Hardwired (31 page)

“All right,” he whispers. His eyelids flutter, an old reflex made obsolete by his plastic eyes and his amputated tear ducts. “All right. We’ll do it your way.”

She walks up to him slowly, putting her arms around his neck, laying her cheek to his.

“I’m sorry, Cowboy,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

He clings to her for a while, lets her lead him away into the night of her own scarred mind, torn life, dark choices.

He lived free in the air, once, on the last free road. It’s a tunnel now, growing ever narrower and blacker, and he never saw the walls rise till he was deep inside. Moving faster than light down this narrowing, echoing, darkening pathway.

He’ll have to watch Sarah carefully. She knows how to survive in this place.

*

Roon’s new body has only been worn for eight years and shouldn’t look any older than thirty, but there are lines around the eyes that can’t be entirely hidden by the kohl, and they proclaim how hard Roon is using himself. His scalp is shaved entirely except for an oiled, curled scalp lock over the left eye. Diamond chips glitter in his head sockets. It looks as if he’s never brushed his teeth. He laughs, reaches for his drink. Cowboy can feel his own eyelids tremble, fear racing up his spine.

“The well has been a barrier for both our peoples,” Roon says. He reaches for an inhaler, fires a pair of rockets, throws his head back and sniffs. His voice drones on, unchanged, directed at the starry hologram of the ceiling. “Consciousness has evolved differently for those outside of gravity. But crystal bridges the gap, burning in our heads, burning away the imperfection. Leaves us helpless before the inevitability of its logic.”

He reaches a hand out, touching one of Cowboy’s temple sockets. Cowboy tries not to flinch. Roon’s corpse breath enfolds him. Cowboy can see Sarah across the dinner table, her face a mask as she watches. “It is the perfect architecture of crystal that bridges the gap between us, Cowboy,” he says. “The barriers of Earth and its well can be dissolved. A new relationship created. The union of exploiter and exploited, cosmic and earthly, predator and prey.”

The hand falls away. Roon turns to Sarah, his eyes looking at her aslant, and then he leans toward her, cupping her face in his hands. Cowboy’s nerves begin to scream. Roon’s words are slurred, drunken. “It was forced at first, our new relationship. The war–– it was made inevitable by the stupidity of the leaders of Earth. Even now you try to resist us. But soon it will change. You will come willingly. Become prey to our vision, our ecstasies. The crystal will draw you.”

He smiles, reaches for his drink again, leans back on his couch, closes his eyes. Cowboy watches as his breathing deepens, as the drink slides from his fingers to bounce soundlessly on the deep carpet. Lupe and Raul, motionless at either side of his seat, exchange covert glances. Cowboy rises from his chair, his head swimming with hatred. Sarah’s eyes rise to him as he stands, flicker to Roon, then turn back to him as she makes her decision. She follows him as he begins to walk toward their suite.

They’re only partway there when they hear the cry, the blow. Cowboy’s nerves trigger as he spins in the dark metal corridor and begins his run through the alloy corridors of Roon’s dream. Raul lies unconscious on the deep carpet, the side of his face reddening. A table knife lies by his hand, a jewel of red trembling on its tip. Roon stands astride him, wrapping a napkin around his arm. Blood streams from his hand onto the smooth white surface of a petroleum-plastic dish.

“A foolish act of rebellion,” Roon says. His breath comes in pants. “Tried to cut me while I slept.” A pair of guards burst trough the kitchen door with their armored coats pulled up around their eyes, weapons in hand. Gorman is right behind them. Roon turns his head. “The boy,” he says. “I handled it.”

Cowboy kneels by Raul. His eyelids are flickering, his head lolls from left to right.

Regaining consciousness. He looks up into the terrified eyes of Lupe, still standing at her place by Roon’s couch. Gorman is calling for a medic on his radio. Tears are spilling silently down Lupe’s cheeks. Cowboy stands up and puts his arm around her shoulders. He can feel her trembling, but she’s too scared of Roon to do anything but remain at attention.

Raul begins to open his eyes. Cowboy looks at Roon. Feels his heart thundering, in his throat. “What will you do with him?”

Roon looks down at the boy. His expression is mild. “Nothing,” he says. “Put him outside the gates. Let him live outside of the communion with the sky.” He looks at Cowboy, and there is a sweet smile of genuine sadness on his face. “It’s the worst thing that can happen to him, really. To be barred forever from the future that could have been his.” One of the mercenaries reaches down, drags Raul to his feet by his collar.

“Poor fool,” Roon says. “I love him still.” He looks down at Lupe and puts a hand on her trembling forehead. Drops of blood patter down the starched white dress. “The sister will stay, of course. I will not shun her for her brother’s sin.” He seems to become aware of the scarlet stream running down his wrist.

“Where is the medic?” He frowns, and walks away, toward his rooms, leaving a speckled, darkening trail.

Cowboy watches him go. Raul hangs by his collar from the guard’s fist, passive now, ready to accept the consequences of his revolt. His cheek is glowing red where Roon’s hand struck. Gorman looks at the guard, shrugs. “You heard the boss. Put the boy outside.”

The two guards march away. Cowboy strokes Lupe’s head, trying to give comfort. Hoping she doesn’t think it a pirate caress. Gorman shrugs, his hands on his hips, then looks at Cowboy–– and for a moment there’s a reflection of Cowboy’s own hatred there, before the mercenary can choke it back down.

Then Cowboy’s fishing in his pocket for a credit spike and holds it out. “Can you see he gets this?”

“Raul?”

Cowboy nods. “Tell him who it’s from.”

Gorman takes the needle with its little jewel of crystal at its tip, then puts it in his pocket. He looks into Cowboy’s eyes for a half second, and Cowboy can’t tell what he’s reading there. Gorman nods slowly. “Yeah. Okay,” he says. He calls into his radio for the guards to wait, then walks briskly away.

Cowboy feels Sarah’s gaze on him. “How much was in that?” she asks.

“A few thousand. Something like that.”

“In dollars?”

Cowboy says nothing. A grin twitches at Sarah’s lips. She turns to look at Gorman’s receding back.

“Dollars aren’t much back home; but they’re worth a lot more here. The little bastard’ll be rich...if they don’t think he stole it. ” She reaches to the table for a napkin, crouches in front of Lupe, blots her tears. Now that Roon and the guards are gone Lupe breaks her stance, throws her arms around Sarah. Sobs.

Cowboy keeps stroking her hair, not knowing what else to do. Adrenaline pulses in spurts through his ragged nerves. He looks at the door where Raul had gone and tastes envy on his tongue. Knows he should have done it himself, should have broken the glass and gone for Roon’s throat with a piece of the crystal in his hand. Let the act become one of the metaphors Roon’s so fond of. He will never do it. He’s too caught up in the matrix of darkness, here, the compromises he’s made have wedged too far into him for him ever to see clearly again.

*

As Sarah and Cowboy come nearer, parts of Roon’s building seem to curl out of sight, as if moving like Thibodaux’s model into the fourth dimension. A warm canyon wind brings dust hissing inelegant scouring tracework over the building’s black skin. There is no door, no interface between the geometrical Orbital fantasy and the courtyard; they simply walk under the bright pretzel girders and into an area of cool, still air, hushed like the place is holding its breath, the sun’s light, refracted by the curved crystal above, shining down in falling sheets of green, violet, blue, touching sculpted metal furniture with delicate pastel-colored nails…

“Must be a metaphor, huh?” Cowboy says. Sarah’s laugh echoes harshly from the silent metal.

They follow the two children down a metal runway that turns into a curving hallway. Cowboy’s bootheels sink deep into the carpet. This leads to a pair of linked rooms, all shadows and curves, just like the Ritz Flop, but with a hologram image of some space habitat rotating slowly near one ceiling corner. Cowboy feels an urge to use the softglow inhaler in his pocket, feeling that a sense of unreality might help in coping with this place. Sarah walks through the irising connecting doorway.

“We’re deep in Fantasyland here,” she says. “You know about Fantasyland, Cowboy? Where they built the spaceport at Orlando?”

“Never heard of it.”

“A place for children. Where they could learn how nice the future was supposed to be.” She laughs. “They sure got that part wrong, didn’t they?”

*

The sitting room has a holo of a refugee kid in the corner, all ribs and eyes. Cowboy doesn’t like to look at it.

Roon enters the room quietly from behind, and Cowboy can feel his hackles trying to rise at the man’s scent, the sweet pomade he uses on his forelock, the scent of corpses on his breath. Roon, moving in silence behind Cowboy’s chair, lowers his pale hands to the iron muscles in Cowboy’s shoulders. Cowboy looks at the opaque expression on Sarah’s face as she curls in a half-lotus on a settee.

“I have considered your plan,” he says. “My crystal tells me it is sound. I will accept.” He pauses. “I will make the arrangements for secure communication lines.”

The tension doesn’t leave Cowboy’s neck. “Thank you, Mr. Roon,” he says.

Roon’s thumbs drill into Cowboy’s neck with considered pressure, as if trying to loosen the hard muscles there. Cowboy remains as still as one of Roon’s children at the table. “You are blessed,” Roon says. Corrupt breath floats in the room. “You will help me to regain heaven. From there I shall impose my crystal dreams upon the Earth.”

“We’re only messengers,” Cowboy says. He can feel prickles of sweat on his scalp.

Roon doesn’t seem to be listening. “I shall send Couceiro to Earth,” he says, his voice drifting on, locked in its own madness. “To the surface of the planet he hates. Perhaps it will redeem him, perhaps the people of Earth will teach him to love. Who can say?”

He takes his hands away, and Cowboy can feel relief filling his muscles. Roon walks toward Sarah. Cowboy can see the white bandage on his arm as he takes her head in his hands and bends to gravely kiss her lips. “I thank you,” he says. “I thank you both.” He turns and fixes Cowboy with his blissful smile. Liquid nitrogen fills Cowboy’s heart. “You have made possible all my dreams.”

*

After waiting for an hour, Cowboy and Sarah decide to go exploring. They poke into things at random, finding the same kind of soft, shadowy rooms lit by tinted sunlight. Beds, chairs, tables, computer access seem to be strewn more or less randomly; few of the rooms appear to have any definite purpose in mind. Hologrammatic images of star fields, ships, industrial colonies move silently on the walls, the ceilings. There are also pictures of children, wide-eyed barefoot refugee kids, standing like appeals to charity in the midst of the plush, silent rooms.

In the end they find Roon by accident, wandering into the room where he sits on a tall white chair, faced into a portable computer deck held in the still arms of a small, absolutely motionless girl-child standing next to him in a white dress. By now Cowboy’s beginning to doubt anything he sees and it takes him a moment to realize the picture isn’t another hologram, that the man with the long laser-optic cable reaching up to the socket on his temple is breathing slightly, that his closed eyelids are trembling with reflex eyeball movement as his optical centers scan the data.

The black-rimmed eyes open, move dreamily across the room. Find Cowboy and Sarah, focus on them. His look sharpens. “I love you,” he says. “As if you were my very own children.”

The black and silver singularity twists into cold n-dimensional space. And the collective nightmare, Roon’s and Cowboy’s, begins again.

Chapter Fifteen

The flat green border of the Florida peninsula, scalloped where the sea is coming in, lies canted up on edge before them. Clouds seem pasted to it like construction-paper cutouts. The returning gravity presses on Sarah’s chest. She swallows hard and feels Weasel lying like a rock in her throat.

In Roon’s house she hadn’t dared relax–– she was either watching Roon the whole time or riding Cowboy to make sure he didn’t flip. The time in Roon’s house had felt like a century, and she’s surprised it was only five days. Before the shuttle left she mixed rightsnap and alcohol in the port bar, the first relief she’d allowed herself, and walked onto the shuttle in a blaze of warm internal light. Now the drugs move sluggishly through her veins, softening the razor edge of reality.

She looks at Cowboy and frowns. He’s been faced into his computer for most of the trip, and even when he’s had his head out of the crystal his eyes have still had that far-off look, as if he was trying to make sense out of something...like maybe the latticework of his three-dimensional holo construct of the Tempel bloc, the way Roon was worked into it, the girders and networks of its architecture studding into his sockets, the way Cowboy and Sarah are now extensions of those networks, a tunnel through which Roon communicates with all the lattices and powers outside of the Tempel organization. Cowboy’s trying to make sense, Sarah thinks, of the way Cowboy and Roon are linked, and what that means to the world that Cowboy’s lived in for so many years, that implausible vision of himself that she’s been able to glimpse from time to time, all jet-powered hardware and burning crystal escaping into black night corridors, the outside sensors filled with flaming rockets, alcohol fire, screaming pumps-and all this mechanical violence in the unlikely servile of some kind of transcendental, personal sense of justice, life lived in service to unspoken codes of honor and existence... Sarah figures Cowboy’s been living alongside evil people all his life, but just never let one touch him before.

Lucky man, she thinks, and sips her rum and lime. Gravity squats on her chest, and she sees the bubbles that rise in her glass slow down, then hang in the cool solution, waiting for the well to free them. Her head presses back against the padded rest.