Slant Page 8

  Not so different now, but as with everything else, anonymity is wrapped around and around with provisions and safeguards, all paid for in higher fees. With the Internet went the lost Free Lunch of the rude, crude, highly energetic First Dataflow Culture.

  —The U.S. Government Digiman on Dataflow Economics,

  56th Revision, 2052

  7

  Y/N?

  The afternoon air is crisp in the hills. A few clouds build to the south. Alice thumbs her pad for the time. “Fourteen thirty-one,” it murmurs in the pocket of her long black coat. Wind is coming around in a whorl and will sweep rain and perhaps snow over the southern sound by seven this evening. She does not need to access the weather voice to know this; she has lived in the Corridor for most of her life.

  The shuttle drops her half a block from her house and she walks the rest of the way, hands buried in pockets, collar pulled up around her neck.

  Alice feels a deep ache unattached to anything specific, except perhaps Twist’s voice, or Minstrel’s problems with his boyfriend. Her social group has always been royal disorder in motion, and that’s often meant something positive. Alice has always claimed that a year in her life held the entertainment of ten years in anyone else’s; but if that is true, Twist can double on Alice.

  She likes seeing herself in the Yox, does not particularly like having just parts of her mental backside displayed for convincing detail. She enjoys dominating, not supplementing. Being on the down spin is simply not something she has ever planned for. And from her skedj it looks as if she will be down for some time to come. She is not skedjed for any corporeal appearances, interviews, or vid whatsoever, and of course, very little on the Yox.

  Francis is it.

  “Maybe I’ll read the Faerie Queene tonight,” she tells herself as the door to her house recognizes her and opens. The house is a quaint century-old framer with brick accents. She has re-done the interior twice and it is small and spare and comfortable, a good place to simply lie back and not think.

  But the house monitor has a message. It’s from her temp rep, and it’s flagged Urgent—might be more work—so she returns the touch as she slips out of her coat. She catches Lisa Pauli in and available.

  Lisa’s upper torso and head flick into view over the kitchen pad. She has small precise eyes and an amused mouth set in a triangular face. “How was Francis, honey?” Lisa asks without any preliminaries.

  “The usual,” Alice says. “Being an artiste.”

  “I’m looking for more Yox body work, believe me, honey,” Lisa says. “Vid pays nothing these days; it’s abso neg. I hate psynthe, but that’s what they’re asking for. However… I’ve got something for you for this evening. I wouldn’t just throw any call-in to you… But this one sounds intriguing.”

  For a moment, Alice is too shocked and hurt to be angry. “A call-in?”

  Lisa blinks. “Excellent money. I’ll halve our commission on this one. Fifteen, honey. Jackie says you’ll be doing our branch a real favor. Can’t say who it is—you won’t even know after you’ve done your job—but it’s high comb, spin sosh, and it’s a max four-hour engagement, bonded. It’s no worse than a live show, honey, you know that.”

  “I haven’t done a live show in seven years,” Alice says, her chin starting to quiver. She hates having a glass soul, especially in front of Lisa, but… a call-in!

  She did call-ins for six months when she was a teenager. That was all supposed to stop with being on the sly spin in vids and Yox.

  “It’s getting tough, honey,” Lisa says.

  “I don’t do call-ins,” Alice says.

  “The agency has gotten three jobs for you in the past six months, all with Francis, and honey, Francis is going nowhere soonest. We can’t bond your bills and back your medical without some roll-in. Your credit is dregged, honey.”

  Lisa’s face, as always, manages to be sympathetic, with that slight upward curl of smile, those wise eyes sharpened by the natural yellow-green of her pupils.

  “You don’t rep call-ins,” Alice says. “I mean, how did you get this, and why are you even handling it?”

  “I won’t tell the whole story, but I’ve done a good pimp’s legwork—let’s be straight, I know what I’m asking of you, honey. It’s a male. He’s alone. He asked for you specifically. He’s a big fan of yours—seen all your vids. He has good connections, I’m told, and the agency vets him.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “No.”

  “I suppose he’ll ask me to marry him?” Alice says, holding her fingers to her chin, feeling the sting in her eyes.

  “This is not mandatory, honey. We never do that.”

  Alice knows Lisa’s expressions very well by now. Lisa has repped Alice at Wellspring Temp for eight years, taking her on after her first rep moved up from show business to corp relations.

  Call-ins are legal in forty-seven states, tolerated in all fifty-two, and in Rim nations it’s even rated in travel guides. But it’s strictly entry-level work, a real slide, and there’s something else about it she does not like.

  Lately she has been enjoying the illusion of choosing her work partners—on the few occasions she’s worked at all.

  “How soon?”

  “He wants a confirmation by four.”

  “He’s bonded?”

  “I wouldn’t touch this without a bond. You know that.”

  “Yeah. I know. His apt?”

  “It’s plush, I understand. Should be very entertaining.”

  Alice closes her eyes, considers. She had hoped for a quiet night and time to think. “What’s my share?”

  “I’m guessing your cut will be seventy-five if we sink the hook and tug.”

  Seventy-five grand could pull her credit out of the pit and pay for several months of toe-twiddling, Alice tries not to look inward. She puts on her Face—the Alice that is always tough-minded and competent and unperturbed, who has in fact done worse things, who is realistic about careers and what it takes to realize long-term goals—and says to Lisa, “Well, we already know what I am. Tug hard.”

  Lisa smiles, but to Alice it is apparent she is not overjoyed.

  “What’s with you?” Alice asks, suddenly brittle. “Should I turn it down?”

  “No, honey,” Lisa says. “It’s honest work.”

  “Lisa, I need your bond on this. You will never ask me to do this again, and you’ll try your damnedest to get me meetings with real producers, not just Yox flockers.”

  “You got it,” Lisa said, then gives Alice that abrupt moment of silence that indicates the touch, she hopes, is fini, and there is so much more for her to do this day.

  “Feed my monitor some directions,” Alice says.

  “No need. You’ll be picked up at seven-thirty and dropped off by twelve-thirty.”

  “He knows my address but I don’t even know who he is?”

  “We know your address, honey,” Lisa says. “It’s an agency limo. The ride’s on us. Bye.”

  Alice closes the touch and stands in the kitchen, tapping her lips with her finger. A slippery wash of emotion obscures her sight. Her eyes lose their focus and time blanks. She is thinking of being very young and determined. Nobody got in her way back then; men and a few women she took as they came along for whatever she needed, money or brief desire. She remembers the looks on their faces when she discarded them, no longer amusing or needed. She developed so many ways, creative techniques—an art in itself—of pushing men away, boyish men really just bigger children with their hearts written on their faces, older men with their money and prestige buying things their looks could not, and here she is back again, but without the controls and techniques.

  She has removed her armor since those years; or rather, it has been plucked off piece by piece, leaving more of her soul exposed. Glass soul.

  The irony is, she is nowhere near old. She is twenty-nine. Below her skin, however, if sex gauges years, she has lived centuries; she is a wrinkled and fragile mummy husk.
/>
  “Bullshit,” she says and shakes her arms out. “It’s just another dance.”

  She knows the steps. She can do it in her sleep.

  8

  ZERO-SUM

  Jack Giffey takes the alcohol-powered bus across Moscow to the east. The bus’s fumes smells like a bad drunk and the seats are almost empty; an older woman and a young boy in her charge ride toward the front. The woman turns to steal a suspicious look at him over the back of her bench. He smiles politely, but he is thinking about Omphalos and his thoughts are far from polite. He hates Omphalos with a passion even he does not understand. It’s not a class sort of thing; he doesn’t envy the rich, he doesn’t want to live forever, and he certainly doesn’t want to be holed up in a fancy icebox until the end of time. It’s deeper.

  He tamps down his irritation and leans over to see through the armored slit windows. Some of the more out-of-control Ruggers like to take potshots at public transportation; the legislature can’t bring itself to control them, since that would trample on individual freedoms. There is probably not a bus or public conveyance in Green Idaho that hasn’t been ventilated by a few bullets. Just boys having fun.

  Giffey thinks the bastard separatist republic has maybe two more years before it falls apart and accepts federal troops to restore order. He will not be sorry to see it go.

  A few trees and some fields with horses in them are passing now; they’re on the 43 Loop outside of town. He’s been here once before, at night, under a tarp in the back of a pickup that also smelled of crude ethanol. But this time the old ranch house has been described in detail.

  His stop is coming in a mile or so. He prepares himself to consort with a few very necessary loons. Giffey is not fond of weapons; but to break into Omphalos and have any hope of surviving, he must work with men who dearly love them. To these men, guns and bombs and more extreme weapons are a necessity; women, pit stops, and food are simply unavoidable annoyances on the road to fondling a shapely new piece of steel.

  Giffey tugs the cord and the bus slows to let him off. The highway is met by a bumpy gravel road. The ranch house is about a mile beyond. He stands by the door.

  “I’ll need a pickup at four, back to Moscow,” he tells the driver, a young man with scruff on his chin and cheeks, dressed in black wool and blue denims. The young man nods solemnly and opens the door. Giffey looks back with a quick grin at the boy and the woman, then steps down to the gravel. The bus farts a sweet corn-liquor cloud of unburned fuel and grumbles back on to the road.

  Giffey shields his eyes against the fumes. He looks up in time to see the boy’s eyes peering at him through a slit, curious at the man getting off in the middle of nowhere.

  Giffey pulls out his pad and punches in a satlink number. A hoarse voice answers, “Hello?”

  “It’s me, Giffey.”

  “Do I have to send a truck?”

  “Just let your guards know I’m coming.”

  “They know.”

  Giffey closes the link and starts walking. Fifteen minutes later, he stands at a fence sixty yards from an old brick and frame house on the edge of two hundred acres of fallow grassland. The house needs paint and a new roof and foundation work. A man steps out on the stoop in front of the snow porch and waves for him to come in.

  The inside of the house smells like Cuban cigarettes and stale beer. Four men stand with hands in pockets in what might be called a living room. They’ve expressed a willingness to take his money, give him supplies and tell him some of what he needs to know. Giffey shakes hands all around.

  One of the four has been corresponding with Giffey for two months; he’s Ken Jenner, a beardless thin fellow with pale blue eyes and yellow bee-fuzz on a scalp that moves when he wrinkles his forehead. Giffey regards that scalp with wonder whenever Jenner looks away; he does not know if he likes working with a man with a scalp like that; that scalp is almost prehensile. Still, Jenner comes highly recommended; he’s an ex-GI with expertise in weapons more extreme than any of Green Idaho’s citizens will ever fondle.

  The other three are not remarkable. The oldest is about Giffey’s age though not as well preserved, probably because of a bad drinking and smoking habit. His face is pale but covered with fine wrinkles. Thin purple and red rivers map his cheeks and nose.

  The remaining two may be brothers, hawkish smiling men between thirty and thirty-five years of age, but Giffey will not even learn their names. They act as if all this is beneath them, but when Giffey talks, they lean forward on the folding plastic chairs and listen intently. Giffey hopes they aren’t informants. There’s something a little false about them.

  “All right, let’s get started, you only got half an hour,” the oldest man says. “I’ve done my part.”

  Giffey looks up at the ceiling and sees a pair of antique car bumper stickers pasted on a composite beam. One reads: QUESTION AUTHORITY. The other, directly beneath it: Who Says?

  He smiles with as much patient tolerance as he can muster. I thank you for the arrangements.”

  “You’re paying,” the oldest man says with a shrug. He rubs one ear like a cat about to clean itself, then says, “Want to inspect the merchandise? I take it you won’t want it delivered until—”

  “I’ll look at it, make sure it’s what I ordered,” Giffey says. The old man seems to want to make the facts plain to everybody. This is just all too thrilling for him.

  Ken Jenner grins at Giffey, gives a small shake of his head. Jenner is likely to be pretty essential in this scheme, so Giffey hopes he won’t be compelled to kill the young man just to stop that unnatural scalp from moving.

  The old man leads them through gloomy hallways to the back of the house. The ceiling here is black, and thick with wiring arranged to mimic the heat signature of something other than what is actually in the long, cool room.

  Here on a pallet are four canisters of MGN, Military Grade Nano, not very old—dated June 19 2051.

  “This is good stuff, not easy to get, but here’s what really takes the prize,” the old man says. The brothers watch everything with religious awe. Jenner’s scalp for once is still. The old man steps around the pallet and pulls back a tarp threaded with more wire. Two more canisters sit beneath the tarp. “The real stuff,” he says. “Military complete paste. Just mix ‘em and—wow.”

  Giffey looks at the drums of MGN and complete paste. He has never seen so much of it in his life except in pictures and vids. They never had this much in all the time he was in Hispaniola. If they had, Yardley would have won in an hour instead of a week.

  “Bet you never seen more than pint or two of this stuff all at once,” Jenner whispers to Giffey.

  “Never,” Giffey says. Jenner is proudly convinced he’s responsible for the procurement. Giffey won’t try to disabuse him.

  Military grade nano can be programmed to manufacture a large variety of weapons from many kinds of raw material available in a combat zone. By Geneva rules, however, it cannot manufacture or contain, prior to actual use, the ingredients necessary to make high explosives. The manufacture of military complete paste is closely monitored.

  It’s the kind of thing that makes Green Idaho’s legislature cry with economic self-pity; that the outside world won’t let them make their own nano or complete paste. They are denied such essential pleasures.

  “Your first payment went through last night,” the old man says. “Much appreciated. It was a pleasure getting this stuff, a real challenge.” The old man also wants Giffey to believe he had a major hand in this procurement. The more hands take credit, the less clear a trail to the real source. “I’ll enjoy thinking about it for weeks.”

  “I’ll bet,” Giffey says. “Can I poke?”

  “Be my guest,” the old man says. Giffey takes a metal rod with a small wire on one end and hooks the wire to his pad. Then he goes to the canisters of paste and opens a valve in the closest. He pokes the tube into the canister and looks at his pad. The numbers come up triple zeroes.

  It’s what he or
dered, all right.

  Giffey decides against checking more than one. The men around him are as sensitive about honor as a bunch of teenage thugs.

  The old man is talking again, aiming his words at the brothers, who listen eagerly. “There’s enough paste there to take care of all of Moscow. Unbelievable bang per gram. Every man, woman, and jackrabbit from here to—”

  “That’s fine,” Giffey says, staring hard to get him to shut up. The old man works his lips, nods in understanding—no need to say too much, no need. Then he offers Giffey a beer.

  “Best assignment I’ve had since emancipation,” he says. “I’d like to toast it, for luck.”

  There’s time—just barely. “Sure, I’m grateful,” Giffey says. The old man hustles back into the filthy kitchen to open a refrigerator. Giffey calls out to him, “You have the delivery arranged?

  “Tonight at seven-thirty. Address?”

  Giffey writes the address on a piece of paper, an old industrial warehouse on the west side of Moscow. Giffey will not be there, but people he trusts will receive the goods and give final payment. Jenner will accompany the goods to their destination and stay with them. The old man brings out a bottle for everyone.

  The beer is good. Jenner’s scalp is asleep. He almost looks normal.

  “Salud,” Giffey says, and they all slug back the thick dark brew.

  Outside, Jenner joins Giffey at the roadside, waiting for the, bus to take them back into Moscow.

  “How long you been out of the service?” Giffey asks Jenner. The young man smiles and shakes his head.

  “I was never really in,” he says. “I got my training at Quantico and Annapolis. Special Operations. I had some trouble and they shipped me out and annulled my enlistment papers. They were training me for sensitive jobs.”

  Giffey nods. He can tell from the man’s expression and posture that Jenner is reluctant to say any more. Jenner knows the ins and outs of military nano, so Giffey’s sources say; that’s enough.