Coyote Rising by Allen Steele Page B

petite that it seemed as if she would wilt in the cold; yet she carried about her an air of calm that seemed to make her invulnerable to the winter chill. She met my eye, favored me with a delicate smile.
    “Just wait,” she added. “You’ll see.”
    “That’s assuming I hang around long enough.” I didn’t mean it to sound insulting, but it came out that way.
    She let it pass. “You’re with us now, aren’t you?”
    “Well, yeah, but I’m trying to find a place for you to camp.” We were near the middle of town. “We’re not going to find anything if we keep going this way.”
    “What about over there?” This from a man walking along behind us; like the girl, his hooded cloak lent him a monkish appearance. He pointed to a small bare spot of ground between two camps. “We could put . . .”
    “Oh, no, you don’t.” I shook my head. “That belongs to the Cutters Guild. And next to them is New Frontiers turf, the people who came on the second ship. Set up here, and you’re in for a fight.”
    The girl shook her head. “We don’t wish to quarrel with anyone.” Then she looked at me again. “What do you mean by ‘turf’?”
    That led me to try to explain how things worked in Shuttlefield. “And what do the authorities have to say about this?” she asked. “We were told that there was a local government in place.”
    “Government?” I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. “It’s a joke. Shuttlefield’s run by the Central Committee . . . Matriarch Hernandez and her crew, Union Astronautica officers from Glorious Destiny . We rarely see them down here . . . they’re all in Liberty. So far as they’re concerned, everyone here is just a supply of cheap labor. As long as we don’t riot or burn the place down, they don’t give a shit how we live.”
    The girl blanched. “What about the Guard?” she asked. “Aren’t they supposed to protect the colony?”
    “Look around.” I waved a hand across the shantytown surrounding us. “You think there’s law here? I’ve known guys who’ve had their throats cut just because they didn’t pay their rent on time, and the Guard didn’t do . . . um, squat about it. Same for the Proctors . . . the blueshirts, we call ’em. They work for the Committee, and their main job is making sure the status quo is maintained.”
    “So why don’t you leave?” This from the man walking behind us. “Why stay here if it’s so bad?”
    I shrugged. “Where would we go?” Before he could answer that, I went on. “Oh, sure, New Florida’s big enough for another colony, and there’s a whole planet that hasn’t been explored . . . but once you get outside the perimeter defense system, you’re on your own, and there are things out there that’ll kill you before you can bat an eye.”
    “So no one has left?”
    “The original colonists did. That was a long time ago, though, and no one has seen ’em since. Generally speaking, people who come here stay put. Safety in numbers. It ain’t much, but at least it’s something.” I shook my head. “All hail the glories of social collectivism and all that crap.”
    A look passed between them. “I take it you don’t believe in collectivist theory,” the girl said, very quietly.
    Back on Earth, publicly criticizing social collectivism could earn you a six-week stay in a rehab clinic and temporary loss of citizenship. But Earth was forty-six light-years away; so as far as most people in Shuttlefield were concerned, I could have stood on an outhouse roof to proclaim that Karl Marx enjoyed sex with farm animals, and no one would have cared. “I’m not a believer, no.”
    “So what do you believe?”
    Zoltan Shirow had stopped, turned to look back at me. I’d later learn that there was little that his ears couldn’t pick up. For the moment, though, there was this simple question. Everyone came to a halt; they wanted to hear my answer.
    “I . . . I don’t believe in anything,” I replied,