Into the Shadows

by Jordan Weisman

  "You can. You have to." Will’s voice rang flatly in the sour-smelling elevator. "Mad Meg’s gone wild again. She boosted us the work order to paint Yoshimura’s office, and headed off south at midnight. It's up to you and me, and I’m no decker at all. You rode sidecar on her last run, so you know the way."

  "Exactly!" Porky Pryne stamped his foot and the elevator shook. "I’ve never done this by myself! I run in the Matrix, sure, but not like this! The real deckers, they’ll eat me alive!" Will turned to Pryne, a mischievous grin stretching his lips. "Not unless they render you down first."

  Porky lifted his eyes to the gridded steelbar ceiling, begging the spirits to look on and take pity. "Aw, Will, you said you weren’t going to pick on me no more. It’s not nice. You know it’s not my fault! It’s glands, and I’m saving to have it all fixed. I don’t need razors and chrome, just a little tinkering. It’s not nice to pick on me when it’s not my fault." Will’s lips twisted, considering how to phrase an apology. He gave up and settled for another shrug. Porky Pryne’s bulk went far beyond what anyone else called "fat." That the man could fit through a door was, literally, amazing. His belly overhung not just his belt, but thoroughly hid his thighs, and had recently made forays into the territory of his knees. His upper arms swelled to the breadth of a young boy’s back, tapering down to what, in proportion, seemed to be tiny infant’s hands with wriggling whiteworm fingers. To make matters worse, the man stood nearly two meters tall.

  Will closed his eyes, gazing inward to the spin of his spiritwheel. It confirmed that Porky Pryne was the proper choice for this job. The earth reds and sunset golds of the medicine wheel swirled, an animated sandpainting, a magician’s mandala. In the center of it, a porcupine quilled with fiberwire and datalines jacked into the Matrix on Meg Motley’s hot deck, with the walls of Natural Vat spinning around him like a cogwheel. Will Grey wondered again if Old Man Coyote might be playing another elaborate prank by urging this run upon him.

  Will smiled, his gold canine tooth flashing. "Porky, I have a lot of confidence in you." He wrapped one arm across the fat man’s shoulders, forcing himself not to recoil from the nervous dampness of the man’s shirt. "You have confidence in you. or you wouldn’t be here."

  "I don’t want to be here, Will. I keep saying that."

  Will nodded knowingly. "Yes, well, I know that, but the fact is. you are here. You did come along, and you know why. St. Bart. This is the perfect revenge on St. Bart." Pryne grunted. He picked at the paint peeling from the steel wall beside him, sliding his fingernail into a ragged scratch. He pulled off a thick flake banded with a decade’s worth of institutional gray overlaying sewage-scum brown, chemical-dump yellow, and a thin, probably briefly used strip, of pill-powder white. He tossed the flake to the dirty floor and sniffed at his fingers. "It’s a way. It’s a way at St. Bart."

  "It needs to be done, chummer!" Will laughed, slapping Porky’s shoulder wetly. "It begs to be done! Listen . . . isn’t it true that Aztechnology’s been moving in on Betty Begging's Nullstreet housing?" He got a nod. "And Betty managed to outmaneuver them?"

  "That couldn’t last."

  "But, hey, she was doing it! She defended the people everyone else considers ciphers, nulls." Will's hazel eyes flashed hot gold. "Then Aztech put St. Bart and his gillettes to fire the street, and when it was over, the Weaver was gone, and Molly and Magda, and old Mrs. Roberts, and the Eng twins. "

  Will watched Pryne carefully. "You agreed to help for a lot of good reasons. Porky. Yoshimura’s terminal slides us past NatVat’s ice. Then Aztech thinks we’re coming in like little cousins. You screw around with St. Bart’s payoff records, and his own razorboys will pull the bastard apart for holding out on them."

  "And we turn the money over to Betty." Porky’s mournful blue gaze searched Grey’s nondescript face.

  Will’s eyes shuttered down like a blown terminal. "You pull the nuyen off St. Bart, and Nullstreeters throughout the city’s backside will be better for it. That’s a bet."

  The elevator’s ascent finally slowed, stopped. With a scream like ripping steel, the doors split open onto the back entrance to Natural Vat’s executive floor.

  * * *

  Will scanned the working execs surreptitiously as he and Porky scooted the glider of paint canisters and the tall Northern Sun paint-sprayer down the hall, following the security man. In small cubicles and dimly lit offices, the look was much the same. Men with narrow shoulders and women with narrow waists worked the corporate net. letting their fingers fly without apparent attention across smudged keyboards. They stared intently into flat vidscreens, and mumbled halfconversations into the wiremikes every one of them wore. Gray-green terminal lights reflected in the whites of their eyes, giving them all an unholy, orkish glare. Only one man. a dark-haired exec, glanced directly at Will as they stopped in front of Yoshimura's office.

  The secman unkeyed the door, pushing it open slightly. "Here you are. Now listen, you two. Your visitors’ passes"— he flicked Will’s with a well-chewed fingernail—"will get you around the building. But don’t wander. We got a hungry Barghest what patrols at night, and it wouldn’t mind gettin’ a bellyful o’ fatboy, here." He spread his teeth at Porky. "You might make him a full meal, for a change—maybe even enough for two."

  Will smiled ingratiatingly. "Can we make a trip to the John. Mister Blue?"

  The secman scowled, then grinned in depreciation. He flipped his chin back the way they’d come. "Down the hall and to the right."

  Will watched him leave, then glanced at Prync. The fat man supported his bulk against a wall, breathing stertorously. He swayed from side to side, shifting his weight as if neither leg would support him for very long. Sweat ran down from one temple, a rivulet gathering speed before plunging wildly into the crevasse that looped under the man’s jowls. The collar of his khaki jumpsuit was black with moisture.

  Will grabbed the fat man’s arm and tugged until he moved, unprotesting, through the door. "You look bad. Porky." Will stepped swiftly back into the corridor and dragged the glider with its equipment into the room. He smiled, businesslike, at the dark-haired suit still watching intently from across the way, and shut the door firmly against the watcher’s scrutiny.

  He turned to Porky again. "Stop looking so bad or you will draw too much attention to us." He deliberately lightened his voice and tried for a grin. "Hey, we’re in! Sit down a minute, take a deep breath, and I’ll take care of setting things up here."

  Blinking rapidly in distress. Porky wiped the sweat from the folds of his jowls and looked at the office chair, too small by far. He lifted one ham onto the edge of the chromesteel desk and concentrated on breathing evenly.

  Will jammed his hands onto his hips, studying the room. The dead man had more taste and grace, it seemed, than his erstwhile colleagues outside, but only enough yen to pay for the occasional touch of high-style. A JBL-Takashi vidscreen filled the north wall, and behind the desk, banks of software docs loaded down shelves as heavily as Porky weighed down the desk. Cool lights, faintly greenish, sparkled on the crystal and chrome mobile that hung just above Porky’s head. Etched with NatVat’s corporate logo, it gave evidence that Yoshimura had been a good and proper sarariman in his time. It suited Grey’s purpose perfectly.

  Will Grey leaped lightly onto the desk, dropcloth in hand. "We’ll want to protect this carefully." He wrapped the free end of the dropcloth around the mobile, setting the crystal clacking, muffled, against the metal struts. "Fine piece like this." Porky twisted with a grunt, to see what Grey was nattering about.

  Having securely fastened one end, Will unrolled the other half of the dropcloth in a broad fan. obscuring half the room behind the desk. Dropping softly back to the floor, he fluffed out the cloth like some dragon-lady’s train. Moving quickly, he strung more dropcloths across the floor and dangled still others from mag-holders near the vidscreen. The room became a maze of opaque cloth.

  "Now, Porky. Time to shine, big boy." Will slapped the top of the ter
minal screen. "Plug in and start skating!"

  The fat man stood up with a grunt and a grimace, then walked carefully around the scatter of cloth and equipment. Standing behind the desk, he looked back at the cloth-covered chair, then mournfully up at Will. "I won’t fit," he announced wretchedly. "Did you see a chair that didn’t have any arms?"

  Will thought for a moment, then shook his head.

  With great dignity, Porky descended to his knees behind the desk. He adjusted the terminal screen as Will pulled the jacks and feedwires from the bottom of a tin holding an artist’s nightmare of dried brushes. Rummaging into the nylon satchel, he pulled out Meg Motley’s deck and turned it over to the fat man.

  Porky clicked a lead off the deck into a modulator, then jackcd himself into the terminal through his mastoid datalink. Will watched Porky’s eyes glaze over momentarily, then begin the rapid, jerky motion of an open-eyed sleepwalker as he looked through and into the Matrix.

  Will pushed aside an unused dropcloth to set the satchel onto the desktop. He dug toward the bottom of the bag, pulling out a spare roller and a dog-eared booklet of paintchips, looking for the auxiliary 'trodenet he could use to ride along and watch Porky’s progress. Sewn into a blotched painter’s cap, the net gave no Matrix control, being less immediate than direct jacking. But a ’trodenet didn’t reduce his contact with the spiritworld the way an implant could. Before he found the cap. the medicine wheel in his head flashed before his eyes, a warning intrusion of scarlet arrows. The office door opened.

  Will turned smoothly, paint roller in hand, stepping toward the door as if caught in a perfectly natural moment of work.

  The dark corporator from the desk across the way stood in the entrance, scowling. "What are you doing in this office?" He tried to look past Will, and was rewarded only by the downpour of gray-green dropcloths hanging from every surface.

  Will looked right, then left, and slowly held the paint roller up toward the suit. He smiled. "Painting."

  Confusion chased petulance across the man’s handsome features. "Don't get cute with me, you." Fidgeting he shifted from one foot to the other, and Will wondered briefly if Porky's mannerism was contagious. "This is my office, and I want to know what you’re doing here!"

  "Your office." Will swallowed convulsively, crossed his arms and turned away from the man to steal a glance back into the room. A slice of Porky's wide back was just visible behind the dropcloth hanging from the mobile. He turned again to face the man’s accusing dark gaze. "So you’re Mr. Yoshimura. are you?"

  "No, it's going to be . . ."

  "The secman brought us to Mr. Yoshimura's office." Will let his voice take on a accusative tone of its own. "O.K! O.K! So we shoulda been here yesterday. Sue us! Now we're here, now we’ll do the job Mr. Yoshimura contracted for."

  The dark-haired man licked his lips in exasperation. "Well I'm sorry to say that Mr. Yoshimura died yesterday. This office is mine. Rather, it's going to become mine." He puffed out his chest, and Will thought he probably practiced that action in front of the mirror twenty times every night before he went to bed, "I don’t think . . ."

  Will narrowed his eyes until they glittered like topaz chips. "And your name is, sir?"

  "Samuel Cortez, if it’s any of your . . ."

  Will produced a mempad and pen from his breast pocket. "Title? As Mr. Yoshimura’s, no doubt. Been with Nat Vat for . . .?"

  "Eight years." Cortez took a deep breath and tried to look stern. His fingers, tapping anxiously against one lean thigh, destroyed the illusion. "Look here ..."

  Will whisked the mempad back into his pocket, picked up the book of paintchip samples, and pulled Cortez out the door into the hallway. "Let’s step into the corridor, Mr. Cortez. All those hangings—well, the light should be better for you to look at these.

  "Now, sir, if you’re going to be moving up into this fine, fine office, you may want to reconsider Mr. Yoshimura’s color choices. Personally"—Will leaned forward confidentially— "I wouldn’t say this sort of thing to just any client, but Dreamwhite just isn’t the power color it was last year." Will tugged at Cortez’s metal-tipped pink collar and winked. "I can tell that you know what I mean." He raised his eyebrows meaningfully, making his eyes show open admiration of Cortez’s neat black wool suit.

  Cortez cleared his throat and tried to control the smug grin tugging at his mouth. "Not the right statement, no."

  Will showed his teeth and forced the paintchip book into Cortez’s hands. "Now why don’t you go back to your desk there, look through these, and I'll finish setting things up inside. Good thing you stepped in when you did. I was almost ready to start painting! When you decide, now, just knock and I’ll see whether we can mix up any color you pick, so there’s no more delay. Got lots of color concentrates and, well, Dreamwhite makes a pretty fair mixbase, after all. Probably one of the reasons it’s not the forefront of style, doncha know." Will winked again, and with a subtle push, sent Cortez back to his own desk.

  Will took a deep breath, concentrating on the exec’s retreating back. He pictured Cortez racked across the spirit-wheel, arms splayed out with a stepped lock-and-key pattern in black and white surrounding his head. Will’s left hand spread out in front of his chest, then he clutched it into a tight fist. A small spell, just a little one, to muddle Cortez and keep him pondering over the paintchips far longer than necessary. With sweat beading his forehead, Will fumbled with the latch and stepped backward into the office.

  "Porky!" He drew only a disoriented grunt for a reply. Will feverishly dug for the painter's cap and settled it firmly on his head. Attaching the link to Meg’s deck, he sank through blackness into the Matrix, riding behind Porky’s eyes and beside him simultaneously. The splendid asymmetry of the jewel-cast Matrix left him breathless, as always, and feeling, as always, like a fish out of water. The Matrix was not his environment.

  "Problems, Porky." he announced to the quill-covered icon beside him. The rustling creature shuddered, setting the jack-cord quills clattering. "But nothing serious. Don’t get excited!"

  Great wet tears welled in the porcupine’s eyes as it waddled to a halt on a stream of fever-green light. "I knew it, Will! I knew this wasn't going to work. Not ever!"

  Will looked around, trying to recognize the location. "Hell, Porky, you’ve already done it. all but the very last bit! Just like we discussed, right? There—." He pointed behind them to a shimmering cube flecked with silver and gold. "That’s St. Bart’s account, right! You’ve retrofit his accounts receivable showing additional payments taken in from Aztech. They’re earmarked for his subcontractors, but the payments have already sunk into three dummy corporations that washed his yen and returned it untendered! His streeters won’t see a single drop. St. Bart looks in and he'll find they’ve already withdrawn their payments. Ha! There’ll be as much disagreement among them as anyone would want!"

  "But Will, I can’t get the money to transfer through to my account where we can pick it up."

  Will laughed frostily. "Meg did that. Mad or not, she’s determined to see the Nullstreeters repaid for the losses, such as can be paid for. Our costs don’t count high in her book, and I kinda doubt she trusts you with all those nuyen."

  He snapped his fingers. "Two birds with one stone, Porky. Try this: dig up the personnel file on Sam Cortez, a corporator here at NatVat. Submerge the money in his private account. no record to him. Just leave us a backdoor that we can use to withdraw the cash normally, from outside the corporate Ice. We get our cut and the Nullstreeters still get theirs."

  The porcupine looked disgruntled, but with a rolling gait, headed toward a black-barred cube on a sheet of silver. He paused uncertainly before a pyramid node obstructing his way. "Mr. Yoshimura liked his caffeine hot, I see." Porky clucked his tongue. "But hooking the pot-timer into the main net seems a little . . . well, careless! This could get me there a little faster, if I can just . . ." He straddled the cube, then slither-skidded down a slanting pole of biue-black light. The netline
bowed but held, and Porky’s icon shook with a kind of relieved laughter. "Never passed one like that before! Meg’s got a wonder here in this deck, Will. I’ve never been able to skate a pass like that before!"

  Will moved along with the quilled icon, the flicker of the jeweled sprawl of the Matrix seducing and unsettling him. "Great. I’ll suggest she hire out her services as a tech when we get back. Just make sure we get back, O.K.?"

  "Feeling a little stifled, Will?"

  He didn’t bother to answer, letting the wire-quilled porcupine shuffle to the side of the opalescent cube. The silver shifting underfoot made him want to scratch between his toes, like a fungus attack. Porky nosed into the silvery floor and the sensation stopped, throwing off a tiny ripple of light. The icon poked one paw gingerly toward the opalescent cube, and the black bars closed before his touch. He drew back swiftly.

  Slowly approaching from another angle, Porky nosed into the junction of the cube and the floor, following the bars’ reflections down into some substrate of translucent glimmer. He raised one paw again, claws extended, to slip between the bars. Again, they closed up before his approach.

  Pryne’s multijack wires writhed and clattered in distress. Will fought down a chill. "This ought to be simple," he accused the fat man. "Shouldn’t it? Deckers have been raiding bank accounts and personnel tiles for decades."

  Porky shuddered again, tears welling up in the porcupine’s watery blue eyes. "NatVat’s got a good mainframe, and I can’t access Meg’s very best. She’s locked it. I’d’ve been freezer-burned before now if her other ’grams weren’t so good, but with what’s here, I can’t think of any other way in. Nothing but straight in. For that, I might as well use a screamer."

  Will stared at the complacent cube, and the pinkish-gold flccks of nuyen credit fading in and out behind the opal sheen. He concentrated, hoping for a clue from his guiding wheel, knowing all the while that, in this environment, he couldn’t touch it. Folder-shaped I.D. files brushed against the cube’s side as information was accessed, transferred, refiled.