Cyberpunk

by Victoria Blake

  left the Mall he looked back at the monument; under its wash of paint it

  looked like a bone sticking out of raw flesh.

  Anxious about coming to the end of his supply, Lee hoofed it up to Dupont

  Circle and sat on the perimeter bench in the shade of one of the big trees,

  footsore and hot. In the muggy air it was hard to catch his breath. He ran

  the water from the drinking fountain over his hands until someone got in

  line for a drink. He crossed the circle, giving a wide berth to a bunch of

  lawyers in long-sleeved shirts and loosened ties, lunching on wine and

  cheese under the watchful eye of their bodyguard. On the other side of the

  park, Delmont Briggs sat by his cup, almost asleep, his sign propped on his

  lap. The wasted man. Delmont’s sign—and a little side business—provided

  him with just enough money to get by on the street. The sign, a battered

  square of cardboard, said PLEASE HELP—HUNGRY. People still looked

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  DOWN AND OUT IN THE YEAR 2000

  through Delmont like he wasn’t there, but every once in a while it got to

  somebody. Lee shook his head distastefully at the idea.

  “Delmont, you know any weed I can buy? I need a finger baggie for

  twenty.”

  “Not so easy to do, Robbie.” Delmont hemmed and hawed and they

  dickered for a while, then he sent Lee over to Jim Johnson, who made the

  sale under a cheery exchange of the day’s news, over by the chess tables.

  After that Lee bought a pack of cigarettes in a liquor store and went up to

  the little triangular park between 17th, S, and New Hampshire, where no

  police or strangers ever came. They called it Fish Park for the incongruous

  cement whale sitting by one of the trash cans. He sat down on the long

  broken bench, among his acquaintances who were hanging out there, and

  fended them off while he carefully emptied the Marlboros, cut some tobacco

  into the weed, and refilled the cigarette papers with the new mix. With

  their ends twisted he had a dozen more joints. They smoked one and he

  sold two more for a dollar each before he got out of the park.

  But he was still anxious, and since it was the hottest part of the day and

  few people were about, he decided to visit his plants. He knew it would be

  at least a week till harvest, but he wanted to see them. Anyway, it was

  about watering day.

  East between 16th and 15th he hit no-man’s-land. The mixed

  neighborhood of fortress apartments and burned-out hulks gave way to a

  block or two of entirely abandoned buildings. Here the police had been at

  work, and looters had finished the job. The buildings were battered and

  burnt out, their ground floors blasted wide open, some of them collapsed

  entirely into heaps of rubble. No one walked the broken sidewalk; sirens a

  few blocks off and the distant hum of traffic were the only signs that the

  whole city wasn’t just like this. Little jumps in the corner of his eye were

  no more than that; nothing there when he looked directly. The first time,

  Lee had found walking down the abandoned street nerve-racking; now he

  was reassured by the silence, the stillness, the no-man’s-land smell of torn

  asphalt and wet charcoal, the wavering streetscape empty under a sour-

  milk sky.

  • • •

  091

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  His first building was a corner brownstone, blackened on the street sides,

  all its windows and doors gone, but otherwise sound. He walked past it

  without stopping, turned, and surveyed the neighborhood. No movement

  anywhere. He stepped up the steps and through the doorway, being careful

  to make no footprints in the mud behind the doorjamb. Another glance

  outside, then up the broken stairs to the second floor. The second floor

  was a jumble of beams and busted furniture, and Lee waited a minute to let

  his sight adjust to the gloom. The staircase to the third floor had collapsed,

  which was the reason he had chosen this building—no easy way up. But he

  had a route worked out, and with a leap he grabbed a beam hanging from

  the stairwell and hoisted himself onto it. Some crawling up the beam and

  he could swing onto the third floor, and from there a careful walk up

  gapped stairs brought him to the fourth floor.

  The room surrounding the stairwell was dim, and he had jammed the

  door to the next room, so that he had to crawl through a hole in the wall

  to get through. Then he was there.

  Sweating profusely, he blinked in the sudden sunlight, and stepped to his

  plants, all lined out in plastic pots on the far wall. Eleven medium-sized

  female marijuana plants, their splayed green leaves drooping for lack of

  water. He took the rain funnel from one of the gallon jugs and watered the

  plants. The buds were just longer than his thumbnail; if he could wait

  another week or two at least, they would be the size of his thumb or more,

  and worth fifty bucks apiece. He twisted off some water leaves and put

  them in a baggie.

  He found a patch of shade and sat with the plants for a while, watched

  them soak up the water. Wonderful green they had, lighter than most

  leaves in D.C. Little red threads in the buds. The white sky lowered over

  the big break in the roof, huffing little gasps of muggy air onto them all.

  His next spot was several blocks north, on the roof of a burned-out hulk

  that had no interior floors left. Access was by way of a tree growing next to

  the wall. Climbing it was a challenge, but he had a route here he took, and

  he liked the way leaves concealed him even from passersby directly beneath

  him once he got above the lowest branches.

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  The plants here were younger—in fact one had sprouted seeds since he

  last saw them, and he pulled the plant out and put it in the baggie. After

  watering them and adjusting the aluminum foil rain funnels on the jug

  tops, he climbed down the tree and walked back down 14th.

  He stopped to rest in Charlie’s Baseball Club. Charlie sponsored a city

  team with the profits from his bar, and old members of the team welcomed

  Lee, who hadn’t been by in a while. Lee had played left field and batted

  fifth a year or two before, until his job with the park service had been cut.

  After that he had had to pawn his glove and cleats, and he had missed

  Charlie’s minimal membership charge three seasons running, and so he

  had quit. And then it had been too painful to go by the club, and drink

  with the guys and look at all the trophies on the wall, a couple of which he

  had helped to win. But on this day he enjoyed the fan blowing, and the

  dark, and the fries that Charlie and Fisher shared with him.

  Break over, he went to the spot closest to home, where the new plants

  were struggling through the soil, on the top floor of an empty stone husk

  on 16th and Caroline. The first floor was a drinking place for derelicts, and

  old Thunderbird and whiskey bottles, half still in bags, littered the dark

  room, which smelled of alcohol, urine, and rotting wood. All the better:

  few people would be foolish enough to enter such an obviously dangerous

  hole. And the stairs were as nea
r gone as made no difference. He climbed

  over the holes to the second floor, turned, and climbed to the third.

  The baby plants were fine, bursting out of the soil and up to the sun, the

  two leaves covered by four, up into four again . . . He watered them and

  headed home.

  On the way he stopped at the little market that the Vietnamese family ran,

  and bought three cans of soup, a box of crackers, and some Coke. “Twenty-

  two oh five tonight, Robbie,” old Huang said with a four-toothed grin.

  The neighbors were out on the sidewalk, the women sitting on the stoop, the

  men kicking a soccer ball about aimlessly as they watched Sam sand down an

  old table, the kids running around. Too hot to stay inside this evening, although it wasn’t much better on the street. Lee helloed through them and walked up

  the flights of stairs slowly, feeling the day’s travels in his feet and legs.

  093

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  In his room Debra was awake, and sitting up against her pillows. “I’m

  hungry, Lee.” She looked hot, bored; he shuddered to think of her day.

  “That’s a good sign, that means you’re feeling better. I’ve got some soup

  here should be real good for you.” He touched her cheek, smiling.

  “It’s too hot for soup.”

  “Yeah, that’s true, but we’ll let it cool down after it cooks, it’ll still taste good.” He sat on the floor and turned on the hot plate, poured water from

  the plastic jug into the pot, opened the can of soup, mixed it in. While they

  were spooning it out Rochelle Jackson knocked on the door and came in.

  “Feeling better, I see.” Rochelle had been a nurse before her hospital

  closed, and Lee had enlisted her help when Debra fell sick. “We’ll have to

  take your temperature later.”

  Lee wolfed down crackers while he watched Rochelle fuss over Debra.

  Eventually she took a temperature and Lee walked her out.

  “It’s still pretty high, Lee.”

  “What’s she got?” he asked, as he always did. Frustration.

  “I don’t know any more than yesterday. Some kind of flu, I guess.”

  “Would a flu hang on this long?”

  “Some of them do. Just keep her sleeping and drinking as much as you

  can, and feed her when she’s hungry. Don’t be scared, Lee.”

  “I can’t help it! I’m afraid she’ll get sicker . . . And there ain’t nothing I

  can do!”

  “Yeah, I know. Just keep her fed. You’re doing just what I would do.”

  After cleaning up, he left Debra to sleep and went back down to the

  street, to join the men on the picnic tables and benches in the park tucked

  into the intersection. This was the “living room” on summer evenings, and

  all the regulars were there in their usual spots, sitting on tables or bench

  backs. “Hey there, Robbie! What’s happening?”

  “Not much, not much. No man, don’t kick that soccer ball at me, I can’t

  kick no soccer ball tonight.”

  “You been walking the streets, hey?”

  “How else we going to find her to bring her home to you.”

  “Hey lookee here, Ghost is bringing out his TV.”

  “It’s Tuesday night at the movies, y’all!” Ghost called out as he

  approached and plunked a little hologram TV and a Honda generator on

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  the picnic table. They laughed and watched Ghost’s pale skin glow in the

  dusk as he hooked the system up.

  “Where’d you get this one, Ghost? You been sniffing around the funeral

  parlors again?”

  “You bet I have!” Ghost grinned. “This one’s picture is all fucked up, but

  it still works—I think—”

  He turned the set on and blurry 3-D figures swam into shape in a cube

  above the box—all in dark shades of blue.

  “Man, we must have the blues tonight,” Ramon remarked. “Look at

  that!”

  “They all look like Ghost,” said Lee.

  “Hey, it works, don’t it?” Ghost said. Hoots of derision. “And dig the

  sound! The sound works—”

  “Turn it up then.”

  “It’s up all the way.”

  “What’s this?” Lee laughed. “We got to watch frozen midgets whispering,

  is that it, Ghost? What do midgets say on a cold night?”

  “Who the fuck is this?” said Ramon.

  Johnnie said, “That be Sam Spade, the greatest computer spy in the

  world.”

  “How come he live in that shack, then?” Ramon asked.

  “That’s to show it’s a tough scuffle making it as a computer spy, real

  tough.”

  “How come he got four million dollars’ worth of computers right there in

  the shack, then?” Ramon asked, and the others commenced giggling, Lee

  loudest of all. Johnnie and Ramon could be killers sometimes. A bottle of

  rum started around, and Steve broke in to bounce the soccer ball on the

  TV, smashing the blue figures repeatedly.

  “Watch out now, Sam about to go plug his brains in to try and find out

  who he is.”

  “And then he gonna be told of some stolen wetware he got to find.”

  “I got some wetware myself, only I call it a shirt.”

  Steve dropped the ball and kicked it against the side of the picnic table,

  and a few of the watchers joined in a game of pepper. Some men in a

  stopped van shouted a conversation with the guys on the corner. Those

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  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  watching the show leaned forward. “Where’s he gonna go?” said Ramon.

  “Hong Kong? Monaco? He gonna take the bus on over to Monaco?”

  Johnnie shook his head. “Rio, man. Fucking Rio de Janeiro.”

  Sure enough, Sam was off to Rio. Ghost choked out an objection:

  “Johnnie—ha!—you must have seen this one before.”

  Johnnie shook his head, though he winked at Lee. “No man, that’s just

  where all the good stolen wetware ends up.”

  A series of commercials interrupted their fun: deodorant, burglar-killers,

  cars. The men in the van drove off. Then the show was back, in Rio, and

  Johnnie said, “He’s about to meet a slinky Afro-Asian spy.”

  When Sam was approached by a beautiful black Asian woman, the men

  couldn’t stand it. “Y’all have seen this one before!” Ghost cried.

  Johnnie sputtered over the bottle, struggled to swallow. “No way!

  Experience counts, man, that’s all.”

  “And Johnnie has watched one hell of a lot of Sam Spade,” Ramon

  added.

  Lee said, “I wonder why they’re always Afro-Asian.”

  Steve burst in, laughed. “So they can fuck all of us at once, man!” He

  dribbled on the image, changed the channel. “— army command in Los

  Angeles reports that the rioting killed at least—” He punched the channel again. “What else we got here—man!—what’s this?”

  “Cyborgs Versus Androids,” Johnnie said after a quick glance at the blue

  shadows. “Lots of fighting.”

  “Yeah!” Steve exclaimed. Distracted, some of the watchers wandered

  off. “I’m a cyborg myself, see, I got these false teeth!”

  “Shit.”

  Lee went for a walk around the block with Ramon, who was feeling good.

  “Sometimes I feel so good, Robbie! So strong! I walk around this city and

  I say, the city i
s falling apart, it can’t last much longer, like this. And here I am like some kind of animal, you know, living day to day by my wits and

  figuring out all the little ways to get by . . . you know there are people

  living up in Rock Creek Park like Indians or something, hunting and

  fishing and all. And it’s just the same in here, you know. The buildings

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  don’t make it no different. Just hunting and scrapping to get by, and man I

  feel so alive—” He waved the rum bottle at the sky.

  Lee sighed. “Yeah.” Still, Ramon was one of the biggest fences in the

  area. It was really a steady job. For the rest . . . They finished their walk,

  and Lee went back up to his room. Debra was sleeping fitfully. He went to

  the bathroom, soaked his shirt in the sink, wrung it out. In the room it was

  stifling, and not even a waft of a breeze came in the window. Lying on his

  mattress sweating, figuring out how long he could make their money last,

  it took him a long time to fall asleep.

  The next day he returned to Charlie’s Baseball Club to see if Charlie could

  give him any piecework, as he had one or two times in the past. But Charlie

  only said no, very shortly, and he and everyone else in the bar looked at

  him oddly, so that Lee felt uncomfortable enough to leave without a drink.

  After that he returned to the Mall, where the protesters were facing the

  troops ranked in front of the Capitol, dancing and jeering and throwing

  stuff. With all the police out it took him a good part of the afternoon to sell all the joints left, and when he had he walked back up 17th Street feeling

  tired and worried. Perhaps another purchase from Delmont could string

  them along a few more days . . .

  At 17th and Q a tall skinny kid ran out into the street and tried to open the

  door of a car stopped for a red light. But it was a protected car despite its cheap look, and the kid shrieked as the handle shocked him. He was still stuck by the hand to it when the car roared off, so that he was launched through the air and rolled over the asphalt. Cars drove on by. A crowd gathered around the bleeding kid. Lee walked on, his jaw clenched. At least the kid would live. He had seen

  bodyguards gun thieves down in the street, kill them dead, and walk away.

  Passing Fish Park he saw a man sitting on a corner bench looking around.

  The guy was white, young; his hair was blond and short, he wore wire-