Voice of the Whirlwind

by Walter Jon Williams

  “It’s where things are.” Where, he thought, the answers are.

  She looked at him. “Where Natalie is?”

  Steward didn’t answer. He took the cigarette and drew on it deeply, welcoming the invasion of THC and carcinogens. Xanadus were one of the worst things in the world to smoke, since holding in the marijuana smoke gave the tobacco time to poison lung tissue. The Canards, being what they were, had loved Xanadus for just that reason.

  Ardala sighed. “Okay,” she said, “I’ve got some material in my office. It’ll help you study for the tests. Maybe you’ll get lucky and qualify for waste disposal tech on Ricot.”

  The name of the artificial planetoid sent a cool thrill through Steward’s nerves.

  “Ricot’s all right,” he said. There were answers there.

  *

  The next morning, after Ardala left, Steward worked the weights in the condeco’s health club, showered, dressed, decided he didn’t want to breakfast alone. He didn’t like the look of the coffee shops in the condeco: too much stained wood, soundproofing, tasteful music, conservatively dressed professionals reading the type of scansheets that weren’t forbidden by the constitution. He headed north into the old city and found a coffee shop with a broken holographic sign that read friendl es rest rant in tow . The booths were upholstered in bright orange Jovian plastic, and the waitress was an overweight woman who greeted him with a scowl.

  After eating, he smoked a Xanadu with his coffee and watched the scowling waitress cope with a Chinese visitor who thought her chicken fried steak was supposed to have something to do with chicken. The Chinese woman thought she was being cheated, but her English wasn’t up to expressing her outrage.

  Steward leaned back in his booth and grinned. He’d made the same mistake the first time he’d visited the United States.

  The problem resolved itself with the appearance of the manager, and Steward finished his coffee. He strolled around the old town, watching the battered old storefronts, the people, old men selling lottery tickets and scansheets, young hustlers wearing T-shirts with liquid-crystal displays that advertised their product: software, literature you couldn’t get in condecos, drugs. Steward remembered scenes from Marseilles, the way the street had seemed more intense there, the dealing more critical—even the colors had seemed brighter. He sensed that these people were just going through the motions—it didn’t matter to them. America hadn’t had a war in 100 years. These people hadn’t been on the edge of starvation for months at a time; they hadn’t had to deal to survive. They hadn’t been through Petit Galop.

  America was getting old, he thought. Like the rest of Earth. Absorbing fashions brought down from space, ways of life—condecologies, ideologies—that were imitations of the way people lived in a vacuum. Steward’s olive skin was fashionable because olive skin had a more interesting texture to those who lived in cultures that never saw sunlight, and heavy makeup was fashionable for the same reason. Earth had shot its bolt. Space was where things mattered now, like it or not.

  He bought a scansheet and walked into one of the wilderness parks that cut the city and sat on a grassy slope. In the bright cloudless sky he could see a pattern of fixed stars, orbital factories, and habitats. One of them, he knew, was the orbital complex where Natalie lived now. He wondered which star was hers, what she looked like now, after fifteen years had passed, years that he hadn’t known. He felt the brightening pain in his throat and nose, and lowered his eyes to the street. Sadness fell on him like rain.

  *

  “So how did you end up in Canard Chronique?” Ardala asked later.

  “Canards Chronique,” he corrected. They were stretched out in bed, Ardala on her stomach, propped up on her elbows while reading this week’s copy of Guys and taking notes. He was reading some of the study material she’d brought with her. “It has a double meaning, either Chronic Ducks or Chronic Hoaxes. Which had a lot to do with their ethic.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “How I got in? It’s all the fault of my African grandmother.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense, Steward,” Ardala said.

  He put a marker in the book and put it down. “Okay. My African grandmother got educated in Canada and fell in love with cold climates, so she became an arctic geologist. Then she fell in love with this Scotsman she met in Novaya Zemlya, who was also in love with the arctic, et cetera. Their second son hated snow and permafrost, which was all he ever saw when he was a kid, so he moved to the Mediterranean, where he married my mother, who was from Marseilles. He had himself a good job in Nice, working as an indentured economist for Far Jewel while my mother was going to school.” Steward frowned at the opposite wall. He was trying to decide what attitude to take, which personality to use for this. “He got killed during Petit Galop,” he said.

  “I’ve heard of that.”

  Heard of it, Steward thought. Europe’s collapse into anarchy following a failed attempt to remodel its sociology along the lines suggested by a space-dwelling policorp. Earth had larger populations than the policorps and less fragile ecological systems; sometimes the policorps ran programs down the gravity well to see if they’d work, before going to the trouble of restructuring themselves along similar patterns. The possibilities inherent in such tampering were one of the reasons the policorps bothered with Earth at all.

  But the thing had gone wrong, Europe being more fragile than anyone knew, and people—policorp people, and citizens, and a lot of presumable innocents—all had paid the penalty.

  How, Steward wondered, to tell Ardala about it? A Canard would just shrug. Everybody in Marseilles had it bad; everybody had a father or mother who was dead, or a sister or brother or at least an uncle or aunt. That attitude might seem callous to an American, though. Stewart decided just to tell it straight out. “It was bad, particularly down south. Some of the rioters were up on the tall policorp ecodromes, dropping big plate-glass windows on the people below. They explode like grenades, you know? That’s how my father died, he and a couple thousand others, all in one afternoon. Not that it’s likely he would have survived anyway—he had biological implants, a hand modified for microcircuitry work and head sockets to take a DNA-computer interface. He hadn’t had his skull capacity increased or the extra brain tissue, but he’d had the superchargers put into his neck for an expanded brain. Anyone with that kind of hardware wouldn’t get past the gangs’ metal detectors and would end up in front of a firing squad.”

  “Jesus. People here have been taking implants for a hundred years. What was so bad about it?”

  This time Steward couldn’t keep himself from shrugging. “It was part of Far Jewel’s program, so it was evil. The modified people were the only ones the mob could find…the decision-makers were living in the asteroid belt and out of reach. Far Jewel’s facilities in France were gutted, so suddenly there wasn’t employment for all their people or for their survivors. Far Jewel washed its hands of the whole experiment once things went bad. The French government got chased to Portugal, so there wasn’t any help for people like my mother and me. We ended up moving to Marseilles, to live with my aunt. And even then we almost starved.” Steward looked at her. “You got any Xanadus left?”

  “In my shirt pocket. I heard some people ate each other. That true?”

  Steward frowned. “I’d believe it,” he said. “None of that was going down where I was living, though. The gangs kept things going.”

  “The Canards came to the rescue?”

  “Yes.” Steward stood, moved toward the chair where Ardala had thrown her shirt. He found the last Xanadu and began looking for the ashtray. “The teen gangs were running the city, more or less,” he said. “The Old Quarter, anyway. Keeping power and water running for people who weren’t living in ecodromes. But most of them had all sorts of funny French ideas about honor and turf and ideology—Jesus, half the gang fights weren’t even fights, just a bunch of kids screaming political slogans at one another. Issuing manifestos over the pub
lic datanets. Proclaiming their loyalty to the Société Bijoux or the New Rejuve Movement or Genetic Behaviorism. The Canards weren’t asking for that kind of loyalty. They just wanted to survive and get rich and have a few laughs at the expense of the kids who were taking it all so seriously.”

  He found the ashtray and brought it back to bed with him. He lit the cigarette and leaned back against the pillows.

  “Did you get rich?” Ardala asked.

  He put the lighter on the bedside table. “I was a good boy and gave it all to my mother. She bought her way into an ecodrome about the time I enlisted in CL.”

  “Sort of rich, then.”

  Steward inhaled, closed his eyes. “The Canards wanted to be middlemen. They figured that’s where the money was. Tried to know who was putting moves in certain directions, what the policorps were up to, where to find certain commodities. Acted as brokers, collected a percentage. Never allied with any of the other gangs. And we’d sabotage the others, too, just for fun. Issue funny absurdist manifestos over other gangs’ signatures, that kind of thing.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Mostly they got killed. The gangs had a war. Being in the middle, the Canards were right in the crossfire. They’d never made any friends, so they were nothing but stationary targets. I took what I’d made and split for Coherent Light.” He grinned. “The other Canards would have approved, I think. They always tried to do the smart thing.”

  “And CL actually let you in.”

  “I fit the profile.”

  “A profile for an extinct policorp. Great.” She closed the issue of Guys and threw the magazine off the bed. “I can’t imagine you being in a gang. When you lived next door to me you were such a good soldier. Such a”—she shrugged her shoulders—“such a straight arrow. You know. Everything was always tidy and in its place. You were always full of Coherent Light’s programs for this and that. Making the galaxy a safer, brighter place.”

  “After what I saw in Nice and Marseilles, Coherent Light made a lot of sense. Seemed to, anyway. Besides,” he added, “there’s not so much between a good soldier and a good gang member. A matter of style, mostly.”

  “Huh.” She reached out for the cigarette and took it from his fingers. “What were you like, back then?”

  “Skinny. Intense.”

  “You’re still skinny and intense. If it weren’t for the muscles, you’d be just a wisp.”

  “Intense maybe. But this body’s been fed. My former body was on the edge of starvation for a lot of years. I was fond of big shades and raw silk jackets and high-topped sneakers with little red balls on the sides. I had a nice home comp with all the latest in stolen software. I chain-smoked Xanadus and traveled on a matte-black fuel-cell scooter. The usual hustler stuff.”

  Odd to think of that as being over twenty years ago. In memory it wasn’t so long. A past that hadn’t even got fuzzy.

  “Hell. Motherfucker.” The Xanadu had burned her fingers. She squashed it in the ashtray, too fast, spilling ashes on the bed. Then she was cursing on her hands and knees, bent over, brushing the ashes off the bed onto the floor. Steward watched the way her spine flexed along her supple back, how her haunches moved as she shifted her weight, the muscles in each thigh tautening alternately, a play of shadow and motion.

  He remembered Natalie, the way she moved, sure of herself, graceful, remembering how she used to slide between the covers as if they were a lover’s arms…. Hell, he thought, if I was as smart as I think I am, I wouldn’t have lost her.

  Stupidity’s something you learn to live with, he thought, just like everything else.

  *

  Morning, next day. Steward sat in the friendl es rest rant, working on his second cup of coffee. It seemed to Steward that he could feel the caffeine moving through his body, switching on first one system, then another. Little bits of his consciousness reawakening, blinking on like a row of little green lights giving a GO signal. A half-eaten sweet roll sat on a plate in front of him. Around him the midmorning coffee-shop crowd lazed over scansheet printouts, read the news, yawned, stretched.

  Steward raised his head to signal the waitress for another cup of coffee, saw a profile moving along the distant aisle between the waitress’s station and his window booth, and suddenly the little row of GO lights in his mind was flashing on and off in hot synchrony, green, yellow, red. His nerves burned. He turned in his seat to watch the man as he walked down the aisle and sat in a corner booth, followed by the waitress with a coffeepot. Steward craned his neck for a view of the man’s face. The waitress was standing in the way, pouring coffee. Steward began to feel foolish. A stranger in an out-of-the-way coffee shop, a chance resemblance, and he was beginning to see ghosts.

  The waitress moved out of the way. Steward looked at the man’s face and felt his mouth go dry. He turned, finished his coffee in a gulp, and stood. He swayed. His balance seemed a little off. He walked down the long aisle, seeing the man’s face foreshortening toward him. Nerves leaped in Steward’s hands, his legs.

  The man looked up as he raised his coffee cup. He was a dark-skinned European with medium-length hair, dressed tidily in a dark short-sleeved suit over a collarless light blue shirt. His arms were gaunt, wiry. His skin was parchment stretched over bone, tied in place with the blue ropes of veins. He wore a graying mustache that was unfamiliar. Steward felt a touch of uncertainty. His memory was of another man, younger, well-muscled, smiling. Then he saw a white splash on a biceps where a tattoo had been removed, and uncertainty was over.

  He felt himself teetering on the edge of something, as if the ground under him was about to spill away, dropping him into a new place, somewhere uncertain, where the rules were different and he would have to learn them as he moved.

  “Griffith,” Steward said.

  The coffee cup stopped halfway to the man’s mouth. His wet eyes glistened, surrounded by dark lines. New eyes. Ghost eyes.

  “Steward,” he muttered, apparently to himself. He put the cup down without moving his glance. His voice was harsh, grating. Steward remembered him singing, a baritone voice that rang from the metal walls of Steward’s apartment in the Coherent Light Mars Orbital Complex. Half the songs were in Welsh and sounded like hymns, the other half were filthy rugby songs. The voice was different now.

  “Jesus,” Griffith said. A grin began moving across his face, moving in an odd way, not all at once but jerkily, invading Griffith’s face zone by zone. “You caught me by surprise. You look good, Captain. Sit down.”

  Captain? Steward thought.

  Griffith’s smile faded. His face clouded over at the cold touch of memory. “I haven’t seen you since the Icehawks,” he said. “Not since we came back from Sheol.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Griffith didn’t so much eat breakfast as tear it apart, nervously shredding eggs and ham, ripping up his toast, now and then eating a bite, otherwise just pushing the food around his plate. Steward understood how he’d grown so thin. While watching Griffith mutilate his breakfast, Steward explained that he was a clone, that he had his Alpha’s training but not his memories of Sheol or anything since.

  Griffith looked at him. “He didn’t update the memories at all? Didn’t give you anything?” Steward shook his head. Griffith leaned back in his booth with surprise on his face. “Why?” Griffith asked.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Shit.” He rubbed his mustache. Then his puzzlement turned to wary concern.

  “He’s dead then, right? You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  “That’s right.”

  Griffith was silent for a moment. His watery eyes seemed turned inward, watching a memory landscape printed inside his mind. “How’d it happen?” he asked. “Did they tell you?”

  “He was killed on Ricot, or maybe Vesta. Hunting Colonel de Prey.”

  Griffith was silent again for a long moment. “Yeah,” he said. The voice wasn’t disapproving, or approving either. “That sounds like the Captain.” And then he
went back to ripping up his food, slowly, not even looking at what his hands were doing. Steward watched him, not wanting to break into Griffith’s reverie, his mourning for someone he hadn’t known he’d lost.

  The Captain. That was the Alpha personality’s name, now. It symbolized a rank, an authority, that Steward did not remember possessing. He hadn’t even been an officer. The Captain had come into being on Sheol.

  Griffith put down his knife and fork and took a breath. He seemed suddenly pale. He excused himself and went to the men’s room. When he returned, his color was back. He lit a cigarette and inhaled.

  “I’ve got some kind of stomach thing,” he said. “It’s been following me for days.”

  “What are you doing in Arizona?”

  “I’m staying in a condo suite my company keeps here. I’m working as kind of a salesman,” he said. “For an outfit called Lightsource, Limited. We provide various kinds of communication services for businesses. Software aimed at solving particular problems, communication equipment built to specific configurations, that kind of thing. Are you working?”

  “Not at the moment. I’ve got some things lined up. I’m going to try to get into Starbright.”

  Griffith’s face grew wistful. “Getting back into space, huh?” he asked. “Wish I was.”

  “I want to travel. I think I’d be restless if I stayed in one place.”

  Griffith nodded, puffed smoke. “I’d like to see the Powers again. Live with them in a real Power environment. That’s what I miss most about space. The Powers turned out to be the only thing up there worth the trip.”

  “You think so?”

  Griffith gave him a glance. “The Captain was that way, too. Wasn’t impressed by them. Kind of a blindness in him.” He shook his head. “But when you meet them, you realize how centered they are. How real they are. And you see by comparison how humans are almost…transparent. As if we’re not really there. And you know how far we have to go.” He looked down at his plate, his mutilated food. Frowned. “I think I know someone in Starbright,” he said. “A drive jockey. Let me think a minute. Maybe she can help you get in on an apprentice program.” He shook his head. “I’ll have to make some calls.”