Futures Near and Far (22 page)

Bill sighed. “I don’t use e-money.”

The mother’s smile faded. “What do you mean? It’s the only
kind that’s safe, you know.” She left her wallet outstretched.

“Not for me,” Bill replied. “If you don’t have any paper
cash, I wouldn’t mind some of those apples over there.” He pointed to the fruit
stand inside the nearest entrance.

Abruptly the mother shoved her wallet out of sight, grabbed
her child’s arm, and hurried away. She glanced back only once, as if to make
sure Bill was not following. She did not stop at the fruit stand.

Bill growled under his breath. He pulled out the harmonica
and started over. With luck, the next prospect would be less easily spooked.
Physical currency was still legitimate, after all, no matter how overwhelmingly
e-money had replaced it.

A man stopped. Instantly Bill concentrated, because the
fellow was carrying a huge sack brimming with steamed crab. Fruits and veggies
were easily won, but a crab would be a coup, a bounty to share with Jimmy. He
launched into his routine of man-checking-out-fabulous-babes, in which he was
aided by the timely passage of three University of Washington co-eds out
enjoying the unseasonal sunny weather.

The man guffawed and moved on, offering Bill nothing.

o0o

The late afternoon bus dropped Bill off many blocks from
the alley, leaving him to trudge the final distance. The earnings in his fanny
pack consisted of a banana, two candy bars, and a package of Kleenex.

The latter was a prize because it could double as toilet
paper, but he had expected a better haul from such a high-traffic day. He
hadn’t even been able to acquire a cup of coffee, and this was Seattle, where
such deprivation was supposed to be impossible.

Mumbling the lyrics to an ancient Hootie and the Blowfish
tune, eyes directed at the jet stream-tossed clouds encroaching across Elliott
Bay, Bill barely saw a boy dash out of a laundromat up ahead, yet immediately
his attention was claimed. In his former life he had never noticed kids, but
children were a mime’s best audience. Parents — despite the woman at the market
— were his easiest marks.

The boy, no more than six years old, squatted down behind a
large pebble-and-concrete trash receptacle. He was plainly visible to Bill, but
completely out of sight from the laundromat door.

The youngster fidgeted, but held his place. A stern-faced
woman emerged. She checked the device on her wrist and strode immediately to
the boy’s hiding place, grabbed him by the arm, and dragged him back inside.

Bill eased forward at his former pace, pausing as he came
opposite the laundromat window. He knew the layout; he had bummed washes here
before. The boy was sitting against the far wall, chin on his fists, resignedly
watching clothes spin in the dryers as his mother cleaned lint screens and
folded finished items.

Eventually the child noticed Bill and grinned at his sad
sack, Chaplinesque pose. As the mom bent over to pick up a dropped sock, Bill
summoned his full thespian flair and, in pantomime, kicked the woman in the
ass.

The kid giggled. His mother frowned. Bill ducked out of view
before she turned toward the street. He rose again just long enough to exchange
a wink with the boy, then resumed his journey.

It took only a few steps before his smile faded, claimed by
the forces of memory.

o0o

“I’ll be right back, William,” his mother said, heading
out the front door with a basket of laundry in her arms. “Then I’ll check to
see if you’ve cleaned that room of yours.”

She always called him William. Bill was “too informal, too
undistinguished.”

“Yes, Mom,” he replied from the top of the stairs.

His room
was
clean. At least, it would qualify as such if Dad did the inspection.
“He’s seven fucking years old, Lucy. He
doesn’t know how to make his bed with a hospital tuck.”
In any case,
William had anticipated this moment too long to waste it puzzling out which toy
belonged on which shelf.

He ran to the window in his parents’ bedroom, confirming
that his mother was entering the laundry room across the apartment complex
parking lot. How he had hated being dragged in there whenever she had clothes
to wash, but now that she had finally agreed he was old enough to remain inside
alone, wash day was liberation. It was the one time when the apartment was his.

Hurrying to the utility closet, he pulled his father’s old
magnifying glass from the tool chest. The broken handle threatened to stab his
palm, but he held the object carefully. Just as warily, he climbed atop Mom’s
grand piano and perched beneath the print that hung on the wall behind it.

Like an image stolen from a
Where’s Waldo
cd-rom,
the painting overflowed with a host of tiny figures no taller than William’s
pinkie fingernail, all rendered in precise, almost photographic, detail. No two
were alike. They represented people from around the world, arrayed in the quintessential
costumes of their locale, era, and occupation. The display had long fascinated
him, but seldom did he have the chance to examine it closely.

William let the magnifier drift from Arab sheik to Buddhist
monk to Incan priest. Was the next an Amazonian tribesman, or a New Guinea
cannibal? He smiled, feeling like the explorers he saw on cable documentaries.

Suddenly a clacking sound came from the front door.

William scrambled to get off the piano. In his haste, the
magnifying glass fell and was dragged by his knee. As he heard the screech of
the handle’s jagged metal assaulting polished wood and paste wax, William’s
heart leap-frogged into the rolled-up cuffs of his overalls. Holding one eye
closed didn’t lessen the horror as he lifted his knee away, revealing a long,
ugly gouge.

The piano had belonged to his mother’s grandmother. As he
had been repeatedly warned, it was an antique as well as an heirloom, and could
not be replaced.

He cowered, waiting for the front door to swing open.
Instead, he saw a pile of mail on the floor below the slot. The sound that had
startled him had been that of the postal carrier inserting his delivery.

William quickly scanned the living room for anything that
might fill in the gouge or hide it. He grabbed the Navaho blanket from the back
of the couch and tossed it onto the piano lid.

No good. Mom never put anything up there. She would lift the
blanket the moment she came in.

As it sank in that nothing was going to save him, William
had to clamp his rear end together and dance to avoid having to run to the
bathroom.

In the dining niche, his mother’s computer screen was lit
with a grid that included the floor plan of his home and a map of the nearby
neighborhood. A cluster of tiny yellow lights blinked in the portion of the display
corresponding to the living room. That was where he was. A single blue light
blinked downscreen, showing his mother’s location in the laundry room. He
moaned as the blue light began moving, heading toward the apartment.

William scrambled toward the kitchen window. There was his
mother in the parking lot. But just then she stopped to chat with Mrs. Buxman
from next door.

William had about one minute to save himself.

Hurriedly, he stripped off every last article of clothing.
Rushing to the tool chest, he pulled out a pair of tin snips and cut his
Kid-Tracker bracelet from his left wrist. As soon as the latter fell to the
carpet, leaving the proximity of his skin’s galvanic field and the
characteristic signature of his pulse, one of the yellow lights on the grid — one
slightly larger and more saffron than the others — began blinking fiercely. The
computer emitted a raucous beep.

“Shut
up
!” yapped
William. He fled through the sliding glass door at the rear of the apartment,
over the fence and down to the creek just beyond, hand thrust low to cover his
crotch. A brief sprint took him upstream into the undeveloped parcel near the
foothills.

The rocks of the dry creekbed jabbed at his bare feet. A
vine snagged his arm, making him yelp. Sweat stung his eyes. A hundred yards
along, he ducked into his secret place — a little bower inside a cluster of
acacia trees, deeply shaded, surrounded by a massive blackberry bush. It was
the best hideout he knew. He had not shared it with friends, and certainly his
parents had never been to it. His hope was to remain hidden until dusk. By that
time, his mother would have had a few hours to calm down. And by then, Dad
would be home. Mom was never as severe in front of witnesses.

A mosquito nipped his ankle. He slapped it, leaving a smear
of insectoid parts and a streak of bright red human blood. More of the pests
hovered about, fresh from the stagnant pond nearby, hungry as only early-summer
mosquitoes could be. William twitched. By the end of his exile, his bare skin
would be covered with welts. But it would be worth it.

A determined tread of shoes over the debris of the creek bed
made him hiccup. All too soon, the foliage parted. There was his mother,
staring down at him. Her trademark scowl was so dark she seemed to have changed
her ethnicity.

“How did you know where I was?” he moaned.

She held up her portable Kid-Tracker unit. On the map, a
flashing dot showed next to the winding course of the stream.

She tapped the bridge of his nose. “You forgot about the
localizer in your glasses. Now come with me, young man,” she said, dragging him
away by the ear.

o0o

The group in the alley stiffened as a police car glided
past, briefly shining a spotlight in toward them. Bill saw the officer on the
passenger side make a comment to his partner, but the car did not stop. In the
absence of a complaint from a local business owner, the cops had so far been
content to leave the alley denizens alone rather than risk them relocating to a
more populated, higher-class part of town.

Crisis averted, Claude resumed probing a Taco Bell wrapper
for one last shred of fake cheese. Farther down the alley three more men
huddled dejectedly, lacking even that trace of food.

A fringe of pink and purple still dusted the undersides of
the clouds to the west. In a shrinking patch of clear sky overhead, a few stars
emerged in spite of the city glow. The summerlike lull vanished with the
twilight. Jimmy wrapped himself in a blanket and instantly fell asleep in his
crate. Bill envied him that trick. He also envied him the blanket; it was too
early to try the warehouse to see if his own could be salvaged.

That left Claude to listen as he described the scene at the
laundromat. Bill said nothing of the long-ago incident with the damaged piano
and his irate mother, but he made it clear he empathized with the kid.

Claude remained silent for such a long time that Bill
wondered if he’d entered one of the semi-catatonic withdrawals that preceded
his seizures, but the man’s bright, alert gaze seemed to indicate this was one
of those intervals when he resembled the capable electrical engineer he had
once been.

Finally, as if out of the blue, he asked, “Do you know how
localizers work?”

“GPS satellite signals?”

“No,” Claude said. “I mean the little ones. The kind that
kid had sewn into his clothes.”

Bill shrugged. “Some kind of radar?”

“Not quite. Regular radar uses sine wave transmission.
Localizers use nonsinusoidal broadcasts. You ever hear of Harmuth waves?”

“Of course not.”

Claude blinked as if Bill were hopelessly uneducated. “The
inventors of the first miniature localizers realized Harmuth waves — coded
sequences of Gaussian impulses —could be harnessed to allow the creation of
positional correlation devices that required very little power, at bandwidths
so wide the signals could harmlessly penetrate buildings, trees, all sorts of
obstacles. It took some inspired engineering to deal with some of the design
problems, but once the devices were available, they were so cheap to make
suddenly everyone was using them to keep track of children or pets or luggage
or wallets, to survey land, to automatically open or lock doors, you name it.”

Claude paused, inhaling the taco aroma lingering on his
hand. Bill waited patiently, knowing how laboriously his companion’s thoughts
had to navigate his damaged cortex to assemble a speech like this.

“Nonsinusoidal transmissions were also used in something
called impulse or ultra-wideband radar. The Soviets published some of the first
papers, just to rub it in our noses that they had something to thwart our
stealth planes. You can make planes transparent to sine wave transmissions, but
impulse radar makes them visible as goose turds on a windshield.”

Bill realized Claude was not entirely speaking to address
any concern of his, but to air an old agenda. “You worked on stealth planes,
didn’t you?”

“I did,” Claude replied.

“Then you must not have had a high opinion of impulse
radar.”

Claude eyes twinkled in that certain way they did whenever
Bill managed to follow the idiosyncratic course of the engineer’s thinking.

“Did it cost you a job or something?” Bill asked.

“Hell no. Impulse radar has been around since before we were
born. The stealth program lasted until I hit thirty-two. Nobody wanted to touch
that pork barrel. Stealth only died because the orbital defense industry
finally got so big it sucked away the funding.

“The reason I didn’t like impulse radar,” he concluded, “is
that it annoyed me knowing that what I was doing was really bullshit.”

Bill nodded.

“There’s too much progress,” Claude said. “Localizers. VR.
E-money. Cold fusion. A man can’t keep ahead of it all. There’s always someone
pulling the rug out. Too many choices. Too much to adjust to.”

Bill was stifling the urge to eat the candy bar he’d
hoarded. If he brought it out now, he’d feel obliged to split it. He left it
hidden in his pack. “I don’t agree,” he said carefully. “People have fewer
choices. There’s always someone looking. Too many ways for folks to check up on
you.”