Palace by Katharine Kerr, Mark Kreighbaum

a moment. ‘It’s the people in Pleasure that bother me. Penned up like criminals, trapped here forever whether they like it or not. It’s not what they do. It’s the way we treat them.’
    Rico felt all his good times run away like spilled water. He’d never really thought of that, never really let himself think about it. Barra leaned over and flipped up a narrow panel on the desktop.
    Underneath lay a row of tiny disks like coins in a wrapper.
    ‘You can load those,’ she remarked. ‘Yeah, in those slots there. Someone’s modified this link to the usual Map sockets for Pleasure Sect, but you’re right. This is a very old frame. I’m surprised it still works.’
    ‘I’m surprised it ended up in a hotel,’ Rico said.
    ‘Oh, those loads are probably games or something. And it’s a nice-looking piece of furniture.’ Barra turned back to her brother. ‘Is that pink stuff drinkable?’
    ‘Better than the water. I’ll pour you some.’
    Rico heard the sofa creak as she sat down again. He powered on the frame and found the icons that had so puzzled him earlier in the day. Most were standard - little circles each marked with an access glyph for different agents and utilities, room service, commcalls, banking access, and so on. One area of the holoscreen showed a set of five icons, though, that he’d never seen before, and one that should have been there was missing, a general route out to the Map at large. Every sect Map contained a pipe to whatever artificial intelligence coordinated the sect, which would then supply the out-route. But this frame showed nothing to mark the pipe, unless Pleasure used a glyph he couldn’t recognize? On a frame this old the glyphs might well mark subordinated access areas, too. Since the frame had no jacks, he was limited to finger-tapping icons like any tourist - irritating enough to make him stubborn about it.
    He began expanding the icons, one at a time, into new clusters, each linked by colour, but he found nothing recognizable as a pipe. Activating the sub-icons brought him air conditioning controls, a commcall directory, some rather startling holos of various sapients having sex in unusual ways, and other end-user objects. Loading in the coin-like objects brought him games and more pornography. The frame’s structure and sockets stayed stubbornly closed until he realized that he had a repair utility in hidden files, just sitting waiting to be unpacked. It took him a bare few minutes to break the passwords and bring the utilities up. Now! He could add a pipe out, easy as easy - well, easy for someone like him.
    As he worked, he could hear Hi and Barra chatting, teasing each other. All at once something caught his attention.
    ‘Been asked to take a team up to Orbital,’ his mother was saying. ‘I’ll be leaving pretty soon.’
    Rico sloughed round in his chair to listen. Hi was sitting at one end of the sofa, a glass in his hand, and Barra was at the other end.
    ‘Orbital?’ Hi said. ‘Orbital? Isn’t that dangerous as hell?’
    ‘Not any more. They’ve finally got the radiation levels down. It’s only taken what... fourteen years to clean the place up? Well, it’s not spotless, no, but I’m not going to be having any more children. My genes and I will be safe enough.’
    ‘Ah.’ Hi paused for a sip of his soda. ‘Well, well, well. We’re finally going to get hands-on access to the Nimue AI.’
    ‘It’s about time, huh? Think I’ll have any better luck than you did?’
    ‘I never got to go up to Orbital. The Lep had just exploded their pulse bomb, remember, when their flagship suicided. The place was hot enough to cook your dinner. What examination I did had to be through the Map, and the Map out there was a mess. It’ll be great to start getting things untangled.’
    ‘If we can. After fourteen years of floating out there with nothing but radiation soakers and clean-up bots, who knows what’s left?’
    ‘Well, you can always count on my help through