Born Bad (32 page)

The Guardians don't stop anyone from writing on the walls. There's only two things you can't do: you can't mess up what the Book Boys write, and you can't sign their tag to anything you write yourself.

The Guardians are a crew. So they're not from the Rulers. Which means they can't punish you the way the Rulers can. The Guardians can't send you to the Hydro–Farm. They can't send you Outside, either.

If you mess up what the Book Boys write, they hurt you.

If you sign the Book Boys tag, they kill you.

The Rulers don't allow any fighting between the crews. So what the Guardians do is against the Rules. They get caught too—every once in a while, you would see it. On the Info–Board. That's where they announce the Crimes and Punishments.

Everybody knows the Crimes.

Everybody knows the Punishments.

But nobody knows who the Guardians are. And the Rulers never name a crew—all they do is give the person's Index Number and say what they did and what happened to them. If you know them, if you know them by their number, then you might know their crew. But that's the only way you could know.

But even if you know, you are not allowed to say—that's against the Rules, to acknowledge a crew. That's what the Book Boys do that makes the Rulers hate them so much—when the Book Boys write on the walls, they use a person's name, not their Index Number. And when they name someone, they name their crew too.

Nobody knows why they are called the Book Boys. Everybody knows some of them are girls. But not
which
girls, of course. The Book Boys are invisible. That's how they gather the news. Whatever they write is the truth, so they have to be everywhere the truth is.

Whispers say that some of the Book Boys are Outside—the Rulers sent so many of them Outside that there's a whole colony of them. When the Book Boys write something about Outside on the walls, maybe that's where they get it.

That's probably bogus—nobody ever came back from Outside, so how would they know?

But nobody
really
knows—not for sure.

The Turf crews are always writing on the walls. They don't give you the news, like the Book Boys. They just write their names, or the name of their crews, or stupid stuff…like saying they
own
one of the Tunnels. No crew could ever own a Tunnel. Not in the Charted Zone anyway. And outside the Charted Zone, no one would care.

Even their crew names are stupid—the names don't tell you anything about them the way other crew names do. Like the Golden Dragons…that's one crew's name. It doesn't tell you anything, that name. It doesn't mean they are all skin/shade band 70, like some people are. And they're not giant lizards either—everyone knows the giant lizards can only live Outside, where there is light coming down on you even without the generators. At least that's the way it was before the Terror—that's what the Book Boys say. In blue. If it's written in blue, it has to be true…everybody knows that.

The Turf crews fight each other. That's what they do. All the time. You can watch it happening…not the fighting so much, but the score…you can see it on the walls. One Turf crew will say they own something. Another crew will cross out what they wrote. That goes on for a while, one crew slashing over what another crew writes. On and on. Until, finally, one crew writes something and it stays there.

But it never stays there too long.

People say the Turf crews did the same thing before. Outside, before the Terror. But that's too stupid to believe. I mean, why would they kill each other over something they could never have? That's as stupid as them saying they own a Tunnel.

Everybody learns the Big Rules first. That's because if you break one of the Big Rules, you go to the Hydro–Farm…if you're lucky. There are other Rules too. So many Rules, you could never learn them all. You're supposed to ask if you don't know. You can't ask the Rulers—nobody has ever seen one of the Rulers. But in every Tunnel there are little pockets all along the walls. Just little indentations, not deep enough to be caves. Inside there is a person and a desk. On the desk is a computer. You ask the person if there's a Rule about something. They check the computer, and they tell you the Rule. Then they give you a piece of paper. The paper says the Rule was just explained to you. You have to sign the paper with your Index Number. Then your Index Number goes into the computer and the Rulers know you asked.

It's funny, the way they do it. If you have a Truth Question, you have to pay for the answer. You have to ask a Messenger, and they ask one of the Sages. You have to pay for that. I think it's a hundred credits, but I don't know for sure—I never asked a Truth Question. But if you ask a Rules Question,
you
get paid. Every time you ask a Rules question, you get two credits. Not open credits—you have to tell them which tunnel you want the credits for. But, still, for each question, you get that much. They pay you, right after they put your Index Number into the computer.

The people who explain the Rules to you are called Bureaucrats. There are lots of them. They come in every skin/shade, but they all look alike. No, I don't mean that…they really don't. They all have the same
look,
that's what I mean.

The Bad Babies were babies against the Rules. They were born against the Rules. There is a Rule about sex. You can't have sex until Year 13 if you are a boy. And not until Year17 if you are a girl. There are reasons for this, I know. There are reasons for every Rule. That's the first Rule—that there are reasons for every Rule.
Good
reasons. Reasons for our own good.

I asked a Bureaucrat about the reason for a Rule once. He told me that was against the Rules, asking for reasons. But he gave me the two credits after I signed the paper, because even though I didn't ask a Rules question, I got a Rules answer.

Anyway, the Bad Babies came from girls under Year 17—so they must have had sex when it was against the Rules, before they were allowed.

At first, the Rulers would punish the girls. If a girl had a Bad Baby, she would have to go into one of the Medical Tunnels and get fixed. After that, they couldn't have any more babies, not even good ones.

The Book Boys wrote that fixing the girls didn't make them stop. They had sex even when they couldn't have babies. The Book Boys wrote it in blue, so it had to be true.

But they couldn't have sex by themselves. I mean, they could…but it wouldn't make babies. For a while, the Rulers had no one to punish for that. If a boy was in his Year i5 and a girl was too, and if they had sex, only the girl would be breaking the Rules.

So the Rulers changed the Rules. They are allowed to do that—it's for our own good. After that, if you helped someone break a Rule, it was the same as if you broke it yourself.

But the Bad Babies kept happening.

You can't keep the truth from the Rulers. If they want to know something, they send you to one of the Synapse Squads. They put this metal band around your head and ask you the questions. Then they just look at the pictures and they know the truth.

But everybody knows this doesn't work on girls.

So when a girl would get pregnant before she was allowed, the Rulers would make every boy she knew go to a Synapse Squad. And they would find out the truth.

But sometimes, they couldn't find the father of the Bad Baby. No matter how far they looked, they couldn't find the boy who was guilty.

The Rulers never give up. They couldn't find the answer Out, so they looked In. They checked the Bad Baby's own spray. And that's when they found out that, sometimes, the father of the girl was also the father of the girl's baby. The father was the father, that's what the Book Boys wrote. In blue.

This was a dilemma. The fathers were old enough to have sex, but the daughters were not. And after they changed the Rules, the fathers would be guilty too. But children belong to their parents—they own them. Everybody knows that.

So they made an Exception. An Exception is when the Rules don't apply. So when a girl had a Bad Baby, they would take it from her and put her on the Hydro–Farm. After she did her punishment time, they would send her back to her own spray.

That didn't solve the whole problem though. While a girl was pregnant, she wasn't much good to her owners. Pregnant girls eat more, and they work less. And nobody wanted them in the Sex Tunnels either. It wasn't fair to the owners: the girl broke the Rules, not them.

But the Rulers are very, very smart—they always figure out what to do. The Book Boys said they made another Rule, a Rule to stop all the Bad Babies. If you were an owner of a girl, when she reached Year 11, you had to bring her to one of the Medical Tunnels. They would give her an implant there, a little fan–shaped thing, five lines with a star at the base—it would always be on the outside of the right thigh, where anyone could see it.

The implants work for six years, so there would be no more Bad Babies.

If it wasn't for the Book Boys, no one would ever know that the Rules used to be different. If you ask a Bureaucrat about an old Rule, you would be in trouble. Everybody knows that asking about an old Rule is against the Rules.

No wonder so many of the Book Boys are Outside.

My name is Hexon. Even though a Warlock named me, I am a Merchant Boy. That's not because we buy and sell stuff. Lots of people buy and sell stuff, especially in the Open Tunnels. The Merchant Boys are different. We sell in the Black Market, outside the Charted Zone. We sell anything. And we share everything we get with each other.

I was the one who heard the whisper first—that someone wanted to buy the Bad Babies. It didn't make sense. With the implants, there couldn't
be
any more of the Bad Babies.

I went in the Open Tunnels to check it out. That's what Merchant Boys do—we scout for new opportunities. New frontiers, we call them.

You have to be careful in the Open Tunnels. There's a No–Name crew in some of them. They went in there to hide. The Book Boys wrote that it was the Game Boys who started it. Then the Dancing Girls too. Killing. But not for money, for marks. Marks on their crew–clothes. It was like a contest. They only killed No–Names—"burns" they called them. They don't play that game anymore, but you still have to be careful in the Open Tunnels—some of the No–Names never came out, even after the killing stopped. And if they think you're hunting them, you wouldn't come out either.

Everybody knows there's a market for baby parts—hearts and kidneys are worth a lot of credits. That's what the Rulers always used the Bad Babies for: parts for transplants. The Rulers stopped doing it because the parts were no good—every time they used a Bad Baby's organs for a transplant the good baby would die. The Book Boys wrote that on the walls. A big sign—in blue.

THERE ARE NO BAD BABIES!

It's against the Rules to sell a baby for parts, but some people do it because baby parts are worth so many credits. Some mothers and fathers, they will pay anything to keep their babies alive. Some mothers and fathers will kill their babies if you offer them enough credits. It doesn't make sense—I could never understand why.

I spent thirteen days in the Open Tunnels, but I couldn't pick up a clue. Some of the traders had heard the whisper too, but they thought it was crazy.

I don't know why, but I wanted to know. The longer I stayed out, the more I needed to And the answer. If the Book Boys said there are no Bad Babies, it must be true. So how could there be a price on theme

I went out past the Open Tunnels, past the Black Market. Deep into whatever was out there past the Charted Zone. Looking for the crew that wanted the Bad Babies.

I was out there for another three days. I didn't find anything except rats. I'd seen rats before, plenty of times. But these rats were different. The noise they made was different—I can't explain how it was different, but I knew it was, the first time I heard it.

It's really dark outside the Charted Zone except for the little pools of light where one of the traders had set up shop. That's why it's called the Black Market, I guess—it's mostly black, with just little spots of light. I kept moving, using my crystal–flash only once in a while, to preserve the charge. Once I thought I saw a dog…just a flash of fur, I guess, but too big to be a rat. Or maybe I just didn't want to think about how a rat could be that big.

I was on my way back when I stopped into a provisions stand near the Rim. A provisions stand only sells maintenance food, like water or freeze–dry. Some of them sell Zoners too—some of the prospectors won't go outside the Charted Zone without them. When I first saw her, I thought she was one of the girls from the Sex Tunnels—some of them work in other tunnels, but I never heard of one working out around the Rim. She was a short girl, only up to my chest. Kind of slim, but real muscular—you could see it in her arms. I couldn't tell her Year—it's harder to do that with girls—but I could see she was a skin/shade 39—lighter than me, but not real pale like some. You don't offer to buy a girl a drink in a provisions stand, so I asked her if she wanted a cigarette. She said No, but she smiled real sweet when she said it, so I started talking to her.

You can't hang around in a provisions stand—they're too small. You're supposed to buy what you need and move on. She went out ahead of me. I was admiring the way her hips moved when I realized what I was looking at. Black Dorban pants, skintight—she was a Dancing Girl.

We found a place to sit, just a little past the halo of light from the provisions stand. She said her name was Fyyah. She spelled it for me, because you say it different from how it's spelled.

Inside the Charted Zone, there are clocks everywhere. Digital clocks, all the same. They are all the same, right down to the exact second no matter where you are. In the Black Market, there are no clocks. But even so, I knew we had talked for a long time. Not because it felt like that—it only felt like maybe a half–hour or something—but because we both said so much. I didn't want to go, and I could see Fyyah didn't want to either, but she had to find a place to sleep.

I told her she could have the sleep–tube I carry in my pack. My sleep–tube is a 33–Z, the very best, one hundred percent Raytell, with a heat exchanger and bubble visor. It only weighs about 12 ounces, so I always carry it in my pack when I'm scouting.