He, She and It by Marge Piercy Page A

wear a sign indicating how low her credit was, she would be safe. Her hand was almost worthless today. Malkah would have transferred enough to help her home; otherwise she was flat.
    Day workers and gang niños and the unemployed lived in the Glop—the great majority of people on the continent. Most of the remainder were citizens of some multi enclave. The free towns were exceptions, as were Rural Zones. Most people who lived in free towns like the one she had grown up in could have sold themselves to a multi directly, instead of contracting for specific jobs, but elected to stay outside the enclaves because of some personal choice: a minority religion, a sexual preference not condoned by a particular multi, perhaps simply an archaic desire for freedom.
    The garment smelled stale as it billowed about her. It had deteriorated during its years of lying folded in the bottom of a storage cube, but she felt immediately safer in it as she joined the crowd on the movers, most wearing black cover-ups so they appeared like sinister nuns. She fumbled for her filter mask as she reached the upper levels of the station. Goggles, mask, cover-up, cooler: she had everything she needed to make herself ready for the street, helped by an edge of amphetamine from the capsule she stopped to buy from a vendor and popped as the mover chugged her along, once she had checked its content with her pocket scanner. It honed her paranoia enough to help her navigate the labyrinthine station where hundreds campedand slept in the filthy decaying passages that mumbled day and night of distant voices, muffled screams, drumming, zak music, running sewage, the hiss of leaking coolant. In some of the passages stores sold clothing, vat food, fast food, stimmies and spikes. Spikes were outlawed in the Y-S enclave. They were more vivid than stimmies. Instead of experiencing what an actor saw, felt, touched, was touched by, the user was projected into the drama and the sensations were more powerful—so she had heard. People told of kids found dead who had replayed favorite adventure or porn scenes until they starved to death.
    Few multis permitted recreational drugs, unless issued by the company. In the Glop, every invented drug was sold by street vendors. In other corridors, vendors were hawking all the jetsam of the times: trash carted from the enclaves, junk of the last century turned into furniture, clothing, weapons, the wired-up skeletons of extinct exotica like robins and warblers, cannibalized parts built into makeshift robots. She noticed a knife made of an organic-based resin that would not show up on detection devices.
    “How much betty for the sticker?”
    “For you, duke?” Behind the metal mask, bloodshot eyes glittered. She winced. Duke was someone with money. She could not talk the Glop talk, and at once they identified her as a grud, a multi employee. “Cuarenta dos. Forty-two. This a sticker don’t cry under rays.”
    “Treinta. Thirty.” She let the knife drop back into the display.
    They bargained ritually for another five minutes. She paid thirty-six. He had a regular credit box. Stripping the glove, she inserted her hand gingerly. He had his box rigged so that instead of just the amount and approval, her balance appeared.
    “Hey, duke, hard times, eh? Flat, blat like a squashed cat. You sound como young meat. I run a good clean cheese shop—”
    She slid the knife into the deep seam of her sleeve and strode on. Hot, it was hot, it was hot. Her brain was melting with the toxic fumes. She was both hungry and thirsty. She still had some water, and that would have to last her. She had no idea what diseases were running through the Glop at the moment, but there were always new types of typhoid and hepatitis, new viral scourges still colonizing from the tropics. She would simply have to endure her hunger. It did not do to imagine what the burgers or sushi were made of, animal, vegetable, mineral. Whether they had been alive in their previous