Finally, sometime around midnight, he wandered past a man in a funny gray jacket and cap with a red star on it, trying to give away little red books, and it hit him: Sendero. Most Senderistas were either Incan or Korean, but they'd take anyone. They had a nice clave here in the Leased Territories, a clave with good security, and every one of them, down to the last man or woman, was batshit. They'd be more than a match for a few dozen Ashantis. And you could join anytime just by walking in the gates. They would take anyone, no questions asked.
He'd heard it was not such a good thing to be a Communist, but under the circumstances he figured he could hold his nose and quote from the little red book as necessary. As soon as those Ashantis left town, he'd bolt.
Once he made up his mind, he couldn't wait to get there. He had to restrain himself from breaking into a jog, which would be sure to draw the attention of any Ashantis on the street. He couldn't bear the idea of being so close to safety and then blowing it.
He rounded a corner and saw the wall of the Sendero Clave; four stories high and two blocks long, one solid giant mediatron with a tiny gate in the middle. Mao was on one end, waving to an unseen multitude, backed up by his horsetoothed wife and his beetle-browed sidekick Lin Biao, and Chairman Gonzalo was on the other, teaching some small children, and in the middle was a slogan in ten-meter-high letters: STRIVE TO UPHOLD THE PRINCIPLES OF MAO-GONZALO-THOUGHT!
The gate was guarded, as always, by a couple of twelve-year-old kids in red neckerchiefs and armbands, ancient bolt-action rifles with real bayonets leaning against their collarbones. A blond white girl and a pudgy Asian boy. Bud and his son Harv had whiled away many an idle hour trying to get these kids to laugh: making silly faces, mooning them, telling jokes. Nothing ever worked. But he'd seen the ritual: They'd bar his path with crossed rifles and not let him in until he swore his undying allegiance to Mao-Gonzalo-thought, and then-
A horse, or something built around the same general plan, was coming down the street at a hand-gallop. Its hooves did not make the pocking noise of iron horseshoes. Bud realized it was a chevaline— a four-legged robot thingy.
The man on the chev was an African in very colorful clothing.
Bud recognized the patterns on that cloth and knew without bothering to check for the scar that the guy was Ashanti. As soon as he caught Bud's eye, he kicked it up another gear, to a tantivy. He was going to cut Bud off before he could reach Sendero. And he was too far away, yet, to be reached by the skull gun, whose infinitesimal bullets had a disappointingly short range.
He heard a soft noise behind him and swiveled his head around, and something whacked him on the forehead and stuck there. A couple more Ashantis had snuck up on him barefoot.
"Sir," one of them said, "I would not recommend operation of your weapon, unless you want the round to detonate in your own forehead. Hey?" and he smiled broadly, enormous perfectly white teeth, and touched his own forehead. Bud reached up and felt something hard glued to the skin of his brow, right over the skull gun.
The chev dropped to a trot and cut toward him. Suddenly Ashantis were everywhere. He wondered how long they'd been tracking him. They all had beautiful smiles. They all carried small devices in their hands, which they aimed at the pavement, trigger fingers laid alongside the barrels until the guy on the chev told them otherwise. Then, suddenly, they all seemed to be aimed in his direction.
The projectiles stuck to his skin and clothing and burst sideways, flinging out yards and yards of weightless filmy stuff that stuck to itself and shrank. One struck him in the back of the head, and a swath of the stuff whipped around his face and encased it. It was about as thick as a soap bubble, and so he could see through it pretty well— it had peeled one of his eyelids back so he couldn't help but see— and everything now had that gorgeous rainbow tinge characteristic of soap bubbles. The entire shrink-wrapping process consumed maybe half a second, and then Bud, mummified in plastic, toppled over face-forward. One of the Ashantis was good enough to catch him. They laid him down on the Street and rolled him over on his back. Someone poked the blade of a pocketknife through the film over Bud's mouth so that he could breathe again.
Several Ashantis set about the chore of bonding handles to the shrinkwrap, two up near the shoulders and two down by the ankles, as the man on the chev dismounted and knelt over him.
This equestrian had several prominent scars on his cheeks. "Sir," the man said, smiling, "I accuse you of violating certain provisions of the Common Economic Protocol, which I will detail at a more convenient time, and I hereby place you under personal arrest. Please be aware that anyone who has been so arrested is subject to deadly force in the event he tries to resist— which— ha! ha!— does not seem likely at present— but it is a part of the procedure that I am to say this. As this territory belongs to a nation-state that recognizes the Common Economic Protocol, you are entitled to a hearing of any such charges within the judicial framework of the nation-state in question, which in this case happens to be the Chinese Coastal Republic. This nation-state may or may not grant you additional rights; we will find out in a very few moments, when we present the situation to one of the relevant authorities. Ah, I believe I see one now."
A constable from the Shanghai Police, legs strapped into a pedomotive, was coming down the street with the tremendous loping strides afforded by such devices, escorted by a couple of power-skating Ashantis. The Ashantis had big smiles, but the constable looked stereotypically inscrutable.
The chief of the Ashantis bowed to the constable and graciously spun out another lengthy quotation from the fine print of the Common Economic Protocol. The constable kept making a gesture that was somewhere between a nod and a perfunctory bow. Then the constable turned to Bud and said, very fast: "Are you a member of any signatory tribe, phyle, registered diaspora, franchise-organized quasi-national entity, sovereign polity, or any other form of dynamic security collective claiming status under the CEP?"
"Are you shitting me?" Bud said. The shrink-wrap squished his mouth together so he sounded like a duck.
Four Ashantis took the four handles and hoisted Bud off the ground. They began to follow the loping constable in the direction of the Causeway that led over the sea to Shanghai. "How 'bout it," Bud quacked through the hole in the shrink-wrap, "he said I might have other rights.