The Shockwave Rider (20 page)

The dog curled his wrinkled upper lip and inhaled a long slow breath, then gave a brisk headshake and a faint growl. Elegantly he lowered his massive hindquarters to the floor, keeping his eyes on the newcomers.

Kate’s fingers relaxed, but she was trembling.

“He says you’re clear,” Horovitz announced. “I understand this poker pretty well, you know. Not as well as he understands us humans, maybe, but there it is. Right, sit down!” With a wave toward a nearby lounge; he himself dropped into an armchair facing it and produced an ancient charred pipe from one of his immense pockets. “What can I do for you?”

They looked at one another. With sudden decision Kate said, “We found our way here more or less by accident. We were in Lap-of-the-Gods and before that I’d been to Protempore. They can’t stand comparison with Precipice. We’d like to visit with you for a while.”

“Mm-hm. Okay … probably.” Horovitz gestured to the dog. “Nat, go tell the councilmen we got applicants, please.”

Natty Bumppo rose, snuffed one last time at the strangers, and padded out. The door had a handle which he could open himself; punctiliously, he also closed it.

Following the animal with his eyes, Sandy said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you our names.”

“Kate and Sandy,” Horovitz murmured. “I knew to expect you. Polly Ryan said she met you on the railcar.”

“She—uh … ?”

“You heard of phones, I guess. We have ’em. Appearances to the contrary. Maybe you were reading up on us in that bad guidebook.” It was protruding from Kate’s side pocket; he leveled an accusing finger at it. “What we don’t have is veephone service. The feds have been on at us for years to link into the data-net on the same token basis as the other paid-avoidance communities, but to satisfy their computers you have to have veephone-sized bandpass capacity. They give all kinds of nice persuasive reasons—they keep reminding us of how Transcience was almost taken over by a criminal syndicate, and how nearly everybody in Ararat was fooled by a phony preacher wanted in seven different states for fraud and confidence-trickery … but we prefer to stay out and solve our own problems. They can’t oblige us to tie in so long as our taxes amount to more than our PA grants. So, on principle, no veephones. Don’t let that mislead you, though, into imagining we’re backward. We’re just about the size of a late medieval market town, and we offer almost precisely one hundred times as many facilities.”

“So you’ve proved it is cheaper to operate on an ecofast basis!” Sandy leaned forward eagerly.

“You noticed? Very interesting! Most people have preconceived ideas about ecofast building; they have to be factory products, they come in one size and one shape and if you want a bigger one you can only stick two together. In fact, as you say, once you really understand the principle you find you’ve accidentally eliminated most of your concealed overheads. Been to Trianon, either of you?”

“Visiting friends,” Kate said.

“They boast about running at seventy-five percent energy utilization, and they still have to take an annual subsidy from G2S because their pattern is inherently so wasteful. We run at eighty to eighty-five percent. There isn’t a community on the planet that’s doing better.”

Horovitz appended a half-embarrassed smile to the remark, as though to liberate it from any suspicion of conceit.

“And you’re responsible for that?” Sandy demanded. “The woman we met—Polly—said you do most of the building.”

“Sure, but I can’t claim the credit. I didn’t figure out the principles, nor how to apply them. That was—”

Kate butted in. “Oh, yes! The railcar-driver said this is the original Disasterville U.S.A.!”

“You heard about that deal?” Horovitz had been loading his pipe with coarse dark tobacco; he almost dropped the pouch and pipe both. “Well,
hell!
So they haven’t managed to clamp the lid down tight!”

“Ah … What do you mean?”

A shrug and a grunt. “The way I hear it, if you punch for data about the Disasterville study, or about anything to do with Claes College, over the regular continental net, you get some kind of discouragement. Like it’s entered as ‘of interest only to specialist students,’ quote and unquote. Any rate, that’s what I heard from Brad. Brad Compton, our librarian.”

“But that’s awful!” Kate stared at him. “I never did actually punch for those data—my father had a full set of Disasterville monographs, and I read them in my early teens. But … Well, isn’t it important that one of the projects they dreamed up at Claes turned into a functional community?”

“Oh, I think so. What sheriff wouldn’t, with a crime rate of nearly zero?”

“Are you serious?”

“Mm-hm. We never had a murder yet, and it’s two years since we had anybody hospitalized after a fight, and as to robbery—well, stealing just ain’t a habit around here.” A faint grin. “Occasionally it gets imported, but I swear there’s no future in it either way.”

Kate said slowly, “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Is this place the reason why Claes went under? Did the really bright people stay on here instead of going home?”

Horovitz smiled. “Young lady, you’re the first visitor I’ve met who got that without having to be told. Yup; Precipice skimmed the cream off Claes, and the rump that was left just faded away. As I understand it, that was because only the people who took their own ideas seriously were prepared to face the responsibility entailed. And ridicule, too. After all, at the same time other refugee settlements were at the mercy of crooks and unscrupulous fake evangelists—like we were just talking about—so who was to believe that some crazy mix composed of bits of Ghirardelli and Portmeirion and Valencia and Taliesin and God knows what besides would turn out right when everything else went wrong?”

“I think you must like us,” Sandy said suddenly.

Horovitz blinked at him. “What?”

“I never saw a façade fall down so fast. The homey-folksy bit, I mean. It didn’t suit you anyhow; it’s no loss. But on top of being a builder and a sheriff, what are you? I mean, where did you start?”

Horovitz pulled the corners of his mouth down in a lugubrious parody of dismay.

“I plead guilty,” he said after a pause. “Sure, I regard myself as local, but I have a doctorate in social interaction from Austin, Texas, and a master’s in structural technology from Columbia. Which is not something I customarily admit to visitors, even the bright ones—
particularly
not to the bright ones, because they tend to come here for all possible wrong reasons. We’re interested in being functional, not in being dissected by in-and-out gangs of cultural anthropologists.”

“How long are you going to wait before becoming famous?”

“Hmm! You
are
a perceptive shivver, aren’t you? But a fair question rates a fair answer. We expect half a century will be enough.”

“Are we going to survive that long?”

Horovitz shook his head heavily. “We don’t know. Does anybody?”

The door swung wide. Natty Bumppo returned, giving Horovitz a nudge with his muzzle as he passed. Behind him came a tall stately black woman in a gaudy shirt and tight pants, arm in arm with a fat white man—heavily tanned—in shorts and sandals like the railcar driver.

Horovitz introduced them as Suzy Dellinger, the mayor, and Brad Compton; they were this year’s councilmen for the town. He gave a condensed but accurate version of his conversation with Kate and Sandy. The new arrivals listened intently. Having heard him out, Brad Compton made an extraordinary comment.

“Does Nat approve?”

“Seems to,” grunted Horovitz.

“Then I guess we found new tenants for the Thorgrim place. Suzy?” Glancing at the mayor.

“Sure, why not?” She turned to Kate and Sandy. “Welcome to Precipice! Now, from here you go back to the square, take the second alley on your right, and you’re on Drunkard’s Walk. Follow it to the intersection with Great Circle Course. The house on the near left of that corner is yours for as long as you care to stay.”

There was a moment of blank incredulity. Then Kate exclaimed, “Hold it! You’re going far too fast! I don’t know for certain what Sandy’s plans are, but I have to get back to KC in a few days’ time. You seem to have decided I’m a permanent settler.”

Sandy chimed in. “What’s more, on the basis of a dog’s opinion! Even if he is modded, I don’t see how—”

“Modded?” Horovitz broke in. “No, Nat’s not modified. I guess his however-many-great grandfather must have been tinkered with a bit, but he’s just the way he grew up. Best of his litter, admittedly.”

“You mean there are a lot of dogs like him around Precipice?” Kate demanded.

“A couple of hundred by now,” Mayor Dellinger replied. “Descendants of a pack that wandered into town in the summer of 2003. There was a young stud, and two fertile bitches each with four pups, and an old sterile bitch was leading them. She’d been neutered. Doc. Squibbs—he’s our veterinarian—he’s always maintained they must have escaped from some research station and gone looking for a place where they’d be better treated. Which was here. They’re great with kids, they can almost literally talk, and if only they lived to a ripe old age there’d be nothing wrong with them at all. Trouble is, they last seven or eight years at most, and that’s not fair, is it, Nat?” She reached out to scratch Natty Bumppo behind the ears, and he gave one absent thump with his thick tail. “But we got friends working on that, and we do our best to breed them for longevity.”

Another pause. Eventually Sandy said with determination, “Okay, so your dogs can work miracles. But handing us a house, without even asking what we intend to do while we’re here—”

Brad Compton gave a hoot of laughter. He broke off in confusion.

“Forgive Brad,” Horovitz said. “But I thought we’d been over that. Did you miss my point? I told you, we offer a hundred times as many services as a medieval town the same size. You don’t just arrive, squat a house, and live on your federal avoidance grant forever and a day, amen. Now and then people try it. They become unhappy and disillusioned and drift away.”

“Well, sure. I mean, I realize you must have all kinds of work to offer us … but that’s not what I’m driving at. I want to know what the hell supports this community.”

The three Precipicians smiled at one another. Mayor Dellinger said, “Shall I tell them?”

“Sure, it’s a job for the mayor,” Compton answered.

“Okay.” She turned to face Kate and Sandy. “We run an operation with no capital, no shareholders and scarcely any plant. Yet we receive a donated income fifteen times as large as our collective avoidance grants.”

“What?
”

“That’s right.” Her tone was sober. “We provide a service which some people—some very rich people indeed—have found so precious that they’ve done things like covenant to pay us a tithe of their salary for life. Once we were left the income on an estate of sixty million, and though the family tried like hell to overturn the will in the courts … I believe you just recognized us, didn’t you?”

Shaking, fists clenched, mouth so dry he was almost unable to shape the proper words, Sandy blurted out his guess.

“There’s only one thing you could be. But— Oh, my God. Are you really Hearing Aid?”

CROSS TALK

“After which I immediately wanted to ask how they managed to keep that incredible promise of theirs, but—”

“Wait, wait!” Freeman was half out of his chair, peering closely at his data console as though shortening the range could alter what the instrument display was reporting.

“Is something wrong?”

“I … No, nothing’s wrong. I merely observed a rather remarkable event.” Freeman sank back in his chair, and with an air of guilt produced a handkerchief to mop his face. All of a sudden sweat had burst out in rivers on his forehead.

There was a brief silence. Then:

“Damn, you’re right. This is the first time you ever transferred me from regressed to present mode and I didn’t have to be steered back to the same subject. Ve-ery interesting! Don’t bother telling me this indicates how deeply I was affected; I know, and I still am. What I learned from that first conversation at Precipice left me with a weird tip-of-the-tongue sensation, as though I’d realized the people there had the answer to some desperately urgent problem, only I couldn’t work out what problem the answer belonged with. … Incidentally, please tell me something. I think I deserve it. After all, I can’t prevent you from making me tell you everything, can I?”

Freeman’s face was glistening as though he were being roasted on a spit before an immensely hot fire. He mopped away more perspiration before he replied.

“Go ahead and ask.”

“If it had become known that I’d called Hearing Aid and talked for an hour about Miranda and myself and Tarnover … would I have been expelled via an operating theater?”

Freeman hesitated, folding and refolding his handkerchief prior to returning it to his pocket. At long last he did so, and with reluctance spoke.

“Yes. With an IQ of 85 if you were lucky.”

As calmly as before: “What about Hearing Aid?”

“Nothing would have been done to them.” The admission was almost inaudible. “You must know why.”

“Oh, sure. Sorry—I admit I only asked to see you squirm with embarrassment. But there’s such a David-and-Goliath pattern about Precipice versus the U.S. government. Want me to continue?”