She eased past Johnny and walked up between the workbenches, raising
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more lights with the remote in her hand. The bikers, Samuel and Ernesto,
emerged into brilliance. Gustave-Donny stared around him in disbelief.
“What the fuck is this place?”
The clerk held up her remote as if it were a weapon, and carefully tossed
it down.
“What’s goin’ on, Cams?”
“Nothin’. Just a little private interview with the eejay.”
This God’s rule had some tinge of humanity. In other places, behavior as
aberrant as this would have got them their heads blown away, straight off.
But Gustave didn’t open fire.
“You expect me to believe that? You’re crazy.”
He jerked his shotgun for Johnny and Cambridge to go up the steps
ahead. When he registered Bella, he started as if someone had dropped ice
down his neck.
“Fuck!”
He pulled the headset from Johnny, carefully so’s not to disturb the child.
He smashed it, conclusively, against the tiled wall of the stair, and handed it back with a defiant glare.
That was bad. Out in the wasteland gun waving was endemic, male display behavior, not so dangerous as it looks. But the engineer-journalist was sacred; his tools even more so. He was the only link with the rest of the world.
Johnny’s calm left him; fear plummeted through him . . .
“Fucking weirdos.”
The tow truck was outside. Johnny got Bella on his knees. She woke up and
began to cry. Ernesto crouched on the flatbed, the muzzle of his shotgun
through the glassless rear window of the cab. It pressed against Johnny’s
neck. Samuel’s bike roared in escort. Young Gustave drove with one hand,
the other awkwardly stabbing his gun into Cambridge’s ribs. His eyes were
wild with anger and humiliation: he’d been taken in completely. Worse
(Johnny read), he feared that his God had been taken in too.
“Fucking diamond mine!” he wailed. “What the fuck you growing back
there, Cams? Illegal drugs?”
Cambridge kept her eyes front. Through his own blank-brain panic Johnny
could feel her arm and side against him, rigid with terror. But for Donny-
Gustave she sneered the way she’d sneered when he was six and she was ten.
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“Nah. Mutants, Donny. Cannibal mutant babies. And they’re coming for
you. Not tonight, maybe not tomorrow night—”
“Fucking shut up.” His face in the driver’s mirror was a darkly crumpled
rectangle of hurt. “I never would’ve believed an eejay would be into drugs . . .”
Bella’s loud and violent sobbing—so rare and devastating, this child’s
crying—was like a wall around them both. Johnny held her tight and vowed
that he was going to get Bella out of this alive. There was no betrayal he
would not gladly embrace—if only, please God, he was given the chance.
“Shut the kid up!”
Cambridge yelled back indignantly. “Are you kidding? How are we going to
do that? She’s terrified!”
Her courage was like a lifeline. He dropped into character . . . “Look, I
don’t know what’s wrong, we weren’t doing anything wrong, we wanted to be
private, kind of get to know each other. Would we be doing anything dirty
with the kid there?” He babbled, injecting innocent panic into the real thing.
He hunched himself forward, arms and head between Bella and the guns.
She could feel that he was back in control—throat-chokingly, fearfully sweet
the way she suddenly obeyed his shushing and went silent: her small hands
clutching his collar, her wet face against his neck . . .
Donny-Gustave looked around with a bitter scowl.
“You and Cams was just holding hands? What about all that stuff? Looked like some kind of heroin still to me.”
The tow truck bucketed, its mean yellow lights barely cutting the darkness.
Cambridge ducked her head and made herself small between the men, fists
burrowed in her jacket pockets, letting them fight it out. Johnny couldn’t
remember his next line. Gustave was going to crash the damn truck. He
thought he was going to pass out, the situation was so consummately awful—
when slam, the shotgun muzzle behind his ear suddenly dealt a numbing, stinging blow to the corner of his jaw.
He yelled, sure he was dying. There was another explosion, unbelievably
close. The truck slewed. Bella whimpered. Cold outdoor air belched into the
cab. Johnny lifted his ringing head. A mess of dark movement resolved itself
into Cambridge, hanging onto the wheel and wrestling with something
flailing and heavy at the flown-open door.
“Take the wheel!” she screamed.
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Johnny grabbed, and shoved Bella—dead silent—in her carrier into the
well in front of the bench.
“Keep your head down, baby.”
She ducked. The top of her dark head was all his eyes could see. He
grappled blindly—the dumb-animal feel of the ancient machine piling in
with the heavy scuffle going on beside him, a blur of confusion. Donny’s body
fell out into the night. Cambridge hauled the door shut. Johnny slid over. She
drove the truck. The road was dark and empty, no sign of the second biker.
“Who shot him?”
“Who d’you think?”
He looked over his shoulder. The second of Micane’s guys was a slumped
heap.
“God. Who shot him?”
“I didn’t go out to the plant with you alone, what did you think? Donny
drove into an ambush. Don’t look so fucking shocked, eejay. Why didn’t the
stupid bastard frisk me, if he wanted to stay alive?”
“Is he dead? Are they dead?”
“I hope so.” Her teeth were chattering.
A mile or so down the road she pulled in. There were no lights, no houses
visible in a strange outdoor darkness, faintly tinged with starlight. The three of them got down. Johnny at last could tug Bella out of the sling and hug her
properly. Her eyes were huge and black in her dim face. A little child
sometimes seems like a machine. Switch off, switch on: no memory, each
event fresh and untainted. She leaned back and stared.
“Stars!”
He hadn’t known she knew what that word meant, not clearly enough to
apply it out here.
The man on the back of the truck made no sound. Somewhere on the road
another two human beings lay: Gustave and Samuel. Johnny wanted to go to
the man on the flatbed, but the silence of that huddled thing was intimidating.
Johnny’s responses were from another planet. He didn’t know what Cambridge
was thinking. Maybe simply breathing, standing there and breathing. She’d
shot someone. How could Johnny imagine the afterburn of that?
He thought of the desk clerk’s life, and how her spunky intelligence had
won her a place with the boys, but only on condition she played by their
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rules. And only till she got pregnant, or fell in love. Then she’d be one of
those gap-toothed, horny-skinned women, “married” to some junior male:
property to be abused. She’d have a string of sickly kids, her whole life the
struggle
to keep one or two of them alive to adulthood. The bad clothes
looked ethnic and interesting on the others. On Cambridge they were
shameful. She was a real human person. She shouldn’t be here, she should
have a future.
“I hope . . .” The clerk shuddered. “I hope Donny’s . . . I didn’t shoot to kill.
Look, don’t blame yourself, eejay. You wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t been
sending out our own signals, well as we could. We knew we couldn’t keep
what was going on from Micane much longer. We need some support. After
what’s happened tonight, we’ll need it more. But Micane’s on the slide. With
help, we can take over . . . I’m real sorry about the cam.”
She looked at the child. “Is having her some kind of cover? Or do you
honest to God look after her? I mean, like a woman?”
“No,” said Johnny, painfully aware of the truth. “I look after her like a man.
It’s a start. I do my best.”
He held Bella like a shield. Cambridge’s movement toward him went
unfinished. She touched Bel, awkwardly patting the little girl’s head.
“Stay here. Someone will bring your car.”
When she was gone, Johnny and Bella walked around a little: admiring the
stars and bumping into a few trees. She’d soiled herself. This didn’t generally happen any more at night, but he could hardly blame her. He managed to
change her, Bella standing, holding onto him with the crotch of her night suit
dangling between her knees. He hugged her in a daze of gratitude. “You and
me against the world, Bel,” he whispered. He gave her some dried snack fruit,
and she asked him when they were going home.
He hoped the desk clerk’s story was the truth. He didn’t want to blame
himself for three murders. But the black man’s dominance must have been
threatened for a long time, if his rivals had been able to set up a coralin plant under his nose. Since power couldn’t change hands out here without violence,
it wasn’t Johnny’s fault. If it hadn’t been over the plant, it would have been
something else.
He thought of setting off into this savage utter wilderness. But he didn’t
have a spare diaper any more, and the prospect of hitchhiking, even in
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daylight, was not appealing. An hour passed. His global-mobile was in his
pocket. He didn’t feel like calling anyone. No more signals . . . The coralin
chip in its heart, like the processor in his cam, was practically sterile. But you weren’t supposed to take any chances.
He thought of the starter that Cam’s cadre had gotten hold of. They were no
biochemists, they didn’t build it from scratch. He imagined a brother eejay dead out here, or stripped of his magic and too ashamed ever to come home . . .
Bella, he found, was happier on his back. He walked her, holding hands
over his shoulder, singing nursery rhymes. She didn’t say a thing about guns,
or shooting, or bad guys. Which didn’t mean this adventure hadn’t scarred
her for life. He writhed to think of the debriefing he’d have to go through
with Izzy.
When he heard the car he hid until he was sure it was his own, and the
driver was Cambridge, and there was no one else with her. She handed over
a sliver of plastic card—his key. It was good to have that safely back in his
hand.
They stood by the car. Johnny put the sidelights on dim, so he could see her
face a little.
Boondock episodes were always incredibly charged: vows of eternal
friendship, exchange of instant pictures that would be kept for a few months—
until they lost all meaning. This one had only been more spectacular; the
configuration was the same. Johnny told himself his picture was already
fading in her purse. But he wanted to give her something real.
“How’s Donny?”
She shook her head. Don’t ask.
“About that ride—”
She thought he was joking. “Another time,” she said. “You get back and
send us some reinforcement. I don’t ask what form it’s going to take, you guys
know best. But make it soon, okay?”
He settled Bella in the backseat, with her beloved plastic tilt-rotor and her
herbal bunny pillow. He got into the car, opened the window wide.
“Cambridge, there’s nothing for you in that town. Don’t go back. Get in,
come with us. I can fix everything.”
He’d thought it out in a split second. He could hack the problems
involved: what’s gilded youthfulness for? His mistake was that he’d
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forgotten, for a moment, who he was supposed to be. In the dim light he
saw her eyes narrow.
“Me? Leave the cadre? Wait a minute. Why shouldn’t I go back?”
He stared over the dash, “I’m an eejay ma’am. I don’t take sides. I just made
the tape that just went on the news.”
At no point had she told him he mustn’t make live transmission. It had
occurred to him (the Wizard of Oz) that she might not know what he was
doing. The 360 looked unimpressive. But he was a journalist, and she hadn’t
asked. The coralin plant could have survived. The legal status of pirated
coralin wasn’t sewn up completely. There were ways, angles: there were
lawyers on the side of the people. Johnny had genuinely been helping, getting
them publicity. It wasn’t his fault that violence had then exploded, on prime-
time news.
It would have taken the police no time to get a precise fix. They were
entitled to deal swift and hard with armed conspiracy involving information
technology. They would be here very soon . . . No one should get hurt. They’d
stun-gas the site and haul the bodies out before they burned the plant.
“Okay.” She gripped the rim of the window. “Okay, fine. You faked your
unionist rap. You took your pictures and sent them straight to the bastards in
power. Okay, I was a fool. But you thought I’d come with you? I don’t want to escape from here. I want ‘here’ to escape from being the way it is. I thought
a guy who was in the union was someone I could trust. You were only
interested in getting a story. Well fuck you, Mr. Eejay. Let them do their
worst. You can’t shut us out forever. Shit—the arrogance. Any day now there’s going to be a revolution. And you’re going to find yourself sitting right in the middle, Mr. Fucking Neutral Observer.”
“That’s where I belong,” said Johnny. “I’m a journalist.”
Cambridge looked down at him, as from a great height. He saw the blighted
skin, every mark picked out by the upward light. The contempt in smart,
clear eyes. She would have liked to be an eejay. Maybe she had the makings,
who could tell? Johnny did not go for the idea, though it was widely accepted,
that there were no genes left out here worth worrying about.
“Violence is never going to solve anything.”
She curled her lip. “What kind of violence? The bureaucratic kind or the
personal kind? I don’t make that distinction.”
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“I’m sorry.”
“No,” said the desk clerk. “No. You’re not sorry, Johnny.”
She let go of the rim and walked away.
Johnny drove around lumpy roads, helpless, until the computer s
uddenly
recovered its bearings and he was on his way home. He thought about the
cold fenland town that he had visited once. (It would be a mistake to let
anyone out here know you’d actually left the continent, that would be too
much.) He thought about the European solution to the big problem. No
citadels there. The countryside was empty. Everyone lived in the cities, cheek
by jowl. In England the wasted people were called the poor. You stepped over
them as you went into your hotel. He didn’t believe it was any worse to let
them have their own world, with its own rules. He thought about the
phylloxera beetle. He hadn’t finished that story. How the plague came back
in the next century and laid California’s vines to waste . . . because people
forgot to take care. Because greed drowned the warnings. It isn’t the coralin,
he thought. The technology is helpless to save the world. It’s what goes on
between people that fucks things up.
Johnny truly was in the union, which made him a radical and dangerous
character, by many standards; inside. But you can be opposed to some of the
laws, and still believe in law and order. You can be on the side of the Indians, and still think it’s a bad idea to sell them guns and firewater. He wished he
could explain. One day the citadel of civilization would spread out the way it
used to and cover the whole continent. But that would not get a chance to
happen if you let the wolves into the sleigh. You couldn’t let yourself be
distracted by the fact that the wolves had human faces. He couldn’t regret his
decisions. But he was glad, as the road jolted away, that his mask had slipped
at the end. It would have been worse to leave Cambridge believing that she’d
met her urban-guerilla savior. He had given her something real after all: a
creep to despise. Maybe it evened the balance, a little.
He drove, and the pain eased. The boondocks episode began to fade in the
accustomed, dreamlike way. Bella, asleep in the back, felt ever more like his
talisman, his salvation, as he scurried for the sheltering walls.
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THE LOST TECHNIQUE
OF BLACKMAIL
By Mark Teppo
RonTom St. John’s Liberty Prescott Four, President and CEO of InterCore
Express, was not, as his CV would otherwise tell you, a graduate of the Las
Cyberpunk Page 25
