Hackers

by Jack Dann

  In the end, they didn't have to play instruments unless they really wanted to, and why bother? Let the synthesizer take their imaginings and boost them up to Mount Olympus.

  Synthesizer. Synner. Sinner.

  Not just anyone can do that, sin for rock'n'roll. I can.

  But it's not the same as jumping all night to some bar band nobody knows yet. . . . Man-O-War and his blown-out living room came back and he said, "You rocked the walls right out of my house. I'll never let you go."

  And I said, "I'm gone."

  Then I was out, going fast at first because I thought he'd be hot behind me. But I must have lost him and then somebody grabbed my ankle.

  Featherweight had a tray, he was Mr. Nursie-Angel-of-Mercy. Nudged the foot of the bed with his knee, and it sat me up slow. She rises from the grave, you can't keep a good sinner down.

  "Here." He set the tray over my lap, pulled up a chair. Some kind of thick soup in a bowl he'd given me, with veg wafers to break up and put in. "Thought you'd want something soft and easy." He put his left foot up on his right leg and had a good look at it. "I never been rocked like that before."

  "You don't have it, no matter who rocks you ever in this world. Cut and run, go into management. The big Big Money's in management."

  He snaked on his thumbnail. "Can you always tell?"

  "If the Stones came back tomorrow, you couldn't even tap your toes."

  "What if you took my place?"

  "I'm a sinner, not a clown. You can't sin and do the dance. It's been tried."

  "You could do it. If anyone could."

  "No."

  His stringy cornsilk fell over his face and he tossed it back. "Eat your soup. They want to go again shortly."

  "No." I touched my lower lip, thickened to sausage-size. "I won't sin for Man-O-War and I won't sin for you. You want to pop me one again, go to. Shake a socket loose, most likely, give me aphasia."

  So he left and came back with a whole bunch of them, techies and do-kids, and they poured the soup down my throat and gave me a poke and carried me out to the pod so I could make Misbegotten this year's firestorm.

  I knew as soon as the first tape got out, Man-O-War would pick up the scent. They were already starting the machine to get me away from him. And they kept me good in the room—where their old sinner had done penance, the lady told me. Their sinner came to see me, too. I thought, poison dripping from his fangs, death threats. But he was just a guy about my age with a lot of hair to hide his sockets (I never bothered, didn't care if they showed). Just came to pay his respects, how'd I ever learn to rock the way I did?

  Fool.

  They kept me good in the room. Drinks when I wanted them and a poke to get sober again, a poke for vitamins, a poke to lose the bad dreams. Poke, poke, pig in a poke. I had tracks like the old B&O, and they didn't even know what I meant by that. They lost Featherweight, got themselves someone a little more righteous, sixteen-year-old snipe girl with a face like a praying mantis. But she rocked and they rocked and we all rocked until Man-O-War came to take me home.

  Strutted into my room in full plumage with his hair all fanned out (hiding his sockets) and said, "Did you want to press charges, Gina, darling?"

  Well, they fought it out over my bed. Misbegotten said I was theirs now; Man-O-War smiled and said, "Yeah, and I bought you. You're all mine now, you and your sinner. My sinner." That was truth. Man-O-War had his conglomerate start to buy Misbegotten right after the first tape came out. Deal all done by the time we'd finished the third one, and they never knew. Conglomerates buy and sell all the time. Everybody was in trouble but Man-O-War. And me, he said. He made them all leave and sat down on my bed to re-lay claim to me.

  "Gina." Ever see honey poured over the edge of a sawtooth blade? Ever hear it? He couldn't sing without hurting someone bad and he couldn't dance, but inside, he rocked. If I rocked him.

  "I don't want to be a sinner, not for you or anyone."

  "It'll all look different when I get you back to Cee-Ay."

  "I want to go to a cheesy bar and boogie my brains till they leak out the sockets."

  "No more, darling. That was why you came here, wasn't it? But all the bars are gone and all the bands. Last call was years ago; it's all up here now. All up here." He tapped his temple. "You're an old lady, no matter how much I spend keeping your body young. And don't I give you everything? And didn't you say I had it?"

  "It's not the same. It wasn't meant to be put on a tube for people to watch."

  "But it's not as though rock'n'roll is dead, lover."

  "You're killing it."

  "Not me. You're trying to bury it alive. But I'll keep you going for a long, long time."

  "I'll get away again. You'll either rock'n'roll on your own or you'll give it up, but you won't be taking it out of me any more. This ain't my way, it ain't my time. Like the man said, 'I don't live today.' "

  Man-O-War grinned. "And like the other man said. 'Rock'n'roll never forgets.' "

  He called in his do-kids and took me home.

  THE PARDONER'S TALE

  Robert Silverberg

  Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards. His novels include, Dying Inside, Lord Valentine's Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, Born With the Dead, Shadrach in the Furnace, Tom O'Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, At Winter's End, and two novel-length expansions of famous Isaac Asimov stories, Nightfall, and The Ugly Little Boy. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, The Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Beyond the Safe Zone, and a massive retrospective collection, The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume One: Secret Sharers. His most recent books are the novels The Face of the Waters, Kingdoms of the Wall, Hot Sky at Morning, and Mountains of Majipoor. He lives with his wife, writer Karen Haber, in Oakland, California.

  Here he takes us to a strange and forbidding future where humans no longer control the Earth, but there is still a place for hackers in the interstices of the conquering alien society . . . a marginal and dangerous place, based on the understanding that although to forgive may be divine, to pardon may be very costly indeed.

  "Key Sixteen, Housing Omicron Kappa, aleph sub-one," I said to the software on duty at the Alhambra gate of the Los Angeles Wall.

  Software isn't generally suspicious. This wasn't even very smart software. It was working off some great biochips—I could feel them jigging and pulsing as the electron streamflowed through them—but the software itself was just a kludge. Typical gatekeeper stuff.

  I stood waiting as the picoseconds went ticking away by the millions.

  "Name, please," the gatekeeper said finally.

  "John Doe. Beta Pi Upsilon 104324x."

  The gate opened. I walked into Los Angeles.

  As easy as Beta Pi.

  The wall that encircles L.A. is a hundred, a hundred fifty feet thick. Its gates are more like tunnels. When you consider that the wall runs completely around the L.A. basin from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley and then over the mountains and down the coast and back the far side past Long Beach, and that it's at least sixty feet high and all that distance deep, you can begin to appreciate the mass of it. Think of the phenomenal expenditure of human energy that went into building it—muscle and sweat, sweat and muscle. I think about that a lot.

  I suppose the walls around our cities were put there mostly as symbols. They highlight the distinction between city and countryside, between citizen and uncitizen, between control and chaos, just as city walls did five thousand years ago. But mainly they serve to remind us that we are all slaves nowadays. You can't ignore the walls. You can't pretend they aren't there. We made you build them, is what they say, and don't you ever forget that. All the same, Chicago doesn't have a wall sixty feet high and a hundred fifty f
eet deep. Houston doesn't. Phoenix doesn't. They make do with less. But L.A. is the main city. I suppose the Los Angeles wall is a statement: I am the Big Cheese. I am the Ham What Am.

  The walls aren't there because the Entities are afraid of attack. They know how invulnerable they are. We know it, too. They just wanted to decorate their capital with something a little special. What the hell, it isn't their sweat that goes into building the walls. It's ours. Not mine personally, of course. But ours.

  I saw a few Entities walking around just inside the wall, preoccupied as usual with God knows what and paying no attention to the humans in the vicinity. These were low-caste ones, the kind with the luminous orange spots along their sides. I gave them plenty of room. They have a way sometimes of picking a human up with those long elastic tongues, like a frog snapping up a fly, and letting him dangle in midair while they study him with those saucer-sized yellow eyes. I don't care for that. You don't get hurt, but it isn't agreeable to be dangled in midair by something that looks like a fifteen-foot-high purple squid standing on the tips of its tentacles. Happened to me once in St. Louis, long ago, and I'm in no hurry to have it happen again.

  The first thing I did when I was inside L.A. was find me a car. On Valley Boulevard about two blocks in from the wall I saw a '31 Toshiba El Dorado that looked good to me, and I matched frequencies with its lock and slipped inside and took about ninety seconds to reprogram its drive control to my personal metabolic cues. The previous owner must have been fat as a hippo and probably diabetic: her glycogen index was absurd and her phosphenes were wild.

  Not a bad car, a little slow in the shift but what can you expect, considering the last time any cars were manufactured on this planet was the year 2034.

  "Pershing Square," I told it.

  It had nice capacity, maybe sixty megabytes. It turned south right away and found the old freeway and drove off toward downtown. I figured I'd set up shop in the middle of things, work two or three pardons to keep my edge sharp, get myself a hotel room, a meal, maybe hire some companionship. And then think about the next move. It was winter, a nice time to be in L.A. That golden sun, those warm breezes coming down the canyons.

  I hadn't been out on the Coast in years. Working Florida mainly, Texas, sometimes Arizona. I hate the cold. I hadn't been in L.A. since '36. A long time to stay away, but maybe I'd been staying away deliberately. I wasn't sure. That last L.A. trip had left bad-tasting memories. There had been a woman who wanted a pardon, and I sold her a stiff. You have to stiff the customers now and then or else you start looking too good, which can be dangerous; but she was young and pretty and full of hope and I could have stiffed the next one instead of her, only I didn't. Sometimes I've felt bad, thinking back over that. Maybe that's what had kept me away from L.A all this time.

  A couple of miles east of the big downtown interchange, traffic began backing up. Maybe an accident ahead, maybe a roadblock. I told the Toshiba to get off the freeway.

  Slipping through roadblocks is scary and calls for a lot of hard work. I knew that I probably could fool any kind of software at a roadblock and certainly any human cop, but why bother if you don't have to?

  I asked the car where I was.

  The screen lit up. Alameda near Banning, it said. A long walk to Pershing Square, looked like. I had the car drop me at Spring Street and went the rest of the way on foot. "Pick me up at 1830 hours," I told it. "Corner of—umm—Sixth and Hill." It went away to park itself and I headed for the Square to peddle some pardons.

  It isn't hard for a good pardoner to find buyers. You can see it in their eyes: the tightly controlled anger, the smoldering resentment. And something else, something intangible, a certain sense of having a shred or two of inner integrity left, that tells you right away, Here's somebody willing to risk a lot to regain some measure of freedom. I was in business within fifteen minutes.

  The first one was an aging surfer sort, barrel chest and that sun-bleached look. The Entities haven't allowed surfing for ten, fifteen years—they've got their plankton seines just offshore from Santa Barbara to San Diego, gulping in the marine nutrients they have to have, and any beach boy who tried to take a whack at the waves out there would be chewed right up. But this guy must have been one hell of a performer in his day. The way he moved through the park, making little balancing moves as if he needed to compensate for the regularities of the earth's rotation, you could see how he would have been in the water. Sat down next to me, began working on his lunch. Thick forearms, gnarled hands.

  A wall laborer. Muscles knotting in his cheeks: the anger, forever simmering just below boil.

  I got him talking after a while. A surfer, yes. Lost in the faraway and gone. He began sighing to me about legendary beaches where the waves were tubes and they came pumping end to end. "Trestle Beach," he murmured. "That's north of San Onofre. You had to sneak through Camp Pendleton. Sometimes the Marines would open fire, just warning shots. Or Hollister Ranch, up by Santa Barbara." His blue eyes got misty. "Huntington Beach. Oxnard. I got everywhere, man." He flexed his huge fingers. "Now these fucking Entity hodads own the shore. Can you believe it? They own it. And I'm pulling wall, my second time around, seven days a week next ten years."

  "Ten?" I said. "That's a shitty deal."

  "You know anyone who doesn't have a shitty deal?"

  "Some," I said. "They buy out."

  "Yeah."

  "It can be done."

  A careful look. You never know who might be a borgmann. Those stinking collaborators are everywhere.

  "Can it?"

  "All it takes is money," I said.

  "And a pardoner."

  "That's right."

  "One you can trust."

  I shrugged. "You've got to go on faith, man."

  "Yeah," he said. Then, after a while: "I heard of a guy, he bought a three-year pardon and wall passage thrown in. Went up north, caught a krill trawler, wound up in Australia, on the Reef. Nobody's ever going to find him there. He's out of the system. Right out of the fucking system. What do you think that cost?"

  "About twenty grand," I said.

  "Hey, that's a sharp guess!"

  "No guess."

  "Oh?" Another careful look. "You don't sound local."

  "I'm not. Just visiting."

  "That's still the price? Twenty grand?"

  "I can't do anything about supplying krill trawlers. You'd be on your own once you were outside the wall."

  "Twenty grand just to get through the wall?"

  "And a seven-year labor exemption."

  "I pulled ten," he said.

  "I can't get you ten. It's not in the configuration, you follow? But seven would work. You could get so far, in seven, that they'd lose you. You could goddamned swim to Australia. Come in low, below Sydney, no seines there."

  "You know a hell of a lot."

  "My business to know," I said. "You want me to run an asset check on you?"

  "I'm worth seventeen five. Fifteen hundred real, the rest collat. What can I get for seventeen five?"

  "Just what I said. Through the wall, and seven years' exemption."

  "A bargain rate, hey?"

  "I take what I can get," I said. "Give me your wrist. And don't worry. This part is read-only."

  I keyed his data implant and patched mine in. He had fifteen hundred in the bank and a collateral rating of sixteen thou, exactly as he claimed. We eyed each other very carefully now. As I said, you never know who the borgmanns are.

  "You can do it right here in the park?" he asked.

  "You bet. Lean back, close your eyes, make like you're snoozing in the sun. The deal is that I take a thousand of the cash now and you transfer five thou of the collateral bucks to me, straight labor-debenture deal. When you get through the wall I get the other five hundred cash and five thou more on sweat security. The rest you pay off at three thou a year plus interest, wherever you are, quarterly key-ins. I'll program the whole thing, including beep reminders on payment dates. It's up to you to make
your travel arrangements, remember. I can do pardons and wall transits, but I'm not a goddamned travel agent. Are we on?"

  He put his head back and closed his eyes.

  "Go ahead," he said.

  It was fingertip stuff, straight circuit emulation, my standard hack. I picked up all his identification codes, carried them into central, found his records. He seemed real, nothing more or less than he had claimed. Sure enough, he had drawn a lulu of a labor tax, ten years on the wall. I wrote him a pardon good for the first seven of that. Had to leave the final three on the books, purely technical reasons, but the computers weren't going to be able to find him by then. I gave him a wall-transit pass, too, which meant writing in a new skills class for him, programmer third grade. He didn't think like a programmer and he didn't look like a programmer, but the wall software wasn't going to figure that out. Now I had made him a member of the human elite, the relative handful of us who are free to go in and out of the walled cities as we wish. In return for these little favors I signed over his entire life savings to various accounts of mine, payable as arranged, part now, part later. He wasn't worth a nickel any more, but he was a free man. That's not such a terrible trade-off.

  Oh, and the pardon was a valid one. I had decided not to write any stiffs while I was in Los Angeles. A kind of sentimental atonement, you might say, for the job I had done on that woman all those years back.