Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  Sarah turns to him. “Stay away from my brother, Joseph,” she says. “He doesn’t need you, or the things that you hide in his towels.”

  “I was just– ”

  Sarah slaps him hard across the face. She can feel the man in the bed flinch at the sound.

  “Just follow instructions, Joseph. My brother doesn’t get any of the drugs you’re selling, and the price of what you’ve sold him comes off my bill. Don’t say anything, just nod yes or no.” Joseph looks up at her, gives a slow nod.

  Sarah straightens, takes the emergency cable and puts it in the hand of the accident victim. “Sorry,” she says. “I just had to reach an accommodation with the local ’dorphin dealer.” She looks into his surprised eyes. “Check your bill carefully before you pay it. Joseph here may have added some of his disguised charges.”

  She turns and leaves the room, the smoldering anger turning to sadness. She can’t keep Daud away from the endorphins, not even if she stays with him. They’re a part of what keeps him alive now. He’s got nothing to look forward to but the next injection, nothing but a visit from his sister–– and Sarah wants only to make him feel again, to bring him back to the world of pain, where nothing stands between him and the city. No wonder, she thinks, that he made his deal with Joseph. She’s a part of the city, the city that wants him. Joseph was his only chance to get away.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Dodger?” Cowboy looks at the phone in surprise.

  “Who else?” says the Dodger.

  Cowboy grins at the sound of the Dodger’s voice. “I’m glad to hear you’re out. I hope your Flash Force people are keeping as good an eye on you as they are on me.”

  “Nothing to worry about there.” Cowboy hears the sound of chewing tobacco being shifted from one cheek to the other. “Some of their mercs tried to set up an ambush down Mora way, on old Bob Aguilar’s land. I must’ve heard from half a dozen people about it; Bob in particular, so we hired an extra platoon for one afternoon and took them out. A wired fight, lasted about ten minutes all told. Had to lock Jimi in the bathroom so he wouldn’t jump in his panzer and join the war. I don’t think our friends’ll be coming into the mountains again. Strangers are too conspicuous up here.”

  Cowboy laughs and offers his congratulations. He’s talking from a public phone at the Orlando port of entry to the Randolph Scott accommodation link in Santa Fe. His phone-in time was set up in advance, giving the Dodger’s people time to instruct the Randolph Scott number to forward the call to Mora or Eagle Nest or whatever public phone the Dodger was standing by.

  “The meet with Roon’s still set up for tomorrow,” Cowboy says. “I’ve got a cube holding the instructions for the treaty we’re going to cut. Ready to receive?”

  “Anytime, Cowboy.”

  Cowboy snaps the trapdoor shut over the cube and fires the data to New Mexico. Dodger’s voice informs him that he’s got the treaty in his crystal.

  “Michael got hit bad last night,” Cowboy says. “One of his people went over to the other side, took his crowd along and a warehouseful of hearts and antibiotics. ”

  “We’ve been doing a little better thisaway.” In spite of the news the Dodger’s voice seems full of good cheer. Probably, Cowboy thinks, because it’s the first time he’s left his house in months.

  “The, ah, express riders are about to split from Arkady’s group.” A pulse of slow delight flares in Cowboy’s mind. The panzerboys, following his lead. They could shut Arkady’s machine down cold. “After Jimi did...what he did...Arkady started insisting on one of his people going along on every run, riding shotgun inside the delivery vehicle. That didn’t sit well with the drivers. And after Arkady’s plane crash his people got even more nervous. It seems Arkady’s replacement showed up real quick.”

  Cowboy’s lips draw back from his teeth. Tempel was showing its hand. “Anyone we know?” he asks.

  “A man from orbit, looks like. Name of Calvert. People had seen him with Arkady from time to time, but they didn’t know who he was. He’s not Russian, and Arkady’s Russians don’t like him.”

  “Think they’ll change their minds about who the good guys are?”

  Cowboy can sense the Dodger’s shrug in the sound of his voice. “The Russians are so paranoid and treacherous that I reckon anything could happen. But Calvert knows Arkady’s people too well, knows where they live and who they associate with. They’re vulnerable to him, but they don’t know him at all, or how to touch him. He’s a bad man, this Calvert. Nobody wants to cross him, not after they’ve met him. And he brought a new crowd in, Orbital people. He says he’ll start his own people running across the Line if the regular express riders stop working for him.”

  “Then he’ll lose a lot of cargo.”

  “It’s pocket change to these people, Cowboy. If they figure there’s a profit in the long run, they can afford to lose for years and years. We can’t.”

  Cowboy rubs his chin. He feels a warning prickle on the back of his neck. “What does this Calvert look like?”

  “Medium height. Real hard. Talks in a kind of whisper. Looks like he started out as a mudboy before he went up the well.”

  Cowboy’s eyes rise to Sarah standing five yards away, kicking absently at the passenger port’s granite paving while she waits for Cowboy to finish. “I think this boy’s known as Cunningham out here, Dodger,” he says. “He’s working this side of the war, too.”

  “That possibility had occurred to me, Cowboy. If it’s true, he’s a busy man.”

  “We’ll try and make him busier.”

  “That we will.” The Dodger clears his throat. “Warren says to tell you he’s got the sixth delta ready to fly. Word has it that Arkady’s people are trying to put deltas together from whatever spare parts they can find. Nice of you to corner the market before you flew against Arkady. ”

  “Nostalgia has its uses,” Cowboy says. On the display over his head he can see the blinking light that means his shuttle is boarding.

  After he says adios to the Dodger, he waves good-bye to the Flash Force guards at the gate.

  Roon has promised them his protection, but Cowboy figures he knows how much that’s worth. If Roon is treacherous, he and Sarah will die.

  The Flash Force won’t make a particle’s worth of difference, except in the number of bodies.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Roon’s home, Cowboy thinks, is a tesseract, coiling in on itself with the logic of a neverending nightmare. A black and silver dream invading Cowboy’s mind, burning through his crystal. Imposing its architecture upon him, its logic, its pattern. He is lost in it, helpless in the swirl of time.

  “Earth,” Roon says. His kohl-rimmed eyes are moist. “I was born in the well. Matured in orbit. Was reborn in crystal. Until then I did not understand.”

  Across the table Cowboy can smell the foulness of his breath. Roon reaches out a trembling hand to touch the short fair hair of the little girl that holds his wineglass. Cowboy sees her start, sees her eyes widen, her mouth open in a hushed intake of breath, prelude to a scream that never comes. “I understand how we may work together,” Roon says. “You and Earth are the past. I and the sky are the present. You are mud, I am vision. I wish to mold the Earth, to form it in the proper image. Build an architecture for the future.”

  The sweat of fear gathers under Cowboy’s collar. He looks at the crystal glass in his hand, pictures the ease with which he can bring the glass down on the edge of the table, the way the cut glass will sing as the shards skate across the polished hardwood and between the priceless petroleum-plastic dishes, the razor-edged fragments inverting the world as they mirror the shadowed airy ceiling, the look in the little girl’s wide, fearful eyes, the pulse in Roon’s throat as Cowboy lunges across the table with the sharp crystal in his hand, finally the bright arterial blood as it pools on the table, welling up around the scattered crystal worlds, extinguishing each miniature light in a rising scarlet tide…

  The anticipated movement quaver
s in Cowboy’s hand. He tightens his grip on the glass to end the shiver. The water in the glass trembles, reflects the lights above in a crescent like the rim of a distant world.

  He looks up at Sarah, seeing her impassive face, her carefully veiled eyes. Thinks of the murderous thing in her throat and the madness it implies. Madness of the world, or Sarah’s? Both at once? He wonders what she would do if he makes his move, whether the cybersnake would flicker out at Roon, or in Roon’s defense.

  He lowers the crystal goblet to the table, pulls his hand back to his lap, clasps it with the other to stop their shaking. What difference will it make? he thinks, and knows that he has made his first compromise with this madness, this horror.

  “What I do I do with love,” Roon says. He strokes the hair of the little girl. Tears trace kohl down his beardless cheeks. “I love you all, as a father does his children. I love you very much.”

  *

  The long tube of the Florida-Venezuela Free Zone suborbital shuttle is full of Orbital executives riding for free, jocks in their blazoned jackets moving from one free port to another, and a blend of Occupied America drawn from professions wealthy enough to afford air travel, hustlers and gamblers wearing cryo max, snagboys with a feigned nonchalance and booby-trapped satchels handcuffed to their wrists, officials of the collaborationist governments who sit in sweating isolation between the indifferent bloc execs and the hustlers with their carnivore smiles.

  Cowboy looks down at the curving horizon against the black sky, the blue ceramic rim of earth softened by the translucent haze of atmosphere. Below him are clouds in implausibly neat rows, wedged above a warm front moving in on the Lesser Antilles, the dusty island brown and green perched on the edge of the glowing turquoise sea. When the shuttle begins its slow fall to Earth, he can feel his body straining against the straps, trying to continue its climb, but the well has the shuttle in its grip again, and his body, too, begins its fall. He turns to Sarah in the next seat, seeing the yearning in her dark eyes as she gazes out of the port, a desire that matches his own longing for the black airless purity... “Damn them,” she whispers, shaking her head, and he knows without asking who she’s talking about.

  The shuttle buffets slightly as it arrows to its landing in La Gran Sabana, the high Venezuelan plateau near the equator where the Orbitals have built their largest spaceport. The green land seems wrinkled as a baby’s skin, cut by rivers that look like drops of quicksilver strung on a necklace. Cowboy can see the long jagged mesa edge of Roraima bulking off the port side as the shuttle drops and touches gently on the concrete and alloy floor of the well.

  *

  “The architecture of earth always strove for the heavens. Think of the ziggurats of Babylon, the pyramids of Egypt. The cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the pagodas of China. Fingers pointing out of the well, toward liberation.” Roon shakes his head. “It’s no longer necessary. Humankind has reached for heaven and has found it. But those who live in the sky have become divorced from those who still live in the soil. A new vision is demanded, and with it a new architecture. Like this place, a metaphor for the fusion of earth and sky. Dominating even the mountain upon which it rests.

  “Architecture has become my passion,” Roon says. Cowboy and Sarah follow him down the coils of his home, along humming alloy corridors, beneath the holographic eyes of Earth’s children. Roon raises a finger. “Architecture in all its forms. Including the architecture of the perfect crystal, of the data in the heart of the machine. There is the true medium. In the past humankind has been inhibited by the sympathy of flesh for flesh, by each person’s sympathetic understanding of another’s own organic weakness. Now we can integrate our consciousness with the immaculate perfection of data. The barriers of Earth are dissolved. No flesh can stand before the supremacy of numbers. Sympathetic action is no longer a possibility. The crystal recognizes only the logic of necessity.

  “Necessity,” Roon repeats, and he looks at them with his painted eyes. “Necessity is the same, in the crystal world, as inevitability. All that is necessary will become, whatever your feelings, your actions.” He smiles. “As my return to power is inevitable. As your own crystal hearts are wise enough to tell you.”

  *

  Roon lives far to the west of the landing port in La Gran Sabana, across the country in the Cordillera Oriental. For Cowboy and Sarah he’s laid on private transport, a jet painted as black as the Orbital sky save for the blue Tempel logo above each canard. A dirtgirl in a uniform rushes to carry their bags to the craft. The pilot is a jock with a spaceborn gliding walk, a cold slight man with the company patches on his jacket and pebble Japanese eyes; he looks at Cowboy with a frigid contempt and talks in monosyllables. Cowboy’s anger rises; he can feel the crystal burning in his brain while his shoulders ache as if with the tension of wrestling a delta, and he wants badly to meet this man in the sky, to match Pony Express against the jock’s Orbital cutter. Cowboy can see Sarah’s face going rigid, her hands coiling as they try to become claws, and he knows she’s thinking of the sweating streets of her own city, placing the jock amid the humid monster of the night.

  The flight lasts only twenty minutes, the plane arrowing straight across the country in a quiet so absolute it seems as if the air itself can’t touch its mirror-obsidian skin. Cowboy feels envy for the craft, wishes to feel her studs in his skull. Sarah rises from her seat to investigate the aircraft’s bar.

  Cowboy shakes his head at her offer and she comes back with a rum and lime, drinks in the silence, the clink of ice the loudest sound in the plane. Cowboy looks down at the dark green land blighted by the brown of erosion, the silver rivers choking, turning dark with topsoil. The black needle threads through cloud. From above the Sierra Nevada, Cowboy can see Roon’s palace shining silver among the tall green slopes, a piece of Orbital alloy and crystal jacked into the earth.

  A peak interposes: the gleam is gone. The plane is banking among mountains, twisting silently down a valley. Sarah’s ice cubes sing at the touchdown, but Cowboy can scarcely feel the impact. He looks up at the surrounding mountains for the flash of silver and sees Roon’s beacon gleaming through the trees...

  *

  Through a holographic door that evaporates as it senses his presence, Roon has taken them into a room alive with holographs of crystal, changing, growing, interlocking. Their brightness gleams in Roon’s eyes, in the eyes of the two children who stand motionless before a comp terminal. The girl is about ten, olive-skinned, wearing a white dress. The boy, a year or two older, wears a white shirt and dark trousers. Both are barefoot. Their dark hair is cut short around the sockets in their heads. Tutorial programs flicker on the crystal displays.

  “This is Lupe,” Roon says. “I named her for her wolf’s eyes. Her brother is Raul.” He looks down at them and smiles.

  “They are my oldest acolytes, here in my temple,” Roon says. “I found them in the streets, living like little rodents. Not a human existence at all. Their parents were dead, their relatives were indifferent. Chances are they would have died of malnutrition or disease before they grew to maturity. If they lived, they would have been on the fringes, turned criminal, addicts, perhaps sold themselves. The girl might have borne half a dozen children before she was twenty.” He shakes his head. “Now their possibilities are...unlimited. I feed them, educate them. Impress upon them the pattern that they, that the Earth, must follow.” He looks down again at the children.

  “Raul was born just after the war. Has lived his whole life amid the new order. New clay, to be shaped by Orbital hands.” His eyes rise to look at Sarah and Cowboy. “The older ones– they’ve absorbed too many of the obsolete views of their parents. Their minds resist the new teaching, the will of the teacher. With these...” He smiles down at them sweetly, proudly, as he raises his hands in a gesture of benediction, of possession. Tutorials flash out from the matrix. “These can lead Earth through its time of changes. To its new relationship with the heavens.”

  He looks up at Cowboy. Hi
s gelid eyes gaze out of kohl-rimmed skull sockets. “You have seen the upright way I have taught them to stand,” he says. “Like soldiers at attention. Disciplined. Obedient, but proud in their subservience.” His eyes radiate joy. His foul breath drifts in the room. “The new relationship,” he says. “The pattern to which the future will adhere.”

  *

  The jock doesn’t even look at them as he steps from his cabin and presses the button that opens the pressure door and drops the spindly alloy ladder. He pushes his fists into the pockets of his jacket and steps out on the ladder, heading for the pilot’s lounge. Sarah looks up. “Hey,” she says. Her voice cuts the air like a razor.

  The jock turns and stands half in the door.

  “You forgot our bags,” Sarah says.

  The jock’s face is stone. Cowboy feels a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth.

  “It’s not my job,” the jock says.

  “It’s your job to keep Mr. Roon’s guests happy,” Sarah says. “Mr. Roon’s guests do not. Carry. Their. Own. Fucking. Bags.” Her eyes are colder than the drink in her hand, her grin a tiger’s.

  Blood rises into the jock’s face. He hunches into his jacket and reaches into the baggage compartment. Sarah stands and smiles with frigid sweetness. “Thanks very much.” Cowboy follows her out.

  Waiting just outside is a helicopter, a cold black and silver stork folded onto the alloy runway apron. Smoking a caffeine stick and leaning on the car is what Cowboy can recognize by now as a mudboy mercenary bodyguard, a broad-shouldered man dressed neatly with matching handkerchief and braces. He opens the cargo compartment and watches the jock push the bags inside. Sarah drops a silver coin into the jock’s hands and sees his jaw muscles clench. Cowboy can’t help but grin. As the jock stalks away Cowboy can hear the sound of metal skiddering on the surface. The mercenary seems to be amused by the jock’s anger.