Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  The endorphin patterns bright images behind his closed lids, the images of green displays glowing deep in his mind, the sight of silver missile fins rotating against the sky, Argosy growing larger and larger as he loops up to intercept...the sight of extinction filling the canopy, the nearing obliteration demanded by crystal and interface...the dark wedge blotting out the steel sky, the interception proof of his devotion to life at the speed of light...the final impact that secures his place in the sky, his last triumphant grin drawn taut like the smile of a skull…

  Cowboy opens his eyes and draws a breath, the shriek poised in his throat. It doesn’t come. Fear dopplers along his triggered nerves. The cycle girl is weaving across night asphalt, dodging between potholes picked out by her headlight. “Fuck,” Cowboy says. He tells his nerves to shut down again.

  “You say something, linefoot?”

  He gazes at the necklace of skulls, the ridged hollow rattler eyes staring at him. The eyes of Mistress Death, whose cool and tenebrous lips brushed against his in the sky. A tremor shakes him. “Nothing much,” he says.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Can I have some more water?”

  He drinks half the squeeze bottle this time before handing it back. His good hand is trembling so much he almost drops it. Pain is lurking deep in his chest, the endorphins wearing off.

  “Are your people going to miss you?” he asks.

  A massive shrug. “My sisters’ll miss me when they miss me.”

  “They all got muscles like you?”

  “That’s why we live together, man.”

  She turns her head to look at him. Starlight glitters in her eyes. “You got anyplace in Boulder City you want to go?”

  “A public phone’ll do. Then maybe a hotel.”

  “Whatever you say, linefoot.”

  The lights of Boulder City splay out into the night. The cycle idles while Cowboy fights stiffness and pain, and manages to stand upright. “Right thigh pocket,” he says, after a moment of struggle. “A credit needle.”

  “Okay.” She unzips the pocket and plugs the needle into the phone for him. He puts a stud in his forehead and thinks Reno’s number. “This is Cowboy. I’m in Boulder City.”

  “So are the Dodger and his people. Where have you been?”

  “I’m hurt. Tell them to get a medic.”

  “Right away. I’m tracing your line now so I can tell them where you are.”

  Cowboy sags against the telephone. Pain pulses in his chest. “Hey, Reno,” he says. “Did anything come back?”

  “Diego force-landed on the desert. The Orbitals got him and his delta.”

  Sorrow trickles into Cowboy. “Fuck. Nothing left then. I lost the Express.”

  “Build another. We won.”

  The news interests him only slightly. “Yeah?”

  “Tempel crashed. We didn’t need the net; all we had to do was wait for it to go below five hundred and then start buying. Roon came out and announced to the screamsheets that he was mounting a slate for the board, and he got so many proxies in the first five minutes that Couceiro resigned before there could even be an election. Roon’s going to shuttle up as soon as he ties up a few loose ends. He’s already announced a policy of retrenchment.”

  “Good for him.” Talking seems to hurt more and more. “You got my location yet?”

  “The Flash Force is on the way. You can hang up if you want.”

  He reaches for the credit needle and yanks it out. He sticks it in his breast pocket, pulls out a pair of half-ounce coins. “You get extra because you have such a winning personality.”

  The cycle girl takes the coins with a grin. She puts them in a belt pouch and swings back aboard her saddle. “You want me to stick around?” she asks.

  “I’ll be okay.” He looks at her dully. “Hey, you got any need for extra money? I need someone to run messages from time to time.”

  She nods. “Blackwater Well Bio Station. I’m a desert ecologist.”

  “No kidding.”

  Her turbine winds up, then she gives him a last grin and accelerates away. He watches her taillights recede to the vanishing point and closes his eyes. He hears rather than sees the long car pull up beside him.

  “Cowboy? Just put your arm around me.”

  Sarah’s voice. He opens his eyes and sees her tall form, feels her hands touching his clothing. He gives her a shadowy grin. “It’s been a long day, huh?”

  “Easy now. Just slide into the car.”

  “Maurice killed himself. I was planning on dying, but Maurice did it for me. Right in the arms of Mistress Death.”

  “Take it easy. The other foot now.”

  “I was always chasing her. Didn’t know it till now.”

  “Rest your head here, on my shoulder.”

  He feels warmth against his cheek, mumbles, “It’s a fuck of a thing, being a legend in your own time.”

  The car speeds away on silent wheels.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “Are you sure you can handle this?”

  “I have most of the data on Tempel we collected. And memories. Mine and his. I think I can do some good.”

  “Yeah,” Cowboy says. “I always thought I could use friends in high places.”

  It’s an old place, a one-room cabin with a cheap tile floor, sad wooden furniture held together by wire, a sagging double bed with a tufted bedspread.

  Cowboy is lying in the bed, humming “Face Riders in the Sky” to himself while he watches a video report on the Tempel crisis. The situation is at an end, the reporter says. Stock values are rising cautiously. The Orbital Soviet has announced its confidence in Roon’s administration. The new directorate has sent Couceiro to Africa, to finally touch the planet he had seen only as a blue and white sphere contaminating his view of the monochrome airless universe. Have fun foreclosing on Ghana, Cowboy thinks. He reaches for his whiskey and sips it, then props the glass on his arm cast.

  He turns as his door opens and sees Sarah coming in, feeling a wave of desert heat on his face as he looks past her, through the door, into a brown stony reach stretching all the way to California, vanishing into a trackless blue sky.

  Sarah closes the door behind her. She’s dressed in a long billed cap, jeans, reflec long-sleeved shirt. “You’re awake,” she says.

  “Yep.” He reaches for the whiskey bottle. “Join me?”

  “Too early.” She pulls off the cap and tosses it on the battleship-gray kitchen table. Shakes her hair free. “The Dodger wants to see you later. Business. And his wife is flying up later this afternoon.”

  She sits beside him on the mattress. He turns off the vid control and moves over to make room for her. He winces at the pain in his scraped leg. Sarah puts her arm around his shoulders. He leans back against her warmth.

  “They have horses here,” she says. “I’ve never learned to ride.”

  “I can teach you.” He looks at her profile, the turned-up nose and parabolic perfection of the lips, the dark skin outlined in a soft haze of light from a window behind her. She turns to him. “The broken arm won’t...?”

  “Not much. No.”

  They’re on a weathered old Nevada dude ranch that the Flash Force has designated as a backup base. Western thirdmen and panzerboys will be drifting in through the next week with the intention of arranging a peace. Cunningham’s dead and Tempel has withdrawn its backing, and suddenly Tempel’s thirdmen are floundering in the dark, surrounded by enemies with sharpened knives.

  The thirdmen will be talking with the Dodger. The panzerboys are planning to talk with Cowboy. His plan of a panzerboy association seems to be taking shape. Maybe it can hold the peace together, if thirdmen who cause their neighbors grief suddenly find they can’t get transport to the East for their action.

  *

  The voice doesn’t sound right. It has a kind of tremor, an echo maybe–– as if two voices were speaking, not entirely in synch.

  “Reno?” Cowboy says. “You okay?”
/>
  “I’m into the big crystal here, Cowboy. My God, the plans these people have! They’ve got the next thousand years in their pocket...but there’s a funny quality to it. They know the shape they want the future to take, but they don’t know what they want themselves to be. They’re up here, and they’re lost. Once their obedience to Earth gave them meaning, and then their struggle against it, but now they don’t know what to do. They’re too distracted by their structures. They got their independence, but they don’t know what it means, and they’re looking for the things that will give it meaning. Some are after dominance–– of the planet, each other... Do you know they’re stockpiling nerve gas up here? In case other blocs attack? They’re that crazy. Some are lost in dreams of bigger and better hardware–– as if the machines they create will give them the definition they lack. The others are content to be parts of the structure, to take their form from their own corporate ecological niche. Content to be programmed by the others.

  “They’re vampires, Cowboy. They’re sucking up Earth’s blood, because that’s what keeps them alive, but they don’t know what living is for.”

  “My capacity for pitying those people is a bit limited,” Cowboy says.

  “Pity,” says the voice, “is not what they need.”

  Sarah looks at Cowboy carefully. He’s sunburned and battered, but after a night’s sleep the tension that’s been a part of him for the last few days has eased; the fevered intensity dissipated. He shifts against her and winces. “Need some painkiller?” she asks.

  Cowboy raises his glass of whiskey. “This is all the painkiller I need right now.”

  “Maybe I’ll join you after all.” Sarah reaches for the bottle and drinks. “I just talked to Michael. He offered me a sort of a job.”

  “What sort of job?”

  “Adviser, I guess you’d say. Counselor–– that’s the old term. He says he trusts my connections. And my instincts.”

  “Glad he’s noticed.” Cowboy rubs his bristles. “You going to take it?”

  “Probably.” A taut wire of amusement vibrates through her. “It’ll get me off the streets.” She grins and raises the bottle again. Drinks.

  She’ll check into a hospital, she thinks, get herself some more crystal. The full Santistevan hardwiring, independent of hardfire. Firearms. Small-unit tactics. And not just streetgirl stuff, either; she wants chips for accounting, shipping, stock market manipulation. The stuff she’ll need in her new position as the Hetman’s counselor.

  “You’ll travel,” he says.

  She cocks an eye at him. “Yes. So will you. We can see each other.” Because, she thinks, what they have is a wartime thing, a fusion made under pressure... With the pressure gone, things may fall apart. Because there are things she knows and can’t tell him, because she’s lived a life that, whatever he thinks, he doesn’t really want to know about. Because he has his own ideas of the world and his place in it, and she can’t understand them. They will have to ease carefully into the peace, into each other, and know it might not work in the absence of the things that brought them together. There ought to be room for that, the coming apart. Or the other. Especially the other.

  She takes another drink. “You promised to show me the autumn aspens. And all I’ve seen is this fucking desert. You owe me.”

  “Daud,” he says. She feels coldness touching her at the name, at the inflection he gives it. Knowing, the both of them, that Daud is responsible for yesterday’s catastrophe, that there are broken hulks on the stony Nevada plain, shards of aircraft lying under the protective waves of the Pacific, men wrapped in canvas and covered by thin desert soil, all with Daud’s smoking signature. Cowboy won’t forget that, and his code does not treat treason lightly.

  “I’m buying him a ticket.” Lightly, hiding the dread in her. “Getting him away.”

  “What if he doesn’t go?”

  Reassurances freeze in her throat. Because it is Daud’s nature to betray, and she has felt the sting of his betrayals all her life, hardened herself to them, told herself it was only because he was weak, that he needed to betray in order to know he was trusted, and she had always forgiven him... But the forgiveness had infected her somehow, as if forgiving Daud made it easier to forgive her own treacheries. She doesn’t want Daud around, not a living reminder of her own capacity to betray the things she cares for.

  She can’t stop loving him. She knows that. What she can stop is trying to be him.

  “He’ll go,” she says. “I won’t give him a choice.”

  Cowboy’s eyes are hard as flint. “I won’t, either.”

  Encourage Daud in one last betrayal, then. Of Nick. If Nick exists, if he hasn’t already betrayed Daud by using him for Tempel’s purposes. A final betrayal. To save his own life.

  The phone purrs quietly in its cradle. Sarah answers it.

  “This is Reno, Sarah.” He’s still acting as switchboard operator, coordinating the fragments of the net that are still in operation, keeping communications open with the various panzerboys and thirdmen who will be visiting the ranch in the next few days.

  “I have a call from Roon,” Reno says. “He wants to talk to the two of you.”

  “Tell him to fuck himself.”

  “He says it’s business.”

  She looks at Cowboy. “It’s Reno. Roon wants to talk to us.”

  To her surprise there is a grim light in Cowboy’s eyes, as if he were expecting this.

  *

  The voice is smoother now, more in control of itself. The echo effect has vanished.

  “The Orbital Soviet is unhappy, Cowboy. Couceiro was someone they liked, someone they could understand. They didn’t like him being brought down by a bunch of mudboys.”

  Cowboy grins and reaches for his bottle of whiskey. “What are they going to do about it?”

  “They can’t change the rules on stock trading. The system’s too big, and they’re making too much money from the situation as it is, by their own manipulations. And they know they’ll just drive the stock market underground if they try to restrict it– communication’s just too uncontrolled, any face bank could run a market just by telephone.”

  “No, Cowboy.” The voice is calm. “What they’re going to do is put you out of business.”

  Ice touches Cowboy’s flesh. “Oh?” he says. “How do they plan to do that?”

  “They’ve decided that the existence of black markets, along with the way the Orbitals are competing to supply them, is a danger... It’s creating too many uncontrollable elements. So they’re going to legitimize the markets. Later this session they’re going to have one of their tame legislators introduce a bill in the Missouri legislature to repeal their tariff restrictions. That’ll create a Missouri-Kentucky corridor across most of the Midwest. Once Missouri goes, the other states will fall like dominoes. The panzerboys just won’t be needed anymore.”

  “What can you do to stop it?”

  “Nothing. It’s the Orbital Soviet’s decision.”

  Despair trickles into Cowboy’s veins. That’s the end, then, all that he and the Dodger fought for. Abolished with a swipe of the Orbital pen.

  “You’ve got warning now,” the voice says. “You can make your preparations.”

  “I don’t see myself as a long-distance trucker. I’ve been an outlaw too long.”

  “You’re rich. You’ll think of something. Look, the U.S. won’t be balkanized anymore. You can take credit for that. Things are going to be a lot easier in the Northeast.”

  We weren’t running the Line, Cowboy thinks, for the Northeast. Or for the money. That was what Arkady and the thirdmen never understood, always thinking we could be bought, that we would respond to economic pressure. And that’s what the Orbitals don’t understand, what their crystal world models can’t figure. That we’d have run the Alley for nothing. Because it was a way to be free.

  “Cowboy?” The voice wavers for a moment. “You did good, you know. We all did.”

  “I know.” How lon
g did he expect it to last? Cowboy wonders. Perhaps not even this long. He had always thought it would end in some Midwest cornfield, the government choppers coming in waves, pouring rockets down, breaking through the Chobham, the panzer coming apart piece by piece. Or in some moonless supersonic sky where the laws waited to pounce, their radars reaching out to touch him with radiant fingertips... He hadn’t expected this, to be informed of his obsolescence in a recovery bed on some sweaty Nevada dude ranch. That all he had done, the legend he had built, was only to put him out of business.

  He laughs. A retired panzerboy, he thinks. An absurdity.

  Amusement trickles through him. There is a lightness in his limbs, as if gravity has eased. He thinks of the world curving away below him, dark behind him flecked with stars, the limb of twilight below, the land before the canopy burning green and brown in the light of the sun...the boundaries that encompassed the Alley gone, gone along with the armored borders of his life, the zones with their internal customs inspectors, their armed forces and restricted areas, the ever-narrowing tunnel down which he was hurled at the speed of light toward whatever violent climax awaited him at the end. The legend that he had embraced, because he had never been able to embrace life.

  He’s free, he realizes. And he’s got friends in high places.

  He figures another chapter in the legend’s going to start right about now.

  *

  Cowboy feels nerve warmth flaring in his limbs, a warning signal. He thinks he knows what’s going to happen. He reaches across Sarah, unspools a stud from the phone, plugs it into his temple. “Reno,” he says, talking into the wire-thin mic fixed on the stud. “Stay on the line. I want you to hear this bastard.”

  “Whatever you say, Cowboy.”

  “I’ve got a few other things I want you to do,” he says. Reno listens quietly as Cowboy tells him. He can feel Sarah shift in surprise as he leans across her.