“Content. Twisty switchbacks, a lot of tight, total-reverse turns matched with some equally extreme verticals. If you can run this at speed, Baja’ll be a piece of cake.”
“For what it’s worth,” he noted, “analysis indicates other sets of tracks, comparatively fresh.”
“Pity we don’t have a record of his tire tread.”
“I could access the manufacturer’s data base. New equipment, recently purchased; with enhancement I could probably get you a decent determination on whether or not it’s a match.”
“Through channels? You’re allowed to do this?”
“Hardly, on either count. That way’d take too long. Actually, so might this. But it’s something to file away for future reference.”
“No such thing as a locked door for you, eh, chum?”
“To each according to his ability, my dear.”
“Ah, what the hell, worse comes to worst, you could always buy the stupid company to get the information, same as you did that drone.”
“Don’t think it hasn’t been done.”
She took a turn a little faster than she should have, skidding out a touch, braking too hard, a tight call that she almost got away with but something flashed from her offside peripheral vision, worst possible moment for a distraction, and she yelled a futile protest as the bike seemed to collapse under her. She wrenched her leg free and lay sprawled on her back, helmet off, catching her breath and feeling like an absolute fool. With an effort, she got to her feet, checking to see that arms and legs still worked fine, no cuts, no bad bruises. Then came time to make the far greater effort needed to haul the bike up on its wheels, but once she’d succeeded and was trying to lever it onto its stand, she discovered the ground was too soft. That was why she’d spun out, there was a thick layer of sand that made the solid ground underneath slick as ice So she settled for leaning the damn thing against the near-vertical wall the trail ran along.
She was panting from exertion and heat, took some more water from her canteen in a vain attempt to counter it, made her way to the edge of the road. The slope was steep, but not impossible.
“Something’s down there, Alex,” she told him over the walkie-talkie, “in the ravine. I think I saw sunlight on metal.”
“Can’t say either way, Nicole,” he replied, no more banter in his tone, “I have no visual access to that location. Terrain’s too messy.”
Told you, she thought, and said, “Lord’a mercy, the man has limits.”
“You okay? I saw some nasty spikes on my telemetry when you took that spill.”
“Worried about my warranty, too.”
“You never heard of sibling rivalry?”
“That was a shitty thing you said, Alex.”
“I give as good as I get.” Making clear that this was none of her business. Fine, she thought, suit yourself, chum. I couldn’t be happier.
She shook her head and, after shouldering a carryall and taking her walkie-talkie, made her way over the edge. Started out on her feet, made most of the trip bouncing off her backside, with one nasty spill that made her wonder if she was done for as she slid sideways, starting to tumble and roll out of control, desperately throwing arms and legs out wide as far as they’d go as she came over onto her face, same as she would skydiving, to stabilize herself. Spent a good minute panting, regretting the impulse that had prompted her to leave her crash helmet by the bike. Her nose was bleeding, but the air was so dry it stopped almost immediately. Was a lot more careful on the last stretch, to where the land flattened out and she could, albeit carefully, regain her feet.
“Alex,” she said into the radio, spitting sand out of her mouth, but got no reply. No sound from the speaker, not even the susurrus of static. The fall had put the walkie-talkie out of commission. Looking up the slope, she was amazed she hadn’t landed just as badly broken. And she began to give serious consideration to finding another way out of the ravine.
First things first, she decided, and made her way towards the wreck. Stu lay about a half-dozen meters beyond his cycle, body twisted up like a boneless rag doll. The sun hadn’t been kind to him, nor had the local scavengers, but at least he hadn’t suffered. Probably was dead before he came to rest.
“Name?”
“Mine or his,” she asked back, offering the CHP officer a bleary gaze as she took another sip from her water bottle.
“His first, please.”
“Hanneford, Stuart, unless the autopsy says different.”
“You have reason to believe it will, miss?”
She shook her head. “Not a one. On the other hand, he doesn’t look a whole helluva lot like the man I remember.”
“Damn coyotes. Them an’ the buzzards, got no respect for the dead.”
“Just another of the basic food groups, that’s us.”
Even with Alex’s alarm, sounded the moment he lost contact—her tumble had severed the telemetry links with her skinsnug as well—it was the better part of an hour before anyone arrived. Nicole was taking things in stride, treating this like a variation on Academy and NASA survival tours. She made one try at the slope, but a small slide that started before she’d gone a half-dozen body lengths persuaded her of the folly of that course. She decided instead to take things easy until the sun slipped out of direct sight and then, in the comparative cool of late afternoon and dusk, make her way along the ravine until she was out of the hills. At one point, fairly early on, she thought she saw movement up on the road, called out as loudly as she could. But there was no reply and she concluded she was either seeing things or it had been some animal. Which started her thinking about the ruin of Stu’s face and when whoever did that might get interested in her, taking small comfort in the sound and occasional sight of Alex’s drone, which had taken up a tight station a mile overhead. She found a piece of chrome bodywork lying loose and used it as a heliograph to signal the aircraft, grinned as she saw it waggle its wings in response. It made her feel better to tell him she was all right.
A U.S. Forest Ranger was the first to arrive, on horseback along the road from farther up into the mountains, with a highway patrolman out of Mojave a little while later, bouncing along the gully in a borrowed all-terrain vehicle—essentially, a fat-wheeled motorized tricycle.
“Know him well?” the officer asked.
Some scrub brush threw up scant shade, but Nicole took it for all it was worth, telling herself anything that blunted the sun was worth the effort. She’d long ago peeled her flight suit to the waist, trying the sleeves about her as a belt. The Ranger was an old hand at this kind of weather, applying some Bedouin adaptations to his uniform, the better to cope. The cop, spending most of his time cruising the highways, had no such leeway, his own uniform looking less impressive by the minute.
“Well enough, I suppose,” she replied, then shrugged, “we served together.”
“Why’d you come look for him?”
“I was worried.” The look he gave her was full of suspicions, mostly centering about the possibility of a relationship between her and Stu, but she didn’t have the energy to explain herself. Spaceflight was a communal enterprise, you learned very quickly to watch out for your mates, whether you liked them or not, the same way you knew they would after you. The person who violated that unspoken covenant was one who generally didn’t last long.
The cop had shifted his attention up towards the road, looking back and forth along it with an assessing gaze.
“He must have been going like a bomb,” Nicole observed.
“Uh-huh,” the officer replied. “There’s a downhill stretch just before that last dog-leg turn, trick’s to find the right speed so you can spit around it without having to do more’n touch your brakes. No downshift at all.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Everybody’s young, miss. For him—too much speed, too much turn, too much bike. Had the right notion, just couldn’t strike the balance. I checked, there’s a broadside skid trail where he went over, but no sign of
brakes. He probably didn’t even realize he was in trouble ’til he was airborne.”
She was nodding. “I almost went the same way myself. Totally treacherous footing. But Stu wasn’t that kind of guy.”
“Call ’em as I see ’em. He bounced off the other slope—see how high up—and still momentum ran him another hundred meters or so along before he hit bottom. He that good?”
She bit back the smart-ass reply, obviously not, said instead, “What do you mean?”
“Ms. Castaneda, she said the Captain was training for the Baja Enduro. Maybe for a shot at the gold.”
“Yeah.”
“I ask again, was he that good?”
“Not my area of expertise. I guess Stu must’ve thought so, why else the investment in the new bike? He pushed his credit to the wall to get it.”
“’S’a champion set of wheels all right.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Nothing I can say officially. I mean, the coronor’ll run a full-spectrum toxicology but I doubt we’ll find anything. In the open sun like this, with all the scavengers have done... ” His voice trailed off.
“What, dammit?!”
“You know Dust?”
“Oh, shit no.”
“Fits the pattern. Body has skill but not enough skill, and way too much hunger. Figures Dust’ll provide the edge. Problem is, whatever value the drug gives is tempered by the instrument it’s forced to work with. The knowledge and skills of a world-class biker don’t matter beans if the body ain’t up to the load. Figure that’s how it was with your boy. Probably took his hit out on the highway, allow time for it to burn into his system, wire itself into all the circuits, then tore right into the hardest trail he could find. No danger. In his own mind he knew he could hack it.”
“Until he went over.”
“Yup.”
“Same temptation in the air”—and in space, she thought—“same dangers. Stupid, stupid sonofabitch!”
“And that’s a fact.”
She said as much again, mostly to herself, at Hotshots over her third beer. The officer had cut her loose as soon as he’d taken her statement, telling her he’d be in touch if any follow-up was needed. A line had been rigged to the road and after hauling herself up the ravine, Nicole had made her way back to Edwards in style, blowing the throttle wide open and ripping down the highway as fast as Stu’s wheels’d take her. More reports then, without any more than the most perfunctory pitstop, a seemingly endless succession, to Kinsella, then Colonel Sallinger’s office, Base CID, the works, the day all but gone by the time she was through. Kinsella claimed the bike, with an icy bitterness that made plain what she’d implied during the interrogation, that she considered Nicole responsible for what had happened. If she hadn’t covered for him...
“It was a goddamn fool pudknocker stunt,” Nicole heard from a neighboring booth, where Alex Cobri was in a passionate argument with a couple of flight officers.
“Dust is a legitimate means of enhancing your capabilities,” Alex countered.
“No,” the other pilot, Ramsey Sheridan, said. “It’s a delusion, Cobri, a mask that allows you to think you can do things. And maybe in some people, thought and reality are the same, bully for them, they’re still relying on a crutch. But most, I suspect, get hoodwinked. And ultimately, screwed.”
“I want to pretend I’m Chuck Yeager,” the first one followed up, “I’ll pull his simulator program. But no way do I want that illusion when I’m in the air. I’m not him, I can never be him, I start reacting like him in a mind and body that are used to a completely different set of signal structures, guarantee I’ll spaz. And auger in. Seriously bad profile, no thank you very much.”
“It’s a way of tapping your instrument—mental and physical, Moss—to its fullest.”
“And when you run out of gas, Alex,” Nicole asked from where she sat, pitching her voice over the top of the booth, “what then?”
“Et tu, Shea?”
“Bullshit,” she sighed. “You ain’t Caesar, I ain’t Antony.”
“Brutus. Wanna bet there’s a Dust configuration that’ll make you a top-notch Shakespearean scholar?”
“Fine. I’d rather read the plays myself. Or better yet, see ’em. Or not. My choice, my consequences. But if I pop a vial full of RNA-impregnated crystal up my nose and presto-changeo become God’s Gift to theater or academe or whatever, what happens when it wears off? The effect’s transitory, Alex, right? It lays a veneer over your own primary programming, a temporary enhancement.” From the way she deliberately spaced the words, she knew she was looped, a surprise on three beers, but understandable given the day. Finish this off, she thought, and scramble for the barn. Hell, probably shouldn’t have come in the first place. “But if you’re used to having it around—if you become dependent—how happy you gonna be when it’s not there anymore?”
“Surgeon has an emergency,” Alex countered, abandoning his two companions—much, it seemed to Nicole’s peripheral awareness, to their relief, always a danger inherent in bucking a Cobri—and taking a chair opposite Nicole. She remained tucked into her corner of the booth, not even bothering to keep her eyes all the way open. “Hasn’t time to learn the procedure,” he continued, as bright-eyed intense as Nicole was totally blitzed, “life’s hanging in the balance. Dust can give him that knowledge, where and when and as it’s needed. Which is how the stuff came into being, for use in combat emergency situations.”
“Stu’s dead, Alex, because... ”
“You don’t know that!” he snapped, and she bit off her viciously instinctive reply.
“Stu’s dead,” she repeated with emphasis, “because he was deluded into believing he possessed a level of skill and ability that he most patently did not.”
“You don’t know that, Nicole,” Alex repeated, “he could just as easily have cracked up on his own. And if there was as much a danger as you say, the stuff’d be banned, am I right?”
“That’s not the point. It doesn’t just change your ability to cope with a given situation, it also affects your ability to assess that capability. You think all the factors add up, you figure everything’s locked tight; the problem is, the very analysis you’re making is flawed, because the analysis is just as affected by the Dust as the abilities it’s supposedly passing judgment on. So Stu Hanneford—who in his right mind probably wouldn’t have even considered running that track, much less at speed—roars into it like a bat out of hell. Because the biker whose profile went into the Dust’s RNA matrix did. Except”—and she hammered her fist lightly on the table with each word—“Stu ain’t him.”
Alex had no snappy comeback, which was something of a surprise, and she nibbled on some cold french fries to pass the silence that followed.
“Another beer?” he asked at last.
She still had better than half the bottle left, so she shook her head.
“Such a fucking waste,” he said.
“And that’s a fact.”
“Why? I don’t understand why.”
“He liked to race. He wanted to win.”
“You saw my VR simulator. I offered it to him. All the thrills, all the excitement, the ride of a lifetime if he wanted against the best that ever were.”
“It’s not the same.”
“No heat, no bugs, no sand, no grit, no risk—some fucking trade-off.”
“That’s the point. The heat, the bugs, the sand, the grit, the risk, they’re all part of the mix. The simulation is limited by the imagination of the programmer.”
“Pardon my French, Nicole, but that’s a crock. My system’s cutting edge, so much so it damn near had you fooled; imagine the possibilities once I interface my capabilities with the Halyan’t’a environmental generator. Full-range direct sensoral input, replicating any situation, any reality, better than ‘being there.’ I could give Stu the race of his life, with all those precious elements, the only difference being I’d guarantee to bring him home every damn time. The only thing he�
��d lose—that any one of you would—is your death wish.”
“Is that what you think it is?”
“You going to tell me different?”
“So if you had your way, nobody’d actually do anything. We’d just strap ourselves into your VR cubicles or helmets or whatever and kick into whatever fantasy we please.”
“Precisely. Instead of watching a game, you could actually play.”
“Actually have the illusion of playing, you mean. No matter how you rationalize, it’ll always be a counterfeit.”
“You don’t approve.”
She nursed her beer through its last two swallows before replying, giving her words weight with a slow, sad shake of the head. “No, I don’t. Not the way I think you envision it. As a learning tool, that’s one thing. And even as a means of entertainment. But there’ll always have to be things that need physical accomplishment. My being, my strength, my skill, my smarts—my fate—all weighed in the balance.”
“It could put you back into space, whether you regained your astronaut’s rating or not.”
“Call me old-fashioned then,” she said flatly, pushing herself to her feet and ending the conversation, Alex realizing too late the moment he spoke he was lashing a raw nerve, “some things I need to feel for myself. Sometimes, Alex, reality needs to be reality.”
“Why? When the capability exists to make it better?”
She didn’t have an answer he’d understand, so she simply said, “Be seeing you,” and left.
She was so zoned she was halfway through the front door of her house before she realized someone was waiting for her in the porch settee.
“I heard,” Amy said. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too, kiddo.”
“Polls say President Russell’s in major trouble,” she continued, offering refuge in banal current events chit-chat as Nicole sank down beside her. “Both Mansfield and Ishida are taking off like they’re solid-fuel boosters. Republican nomination’s turned into a real bear fight and that’s only the prelude to the main event.”
“How nice,” stifling a yawn.
“That all you got to say? Boy, some informed citizen you are.”
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