Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  Andrei, Sarah knows, is one of the Hetman’s lieutenants. She watches as Michael fumbles in his pocket for a Russian cigarette.

  “Someone may be trying to set me up, but I can’t think who, or why.” Crimping the end. Lighting it with a match that trembles. His hands are liver-spotted, old man’s hands. “These people I’m dealing with are small men, and if they hijacked the cargo they wouldn’t last long. Unless they have protection. But no one has that kind of strength, and right now I’m friends with everybody here on this coast. No sign that anyone’s getting their moves ready. So maybe you’ll be working for me for nothing.”

  “You don’t feel that, Hetman,” Sarah says. “Or you wouldn’t be hiring me. Not at that price.”

  He gives her a long, expressionless glance, his eyelids jittering a nervous reply to Sarah’s words, the cigarette smoke drifting ceilingward. Behind them the video begins to hype some new cocaine substitute, guaranteed nonaddictive, the audio filled with the tasteful hissing of compressed gases, the delighted exclamations of a young couple obviously in love. The cigarette flutters in the corner of Michael’s mouth as he speaks.

  “I’m hiring a panzerboy,” he says. “If they’re trying for a hijack and expecting to be able to knock out a truck, they’ll be surprised. Andrei is handling the deal, the money. He’ll have friends to protect him, but I want you to ride along in the panzer. Watch the deal, watch the panzerboy. You’re hardwired for firearms?”

  “Pistols and machine pistols.” She shrugs. “Guns have no style,” she says.

  He smiles, a little wistful. As if he has heard this declaration many times, and knows that guns always seem to matter in the end. “I will get you a Heckler and Koch, seven millimeter. You will practice with it?”

  “When are we running?”

  “Saturday.”

  “I’ll practice tomorrow. If you can get me the gun by then.”

  “I will send a boy to meet you, take you to the range, then collect the gun when you are chipped in with it. Meet you when?”

  “Tomorrow. The Plastic Girl, noon.”

  The Hetman draws on his cigarette and nods. Sarah can see the reflection of the vid in his eyes, hears the jarring resumption of a South American comedy, the canned laughter raucous in reply to shrill Spanish. “I hope I am wrong about this, mi hermana,” says Michael. His voice is filled with Russian sadness that is no less genuine for its being theatrical. “I would be sorry to see another war. Just when things seem a little settled.”

  A war would mean work for Sarah; but she doesn’t want it either. She knows that the only important war is already over, and that both she and Michael have already lost it, that any fighting here in the American Concessions is over the scraps the Orbitals had left behind, not thinking them worth the bother.

  The Hetman rises to his feet. His hands make nervous movements. Sarah rises with him.

  “I will go arrange for the gun,” he says. A long worm of ash falls from the end of the cigarette, leaving a fingerprint of gray dust on his vest.

  If he is responding to pressure, Sarah thinks, if he is ready to betray her, then it will be tomorrow. When the boy comes with the gun, he will use it. She will try to be ready for it, poised to make her move, if that’s what’s really in the cards. She raises her hand to her throat, like a gypsy woman touching iron.

  His eyes are unfocused, looking not at Sarah but at what will come, the future that, from the direction of his dreaming gaze, seems to be waiting above her right shoulder. She feels as if she should turn her head and see what is there.

  “Thank you, Michael,” Sarah says.

  He turns his wise eyes to her, says nothing. She fights an impulse to put her arms around him, to seek a piece of comfort here in the sterile brightness, ignoring the fact that this is business and that this man may already have arranged for her death... But it’s a death she could almost welcome, feeling as if her own soul fled when she watched Danica’s eyes turn to marble, that it is lost somewhere, with all the things that had seemed to give her meaning. Where does the shaped charge go when it has done its task? It flies apart, needles of steel each pursuing its own end. Scrap, seeking oblivion.

  Once, she thinks dully, there was a purpose to this. Her life had intent, a wider focus. A direction, upward, out of the gravity well and into the black enveloping purity of airless space. Now the focus has narrowed. There is only the single imperative, Survive this Moment. The past scarcely matters; the future will be dealt with, instant by instant, as it arrives. Each tick of the clock, a new burden, a new application of the imperative. The Hetman will help her get through this moment, provide another brief imperative. Survive until tomorrow, attend the meet at the Plastic Girl. Then survive the meet, if possible.

  The boy across the room weeps, shreds another tissue. “Clever of them,” the Hetman says, “to go through Andrei, and not come direct. Knowing that Andrei would add his pressure to theirs.” The voice is reflective, reaching into the ether for the enemy that may exist there, trying to know his mind.

  “I’ll meet your boy,” Sarah says. And leaves, before the pain in her throat breaks free. Daud is only a dozen doors away, sharing his room with an old man who is having his hips rebuilt. The flowers that Sarah and the old man’s children have brought do not entirely mask the smell of chemical disinfectant. In an upper corner the video is showing the same graceless comedy that was playing in the waiting room. The old man is watching intently and does not acknowledge Sarah’s presence.

  “Hello, Daud,” she says.

  LEDs pulse green in Daud’s corner, machines make ticking noises as they perform their obscure tasks. A vid screen shows a succession of jagged parabolas. He is breathing on his own these days, and his heart beats for itself. Over Daud’s head gleams a mobile of stainless steel, the bars and weights that he is supposed to use to exercise his new arm. The chemicals he was taking to alter his hair color have been discontinued, and his hair, where it has grown in after being shaved, is brown; there is a bald spot on one side of his head, pink with new skin. A gauze patch is taped over the eye socket that will soon be filled with a Kikuyu implant. From beneath the patch a wire trails to the computer on the headboard, keeping the optic nerve alive. The sheet is tented over the stumps of his legs, and from beneath it come the tubes that are keeping the tissue and bone alive in its coating of gel.

  Sarah bends over the bed to kiss him. She pulls a pack of cigarettes out from her pocket, lights one for him, and puts it in his mouth. His remaining eye is alert as it follows her movements: he has developed a remarkable tolerance to the doses of endorphin they have been giving him.

  Daud swallows. There is a plastic button on his throat where the tracheostomy went in, where the machine had fed him air for weeks. His voice is ragged, forced up the damaged trachea, made harsher by the cigarette smoke. “Where’s Jackstraw?” he asks. “He told me he’d come.”

  “I haven’t seen him.” She doesn’t want to tell Daud that Jackstraw will probably not come again, will have long ago found another boy to take Daud’s place. For weeks Jackstraw has been just a voice on the phone that answers Daud’s calls without enthusiasm, that cuts him off with talk of business, sudden guests, clients’ demands. Anyone less isolated than Daud, anyone less desperate, would have long since got the message. When Jackstraw judges Daud can earn money for him, he will visit.

  “We can start building you legs now, in the next few days,” Sarah says. “One after the other, as soon as you’re strong enough. I just got a job.” She tries to smile. “Would you like the right first, or the left?”

  He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ll be gone a few days. From Saturday.”

  “On the job.” He reaches up with his pink new arm and flicks ash from his cigarette.

  “Yes.” Sarah can sense a fever behind Daud’s eyes, some desperate intensity building. He reaches up with his good hand to one of the handgrips of the weight machine, clasping it, then batting it away in frustra
tion. When he speaks, he keeps his teeth clenched on his cigarette, biting on each word.

  “Jackstraw said he would try to get me some hormone maskers,” Daud says. “Can you bring me some? Maybe tomorrow, before you leave?”

  She looks at him in surprise at how desperate he is, how far from reality. She moves forward to sit on the edge of his bed, reaching for his hand. He snatches it away. “Will you bring me some?” he cries.

  She tries to speak calmly at the ache in her throat. “Daud,” she says, “you can’t suppress your hormones, not when you’re trying to rebuild muscle tissue.”

  “You don’t understand!” Desperate now. He is beating on the mattress with his fists, bounding from the mattress with each strike. A red warning light begins to blink from one of the machines, synching with a little mechanical peep. The old man in the next bed stirs restlessly, his comedy interrupted.

  “I’m getting a beard! They shave me every morning now! I’m getting older!” He turns his head away, gasping for breath, coughing through the phlegm that coats his scarred windpipe. “They only want me young, my people,” he says. “Jackstraw will only want me if I stay young.”

  “Daud.” He is coughing too hard to speak. She takes his cigarette and stubs it out, then reaches for his hand with both of hers. He lets her take it now, holding it to her breast, stroking the hairs on its back with her knuckles. The warning peep dies, the light turns green again. “You’ll be strong,” she says. “You’ll be young. You’ll do fine. You have nothing to be afraid of.” An incantation of hope, that she must repeat every day. Trusting that it will come true, or at least that Daud will come to believe it will come true.

  “The ones who want cripples. I don’t want to be with them.” A breathy whisper, a last protest through the torn throat. Sarah kisses his hand, strokes the arm, says nothing. Says nothing at all, her language all mute strokes, comforting touch, until it is time to leave.

  She calls a cab from the waiting room, tells it where to meet her, and goes out through one of the back doors, this one off the cafeteria. Her nerves are tingling as she steps near the loading dock where the food comes in, her eyes flickering left and right, looking for faces she hasn’t seen before. She zips up her armored jacket and turns the collar up. It looks odd: the cafeteria workers have seen this behavior before, but still don’t understand it. She ignores their stares, looks left and right, puts her weight on the metal door.

  The heat almost takes the breath from her lungs. Instantly, it seems, her body is sheathed in sweat. Sarah dodges past a parked car to an alley, sees no one, moves quickly along the baking concrete. The hospital is huge and has a lot of exits: Cunningham’s people can’t cover their all. The alley stinks of trash, urine, and frangipani. She stands for a moment, waiting, her eyes searching the blank windows above for sign of movement, for the foreshortening bullet... The cab arrives within a minute: she almost flings herself into it. She feels herself safer here, though she knows it’s an illusion. Last time they used a rocket; the fragile doors of a cab aren’t going to stop their hardware if they really want to get in. She shouldn’t even unzip her jacket, but she does.

  Sarah looks over her shoulder as the cab speeds away and sees hurried motion through the rising waves of heat, an old piebald Mercury colored mainly primer gray, lunging from the curb before its passenger-side door can swing shut…

  Now she knows.

  She is being hunted. Now, at this moment, not in some indefinite future. And Sarah’s first feeling, to her surprise, is relief. The knot of tension at the back of her neck subsides; already her muscles seem to be easing, moving more fluidly. The waiting is over; she knows the situation and will be able to act.

  But maybe she’s being premature. First she should confirm things.

  “Turn left here. Then right.” The driver gives her a look in the mirror, but follows instructions. The Merc follows, keeping well back now that they have their quarry in sight. Sarah digs in her pocketbook for the control and turns on her police-band scanner, feeding the sounds directly into her audio nerves now that there’s nothing else she needs to hear. Plenty of traffic, but none that sounds like it’s from the Merc. She pops through a succession of channels. Nothing.

  “Go straight.” She’s pretty sure the Merc is alone, that there aren’t any backup cars. She lifts a hand to her throat, where her friend lives. Weasel, I will call on you soon. “Left.” The driver glances at her in his mirror again. They’re heading straight for Venice.

  Every coastal city has one, the low-lying district that was too big to dike off when the seas began to rise–– only New York tried to keep the Atlantic at bay with its vast encircling wall, but the dikes were broken in the Rock War and now Manhattan is the largest Venice of all, swept by gray waters at the spring tides, the boiling white wave-caps climbing the empty streets, swirling among the broken ruins, snatching at the ankles of the people who still live there, who witness the slow erosion, the giving back to the sea, of the greatest city of legend…

  But there isn’t much of a tide in Tampa Bay, just an inch or two, and the Venice here is more stable, the tranquil bay content to eat at the city only gradually, reserving its biggest bites for the summer storms. When the waters rose, the port was dredged and deepened but the residential and business quarters were allowed to fade away, the expensive beachfront property losing itself by millimeters to each tide. From the sea marches a progression of devastation, the farthest buildings out little more than rubble, perhaps a chimney or two; inland are the buildings that lean out to sea, as if in anticipation of the inevitable fall, or display their looted interiors following the collapse of a seaward wall. Some are almost untouched: the massive stone walls of some old office buildings remain upright, stained but defiant, and far inland, where the water only stands rippling a foot or two above the old pavement, the buildings stand intact, almost livable.

  They have long since been gutted, of course, stripped of furniture, of wood and wiring. After the war the buildings were home to thousands of refugees come to undamaged, occupied Florida from the devastation in the North, and the desperate occupancy did not improve them. The refugees left some things behind on their own junk heaps, scavenged or homemade furniture, mattresses, rotting blankets, heaps of mildewed clothing. Things that could be of use to a new generation of refugees.

  There aren’t many who live in Venice now, only a few determined eccentrics, wanderers passing through to someplace else, and those on the run who have exhausted the other possibilities for places to hide. Runners like Sarah.

  The taxi is on a road built above the tide line, a causeway looping out into the city of ruins and flanked by pellucid water, heading eventually across the bay to drowning St. Petersburg. Shattered windows seem to peer into the taxi. “Stop here,” she says, and as the taxi’s flywheel disengages, she begins shoving bills through the bulletproof shield. If it’s to be her last, she thinks, let the tip be a big one.

  The driver counts the money in surprise as Sarah skates down the embankment, warm water greeting her as radio conversations crackle and snarl in her head. Her ankles are embraced by water lilies as she walks down a shallow bay between a pair of apartment buildings. Behind her, not quite daring to look, she hears the Mercury’s low hiss on the causeway. She steps through a doorway into an apartment foyer, the audio in her head dimming.

  The room is full of darkness and bright, wet sounds. Silt rises around her feet as ripple reflections dance on the ceiling. Mildew crawls up ancient, defaced wallpaper, algae devour the scrawled obscenities of the last inhabitants. An imbecile fish strikes at her shin repeatedly, tasting something he wants. The elevator doors are open, revealing broken mirrors, a drooping cable. Walking carefully on the crusted carpet, Sarah takes the stairs to the landing and gives herself a two-second glance past a broken, dagger-edged pane.

  The Merc has crawled another 300 yards down the causeway and pulled over to the side. Two heads are peering out as the traffic slices past. Sarah reaches for the cont
rol and turns off the police calls that track letters above her vision. The two are leaving the car, walking back along the highway verge. Sarah moves up the stairs.

  Echoes of her childhood ring from the broken walls, from the litter lying on the landings. How many years did she live in a place like this? Hiding in the broken corners, playing in the glass-strewn hallways? Now to return, having-once again-no other place to run. Sarah, returning to the corridors of a childhood memory, come back to play another game of hide-and-seek. The stairway is well lit through shattered windows, the walls streaked by every downpour. A mad profusion of fungus grows on each landing. Tired planks sag under the stained carpet. Sarah is leaving footprints in the sodden mess, a track for the two soldiers to follow.

  It’s an old trick, laying footprints down a hallway, then walking backward in one’s old tracks. She moves with childhood ease, familiar scents and memories rising as she skates backward through the rubble. Then a leap to one side, into a darkened apartment, and wait, poised to move. A hiss of hardfire up each nostril to trigger her hardwired nerves, to make the neurotransmitters leap as they run jangling down the neural communications net. Listening. Tasting the sweat on her upper lip. Heartbeat and respiration climbing silently through the gears, ready to provide blood and oxygen to the tissues when the time comes…

  How many times had she done this as a girl? Hid in a dark room while the drunken hurricane that was her father raged outside, shouted his threats, banged on the doors, Daud’s trembling arms around her while she tasted the scent of their mingled fear? But there are overlays on that childhood memory now, pictures of darker violence, of snagboys lying bloody in alleys next to their bags of merchandise, of runners caught in the sodium glare of police spotlights as their feet scrambled for traction on the wet concrete, of Weasel running its red cybernetic errands into the darkness of some terrified heart. But never anything like that earlier fear, the white nights with her father, the terror as the bedroom door finally gave way, the hinges tearing out amid pale moonbeam slivers of wood while her father stood silhouetted in the yellow hall light, the broken bottle in his hand…