The banner draped across the front of the Neo Assyrian facade of the Kochfeld Memorial Art Museum read Incredible Painting Elephant Retrospective. A blond oriental woman standing on the faux marble steps, under the banner, wore a white off the shoulder silk sheath that clung to her skin like perfume. Ricart Dancer would have found either of those images remarkable by itself. What was an Incredible Painting Elephant? Why did it deserve a retrospective? How did it relate to the sexual vision of the woman on the steps?

She was no silk pillow girl plying the body trade after midnight in this district. Clients of the caliber she would need to pay for that bit of silk would not be found this late in a place this respectable.

Ricart placed his middle finger against the track ball control on the aerohack's control console, spun it hard and rolled his taxi on a wing tip, turning the craft back along its path, while dropping through two lanes of traffic. Had there been anyone else in those lanes, anyone at all, he'd have died three times before crashing into the museum parking lot. Coming out of the turn he braked, hard, losing the rest of his altitude and coming to a stop at the foot of the steps.

The woman walked down the steps, the curves of her body contrasting against the sharp castellated architecture. Leaning over, she looked into drivers' window. Tears streaked her face and story filled her dark almond eyes. A sharp knife of regret cut him to the soul. She'd leave him after this ride without a thought. For Ric, one look into her eyes was too many and a thousand not enough.

"Are you free?" She asked in a sultry whisper.

Ric thought he saw a trace of smile on her red lips, but couldn't be sure. The perfect flippant response of `No but I'm cheap' hung between them unspoken. His discomfort left him mute. He managed to hit the autovalet door release, opening the back seat for her. She glided in like a streamer of fog after a hot summer's rain.

Ric laid his arm on the back his seat and watched her in the rear view mirror while she adjusted herself in the seat. His own weary lined face looked back at him beside hers. The mag-rez and cat scanners built into the vehicle looked through her dress, skin and bones for anything remotely deadly. When nothing triggered an alarm, he keyed the sniffer. It detected clean female body and the thousand Nudollars an ounce scent of Violence, the hottest pheroscent on the market.

"Skyhook Aleph." She mouthed the words, as if she passed a secret in class.

"No problem," Like all good cabbies Ric read lips. But he wondered why the big secret about a trip to the liftport in Quito, Peru. Thousands of people a day took the elevators to the Geosynchronous GEAsat's. She didn't have an active transmitter hidden anywhere. The cab, of course, had IFF and GPS systems. Neither of them transmitted audio. Maybe she noticed that Ric acted like a stud horse in a field of mares, and had decided to tease him. Or just maybe there was more to this cab ride than appeared on the surface.

Ric keyed the cred-a-lyzer and a laser read the cyberid implant, in the corner of her right eye. She had a numbered Platinum Plus credit line with no listed name or address, which contained enough guaranteed credit for her to buy the cab outright, put a down payment on Ric's eternal loyalty and still live a comfortable life style for a thousand years. Ric downloaded sufficient funds to pay for a cab ride from Miami to darkest Peru, added a 15 percent honorarium as required by law, and attached a rider to the account, in the event that other services might be required.

When the payment OK light came on, he pushed the thumb throttle, pulled back on the joystick and tapped the pedals. The cab accelerated into the sky, passing up through the local lanes into the international traffic pattern. Basic cabby instinct drove him to fire two rounds of chaff and key the standard ECM decoys. The computer downloaded the cost automatically from her account. Any skimtracer would now find itself lost in a cloud of aluminum fiber or on a slow tour of the Little Cuba.

Sure that any simple minded trackers or basic missiles would not find them, Ric allowed himself to smile into the rear view mirror. Cabbies were expected to be nosey. Drivers could ask the most intimate questions of their riders with better chances of an honest answer than most people gave in either the confessional or a psychologist's couch. "I'm dying to know," his eyes flashed back in the direction of the museum. "What an Incredible Painting Elephant Retrospective might be."

She smiled. The expression didn't just turn up her lips. Her eyes brightened, all sadness fled from her posture and even her nipples sharpened under the silk. "In the 1980's, financially strapped zoos taught elephants to paint. The novelty brought collectors and hundreds of thousands of dollars poured into zoo coffers and artists learned that animals, too, had an artistic viewpoint."

Out of habit, Ric's eyes flickered across the bank of readouts and indicators while he listened to her voice, though he didn't need to. Jacked into the cab he'd know of any problem before a readout reported one. In the holosense vidfeed he saw something waver in and out of view, indistinct but still visible as hot air over asphalt. The hack's computer interpreted it as a sensor ghost caused by reflections in the warm moist air rising on convection currents along the front of buildings.

Ric fired a Limner Aerosol, filling the air behind him with a fine dust that would condense moisture on the surface of anything passing through it. Any radar absorbent surface would become visible until scrubbed clean. Thirteen seconds later an airfoil shape phased into existence then faded again. Auto-recognition pegged it as a Sorbenson StealthTrac 3000 tracer drone. Ceramic structure and polyplasts skin made the unit nearly undetectable. Surface bound nano cleaning agents removed dust and other particulates. Even Limner agents had only seconds of life with the StealthTrac.

At five million Nudollars a pop, turf agitators and deep gangs found the StealthTrac 3000 too expensive. Only Nationals, Theocorps and the better Mercs could afford such toys.

Feeling a need to keep his customer talking, Ric smiled into the mirror and asked, "But really, why look back at the eighties? There might be ninety people living out their lives in Zero-g rest homes that remember it."

"Elephant painting was a historical paradigm shift. Before that there were a few apes painting, but no one considered it valid art. They were, at best, thought to be imitative. Painting elephants forced scientists to change their ideas concerning intelligence. To create art, elephants had to think. When they developed art different from anything humans made, it showed they were independent thinkers, that intelligence did not mean complex machines and societies that relied on them."

Ric scanned all available sensors as a precaution. The owners, whoever they might be, must have the StealthTrac configured in hunt/seek mode. The fact that the tracker used pure passive search techniques, and that they were still alive, corroborated that evidence. But the StealthTrac 3000's intelligence protocols encouraged independent thinking so no distant observer need transmit a kill command.

"So what's your interest. Are you an artist? Do you like elephants?"

She didn't answer immediately. She studied his face in the rear view mirror, tracing out the lines cut there by the knives of life. "I was a corporate efficiency artist for the Dawntreader Theocorp."

"Was?" That question might be a little pushy. With the StealthTrac out there, Ric felt the need to be pushy. Theocorp workers existed in only three varieties, active, pensioners and the dead. No one retired or quit.

"Exactly what are the terms of our contract, Ric?"

Her question caught him off guard. Ric had driven an independent aerohack for ten years and no one had ever questioned him before. A brief flare of anger caused his eyes to narrow, and sent a twitch through his jaw.

"This is a fully licensed, independent aerohack. As long as you're under my care, no one gets to you." The edge in his voice was likely to dry her up as a source of information. He didn't care. No one questioned his integrity.

She must have liked what she read in his face or his voice. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, then said, "My name is Aria, and I'm retiring."

That explained a lot. Ric whistled, scanned the readouts, set the aerohack to full battlemode and engaged the cyber controls. He like the sensation of a joystick and track ball under his fingers, but in battle a man needed every microsecond of response time. Retirees were rare birds, mostly because their life expectancy usually was numbered in hours. A few retirees escaped, disappearing into the deeps around some megaplex, or left Earth entirely by taking a Slingship out into the Sprawl States. Her guaranteed credit line would get her there and keep her living in style, unless the StealthTrac made the determination that she was retiring and blew them both out of the sky.

"Of all the aerohacks in all the world, you had to step into mine."

She smiled and relaxed a bit deeper into the cushions. "You're no Bogart."

"Watch your tongue," He smiled. The image of the StelthTrac wavered in and out of existence too quickly for him to fire on it. "Bogart and I aren't what you would call classically handsome, or very tall."

Ric downloaded every appearance of the 'sensor ghost' to his navcomp and began a pattern search. If he was quick enough, the computer would recognize the right combination of temperature, smog and buildings that would cause the Sensor Ghost to become visible. Predict just where it would be visible and he could shoot the StelthTrac down.

"So why are you retiring?" He continued with the light banter, but changed the subject. "Dawntreader is about the hottest Theocorp going. It shares the rights to the Sling Gates and is the only corp. that can make the self-contained Sling Drives. That means Dawntreader owns the Warship market."

"It's not their market that offends me. It's their . . . employee policies."

From the pause before `employee' Ric knew that she meant a different word. The difference between what she said and what she meant was the difference between having a nice breakfast tomorrow and holding up a tombstone in the veteran cometary of your choice. While he thought, the pattern search completed its assignment and fed him a series of wind velocities, barometric pressure readings and moisture content of the sites where the StealthTrac was detected. Ric uplinked to the GEAsat TheoCorp's weather satellite, requested weather data along a five-hundred-kilometer wide corridor across the Carribean and waited for a match. Via the rider on her cred account he downloaded the cost plus a silence gratuity to GEAsat.

"Do you know what the StealthTrac 3000 can do?" Ric kept his voice calm. The sniffer in the back seat instantly noted a change in sweat from playful-sexual to fear-panic and verging on flight or fight. While he waited for her to decide how to react, Ric changed the aerohack's course to overfly Stellardyne TheoCorp's Cuban complex. Early morning sea fog coupled with several megastructures created perfect conditions for a trap.

"Can you kill it?"

"Yeah," He nodded to add emphasis. "What I need to know is what they will do when I shoot it down. How bad are they going to want you? Are five million Nudollars the limit that they are willing to pay?"

She sat quietly, lips pursed, head tilted up as if she searched for some scent. A dark certainty came over Ric that she would not talk. By law he had to guard her, but she was under no ethical or legal requirement to tell him what to expect. Of course that would only make the ride more expensive.

"Do you know who Immori Dawn is?"

"Son of the inventor of the Sling Drive. CEO of Dawntreader Theocorp. You move in high circles, lady."

"It's more than that. I am his…Anagene… created to be the perfect lover, protector and servant."

"His Genie." Ric watched her pout turn to a frown. Anagenes were artificially created humans, made from the Genes of a person as the ultimate play toy or help mate, depending on your point of view. They had no rights under any law and were required to be registered, one of the few laws that Nationals anywhere enforced on the Theocorps. The term Genie had been foisted on them by a critic. In an age where right of Freedom of Expression had stolen the sting from profanity it had become the worst possible insult.

"Wash your mouth out Ric." The sniffer told him she was still in flight or fight mode, though her body language had returned to the playful sexual signals.

"I will, just as soon as I get home. I can have my teeth pulled if you like."

"And ruin that pretty mouth of yours?" She shook her head and laughed.

A warning flashed across Ric's vision, telling him that the predicted target would be visible in thirty seconds. "Hold on tight, Angel. Things are going to get rough." Ric activated the passive seekers on a full spread of seven missiles.

Ric flew the aerohack close to the structure where the convection zone mixed with fog off the ocean. The StealthTrac 3000 phased into sight, like a ghost caught in a video. Missiles reported target lock and launched. Ric punched the aerohack into full evade. He flew up the side of the building, watching his rear monitors and counting seven brief explosions, then a brighter secondary explosion marking the StealthTrac 3000's death.

Four target acquisition radars from the Megastructures defense system painted the aerohack. At the top of the two-kilometer high tower, Ric rolled the cab across the top, killed his engines, fired a flares and chaf to defeat any missiles, then plummeted down the other side for a kilometer and a half. At the bottom of the dive he brought the nose up and left, darted into the normal air traffic pattern and squawked IFF for a random Aerohack company based in Havana.

Ric sat quietly, for almost a minute, waiting the sudden wild movement and blackness that would tell him a missile hit. When he was sure they were safe he turned and said, "It's just a fast ride to Quito now. Once inside the liftport not even the Theocorps can touch you. Neither the Vatican nor the Kaba is sacred anymore. The Theocorps and Nationals guarantee the safety of Liftports for reasons of pure self interest. You can trust that."

They remained quiet for a while, listening to the faint whisper of air blowing past the windows. Most of the time Ric stayed inside the high Supersonic Traffic Lanes, leaving only briefly to entered cluttered city zones where he could switch IFF codes. What waited at Quito worried him, though not a lot. Twenty years as a Merc out among the Sprawl States had taught him not to agonize in the calm time between battles.

After a time she broke the silence. "Do you want to know why I left him?"

He couldn't blame her for speaking. She didn't understand combat nor the importance of mental preparation. Civilians never did. "I think I'd like that."

"For the most part, it's not so bad being Immori Dawn's . . . Genie." She spat out the word as if it were a roach swallowed with a sip of coffee. "We share the same genetic code. Geneticists shifted mine to make me a woman. At a level that not even twins can comprehend, I know what he thinks, what he feels, what he dreams. The only differences, other than sex, are enhancements that make me a better lover and a guard." She stopped and shook her head.

Ric sent a query for landing instructions to Quito Liftport. Quito sent back complete landing instructions, including directions to remain clear of all north eastern approaches due to an unannounced and unrequested landing by the second platoon of Langstons Armored Cavalry. They were a tough unit with a rep for nastiness that only a few outfits shared.

Ric smiled into the mirror to let his ride know that she should go on. He needed to think up a plan to handle an armored platoon, complete with possible E-frame support.

"By law I have no more rights than this aerohack. Though I am more than ninety-eight percent biological, I am a possession. My genes are not even my own. So long as I live, I can never be more than Immori Dawn's Genie. The Theocorps cradle to grave policy guarantees even the lowliest line worker a comfortable living. All you give in return is absolute loyalty. Though I am listed as a Theocorp asset rather than a worker, I had it better than anyone. As Immori's Genie I had everything I could wish for, except freedom. Then one day I asked myself how Immori would feel in my position. I couldn't even imagine an answer. For the first time I found something we didn't share. I could not stay with him."

Though Ric had lived a life that he always considered full, he had never met a genie. They were fabulously rare and expensive creations that almost everyone viewed as a form of obscenity practiced by the very rich. Legally she was a machine. A machine cannot enter into a contract, and that made his contract null and void. It would be a simple and legal matter to avoid his meeting with Langston's Armored Cavalry. Had he known at the beginning of the ride that this fare was a genie Ric would have taken it. Things had changed.

"When we get to Quito, I will drop you as near to the Liftport as possible. Hit the ground running and don't look back."

"And when I'm out of your cab I am no longer your problem."

"When you're in the liftport you're no longer my problem." Ric hit the cocoon button on the dash and watched the back of the cab fill with a fast drying cocoon. She smiled just before her face disappeared.

Ric brought his cab in low, turned very hard and hit the emergency jettison for the back compartment. The section arched out toward the front door of the Lift port. In the background he could see the skyhook wires rising out of sight, lifting elevators toward geosynchronous satellites. Her cocoon came to a stop maybe thirty meters from the door and began to evaporate. A sudden shock slammed him against the restraints, a missile hit to the undercarriage. The explosion, hardly more than a love tap, was intended to bring him down rather than kill. Ric hit the jet brakes, cut power and dropped the aerohack on its side. Battle diagnostics fed over the cyberlink told him the cab was close to a write off. After downloading the cost of the repairs from her account he blew the top hatch and pulled himself out.

Ric backed away, careful to keep his hands open and clear. Government guidelines required that small unit actions such as this keep civilian casualties to a minimum. Killing innocent civilians outright was considered a war crime that could tarnish a unit's reputation. Using the cyberlink, he transmitted the destruct code to the aerohack's computer, but set final command to a dead man switch as well as a last command code.

Jump troops leap frogged across the field, with half the men always on the ground to cover those in the air. Four support E-Frames loped across the parking lot on bird legs, careful not to step on parked vehicles. The lead warframe, a MAX-WarFrame, ultra-light Scout Raptor fired jatoboosters to leap out of the parking lot into the street, narrowly missing a tour bus. The tourists, never realizing the danger, oohed, awhed and took videos.

The Scout jumped again and landed with its legs straddling the overturned aerohack. Scout Raptors resembled nine meters tall metal dinosaurs with a balancing tail, and vestigial wings that support light plasma cannons. As the head turned to look at him, the plasma cannons tracked with the movements of the head.

Ric stood with his arms high, attempting to look as harmless as possible. It was always difficult to stand passively by and wait for someone else to decide to kill you. He forced himself to wait to give his fare a few more seconds. When the Raptor jerked its head up toward the front of the liftport, Ric realized that the pilot had seen the woman running for the door. Out of time, he opened his mouth to equalize the pressure on his eardrums, sent the detonate command to the aerohack and downloaded the cost of his insurance deductible from her cred account.

The shockwave tossed Ric thirty feet backwards. Ceramic plates sewn into the lining of his duster protected him from most of the shrapnel but none of the bruising. Ric had just decided to try and set when the Jump infantry's point man pressed a gun to his forehead and told him not to move.

A young Lieutenant bearing the ancient look in his eyes that the survivors of war always carry knelt near Ric's head. The gel that filled the inside of e-frame cockpits glistened against his skin. "You're a hell of a cab driver."

Ric smiled. "You ought to see me with a shopping cart. I do wonders."

"That thing you helped escape, did you know it was a Genie?"

Ric nodded and it hurt. "Yes. She said something like that."

"That makes you accessory to a theft."

"Some people might say that. But whoever gets into my cab contracts' me to get them to a destination. I don't care if the fare is the CEO of a Theocorp, a grifter from the deeps or an Incredible Painting Elephant. That's the way I do business."

The Lieutenant sat for a moment, chewing on what Ric had said. When Ric was almost sure the man was going to order him arrested or carry him off to some dark room with a Theocorp interrogator, he nodded to his men. They pulled back as carefully and professionally as they had arrived.

After about ten minutes Ric managed to drag himself to a nearby phone. He jacked into his accounts to confirm the balance and was more than pleased at the total. He had just started to call the GenDyn Theocorp to order a new aerohack when a better idea occurred to him. What does a Genie built for sex do with her new found freedom? It would be weeks before delivery of a new cab, even if he consented to pay horrendous rush fees. Without rush fees, GenDyn reported a six-month wait time.

The whisper of air around the sky hook cables, and the thought of time, reminded Ric that it had been ten years since his last vacation. With this last ride he was almost what you would call a rich man. The downside of vacations was that they happened in strange places with strangers.

But Aria was up there ahead of him, on her way to the Slingship. So he wouldn't travel alone. Ric jacked out of the phone system and walked though the Liftport doors.

About the author:

Frank Darbe tells us, "I misspent my youth in Oklahoma, but live as an adult in California, where I retired from the Navy and work as a technical writer. I began reading science fiction with Heinlein, and stumbled over fantasy with Andre Norton. In 1996, I won the Fiction Writer's Award at Mesa College in San Diego and published a short Story "Resurrection Man." I have written two novels, one fantasy and one mystery, that are now circulating through slush piles.