Hardwired (33 page)

The waiter is coming with Cowboy’s beer. Cowboy’s knuckles are white as he grips the frame of the phone booth. He gulps the cool air fanning slowly down from above.

“Cowboy, listen.” White noise crashes like the sound of Oahu surf. “I remember a time we were playing poker. In that little cammo shack Saavedra set up by the Dakota line. You’d just brought the Express back from a run and you decided to stay around and be part of my ground crew later that night. You and I were there, and Saavedra dropped in for a few hands, and there was another jock. Begay, the big Navajo. The one who got killed by his brother in that accident. He took all our money, gave us all cigars. Remember?”

The waiter is standing by the booth with a beer in his hand. Cowboy has no strength anymore, just leans against the transparent plastic. Sobs try to force their way up past his throat. “Jesus, Reno. My god. It’s you. It’s you.”

He would cry if he could. Saavedra and Begay are both dead and there is no one else who could have told Tempel about that poker game. Reno’s caught somewhere in the crystal, what’s left of him an electronic ghost caught in an endless loop between two worlds, going nowhere at the speed of light. Cowboy smashes the back of his head against the booth, seeking the clarity of pain. The waiter looks at him in disapproval, a buttonhead junkie going mad in his clean palm bar.

“Look, Reno, we’ll get you out.” Cowboy tastes blood in his mouth. He swipes his forehead with the back of his arm. “The Dodger and me. We’ll find a body for you.”

“I don’t have the money, Cowboy. I’ve got most of my accounts, but the money isn’t near enough.”

Cowboy laughs. The sound is vast in the small booth, and the echo comes back tinny with the overtones of hysteria. He wants to keep on laughing but manages to stop himself.

“Hell, brother, you’re halfway there.” He realizes he’s shouting and lowers his voice. “You’re already out of your body and in the crystal medium. It’s only the last part we’ve got to pay for. Bet we can get a big discount.”

He swings open the door and takes the beer from the surprised waiter. “Some snacks, too,” he says. “Nachos, if you have them. Peanuts’ll be okay, though.”

“Cowboy...Cowboy.” Reno’s voice is fading in and out of the white noise.

“Yeah, Reno. I’m still here.”

“Thank you, Cowboy. Thank you so much. Everyone I called was dead or hiding. It’s like I killed them or drove them away.”

“Reno, I’m here.” He gulps air. The little booth smells of beer. “I’m here.” Cowboy tries to speak comfortingly. “I’m here,” he says.

But where are
you
? he thinks. A lost program, stealing comp time where he can find it, hiding from the system that will kill him without knowing what he is. Running forever, losing bits of himself in inefficient transfers until there’s almost nothing left, just a ghost wind touching the interface with its electron breath.

“I’ll take care of you,” Cowboy says. And thinks of the little girl trembling under Roon’s hand, the two kids in the barn in Missouri, all the burdens he’s failed to carry, and how much good he’s done any of them…

“I’ll figure a way out,” he promises, and in some part of his own mind sees a monochrome image, himself and Reno, Raul and Lupe, Sarah looking as if she’s been lit by von Sternberg and bearing a resemblance to Louise Brooks, all in some improbably large delta cabin, sailing against a background of gray watercolor-wash clouds pierced by the bright swords of sunbeams, a happy silver nitrate ending glowing on the screen of Cowboy’s closed lids, and he has a feeling he can work it somehow, flick a switch and things will turn out that way, if he just knows what switch and when.

There is knock on the booth door. It is the waiter with his peanuts. Cowboy looks up at him, the thin disapproving face with its tracks of broken veins high on the cheeks, the clipped graying mustache, the careful contempt somehow enhanced by the twitch of one lower lid. The gray mindcolor fades, no THE END marching across the sky in a sudden Alfred Newman swell of triumphant music. Cowboy’s lost his grip on the switch; instead, he’s trapped in the sweating plastic walls of a tiny room in a little Florida bar, stuck here with all of Earth’s lost children, and can’t seem to find his way out…

Chapter Seventeen

LIVING IN THE DEAD ZONE?

WE GUARANTEE A PAYOFF

When Sarah gets back, Cowboy is sitting with crossed legs on the mattress, shirtless, wearing only a pair of cutoff jeans. A half-dozen empty beer bottles are scattered around him. He’s lubricating his eyes, rolling them up into his head while he attaches the nipple on a bottle of silicon gel to the little reservoir in the bottom of each implant.

When he finishes and looks at her she can see that his eyes are rimmed by violet shadows. There are cords in his neck that weren’t there before.

“Cowboy,” Sarah says, “you look like death.”

He looks down at the floor, swallows. “Yeah.”

She walks over to him, squatting on her heels and putting her hands on his shoulders. His skin is moist. She feels a trickle of gratitude that he doesn’t flinch, like Daud, from her touch.

She looks into his eyes. “Anything happen while I was gone?”

“Just...” he begins, then shakes his head. “No. Nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

She kisses his cheek, feeling bristles against her lips. She stands up and shrugs out of her jacket. “I’m going to take a shower,” she says. “Want to join me?”

The shower is in an old battered stainless-steel tub, down the hall in a bathroom Sarah shares with Maurice. Pebbled glass doors seal in the mist, fill the tub with soft, ambiguous luminescence, patterning their skin with diffused nebula light. Cowboy stands under the running heat for a long time, soap and water pouring in translucent waves down his chest while Sarah reaches up to work on his muscles, finding them strung like steel wire with all the unvoiced screams of the last five days with Roon, each shriek encoded on the muscle pattern like data in crystal. She takes her time, works on each muscle in turn, feeling him grow alive again under her fingers. Then she turns the water cold and watches a shudder run up his back. His eyes come alive for the first time in days.

Sarah turns the water off and Cowboy puts his arms around her, presses his cool skin against hers. With her cheek she blots the droplets on his shoulder. Standing on the scarred reflective surface of the tub, they are moving against each other before either of them quite realizes it.

She’s uncertain when Cowboy picks her up and carries her toward her room. Sarah can’t tell if he really belongs, if he’s sufficiently a part of things here... There’s a difference, she thinks, between letting someone into your body and letting him into the place where you live–– but then she realizes that she wants him here, that he’s not a false note in her walk-up hideaway. She puts her arms around his neck, surprised to find herself excited by the fact of someone tall and strong enough to carry her so easily, freeing her from gravity in the cradle of his forearms. She watches water droplets appearing from his nape hair, running down the thick muscle of his pilot’s neck. Feels his hard pectoral against her shoulder. Lets her head hang back, shaking it, feeling the water flying from her hair in parabolic rainbow trajectories. Laughs. Decides to let things happen.

The both of them together have a tendency to overflow her narrow mattress, their long legs and arms tangling on the dark polished floor, heads lolling to leave wet beaded traceries on the polymer... It doesn’t seem to matter much. Eventually they’re facing each other, sitting up with Sarah in his lap. Their motion is slow, almost imperceptible, a renewed acquaintance of near-frictionless membranes sliding slower than the tolling chimes of breath and heartbeat. Window light patterns his chest with distorted crossword patterns; she reaches out to touch them, fill in the bright squares with an alphabet of her own invention, touches, nail-scratches, brushes with the backs of her knuckles or the pads of fingertips. Cowboy looks at her with a silent intensity, and she finds this unnerving until she begins to feel that for the first time he’s all here, not drifting in and out of some strange space hidden behind his artificial eyes, but looking at her as if there’s something there he hasn’t seen before. She gazes back at him, into the hard dilated pupils that seem to absorb her, absorbing the radiance she has become, bottomless singularities planted in Cowboy’s head... She reaches for him and comes, Cowboy’s face dissolving as if a sheet of gelid rain had fallen before her unfocused eyes, the breath bottled in her throat, burning her lungs.

Sarah lets the air out a sip at a time, feeling Cowboy’s eyes still on her. She runs her fingers through his short fair hair. They’re moving a little faster now they’ve become acquainted. She reaches forward and pushes him onto his back, crouching over him. Sunlight warms the side of her face. Her thigh muscles are as taut as bridge cable, an arch spanning his hips. He reaches up to touch her breasts, cupping them, raising his head to lick the nipples. Sarah throws her head back, feeling hair ends tickling her shoulder blades. Packets of energy rush along the highways of her nerves, sirens dopplering up and down, their speedometer needles twitching, rising higher, climbing toward the speed of light. Cowboy leans back and she feels the touch of his eyes... She comes again, superluminal.

Impact, splash, into the heart of a star. Sarah is a pulsar, flinging burning photons in widening circles... She’s surprised her binary’s flesh is still cool, that she isn’t giving him sunburn. He’s on top of her now, their orbits having swung round each other. There’s a crumpled wet towel under her left shoulder. Slow music throbs up from the bar below. The room is beginning to blueshift again. Sarah raises her hands, clasps Cowboy’s head. He comes a half second before she does, a mutual gravitational collapse. She folds her arms around him, drawing him toward her, cherishing the touch of his breath on her neck.

The music crawls slowly beneath Sarah’s spine. Cowboy raises himself again. Her arms still wreathe his neck. She wonders if this is someone she could get sentimental about.

His storm-cloud eyes rain down on her. She can feel parts of herself coming to life. His voice is slow, like a recording at half speed. “Reno’s alive,” he says. “I just talked to him.”

TEMPEL PROMISES DELIVERY OF HUNTINGTON’S CURE IN 6-10 WEEKS

ANTICIPATION MOUNTS

Two sets of purposeful figures move through the confusion of the bullet station, the square Caucasian jaws of Cowboy’s Flash Force guards thrusting against the current set up by the suspicious black faces of the Gold Coast Maximum Law people that Michael the Hetman is sending to New Mexico to help establish a secure communications link. Mercenaries can’t afford overlong memories, but these two groups have tangled in the past, and though neither is being outright hostile, they’re obviously not going to make friends anytime soon.

Sarah can feel the tension. Cowboy is already looking unhappy at the prospect of sharing a ride to Santa Fe with this crowd. He pulls up his jacket collar and glances around the platform.

A hawker wanders by, selling drugs from a cart. A disconnected female voice, in three languages, announces schedules, tracks, numbers.

“I’ll see you in a couple weeks,” Sarah says.

“See you then.”

The faces circle, black and white, weaving their invisible pattern of defense, of power, moving outside of Sarah’s volition like Orbital constellations involved in some vast and vastly subtle game of positional strategy... Their presence inhibits her. She tries to shrug off their influence, fails.

“You’ll like the mountains,” Cowboy says.

“I’ll look forward.”

Spanish numbers accumulate in the air, flitting like birds around their pointless spoken banalities. Fuck it, Sarah decides, and grabs Cowboy by the sleeves of his jacket. “Hey, Cowboy.” She looks up into his lean, impassive face. “Are we friends, or allies?”

A cold smile twitches at the corners of Cowboy’s mouth. “I guess we’re friends,” he says.

“When we can afford to be.”

A chime of steel amusement vibrates through her. “Yeah.” She nods slowly. “That’s how it looks from here.”

“Call Reno when you can,” Cowboy says. “He’s lonely where he is.”

She remembers the white-brained cyborg zombie in his dark, glowing little Pennsylvania womb, then imagines his disembodied spectral voice coming out of some disconnected piece of crystal, pulsing into her ear... The man was ghost enough when he was in his body, no sense in asking to be haunted. She shrugs. “I’ll try. But the guy spooked me enough when he was alive.”

Cowboy frowns a little. “He can help. He’s got a lot of money stashed away.”

“Okay. I’ll call him. Promise.”

They say good-bye. Sarah watches his tall form, orbited by his black and white satellites, fading down the fluorescent-lit platform, moving down the tunnel toward the vanishing point, and wonders if it’s a good idea to see him again. She could arrange it easily enough, simply talk the Hetman into sending someone else out to the Dodger when the time came... There are commitments she has made, to herself, to her brother, and they allow no indulgence in sentiment. Letting people into the places where you live, she knows, gives them a license to injure you, and she’s had injuries enough as it is.

Her Maximum Law guard is looking impatient. She rates a bodyguard now that she knows the Hetman’s plan– this boy’s probably got orders to kill her if he can’t keep her from capture. After this he’ll take her to a hotel, where she’ll be easier to keep secure: she won’t be visiting her hideaway at the Blue Silk anytime soon. She turns her back on her guard as the drug vendor comes by and buys a whiff of snapcoke. Well-being coils in helixes of pleasure along her veins. She buys some cigarettes for Daud and begins to move toward the exit.

She’ll feel good when she visits Daud, at least until the drug wears off.

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