“What’s that to me?”
“This is their turf.”
“This is my goddamn turf, man. They might own it, I run it. This thing between you and me is strictly private because if the Wasps hear I’m renting, they’ll cut my fucking nose off. I won’t tell.”
“That’s good to know. Where is this place I’m renting?”
Fat Tony turned a corner, ducking awkwardly beneath the end of a bus that tilted on half a dozen mashed down Fords. “Right here, man. Right here.”
It was a circular space roughly a hundred meters across, floored with compacted ashes and scrap, one side cut by a long channel of oily water that reeked of long-chain organics. “Don’t fall in,” Fat Tony said, standing at the very edge, the metal toes of his knee-length biker boots over the rim. “They used to render down organics from the junkers here, tires, plastic trim. All round here we got the cars that were left stranded when the petrol run out, no place else to take them in the city, nothing to move them further. I’m like a fucking industrial archeologist, you know.” He spat towards the murky water, wiped his chin. “Hell’s own soup of bugs in there. Strip you to your bones in a second.”
Cameron watched a little kid walk by on the far side. A string of dead pigeons dangled down the boy’s smooth mud-streaked back, wings flopped open. “Listen, I really need to talk to the Family.”
Fat Tony turned away from the water. “Happens the Wasps want to talk with you too,” he said. “Seems all sorts of people are after your ass, Doc. What’s the score?”
Cameron pressed one of the man’s hands between both his own. “You’ll see soon enough. One more thing. I want to buy anything the kids catch in here.”
“You want food, I can arrange it. You needn’t eat rats.”
“Not to eat. Anything they bring me has to be alive.”
###
The contact for the Wasps was a smooth-skinned boy with only the faintest wisp of a mustache, no more than fifteen. He lounged in the back of the electric stretch with studied cool, looking at Cameron from under half-closed lids. He wore a white linen suit, white sneakers. No socks. He said, as the stretch pulled into the traffic, “I hear the Exchange is after you. A contract going all the way across the water. It’ll cost you real money to help you out.”
“I appreciate that. There’s enough for all of us. Are you interested?”
The kid held out a hand with a languid gesture, and the big bodyguard who was driving reached around and put a little glass tube into it. The kid sniffed at it, held it out, and it was taken back. The spurs on the bodyguard’s wrists were tipped with black polycarbon. The kid said, “From what I know of it, it’ll give us the clout to take over the other Families, maybe even put us into the Exchange. Of course I’m interested.”
“What you can do with it is down to you,” Cameron said. “I can set up a demonstration.”
“Real soon. Your ass is on fire, from where I stand.”
“Let me worry about that. But if I’m not left alone until the meeting you’ll never see what I have to sell.”
“For streetmeat, you have sass. I dig that.” The kid’s laugh was like fingernails drawn down sharp metal. “Okay, we’ll meet on your terms. Now, let’s deal.”
The stretch circled the perimeter of Wreckers Heaps half a dozen times while Cameron talked with the kid. When at last it stopped and Cameron climbed out, the outside air seemed to him like pure oxygen, for all the heat and stink of the street. The stretch had smelled of bad money and worse promises. As he watched it pull away, he knew at last what Holroyd had meant, about the pain of connections, and he mused on it all the way to the place where he had once lived.
Cameron knew better than to walk into the old department store, so he sent a mudlark around the corner to fetch Lost In Space. “Oh my man,” the pusher said, when he saw Cameron. “Doc, you are bad news all over town.”
“I just need to talk with the people who own your deckchair.”
“You’re dealing? That’s keen, Doc.” They stood in the doorway of a shop, Lost In Space shifting from one foot to the other, his tongue passing over his lips with a lizard’s flick. For an instant, Cameron saw clear to the roots of the man’s life. The filthy crowded room where he’d grown up in the constant smothering company of a dozen brothers and sisters and a despairing mother, childhood innocence withering in the fire of his pride, pride which had driven him to be different when he couldn’t begin to define what he really wanted, when all he had was pride, and his fragile armor of vanity and indifference . . .
“I’m dealing,” Cameron said. “Something big enough to promote you out of that deckchair, if you want to help me.”
There was a derelict huddled in a nest of rags in the far corner of the doorway, asleep or dead. Lost In Space spat in his direction, unsettled by Cameron’s tender gaze, and said, “It’ll take maybe an hour.”
Cameron thought of all he had to do before night fell. “It had better be quicker.”
###
Komarnicki wasn’t answering his office phone, but Cameron had already worked out where his former employer was likely to be. He got into the black clinic by offering to incubate more mutated marrow, slipped out of the confusion of reception and sprang door after door along a row of office cubicles until he found a white laboratory coat that didn’t fit too badly.
Komarnicki was in intensive care, a guard at the door and a screen flagging vital signs above his head. Cameron waited until the guard went to use the toilet and then walked straight in.
Komarnicki lay naked on the bed, his flabby chest a shield of vivid purple bruises, slashed by a raw, ridged scar. Gene-melded sawfly larvae lay along it, jaws clamping the incision closed, swollen white bodies glistening with anti-inflammatory secretions. Cameron sat down beside him, and presently he opened his eyes.
“You’re a ghost,” he said wearily. “Go away, Cameron.”
“I’m real enough. Want me to pull open your chest to prove it? What did they pay you, apart from a heart?”
“Nothing else. They explained about Holroyd. I wasn’t going to get his fee, so it seemed fair. I took a guess at where you were hiding him, and they got his scent from the couch in my waiting room. It was just business, you understand. I’ve always liked you, Doc.”
“I’ve got what they want. I can make a deal, cut you in too. Ten percent, for old time’s sake.”
“You don’t make deals with them. They don’t operate like the New Families. You’re streetmeat, Cameron. Even if you give it to them, they’ll take you. And don’t you tell me what it is, either. I don’t want to know. That kind of knowledge is dangerous—”
Cameron had caught Komarnicki’s hand, as it edged towards the buzzer on his bedframe. After a moment, Komarnicki relaxed. He had squeezed his eyes shut. Sweat glittered on his pink face. Cameron leaned close and said, “I’m not going to hurt you. Just tell them I’ll deal, OK? I’ll call you later.” Cameron set down Komarnicki’s limp hand and smiled at the guard on his way out, impervious in his white coat.
###
At Wreckers Heaps, the mudlarks had delivered all Cameron had asked for, and after he had paid them with the last of Holroyd’s dollars and set things up, there was nothing left for him to do but wait. He sat near the arm of scummy water, watching silver beads shuttle up and down the almost invisible thread of the skyhook beyond the shining towers of the Exchange, letting sunlight and the invisible flux of the Exchange’s trade fall through him, until it was time.
He had arranged to meet with both the Wasps and the Zion Warriors at sunset. With half an hour to go, he called up Komarnicki and told him where he was. And then he sat back and waited.
He did not have to wait long. Soon there was the rattle of gunfire in the south, and then a series of flares rose with eerie slowness against the darkening sky. All around him, stacks of junked vehicles began to groan and shiver, dribbling cascades of rust: someone was using a sonic caster. Cameron sat still in the middle of the clearing, in a bucket seat he’d taken f
rom one of the cars, imagining the hired fighters of the Exchange and the war parties of the two Families clashing amongst the wreckage of the twentieth century. Exchange fighters outnumbered, Family members outgunned. Smoke billowed up from an explosion somewhere near the perimeter. Soon after, the gunfire stopped. One by one the sound systems that circled the perimeter of the dump started to broadcast their competing rhythms again. Cameron sighed, and allowed himself to relax.
The electric limo glided into the clearing twenty minutes later, its sleek white finish marred by the spattered stars of bullet holes. The teenage negotiator was ushered out by his massive bodyguard. “I know I’m a little late,” the boy said coolly, “but I nearly had an accident.”
“You’re later than you think,” Cameron said, looking past the boy at the junk heaps across the channel of stinking water, where he knew sharpshooters must be taking up positions.
“I got all the time in the world,” the boy said, his smile as luminous as his white suit, and motioned to the bodyguard.
The tall burly man crossed to where Cameron was sitting and without expression patted him down, pulled his pistol from his harness, showed it to the boy. “It’s empty,” Cameron said.
“Your mistake,” the boy said. “Let’s go.”
The bodyguard put his hands under Cameron’s armpits and effortlessly pulled him to his feet.
And then everything went up.
The pressure switch had been sprung when Cameron’s weight had been taken away. It closed the circuit which ignited the cartridge loads, shredding the mesh covering the watertank where Cameron had caged what the mudlarks had brought him. Pigeons rose into the dark air in a vortex of wings. The bodyguard’s attention flickered for a second and Cameron punched him in the solar plexus. The man staggered but didn’t let go of Cameron. For a moment they teetered at the edge of the water, and then Cameron found the point of leverage and threw the man from his hip. The bodyguard twisted awkwardly and fell the wrong way, flailing out. Cameron danced back (one of the man’s spurs drawing blood down his forearm) as the man hit the lip of the drop and rolled into the water, screaming hoarsely before disappearing beneath the oily surface.
Cameron sprang on the boy and whirled him around as a shield. “I’ll let you drive me out of here,” Cameron said, but the boy, limp with shock, was staring down at the red spot of a laser rifle-guide centered on the left lapel of his white jacket. Cameron wrestled him into the car in a clumsy two-step, slammed the door and slid behind the wheel as bullets rattled on the armor.
The boy pressed hard against the corner of the passenger seat as Cameron drove down the winding alleys that threaded the junk piles. At last he said, “Whatever it is you’re doing, I’m impressed, OK? But there’s still a chance to make your deal.”
“There never was going to be a deal. I just canceled things out, that’s all. The Exchange and the Families. Hang on now.”
The gate was ahead, armed men running towards it from both sides. Cameron floored the accelerator and swerved between two flatbed trucks, pedestrians scattering as the limo shot through the gate. Then it was weaving through dense traffic and the armed men were lost in the crowds. Cameron said, “I’m sorry for all the hurt I caused, especially your bodyguard. He was only doing his job, and I meant for him to land on dirt.”
“You stop now, I can help you,” the boy said.
Cameron laughed. “Oh no, it’s too late for that. Holroyd took it all round the world, but I want to play my part, too. I ran away one time. No more. When the universities were closed down, when knowledge was finally transformed into a commodity, I should have done more to try and stop it. I can remember when there was free exchange of ideas, and now most of the cartels’ energies are spent on security against piracy. But that won’t do them any good now, not against five billion data pirates.”
“You’re rapping like a crazy man. I bet you never even had the stuff.”
“I had it all right. You saw it go.” Cameron pulled the limo over and switched off its motor, leaned across the seat. The boy’s wide eyes looked up into his, centimeters away. “I turned pigeons and rats into vectors,” Cameron told him. “If you want what I had, you’ll have to catch them. Doves would have been more appropriate, but I had to make do.” And then he kissed the astonished boy on the lips and slid out of the limo and vanished into the crowds.
###
Afterwards, Cameron lived on the street, restless for change. The Exchange must have found out what had happened; suddenly there was a bounty on rats and pigeons. But it only served to spread the caring sickness through the mudlarks, and within a week it was irrelevant. The rats had gotten too organized to be caught by ordinary means, but suddenly there were weird devices all through Wreckers Heaps, eye-bending topological conundrums of rusty mesh that mesmerized rats and drew them into their involuted folds. Mobile traps like tiny robot shopping carts careened after rats and pigeons, multiplying like sex-crazed von Neumann machines. When they had run out of prey they started raiding the street markets for trinkets and bits of food, and then sleek machines armed with a rack of cutting tools starting hunting them. After that the sickness must have gotten into the water supply, for infection seemed to take off on an asymptotic curve. There was a sudden boom in ingenious, horrible murders—one night two dozen eviscerated riot cops were found dangling from the Knightsbridge gibbets—and then crime plummeted. Graffiti went the same way, and one by one the sound systems fell silent.
One day a young mudlark stopped Cameron in the street. After a moment Cameron recognized Komarnicki’s messenger. The little kid was clean now, wore a shirt several sizes too big for him and had a canvas pack slung on his shoulder. He was heading out he said, a lot of people had that idea. Divide up the conglomerate farms, grow food again.
“Out or up,” the boy said.
They were at the northern edge of Wreckers Heaps. Amongst abandoned shacks, people were working on what looked like a small air dirigible, a hectare of patched white fabric spread on the ground amid a tangle of tethering cables. The boy looked past them at the skyhook, still there beyond the irrelevant towers of the Exchange. Looking at the boy looking at the skyhook, at the door into orbit, Cameron thought about what Holroyd had said about vectors. Maybe humans were just the infection’s way of spreading beyond the Earth’s fragile cradle, the Galaxy like a slow-turning petri dish, ripe for inoculation. Maybe it was his thought, maybe the infection’s. It didn’t matter. It was all one now, no longer an infection but a symbiosis, as intimate and inextricable as that with the mitochondria in his every cell.
The boy was smiling at Cameron. “I heard you were around here. I just came to say thanks, for what you did back then. What are you going to do? You could come with us, you know.”
“Oh, I’ve already done that stuff, in another life. Who told you about me?”
“I heard from an ex-pusher who heard from some muscle who got it from the kid who was right there. Everyone knows, man. Luck, now.”
“Luck,” Cameron said, and the boy grinned and turned and headed on down the street, a small brave figure walking into a future that everyone owned now.
Cameron watched until the boy was out of sight. The dirigible was beginning to rise, its nose straining against the people who were hauling back on the anchor ropes. Cameron strolled over to give them a hand.
THE KINDLY ISLE
Frederik Pohl
Here’s a wise and gentle story by one of science fiction’s best-known authors, one that takes us to a friendly island paradise that is perhaps a little too good to be true . . .
A seminal figure whose career spans almost the entire development of modem SF, Frederik Pohl has been one of the genre’s major shaping forces—as writer, editor, agent, and anthologist—for more than fifty years. He was the founder of the Star series, SF’s first continuing anthology series, and was the editor of the Galaxy group of magazines from 1960 to 1969, during which time Galaxy’s sister magazine, Worlds of If, won three consecutive Best
Professional Magazine Hugos. As a writer, he has several times won Nebula and Hugo Awards, as well as the American Book Award and the French Prix Apollo. His many books include several written in collaboration with the late C.M. Kornbluth—including The Space Merchants, Wolfbane, and Gladiator-at-Law—and many solo novels, including Gateway, Man Plus, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, The Coming of the Quantum Cats, and Mining the Oort. Among his many collections are The Gold at the Starbow’s End, In the Problem Pit, and The Best of Frederik Pohl. He also wrote a nonfiction book in collaboration with Isaac Asimov, Our Angry Earth, and an autobiography, The Way the Future Was. His most recent books are the novels O Pioneer!, The Siege of Eternity, and The Far Shore of Time.
I
The place they called the Starlight Casino was full of people, a tour group by their looks. I had a few minutes before my appointment with Mr. Kavilan, and sometimes you got useful bits of knowledge from people who had just been through the shops, the hotels, the restaurants, the beaches. Not this time, though. They were an incoming group, and ill-tempered. Their calves under the hems of the bright shorts were hairy ivory or bald, and all they wanted to talk about was lost luggage, unsatisfactory rooms, moldy towels and desk clerks who gave them the wrong keys. There were a surly couple of dozen of them clustered around a placatory tour representative in a white skirt and frilly green blouse. She was fine. It was gently, “We’ll find it,” to this one and sweetly, “I’ll talk to the maid myself,” to another, and I made a note of the name on her badge. Deirdre. It was worth remembering. Saints are highly valued in the hotel business. Then, when the bell captain came smiling into the room to tell me that Mr. Kavilan was waiting for me—and didn’t have his hand out for a tip—I almost asked for his name, too. It was a promising beginning. If the island was really as “kindly” as they claimed, that would be a significant plus on my checklist.
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