by Ian Stewart
He grunted. He couldn't let that affect his judgment. He took two quick paces and grabbed the kid by the leg, flipping him onto his back. With the other hand he tilted the child's chin upwards, exposing the throat. He laid the blade of his hunting knife against the defenseless skin . . .
The child flinched, terrified. It began to whimper. A trail of snot ran from one nostril and down a muddy cheek.
Carlesson swore, and slid the knife back into its sheath. He could no more kill the kid in cold blood than he had been able to kill Kandinsky—and he'd been begging for death. Carlesson had no compunctions about killing animals, and no respect for the law, but now he'd discovered—to his surprise—that he drew the line at people.
Shit. Now what?
His training had emphasized general principles over rigid rules. A Hunter was supposed to think things out for himself.
Secrecy was the prime directive. But the directive didn't say how secrecy should be maintained. It authorized the killing of witnesses, if that could be done without creating a worse danger of discovery, but it did not make their murder mandatory . . .
Okay, suppose he did kill the child. Then he'd have to dispose of the body. The only way he could think of was burial, and the ground was either as hard as rock or the consistency of porridge. In either case, whatever he managed to bury could rapidly be unburied by hyenas. Gathering vultures would be visible for miles. Already he could see a few of the ugly birds circling, attracted by the dead cheetahs. Soon there would be more. If he left a corpse, the remains would quickly be discovered. The kid was somebody's child, the parents would be looking . . .
He needed to get out fast, before somebody showed up. He knew he was rationalizing, but it made sense: it wasn't sensible to leave a dead child as evidence. It might well trigger another of those erratic crackdowns on Hunters.
Though it wouldn't be a bad idea to leave something sufficiently misleading . . .
There was only one answer, and Carlesson was pleased by how neatly his reasoning led to it. Send the kid off with the dead cheetahs. He'd be missed, no doubt about it—but it would take a while, maybe a day or more, before the parents got sufficiently worried to call in the authorities. By then, he and the child would both be long gone.
He began muttering into his wristnode. There was a pickup to arrange.
The autogiro swooped in from the northeast, just before noon when the survsats were looking the other way. It was a conspicuous bright yellow, with sky safari painted prominently along both sides in green.
Carlesson averted his eyes as it dropped to the ground in a billowing cloud of dust. The engine revs dropped to a tick-over, and the pilot jumped from the doorway, half crouching to stay well clear of the circling vanes.
Together they loaded the two cheetahs and the child. Car-lesson had cut out the flaps of hide bearing transponder tattoos—a pity to damage the fur, but there was no choice—and left them miles away among some bushes. They would eventually disappear off the Diversity Polices screens—with luck they'd think it was death by natural causes. The pilot had been warned that there was a child, and he wasn't going to argue with Car-lesson whatever his intentions might be. The kid was the Hunter's problem. It didn't even matter if the kid saw the pilot's face, because the kid would shortly be disposed of.
Carlesson was new to the game, so he didn't know that this kind of thing had happened before. The kid would leave the country by the same route as the dead cheetahs. After that, the pilot had no idea what would happen to any of them, and he didn't care—but he knew they'd never be seen again. His job was to deliver the human and animal cargo as directed. Then he could get the 'giro packed safely away in its shelter and reconfigure its livery memory back to camouflage khaki. Sky Safari was a well-known tour operator, based in Pretoria, but this 'giro wasn't one of theirs. It was a Korean copy of one of their Franklin P45's equipped with a military-issue smart-paint skin.
The 'giro rose, twirled, and began zigzagging its way toward the border with Mozambique. If anyone saw it, with radar or naked eye, they would assume it was looking for wildlife to amuse its tourist passengers.
Satisfied, Carlesson turned his mind to the one remaining task: getting the hell out of there before the Diversity Police dropped by. He checked his wristnode, confirmed his position and bearings, and hiked off across the veldt, whistling.
8
Democratic Republic of Free China, 2210
The Democratic Republic of Free China was neither democratic nor free. It wasn't even a republic. It was, though, indubitably Chinese, having reverted to the ancient traditions of that innately self-sufficient nation. With two-fifths of the worlds total population, it was the largest single-language politico-economic unit on Earth, and it probably had the largest gross domestic product—there were no official figures and its economy was as closed and protectionist as its ruling classes could contrive. Its borders were almost completely closed to traffic—in both directions. When the Pause took root in the outside world and technology became, for half a century, something to be avoided, China turned inward upon itself and resumed its age-old habits. From outside it was now impossible to be sure who—if anyone—was in charge.
Free China also constituted the largest urban sprawl on the planet. An unbroken crescent of densely packed buildings stretched from Shenyang in the northeast through Beijing and then south to Xuzhou and Nanjing, to run into a second vast crescent radiating from Shanghai. The once separate cities of Xi'an, Guangzhou, and Wuhan had become dense conglomerations in a single massive metropolitan area. In between were innumerable cities that a century earlier had been minor towns; packed in between the cities were town upon town upon town, and everything was linked together by ribbon developments that had grown up alongside the main rivers, canals, and highways. Yet even the densest accumulations of high-rise towers were never more than a few miles from areas of intensive agriculture, which were spattered across the landscape in fractal profusion. In satellite photographs it looked more like a Jackson Pollock painting than a country
When the rest of the world emerged from the madness of the Pause and began to restructure itself on the basis of low populations and nonpolluting, nonproactive technology, Free China found itself committed irrevocably to a very different trajectory. The rest of the world collectively renamed itself Ecotopia, made sure its low population stayed low, and did its best to find an intelligent way to combine technology and environmentalism. There, the robot economy that had begun in the late twentieth century, skipped a beat in the twenty-first, and powered un-stoppably ahead in the twenty-second, had not so much turned conventional economic theory upside down as shredded it to ribbons and scattered it to the four winds. "Laws" of supply and demand and diminishing returns revealed themselves as temporary misunderstandings based on the limitations of human labor and the psychology of ownership. But while Ecotopia pursued a low-population, high-living solution to the dynamics of globally circulating wealth, Free Chinas idosyncratic ideology led it in quite another direction. Historically, China had always defaulted to isolationism and inscrutability, and it surged into the twenty-second century with the same indifference to the ways of the outside world that it had displayed in the minus twenty-second.
Free China was the closest thing on the planet to infinite suburbia—the "Ant Country" of complex systems theory in which almost the same pattern repeated itself a billion times over on every street corner, every cluster of government offices, every train station, every street vendor with his homemade cart. There was structure, of a kind—few people starved, organized crime never quite got itself organized enough to threaten whatever it was that held the country together, goods generally found their way to the intended destination unless they were stolen, mislaid, or destroyed by acts of God and man . . . But whatever the structure was, there was no way to sum it up in a few simple sentences. Not that there was no government: on the contrary, there were many, functioning on different geographical scales and with different and contradictor
y powers, adhering to legal codes so confused by uncoordinated amendments that even the juridical computers couldn't fathom them. It worked—but it worked like a huge, diverse ecology, not like the hierarchical rule of law and order. And, like an ecology, order somehow emerged from an infinite cascade of infinitesimal causes and effects.
What commodities did trade across its borders were mostly illicit—not that it was any easier to determine what actions were illegal than it was to find out who was responsible for what. The legal and paralegal codes of its overlapping, ephemeral, fuzzy subcultures contradicted one another—and often themselves—and the main principle seemed to be that what was legal was whatever attracted the largest bribes.
Not that anyone could distinguish a bribe from a legitimate fee.
The economic walls that Free China had erected to protect itself from the changeable fashions of the barbarian world beyond were as sturdy as the Himalayas and just as immovable. The rock from which those walls were built, however, was . . . porous. With enough lubrication and enough pressure, two-way traffic could be squeezed through.
One such economic pore ran through the office of Wang Li-Po, assistant inspector of water taxation in the Sixth Communal Municipality Reeducational Office of Urban Renewal Project 512 in the city of Ningming in South Guangxi Provincial District. Not physically—the actual conduit for goods was a disused sewer system running beneath the border garrison at Pingxiang into Greater Vietnam—but this was where the lubrication was applied. Wang had no evidence regarding the source of that lubrication, and fervently wished never to acquire any, but he suspected from the nature of the imported articles that it must be Xi Ming-Kuo, reputedly a billionaire, widely credited as the mastermind behind a nationwide chain of tiny back-street shops that dealt, entirely legally, in "traditional" medicines.
Wang's role was to receive and disburse the necessary lubricant. He seldom supervised the deliveries himself, for reasons of security . . . but he had ways of finding out what was in them if he really needed to know, and once or twice he had succumbed to the temptation. Who except Xi would import bones, and even the frozen corpses, of exotic foreign animals? You couldn't eat a snow leopard—not at any normal meal, though some gourmets had astonishingly refined tastes—but you could sell its bones for more than his office pulled in in a year. The fur, oddly enough, was less valuable, though still worth more than a fair-sized house: it possessed an unearthly beauty, but had few medicinal virtues. Such a skin would sell for a lot more in the outside world's black market, and he was convinced that once the animal had been warmed and skinned, that's exactly where it would go. Not all barbarians were as foolish about such matters as their governments seemed to be. His Vietnamese informant kept telling him about persistent rumors of rhinoceros horns being smuggled across the nearby border—which for reasons Wang found incomprehensible were considered untouchable in the outside world—and that pointed even more clearly at Xi Ming-Kuo.
Just occasionally, the cargo was the warm, living body of a different kind of animal, one that walked on two legs and possessed the power of speech (once the drugs wore off). Which is how Moses Odingo entered the Democratic Republic of Free China.
"We ought to be vidivising this," said Bailey morosely. Prudence had used Angie's advance on the wheelers to spring her sister from jail, but now she was fighting to stay out of it herself—in public. "Cash, how come we never put in a bid for the contract?"
"I wanted to," Cashew replied. "Jonas convinced me not to."
Bailey drummed his fingertips on the tabletop, menace in his eyes. "He did what?"
Cash gave Bailey a sharp look and sighed. "Tell him, Jonas. He's too stupid—or too drunk—to work it out for himself." She kicked off her remaining shoe and leaned back in one of Angle Carver's comfortable armchairs. They should have been—they cost ten thousand dollars apiece. Angle said she kept the best chairs in another part of the house, for special occasions. Apparently these—real leather from the time when it was legal, saved from confiscation by a smart lawyer and a Historical Merit Waiver Certificate, and kept by virtue of her museum license— were for slumming.
If Cashew had been more sober, she would have felt very uncomfortable lounging on a strip of dead cow.
Jonas—who if asked would have pointed out that cows got a pretty good deal, better than most wild animals ever got, so why not let them pay the rent for their nice warm barns by donating their hides when they no longer needed them, because when all was said and done the ban on leather had been a political concession to the squeamish urban classes and a waste of renewable resources—gave Bailey a hard stare. "Isn't it obvious?"
"Should it be?"
"Don't be stubborn. Of course it is. Technically, we don't have the experience to vidivise paralegal docudrama. And ethic—"
"We didn't have the technical expertise to make Rose Red Cities, either, but that's what got us star—"
"That was a long time ago, and there wasn't any competition for that niche. Shit, nobody even knew it was a niche. Trial-by-vidivision is a hot commodity, there are twenty outfits a lot bigger than us who cut their teeth on it." He paused for breath, wondering how Bailey would react to the other reason. Hell, go for it. "Even if the Bandwidth Pro4der had gone nuts and by some bizarre accident we had secured the contract, ethically we owe it to Prudence Odingo not to help that nasty little bastard Charles Dunsmoore drag her professional reputation through the dirt."
So that was the real reason. "Jonas, she doesn't have a professional reputation. She's an offworld rockhound and a hustler. Whereas we need the money. If we don't land a new contract soon—"
"Bailey, we don't have the capability. Forget the ethics—we could never have put in a credible bid."
"I guess," Bailey conceded. God alone knew where the next contract would come from. But God didn't have an Xsite.
"Hey, look, there she is!" yelled Cashew, who had been in the business for a decade and still got excited when someone she knew showed up on the W
Prudence was trying to look confident, but the vidivision lighting rigs were daunting and the sudden reversal of her fortunes had left her nerves shredded. She looked defiant, diminished, and depressed. Her sister's problems had hit Prudence hard. Moses' disappearance had turned Charity into an emotional wreck, liable to dissolve in tears at any moment, and that was something that her sister had never had to cope with before. It was always Prudence who hovered on the edges of nervous breakdowns; Charity was the calm one, the steady one, the one with both feet on the solid earth of the African continent and her head no more than shoulder-height above it. She went to Charity for comfort. But now Moses had vanished from the face of the planet, and the only trace that the policemen had found was his toy memimal. In all likelihood he was dead. They might never find out what had happened.
Prudence knew she couldn't dwell on such matters now, though. Unless she put up a stunning performance, she stood a serious chance of losing the wheelers and the income they would have generated, not to mention having her ship confiscated. She wouldn't even be able to sell Tiglath-Pileser to set against bankruptcy And all because of that smarmy, conniving, cheating, lying little prick Charlie Dunsmoore! Again.
One day. . . she swore to herself and the silent cosmos, one day ril get even.
The W cameras zoomed in on her face. In the control room the director juxtaposed two angles that together looked like an old-fashioned jailbird mug shot—square view and profile. He liked clever historical allusions and was not above putting a bit of spin on his documentaries.
"Prudence looks worried sick," said Angle. "I don't think she believes that those lawyers I bought her will deliver."
"It's a difficult case to crack," said Cashew. "Of course, you could always consider buying her a new ship if she loses."
"Nope, dearie—wouldn't do any good if I bought her a fleet. If she loses, they'll pull her pilot's license. Nothing short of cosmetic surgery and a change of ID would change that, and we'd both end up in the pokey if a
nyone found out."
The inquiry had been organized on quasi-judicial lines. Prudence was permitted legal representation, and instead of a judge and jury there was a panel of five scientific assessors, including Sir Charles. The chair was as he had suggested to CEIdA: an elderly woman by the name of Elizabeth Strunck, editor-in-chief of Glyph, a leading archaeological journal. Everyone in the trade knew that Sir Charles and Strunck were always at loggerheads over her views about early Mycenaean pottery, and that made her ideal for the job because it made him look magnanimous.
The inquiry was now in its sixth day, and Prudence could see that despite all the efforts of her legal team it was going badly Sir Charles, assisted by a chain of expert witnesses which she knew he had helped line up, had done a thorough demolition job on her background, her professional expertise, and her (lack oO qualifications . . . which of course had been Sir Charles's fault, the thief. If he hadn't stolen her discovery, she'd have been the famous professor who'd established the age of the Sphinx and overturned two centuries of Egyptology . . .
Focus, girl.
Sir Charles had also tried to introduce witnesses to show that her previous career had been scientifically irresponsible and hovered at the bounds of legality Angle's legal hired hands had staved off that line of questioning, but the message had still gotten through to the panel of assessors, and the more times that stupid woman in the chair kept telling them to ignore it, the more the mud would stick.
She wondered just what viperous trick Sir Charles was nursing around his stony heart.
Sir Charles was clarifying a number of technical issues for the rest of the panel, explaining, for the umpteenth time, why the wheeler artifacts were obvious fakes. An assistant was distributing copies of magnetic resonance tomograms, cross-sectional diagrams made by noninvasive imaging, and Sir Charles was explaining their significance.