Sophia leads me into a deserted back alleyway, steam rising from vents in the ground, then out the other side, to another crowded street, parallel to the first. “Elaborate.”
We keep running. Miraculously, I don’t fall over. “We still go to a printer’s, but without a private terminal, I can’t copy someone’s private key to my transponder. Even if we somehow found a public terminal with the right interface, it wouldn’t work. It takes time. It’s suspicious. So we don’t. We go to a printer’s as ourselves. I set up a new print job, in my real name or your real name, and we walk in and pick it up.”
Sophia talks in short bursts, between breaths. “That’s your plan? To just waltz right into a printer’s using our real names? Forgive me, but I thought that’s exactly what you told us not to do, back in Cravache.”
Struggling to keep up, I barely manage to say a whole sentence in between panting. “If we move quickly enough, we might be able to make it in time.”
Sophia slows down to a brisk walk, catching her breath. She looks back at me. “Might?”
Once I catch up with her, I follow suit, grateful to finally have a chance to get my breath back. “Hear me out. We find the four or five closest printers, we queue up the job in all of them, then we go to just one of them and pick up the printouts. He’ll have to guess which one we’re at, so we’ll have a good chance of not running into him.”
“Unless they have more than one person after us,” points out Sophia, her face lit up by the neon lights, alternating between the primary and secondary colors of a twenty-four hour café’s animated sign. “Did you get a good look at your tail last time? Was it the same guy?”
I let out a grunt of frustration. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Sophia sighs. “Any other options?”
“None come to mind.”
Sophia opens the café door, her voice resigned. “Come on. Just remember to keep your coat on.”
•
An old guy sitting at the table next to ours scowls at us until he leaves a few minutes later, but no one says anything. We have a cup of coffee and a sandwich each—the first thing I’ve eaten all day, I suddenly realize—and I set up five print jobs, two as Sophia, two as myself, and one as Spark. All the while, Sophia is drumming her fingers, nervous like. It distracts me, but I don’t say anything. The way I figure it, she’s more than entitled to feel nervous. Then we pay our bill and head off to the closest print store, one of the two I used my own name for.
•
The print store turns out to be a regular convenience store that happens to have a cheap laser printer on the counter. My heart’s beating hard in my chest as Sophia and I walk up to the counter.
“I believe you have a printout waiting for me,” I tell the guy behind the counter.
“Name?” he asks.
“Rain.”
He smiles in a way that seems slightly creepy. “Pretty name.”
“Thanks.” At least he’s not complaining about how short my hair is. Maybe that’s the magic of Sophia’s make-up skills. Maybe I blend in with polite society a little more now. I glance down briefly at the trenchcoat, making sure it’s buttoned up. It is.
“Pre-paid, all accounted for.” The old man hands me a thick stack of papers. “Happy reading.”
“Thanks.” I open the door, Sophia the other side, and that’s when he walks in. The salaryman. Mr. Ghost white. He spots her first. I see him grab his gun, as if watching it in slow motion. I look around for something, anything I can use. I grab a glass wine bottle off the shelf and swing it into his hand. I picture the glass smashing everywhere, the floor suddenly washed with liquid red, wine with a little blood mixed in, but the bottle doesn’t break. It must have hit him pretty hard though, as he screams in pain. The guy behind the counter starts shouting at us, but words don’t register.
I get ready to swing it again, but there’s no need. Sophia kicks him with her heel again, this time in his stomach, and he doubles over. I shove the bottle back onto the shelf, and we run out of there, back into the street. The shouting is replaced by human traffic, and we’re back to running through the crowd again, only this time I’m carrying the printouts at last.
Sophia takes the lead. “Follow me.”
“Where are we going?” I gasp.
“Somewhere close. Somewhere we can blend in. Somewhere we haven’t been shot at yet.” She holds up her hand. First I think it’s so I can keep track of where she is, but then I realize she’s showing me the ink stamped on the back of it. Cravache.
“You have to be kidding me.”
“It’s just around the corner from here, and you seemed so keen to go the last time. Didn’t you have fun?”
•
The pounding so-called music actually gives me a headache this time, but at least no one’s staring at us here—aside from the occasional look of approval—and at least Sophia doesn’t leash me this time. Finally, I can go over the schematics, colored spotlights and the occasional strobe lights providing a suitable ambience, giving them the splendor they deserve, something that black ink on white paper alone just doesn’t do justice to.
They’re beautiful, both in purpose and in elegance. A computer small enough to fit in your home. Instead of renting a seventy-two and buying cycles on a frame, you can solder together one of these babies and have a whole computer to yourself, right there in your room. A CPU, a text chip, a modem chip, all things that video terminals have, but in addition, a ludicrous amount of memory. Dozens of K. Enough to fit in whole programs. A modified modem that lets you frequency-shift key your data right onto your own personal stash of audio cassette tapes. Then it’s no longer a dumb terminal. It’s a tiny computer in its own right, capable of running whatever software you want, and no one can spy on you. It’s privacy. It’s beautiful.
My first thought’s to build it, natch, but that wouldn’t be enough. KT had already killed Spark, and taken a pop at Sophia and me. I mean, we’re good, but we’re not that good. We can’t outmaneuver them forever. Maybe they hadn’t caught up with us yet, but they would eventually. Information spreads pretty quickly on the net, no matter what kind. With enough dedication, everything can be traced.
That’s when I hatch the final stage of my plan. This invention was by Spark, but it’s not his. It’s not mine or Sophia’s, either. It’s everyone’s. That’s who I have to give it to. Everyone.
I log in as the illustrious five once more, one at a time. From each of their accounts, I can e-mail one point seven million people, using a glitch in the ubiquitous mail server that I learned to exploit a while back. There are eight million, seven hundred thousand people in this city with their own private—whatever that means—account on the KT frame net. In the morning, they’ll all wake up. Maybe a few dozen thousand know how to solder. Each of them will be able to make their own private, personal computer, and each of them can make them for their friends, too.
I set up the first batch of e-mails, my finger hovering over the enter key, and that’s when I feel it, something hard pressed against the side of my waist. I turn around, refamiliarizing myself with my surroundings. Sophia has gone, not that I really blame her. In her place is the salaryman, that stupid grin back on his face.
“No one around to kick me this time,” he says. He’s so close, I can smell the mint on his breath. I look down at his bloodied hand, wrapped around the grip of his pistol, the barrel pressing against my waist.
I nod at his hand. “You should get that looked at.”
He sneers. “Move your hands away from the keyboard. Slowly. Now.”
I look him in the eyes. “I suppose if I press this key, and e-mail all these people, your client or employer or whoever will just go in and delete them all anyway.”
He nods.
“You know what?”
He looks ever so slightly unnerved, but too cocky to really feel threatened. “What?”
“I don’t care.” I look past my assailant to the crowd behind him. The slaves. The ma
sters and mistresses. One particular woman with curly hair, who I’m increasingly proud to call my friend. The salaryman turns around to see who I’m looking at, but it’s too late. Sophia punches him in the cheek at the exact same time I try to prise the gun from his hand, pointing the barrel up at the ceiling, away from me. He fires it, destroying a light in the process, small shards of glass flying towards the crowd. There’s a burning smell. Screams. Running. The place empties out, and I take the gun safely off the man as Sophia pats him down, making sure he hasn’t got any other tricks up his sleeve.
She looks down at me, a warm smile greeting me. “Doesn’t he know you’re spoken for?”
The few people left in the room have no shortage of restraints, and are polite enough to help us out. With our would-be dispatcher safely apprehended, I finish sending the e-mails, all of them.
I look down at the salaryman, disheveled, cuffed and bleeding. “A word of advice: try datsusara.”
“I think we’d better leave,” suggests Sophia. I nod, and she offers me a hand, pulling me out of the seat.
“Your place?” I ask.
“Depends. Can I paint you?”
I look up at her, grinning. “Maybe.”
Sure, this man will be back on the streets soon enough. Maybe he’ll come after us again, maybe even with some co-workers. At least now I can follow the first rule of a gunfight: bring a gun.
KT will see what we’ve done before morning, I’m sure. Try to stop it. Over eight million e-mails from just five accounts has to get noticed somewhere. Maybe they’ll delete almost all of them. Almost all. Nothing stays hidden in these streets. And now, with a little luck, KT might not be a monopoly forever. Maybe people can finally start to make their own machines, their own languages, their own protocols. A chaotic, haphazard, organic mess, just like home. And maybe that would be a beautiful thing.
•
The Bride in Furs
Layla Lawlor
In the middle of town there is a house, and in the courtyard behind the house, there is an apple tree. It grows above an old cracked fountain, the dry basin half-clogged with dead leaves from seasons past. In the spring the tree puts forth pink-white flowers, all up its branches to the very top of the tree, where there is a single blood-red blossom. And in the fall, it puts forth rich red fruit up to the top, where there is a single golden apple.
They will tell you this is because a woman is buried there, at the roots of the apple tree. What happened to her, that woman…what you hear depends on who you talk to. Mal the butcher says it was a girl who killed herself of a broken heart, opened up her veins and spilled blood as red as appleskin on the tree’s thirsty roots. Ostra who runs the laundry says it is nothing of the sort, she was killed by a husband who beat her and struck her head on the side of the fountain, and it ran dry in that instant and has never worked since. And Calmarie, who lives and works in the house at the bottom of the street, looks you in the eye, with eyes that make you shiver, and says that this woman was a working girl like Calmarie, nothing to do with the people in the house at all, and she went to the courtyard with the first quickenings of a baby in her belly and drank a tea that the old women told her about. But the tea made her ill, and this girl’s life poured out of her, and now she is buried under the roots of the tree with a thing that is not a baby, no matter what men try to tell you.
In any case all of this happened long ago. Nowadays it’s common sport for children to climb into the courtyard and steal the apples, swarming like squirrels up the gnarled branches. But they all whisper stories to each other, about the house and the old man who owns it and the single gold apple, and no one climbs to the top of the tree. No one eats the golden apple. It hangs until it falls. Its overripe flesh breaks open on the ancient paving stones, and its juice seeps down, down, to the roots of the tree and the secrets that might be hidden there.
•
Into the house with the courtyard and the apple tree, there comes a bride.
She is from the north, dressed all in furs. She brings with her all the things that a bride should have: a bow carved with prayers in the old whisper-language (to hunt meat for the table), a set of small bronze knives (to cut up meat for the table), and a long knife sheathed in dragonskin (for keeping husbands honest). She brings with her two strong-legged hunting dogs, and a white wolf pelt to lay upon the bridal bed, and a red deerskin to wear on special occasions.
In this house in the middle of the town, she opens all the windows, letting light and air into stuffy rooms with furniture that is decades out of style. She crouches on the roof to see how far she can see. She walks in the courtyard and looks up at the apple tree, with its small green fruits.
Her elderly husband is a merchant and spends most of his time abroad, which is how he met her in her northern homeland. But that suits the bride just fine. She engages a tutor to teach her to read and write the local language. In the morning she goes running in the streets to keep herself fleet and fit. The dogs run with her. People stare. In the afternoon, she practices with her bow in the courtyard. She climbs the apple tree, nimble as the alley children, and ties bits of ribbon and leather on the branches to serve for targets. She cleans the dead leaves out of the fountain’s empty basin, but it is well and truly clogged. Or perhaps the water to this courtyard was shut off long ago. In any case, it does not flow.
One day there is a girl sitting on top of the courtyard wall. She is Mal the butcher’s youngest daughter, and she is wearing her older brother’s castoff trousers, patched and worn. She watches the bride from the north shooting arrows at twisting, dancing targets hanging from the apple tree’s branches, and she says, “Teach me to do that.”
So the bride stands behind her and places the bow into her hands, shows her how to nock the arrow and how to draw the string. The girl’s arms, though thin, are strong from helping her father wrestle pig carcasses on the butcher block. Her first shot goes wide. Her next is much closer.
“You learn quickly,” the bride tells her, in speech that is accented but comprehensible.
“I’m not supposed to talk to you, you know.”
“I know,” the bride says.
There is nothing so appealing to children as the lure of the forbidden. Soon the butcher’s daughters, the blacksmith’s daughter, and the sons and daughters of Calmarie’s working ladies are taking lessons in archery and knife-fighting and tracking in the courtyard. Most of them are girls because the boys are embarrassed to take fighting lessons from a woman, especially one who is not so much older than themselves. But some of the braver boys sneak in too.
Their parents threaten to beat them. The respectable working people of the town appoint Mal, the great-armed butcher, from among their number to speak to her. The bride answers the door dressed in her furs, casually sharpening her long knife as if interrupted in the middle of a task that she does not intend to stop. Mal goes away flustered. The lessons continue.
Something obviously must be done. Where is her husband? Why does he do nothing to control his wild bride? New whispers circulate around the public fountain and the laundress’s front step. Perhaps the apples are looking especially bright this year. Perhaps new blood has watered the roots of the apple tree. The house is very large and was grand, once, in its day. The merchant has no children. It is all quite easy to understand.
The situation is brought to the magistrate, but he makes excuses about visiting her, in her house with its thick walls, with her hunting dogs and her bow that never misses a shot. Well, perhaps she will come to him. He sends a courier with a summons on heavy, cream-colored paper, sealed with the town stamp.
It so happens that the magistrate has a daughter named Esmery. Once, not so long ago, she ran wild in the streets with her short skirts hiked up to expose her long brown legs. Now she is of marrying age, and she must wear long layered skirts so that men will like her. But she does not like any of the men that her father has brought to her. From her bedroom window, she can see the top of the apple tree behind t
he merchant’s house, where the single apple is starting to blush gold. She hears the talk of the children, mostly girls, who gather in the courtyard and learn to fight from the woman in furs.
Every morning she watches for the bride from the north, who always runs the same way. If Esmery is at her window, and if she is not distracted by a maid or a tutor, she will see the bride for an instant, fleet-footed, dark hair streaming behind her like a flag. And sometimes, the bride looks up at her as she pounds by, fleet and graceful as a wild deer, and smiles.
If Esmery were a few years younger and still possessed of her younger self’s freedom, she would be in the courtyard in a heartbeat, learning to aim a bow and wield a knife.
But Esmery has not forgotten how to run. When her father sends his man to the merchant’s house, Esmery sheds her heavy skirts and slips out the window. She drops lightly in her bare feet to the top of the wall below her window, and then she is down and into the alley. She stretches out her long legs and she runs. One might take her, at a glance, for the slim-legged girl of twelve, not the young woman of nineteen.
She pulls herself to the top of the courtyard wall, just as she used to do when she would steal apples from the tree. It is autumn now, and the apples are ripe, all the red ones and the one golden one at the top. Esmery spares them barely a glance and calls instead for the merchant’s bride in furs.
“Sit,” the bride says, taking one look at her flushed face and dusty feet, and gives her a drink of water and a red apple from the tree. “I know you. You are the one from the window.”
Knowing that she has been seen, and remembered, makes Esmery blush up to her hairline. “My father’s man is coming for you,” she says. “My father does not like to be told no.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” the bride says, and smiles lazily. “I’ve hunted wild bears. He is not a bear.”
“No, but bears can’t plot against you.”
The bride thinks about this, then kisses Esmery swiftly. No one has ever kissed Esmery before. None of her slow-witted suitors ever made her feel like she does when she touches this strange wild woman in furs.
Heiresses of Russ 2014 Page 15
