Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  He’s surprised at the narrowness of the little place, the lack of furnishings in the room with its white walls and bricked-over window. He takes off the heavy jacket and sits on the only chair. Sarah offers him a beer from the cooler, then sits in a half-lotus on her little mattress. She rips the foil lid off her own beer and looks at him. “So why are you in Florida, Cowboy?”

  “To talk to Michael the Hetman.”

  “What about?”

  “A way to win the war.”

  She laughs. “Good. I was afraid you were just getting sentimental.”

  That game again, Cowboy thinks. Okay, he can play it well enough. “Sentimental for the Silver Apaches’ beer, maybe,” he says. He looks at her carefully. “You’re still working for the Hetman, right? Not changed sides?”

  A brief shake of the head. “We’re still on the same team. The other side wouldn’t have me anyway.”

  “So we’re still allies.”

  Sarah allows herself a quiet smile. “Yes. I guess we are.”

  Point to me, Cowboy thinks. He sips his beer. “When can you put me in touch with Michael?”

  “I happen to know he’s out of town. I won’t be able to get a line to him till tonight.”

  Cowboy takes a long drink of his beer, then puts the bottle down. He switches his eyes to infrared, seeing the blood burning silver in Sarah’s cheeks.

  “Arkady’s dead,” he says. “I shot down his plane.”

  Sarah considers this, patterns of warmth shifting across her face. “Good,” she says. “But that won’t put an end to things in your part of the world, will it?”

  “Probably not, considering who was behind him. But we’ll have some time.” He clicks back to normal vision. Sarah’s dark eyes are watching him carefully.

  “Time for what?” she asks.

  So he tells her about Tempel, about Henri Couceiro sitting in his Lagrange habitat and looking down at Earth with cold spaceborn eyes, about Albrecht Roon feeding his mind through the crystal matrix and into a new, young body, about portfolios and offices and lattices of control, about Cowboy’s sense of the votes on the board that could be swung if certain things happened, the stockholders whose proxies held the balance of power. It’s all pure intuition, simply Cowboy’s ideas about the people he’s been studying, but he thinks he’s right about them.

  The whispery cadences of hob music throb up through the floor while Sarah listens quietly in her half-lotus, barely sipping her beer. After Cowboy finishes, she stares down at the floor for along moment. “If it doesn’t work?”

  “We lose more quickly than we’re losing now. We cut a deal and run.”

  Sarah looks at him. “So long as you know when to cut, Cowboy. Daud and I aren’t planning to commit seppuku with you, and I don’t think the Hetman will, either.”

  “You can pull out whenever you want. I can’t stop you, and I won’t try.”

  She looks at him for a long while, her face intent, then she nods. “Just so you know.”

  Sarah uncoils her long legs and stands, moving to the bricked-up old window, leaning a shoulder against its sill and gazing into the distance as if the frame still held glass. “Do you think we can win this war, Cowboy?” she asks. Softly, almost as though she’s talking to herself.

  “Yes. If Roon gives us what we need.”

  “I wasn’t planning for a win. I just wanted to hang on long enough to get Daud a ticket into orbit. Then...” She shakes her head. “It didn’t seem to matter what happened after. I would have tried to run, I suppose, when our side fell apart. ”

  “A place in the sky. That’s what you want?”

  Sarah turns to face him, her body slumped against the wall. “Shit, man. I sold my soul for a ticket. Turned out the people I sold it to didn’t even want it. Too dirty for them, I guess.” A bitter skeleton’s grin twists across her face. “They’ll take Daud, though, if he comes with enough cash. They’ll wrinkle their noses at the smell, maybe, but they’ll take him.”

  “Is that what he wants?”

  A shutter falls across her face. “That’s what’s best. If he stays with me, he’ll die.”

  Cowboy feels the chill bottle in his hands, the condensation trickling down his thumb. “You might not be doing your Daud a favor sending him up the well, Sarah,” he says. “Those aren’t our people up there.”

  She laughs. “Our people, Cowboy, are losers. They lost twelve years ago and they haven’t stopped losing yet.”

  Cowboy feels his jaw muscles. tautening, his hands turning into fists. He looks at Sarah.

  “We can win this one,” he says.

  Sarah raises her eyes, looking at him for a long moment. A long bass line threads up from the bar to fill the silence. “Yes,” she says. “We might. For once we might come out ahead.”

  Cowboy can almost see Sarah’s hackles rising at the sight of the two Flash Force guards, but she greets them with a terse nod and steps out of the bar into Cowboy’s rented car, her head turning each way to look at the slow-motion figures moving down the shadowed street. Cowboy follows her into the back of the car and the driver smoothly pulls away from the curb.

  “Secure phone,” he says, wishing he was faced into the car and driving himself, but the driver glides easily through the traffic, his eyes flickering to the mirrors to check for tags. He heads for a public phone standing by an old twenty-four-hour bank, where they will be covered not only by the Flash Force but by the bank’s own security system. Sarah leaves the car, jingling change in her pockets. She leans into the phone, punches numbers, talks in an undertone.

  She gives Cowboy a ragged smile as she steps into the car again. “He was getting high with some of his Russian friends, but he said he’d see you tomorrow morning. I figured in the morning he’d either be hung over or still in orbit, so I made an appointment for the afternoon. He’ll be more receptive then, I think. Suit you?”

  “To the ground,” Cowboy says. Sarah closes the door and the automatic security locks chunk shut with the cold sound of impervious alloy, the closing of the cage called Security.

  “Take you back to the Blue Silk?” Cowboy asks. “Or shall I buy you dinner first?”

  Sarah’s eyes flicker to the Flash Force people in the front seat, forming a question.

  “In my room at the Ritz Flop,” he says. “They won’t let me out in public anyway.”

  She leans back in the padded seat, her fingers sliding along the grain of the simulated leather. “Fine,” she says. The flywheel engages smoothly and the car slides away from the crumbling curb.

  Glittering alloy alternates with obsidian glass at the Ritz Flop, a smooth series of parabolas, half buried, low and close to the ground without a single straight line anywhere, a Lagrange world come to terms with gravity. In Cowboy’s room, like the others, there are no right angles, only smooth curves meeting one another like clouds in a dream of night flight. The dark wood in the furniture turns out, at a touch, to be cool alloy, vibrating faintly against Cowboy’s fingertips, as if with a fast hummingbird life existing in the ultrasonic, just beyond the realm of human perception.

  He snaps on the computer on the headboard of the bed and orders western beef, guaranteed not to have been plexgrown in a vat, and a bottle of Cryo White. One of the Flash Force shadows comes in with room service and Cowboy can see Sarah’s scowl as their meal passes its electronic examination. She seems to relax after the guard leaves, shrugging out of her jacket, shaking her hair. She looks at the dark gray matte of the curved ceiling.

  “I was a lot less obvious when I was guarding you,” she says, her mouth twisting. She reaches for the White, and thick chips of frost fall from the metal flask as she holds it over her goblet and presses the nitrogen trigger. White foam splatters over the goblet lip and lands on Cowboy’s knuckle. He lifts the finger to his lips and feels the chill shock move through his nerves, his teeth.

  After dinner he goes in his luggage for an inhaler of softglow, a chemical high that won’t tangle with hardwired nerve
s. Sarah finishes the last of her Cryo White and then breathes in a pair of torpedoes. She tosses her head back, shakes her hair, grins. Cowboy triggers the inhaler twice and feels a windblown grassfire burning up each hemisphere of his brain.

  “Do you remember...?” Sarah says.

  “It’s good being allies again.”

  Then they’re tangled on the bed, Cowboy watching her body on infrared, seeing the blood rush to the skin in rivers of silver, forming bright pools in her breasts, her groin, little glowing snake tracks following his fingertips wherever he touches her. He reaches into one of the headboard compartments for a headset and some studs, faces in, fits the headset over her temples. Her dreaming eyes grow suddenly wide and her hands jerk up to yank off the headset.

  “No, Cowboy.”

  There is fear in her voice, and he feels a chill surprise. His eyes click back to normal.

  Sarah’s face is deep in shadow. “I thought we could share our heads,” he says.

  He can feel Sarah give a quick shake of the head. “No.” She takes a deep breath, presses her hand to his cheek. “I’m not...” She shakes her head again. “There are things in my head you don’t want to know about,” Sarah says. She presses her forehead to his, looks straight into his eyes. Speaks regretfully, plainly. Her breath flutters against his lips. “Things from my past, things that don’t have anything to do with you. It’s just that...sometimes they’re there. Even when I don’t want them to be. And you wouldn’t like it.”

  “I’ve been places,” he says.

  “Not these kinds of places. Otherwise you wouldn’t have tried to put us both into the same face.”

  Cowboy slowly reaches up to his head and takes himself out of the face. Sarah slides her arms around him. He can feel the warm silk of her thigh riding up his hip and switches to infrared, seeing the silver and rust build glowing patterns in the darkness. He thinks about Sarah’s little room above the bat, the single chair, the bare narrow mattress. He knows he will not be invited into that bed, that the sex between the two of them must always remain on neutral ground. Because she will always need that little place, the bare little room where she can hide and nothing can touch her.

  He rolls atop Sarah and enters her, seeing her glowing against the sheets, her skin ablaze. Her eye sockets are a cool cyanide violet, the windows to her mind firmly shuttered.

  A few hours later Cowboy wakes to find Sarah deep in her own rhythm, her nerves triggered and her body a blur of kicks and punches, running her pattern of makebelieve violence in the center of the room, locked in battle with the night, with the phantoms trying to reach her. He watches her move in the dimness, feeling the vibration of the Ritz Flop rising through his spine. Wondering what she sees in front of her as she launches her attacks, what faces are conjured in the legion of invisible enemies. If his own face is among them, to be kept always at bay.

  And then he sees the flicker of darkness from between her lips, and coldness touches him with spiderweb fingertips. He snaps his vision to infrared and sees the cybernetic lash that is Weasel, the cybersnake running its swift deadly patterns in combination with her hand strikes, flashing out against the ghosts that fill the room.

  Fear fills him, cold touching his fingertips. He watches silently from his pillow, realizing that she’s always had this, a piece of cold alloy and plastic madness incarnated in her throat, hidden beneath her warm, humid tongue... Cowboy’s heart thrashes in his chest, urging him to run. He thinks about facing with the cybersnake by accident, feeling its cold crystal mind through his sockets... “There are things in my head you don’t want to know about.” In her head, aye, and her throat, her heart. Hidden behind her cyanide eyes.

  She finishes her work and sucks the Weasel back in her. Cowboy closes his eyes and hopes she will think he is asleep. Sarah pads quietly to the shower, giving Cowboy time to get his breathing under control.

  When she comes back to the bed, he moves over and gives her plenty of room.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sweat gathers on Daud’s upper lip, on his forehead. His blue eyes are glazed with pain. The muscles on his upper arms bunch as he tries to support his weight on the gleaming metal rails while his new pink-fleshed legs take a few careful steps.

  “That’s it, Daud. You got it.” The blond bodybuilder therapist, standing close by in case of a fall, urges Daud on. Sarah adds her own encouragement as Daud walks slowly the length of the rails, then turns and moves torturously back to his wheelchair.

  “That was good, Daud,” Sarah says later, as she pushes the chair to the elevator. “The best yet.”

  Daud’s head lolls back against its rest. “Can we stop for some cigarettes?” he asks.

  “I’ve got some with me.” Back in his room she helps him climb into his bed and then opens one of the two packs of cigarettes she’s brought with her. She puts the other in a drawer where he can reach it. The neighboring bed is empty and Sarah sits on it.

  A thin bearded nurse comes in, with a basin for Daud’s bath. “You shouldn’t be smoking in bed,” he says mildly. He carefully begins to stack towels on the bedside table.

  “I’ll wash him,” Sarah says. She slides off the bed and reaches for the basin in the nurse’s hands. The nurse looks at her in surprise.

  “Daud and I have some talking to do,” Sarah says. “In private.” The nurse’s nervous eyes flicker to Daud, and Daud nods.

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” the nurse says, and shrugs. He looks at Sarah. “You’re not supposed to sit on the beds.”

  “Won’t happen again.”

  The nurse leaves, and Sarah pulls down the sheets covering Daud, unbuttons his pajama tunic, exposing the slack white chest mottled with pink shrapnel scars. She washes him while Daud stares at the ceiling, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

  “You should exercise more, Daud,” she says. “You used to exercise all the time when you lived with me. You’ll be walking a lot faster.”

  “It hurts too much.” He blows smoke at the high acoustic ceiling. “They keep dropping my dose.”

  Sarah washes the long legs, the thin white calves weightless in her arms.

  “I’ve got to leave again, Daud,” she says. “I don’t know for how long.”

  Daud blinks, his eyes still upturned. “I knew you were going again,” he says. “All those afternoons when you were at meetings and couldn’t see me.” She reaches for his cigarette and taps the lengthening ash into his tray.

  “I have to pay your bills, Daud,” she says.

  He swallows hard. Sarah watches the cords in his neck. She gives him his cigarette.

  “Don’t go,” he says. “Don’t leave me here again.”

  “Roll over on your side.” She washes his back, the deep white hollow between his shoulder blades.

  “There’s a number where you’ll be able to leave a message,” Sarah says. “It’s in New Mexico. Maybe they’ll be able to patch you right through to me, maybe not. But I’ll get the message and call you from wherever I am. Okay?”

  “Whatever you say.”’ Dully, pretending not to care.

  “I’ll give you the number,” Sarah says. “You’re going to have to memorize it. I can’t ever write it down. And you can’t call from this room. Your phone might still be monitored. You’ll have to get in your wheelchair and go down to the waiting room and use the phone there. I’ll give you a credit needle so you can use it. Understand?”

  “Yes. I understand.” Daud’s voice is a whisper. He reaches to the table for a towel and snatches it, but he’s using the new left arm and the movement lacks precision. The towel unfolds and Sarah sees the flash of crystal and metal in the instant before a vial strikes the floor and dances under the table. The cold rattle of glass on tile seems to last for a long time. Sarah feels the chill touch of metal on her nerves.

  “No,” Daud says. “It’s mine. Don’t look.”

  He gives a little moan as she reaches for the vial, as she brings it up to the light. Polymyxin-phenildorphin Nu,
solution of 12 percent. At his old level, it should last him about a day. Less now. Not a surprise, now that she thinks about it.

  Daud whimpers as she searches the towels and the bed, finding another new vial and one near-empty vial under his pillow. “No,” he says. “Look. Joseph was just doing me a favor.” He looks at the coldness in her face and falls silent.

  “You don’t have any money, Daud,” she says. “How’d you pay for it?”

  He clamps his mouth shut and shakes his head. Sarah feels the towel in her hands, and she flicks it in his face. He jerks his head back, his lips trembling.

  “Tell me.”

  He swallows, tries to turn his head away. Sarah flicks the towel again. It makes a hard sound in the air.

  “Look,” he says, “they just add the cost to the– the hospital bill. Disguised charges. Joseph has a friend at the desk. You would never have known. ” He begins to talk fast. “I’ve been making such progress since, Sarah. I really have.”

  “I’m moving you out of this place. A recovery hospital somewhere. You don’t need full care anymore.”

  “Sarah.”

  “Don’t.” She raises a hand clenched around a towel, feeling the anger making her fist tremble. She balls the towel up and flings it into a corner of the room, then spins and stalks into the corridor.

  She finds Joseph in another room, washing the gaunt corded muscles of an accident victim who has both his legs raised in traction. “Hey, Joseph,” she calls, and sends one of the vials at his head. He ducks, his eyes wide, and the vial splinters against the wall. The room fills with a glycerine chemical smell.

  Sarah’s moving too fast for him to dodge. The first kick catches his midsection; the second, his face. He goes down and she stands astride him, her hands seizing his collar, holding it tight, cutting into the skin around his neck. “Joseph,” she says, “I should fire the rest into your veins. How’d you like a nice endorphin overdose, hey?”

  The accident victim is scrambling with his one good hand for the emergency cable. Sarah drops the bearded nurse and gently takes the emergency cord and puts it out of reach. Joseph puts a hand to his throat and gasps for breath.