by Dave Smeds
Like an image stolen from a Where’s Waldo cd-rom, the painting overflowed with a host of tiny figures no taller than William’s pinkie fingernail, all rendered in precise, almost photographic, detail. No two were alike. They represented people from around the world, arrayed in the quintessential costumes of their locale, era, and occupation. The display had long fascinated him, but seldom did he have the chance to examine it closely.
William let the magnifier drift from Arab sheik to Buddhist monk to Incan priest. Was the next an Amazonian tribesman, or a New Guinea cannibal? He smiled, feeling like the explorers he saw on cable documentaries.
Suddenly a clacking sound came from the front door.
William scrambled to get off the piano. In his haste, the magnifying glass fell and was dragged by his knee. As he heard the screech of the handle’s jagged metal assaulting polished wood and paste wax, William’s heart leap-frogged into the rolled-up cuffs of his overalls. Holding one eye closed didn’t lessen the horror as he lifted his knee away, revealing a long, ugly gouge.
The piano had belonged to his mother’s grandmother. As he had been repeatedly warned, it was an antique as well as an heirloom, and could not be replaced.
He cowered, waiting for the front door to swing open. Instead, he saw a pile of mail on the floor below the slot. The sound that had startled him had been that of the postal carrier inserting his delivery.
William quickly scanned the living room for anything that might fill in the gouge or hide it. He grabbed the Navaho blanket from the back of the couch and tossed it onto the piano lid.
No good. Mom never put anything up there. She would lift the blanket the moment she came in.
As it sank in that nothing was going to save him, William had to clamp his rear end together and dance to avoid having to run to the bathroom.
In the dining niche, his mother’s computer screen was lit with a grid that included the floor plan of his home and a map of the nearby neighborhood. A cluster of tiny yellow lights blinked in the portion of the display corresponding to the living room. That was where he was. A single blue light blinked downscreen, showing his mother’s location in the laundry room. He moaned as the blue light began moving, heading toward the apartment.
William scrambled toward the kitchen window. There was his mother in the parking lot. But just then she stopped to chat with Mrs. Buxman from next door.
William had about one minute to save himself.
Hurriedly, he stripped off every last article of clothing. Rushing to the tool chest, he pulled out a pair of tin snips and cut his Kid-Tracker bracelet from his left wrist. As soon as the latter fell to the carpet, leaving the proximity of his skin’s galvanic field and the characteristic signature of his pulse, one of the yellow lights on the grid — one slightly larger and more saffron than the others — began blinking fiercely. The computer emitted a raucous beep.
“Shut up!” yapped William. He fled through the sliding glass door at the rear of the apartment, over the fence and down to the creek just beyond, hand thrust low to cover his crotch. A brief sprint took him upstream into the undeveloped parcel near the foothills.
The rocks of the dry creekbed jabbed at his bare feet. A vine snagged his arm, making him yelp. Sweat stung his eyes. A hundred yards along, he ducked into his secret place — a little bower inside a cluster of acacia trees, deeply shaded, surrounded by a massive blackberry bush. It was the best hideout he knew. He had not shared it with friends, and certainly his parents had never been to it. His hope was to remain hidden until dusk. By that time, his mother would have had a few hours to calm down. And by then, Dad would be home. Mom was never as severe in front of witnesses.
A mosquito nipped his ankle. He slapped it, leaving a smear of insectoid parts and a streak of bright red human blood. More of the pests hovered about, fresh from the stagnant pond nearby, hungry as only early-summer mosquitoes could be. William twitched. By the end of his exile, his bare skin would be covered with welts. But it would be worth it.
A determined tread of shoes over the debris of the creek bed made him hiccup. All too soon, the foliage parted. There was his mother, staring down at him. Her trademark scowl was so dark she seemed to have changed her ethnicity.
“How did you know where I was?” he moaned.
She held up her portable Kid-Tracker unit. On the map, a flashing dot showed next to the winding course of the stream.
She tapped the bridge of his nose. “You forgot about the localizer in your glasses. Now come with me, young man,” she said, dragging him away by the ear.
o0o
The group in the alley stiffened as a police car glided past, briefly shining a spotlight in toward them. Bill saw the officer on the passenger side make a comment to his partner, but the car did not stop. In the absence of a complaint from a local business owner, the cops had so far been content to leave the alley denizens alone rather than risk them relocating to a more populated, higher-class part of town.
Crisis averted, Claude resumed probing a Taco Bell wrapper for one last shred of fake cheese. Farther down the alley three more men huddled dejectedly, lacking even that trace of food.
A fringe of pink and purple still dusted the undersides of the clouds to the west. In a shrinking patch of clear sky overhead, a few stars emerged in spite of the city glow. The summerlike lull vanished with the twilight. Jimmy wrapped himself in a blanket and instantly fell asleep in his crate. Bill envied him that trick. He also envied him the blanket; it was too early to try the warehouse to see if his own could be salvaged.
That left Claude to listen as he described the scene at the laundromat. Bill said nothing of the long-ago incident with the damaged piano and his irate mother, but he made it clear he empathized with the kid.
Claude remained silent for such a long time that Bill wondered if he’d entered one of the semi-catatonic withdrawals that preceded his seizures, but the man’s bright, alert gaze seemed to indicate this was one of those intervals when he resembled the capable electrical engineer he had once been.
Finally, as if out of the blue, he asked, “Do you know how localizers work?”
“GPS satellite signals?”
“No,” Claude said. “I mean the little ones. The kind that kid had sewn into his clothes.”
Bill shrugged. “Some kind of radar?”
“Not quite. Regular radar uses sine wave transmission. Localizers use nonsinusoidal broadcasts. You ever hear of Harmuth waves?”
“Of course not.”
Claude blinked as if Bill were hopelessly uneducated. “The inventors of the first miniature localizers realized Harmuth waves — coded sequences of Gaussian impulses —could be harnessed to allow the creation of positional correlation devices that required very little power, at bandwidths so wide the signals could harmlessly penetrate buildings, trees, all sorts of obstacles. It took some inspired engineering to deal with some of the design problems, but once the devices were available, they were so cheap to make suddenly everyone was using them to keep track of children or pets or luggage or wallets, to survey land, to automatically open or lock doors, you name it.”
Claude paused, inhaling the taco aroma lingering on his hand. Bill waited patiently, knowing how laboriously his companion’s thoughts had to navigate his damaged cortex to assemble a speech like this.
“Nonsinusoidal transmissions were also used in something called impulse or ultra-wideband radar. The Soviets published some of the first papers, just to rub it in our noses that they had something to thwart our stealth planes. You can make planes transparent to sine wave transmissions, but impulse radar makes them visible as goose turds on a windshield.”
Bill realized Claude was not entirely speaking to address any concern of his, but to air an old agenda. “You worked on stealth planes, didn’t you?”
“I did,” Claude replied.
“Then you must not have had a high opinion of impulse radar.”
Claude eyes twinkled in that certain way they did whenever Bill ma
naged to follow the idiosyncratic course of the engineer’s thinking.
“Did it cost you a job or something?” Bill asked.
“Hell no. Impulse radar has been around since before we were born. The stealth program lasted until I hit thirty-two. Nobody wanted to touch that pork barrel. Stealth only died because the orbital defense industry finally got so big it sucked away the funding.
“The reason I didn’t like impulse radar,” he concluded, “is that it annoyed me knowing that what I was doing was really bullshit.”
Bill nodded.
“There’s too much progress,” Claude said. “Localizers. VR. E-money. Cold fusion. A man can’t keep ahead of it all. There’s always someone pulling the rug out. Too many choices. Too much to adjust to.”
Bill was stifling the urge to eat the candy bar he’d hoarded. If he brought it out now, he’d feel obliged to split it. He left it hidden in his pack. “I don’t agree,” he said carefully. “People have fewer choices. There’s always someone looking. Too many ways for folks to check up on you.”
Claude grunted. “That your problem? That why you’re here? You get caught with your hand in the cookie jar?”
“None of your business.”
“Hey . . .” Claude held up open hands, gesturing peace with mittens that needed darning.
“I don’t see you asking them why they’re here,” Bill said.
Claude scanned the dull eyes and stubbled chins of the men loitering twenty paces away. “I know why they’re here. Them and me, we’re at the end of our roads. Got nowhere else to go.”
“And I do?”
“I think so. I can see it in your eyes. You could go back to the world, if you wanted to pay the price.”
Bill pressed his lips closed. He had blown it, talking about the boy in the laundromat. He’d forgotten to be the mime, stay behind the mask, silent.
Claude stopped staring. He rose, rubbing mittens together. “Care for a walk?”
“Might as well,” Bill said, relieved to be granted a change of subject.
o0o
They set out for downtown. The clouds closed off any glimpse of the stars, their dark umbrella heralding another dose of Seattle’s itinerant drizzle. The cold wormed into Bill’s collar, into the cracks in his shoes, into his ears. But where clothes pressed, the warmth of the exercise suffused faster than it could be removed by the brisk air.
As the two men entered the maze of skyscrapers, the shadows drew back, banished by neon and fluorescence. The lights played softly up the chrome, glass, and concrete, accentuating the buildings’ vertical angles until they seemed to climb toward infinity. Bill loved the architecture of Seattle. Perhaps that was the reason he had chosen the place to flee to.
His joints ached, protesting the increasing humidity, reminding him of his forty years of age and his weeks of questionable sustenance. He watched with envy as men and women strode into the Hyatt Regency lobby and continued into the rest of the hotel. The doors parted magically for them, acknowledging the proximity of their localizers, recognizing them as registered guests. No need for keys. Whatever areas they belonged in, be it their own sleeping rooms or the spa, restaurants, gift shop, or concierge suite, the doors would know and grant them entry.
Those same doors would remain closed for Bill. If he managed to piggyback his way through them when they opened for someone else, a little light would blink in the security office and tall men in suits would appear to escort him to the exit — discreetly, of course.
The world was so convenient, for those that managed never to scratch their mother’s pianos, be tracked down in mid-tryst by jealous wives, go to the wrong places with company cars. Or . . .
“Ah, soft beds,” Claude murmured, startling Bill out of his soliloquy. “Room service. Maids.”
Bill laughed hollowly. It would have been enough just to amble along the mezzanine level, past the conference rooms and banquet hall, in temperature-controlled air.
“I stayed here once,” Bill said, gesturing up at the guest floors.
“Back before you decided to become a professional mime?”
Claude wasn’t going to stop probing. “I didn’t do anything businessmen haven’t been doing for seven thousand years,” Bill said testily. Immediately he regretted his tone. These days Claude was the nearest thing he had to a friend.
The brief time spent stationary had cost them their envelope of warmth. “Come on,” Bill said. “Let’s go back. There’s something I’d like to do.”
o0o
Roars of laughter bounced off the brick and stucco of the alley walls. Jimmy slapped his prosthetic foot in applause.
Bill was performing “The Beast with Two Backs,” a mime routine he never showed his normal clientele. It touched a real need in the hearts of men who had probably been deprived of sex longer than they had lacked homes. Bill’s hips pumped the air with abandon. His mouth dropped open and his eyes closed, feigning bliss. Any woman witnessing the antics would have been mortified, but there were no women here. There were only men ready and willing to appreciate a little entertainment, a little distraction from the bleakness of their existence, and they paid in a pure sort of gold: camaraderie.
Though it was past midnight, all eight men present were still awake. Bill knew the names of only half of them, but tonight they were part of his community. It was a union founded on links no thicker than spider web. A thing as mundane as climate could sever the strands.
Had severed it. This was Bill’s farewell performance. He’d decided that much. The thermometers of the city delivered an uncompromising message. Soon even in the daylight hours, the alley would be inhospitable. The rains would fall harder than tarps and blankets could fend off, the wetness containing the seeds of influenza or pneumonia. Within another few weeks, even Jimmy would seek a less exposed, less independent venue to haunt — a mission, a Vet hospital. That or the police would finally sweep him out.
Bill reached the final mock spasm and, breaking into voice to mark the end of the routine, emitted a long, deep sigh. Jimmy kept the mood going by bringing out his harmonica. He glanced at Bill, asking silently if he wanted to accompany him, but Bill shook his head and settled down on an upended box near Claude.
They listened together awhile. Halfway through the third song, Claude turned and said privately, “Do you know a woman who wants a guy with brain damage?”
Bill paused. “No.”
“Neither do I,” Claude said. “So here I am.”
Bill pulled off the Chaplin mustache and shoved it in his kit, sighing. The alley became a cul-de-sac, with Bill at the dead end. Claude had revealed himself. Bill could do no less.
o0o
“It’s not the end of the world,” his lawyer said. “You made some mistakes, that’s all.”
The man was younger than Bill. Sleek. Well-dressed. He gestured toward his computer screen. Bill watched the numbers, charts, and text scroll across it: credit reports, income statements, loans, bank account activity, employment record — all the documentation that described who he was, there with a few taps of a keyboard. Only a tiny fraction of it was data Bill had supplied. The rest was simply . . . available.
“The second-offense bit will be a challenge, but there are plenty of means for damage control,” the man added.
On the wall behind the attorney hung a morph calendar. Bill had one in his own office that showed a different landscape each day, complete with branches that swayed in the wind, clouds that moved across the sky, shifts of lighting to indicate the hour. This calendar displayed a still-life painting by a latter-day Norman Rockwell.
The painting showed a well-kept dachshund standing at a living room window, gazing out at its front yard at dusk, where a scraggly terrier, obviously a stray, danced with a tennis ball. As Bill watched, the view dissolved — the morph calendar seemed to be set to a one-minute cycle — and in its place appeared the same scene, painted by the same artist, as seen from the yard. The terrier, breath steaming in the frosty air, was
rendered in mid-leap in the foreground, while the dachshund, its eyes round, tongue lolling, peered forlornly through the broad window pane.
The terrier seemed so happy. The dachshund, so envious.
“Excuse me,” the lawyer said. “Did you say something?”
“Couldn’t I just . . . run away?”
The man chuckled. “Wouldn’t we all like to do that.” Shaking his head, he went on describing how best to proceed, unaware that Bill had stopped listening.
o0o
Claude pursed his lips as Bill finished the story. “So now you’re living a dog’s life.”
Bill raised an eyebrow. “I guess you could say that.”
“The question now,” Claude murmured, “is which dog do you want to be?”
Claude did not wait for an answer. He turned his attention toward Jimmy and his harmonica.
Someone dumped crumpled newspaper in a metal drum and threw in a match. In the brief glow of the flames, Bill saw feet tapping and knees jiggling to the music. Blood still flowed in his companions’ limbs, but it did so too sluggishly to lift them to their feet to actually dance.
They were free, but like Bill, chains remained around their ankles.
Bill tried to hum, tried to sway in time to the beat. The terrier was out in the cold, trying desperately to pretend nothing was better than chasing that ratty tennis ball across that lawn.
Return to Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION TO “FEARLESS”
By the time I broke into professional fiction writing in early 1979, I was already a black belt in goju-ryu karate-do. Yet in all the years between then and the creation of this story in 1993 for Roger Zelazny’s Warriors of Blood and Dream anthology of martial arts science fiction and fantasy, the only karate story I’d produced was “New Breed.” People who knew of my martial arts credentials would ask why I hadn’t done more.
It’s simple. I create works of imaginary pasts and futures. Things beyond my experience. Often, in fact, beyond the very possibility of my experience. Money and readership aside, the act of creating a piece of fiction is the way it expands my universe just a little more, makes me more complete. Novels and stories bring to me aspects of existence that I would never otherwise sample.
