"Ellie!" the voice repeated.

She picked up the doll.

"You did it," she mumbled.

"It's hard for me, now," the doll said. "I've forgotten so much."

She stared at it. Of course. The simplest processor drove its brain now. Its intelligence would be a magnitude less than that of the Adjunct-like the result of a human lobotomy.

"I remember there's a message for you, Ellie," the doll said.

She looked around the room, but there was no clue.

"Where is it?"

"Don't know," the doll said. "When are we going to go on our adventures?" Eloise sighed.

"I want to go on our adventure," the doll repeated.

She scanned the desk again, but it was empty. Then she noticed that the Adjunct held something in its lifeless hand.

A datapad.

She slipped it out between the cold fingers.

It flickered to life at her touch.

"Hello Eloise," it was the Adjunct's voice, sounding tinny through the small speaker. "This pad holds the travel permit-according to the permit, you're twenty years younger than a moment ago!-but don't worry. No one human will check that on the route I've fed into the ticket. The bus you need to catch is the 81b-it's at the Bus Terminal now. That will take you to Dover where you can take the Channel Link over to France, then cross from there to Greece. The details are on the ticket.

"It was difficult for me to accept removal of the processor, but I accepted your argument; that it's better to live life to the full, even incomplete. Take care of me!"

The pad's RAM light sparked. The message was deleted.

Eloise pocketed the pad and stuffed her Clever Dolly back into her bag.

"What's this?" a muffled voice said.

"Be quiet!" she ordered. "Don't say anything, otherwise we can't go on an adventure!"

"All right! But when can I talk again?"

She remembered, now, how argumentative her doll could be.

"When I tell you," she hissed.

She opened the office door, and peeped outside.

Mrs. Whitten was in the reception room, her face white with anger.

"There you are!" she exclaimed. "What were you doing in there? How did you get in?"

Eloise held up her bag. "I was doing my knitting."

Mrs. Whitten looked flummoxed at her answer.

"Well!" she said. "They'll be plenty of time for that on the coach. Come on! We're late enough."

Eloise followed Mrs. Whitten out through the Clinic doors. She winced from the icy slap of the glacial wind; shuffled along the tarmac as slowly as she could manage, yet without looking like she was deliberately hanging back.

A muffled voice sounded in her bag. She clutched it tight.

"Losing that eye shouldn't have slowed you down," Mrs. Whitten said. "I know you didn't use the other one much. Maybe I should have fetched a wheelchair for you, as well as for the others."

Eloise didn't reply. She was concentrating on keeping her feet moving, while trying to work out how she could avoid getting back on the coach.

It seemed an impossibility. The bus she hoped to catch was among the others she saw, parked over on the other side of the terminal. How could she get there? How could she outrun Mrs. Whitten?

Once they were at the coach door, Eloise hesitated to board.

Mrs. Whitten had turned toward her, ready to pull her up the steps, when Eloise spotted Arnold sitting in the coach's front seat. His face even paler than usual, and his right leg stuck out in front of him.

It was missing at the knee.

"Arnold!" she called out.

His eyes defocused and he stared down at her, obviously trying to place her face.

"It's me, Arnold!" she said. "How are you?"

"He's fine!" Mrs. Whitten interrupted.

" 'lo Ellie!" It was Betty, banging her hand on the window. She waved her other arm, showing the stump. Despite that, she looked as cheerful as ever.

Resigned to her fate, Eloise began to board the coach.

A shrill cry erupted from her bag.

"What's that?" Arnold said.

Mrs. Whitten had heard the sound, too. "What have you there, dear?" she asked.

She leaned forward to grab the bag, but Eloise drew back.

"No," she said. "You can't take that, too."

Mrs. Whitten's lips pursed. She took a step down toward her, tensing to snatch the bag from her hand.

Eloise knew she couldn't resist the younger woman. She gave a whimper.

The sound struck a chord deep within Arnold-something heroic awoke.

"Bitch! Bully! Leave her alone!"

His left leg shot out, slamming into Mrs. Whitten, toppling her forward down the coach steps.

She fell in a heap on the tarmac.

Eloise heard a snap, like a chicken bone cracking.

"My leg!" Mrs. Whitten screeched. "My leg!"

Eloise stepped back hurriedly, then took her chance. The others were too busy with Mrs. Whitten to notice her.

She'd crossed the tarmac by the time she heard their calls. Somehow, she found the wit to dart between the nearest set of buses, then double back-keeping the vehicles between her and the coach until she found the 81b.

It took a moment of fumbling to find the datapad-press its link node against the bus's socket.

The bus door slid open. To her relief, it was a ramp entrance.

After she had settled in her seat, she pulled the Clever Dolly out of her bag to let it look around. It seemed the only way to keep it quiet.

She had a window seat, but she was safe. The bus engine was revving up, ready to take her to Dover, and through the Tunnel. They'd never catch her now-never think to check the borders.

As the bus pulled out of the terminal, she risked a peep out of the window. The Home Carers were still scouring the terminal in puzzlement, wondering how an old woman could disappear so quickly. Mrs.

Whitten still lay by the bus steps, with a medic stooped over her.

She looked down at Clever Dolly.

"We made it," she whispered. "I don't mind losing my eye for that."

Clever Dolly opened its right eye-the sapphire implant gazed back at her.

"To be human," the doll said, "is to be incomplete."

The Madwoman of Shuttlefield

ALLEN M. STEELE.

Allen M. Steele [www.allensteele.com] lives in Whateley, Massachusetts. He came on the scene as a hard SF writer in 1989 with his first novel, Orbital Decay. It was followed by Clarke County, Space (1990) and Lunar Descent (1991), which are also set between Earth and the Moon and belong in the same Future History, which Steele calls the Near Space series. His short fiction is collected in three volumes, Rude Astronauts (1993), All-American Alien Boy (1996), and Sex and Violence in Zero G (1999), which collect the short fiction in the Near Space series and provide a list of the series, "all arranged in chronological order," he says on his web site. He has gone on to become one of the leading young hard SF writers today, with a talent for realism and a penchant for portraying the daily, gritty problems of living and working in space in the future.

"The Madwoman of Shuttlefield" appeared in Asimov's and is a sequel to his series of stories integrated into the novel Coyote (2002). Six years have passed since that first landing, and the settlement-its growing population now taxing limited resources-has become rigid andrepressive Allegra, having come to Coyote largely to escape her past, has a rough early go of it on the new world until she accidentally befriends the mad old woman of the title.

On the first night Allegra DiSilvio spent on Coyote, she met the madwoman of Shuttlefield. It seemed like an accident at the time, but in the weeks and months to follow she'd come to realize that it was much more, that their fates were linked by forces beyond their control.

The shuttle from the Long Journey touched down in a broad meadow just outside the town of Liberty. The high grass had been cleared from the landing pad, burned by controlled fires to create a flat expanse nearly a half-mile in diameter, upon which the gull-winged spacecraft settled after making its long fall from orbit. As she descended the gangway ramp and walked out from beneath the hull, Allegra looked up to catch her first sight of Bear: a giant blue planet encircled by silver rings, hovering in an azure sky. The air was fresh, scented with midsummer sourgrass; a warm breeze caressed the dark stubble of her shaved scalp, and it was in this moment that she knew that she'd made it. The journey was over; she was on Coyote.

Dropping the single bag she had been allowed to take with her from Earth, Allegra fell to her hands and knees and wept.

Eight months of waiting to hear whether she'd won the lottery, two more months of nervous anticipation before she was assigned a berth aboard the next starship to 47 Ursae Majoris, a week of sitting in Texas before taking the ride to the Union Astronautica spaceport on Matagorda Island, three days spent traveling to lunar orbit where she boarded the Long Journey...and then, forty-eight years in dream-less biostasis, to wake up cold, naked, and bald, forty-six light-years from everything familiar, with everyone she had ever known either long-dead or irrevocably out of her reach.

She was so happy, she could cry. Thank you, God, she thought. Thank you, thank you...I'm here, and I'm free, and the worst is over.

She had no idea just how wrong she was. And it wasn't until after she'd made friends with a crazy old lady that she'd thank anyone again.

Liberty was the first colony on Coyote, established by the crew of the URSS Alabama in A.D. 2300, or C.Y .01by LeMarean calendar. It was now 2306 on Coyote by Gregorian reckoning, though, and the original colonists had long-since abandoned their settlement, disappearing into the wilderness just days after the arrival of WHSS Seeking Glorious Destiny Among the Stars for the Greater Good of Social Collectivism, the next ship from Earth. No one knew why they'd fled-or at least those who knew weren't saying-but the fact remained that Liberty was built to house only a hundred people. Glorious Destiny brought a thousand people to the new world, and the third ship-Traveling Forth to Spread Social Collectivism to New Frontiers-had brought a thousand more, and so by the time the Long Journey to the Galaxy in the Spirit of Social Collectivism reached Coyote, the population of New Florida had swelled to drastic proportions.

The log cabins erected by the first settlers were now occupied by Union Astronautica officers from Glorious Destiny and New Frontiers. It hadn't been long before every tree within ten miles had been cut down for the construction of new houses, with roads expanding outward into what had once been marshes. Once the last stands of blackwood and faux-birch were gone, most of the wildlife moved away; the swoops and creek cats that once preyed upon livestock were seldom seen any more, and with automatic guns placed around the colony's perimeter only rarely did anyone hear the nocturnal screams of boids. Yet still there wasn't enough timber to build homes for everyone.

Newcomers were expected to fend for themselves. In the spirit of social collectivism, aid was given in the form of temporary shelter and two meals a day, but after that it was every man and woman for himself. The Union Astronautica guaranteed free passage to Coyote for those who won the public lottery, but stopped short of promising anything once they'd arrived. Collectivist theory held that a sane society was one in which everyone reaped the rewards of individual efforts, but Liberty was still very much a frontier town, and anyone asking for room and board in the homes owned by those who'd come earlierwas likely to receive a cold stare in return. All men were created equal, yet some were clearly more equal than others.

And so, once she'd picked herself up from the ground, Allegra found herself taking up residence not in Liberty, where she thought she'd be living, but in Shuttlefield, the sprawling encampment surrounding the landing pad. She made her way to a small bamboo hut with a cloverweed-thatched roof where she stood in line for an hour before she was issued a small tent that had been patched many times by those who'd used it earlier, a soiled sleeping bag that smelled of mildew, and a ration card that entitled her to eat in what had once been Liberty's grange hall before it was made into the community center. The bored Union Guard soldier behind the counter told her that she could pitch her tent wherever she wanted, then hinted that he'd be happy to share his cabin if she'd sleep with him. She refused, and he impatiently cocked his thumb toward the door before turning to the next person in line.

Shuttlefield was a slum; there was no other way to describe it. Row upon row of tents, arranged in untidy ranks along muddy footpaths trampled by countless feet, littered with trash and cratered by potholes. The industrious had erected shelter from bamboo grown from seeds brought from Earth; others lived out of old cargo containers into which they had cut doors and windows. Dirty children chased starving dogs between clotheslines draped with what looked like rags until Allegra realized that they were garments; the smoke from cook fires was rank with odor of compost. Two faux-birch shacks, side by side, had handwritten signs for Men and Women above their doors; the stench of urine and feces lay thick around them, yet it didn't stop people from pitching tents nearby. The voices she heard were mostly Anglo, but her ears also picked up other tongues-Spanish, Russian, German, various Arab and Asian dialects-all mixed together in a constant background hum.

And everywhere, everyone seemed to be selling something, from kiosks in front of their shelters.

Plucked carcasses of chickens dangled upside-down from twine suspended between poles. Shirts, jackets, and trousers stitched from some hide she'd never seen before-she'd later learn that it was swamper fur-were laid out on rickety tables. Jars of spices and preserved vegetables stood next to the pickled remains of creatures she'd never heard of. Obsolete pads containing data and entertainment from Earth, their sellers promising that their power cells were still fresh, their memories virus-clean. A captive swamper in a wooden cage, laying on its side and nursing a half-dozen babies; raise the pups until they're half-grown, their owner said, then kill the mother and in-breed her offspring for their pelts: a great business opportunity.

A small man with a furtive look in his eyes sidled up to Allegra, glanced both ways, then offered her a small plastic vial half-filled with an oily clear liquid. Sting, he confided. Pseudo-wasp venom. Just put a drop or two on your tongue, and you'll think you're back home....

Allegra shook her head and kept walking, her back aching from the duffel bag carried over her shoulder and the folded tent beneath her arm. Home? This was home now. There was nothing on Earth for her to go back to, even if she could return.

She found a bare spot of ground amid several shanties, yet no sooner had she put down her belongings when a man emerged from the nearest shack. He asked if she was a member of the Cutters Guild; when she professed ignorance, he gruffly told her that this was Guild territory. Reluctant to get in a quarrel, Allegra obediently picked up her stuff and went farther down the street until she spotted another vacant place, this time among a cluster of tents much like her own. She was beginning to erect the poles when two older women came over to her site; without explanation, one knocked over her poles while the other grabbed her bag and threw it in the street. When Allegra resisted, the first woman angrily knocked her to the ground. This was New Frontiers turf; who did she think she was, trying to squat here? A small crowd had gathered to watch; seeing that no one was going to take her side, Allegra quickly gathered her things and hurried away.

For the next several hours, she wandered the streets of Shuttlefield, searching for some place to put up her tent, yet every time she found a likely looking spot-and after the second incident, she was careful to ask permission from the nearest neighbor-she discovered that it had already been claimed by one group or another. It soon became clear that Shuttlefield was dominated by a hierarchy of guilds, groups, and clubs, ranging from societies that had originated among the passengers of earlier ships to gangs ofhard-eyed men who guarded their territory with machetes. A couple of times Allegra was informed that she was welcome to stay, but only so long as she agreed to pay a weekly tax, usually one-third of what she earned from whatever job she eventually found or, failing that, one meal out of three from her ration card. A large, comfortable-looking shack occupied by single women of various ages turned out to be the local brothel; if she stayed here, the madam told her, she'd be expected to pay the rent on her back. At least she was polite about it; Allegra replied that she'd keep her offer in mind, but they both knew that this was an option only if she were desperate.

It was dusk, and she was footsore, hungry and on the verge of giving up, when Allegra found herself at the edge of town. It was close to a swamp-the sourgrass grew chest-high here, and not far away was a cluster of the ball-plants she'd been warned to avoid-and there was only one other dwelling, a slope-roofed and windowless shack nailed together from discarded pieces of faux-birch. Potted plants hung from the roof eaves above the front door, and smoke rose from a chimney hole, yet there was no one in sight. Coming closer, Allegra heard the clucking of chickens from a wire-fenced pen out back; it also seemed as if she heard singing, a low and discordant voice from within the shack.

Allegra hesitated. This lonesome hovel away from all the others, so close to the swamp where who-knew-what might lurk, made her nervous. Yet darkness was settling upon town, and she knew she couldn't go any further. So she picked a spot of ground about ten yards from the shack and quietly went about pitching her tent. If someone protested, she'd just have to negotiate a temporary arrangement; she'd gladly trade a couple of meals for a night of sleep.

Yet no one bothered her as she erected her shelter, and although the voice stopped singing and even the chickens went quiet after awhile, no one objected to her presence. The sun was down by the time she was finished, and dark clouds shrouded the giant planet high above her. It looked like rain, so she crawled into the tent, dragging her belongings behind her.

Once she had laid out her sleeping bag, Allegra unzipped her duffel bag and dug through it until she found the light-stick she'd had been given before she left the Long Journey. The night was cool, so she found a sweater and pulled it on. There were a couple of food bars in the bottom of the bag; she unwrapped one. Although she was tempted to eat the other, she knew she'd want it in the morning. The way things were going, there was no telling what she'd have to suffer through before she got a decent meal. It was already evident that Shuttlefield had its own way of doing things, and the system was rigged to prevent newcomers from taking advantage of them.

Yet she was free. That counted for something. She had escaped Earth, and now she was...

A shuffling sound from outside.

Allegra froze, then slowly raised her eyes.