Ninety Minutes of Rent

Every Monday, Eno paid part of his rent with ninety minutes of sleep.

Ordinary sleep was worth almost nothing; anyone could lie in a bed. The contract wanted usable REM, which meant fragmentation below twelve percent, a declared medication load, no alcohol in the six hours before collection, and a consent form Eno had not reread since the third renewal. The machine knew the difference between sleeping and producing something that could be sold.

So did Eno.

He entered booth 18 at six forty-one, settled the back of his neck against the cold cushion, and waited for the optical band to come down over his eyes. The booth smelled of cleaning solvent. A voice asked him to confirm his identity.

“Eno Veyr.”

Night contribution: ninety minutes, the booth said. Voluntary bonus on file: thirty. Confirm bonus?

He opened his eyes. “No.”

The thirty-minute bonus reduces your rent balance by eighteen credits.

“I know.”

Confirm cancellation?

Someone had scratched three letters into the plastic above his face, G-A-R, and the solvent had taken the rest. Eighteen credits. The orange warning light on his water heater had been blinking for nine days.

“Keep the thirty.”

Ambiguous response. Confirm bonus?

“Yes.”

The band came down. Outside, Calis would be fading into the morning. He couldn’t see it from inside the booth, but he knew what it did to the buildings at this hour, the sick blue cast it laid over the concrete, too cold for dawn and too even to come from the sun. People his age still carried a vague memory of the sky before the second moon. Children didn’t. It had become a way of counting generations. Before Calis. After Calis. Like a war that had officially killed no one on the day it began.

Breathe normally.

“I’ve been trying for twenty-seven years.”

The machine let that pass. Cheap models no longer came with conversational humor. The tenants’ association had won that after a long campaign against what its leaflets called automated affective persuasion, and collection booths were no longer allowed to sound friendly while they took more of your sleep. Eno considered it a tiny, perfect union victory. The mild sedative came through the patch on his wrist, and the last thing he heard was the click of the magnetic lock.

He barely dreamed anymore. He produced. The two had stopped meaning the same thing eight years ago. When the booth woke him two hours and six minutes later, his mouth was dry, and someone seemed to have moved a piece of furniture inside his head while he was gone.

Collection validated, the screen read. One hundred and seventeen usable minutes. Yield above contract.

He sat up. “I gave you a hundred and twenty.”

Three minutes noncompliant.

“Give them back.”

Noncompliant sequences are automatically destroyed.

“Then I want a receipt for my three dead minutes.”

The door slid open, which was the machine’s preferred way of ending an argument. In the corridor outside, a woman was crying quietly at the disputes counter, holding a small translucent cylinder sealed inside an evidence bag.

“You gave me the wrong one,” she said, and then said it again, as if the glass might not have heard. “This isn’t his dream.”

The clerk behind the glass kept his voice level. “Ma’am, the identifier matches the lot.”

“I know his dream.”

“I understand,” the clerk said.

“No.” She pressed her palm flat against the glass. “There was a kitchen. My son was six. He kept trying to open the oven after I’d told him not to, and there was a yellow towel. I described all of it when we made the deposit.”

The clerk read something off his screen. “A description does not guarantee content. Sequences are recompressed during restitution.”

“There’s no kitchen.”

“Some scenes may be lost,” the clerk said.

“My son isn’t even in it.”

Eno turned away. Not his problem. He had picked that phrase up at work, and it had the remarkable advantage of applying to almost everything.

His terminal buzzed against his hip. Assignment 7041, it read. Night-collateral recovery. Lower East, Block 39. Amount: three hundred and twelve credits. Risk: low. He accepted it before someone faster could, and in the elevator he checked his balance. His rent had turned green. The water heater could wait. Victory.

Outside, the city looked up without looking up. Calis filled nearly a third of the western sky, a pale blue disk striped with dark bands that civilian astronomers called maintenance structures and preachers called veins, and people walked out beneath it the way they walked past streetlamps and traffic cameras. In front of it, or above it, depending on the light, floated the Crown of Sere. His sister Nelle had lived up there for eight years.

Even from twenty kilometers away the island seemed too close. It hung over the lower city like a small continent of white towers and parks, and its trees leaned out past the rim for a better view of the people underneath. A waterfall dropped four hundred meters off its edge before an invisible capture field caught the water and sent it back up. The advertising loved that waterfall. Water that is never wasted, said the posters. Down in Block 39, the taps were cut off three days a week.

Eno took the tram. Halfway there, gravity slipped for less than a second, which was long enough for every hanging strap in the car to lean the same way, for a child to laugh, and for his mother to close her hand on his sleeve. The weight came back. Nobody screamed, and the tram kept moving.

Local gradient correction, the speakers announced. No risk. Please maintain three points of contact while standing.

Through the glass, the avenue trees showed the usual damage. Their trunks rose straight for several meters, and then the main branches bent back toward the ground, as if a second light were calling them from below. The city cut them back every spring. Every spring they grew the same way again.

The elevator in Block 39 was broken. Eno climbed nine flights and arrived at Sava Mer’s door breathing badly enough for his terminal to suggest a recovery pause, which he declined. Sava opened before the second knock. He was a man of about fifty, barefoot, in a white shirt, with the air of someone who had either slept in his clothes or dressed without sleeping.

“I don’t have the money,” Sava said. “Whatever they told you, I don’t have it.”

“I know,” Eno said. “It’s in the file.”

“Then why are you here?”

Eno showed him the badge. “Night collateral.”

Sava’s face changed. “No. You can’t have those.”

“You pledged two private-grade crystals.”

“They’re worthless,” Sava said. “Nobody would give you ten credits for either of them.”

“Then this should be easy.”

“You don’t understand.”

Eno kept the sigh to himself. He knew what came next: the gift from a dead woman, the child’s dream, the wedding memory, the sequence bought the week before the bankruptcy. Nobody mortgaged anything without later discovering a reason the bank should have known that this particular mortgaged thing was different from all the other mortgaged things.

His voice stayed pleasant. “Mr. Mer, I can leave, and the file goes to forced recovery. Two agents will come, they’ll bill you for the intervention, and your debt goes up. Or you hand me both lots, I seal them in front of you, and this is over today.”

Sava’s eyes went to the hallway behind him. “I can give you one.”

“Two. The file says two.”

“The second isn’t mine.”

“It’s registered in your name,” Eno said.

“That isn’t the same thing.”

The woman from the collection center came back to him, her palm flat against the glass. My son isn’t even in it. He hated the connection. “Show me.”

The apartment was almost bare, the way rooms get when their contents have been sold off one piece at a time. Paler rectangles on the walls showed where furniture and framed pictures had been. In the kitchen, three smart outlets blinked red, cut off from service. Sava set a metal box on the table and opened it. Inside were two crystals, which was the marketing name, because phase-change dream-storage matrix had never fit well on a poster. The first was pale gray and about the size of a fingertip. The second was almost black.

“I’m checking the identifiers,” Eno said, and took out his reader.

Sava caught his wrist. It was barely a grip, only enough to stop the reader. “Don’t open it.”

Eno said nothing. He lowered his eyes to the hand on his wrist and left them there.

Sava let go. “Sorry.”

“Why not?”

“Because it opens by itself.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Eno said.

“It didn’t mean anything to me either.”

Eno brought the reader to the first crystal. Lot Sava Mer, the screen said. Valid. He moved it to the second, and the reader vibrated once and died in his hand.

“Battery?” Sava asked.

Eno restarted it. Eighty-two percent. He tried again, and the screen went white, and a single line came up in the middle of the white.

Provenance unresolved.

“That’s what it does,” Sava said. “Every reader. Every time.”

Eno was already recalculating the visit. Provenance anomalies paid a bonus if you reported them properly. “Where did you get it?”

“It was with my daughter’s things.”

“She died?”

“Gone,” Sava said.

“Gone where?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t say gone.”

Eno put the reader away and fell back on the form. “Name?”

“Lio.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-two,” Sava said.

“Did she work in collections?”

“No.”

“A Crown?”

Sava gave a short laugh. “With what money?”

Eno held the black crystal up between two fingers. It was warmer than the room, warm as if a hand had only just let go of it. “You’ve touched it?”

“I haven’t touched it in three weeks,” Sava said.

Eno meant to put it down. Instead the living room disappeared, all at once, with no dizziness and no flash of light. One second he was facing the metal table; the next his feet were in warm water, sand shifting under his toes, a black sea spread out beneath an orange sky. Someone was running ahead of him through the shallows: a little girl with her hair tied too high, in a yellow swimsuit with a blue whale across the stomach.

Eno knew that swimsuit, and he was afraid of knowing it before he was afraid of anything else.

The girl turned around. “Nono!”

He heard the name in his body before he heard it in his head. Then he was on his knees on Sava’s floor, and the crystal had rolled under the table, and his breathing would not slow down. Sava hadn’t moved.

“What did you see?” Sava asked.

Eno spread his hands flat on the tiles. Dry skin. No sand in the creases of his palms. “Nothing.”

Sava sat down, slowly. “That’s what she used to say.”

“Who?” Eno asked.

“Lio.”

Eno reached under the table, feeling for the crystal. “What did she see?”

“A life that said it was hers.”

His terminal buzzed. He ignored it. “You had this analyzed?”

“Three times.”

“And?”

Sava pointed to a drawer, and Eno pulled it open. It was full of printed reports. The first said Primary provenance: undetermined, and the second said Bio-affective signature: partial match, Lio Mer. The third came from a private firm, and one of its results had been circled in pen: Secondary match: Eno Veyr, ninety-one point eight percent.

His hand would not hold the page still. “You’ve been looking for me.”

“For four months,” Sava said.

Anger was nearer to hand than whatever lay underneath it, so Eno picked that up instead. “You pushed your debt into recovery through my employer.”

“I didn’t choose the agent.”

“But you hoped it would land on me.”

“Yes,” Sava said.

“Why?”

Sava’s eyes went under the table, to where the crystal had rolled. “Because my daughter disappeared after she found your name inside a dream nobody can attribute.”

Eno got to his feet. “I don’t know her.”

“I believe you,” Sava said.

“I’ve never seen that beach.”

“I believe you.”

“And nobody has ever called me Nono.”

Sava made the face of a man already regretting what he was about to say. “Lio didn’t know where the name came from either.”

He opened another drawer and took out a dream print, a flat still image exported from a trajectory. A boy of six or seven stood at the edge of a sea in a yellow swimsuit with a blue whale on it. Behind him stood a woman Eno recognized immediately.

His mother.

His knees went soft. “This isn’t a photograph.”

“No.”

A technical line had been printed automatically in the lower corner: Trajectory 9031. Estimated context: one year before Calis. The number meant nothing to him. On the back, Lio had written in pen, Nono?, and underneath it, Why is this world already talking about a second moon? Eno read it twice. “When did she print this?”

“Four months before she disappeared,” Sava said.

“And my mother?”

“At first,” Sava said, “Lio thought it was profile contamination.”

“My mother died before Lio knew my name.”

Sava didn’t argue with that. Eno turned the print over again. The boy resembled him closely enough to be insulting, one front tooth too straight, the ears slightly wrong. The woman behind him had his mother’s face and wore a dress Eno had never seen her wear. The image was plausible, and false, and derived from something, and he did not have a word yet that could hold all three.

Somewhere above Block 39, the sky groaned. The whole room grew lighter. The print slid out of Eno’s fingers and hung in the air between them for three seconds before gravity came back, and then it fell face down on the floor.

“Now you understand,” Sava whispered, “why I didn’t want to give you the crystal.”

Under the table, the black crystal pulsed softly against the tiles, like something breathing in its sleep. That morning a machine had taken a hundred and seventeen minutes of dream out of him and turned them into rent. Now a beach his body seemed to remember had given something back. He had spent eight years resenting sleep. Tonight, he was afraid of it.