He heard footsteps and turned, working up what he was going to say to the band. But it was the chaotichick and someone else, and then a third dude coming in after the someone else.
The someone else was a skinny guy with brown hair that was naturally messy, not messy as part of one of the cultural subcurrents. His mouth hung a little ajar, and one of his incisors was decayed black. His nose was windburned and the back of his bony hands were gnarled with veins. The third dude was Japanese; small, brown-eyed, nondescript, his expression was mild, just a shade more friendly than neutral. The skinny Caucasian guy wore an army jacket sans insignia, shiny jeans, and rotting tennis shoes. His hands were nervous, like there was something he was used to holding in them that wasn’t there now. An instrument? Maybe.
The Japanese guy wore a Japanese Action Suit—surprise, surprise—sky-blue and neat as a pin. There was a lump on his hip—something he could reach by putting his right arm across his body and through the open zipper down the front of the suit—and Rickenharp was pretty sure it was a gun.
There was one thing all three of them had in common: they looked half-starved.
Rickenharp shivered—his gloss of sweat cooling on him, but he forced himself to say, “Whusappnin’?” It was wooden in his mouth. He was looking past them, waiting for the band.
“Band’s in the wings,” the chaotichick said. “The bass player said to tell you … well it was Telm zassouter.”
Rickenharp had to smile at her mock of Julio’s technicki. Tell him, get his ass out here.
Then some of the druggy feeling washed away and he heard the shouts from the audience and he realized they wanted an encore.
“Jeez, an encore,” he said without thinking. “Been so fucking long.”
“ ’Ey mate,” the skinny guy said, pronouncing mate like mite. Brit or Aussie. “I saw you at Stone’enge five years ago when you ’ad yer second ’it.”
Rickenharp winced a little when the guy said your second hit, inadvertently underlining the fact that Rickenharp had had only two, and everyone knew he wasn’t likely to have any more.
“I’m Carmen,” the chaotichick said. “This is Willow and Yukio.” Yukio was standing sideways from the others, and something about the way he did it told Rickenharp he was watching down the corridor without seeming to.
Carmen saw Rickenharp looking at Yukio and said, “Cops are coming down.”
“Why?” Rickenharp asked. “The club’s licensed.”
“Not for you or the club. For us.”
He looked at her and said, “Hey, I don’t need to get busted … ” He picked up his guitar and went into the hall. “I got to do my encore before they lose interest.”
She followed along, into the hall and the echo of the encore stomps, and asked, “Can we hang out in the dressing room for a while?”
“Yeah, but it ain’t sacrosanct. You come back here, the cops can, too.” They were in the wings now. Rickenharp signaled to Murch and the band started playing.
Standing beside him, she said, “These aren’t exactly cops. They probably don’t know these kind of places, they’d look for us in the crowd, not the dressing room.”
“You’re an optimist. I’ll tell the bouncer to stand here, and if he sees anyone else start to come back, he’ll tell ’em it’s empty back here ’cause he just checked. Might work, might not.”
“Thanks.” She went back to the dressing room. He spoke to the bouncer and went on stage. Feeling drained, the guitar heavy on him. But he picked up on the energy level in the room and it carried him through two encores. He left them wanting more—and, sticky with sweat, walked back to his dressing room.
They were still there. Carmen, Yukio, Willow.
“Is there a stage door?” Yukio asked. “Into alley?”
Rickenharp nodded. “Wait in the hall; I’ll come out and show you in a minute.”
Yukio nodded, and they went into the hall. The band came in, filed past Carmen and Yukio and the Brit without much noticing them, assuming they were backstage hangout flotsam, except Murch stared at Carmen’s tits and swaggered a bit, twirling his drumsticks.
The band sat around laughing in the dressing room, slapping palms, lighting several kinds of smokes. They didn’t offer Rickenharp any; they knew he didn’t use it.
Rickenharp was packing his guitar away, when Mose said, “You blew good.”
“You mean he gave you a good head?” Murch said, and Julio snickered.
“Yeah,” Ponce said, “the guy gives a good head, good collarbone, good kidneys—”
“Good kidneys? Rick sucks on your kidneys? I think I’m gonna puke.”
And the usual puerile band banter because they were still high from a good set and putting off what they knew had to come, till Rickenharp said, “What you want to talk about, Mose?”
Mose looked at him, and the others shut up.
“I know there’s something on your mind,” Rickenharp said softly. “Something you haven’t come out with yet.”
Mose said, “Well, it’s like—there’s an agent Ponce knows, and this guy could take us on. He’s a technicki agent and we’d be taking on a technicki circuit, but we’d work our way back from there, that’s a good base. But this guy says we have to get a wire act in.”
“You guys been busy,” Rickenharp said, shutting the guitar case.
Mose shrugged, “Hey, we ain’t been doing it behind your back; we didn’t hear from the guy till yesterday night. We didn’t have a real chance to talk to you till now, so, uh, we have the same personnel but we change costumes, change the band’s name, write new tunes.”
“We’d lose it,” Rickenharp said. Feeling caved-in. “We’d lose the thing we got, doing that shit, because it’s all superimposed.”
“Rickenharp—rock ’n’ roll is not a fucking religion,” Mose said.
“No, it’s not a religion, it’s a way of life. Now, here’s my proposal: we write new songs in the same style as always. We did good tonight. It could be the beginning of a turnaround for us. We stay here, build on the base audience we established tonight.”
It was like throwing coins into the Grand Canyon. You couldn’t even hear them hit bottom.
The band just looked back at him.
“Okay,” Rickenharp said. “Okay. We’ve been through this ten fucking times. Okay. That’s all.” He’d had an exit speech worked out for this moment, but it caught in his throat. He turned to Murch and said, “You think they’re going to keep you on, they tell you that? Bullshit! They’ll be doing it without a drummer, man. You better learn to program computers, fast.” Then he looked at Mose. “Fuck you, Mose.” He said it quietly.
He turned to Julio, who was looking at the far wall as if to decipher some particularly cryptic piece of graffiti. “Julio, you can have my amp, I’ll be traveling light.”
He turned and, carrying his guitar, walked out, leaving silence behind him.
He nodded at Yukio and his friends and they followed him to the stage door. At the door, Carmen said, “Any chance you could help us find a little cover?”
Rickenharp needed company, bad. He nodded and said, “Yeah, if you’ll gimme a hit of that blue boss.”
She said, “Sure.” And they went into the alley.
FirStep. The Colony.
They all had to sit on the floor in Bitchie’s because there weren’t enough chairs. And Molt didn’t want some of them on chairs and some on the floor. He wanted them all on the same level, where he could make easy eye contact.
There were twenty-two of them, eighteen men and four women, sitting in a circle on the mattress-covered floor. They were technickis just off the shift, or waiting to go on shift. The little room was fuggy with their smell; the air cycler in this part of the space colony was overtaxed. Had been wafting them green air lately anyway.
Wilson was going on, and on, his technickese slurring the sentences together so the monologue sounded like one big sentence, even translated: �
� … so the thing to do is to push for confrontation and then stop short of the actual confrontation and hold the confrontation out as a threat to make them deal with us because if we really push it and get down to fighting with them we’re going to lose but even though they know they’re going to win they still don’t want the confrontation because it’s going to endanger the Colony’s air-tigh integ and it’ll cost them a few men and it’ll be expensive to repair everything that gets busted so I think we oughta … ”
On and on. Molt had had enough. Wilson was short, thick-bodied, his blond hair had been flared into a corona-shape, was losing its shape like a dying dandelion; he had small, squinty blue eyes and a bulbous nose, little red mouth always going, probably got an in with the pharmacy techs for uppers. Wearing his greasy air-systems mechanic’s overalls. Wilson wanted badly to be a radic leader. Molt and Bonham and Barkin were the acknowledged leaders, and Wilson muttered about it because Molt and Bonham weren’t real technickis, spoke it with the accent of someone raised in Standard English. Molt’s opinion was: Wilson was a grasping scheming runt. Molt had tried to keep Wilson out of this meeting, but the little prick had wormed in, nudged his friends about till they got Barkin to invite him. Little prick’d sell out his granny, Molt thought.
Molt broke in on him with, “You had it a minute ago, Wilson, when you said they’re scared of confrontation even though they’d win it. But you didn’t carry it far enough.” Though of course Molt said it in technicki. “They’re scared enough of it, what we got to do is, hit ’em harder, go for it—we got more power than they want to admit because they’re scared we’ll—”
Bonham broke in, “There’s something else we could do.”
Molt glared at Bonham. He didn’t like being interrupted. And he was beginning to mistrust Bonham, too. All their chumminess had evaporated when they got to be rivals in the new party. Bonham, sitting beside Wilson, shifted, wincing, to keep his long legs from going to sleep, ran his fingers through his hair with that goddamn Che Guevara took on his face, going on, “We could put up a barricade. Several. Take control of the heart of technickitown. That’s a confrontation, but then again it isn’t. I mean, a big barricade, maybe block off Corridor D completely.”
“They’d be on us before we got it half done,” Barkin said. No flatsuit today, Molt noticed. The fucking hypocrite wearing mech’s overalls, like he ever ventured into the repair hangars. He was squatting in a way that kept him from coming into direct contact with the greasy mattress, except for the bottom of his feet. Doesn’t want to get dried cum and sweat from Bitchie’s customers on his legs. Nice clean mech overalls, probably bought ’em at a costume shop. Christ.
Bonham shook his head. “We stage a diversion, smoke bombs, whatever, up at the main crossover. We have forklifts, everything else we need, get most of it in place in no time.”
“You defend a barricade in Corridor D,” Molt said, “you got to use guns and you got to shoot to kill. Because they won’t stand for a barricade, they’ll rush it right off.”
Wilson shook his head like a terrier with earmites. “No, hey, I think Bonham’s right we’d just fire warning shots, capture some territory, they wouldn’t want to move in right away because it’d force confrontation and they don’t want that, leastways not yet … ”
“I’m not so sure they don’t want that,” Barkin said, but no one was listening, except Molt. They were all jabbering at once now, hot on the idea of a barricade. And then a whistle came through the intercom, signal that the admin bulls were coming down the corridor, were going to raid Bitchie’s, so the radics started moving out according to the drill, going out into the little service hallway and through the kitchen; the bulls would find the place empty …
But how did they know about the meeting?
It hurt with every breath. But after a while that particular pain was part of the rhythm of being alive, was almost reassuring, and Smoke ceased to take much notice of it. The monotony, and the bedlam noises and smells of the place—that’s what was hard to take. He tried to keep himself amused by guessing where he was, what was going on. But the body cast (and damn its itching!) kept him from looking around much. And there was no one who spoke English near him, at first. After a couple of days, he worked out that he was in Belgium, southeast of Brussels, in some kind of military hospital.
After they’d put on the body cast he’d spoken to the doctor only once. “You are lucky,” the doctor said, in a heavy Belge accent. “We find no brain damage. Zare ess some internal bleeding and we stop it. You have fracture breastbone, fracture arm, fracture collarbone. Slight concussion. Burns—second degree, not zo bad. You are lucky alzo zince we have … ” And then he said something in Belgian.
“What’s that?” Smoke asked.
“A machine puts a current in zuh broken places of the bone, helps to heal faster. Good-bye.” There was finality in that good-bye, and Smoke never saw him again except out of the corner of his eye as he ghosted around the beds of other patients in the big hospital dorm room.
“He is a bastard of a Belge,” said the man next to him. A Frenchman. That was all Smoke could tell about him, because his casts made it impossible to turn and look that far to the side. “The Belge are imbeciles, all Belge,” the Frenchman said. “And this electricity cure, this will kill you bientôt.”
It hurt Smoke too much to talk, at that point, so he didn’t reply, and that was their entire conversation. Two days later the Frenchman died.
Sometimes Smoke played with the pain. It came in waves, and when the waves were in a peak, the pain was something palpable. He had always had what he thought of as his inner hand. It was the area low in his chest where he felt the center of his sensations. The place that glows for gratifications and aches for emotional hurt. Sometimes he felt he could shape the locus of sensation there into a kind of ectoplasmic hand—he knew it wasn’t ectoplasm, but he pictured it that way—and he could imagine reaching with that hand into other parts of his body, to test them. Reach into the left leg and it will tingle with sensitivity. If it was in pain, he could reach in and touch the pain. Now when the waves of pain came strongest, he reached out his inside hand and caught the waves of pain in the hand and parted them, split them up, or squeezed them like something gelatinous between fingers of internal self-sensation; and this “contact” produced, in his mind’s eye, a kind of rainbow-on-oil shimmer he watched with childlike fascination. In this way the pain became objectified into visual terms, and was rendered neutral, defused. The pain became almost painless.
But sometimes the misery of the ward overwhelmed him. The sick were in cots and their cots were everywhere; there were, lately, men laid out on the floor. The place stank, of course, and sometimes the smell was given the extra pungency of humiliation when much of the stink came from himself—the overworked nurses were slow about his bedpans. And the noise of the place diminished at night, but it never ceased. There was moaning and, always, bitching in four or five languages. There were men babbling obscenities, an unceasing bubbling over of mental ugliness, and that was perhaps the worst. He was perversely grateful for the occasional CRUMP and quaking of the shellings—or were they bombs?—in the countryside around the hospital. They made it possible to visualize a world outside the infinitely monotonous grind of life in the hospital.
For a time some of the patients were refugees, adding the sirening of wailing children to the dissonant symphony of complaints bouncing from the ceiling. But there was a rule about the hospital being used only for NATO soldiers—Smoke heard a British Red Cross nurse complain about it—and the refugees were moved out to a camp where, it was said, death was certain for the very ill. There wasn’t enough food to go around in the refugee camps. In keeping with triage, critically ill refugees simply were not fed.
Smoke had seen the Dutch refugee camps. Had heard the stories … Stories of a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand—an ever-swelling multitude of the displaced and homeless tramping the roads outside the European
cities. At first they’d fled the war in cars—but the highways had become impassable with rubble and craters, and anyway fuel was hard to get. Now they walked, or pulled carts—often whole families pulling a cart made of a small stripped-down fiberglass car, propane or electric engines removed. Legions of people yoked to automotive shapes, as if enslaved to serve cars … Part of a dust cloud in summer, slogging through icy mud in the winter; learning about trenchfoot and scurvy, cholera and hepatitis, gangrene and lice. Some formed tribes for self-protection. The tribes were usually ethnocentric, which festered racial awareness. People who, before the war, had been indifferent to their neighbor’s race, were reviling the “scheming Jews hoarding food” or the “thieving Arabs, steal your last crust if you’re not watching with a gun in your hand!” By some unspoken consensus, the roads were usually a neutral place, where the tribes merged into one mass of tramping, weeping, cursing, death-eyed misery. Thousands more took to sea in improvised boats and those who didn’t founder and drown sometimes found refuge in the Middle East, in Israel and Egypt; a few thousand were admitted to Scotland; thousands more to Canada and the USA. But the anti-immigrant feeling was strong in North America, now, with the global warming crisis and the propaganda, and the quota was quickly filled. The flow of refugees to America became a trickle and then stopped with the near-cessation of civilian air and sea traffic over the Atlantic.
Most of the refugees were trapped in Europe. And most had been cosmopolitan urbanites, whose major baseline concerns before the war had been the acquisition of new technology, or car repair, or money for the August holidays. And now their worries were food, water, weapons, shelter, warmth, medicine. The refugee camps provided enough food to prolong the suffering, but not enough to generate the energy to find a way out of the suffering. The camps were called “the shitpits” by the English speakers. Camp shelters were made from waterproofed cardboard, which turned out to be waterproof for only three or four rainfalls. At first the refugee camps were clean, and run like military bases, dreary but livable. But as the war dragged on the volunteers fell sick, or lost heart; the military could no longer spare men to help out; the Russians blockaded emergency-civilian supplies, believing they might also be supply ships for NATO. The Second Alliance was involved in shipping relief supplies, and Steinfeld claimed they diverted much of it for their own use. The camps swelled and rotted, teeming with people the way cysts teem with bacteria. Riots against the camp administration flared—and quickly died out. They accomplished nothing. But inter-tribal melees followed by guerrilla warfare became a fact of life, as one refugee racial group attacked another for food and medical supplies. And here and there were the advance agents of the Second Alliance, quietly distributing small amounts of food, and great bags of promises. Recruiting those the SA saw as having “special potential.” These would disappear from the refugee camps, would turn up later in the Second Alliance, unswervingly loyal to the organization that had brought them out of starvation and squalor and hopelessness, shown them purpose and order and a reinforcement of their most cherished prejudices …
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology Page 21