Shaman

by John Shirley

  Flick flick flick, three moving images just that fast, and every fourth one was of Dierdre.

  Jabbar stabbed a button on the frame, freezing the painting on an image of Deirdre setting up a corner video re-education booth, vidding the slums the truth about FedControl's part in the Brazilian War and what happened to anyone who joined the Army . . .

  "What comes after this?" Jabbar asked.

  "There are lots of Movement paintings," Bowler said desperately. "We can't—"

  "It'll be a shot of a kid watching a TV-graffiti pattern with Deirdre's name in it," Quinn interrupted. He turned to Bowler. "I oughta know. I shot it myself."

  Jabbar hit the button. The painting moved on, and a small child with his back to the camera sat watching as video-animated words snaked in superimposition over the President's face: Deirdre says don't listen to liars . . .

  Jabbar nodded. "Okay." He pointed the gun at Quinn. "Now tell me with complete truth, what is it you are to do, eh? What? Because I know you've lied to me. You are Movement, but you are lying."

  Quinn looked at the muzzle of the gun. He could hear his heart hammering, far away somewhere, like a distant construction site noise. "Uhhh ... We told you. We've going to get Deirdre out."

  "Deirdre is in the Fridge," Jabbar said, an impatient adult with a dense child. The flickering light from the video painting lit his face from below, shifting its planes in eerie dislocation. "No one can be broken from there. If you say that is what you do then you are stupid or liars."

  Quinn looked at Bowler, eyebrows lifted. Bowler chose to tell the truth, as he saw it. "We're going to see the Shaman. The Middle Man. But not because I think there's anything to his, you know, ah, claims about the Spirits of the Urban Wilderness, any of it. I think they've got some kind of hardware or wetware access to the FedControl grid. Whatever they've got," Bowler went on, talking fast, "it seems to work. Deirdre herself swore it worked for her once. Only, the Middle Man is probably a schizophrenic so he interprets things . . . you know, mystically."

  Quinn thought about the banshee. Spirits of the Urban Wilderness . . . but all he said was, "Bowler made arrangements to go to the Middle Man because he thinks the Middle Man could get Deirdre out of the Fridge. We got to get there at a certain time. And the blackouts brought the riot squads down, they've sealed off the other ways through. The only way left to get through is . . . here. Through your territory. We need an escort so your people don't shoot us."

  "A way to get into the Fridge." Jabbar's nostrils flared, his eyes hardened. "If it's true, then you will take our people out, too. We have four in the Fridge." He fingered the gun meaningfully.

  "I told you, Bowler," Cisco muttered. "The vibes were—"

  "No, this is greaaa-aaaat!" Zizz broke in, doing a little spastic dance that made two of the guerrillas look at each other and snort. "We could get them out, too! We could—"

  Bowler shook his head. "One will be hard enough. We have a video key for her cell. We need the Middle Man to get us past the guards and failsafes and cameras. We only have one video key."

  "A bomb!" Zizz suggested gleefully. "We could get in, then blow up their com-pu-uuu-ter! Then maybe all the cells would open up and—"

  Quinn groaned. He felt the sweat sticking his shirt to his back. The room seemed chokingly close. "Zizz," Quinn hissed, "stop trying to help before you help us into even deeper shit."

  "No, it's not a bad idea," Jabbar said, looking at Zizz with a new respect. "A bomb in their master computer."

  Bowler shook his head so hard you could hear his beard rustle. "No! Listen—"

  "No, you listen—if you are going to break out your people," Jabbar said, grinding the words between his teeth, "and you want our help, then you will break out our people, too! We will provide the explosive."

  He had lifted the SMG, was pointing its muzzle at Bowler's face.

  Zizz's expression shifted radically in a split second, from glee to a grim uh-oh. She saw that she'd blown it.

  She moved closer to Quinn. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her take the little wire-doll dangling from her wrist . . .

  She jabbed its tongue-wire into Quinn's forearm. Quinn jerked his arm away, sucked in his breath, and felt . . .

  A flash of white light; a wave of white heat.

  Quinn went rigid. Electrified within. Paralyzed. He felt a Presence. Someone . . .

  Click. Suddenly he was standing outside himself. He was tethered but detached, off in a dark corner, unseen, apart from the others, watching himself, seeing an expression on his face that had never been there before.

  He couldn't smell or hear anything—except he heard his own voice. It was talking nonsense. No, it was talking in Arabic, to Jabbar. He, Quinn, was speaking Arabic. He had no idea how to speak Arabic. Not one lesson. But he was doing it. And he knew what the words meant in English:

  "Jabbar! The Fridge is wall-to-wall biomonitoring. The prisoners are all in restraints, on IV medifeeds and spinebox. They can't move unless the spinebox moves them. The cyberguards watch them, they never sleep, they never take a break, they're always there—if you destroy the master computer they and the rest of the equipment might do anything. It isn't necessarily going to shut down—it might feed the prisoners overdoses of medication, the guards might get confused and mistake them for attackers. The bottom line is, if you destroy that computer the system will break down and the people plugged into it will die. Including your men." Cisco and Bowler were staring at him; the physical part of him. Outright amazed.

  Jabbar got over his surprise and replied in Arabic, "Why should we help you if it does not release our people? If we're involved and the Feds find out, they'll push us even harder. Already they fabricate this blackout to harass us, to try to drive us out. Already they raid us twice a month, when they can find us. To provoke them further would not advance our cause, not now. It would be too much pressure. In our position, we have learned how much trouble we can make and still survive. We're not fools."

  "Deirdre struggles for your cause. She spoke up against the new anti-Muslim immigration laws. She spoke up and said that you were being harassed, driven to urban war, because the Christian Fundamentalists are taking over government; she said you were being framed and pros-ecuted and jailed and deported only because of the prejudice against Moslems. She spoke up so many times they had to get rid of her. So they planted illegal chemicals in her house, bomb-making equipment. The irony is unspeakable. Deirdre, a bomber! Countless were the times at the Movement meetings when she argued against bombs. She said bombs couldn't discriminate civilians. But FedControl framed her, they said she was a terrorist bomber, and that gave them the authority io put her in the Fridge, to sentence her to conditioning. She spoke up for you, for all of us—and they kidnapped her! Superficially legal—but kidnapping, Jabbar! Surely Allah tells you now what you must do . . ."

  Jabbar gaped at him. Then Quinn—the watching, detached part of Quinn—fell into a red tube, and passed through a wall of pain. Through white light, a wave of heat . . .

  Click. He was back in himself, bathed in sweat, shaking, but . . . alone in his body now.

  Everyone was staring at him. "This one," Jabbar said, slowly, in English, "has cared enough to learn our language. Has spoken good sense. He has moved me. I am the Mufti and that is my judgment."

  A sloppy breeze, moldy-damp from the East River, oozed between the ruined tenements, and carried some heat away from Quinn and Bowler and Zizz and Cisco and the Mufti as they trudged down the middle of the rubbled street.

  Quinn felt strange. Still a little dislocated; like he was here and not here. Zizz did this to him, somehow. The doll. Its wire tongue . . .

  Quinn dropped back and whispered to Zizz, "What did you do to me back there? You fucking inject me or what?"

  Zizz bit her lip to keep from giggling. "I did what the Fetish Broker told me. She said if there was a 'mergency—"

  "What? Who's the—"

  "She works for the Middle Man, sent the doll
around when Bowler made the—"

  The Mufti turned and hissed, "No talk!" He gestured toward the rooftops.

  The buildings were picked out with a little starlight, and with the soft edges of firelight from clearings in the rubble: smudges of red on the black-pocked wall of night. Fragments of Arabic and Farsi and Lebanese reached them and fell away as they moved through Lower East Manhattan. They were still in Moslem Funs territory but only barely. The precarious ceasefire had crystalized the Moslem and Christian zones on their respective sides of Clinton Street. National Guard barriers and checkpoints stood there still, a block West; nearer were the stripped chassis of military trucks and the burned shells of blasted cars, humped in shadow like the dessicated carcasses of Badlands buffalo.

  Quinn stiffened every time they came to a cross street, since intersections exposed them to the strong possibility of sniper fire from the Christian sectors; tonight of all nights, with the cops and soldiers massively occupied by the blackout riots, would be a great night to start something, to pick off a few Funs . . .

  And the Christian snipers wouldn't know at this distance that Quinn and friends didn't belong in their gunsights. If they knew who they were, they'd probably shoot anyway: Quinn's bunch came from the Registered Socialist boro.

  Quinn almost wished someone would open fire. Something to break up the flow of events, the current that tugged him deeper into this thing. He was so scared he didn't recognize the sensation at first. He'd never been that scared before. It was a ball of shaking tautness in his gut, like a rabbit having a heart attack.

  Something had taken him over, back there. It was gone now, but . . . he felt its footprints on his nervous system. And that scared him more than bullets or bombs or even the Fridge.

  But no one fired at them. Ten minutes later, Bowler said, "Here's the HopeScope."

  It was a bank.

  * * *

  Quinn sat in a locker room, on an old wooden bench, his back to a cool concrete wall, trying to remember how he'd come here. The Mufti had left them, and Bowler had given Quinn a slip of paper with some numbers on it, and a bank card. Anyway it looked like a bank card . . .

  "Here," Bowler had said. "Put it in the Instanteller slot."

  "What? That thing's trashed—"

  "Just do it. You're going in."

  "Why me?"

  "I don't know. . . . They said it was you." Bowler was looking at him strangely. A little angrily. "What did you do back there? Babbling in . . . I mean, you didn't tell me that you could speak—"

  "I can't. I don't know what happened."

  Bowler shifted his weight and looked at the bank, frowning. "I don't like this mumbo-jumbo. Occultism is religion and religion is social paralysis. I thought the Middle Man was . ." He shook his head. He reached out and closed Quinn's hand around the slip of paper and the card. "Fuck. Just do it."

  "Tell you the truth, I'm kind of—"

  "We're all scared, man. But do it for Deirdre."

  Quinn took a deep breath. He looked at Zizz. Saw her swallow; saw her skull-eye makeup was streaked. He found himself wanting to take her in his arms. And then he thought: You want to get into that with Zizz? Are you kidding? But the feeling lingered.

  He reached into his shirt pocket, took out the video key-cassette, and handed it to her. Some instinct: Give it to her and not Bowler. Their hands touched for a moment and he found himself giving her fingers a dry, shaky squeeze.

  Then he turned and made himself walk up to the grime-streaked face of the Instanteller. He looked at it dubiously, not expecting it to be functional in any way at all. The money dispenser was in a bank whose roof had collapsed; whose windows were opaque with graffiti. But he'd inserted the card, the teller had lit up, and he'd looked at the piece of paper, tapped out . . .

  Couldn't remember the code now. Numbers. He'd felt a ripple go through him, heard a sort of buzzing, and smelled something burning. There was a faint vibration at the top of his head. That's all: then all the doors of his perception had silently closed.

  He'd awakened here. A fluorescent light overhead, and another tube down a little ways, that one blinking and going Zzt-zzt-zzt. Long rectan-gular room, forgotten grey-green lockers against the far wall; rusty pipes overhead and rust-flecked puddles of water on the floor. A locker room, for sure. What did a locker room have to do with a bank?

  No Bowler or Cisco or Zizz. Quinn had fallen asleep standing up, never felt himself hit the ground, and then he was here, sitting against the wall, all alone. How?

  There was someone sitting beside him.

  They hadn't been there a second before. But hey: His brain was probably fogged from the whatever-it-was. The guy must've come in while he was spacing out, trying to remember. Sure.

  He was just another guy. Street sleeper, looked like. Matted hair, matted beard, shared a grey-black skin with the city. The same coating of atmospheric silt and simple dirt. Long horny yellow nails. No shoes, clothes unrecognizable from sleeping in them. Probably smelled bad, if you got any closer: the guy sat slumped against the wall just out of the direct light, about eight feet away. Another devotee, another supplicant to the HopeScope. Supposedly the Middle Man helped anybody he chose, and he chose almost at random.

  "What you going to get?" The guy asked, just like someone who was planning to get something here himself.

  "Help a friend. How about you?"

  "Kinda obvious isn't it? Someplace to rest my butt and maybe a grade D credit rating. That ain't much."

  "You could've applied to move into the Socialist boro, they'll give you—"

  "I look like a fucking Red to you?"

  You barely even look human so the question doesn't apply, Quinn thought. But he said, "Guess not. Me neither. But they got good rent control there . . . How'd we get in here anyway?"

  "With a headache. That's all I know."

  "I don't even know if I'm awake. Or if this place is—"

  "It's not a hallucination. Even the thing you saw tonight, that wasn't hallucination. That was the Higher Reality of the object. You're not hallucinating. You're here. I'm here."

  "How'd you know I saw—"

  "Experience. I seen'a lot of guys in that State, you know? Come down from visions."

  Bullshit, Quinn thought.

  The tramp rattled on, "The vision wore off in you, but it's the reason you're gonna work so well. It put your brain into the right frequency, for a while. Visions isn't just hallucinations, man. It shows you things. The Conceptual Dimension of a thing. And of things you don't even know're there."

  He's a loon, hasn't been taking his medication, Quinn thought. It's not enough drugs, that's why he's a Street Sleeper.

  "So," Quinn said. "What do we do now?"

  "We wait. You're in a waiting room, man."

  "You know all about it, huh?" Quinn said. "Then explain this place to me." Thinking that the guy probably had it all wrong. But Quinn was scared. He wanted to hear someone talking.

  "The Middle Man works for the Spirits, and the Fetish Broker works for the Middle Man. You got a cigarette?"

  "Uh uh."

  "Then I'll smoke one of my own." From some wen in his clothing he took a crooked, dirty cigarette and pushed its end into his tube lighter. The smoke smelled like real tobacco. He'd bummed somebody generous.

  The tramp leaned back against the wall, blew smoke out through his nose and said, "The Middle Man is a Wetware Medium. He . . . how much do you want to know?"

  "All of it, if I can get it."

  "You'll be sorry you said that. . . . There's a subatomic particle called the IAMton. Physicists, they speculate about it, but the Middle Man knows. He was a cutting-edge hot shot at Stanford. He isolated the IAM-ton, and when he did, it spoke to him. Can you fade that? A subatomic particle that tells you, Yeah! You found me!" The street sleeper laughed. "Actually, see, it was all the IAMtons on the fucking planet that spoke to him, through the group of 'em he had contained in the tokomak field. Anyway, the Middle Man, now, he wants other
people to know what the IAMton can give you, which is why he lets people tell about it like this, because he wants other people to use the knowledge—to find their own way to use it—but so far no one has. And he lost the way to it, once he was there. It's like biting your own teeth or licking your own tongue, once you're there . . . so now he can't tell anybody how he got there." He took a drag, coughed, blew smoke. "The IAMton, now, it's a subatomic particle that's present any time there's awareness. The body is electric, right? Has its own electromagnetic field, right? This IAMton, it's a ubiquitous particle and when an organism has the right sort of magnetic field some of these particles—more for the higher organisms—are attracted and incorporated into the organism's seat of holographic con-sciousness. Into the brain. It's the I, the thing that reacts beyond reflex. Now when a tribe of people are in psychological alignment they generate an external collective electromagnetic field—"

  "What were you before you were a Street Sleeper?"

  "Don't interrupt. Anyway—"

  "I mean, you're talking different now—"

  "You want to know about the Middle Man or not?"

  Shaken for new reasons, Quinn said, "Go ahead."

  "Anyway, this tribal field generates entities, or attracts entities—the Middle Man is still not sure which it is—and the entities appear to us as expressions of our consensual interpretation of our environment. Now your primitive Shaman, your aborigine, sometimes he can talk to them and get results and sometimes not. These entities aren't really very powerful and a lot of the time they can't do anyone any good, except that they can teach you about things, like tell you what plants are medicinal . . . but in a big civilization, these entities are a little stronger. Especially now that the Middle Man has made some solid contacts, and they're more a part of our world, they're less ephemeral than—Are you listening?"

  Staring at the tramp, Quinn had seen him flicker. "You're part of the HopeScope. Some kind of . . . image."

  "So? I had to check you out, didn't I? I mean, you're so fucking ridiculous, you and your friends . . . getting P.O.'d and walking around with a fantasy about cracking the Fridge. And you, considering your old man's Dizzy Doseout. Progeny of a popstar gotta be a flake. Spoiled little rich kid. In short: What a bunch of jerk-offs. I had to see how serious you were. Engaged your top mind so I could look in the lower mind . . ."