Hardwired (45 page)

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.

“Yeah, Cowboy,” Reno says. “I see your point.”

“Cowboy?” Sarah says. “What file are you talking about? Do I–”

“I’ll tell you later,” Cowboy says.

Roon’s voice, when it comes, makes his hackles rise. Sarah grows tense beside him. He remembers cold alloy corridors, images of children floating in darkness, hologrammed ceilings glowing with Orbital settlements reflecting stellar light. A cold smile that smelled of corpses.

“Cowboy. Sarah. You are to be congratulated. The plan was a great success. It was blessed, and so are you.”

“Thanks,” Cowboy says. He takes a hearty drink of whiskey, grimaces as the fire goes down his throat. Feeling his heart pounding in his chest, a cold sweat rising on his forehead. A deep sickness in his gut, anticipation…

“Sarah,” Roon says, “I want you to come into the sky with me.” The voice is like a silken icicle caress. “I want someone to head my security team. I can’t trust Couceiro’s people. ”

Cowboy watches the scars whiten on Sarah’s face, tautening under her cynical smile. “You want me to be your Cunningham?” she asks.

“Cunningham wasn’t his real name. But yes, I want you to do the same job for me that Cunningham did for my predecessor. Your files say that you have the potential. Come to the sky, Sarah. Look down at the planet of our birth. Then help me shape its future.” The lyrical words are somehow more terrifying coming from the emotionless, crystal voice, the cold rapture of the deepening, triumphant madness. “Be the means of my communion with the planet, Sarah,” he says. “The instrument by which I possess it. The human extension of my crystal.”

Cowboy sees Sarah’s lips curl. “No, Mr. Roon” she says. “That’s not my kind of action.” Still, there is a trace of hesitation in her voice, as if she’s bidding farewell to a cherished dream, having found its price.

“You will condemn yourself,” Roon says. “History will allow freedom only to raptors, not to the creatures on which they feed. Stretch your wings, Sarah. I will give you blood for your Weasel to feed on. ”

“No,” Sarah says. Her eyes are stone. “It’s not for me.”

“I regret your decision, Sarah. Cowboy, I hope you will be more sensible.” Cowboy’s mouth feels dry. He licks his lips.

“What are you offering?” he asks.

“A place. You have talents that extend beyond those of a pilot. You have a predator’s instinct, you can spot weakness and act on that knowledge. You saw Couceiro’s weakness and knew how to bring him down. I want you to give me that talent of yours, Cowboy.”

“No. It’s not my sort of work.”

“You are dangerous.” The cold judgment turns Cowboy’s veins cold. “You have brought down a powerful man, and neither he nor his friends will forget. I offer you my protection.”

“No,” Cowboys says. “It’s no secret, what I did. Other people could do it. Things will change.”

“Your decision is that of a weakling. You are a fool.” There is a frozen second in which Cowboy can almost hear the decision being made somewhere in Roon’s crystal. “Still, you are dangerous. Perhaps too dangerous to be allowed to roam at will.”

The crystal burns in Cowboy’s skull. He had known this all along, that this would come. Because the Orbitals could not allow a free man to exist, once they noticed him.

“Reno, are you there?” Cowboy says.

“Yes, Cowboy.”

“Hand this Texan’s ass to him.”

There is a scream in Cowboy’s socket, a scream composed partly of the Black Mind program that’s shrieking down the link at the speed of light, partly of the noise that is coming from Roon’s throat as Reno climbs over the safeguards in his crystal and begins to write himself over Roon’s mind. Cowboy can see the puzzlement in Sarah’s eyes as she hears the noise coming from the phone she holds. Cowboy takes the stud from his temple and the screaming fades away. Sarah looks at him.

Cowboy reaches over and takes the phone from her hand. Over the whine of data he can hear far-off moans, cries, whimpers. He laughs.

He puts the phone down on the bed between them and explains. There is a smile in Sarah’s eyes, an answering chord struck in resonant steel.

They listen together till the sounds stop, and they can hear Reno’s voice coming over the phone. Cowboy feels as if he’s been on a long night flight, and now, through his skin sensors, whispering over the crystal, caressing his nerves, he feels the warm touch of the sun.

THE END

Bonus

Excerpt from
Voice of the Whirlwind

By Walter Jon Williams

L.A. Night. Steward looked down from the window of
his descending aircraft and saw a web of Earthbound stars that marched from the mountains right into the rising ocean, stars that blurred with heat shimmer and promise.

The plane began to buffet as its plastic and alloy skin changed configuration, braking from supersonic to landing-approach speed. Below, Steward could feel Los Angeles reaching up for him with mirrored fingers.

He smiled. At home, though he’d never been here before.

*

Steward put the package in his pocket. He was to deliver it to Spassky in LA tomorrow evening.

“Beer in the refrigerator,” Griffith said. “Make yourself at home.”

Lightsource’s apartment in Flagstaff was furnished in a utilitarian way, very like a hotel room: bed, sturdy chairs, video, refrigerator, cooking range—just like a hundred other apartments in the same building, most owned by corporations. Steward sat on one of the chairs. He felt scratchy brown fabric against the backs of his arms.

Griffith stubbed out his cigarette and disappeared into the bathroom. Steward watched a silent vodka ad on the vid. The vodka was photographed so that it looked like liquid chrome. Griffith reappeared after running the sink for a while. The Welshman took a Negra Modelo longneck from the kitchenette refrigerator and twisted off the foil top. “Want some?” he asked.

Steward shook his head. He watched as Griffith walked to a cloth-covered chair placed next to the vid. He sat down, sipping at his dark Mexican beer.

Steward took a breath. “Tell me about Sheol,” he said.

Griffith looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t like to talk about it,” he said. “You know that.”

“You said you would.” Steward felt a kind of pressure on his neck, like a brush of wind from distant exploding stars. “I need to know what it did to—to the Captain. What I became, out there.”

Griffith looked away. “I know. I wasn’t trying to weasel out. I was just telling you this was going to be hard.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

Griffith’s voice was low. The words came slowly. “I don’t think you can know. Even if I tell you. It was just…not a thing you can understand secondhand.”

Steward just watched him. On the vid, a small child was choking on a piece of food at a birthday party. Adults moved in silent, screaming panic; other children were crying. Colors from the silent drama bled over Griffith’s face. Without looking up, Griffith flung an arm up and snapped off the picture. He looked up. He was pale. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

Steward waited. Saying nothing.

“First thing to realize,” Griffith said, “is that the psychological dimension isn’t all there is. It’s not just a matter of forgetting, or learning to adjust. I got married when I came home. She was a nice lady. Had herself, her life the way she wanted it. Knew where she was going. We tried to have kids, and each time it was a miscarriage…and that turned out to be lucky, because they were all monsters. My genes are all screwed up. From what happened out there. There were biological and chemical weapons that fucked with chromosomes. A lot of the medicines we took with us were experimental Coherent Light Pharmaceuticals, and the manuals that gave the dosages were just guessing. Some didn’t work, some had side effects. Some broke chromosomes. Coherent Light didn’t care. The Icehawks were an experiment, too, and even if we failed, we’d generate some interesting data.”

Griffith put a hand on his chest. “I’m marked, wherever I go, by what happened on Sheol. Not just in my mind, but on the microscopic level, in the little bits of DNA that made me. Poisoned. I could die of some new kind of cancer, and that would be Sheol. Or some kind of chemical I’d breathed in years ago could strip the myelin sheathing from my nerves, and I’d be crippled. That would be Sheol, too. It’s happened to other survivors. Like we’re all carrying little time bombs inside us.” Griffith was sweating. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “That’s something I can’t forget, that I’m carrying those little bombs. And the bombs keep reminding me of everything else.” He looked up at Steward. “You’re lucky, you know? You don’t have that stuff in your body.”

“Can’t you get a new one?”

“I didn’t buy the clone insurance, the way you did. I didn’t have family. I just took my hazardous duty bonus and had a big party the week before we took off. And now I can’t afford a new body.” Griffith looked at him. “You knew that,” he said.

Steward pointed a finger at his temple. “Not this memory. These are old recordings.”

Griffith breathed out, a harsh sigh. “Yeah. I keep forgetting. That you’re so much younger than I am. Even if you were born before me.”

*

Ardala leaned back on pillows. She was wearing a white T-shirt, smoking a Xanadu.
Guys
was open, lying unread on her stomach. “Two thousand Starbright,” she said. “Not bad for a day’s work.”

“Not bad,” Steward agreed. He had one of her cram books open in front of him, but he hadn’t looked at it in a while.

Ardala drew up a leg, scratched a bare calf. “I assume this is against the law.”

“It isn’t. I used your comp and checked the library.”

“If it isn’t illegal, then it’s dangerous.”

Steward frowned. “Maybe so. Griffith says not.”

Ardala handed Steward the Xanadu. He inhaled. “How well do you know Griffith?” she asked.

“At one time, very well.”

She sat up, leaned toward him, propping her elbows on her knees. “He’s changed a lot. You said so.”

“Yes.”

“So it’s dangerous.”

Steward shrugged and handed the cigarette back to Ardala. She looked at it in her hand and ignored it. “What was the company he worked for?”

“Lightsource, Limited.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know it, but I’ll check my files. I should be able to find out something about it.”

Steward shrugged again. Ardala’s green eyes narrowed. “You act,” she said, “as if you don’t care whether or not your old friend is going to fuck you over.”

“He’s giving me something else I want.”

She put the cigarette to her lips, inhaled, made a face at the discovery that it had gone out. She dropped it in an ashtray. “He’s giving you a chance to get into space, right? Money? Lotta good it’ll do if you’re dead.”

He looked at her. “Sheol,” he said.

The word seemed to hang in the air for a long moment, like honey dropping from a spoon. Ardala shook her head and fell back to the pillows. “It’s like you want to give Sheol a second chance to kill you. As if it wasn’t bad enough the first time.”

He reached out, put a hand on her knee. “I can’t do anything about whether the job’s dangerous or not. All I can do is be ready. I’m ready.”

She turned her head away. He could see her throat working. “Dead man,” she said. “A fucking dead man.”

Steward took his hand back, gazed down at the book. “I’ll be back in a day or so,” he said.

Ardala was still looking away. “So you say.”

*

“At the beginning it was easy. Sheol was pioneered by Far Ranger, but Coherent Light got the Icehawks into the Wolf 294 system before anyone else. Mobilized, declared hostilities Outward, and went. Only the male Icehawks were sent Outward; the women’s battalions were kept in-system to guard against sabotage and maybe try some themselves. The women weren’t happy about it—what were they trained for, anyway?—and a lot of the men were pissed off because they got separated from their girlfriends.

“Far Ranger only had a few pioneers down in the northern hemisphere, and a small base on the big moon. We captured all their personnel and got all their artifacts and data. Fortified the moon base, put some ships in orbit, put our people down. We had the Icehawks plus two brigades of corporation grunts that had been recruited and shipped up from Earth at the last minute. Plus support personnel and a couple hundred archaeologists, xenobiologists, scientist types.”

Griffith let his head fall forward. He passed his forearm across his eyes, wiping away invisible sweat. His voice changed, lost in a grating reverie. “Sheol was…lovely,” he said. “It was summer in the northern hemisphere when we landed. The planet had been tamed by the Powers over thousands of years…they’d arranged it like a garden, landscaped the mountains and rivers. It had overgrown and changed, but the intent was still there. The…harmony of the way they’d set things.”

He raised his head. “The Powers—they’re not like us.” Griffith’s watery eyes seemed to shine. “They’re older,” he said. “Better. They…they know how to live with each other. What we found on Sheol and its moon reflected that. They built well, but after all the years they’d been away, there wasn’t much intact above ground. But they live in tunnels as well as on the surface, and there was a regular underworld there, hundreds of thousands of tunnels and rooms, some wrecked or collapsed but most intact, filled with stuff that had been packed carefully for storage… and there were tunnels on the moon as well, still pressurized with air we could breathe. The Powers knew they were coming back, even if we hadn’t twigged to that. It was…beautiful. A wonderland.” He shook his head. “And we fought our filthy little war in there. In all that magnificence, amid all the beauty….”