by John Brunner
Meanwhile the waiter had faded in response to a signal from another table, and when he returned Ina was struggling not to scream with fury.
He laid a slip of paper in front of her. It bore a message in firm clear handwriting, unusual now that most literate kids were taught to type at seven. She read it at a glance:
The lucky shivver with the champagne has an idea. Share the bottle?—Sandy Locke
She raised her eyes and found grinning at her a man in a fashionable pirate shirt open to the waist, a gaudy headband, gilt wristers, one long lean finger poised at arm’s length on the cork.
She felt her anger fade like mist at sunrise.
He was a strange one, this Sandy. He dismissed her complaint about how ridiculous it was never to have any more champagne at this hotel and steered the conversation into other channels. That made her ill-tempered all over again, and she went to bed alone.
But when the breakfast-trolley rolled automatically to her bedside at 0900, there was a bottle of champagne on it tied with a ribbon and accompanied by a posy. When she met Sandy by the pool at eleven, he asked whether she had enjoyed it.
“So it was you who fixed it! Do you work for this hotel chain?”
“This slumpy linkage? I’m insulted. Third-rank operations aren’t my framework. Shall we swim?”
The next question died on her lips. She had been going to ask what pull he had, whether it was government or a hypercorp. But another explanation fitted, and if that were the right one, the implications were so enticing she dared not broach the matter without a buildup. She said, “Sure, let’s.” And peeled off her clothes.
The wine list was not reprinted after all, and the manager wore a very puzzled expression. That convinced Ina her guess might be correct. Next morning while they were breakfasting in bed she put it squarely to Sandy.
“Poker, I think you must be a CSC.”
“Only if this bed isn’t bugged.”
“Is it?”
“No. I made sure. There are some things I simply don’t care to let computers know.”
“How right you are.” She shivered. “Some of my colleagues at G2S, you know, live at Trianon, where they test new life-styles. And they boast about how their actions are monitored night and day, compare the advantages of various ultramodern bugs … I don’t know how they can stand it.”
“Stand?” he echoed sardonically. “Not a matter of standing, except social standing, I guess. More, it kind of props them up. A few years and they’ll forget they have feet of their own.”
All day Ina was near to shaking with excitement. To think that by pure chance she had bumped into a genuine three-vee tactile-true member of that prestigious elite, the tiny secretive tribe of computer-sabotage consultants … ! It was a perfectly legal discipline, provided its practitioners didn’t tamper with data reserved to a government dept under the McBann-Krutch “greatest-good-of-the-greatest-number” act, but its experts didn’t advertise themselves any more than industrial spies, and it would have been politer to ask whether he was into DDR, “difficult data retrieval.” Luckily he’d taken no offense.
Delicately she hinted at what was worrying her. How much longer was she still going to be able to move upward, not crosswise, when she changed jobs? At first his response was casual: “Oh, turn freelance, why not, the way I did? It’s not so much different from the regular plug-in life-style. When you get adjusted to it.”
Echoes underlying “freelance” resounded in her head: the lone knight riding out to champion his lady fair and Christian justice, the King’s Messenger, the secret agent, the merchant venturer …
“I’ve thought about it, naturally. But I’d dearly like to know what G2S has added to my file before I decide.”
“You could try asking me to find out.”
“You mean”—hardly daring to hope—“you’re for rent?”
“Right now?” He put the nip into nipple with sharp well-cared-for teeth. “No, my jiggle-oh rating is strictly O. This kind of thing I do for free.”
“You know what I mean!”
He laughed. “Don’t slidewise out of control. Of course I know. And it might be kind of fun to poke G2S.”
“Are you serious?”
“I could be, when my vacation’s over. Which it isn’t.”
Musingly, at two in the morning—her sleeping time was being eroded, but what the hell?—she said, “It isn’t knowing that the machines know things about you which you wouldn’t tell your straightener, let alone your spouse or chief. It’s not knowing what the things are which they know.”
“Sweedack. The number of people I’ve seen destabled by just that form of uncertainty, clear into paranoia!”
“Sweedack?”
“Ah, you don’t follow hockey.”
“Now and then, but I’m not what you’d call a ’fish for it.”
“Nor me, but you have to stay in circuit. It’s French. Came south with Canadian hockey players. Short for je suis d’accord. Thought everybody had picked up on it.”
Before she could guard her tongue she had said, “Oh, yes! I’ve heard Kate say it to her friends.”
“Who?”
“Uh … My daughter.” And she trembled, imagining the inevitable sequence:
I didn’t know you had a daughter. She in high school?
No—uh—at UMKC.
Followed by the brief silence full of subtraction which would all too closely betray her location on the age scale.
But this man, ultimately tactful, merely laughed. “Quit worrying. I know all about you. Think I’d have generated so much champagne on spec?”
That figured. In seconds she was laughing too. When she recovered, she said, “Would you really come to KC?”
“If you can afford me.”
“G2S can afford anybody. What do you usually click on as?”
“A systems rationalizer.”
She brightened. “Fantastic! We lost our head-of-dept in that area. He broke his contract and—Say, you didn’t know that too, did you?” Suddenly suspicious.
He shook his head, stifling a yawn. “Never had any reason to probe G2S until I met you.”
“No. No, of course not. What attracted you to your line of work, Sandy?”
“I guess my daddy was a phone freak and I inherited the gene.”
“I want a proper answer.”
“I don’t know. Unless maybe it’s a sneaking feeling that people are wrong when they say human beings can’t keep track of the world any more, we have to leave it up to the machines. I don’t want to be hung out to dry on a dead branch of the evolutionary tree.”
“Nor do I. Right, I’ll get you to KC, Sandy. I think your attitude is healthy. And we could do with a blast of fresh air.”
SOLD TO THE MAN AT THE TOP
“I am not bleating you. This shivver is escape-velocity type. And we’ve been short one systems rash since Kurt bailed out and not wishing to cast nasturtiums at George she hasn’t made my job any less of a bed of nails—let alone yours, hm?
“Sure, he asked for a trial period himself. Eight weeks, maybe twelve, see how he meshes with the rest of us.
“Right now he’s on vacation. I told you: I met him in the Sea Islands. You can reach him there.
“Great. Here, take down his code. 4GH …”
UNSETTLEMENT PROGRAM
The palisade of thousand-meter towers around Mid-Continental Airport had two gaps in it, memorializing not—for once—buildings that had been riot-blown or tribaled but the crash sites of two veetol airliners, one taking off and one landing, which had slidewised simultaneously off their repulsors last week. Rumor had it the reason might be found in the launch of Ground-to-Space’s latest orbital factory from their field westward in the cross-river state of Kansas; allegedly someone had omitted to notify the airlines of the volume and extent of the blast wave. But an inquiry was still in progress, and anyhow G2S was far too much of a Power in the Land hereabouts for any negligence charge to emerge from the hearings.
Nonetheless the outcome was a popular subject for bets on illegal short-term Delphi pools. Legal pools, naturally, were forbidden to pre-guess a court’s verdict.
The façades of the remaining towers, whether homes or offices, were as blank as ancient gravestones and as gloomy. They had mostly been erected during the shitabrick phase architecture had suffered through in the early nineties. There was a more flattering term for the style—antideco—but it was too lame to have caught on. Such structures were as dehumanized as the coffins employed to bury the victims of the Great Bay Quake, and stemmed from the same cause. The damage sustained when San Francisco, plus most of Berkeley and Oakland, collapsed overnight had come close to bankrupting the country, so that everything but everything had to be designed with the fewest possible frills.
In a desperate attempt to make a virtue of necessity, all such buildings had been made “ecofast”—in other words, they were heavily insulated, they incorporated elaborate garbage-reclamation systems, every apartment was supplied with a flat area outside that caught at least some sunlight, allegedly large enough to be hydroponically planted with sufficient vegetables and fruit to meet the requirements of an average family. The consequence had been to fix in the public mind the impression that any genuinely efficient building must be stark, ugly, undesirable and dull.
It seemed that necessity was too hateful for anybody to enjoy being virtuous.
Thanks to some smart route adjustment by his airline’s computers, his plane was a few minutes early. Ina had agreed to meet him on the main concourse, but when he emerged, tingling slightly, from the static-discharge chamber by the plane gate, she wasn’t in sight.
It would be out of character for him to waste spare minutes. Rubbing his arms, reflecting that even if electric lift for aircraft was efficient, economical and non-polluting it was damnably hard on the passengers when they had to shed their accumulated volts, he caught sight of a sign pointing the way to the public Delphi boards.
Most of his belongings, bought to fit his new identity, were on their way direct to G2S’s recruit-settlement block. But he did have a travel bag weighing nine kaygees. From under the nose of a sour woman who favored him with a string of curses he nabbed an autoporter and—after consulting the illuminated fee table on its flank—credded the minimum: $35 for an hour’s service. Rates were higher here than at Toledo, but that was to be expected; the cost of living at Trianon, a hundred kilometers away, was the second highest in the world.
From now until his credit expired the machine would carry his bag in its soft plastic jaws and follow him as faithfully as a well-trained hound, which indeed it resembled, down to the whimper it was programed to utter at the 55-minute mark, and the howl at 58.
At 60 it would drop the bag and slink away.
With it at his heels he stood surveying the high-slung display, tracking the shifting figures with the ease of much practice. He looked first at his favorite sector, social legislation, and was pleased to see he had two won bets due to be collected shortly. Despite all the pressure that had been applied, the president would not after all be able to make jail sentences mandatory for slandering his personal aides—it would cost him his majority if he tried. And Russian math-teaching methods were definitely going to be introduced here, given that money was still piling in when the odds had shortened to five-to-four. Well, if the U.S. team were ever to make a decent showing in the Mathematical Olympiads, there was no alternative.
Odds, though, were poor on that sector of the board, except ten-to-one against the adoption of the proposed new amendment to the Constitution which would redefine electoral zones in terms of professions and age groups rather than geographical location. It might make sense, but people were scarcely ready for it yet. Next generation, maybe.
He turned his attention to social analysis, which was offering many double and a few treble figures. He put a thousand on the chance that the mugging-per-adult rate in New York City would break ten percent this year; it had been hovering around eight for an improbably long time and people were losing their enthusiasm, but there was a new police chief in the Bronx with a get-tough reputation and that ought to sew the matter up.
And the technical breakthrough odds were also nice and fat. For old time’s sake he put another thousand on the introduction of an Earth-Moon gravislide before 2025. That was a perennial disappointment. The idea was to haul cargo off the Moon on a cable stretching past the neutral point and spill it direct into Earth’s gravity-well so it could coast to a landing free of charge. It had failed twice already. But someone in New Zealand was on the track of mile-long single-crystal filaments. Given those …
A couple of hungry-faced old men, one black and the other white, who clearly were not here to travel but merely to pass the time, noticed him placing the wager. They studied his expensive clothes, assessed his air of financial well-being, and after some argument agreed to risk fifty apiece.
“It beats horse racing,” he heard one of them say.
“I used to like the horses!” the other objected, and they moved on, their voices querulous as though both craved the tension discharge of a quarrel but dared not start one for fear of losing an only friend.
Hmm! I wonder whether the Delphi systems in Russia, or East Germany, are patterned on stock markets and totalizators the way ours obviously are. One knows that in China they—
But at that moment he caught sight of odds being quoted which he simply didn’t believe. One gets three in favor of genetic optimization becoming a commercial service by 2020, instead of a privilege reserved to government officials, hypercorp execs and billionaires? Last time he saw a board it had been up around 200, regardless of the fact that the public was clearly hungry for it. Such a violent crash in the odds must surely be due to inside information. One of the thousand-and-some staff and “students” at Tarnover must have yielded to the temptation to go sell his headful of data, and company scientists somewhere must be busily trying to turn a vague hope into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Unless …
Oh, no! It can’t be that they know somebody did get away? After all this time, after these six mortal, hateful years, has the precious secret of my escape leaked out?
There couldn’t possibly be a connection! Even so—!
The world swam around him for the space of half a dozen thumping heartbeats. Some one jostled him roughly; he was barely able to perceive that it was an economist, wearing a sewn-on badge in bright green and white saying underpower!—one of the people who on principle declined to use up their full power allotment and did their utmost to prevent others from using theirs. There were alleged to be a great many economists at KC.
Then a bright voice was saying, “Sandy, good to see you—Is something wrong?”
Vast effort pulled him back together, smiling, calm, in a condition to note how changed Ina was from the image she’d presented at the resort. She wore a light but severe coverall in plain black and white, and her long hair was in a snood. She was very much the head-of-dept doing a special favor to this recruit who was slotting into a higher-than-average level of the hierarchy.
Therefore he didn’t kiss her, didn’t even take her hand, simply said, “Hello. No, nothing’s wrong. Except I just saw what the odds are on my favorite long shot. One of these mornings I’ll wake to find my credit well and truly docked.”
As he spoke, he started toward the exit. Ina, and the autoporter, kept pace.
“You have baggage?” she inquired.
“Just this. I sent the rest direct. I hear you have a great settlement block.”
“Oh, yes. It has a fine record. Been in use for ten years and so far not one environmental psychosis. Speaking of accommodation, I should have asked if you plan to bring a house with you. Currently we have room for one on site; we don’t start building our next factory until September.”
“No, I’ve had my house four years so I decided to trade it in. Matter of fact, I might get my next built here. I’m told there are good
architects around KC.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know. I prefer to plug into an apt, but someone at the party might advise you.”
“I’ll ask around. What time is it set for?”
“Eight o’clock. The welcome suite is right on the entrance floor. All your signifying colleagues will be there.”
PARADOX, NEXT STOP AFTER THE BOONDOCKS
“It’s not because my mind is made up that I don’t want you to confuse me with any more facts.
“It’s because my mind isn’t made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.
“So shut up, do you hear me? shut up!”
YOU’RE BEING FRAMED
Although this was strictly transient accommodation, it differed subtly from a hotel suite. He noted with approval the touches that made it more like a smart private apartment. Retractable textured walls could subdivide the main room in half a dozen ways, according to taste. The decor on his arrival was in neutral shades: beige, pale blue and white. He made use at once of the switch by the door to change that to rich dark green, russet and old gold. It was done with lights behind translucent paneling. The conveniences, such as the three-vee, the polarity-reversal clothing cleaner and the electrotoner attached to the bathtub, were not the basic hotel-chain type but the more expensive home-use version. Perhaps most important of all, you could not only draw back the curtains but even open the windows. That was a facility not found in hotels nowadays.
Out of curiosity he did open one, and found he was looking over treetops toward the source of a roaring noise which a moment ago had been inaudible thanks to superefficient soundproofing.
What in the world—?
Followed a moment later by the wry contradiction: What out of this world—?
