A Good Old-Fashioned Future (20 page)

“Probably not very tough,” Sardelle said calmly. “But strange things happen during a Wende.”

Eddy nodded soberly. “Wendes are very interesting
phenomena. CAPCLUG is studying Wendes. We might like to throw one someday.”

“That’s not how Wendes happen, Eddy. You don’t ‘throw’ a Wende.” Sardelle paused, considering. “A Wende throws
you.”

“So I gather,” Eddy said. “I’ve been reading his work, you know. The Cultural Critic. It’s deep work, I like it.”

Sardelle was indifferent. “I’m not one of his partisans. I’m just employed to guard him.” She conjured up another menu. “What kind of food do you like? Chinese? Thai? Eritrean?”

“How about German food?”

Sardelle laughed. “We Germans never eat German food.… There are very good Japanese cafes in Düsseldorf. Tokyo people fly here for the salmon. And the anchovies.…”

“You live here in Düsseldorf, Anchovy?”

“I live everywhere in Europe, Deep Eddy.” Her voice fell. “Any city with a screen in front of it.… And they all have screens in Europe.”

“Sounds fun. You want to trade some spexware?”

“No.”

“You don’t believe in
andwendungsoriente wissensverarbeitung
?”

She made a face. “How clever of you to learn an appropriate German phrase. Speak English, Eddy. Your accent is truly terrible.”

“Thank you kindly,” Eddy said.

“You can’t trade wares with me, Eddy, don’t be silly. I would not give my security spexware to civilian Yankee hacker-boys.”

“Don’t own the copyright, huh?”

“There’s that, too.” She shrugged, and smiled.

They were out of the airport now, walking south. Silent steady flow of electric traffic down Flughafenstrasse. The twilight air smelled of little white roses. They crossed at a traffic light. The German semiotics of ads and street signs began to press with gentle culture shock at the surface
of Deep Eddy’s brain. Garagenhof. Spezialist fur Mobil-Telefon. Burohausern. He put on some character-recognition ware to do translation, but the instant doubling of the words all around him only made him feel schizophrenic.

They took shelter in a lit bus kiosk, along with a pair of heavily tattooed gays toting grocery bags. A video-ad built into the side of the kiosk advertised German-language e-mail editors.

As Sardelle stood patiently, in silence, Eddy examined her closely for the first time. There was something odd and indefinitely European about the line of her nose. “Let’s be friends, Sardelle. I’ll take off my spex if you take off your spex.”

“Maybe later,” she said.

Eddy laughed. “You should get to know me. I’m a fun guy.”

“I already know you.”

An overcrowded bus passed. Its riders had festooned the robot bus with banners and mounted a klaxon on its roof, which emitted a cacophony of rapidfire bongo music.

“The Wende people are already hitting the buses,” Sardelle noted sourly, shifting on her feet as if trampling grapes. “I hope we can get downtown.”

“You’ve done some snooping on me, huh? Credit records and such? Was it interesting?”

Sardelle frowned. “It’s my business to research records. I did nothing illegal. All by the book.”

“No offense taken,” Eddy said, spreading his hands. “But you must have learned I’m harmless. Let’s unwrap a little.”

Sardelle sighed. “I learned that you are an unmarried male, age eighteen-to-thirty-five. No steady job. No steady home. No wife, no children. Radical political leanings. Travels often. Your demographics are very high-risk.”

“I’m twenty-two, to be exact.” Eddy noticed that Sardelle showed no reaction to this announcement, but the two eavesdropping gays seemed quite interested. He
smiled nonchalantly. “I’m here to network, that’s all. Friend-of-a-friend situation. Actually, I’m pretty sure I share your client’s politics. As far as I can figure his politics out.”

“Politics don’t matter,” Sardelle said, bored and impatient. “I’m not concerned with politics. Men in your age group commit 80 percent of all violent crimes.”

One of the gays spoke up suddenly, in heavily accented English. “Hey fraulein. We also have 80 percent of the charm!”

“And 90 percent of the fun,” said his companion. “It’s Wende time, Yankee boy. Come with us and we’ll do some crimes.” He laughed.

“Das ist sehr nett vohn Ihnen,”
Eddy said politely. “But I can’t. I’m with nursie.”

The first gay made a witty and highly idiomatic reply in German, to the effect, apparently, that he liked boys who wore sunglasses after dark, but Eddy needed more tattoos.

Eddy, having finished reading subtitles in midair, touched the single small black circle on his cheekbone. “Don’t you like my solitaire? It’s rather sinister in its reticence, don’t you think?”

He’d lost them; they only looked puzzled.

A bus arrived.

“This will do,” Sardelle announced. She fed the bus a ticket-chip and Eddy followed her on board. The bus was crowded, but the crowd seemed gentle; mostly Euro-Japanese out for a night on the town. They took a beanbag together in the back.

It had grown quite dark now. They floated down the street with machine-guided precision and a smooth dreamlike detachment. Eddy felt the spell of travel overcome him; the basic mammalian thrill of a live creature plucked up and dropped like a supersonic ghost on the far side of the planet. Another time, another place: whatever vast set of unlikelihoods had militated against his presence here had been defeated. A Friday night in Düsseldorf, July 13,
2035. The time was 22:10. The very specificity seemed magical.

He glanced at Sardelle again, grinning gleefully, and suddenly saw her for what she was. A burdened female functionary sitting stiffly in the back of a bus.

“Where are we now, exactly?” he said.

“We are on Danzigerstrasse heading south to the Altstadt,” Sardelle said. “The old town center.”

“Yeah? What’s there?”

“Kartoffel. Beer. Schnitzel. Things for you to eat.”

The bus stopped and a crowd of stomping, shoving rowdies got on. Across the street, a trio of police were struggling with a broken traffic securicam. The cops were wearing full-body pink riot-gear. He’d heard somewhere that all European cop riot-gear was pink. The color was supposed to be calming.

“This isn’t much fun for you, Sardelle, is it?”

She shrugged. “We’re not the same people, Eddy. I don’t know what you are bringing to the Critic, and I don’t want to know.” She tapped her spex back into place with one gloved finger. “But if you fail in your job, at the very worst, it might mean some grave cultural loss. Am I right?”

“I suppose so. Sure.”

“But if I fail in
my
job, Eddy, something
real
might
actually happen
.”

“Wow,” Eddy said, stung.

The crush in the bus was getting oppressive. Eddy stood and offered his spot in the beanbag to a tottering old woman in spangled party gear.

Sardelle rose then, too, with bad grace, and fought her way up the aisle. Eddy followed, barking his shins on the thicksoled beastie-boots of a sprawling drunk.

Sardelle stopped short to trade elbow-jabs with a Nordic kamikaze in a horned baseball cap, and Eddy stumbled into her headlong. He realized then why people seemed so eager to get out of Sardelle’s way: her trenchcoat was of woven ceramic and was as rough as sandpaper. He
lurched one-handed for a strap. “Well,” he puffed at Sardelle, swaying into her spex-to-spex, “if we can’t enjoy each other’s company, why not get this over with? Let me do my errand. Then I’ll get right into your hair.” He paused, shocked. “I mean,
out
of your hair. Sorry.”

She hadn’t noticed. “You’ll do your errand,” she said, clinging to her strap. They were so close that he could feel a chill air-conditioned breeze whiffling out of her trenchcoat’s collar. “But on my terms. My time, my circumstances.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes; her head darted around as if from grave embarrassment. Eddy realized suddenly that she was methodically scanning the face of every stranger in the bus.

She spared him a quick, distracted smile. “Don’t mind me, Eddy. Be a good boy and have fun in Düsseldorf. Just let me do my job, okay?”

“Okay then,” Eddy muttered. “Really, I’m delighted to be in your hands.” He couldn’t seem to stop with the double entendres. They rose to his lips like drool from the id.

The glowing grids of Düsseldorf highrises shone outside the bus windows, patchy waffles of mystery. So many human lives behind those windows. People he would never meet, never see. Pity he still couldn’t afford proper telephotos.

Eddy cleared his throat. “What’s he doing out there right now? The Cultural Critic, I mean.”

“Meeting contacts in a safehouse. He will meet a great many people during the Wende. That’s his business, you know. You’re only one of many that he bringed—brought—to this rendezvous.” Sardelle paused. “Though in threat potential you do rank among the top five.”

The bus made more stops. People piled in headlong, with a thrash and a heave and a jacking of kneecaps. Inside the bus they were all becoming anchovies. A smothered fistfight broke out in the back. A drunken woman tried, with mixed success, to vomit out the window.
Sardelle held her position grimly through several stops, then finally fought her way to the door.

The bus pulled to a stop and a sudden rush of massed bodies propelled them out.

They’d arrived by a long suspension bridge over a broad moonsilvered river. The bridge’s soaring cables were lit end-to-end with winking party-bulbs. All along the bridge, flea-marketeers sitting cross-legged on glowing mats were doing a brisk trade in tourist junk. Out in the center, a busking juggler with smart-gloves flung lit torches in flaming arcs three stories high.

“Jesus, what a beautiful river,” Eddy said.

“It’s the Rhine. This is Oberkasseler Bridge.”

“The Rhine. Of course, of course. I’ve never seen the Rhine before. Is it safe to drink?”

“Of course. Europe’s very civilized.”

“I thought so. It even smells good. Let’s go drink some of it.”

The banks were lined with municipal gardens: grape-musky vineyards, big pale meticulous flowerbeds. Tireless gardening robots had worked them over season by season with surgical trowels. Eddy stooped by the riverbank and scooped up a double-handful of backwash from a passing hydrofoil. He saw his own spex-clad face in the moony puddle of his hands. As Sardelle watched, he sipped a bit and flung the rest out as libation to the spirit of place.

“I’m happy now,” he said. “Now I’m really here.”

By midnight, he’d had four beers, two schnitzels, and a platter of kartoffels. Kartoffels were fried potato-batter waffles with a side of applesauce. Eddy’s morale had soared from the moment he first bit into one.

They sat at a sidewalk cafe table in the midst of a centuries-old pedestrian street in the Altstadt. The entire street was a single block-long bar, all chairs, umbrellas, and cobbles, peaked-roof townhouses with ivy and windowboxes and ancient copper weathervanes. It had
been invaded by an absolute throng of gawking, shuffling, hooting foreigners.

The gentle, kindly, rather bewildered Düsseldorfers were doing their level best to placate their guests and relieve them of any excess cash. A strong pink police presence was keeping good order. He’d seen two zudes in horned baseball-caps briskly hauled into a paddywagon—a “Pink Minna”—but the Vikings were pig-drunk and had it coming, and the crowd seemed very good-humored.

“I don’t see what the big deal is with these Wendes,” Deep Eddy said, polishing his spex on a square of oiled and lint-free polysilk. “This sucker’s a walk-through. There’s not gonna be any trouble here. Just look how calm and mellow these zudes are.”

“There’s trouble already,” Sardelle said. “It’s just not here in Altstadt in front of your nose.”

“Yeah?”

“There are big gangs of arsonists across the river tonight. They’re barricading streets in Neuss, toppling cars, and setting them on fire.”

“How come?”

Sardelle shrugged. “They are anticar activists. They demand pedestrian rights and more mass transit.…” She paused a bit to read the inside of her spex. “Green radicals are storming the Lobbecke Museum. They want all extinct insect specimens surrendered for cloning.… Heinrich Heine University is on strike for academic freedom, and someone has glue-bombed the big traffic tunnel beneath the campus.… But this is nothing, not yet. Tomorrow England meets Ireland in the soccer finals at Rhein-Stadium. There will be hell to pay.”

“Huh. That sounds pretty bad.”

“Yes.” She smiled. “So let’s enjoy our time here, Eddy. Idleness is sweet. Even on the edge of dirty chaos.”

“But none of those events by itself sounds all that threatening or serious.”

“Not each thing by itself, Eddy, no. But it all happens all at once. That’s what a Wende is like.”

“I don’t get it,” Eddy said. He put his spex back on and lit the menu from within, with a fingersnap. He tapped the spex menu-bar with his right fingertip and light-amplifiers kicked in. The passing crowd, their outlines shimmering slightly from computational effects, seemed to be strolling through an overlit stage-set. “I guess there’s trouble coming from all these outsiders,” Eddy said, “but the Germans themselves seem so … well … so good-natured and tidy and civilized. Why do they even have Wendes?”

“It’s not something we plan, Eddy. It’s just something that happens to us.” Sardelle sipped her coffee.

“How could this happen and not be planned?”

“Well, we knew it was coming, of course. Of course we knew
that
. Word gets around. That’s how Wendes start.” She straightened her napkin. “You can ask the Critic, when you meet him. He talks a lot about Wendes. He knows as much as anyone, I think.”

“Yeah, I’ve read him,” Eddy said. “He says that it’s rumor, boosted by electronic and digital media, in a feedback-loop with crowd dynamics and modern mass transportation. A nonlinear networking phenomenon. That much I understand! But then he quotes some zude named Elias Canetti.…” Eddy patted the gray bag. “I tried to read Canetti, I really did, but he’s twentieth-century, and as boring and stuffy as hell.… Anyway, we’d handle things differently in Chattanooga.”