Burning Chrome (14 page)

I think she saw me, as I left. I was practically running.
If she did, I suppose she hated me worse than ever, for the horror and the pity in my face.

I never saw her again.

Someday I'll ask Rubin why Wild Turkey sours are the only drink he knows how to make. Industrial-strength, Rubin's sours. He passes me the dented aluminum cup, while his place ticks and stirs around us with the furtive activity of his smaller creations.

‘You ought to come to Frankfurt,' he says again.

‘Why, Rubin?'

‘Because pretty soon she's going to call you up. And I think maybe you aren't ready for it. You're still screwed up about this, and it'll sound like her and think like her, and you'll get too weird behind it. Come over to Frankfurt with me and you can get a little breathing space. She won't know you're there…'

‘I told you,' I say, remembering her at the bar in that club, ‘lots of work. Max –'

‘Stuff Max. Max you just made rich. Max can sit on his hands. You're rich yourself, from your royalty cut on
Kings,
if you weren't too stubborn to dial up your bank account. You can afford a vacation.'

I look at him and wonder when I'll tell him the story of that final glimpse. ‘Rubin, I appreciate it, man, but I just…'

He sighs, drinks. ‘But what?'

‘Rubin, if she calls me, is it
her.'

He looks at me a long time. ‘God only knows.' His cup clicks on the table. ‘I mean, Casey, the technology is there, so who, man, really who, is to say?'

And you think I should come with you to Frankfurt?'

He takes off his steel-rimmed glasses and polishes them inefficiently on the front of his plaid flannel shirt. ‘Yeah,
I do. You need the rest. Maybe you don't need it now, but you're going to, later.'

‘How's that?'

‘When you have to edit her next release. Which will almost certainly be soon, because she needs money bad. She's taking up a lot of ROM on some corporate mainframe, and her share of
Kings
won't come close to paying for what they had to do to put her there. And you're her editor, Casey. I mean, who else?'

And I just stare at him as he puts the glasses back on, like I can't move at all.

‘Who else, man?'

And one of his constructs clicks right then, just a clear and tiny sound, and it comes to me, he's right.

Michael Swanwick and William Gibson

He meant to keep on going, right down to Florida. Work passage on a gunrunner, maybe wind up conscripted into some ratass rebel army down in the war zone. Or maybe, with that ticket good as long as he didn't stop riding, he'd just never get off – Greyhound's Flying Dutchman. He grinned at his faint reflection in cold, greasy glass while the downtown lights of Norfolk slid past, the bus swaying on tired shocks as the driver slung it around a final corner. They shuddered to a halt in the terminal lot, concrete lit gray and harsh like a prison exercise yard. But Deke was watching himself starve, maybe in some snowstorm out of Oswego, with his cheek pressed up against that same bus window, and seeing his remains swept out at the next stop by a muttering old man in faded coveralls. One way or the other, he decided, it didn't mean shit to him. Except his legs seemed to have died already. And the driver called a twenty-minute stopover – Tidewater Station, Virginia. It was an old cinder-block building with two entrances to each rest room, holdover from the previous century.

Legs like wood, he made a halfhearted attempt at ghosting the notions counter, but the black girl behind it was alert, guarding the sparse contents of the old glass case as though her ass depended on it.
Probably does,
Deke thought, turning away. Opposite the washrooms, an open doorway offered GAMES, the word flickering feebly in biofluorescent plastic. He could see a crowd of the local kickers clustered around a pool table. Aimless,
his boredom following him like a cloud, he stuck his head in. And saw a biplane, wings no longer than his thumb, blossom bright orange flame. Corkscrewing, trailing smoke, it vanished the instant it struck the green-felt field of the table.

‘Tha's right, Tiny,' a kicker bellowed, ‘you
take
that sumbitch!'

‘Hey,' Deke said. ‘What's going on?'

The nearest kicker was a bean pole with a black mesh Peterbilt cap. ‘Tiny's defending the Max,' he said, not taking his eyes from the table.

‘Oh, yeah? What's that?' But even as he asked, he saw it: a blue enamel medal shaped like a Maltese cross, the slogan
Pour le Mirite
divided among its arms.

The Blue Max rested on the edge of the table, directly before a vast and perfectly immobile bulk wedged into a fragile-looking chrome-tube chair. The man's khaki work shirt would have hung on Deke like the folds of a sail, but it bulged across that bloated torso so tautly that the button threatened to tear away at any instant. Deke thought of southern troopers he'd seen on his way down; of that weird, gut-heavy endotype balanced on gangly legs that looked like they'd been borrowed from some other body. Tiny might look like that if he stood, but on a larger scale – a forty-inch jeans inseam that would need a woven-steel waistband to support all those pounds of swollen gut. If Tiny were ever to stand at all – for now Deke saw that that shiny frame was actually a wheelchair. There was something disturbingly childlike about the man's face, an appalling suggestion of youth and even beauty in features almost buried in fold and jowl. Embarrassed, Deke looked away. The other man, the one standing across the table from Tiny, had bushy sideburns and a thin mouth. He seemed to be tryng to push
something with his eyes, wrinkles of concentration spreading from the corners…

‘You dumbshit or what?' The man with the Peterbilt cap turned, catching Deke's Indo proleboy denims, the brass chains at his wrists, for the first time. ‘Why don't you get your ass lost, fucker. Nobody wants your kind in here.' He turned back to the dogfight.

Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff, liberty-headed dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stamp-and-coin stores, while more cautious bettors slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a trio of red planes, flying in formation. Fokker D VIIs. The room fell silent. The Fokkers banked majestically under the solar orb of a two-hundred-watt bulb.

The blue Spad dove out of nowhere. Two more plunged from the shadowy ceiling, following closely. The kickers swore, and one chuckled. The formation broke wildly. One Fokker dove almost to the felt, without losing the Spad on its tail. Furiously, it zigged and zagged across the green flatlands but to no avail. At last it pulled up, the enemy hard after it, too steeply – and stalled, too low to pull out in time.

A stack of silver dimes was scooped up.

The Fokkers were outnumbered now. One had two Spads on its tail. A needle-spray of tracers tore past its cockpit. The Fokker slip-turned right, banked into an Immelmann, and was behind one of its pursuers. It fired, and the biplane fell, tumbling.

‘Way to go, Tiny!' The kickers closed in around the table.

Deke was frozen with wonder. It felt like being born all over again.

Frank's Truck Stop was two miles out of town on the Commercial Vehicles Only route. Deke had tagged it, out of idle habit, from the bus on the way in. Now he walked back between the traffic and the concrete crash guards. Articulated trucks went slamming past, big eight-segmented jobs, the wash of air each time threatening to blast him over. CVO stops were easy makes. When he sauntered into Frank's, there was nobody to doubt that he'd come in off a big rig, and he was able to browse the gift shop as slowly as he liked. The wire rack with the projective wetware wafers was located between a stack of Korean cowboy shirts and a display for Fuzz Buster mudguards. A pair of Oriental dragons twisted in the air over the rack, either fighting or fucking, he couldn't tell which. The game he wanted was there: a wafer labeled
SPADS
&
FOKKERS
. It took him three seconds to boost it and less time to slide the magnet – which the cops in D. C. hadn't even bothered to confiscate – across the universal security strip.

On the way out, he lifted two programming units and a little Batang facilitator-remote that looked like an antique hearing aid.

He chose a highstack at random and fed the rental agent the line he'd used since his welfare rights were yanked. Nobody ever checked up; the state just counted occupied rooms and paid.

The cubicle smelled faintly of urine, and someone had scrawled Hard Anarchy Liberation Front slogans across the walls. Deke kicked trash out of a corner, sat down, back to the wall, and ripped open the wafer pack.

There was a folded instruction sheet with diagrams of loops, rolls, and Immelmanns, a tube of saline paste, and a computer list of operational specs. And the wafer itself,
white plastic with a blue biplane and logo on one side, red on the other. He turned it over and over in his hand: SPADS&FOKKERS, FOKKERS&SPADS. Red or blue. He fitted the Batang behind his ear after coating the inductor surface with paste, jacked its fiberoptic ribbon into the programmer, and plugged the programmer into the wall current. Then he slid the wafer into the programmer. It was a cheap set, Indonesian, and the base of his skull buzzed uncomfortably as the program ran. But when it was done, a sky-blue Spad darted restlessly through the air a few inches from his face. It almost glowed, it was so real. It had the strange inner life that fanatically detailed museum-grade models often have, but it took all of his concentration to keep it in existence. If his attention wavered at all, it lost focus, fuzzing into a pathetic blur.

He practiced until the battery in the earset died, then slumped against the wall and fell asleep. He dreamed of flying, in a universe that consisted entirely of white clouds and blue sky, with no up and down, and never a green field to crash into.

He woke to a rancid smell of frying krillcakes and winced with hunger. No cash, either. Well, there were plenty of student types in the stack. Bound to be one who'd like to score a programming unit. He hit the hall with the boosted spare. Not far down was a door with a poster on it:
THERE
'
S
A HELL OF A GOOD UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR
. Under that was a starscape with a cluster of multicolored pills, torn from an ad for some pharmaceutical company, pasted over an inspirational shot of the ‘space colony' that had been under construction since before he was born,
LET
'
S
GO
, the poster said, beneath the collaged hypnotics.

He knocked. The door opened, security slides stopping it at a two-inch slice of girlface. ‘Yeah?'

‘You're going to think this is stolen.' He passed the programmer from hand to hand. ‘I mean because it's new, virtual cherry, and the bar code's still on it. But listen, I'm not gonna argue the point. No. I'm gonna let you have it for only like half what you'd pay anywhere else.'

‘Hey, wow,
really,
no kidding?' The visible fraction of mouth twisted into a strange smile. She extended her hand, palm up, a loose fist. Level with his chin. ‘Lookahere!'

There was a hole in her hand, a black tunnel that ran right up her arm. Two small red lights. Rat's eyes. They scurried toward him – growing, gleaming. Something gray streaked forward and leaped for his face.

He screamed throwing hands up to ward it off. Legs twisting, he fell, the programmer shattering under him. Silicate shards skittered as he thrashed, clutching his head. Where it hurt, it hurt – it hurt very badly indeed.

‘Oh, my God!' Slides unsnapped, and the girl was hovering over him. ‘Here, listen, come on.' She dangled a blue hand towel. ‘Grab on to this and I'll pull you up.'

He looked at her through a wash of tears. Student. That fed look, the oversize sweatshirt, teeth so straight and white they could be used as a credit reference. A thin gold chain around one ankle (fuzzed, he saw, with baby-fine hair). Choppy Japanese haircut. Money. ‘That sucker was gonna be my dinner,' he said ruefully. He took hold of the towel and let her pull him up.

She smiled but skittishly backed away from him. ‘Let me make it up to you,' she said. ‘You want some food? It was only a projection, okay?'

He followed her in, wary as an animal entering a trap. ‘Holy shit,' Deke said, ‘this is
real cheese
…' He was sitting on a gutsprung sofa, wedged between a four-foot
teddy bear and a loose stack of floppies. The room was ankle-deep in books and clothes and papers. But the food she magicked up – Gouda cheese and tinned beef and honest-to-God greenhouse wheat wafers – was straight out of the Arabian Nights.

‘Hey,' she said. ‘We know how to treat a proleboy right, huh?' Her name was Nance Bettendorf. She was seventeen. Both her parents had jobs – greedy buggers – and she was an engineering major at William and Mary. She got top marks except in English, ‘I guess you must really have a thing about rats. You got some kind of phobia about rats?'

He glanced sidelong at her bed. You couldn't see it, really; it was just a swell in the ground cover. ‘It's not like that. It just reminded me of something else, is all.'

‘Like what?' She squatted in front of him, the big shirt riding high up one smooth thigh.

‘Well…did you ever see the –' his voice involuntarily rose and rushed past the words –
‘Washington Monument?
Like at night? It's got these two little…red lights on top, aviation markers or something, and I, and I…' He started to shake.

‘You're afraid of the Washington Monument?' Nance whooped and rolled over with laughter, long tanned legs kicking. She was wearing crimson bikini panties.

‘I would die rather than look at it again,' he said levelly.

She stopped laughing then, sat up, studied his face. White, even teeth worried at her lower lip, like she was dragging up something she didn't want to think about. At last she ventured, ‘Brainlock?'

‘Yeah,' he said bitterly. ‘They told me I'd never go back to DC. And then the fuckers laughed.'

‘What did they get you for?'

‘I'm a thief.' He wasn't about tell her that the actual charge was career shoplifting.

‘Lotta old
computer
hacks spent their lives programming machines. And you know what? The human brain is not a goddamn bit like a machine, no way. They just don't program the same.' Deke knew this shrill, desperate rap, this long, circular jive that the lonely string out to the rare listener; knew it from a hundred cold and empty nights spent in the company of strangers. Nance was lost in it, and Deke, nodding and yawning, wondered if he'd even be able to stay awake when they finally hit that bed of hers.

‘I built that projection I hit you with myself,' she said, hugging her knees up beneath her chin. ‘It's for muggers, you know? I just happened to have it on me, and I threw it at you 'cause I thought it was so funny, you trying to sell me that shit little Indojavanese programmer.' She hunched forward and held out her hand again. ‘Look here.' Deke cringed. ‘No, no, it's okay, I swear it, this is different.' She opened her hand.

A single blue flame danced there, perfect and ever-changing. ‘Look at that,' she marveled. ‘Just look. I programmed that. It's not some diddly little seven-image job either. It's a continuous two-hour loop, seven thousand, two hundred seconds, never the same twice, each instant as individual as a fucking snowflake!'

The flame's core was glacial crystal, shards and facets flashing up, twisting and gone, leaving behind near-subliminal images so bright and sharp that they cut the eye. Deke winced. People mostly. Pretty little naked people, fucking. ‘How the hell did you do that?'

She rose, bare feet slipping on slick magazines, and melodramatically swept folds of loose printout from a
new plywood shelf. He saw a neat row of small consoles, austere and expensive-looking. Custom work. ‘This is the real stuff I got here. Image facilitator. Here's my fast-wipe module. This is a brain-map one-to-one function analyzer.' She sang off the names like a litany. ‘Quantum flicker stabilizer. Program splicer. An image assembler…'