Globalhead

by Bruce Sterling

  “They probably want to rip your lungs out for transplants. Or put you on trial.”

  “On trial for what?”

  She looks at him with open loathing. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

  Good old Cecily, the selfless humanitarian. He’d always been a big devotee of public benefactors. Especially when they had grant money. But what right did she have to be so stiff-necked? All this was just an episode—compared with the Ultimate Life-Enhancing Benefits of Modern Medicine’s Astonishing Miracle Breakthrough.

  “Cecily, we need to find out what’s going on.”

  She ignores him. “You should head for the hills. I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  “Sure you will.”

  Russell looks at the leaflet. “Why should I help you anyway?”

  “Because of the chicken livers. And because, if I didn’t come here, who’d give you your shots?”

  “I don’t want any more of your shots!”

  Sniffy pulls a vial from the pocket of his jeans. He palms it expertly, twists the top off, sniffs carefully. “Pure as gold,” he whispers. “Crisp, dry, and smooth, with a distinctive varietal flavor.”

  “Go away,” she says hopelessly.

  “You know you can’t keep up your pace of work without your shots. And if you get weak, or sick, or even just too tired, think how many here will die.”

  A light drug-hungry sweat beads the hollows of the doctor’s temples. “Well, this isn’t the place for it …”

  Sniffy glances over his shoulder, down the length of the hospital tent. Victims of mortar and sniper fire sprawl on their khaki-colored cots, wrapped in bloodied gauze. “I could pop you a quick one, in the leg. But I need some new works first. My old ones are getting dull.”

  “You can’t have any more of my needles.”

  “Heck, Cecily, who’ll miss a hypodermic here? You’re Red Cross, you can get plenty.”

  “No. They’re for the sick and dying!”

  “Hey, without a proper taste of FREE, everybody’s dying, every minute. That’s the human condition, right? Used to be, anyhow.”

  She gives in, and they slip into the screened-off surgery at the end of the tent. “You don’t have to act like this,” she hisses. “You’re not really twelve, even if you look and feel like you are. You don’t have to nag and pester me in this compulsive, juvenile way.”

  “Don’t get Freudian on me,” Sniffy says. “You’re the one with the stone-obvious self-sacrificial death wish.”

  Dr. Russell bites her lip, turns her back on him. She bends a little, tugs her trousers down over one hip. Sniffy jabs neatly through the vial top, sucks the drug into the hypo with an analytical look. He gives her buttock a sharp proprietarial spank, and jabs the needle in. A quick squeeze, and out again.

  “Damn,” she says. “That thing is dull.”

  They sit again on the picnic bench. Sniffy, something of a connoisseur of the effects of FREE, watches with interest as color floods Cecily’s sallow cheeks. She stretches, yawns, shivers, tries to hide a grin.

  Uniformed men appear at the entrance of the tent. Europeans! Sniffy ducks and scrambles back to the surgery.

  He watches warily around the edge of the surgery screen, as Russell rises to greet the intruders: two khakiclad privates carrying elegant-looking French automatic rifles, and a sergeant in a peaked cap. The sergeant’s smooth chin is shaved blue and looks about as hard as granite. One of the privates pulls a cart carrying white boxes of medical supplies, stencilled with red crosses.

  “May I help you gentlemen?”

  “Are you Dr. Cecily Russell, in charge of this camp?”

  “Yes I am.”

  “Herr Spittzler of the European Red Cross sends you his greetings,” the sergeant said. “We are on a mission of mercy and goodwill. We bring you these supplies as a gift.”

  “Any hypodermic needles?”

  “Some.”

  “That’s great. What can I do for you, then?”

  “We need your aid, doctor, in our negotiations with all local militia groups. We hope to arrange a general cease-fire, and establish economic relations …” The sergeant glances at the picnic table. “I see that you have our leaflet. Can you aid us in our search for Dr. Havercamp?”

  “He’s probably dead.”

  “We doubt that. Our reports say he is a very clever man.”

  “I haven’t seen Dr. Havercamp in years. Why are you looking for him?”

  “Let us only say we want him. And, of course, he is a criminal.”

  Cecily shifts a bit from foot to foot. “The, uh, medical research he was engaged in—that wasn’t illegal, you know.”

  “Not illegal, but criminally irresponsible.”

  “What are you going to do with him?”

  The sergeant smiles. “We shoot him—with the moral bullet.” He touches his index finger to the middle of his forehead. “Right between the eyes.”

  That’s enough for Sniffy. Time to hit the road. No way to get past these soldiers, though. These are no sloppy militia amateurs, but wary-looking hard-bitten veteran military professionals, totally disciplined and dutiful and spooky, the kind of people he hasn’t seen in ages.

  Sniffy spies a scalpel on a stainless-steel cart, just past the screen. If he can filch it, he can slice his way out through the back of the tent.

  He crouches down silently, leans out behind the shelter of the cart, tries a grab, misses. Damn. He waits. They’re still talking. He tries again, touches the hilt of the scalpel …

  Someone grabs his wrist and yanks him up. One of the soldiers.

  “Who is this?” the sergeant demands.

  Russell looks flustered. “That’s my—my son. Chip,” she says. “Chip, what were you doing, hiding back there?”

  “Sorry, mom. I was just curious.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat, young man.”

  “Herr Spittzler did not tell us that you have a son,” the sergeant says.

  “How would he know?”

  Time for the helpless kid routine. “You’re not gonna shoot me, are you, mister?” Sniffy whimpers. He squirms in the grasp of the soldier.

  “Release him,” the sergeant says. The soldier lets go, takes a step back.

  Sniffy tugs his T-shirt straight. “Thanks, sergeant. I was afraid you guys were Nazis or something.”

  The sergeant stares at Sniffy. “How old are you, young man?”

  “Twelve.”

  “So you are born since Dr. Havercamp’s great discovery? You don’t remember the world before the change? How is it you learn about bad men like Nazis?”

  “I learned in school.”

  “The schools are lately not working, I understand.”

  “Mom taught me.”

  “He’s very bright,” Russell says, without conviction.

  The sergeant’s eyes narrow. “I think he is very clever, this boy. I think he comes along with us to meet Herr Spittzler.”

  So much for misdirection. Sniffy flings himself to the ground with a howl of terror. Before their embarrassed shock can fade, Sniffy darts on hands and knees beneath the cot of a casualty. They can’t get a shot off while he’s in the midst of the sick. Ducking, leaping, sometimes trampling the patients, he evades the sergeant’s attempt to block him, and dashes out the front of the tent.

  Outside, he knows the place, they don’t. In a minute and a half, weaving through tents and behind the stadium along the track, he’s up the embankment and out. He retrieves his bike and his bat and speeds down the hill to Western Boulevard.

  A fat lot of good a baseball bat will do him now. And now they know what he looks like! He really is going to have to get himself a gun.

  Sniffy feels a little safer when he hits Chamber of Commerce territory. He’s not an official member of the Commerce gang or anything, but General Rockefeller, their head, is his pal.

  The L.D.L. is clearly awed by the Europeans, since they let them land in their turf. They’ve already struck some deal. If these E
uros are trying to ingratiate themselves with the militia groups, that’s all the more reason for Sniffy to get to Rockefeller first.

  The Chamber HQ is one of the biggest shot-houses in Raleigh, maybe in the whole state of North Carolina. It’s a mansion on White Oak, a white antebellum sprawl with a pillared porch like Tara, covered with sandbags. Twin trenches cut the streets east and west of it, dug-in roadblocks, anchored by machine-gun nests. Ack-ack guns lurk on the mansion’s roof, to keep the copters off. A half-track is parked on the lawn, under a pegged-out tarpaulin.

  The sight of all these guns makes the customers confident. There’s a big crowd of the shot-hungry here, shuffling in with a glazed impatience, then gliding out with that loose-looking happy step that comes with a skinful of FREE. Some are wealthy and have come in their cars, but they parked blocks away; there’s no way the wily Commerce boys will let a car-bomb near their HQ. You only have to have your ass blown up once, to get hip to that trick.

  A skinny tout in a Commerce jacket and sunglasses assembles the customers in the shade of the porch. He marches up and down the line, checking their faces for the proper vibe of submission and dope-greed. As he walks and peers, he chants at them: kind of an auctioneer’s spiel. “Open for bidness, folks, open and smokin’! Got them Green-Top vials, fresh shipment from the brothers in Chapel Hill! Buy y’self five, get one for play. Ten silver quarters for a jugular hit!”

  Sniffy crosses the lawn and clomps up the porch. He doesn’t see any yellow flyers lying around here, but that doesn’t much reassure him. He feels like someone’s gonna collar him any minute. It isn’t fair.

  Down the mansion’s big entrance hall there’s a barred nook where the house’s bag man sits. He’s taking in money, passing out vials, with the crisp fluid ease of habit. Old biker’s tattoos show, very faded, on the dewy fresh skin of his arms. He has a frizzy crew-cut, a chubby face, and a holstered .45 in one sweaty armpit.

  “Have that money ready folks,” he calls, in a high, sweet voice. “Have them dimes and quarters counted and ready, or you lose y’all’s place in line. Jabbin’ parlor upstairs to your left, we got a special today on jugular hits, a real M.D., folks! Got a real gentle hand. Ten silver quarters, and get that goodness straight to y’all’s brain tissue!”

  The Chamber of Commerce HQ possesses the modern miracle of air conditioning. The A.C. is a status symbol and the Chamber runs it whenever they can spare the generator fuel.

  The mansion is packed to the walls with loot. It spills right into the halls, room doors jammed open with collapsing stacks of goodies. Crates of whiskey, vodka, tequila—the real stuff, not moonshine. A whole room crammed with video recorders. Another full of ten-speed bikes, wheels and frames neatly disassembled. Three piece men’s suits, all styles and sizes, hung on shiny wheeled racks. Lots of mink and sable, with some sad moth damage; furs are hard to keep through a Carolina summer.

  The Chamber has lost the habit of guarding their “valuables.” Nowadays it’s food that really counts: bags of rice and beans. You can smell them but not see them; they’re snookered away.

  Sniffy goes on back toward Rockefeller’s office, where Lindsey, Rockefeller’s secretary, holds court. Lindsey was once the wife of a Governor of North Carolina. She’s maybe eighty-five, but looks about thirty, and wears enough jewelry to choke an old-fashioned Las Vegas showgirl. It’s real gold and emeralds and diamonds. Or at least Lindsey thinks it’s real. All the Commerce guys like her because she’s so crazy, so they never tell her otherwise.

  Today she’s busy talking to three Chamber toughs. Everybody seems pretty excited, shuffling around whispering and peering back toward the General’s office.

  When Sniffy approaches, Lindsey jumps up, a big frozen grin on her face. It’s enough to make even Sniffy flinch. “Sniffy, you charming boy, how are you? Haven’t seen you for an age!”

  “Lindsey, I need to talk to the General.”

  “I’m afraid he’s busy,” she says. “Hadn’t you heard? We have some European visitors—Swiss I think. They’re in there with him right now. And they have a TV camera! They want to do a documentary about us!” This explains Lindsey’s demented energy. The thought of being on TV again has triggered some deep-buried media reflexes.

  “I remember television,” one of the toughs says.

  “Think they got any hard cash on ’em?” another asks. “Maybe some of that European paper money.”

  “They probably got credit cards,” the third says.

  “I remember credit cards,” the first guy says.

  Sniffy hops up and down to get their attention. “I came to warn the General about these guys. I was just over at the Red Cross camp. These Euro bastards are hooked up with the Library gang—they want to put us out of business!”

  Lindsey looks at him with fatuous credulity. “Maybe you better go back there, Sniffy.”

  So Sniffy pushes past the desk and through the General’s office. The door is open and he walks right in.

  Rockefeller’s office has Persian rugs, walnut panelling and gold-stencilled leather chairs looted from the State Capitol. All the windows are securely bricked up. An open closet door shows more loot: a microcomputer, an open case of Canadian Club, boxes of light bulbs, tins of sardines. There’s a lot of stuffed animal heads on the walls, big game trophies. Elk, bear, and moose, mostly. Too many, probably. There’s about fifty of them.

  Rockefeller wears a Giorgio Armani gray wool suit, a gold-threaded gambler’s waistcoat, and silver-spurred python-skin cowboy boots. He’s chewing meditatively on a Mars Bar, an item of great rarity and price. He’s talking with two blond men in black baggy cotton pants and white shirts. They are unarmed. One of them holds a floppy sunhat on his lap; the other has a compact videocamera, and moves deftly around the room.

  One of Rockefeller’s lieutenants, Forbes, lounges by the door, in a baseball hat and flak-jacket. Rockefeller looks up as Sniffy enters. Rockefeller smiles broadly. Sniffy realizes at that moment that Rockefeller has read the leaflets.

  The blond man sitting in the chair turns to inspect Sniffy. “Who is this?” He has an odd accent, like he studied his English in Britain.

  “This here’s Sniffy. Howdy, Sniff. Long time no see.”

  “At your service, General,” Sniffy says. “You know you can count on me. But I wouldn’t trust these guys.”

  “This is Herr Spittzler,” the General says. “And Signor Andolini.”

  “I am pleased to meet you,” Spittzler says, rising from the chair. He moves like he’s got a pole stuck up his ass. “But you are wrong to mistrust our intentions. We are here to help you.”

  “Last we heard about the situation over the water, you guys needed help yourselves,” Rockefeller says.

  “Conditions in Europe are much improved,” replies Spittzler. “We have developed a working system of Enhancer distribution. We are past the stage of social breakdown and chaos.”

  Sniffy takes a seat on the sofa against the wall, and keeps an eye on the door, in case he needs to beat a retreat. Not much use in hoping for that, though. It would take heavy artillery to fight your way out of this shot-house. He’ll have to play this situation out to a finish, right here.

  “Glad to hear it,” Rockefeller says. “Y’all had it pretty bad, I hear.”

  “We lost two million in Switzerland alone. Fifty million in Europe overall. Most the first years of the crisis. The worst is past, now.”

  Rockefeller sobers. “That’s a lot. Wonder how many America lost.”

  “We estimate ninety-five million,” Spittzler says readily. “Maybe many more. Estimates are difficult, in the absence of a federal census or central authority.”

  “My God,” Rockefeller muses, “ninety-five million!”

  “We estimate the global population at only three billion, now. That means three billion people have died in the last fifteen years.” Spittzler pauses. If he’s not the cleanest person Sniffy has seen in the last ten years, he’s a close runner-up. His blue eyes
are calm and precise and even though he looks twenty-five Sniffy figures he’s at least fifty. Then again, he probably looked just as over-controlled when he was twenty-five for real. “May I ask you,” Spittzler says, “your opinion of this terrible catastrophe?”

  Rockefeller takes a meditative bite of his Mars Bar.

  “Well,” Sniffy breaks in, “that leaves the survivors some room, anyhow. I mean, people used to worry a lot about the tremendous strain on global resources. What with the vast increase in human lifespan, and all.”

  “Thanks to the social breakdown brought on by FREE—the plagues and starvation—the average lifespan today is less than twenty years.”

  “Y’all sure are big on statistics,” Rockefeller says. “What’s the point of all this?”

  “The point is that we must heal the wounds to civilization,” Spittzler says. “The European Community can now feed itself, with surplus for export. The United Nations has been re-established in Geneva. We have a plan for restoring world order and trade.”

  Rockefeller crumples his candy wrapper and tosses it at a wastebasket. “Well, the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce is all for world trade. I mean, we’re the strongest banking and resource center in the Piedmont. And we’re prepared to deal. Raleigh’s the capital of North Carolina, a big strategic center. Once we take over this city, we’re poised to move on Charlotte, Richmond, Charleston—up and down the whole Eastern seaboard. It’s rich country, too. We got whatever you Europeans need: dope, tobacco, you name it! You help us, we help you!”

  Rockefeller bends and hauls a large crate from beneath his massive office desk. He tugs it one-handed around the desk into the center of the room, ruffling the Persian carpet. Sniffy has seen this box before, but Rockefeller has always been pretty secretive about its contents. It’s khaki-colored metal, the size of a deluxe microwave oven, with US military stencils. He opens it on a squeaking hinge. “This is a U.S. Army Model M3 50-Caliber Heavy Machine Gun,” he announces, hauling the monster out by its perforated matte-black barrel. “Now this baby was a total design breakthrough! Real Yankee know-how, right? Ceramic barrel, foamed-metal stock and tripod, weighs half what the old Browning 50-Caliber did. The rate of fire kicks ass, there’s no recoil to speak of, and the slugs can pierce battleship armor.”