by Barnes, John
“You didn’t either,” I said. “We looked it up, remember? Route 66 was all gone before either of us was born.”
“Ahhh.” He drained his beer most of the way, grabbed a You-4, popped it under his tongue, dissolved it in the beer still held in his mouth, and swallowed it in a gulp. “You still want me to show you why the war’s going to come, just like the Organization says, just like those worried-looking buroniki on the flashchannel keep threatening?”
“Do I really get a choice?” I asked. “Shitmaryjesus, look at that.”
The holo we were pulling off flashchannel was projected right in front of the porch, lifescale. Looked like six meters in front of the steps was the fifty yard line of the game being played on the moon — see right through it if you just unfocused your eyes. One September afternoon we had watched a herd of bison charge through a porno movie, their hooves shaking the earth and their thick, hairy hides brushing against the walls of the house as all around them fifty-foot women with tits the size of automobiles sucked on seven-foot dicks. It had been a sight to see, especially on a lot of You-4, gressors, and beer.
What was happening now was almost as much fun; a kick line of OSU cheerleaders right there, a bunch of sweet little honeys with perfect bodies.
We whooped and cheered and had another beer each, and I thought that had gotten rid of the stupid subject of the war, but as soon as the holo went back to the game, he was setting up that chessboard again.
“Okay, now pretend this tall white one with the cross on top of it’s the Pope — “
“It’s the king,” I said.
“In this game, it’s the Pope. Now the one we’ve got’s pretty talented and pretty tricky and all that, but he just isn’t PJP. He doesn’t have the moves. So all these little guys — “
“Bishops. And the sides go by colors — “
“Not in this game, and bishops is perfect. All these guys are trying to get their own corners and run that, you see, exclude everyone else. See, four corners and four bishops. But they can’t sell their ideas for shit. Which didn’t used to be a problem, because old Paul John Paul kept them in line so they didn’t need to have any ideas, and he did the selling. They’re finding out that while they’ve just been taking orders and processing the bodies that PJP brought in, the cybertaos” — he pulled out the queens and rooks — “have been getting fucking good at recruiting.” He put the rooks and queens around the center of the board and dragged the pawns into piles around them.
“So they don’t stand a prayer. Unless. You see, unless? Unless they can enlist the cybertaos to go in with them. And the cybertaos would just love that, because any idea that gets too dose to cybertao ends up being cybertao, which is why the Jews and Muslims and Hindus have all gotten so paranoid about cybertao — because they’ve all lost millions of believers overnight. The poor fucking Buddhists and Taoists just disappeared entirely, you know?”
“I lived in this century too, Sadi, and right now I remember more of it than you do. So what’s your point? Yeah, everyone knows that the Ecucatholics are ripe to splinter, there’s a lot of bishops ready to break with Rome, and when they do they’ll ask the cybertaos in to help them move their brand of EC. So what the fuck?” I handed him another beer. “I know we’ll get into it, buddy, the Organization’s always there when shit goes down.”
He laughed. ” ‘When shit goes down.’ Talk about blowing your longtimer cover!”
I laughed too. “Well, yeah, but in such a groovy way.” That cracked him up, and then we had the bands out for halftime with some majorettes, so we walked out into the holo and followed their butts up close, talking about them (of course they couldn’t hear us or see us, they were just holos, but it was fun anyway), and that time I thought for sure he was off the kick.
No such thing, pos-def no way, unh-unh. The game started again and there he was fumbling around with the knights. “Well, see, here’s the thing. You can do a lot with psychorrects and shit, and a lot with combined CSL tactics and all, but when you come right down to it, if you don’t want a brain to think the wrong thoughts, the surest way is to put a hole in it. You can do all you like with intelligences that aren’t in bodies, but it’s the ones that are that call the shots. If you shoot those bodies, that settles the question. And who’s got the expertise in shooting? Us horses.”
“Knights.”
“Even better. Samurai.” He tossed me another beer and I took a long gulp of it. “See, the struggle isn’t going to stay diplomatic and religious forever. It can’t. It won’t. And then there’ll be a real market for us. Not just around the edge like dealing You-4 and shit. Not just loans and construction and running hos. Real work. Kick some butt. Make some bucks. And fun too. Remember what it was like to have a woman all by herself, no cops, and do whatever you wanted, kill her right in the middle if you wanted?”
I almost choked on my beer, and then I started to tell him about that little German girl I’d murdered, the one that was living with the computer nerd ten years older than she was, she was bare-naked and sobbing over the nerd’s body, how I’d made her eat the gun to the trigger guard, pulled her black sweater up around her neck, how small and perfect her breasts had been as I stroked them just before I pulled the trigger and how her head had gone apart. It made me feel so bad that I just lay there crying and sobbing while Sadi tried to get me out of it.
The comedown off You-4 can be like that, and once it starts, a diskster load of them won’t get you back up. You get crying and you can’t stop.
I thought the little German girl’s name was Alice, and that was the name I was calling in my sleep all that night, according to Sadi, but when I checked my werp I had no record of her name. I was sure I had seen it on the marriage certificate on her wall. Anyway, the next morning I was feeling better, having sobbed it all off in my sleep. Besides it was pretty hard not to feel better when Sadi fixed one of his monster breakfasts.
“Just the same,” Sadi said, “we know what’s coming, bud. Time to start the disappearing process and get you under wraps. You got an i.d. even started?”
I yanked out my werp and grinned at him. “Here we go,” I said, and pulled up the master for it.
He looked over my shoulder. “Fred Engels? You’re on a history kick. No more of those after this one. You don’t want to get a pattern going, you know.”
“Tell me about it, Joseph Andrews. Who was Tom Jones before?” Sure, he’d had to explain it to me, but who said a cop couldn’t be an English major?
He shrugged. “Well, I won’t call myself ‘David Copperfield’ next time. So is yours all in order, bud? Can you give me a file to take care of?”
“Jack the werps together and I’ll do it for you right now,” I said. “Now, you were saying — “
“Well, I thought maybe we’d take some of the throw-away cash and go throw some of it away up at one of the supras. It’ll just go to waste otherwise.” We had hit on the tactic, when it was time for one of our i.d.‘s to disappear, of establishing a pattern of wild spending just before, leaving a substantial wad in the bank to just lie there, and scattering a few blank checks and credit numbers around to insure there’d be withdrawals after we disappeared. It made the exact date of disappearance hard to identify and also made it look like the fake i.d. had been killed and robbed, by the time it came to any police AI’s attention. That made a nice, cold confusing trail to nowhere for anyone trying to follow us.
“You’re right,” I admitted. “We need to make Ulysses Grant look like he’s off on a spree.”
“You know I’m right,” he said, and put through a signal for a robot cab. “One spree coming up. Got your keeper box and other junk in order?”
“Always. Ready to jump to the next life when you are. What kind of spree did you have in mind?”
“Well, the supras are expensive, and lots of vice is legal there. I was thinking Supra New York. We can get it onto your debit accounts that you’re gambling and losing, and maybe have a serious ho habit and a ten
dency to gobble You-4 like popcorn. Which you do of course. That should make you look like a small-time hood who got careless on a spree.”
” ‘Louie Miller disappeared dear/After drawing out all his cash … ‘ ” I sang.
“What’s the matter, Lassie, is Timmy caught in the fence again?” He poured another large mug of coffee and plunked it down in front of me. “Drink that and let’s get some more potatoes and bacon into you. You’re not as young as you used to be and we need to get some extra weight on you before you transit. But yeah, in fact, I had another idea, we can maybe help each other out on this. Suppose it looks like maybe I looted your accounts — a couple of them, missing several others — shortly after you vanish. Make the AI suspicious.”
“And then what? Getting yourself watched by the cops isn’t exactly — “
“That’s the beauty. If they just think maybe I did you, I go into the back-burner file as the guy to arrest whenever they find Ulysses Grant’s body or other evidence he’s dead. True?”
“If you say so. We can hack Interpol’s system, scan a bunch of files, and see if that’s true.”
“Way ahead of you, I’ve already done it. Answer is, they like to solve murders with minimum effort, especially when it’s social scum like us, bud, because us killing each other is a low priority. So as long as it just looks like one of us doing the other, they leave it to the AI to remind them, once there’s a body.”
“Hmmph. So … I get it! When the ‘suspected murderer’ disappears, it makes it look like they can close the case on the ‘victim,’ right? Every time one of us transits the last police records of the other go inactive. Slick. How long before they notice that chain of victims?”
“Length of four or so I guess. Thirty-plus years. A lot can happen in that time. Why worry?”
“Unhhunh.” I gulped coffee and shoved in a mouthful of the scrambled eggs he’d plopped down in front of me. It was never fancy but Sadi could cook. I thought about our plans some more. “Yeah, a spree in Supra New York, I think. Then we make it look like our boy Tom Jones did something rash.”
The biggest advantage of losing your memory every fifteen years is that there’s a limit to how sentimental you can get about anywhere or anything. I took just the bags for a vacation (clothes and my werp), plus my space allocation box. On my way out the door, Sadi turned and picked something up. “See if I’m not right, bud. Try to remember it for the next trip around, and note it in your werp.”
I switched on the recorder and said, “What have you got there?”
He walked in front of the werp’s camera eye, and said, “Okay, official prophecy from Sadi, currently Tom Jones, and your old buddy. When you wake up in 2049, I’ll buy you a steak dinner if there’s not a war on, and if we’re not in it somehow, Paladin.” He held up a white knight to the camera, then tossed it to me.
I clicked off the werp and muttered, “That was pretty goofy. It’ll just confuse me after transit.” The chess piece went into a pocket, or my bag, or something. I don’t know when or how it got into my space allocation box. I’m pretty fussy about what goes in there.
We joked around a few more minutes. Faint hoot from outside — the robot cab out of Tulsa Dome. We grabbed the bags that were always packed, and our keeper boxes, and went out the door, leaving it unlocked with all the home security software wiped. Better if the place got burgled; it would destroy and scatter more evidence.
The diskster that hovered a few inches off the grass was a first-class job — no point in being cheap — comfortable, spacious, and all ours. We figured we’d catch it all the way south to Mexico City before we got on the maglev to ride down to Quito — a splurge, but this was supposed to be a spending rampage.
We took more You-4s and gressors and ordered a big onboard meal. With the extra time to swing by the pickup point for the diskster to grab our meals it would be five hours till the Mexico City station. We left the windows sealed and told the robot to give us lim speed. That meant every so often it lurched wildly when it dodged a bison, didn’t see a cactus till the last minute, or had to jump a fallen overpass, but it also meant we would get to Mexico City way ahead of normal schedule, and kind of splashed up with liquor and disheveled. A few cameras were bound to look at us. If they checked the tapes we’d look like two guys on a spree.
From Mexico City we took the express maglev to Guatemala City and then the highspeed undersea tunnel to Quito. Since it would take two days for the train up the cable to orbit, no matter what, being in such a hurry to get to Q-town looked pretty goofy too — just as we wanted it to. We partied some more in our compartment with a couple of disposable girls who had just wanted a ride from Guatemala City, Japanese I think, if the recording in the werp of two naked Asian girls was made when it says it was.
We knew we’d done a pretty good job of establishing ourselves as scum on a spree when we got held at the cablehead for a couple of hours and NihonAmerica made us put down a return-ticket deposit.
The train ride out to orbit was just like it always is. You pass the Condor station, outside the atmosphere, in twenty minutes, at the speed you’re making, but then it’s still forty-five hours till the train pulls in at Supra New York. As you climb the grav falls steadily, which is kind of fun, and there’s a couple of hours there in the middle where you can look back at the Earth and see that it’s far away, SNY isn’t more than a bright star just yet, and the kilometer-wide cable seems to stretch to infinity in both directions. Okay view.
But mostly you just take drugs, hire a girl, or go down and play in the casino car, once you’re beyond the atmosphere and it’s all legal. Most people on board are tourists; the corporados and plutocks flaunt their money by taking fast private-track cars, or the even more expensive rocket service that leaves from the same station as the Condors.
I spent my time in the cabin by myself, sorting through the mementos, getting drunk and reviewing old records on the werp. I got to feeling extremely sorry for myself, and for the whole world. Maybe I just had some weak You-4 and was coming down off it harder and faster than I expected.
Because I got all sloppy and regretful the whole way up, I read through the werp and found out who Alice was. Thank god not mat German girl. Naturally then I checked, hacked a netwide search on her global i.d., and in about an hour found her working — at least pulling wages — in a dance bar up in Supra New York.
When I mentioned that to Sadi, he grinned and said, “Now there’s something you can play with.”
“Play with?” I took a long sip from a big bourbon and ice.
“Well, you know for all practical purposes you’re her dad, bud, am I right?”
“I don’t remember her.”
“But she remembers you. Except she’d figure you ought to be about eighty years old, right?”
“Something like … yeah, that’s what she’d figure.”
“And she’s gotta be what, fifty-two? Good shape, too, if she’s still shaking her titties for the crowd, especially in a high-price joint like they have up in the Supra. Well, you’re in good shape too, and you don’t quite look fifty. Wanna see if she’s got an Electra complex?”
“What’s that?”
“Like a female Oedipus complex. See if she gets hot for guys who look like dear old Dad?”
I shrugged. Reviewing the records had brought back some stray memories, mostly things when she was a little girl. Nothing that would get me all hot for her or anything. “Sure, I guess. You got something in mind?”
“Just an experiment. Let’s see how she takes it when you walk into that club … you can’t know till you try. It won’t be boring I bet.”
Nobody ever figured out why the supras were so much like the originals. Supra Tokyo was crowded, rude, and bewildering, but clean and safe. Supra Berlin was badly lighted, cold, and decadent. Supra New York was where everything and everybody was completely for sale, like some old analog sound recording I had when I was a kid said “where they roll you for a nickel and they stick you fo
r the extra dime.” I used to love the freedom there.
The dance bar was called Titswingers. The women flipped around in zero g and shook their breasts. Usual lez show. Usual dildo show. Usual bid board so you could buy what you wanted. I got restocked on You-4 and then sat back to see what came out, brushing off a couple of bims that were trying to B-drink off me. Not that I couldn’t afford it or that it wouldn’t have been good for my cover. Just that I wanted the table free if Alice was working tonight.
Sadi had said he wouldn’t come along the first time but he admitted one reason he had pushed me on the idea was that after looking at some of the shots of Alice in my old werp he was a little hot for her. I said she wasn’t eighteen anymore and I wasn’t so sure that picture was even her but he said he liked her attitude, not her body.
Anyway, so I was in there alone, riding on You-4, though a longterm user like I was doesn’t get that great glow a lot of people do — it didn’t seem like the place was wonderful, just that I was happy. They said if you kept using it you’d have to take it, like a vitamin, just to avoid depression when you got old. I figured I wasn’t going to get old for fifty years. Meanwhile it made me happy.
After a while a bored-looking woman, a fat blonde wearing a pair of fake fox ears on her head and a fox tail on a short stick stuck into her ass, swam by and asked what I wanted to drink. I said lots, didn’t care much what. She suggested their champagne, which was going to be outrageous. in price, so that’s what I took. She asked me if I wanted any company at the table, probably hoping it would be her.
I said I’d know what I wanted when I saw it.
At first I didn’t recognize Alice. All I remembered was the pictures, and she’d had herself genaltered, the popular new form of cosmetic surgery, and then surfacted, so that the flesh had grown back according to the new genes. That had given her two big firm tits, a flat belly, and vivid strawberry-blonde hair, but she’d kept her basic face with just a lift. Maybe she liked it, maybe she’d just been afraid of what might go wrong with having that surfacted — every so often you saw a bad regen, a woman who looked like the troll dolls they had when I was a kid. Some women, especially an old bim like Alice, would be scared pissless of that.
