Wireless (32 page)

Roscoe sat and stared at her dumbly.

“Cheer up! You’re going to be famous—and they won’t be able to put you away! All we have to do is get you to Montreal. There’s a crossing set up at the Mohawk Reservation, and I’ve got a rental car in the lot next door to the Days Inn. While I’m at it, can you sign these?” She thrust a bundle of papers at him and winced apologetically. “Exclusive contract with the
Wall Street Journal.
It covers your expenses—flight included—plus fifteen grand for your story. I tried to hold out for more, but you know how things are.” She shrugged.

He stared at her, stunned into bovine silence. She pinched his cheek and shoved the papers into his hands.
“Bon voyage, mon ami,”
she said. She kissed each cheek, then pulled out a compact and fixed the concealer on her lip.

Paris in springtime was everything it was meant to be and more. Roscoe couldn’t sit down in a cafe without being smartmobbed by unwirer groupies who wanted him to sign their repeaters and tell them war stories about his days as a guerrilla fighter for technological freedom. They were terribly, awfully young, just kids, Marcel’s age or younger, and they were heartbreaking in their attempts to understand his crummy French. The girls were beautiful, the boys were handsome, and they laughed and smoked and ordered him glasses of wine until he couldn’t walk. He’d put on twenty pounds, and when he did the billboard ads for Be, Inc. and Motorola, they had to strap him into a girdle. LE CHOIX AMÉRICAIN in bold sans-serif letters underneath a picture of him scaling a building side with a Moto batarang clenched in his teeth.

Truth be told, he couldn’t even keep up with it all. Hardly a week went by without a new business popping up, a new bit of technological gewgaggery appearing on the tables of the Algerian street vendors by the Eiffel Tower. He couldn’t even make sense of half the ads on the Metro.

But life was good. He had a very nice apartment with a view and a landlady who chased away the paparazzi with stern French and a broom. He could get four bars of signal on his complimentary Be laptop from the bathroom, and ten bars from the window, and the throng and thrum of the city and the net filled his days and nights.

And yet.

He was a foreigner. A curiosity. A fish, transplanted from the sea to Marineland, swimming in a tank where the tourists could come and gawp. He slept fitfully, and in his dreams, he was caged in a cell at Leavenworth, back on the inside, in maximum security, pacing the yard in solitary stillness.

He woke to the sound of his phone trilling. The ring was the special one, the one that only one person had the number for. He struggled out of bed and lunged for his jacket, fumbled the phone out.

“Sylvie?”

“Roscoe! God, I know it’s early, but God, I just had to tell you!”

He looked at the window. It was still dark. On his bedstand, the clock glowed 4:21.

“What? What is it?”

“God! Valenti’s been called to testify at a Senate hearing on unwiring. He’s stepping down as chairman. I just put in a call to his office and into his dad’s office at the MPAA. The lines were
jammed
. I’m on my way to get the Acela into DC.”

“You’re covering it for the
Journal
?”

“Better. I got a
book deal
! My agent ran a bidding war between Simon and Schuster and St. Martin’s until three a.m. last night. I’m hot shit. The whole fucking thing is coming down like a house of shit. I’ve had three congressional staffers fax me discussion drafts of bills—one to fund 300 million dollars in DARPA grants to study TCP/IP, another to repeal the terrorism statutes on network activity, and a compulsory license on movies and music online. God! If only you could see it.”

“That’s—amazing,” Roscoe said. He pictured her in the cab on the way to Grand Central, headset screwed in, fixing her makeup, dressed in a smart spring suit, off to meet with the Hill Rats.

“It’s incredible. It’s better than I dreamed.”

“Well . . .” he said. He didn’t know what to say. “See if you can get me a pardon, okay?” The joke sounded lame even to him.

“What?” There was a blare of taxi horns. “Oh, crap, Roscoe, I’m sorry. It’ll work out, you’ll see. Clemency or amnesty or something.”

“We can talk about it next month, okay?” She’d booked the tickets the week before, and they had two weeks of touring on the Continent planned.

“Oh, Roscoe, I’m sorry. I can’t do it. The book’s due in twelve weeks. Afterward, okay? You understand, don’t you?”

He pulled back the curtains and looked out at the foreign city, looking candlelit in the night. “I understand, sweetie,” he said. “This is great work. I’m proud of you.”

Another blare of horns from six thousand miles away. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you from the Hill, okay?”

“Okay,” Roscoe said. But she’d already hung up.

He had six bars on his phone, and Paris was lit up with invisible radio waves, lit up with coverage and innovation and smart, trim boys and girls who thought he was a hero, and six thousand miles away, the real unwiring was taking place.

He looked down at his slim silver phone, glowing with blue LEDs, a gift from Nokia. He tossed it from hand to hand, then he opened the window and chucked it three stories down to the street. It made an unsatisfying clatter as it disintegrated on the pavement.

Snowball’s Chance

The louring sky, half-past pregnant with a caul of snow, pressed down on Davy’s head like the promise of tomorrow’s hangover. He glanced up once, shivered, then pushed through the doorway into the Deid Nurse and the smog of fag fumes within.

His sometime conspirator Tam the Tailer was already at the bar. “Awright, Davy?”

Davy drew a deep breath, his glasses steaming up the instant he stepped through the heavy blackout curtain, so that the disreputable pub was shrouded in a halo of icy iridescence that concealed its flaws. “Mine’s a Deuchars.” His nostrils flared as he took in the seedy mixture of aromas that festered in the Deid Nurse’s atmosphere—so thick you could cut it with an ax, Morag had said once with a sniff of her lopsided snot-siphon, back in the day when she’d had aught to say to Davy. “Fuckin’ Baltic oot there the night, an’ nae kiddin’.” He slid his glasses off and wiped them, then looked around tiredly. “An’ deid tae the world in here.”

Tam glanced around as if to be sure the pub population hadn’t magically doubled between mouthfuls of seventy bob. “Ah widnae say that.” He gestured with his nose—pockmarked by frostbite—at the snug in the corner. Once the storefront for the Old Town’s more affluent ladies of the night, it was now unaccountably popular with students of the gaming fraternity, possibly because they had been driven out of all the trendier bars in the neighborhood for yacking too much and not drinking enough (much like the whores before them). Right now a bunch of threadbare LARPers were in residence, arguing over some recondite point of lore. “They’re havin’ enough fun for a barrel o’ monkeys by the sound o’ it.”

“An’ who can blame them?” Davy hoisted his glass. “Ah just wish they’d keep their shite aff the box.” The pub, in an effort to compensate for its lack of a food license, had installed a huge and dodgy screen that teetered precariously over the bar: it was full of muddy field, six LARPers leaping.

“Dinnae piss them aff, Davy—they’ve a’ got swords.”

“Ah wis jist kiddin’. Ah didnae catch ma lottery the night, that’s a’ Ah’m sayin’.”

“If ye win, it’ll be a first.” Tam stared at his glass. “An’ whit wid ye dae then, if yer numbers came up?”

“Whit, the big yin?” Davy put his glass down, then unzipped his parka’s fast-access pouch and pulled out a fag packet and lighter. Condensation immediately beaded the plastic wrapper as he flipped it open. “Ah’d pay aff the hoose, for starters. An’ the child support. An’ then—” He paused, eyes wandering to the dog-eared NO SMOKING sign behind the bar. “Ah, shit.” He flicked his Zippo, stroking the end of a cigarette with the flame from the burning coal oil. “If Ah wis young again, Ah’d move, ye ken? But Ah’m no, Ah’ve got roots here.” The sign went on to warn of lung cancer (curable) and two-thousand-euro fines (laughable, even if enforced). Davy inhaled, grateful for the warmth flooding his lungs. “An’ there’s Morag an’ the bairns.”

“Heh.” Tam left it at a grunt, for which Davy was grateful. It wasn’t that he thought Morag would ever come back to him, but he was sick to the back teeth of people who thought they were his friends telling him that she wouldn’t, not unless he did this or said that.

“Ah could pay for the bairns tae go east. They’re young enough.” He glanced at the doorway. “It’s no right, throwin’ snowba’s in May.”

“That’s global warmin’.” Tam shrugged with elaborate irony, then changed the subject. “Where d’ye think they’d go? Ukraine? New ’Beria?”

“Somewhaur there’s grass and nae glaciers.” Pause. “An’ real beaches wi’ sand an’ a’.” He frowned and hastily added, “Dinnae get me wrong, Ah ken how likely that is.” The collapse of the West Antarctic ice shelf two decades ago had inundated every established coastline; it had also stuck the last nail in the coffin of the Gulf Stream, plunging the British Isles into a subarctic deep freeze. Then the Americans had made it worse—at least for Scotland—by putting a giant parasol into orbit to stop the rest of the planet roasting like a chicken on a spit. Davy had learned all about global warming in geography classes at school—back when it hadn’t happened—in the rare intervals when he wasn’t dozing in the back row or staring at Yasmin MacConnell’s hair. It wasn’t until he was already paying a mortgage and the second kid was on his way that what it meant really sank in. Cold. Eternal cold, deep in your bones. “Ah’d like tae see a real beach again, someday before Ah die.”

“Ye could save for a train ticket.”

“Away wi’ ye! Where’d Ah go tae?” Davy snorted, darkly amused. Flying was for the hyperrich these days, and anyway, the nearest beaches with sand and sun were in the Caliphate, a long day’s TGV ride south through the Channel Tunnel and across the Gibraltar Bridge, in what had once been the Northern Sahara Desert. As a tourist destination, the Caliphate had certain drawbacks, a lack of topless sunbathing beauties being only the first on the list. “It’s a’ just as bad whauriver ye go. At least here ye can still get pork scratchings.”

“Aye, weel.” Tam raised his glass, just as a stranger appeared in the doorway. “An’ then there’s some that dinnae feel the cauld.” Davy glanced round to follow the direction of his gaze. The stranger was oddly attired in a lightweight suit and tie, as if he’d stepped out of the middle of the previous century, although his neat goatee and the two small brass horns implanted on his forehead were more contemporary touches. He noticed Davy staring and nodded, politely enough, then broke eye contact and ambled over to the bar. Davy turned back to Tam, who responded to his wink. “Take care noo, Davy. Ye’ve got ma number.” With that, he stood up, put his glass down, and shambled unsteadily toward the toilets.

This put Davy on his lonesome next to the stranger, who leaned on the bar and glanced at him sideways with an expression of amusement. Davy’s forehead wrinkled as he stared in the direction of Katie the barwoman, who was just now coming back up the cellar steps with an empty coal powder cartridge in one hand. “My round?” asked the stranger, raising an eyebrow.

“Aye. Mine’s a Deuchars if yer buyin’ . . .” Davy, while not always quick on the uptake, was never slow on the barrel: if this underdressed southerner could afford a heated taxi, he could certainly afford to buy Davy some beer. Katie nodded and rinsed her hands under the sink—however well-sealed they left the factory, coal cartridges always leaked like printer toner had once done—and picked up two glasses.

“New roond aboot here?” Davy asked after a moment.

The stranger smiled. “Just passing through—I visit Edinburgh every few years.”

“Aye.” Davy could relate to that.

“And yourself?”

“Ah’m frae Pilton.” Which was true enough; that was where he’d bought the house with Morag all those years ago, back when folks actually wanted to buy houses in Edinburgh. Back before the pack ice closed the Firth for six months of every year, back before the rising sea level drowned Leith and Ingliston, and turned Arthur’s Seat into a frigid coastal headland looming grey and stark above the permafrost. “Whereaboots d’ye come frae?”