The Pardoner's Tale

by Robert Silverberg

  Then he wanted to know where I was from. Santa Monica? West L.A.? Something in my accent, I guess. “I’m a traveling man,” I said. “Hate to stay in one place.” True enough. I need to hack or I go crazy; if I did all my hacking in just one city I’d be virtually begging them to slap a trace on me sooner or later and that would be the end. I didn’t tell him any of that. “Came in from Utah last night. Wyoming before that.” Not true, either one. “Maybe on to New York, next.” He looked at me as if I’d said I was planning a voyage to the moon. People out here, they don’t go east a lot. These days most people don’t go anywhere.

  Now he knew that I had wall-transit clearance, or else that I had some way of getting it when I wanted it. That was what he was looking to find out. In no time at all we were down to basics.

  He said he had drawn a new ticket, six years at the salt-field reclamation site out back of Mono Lake. People die like mayflies out there. What he wanted was a transfer to something softer, like Operations & Maintenance, and it had to be within the walls, preferably in one of the districts out by the ocean where the air is cool and clear. I quoted him a price and he accepted without a quiver.

  “Let’s have your wrist,” I said.

  * * *

  He held out his right hand, palm upward. His implant access was a pale yellow plaque, mounted in the usual place but rounder than the standard kind and of a slightly smoother texture. I didn’t see any great significance in that. As I had done maybe a thousand times before, I put my own arm over his, wrist to wrist, access to access. Our biocomputers made contact and instantly I knew that I was in trouble.

  Human beings have been carrying biochip-based computers in their bodies for the last forty or fifty years or so—long before the Entity invasion, anyway—but for most people it’s just something they take for granted, like the vaccination mark on their thighs. They use them for the things they’re meant to be used for, and don’t give them a thought beyond that. The biocomputer’s just a commonplace tool for them, like a fork, like a shovel. You have to have the hacker sort of mentality to be willing to turn your biocomputer into something more. That’s why, when the Entities came and took us over and made us build walls around our cities, most people reacted just like sheep, letting themselves be herded inside and politely staying there. The only ones who can move around freely now—because we know how to manipulate the mainframes through which the Entities rule us—are the hackers. And there aren’t many of us. I could tell right away that I had hooked myself on to one now.

  The moment we were in contact, he came at me like a storm.

  The strength of his signal let me know I was up against something special, and that I’d been hustled. He hadn’t been trying to buy a pardon at all. What he was looking for was a duel. Mr. Macho behind the bland smile, out to show the new boy in town a few of his tricks.

  No hacker had ever mastered me in a one-on-one anywhere. Not ever. I felt sorry for him, but not much.

  He shot me a bunch of stuff, cryptic but easy, just by way of finding out my parameters. I caught it and stored it and laid an interrupt on him and took over the dialog. My turn to test him. I wanted him to begin to see who he was fooling around with. But just as I began to execute he put an interrupt on me. That was a new experience. I stared at him with some respect.

  Usually any hacker anywhere will recognize my signal in the first thirty seconds, and that’ll be enough to finish the interchange. He’ll know that there’s no point in continuing. But this guy either wasn’t able to identify me or just didn’t care, and he came right back with his interrupt. Amazing. So was the stuff he began laying on me next.

  He went right to work, really trying to scramble my architecture. Reams of stuff came flying at me up in the heavy megabyte zone.

  —jspike. dbltag. nslice. dzcnt.

  I gave it right back to him, twice as hard.

  —maxfrq. minpau. spktot. jspike.

  He didn’t mind at all.

  —maxdz. spktim. falter. nslice.

  —frqsum. eburst.

  —iburst.

  —prebst.

  —nobrst.

  Mexican standoff. He was still smiling. Not even a trace of sweat on his forehead. Something eerie about him, something new and strange. This is some kind of borgmann hacker, I realized suddenly. He must be working for the Entities, roving the city, looking to make trouble for freelancers like me. Good as he was, and he was plenty good, I despised him. A hacker who had become a borgmann—now, that was truly disgusting. I wanted to short him. I wanted to burn him out, now. I had never hated anyone so much in my life.

  I couldn’t do a thing with him.

  I was baffled. I was the Data King, I was the Megabyte Monster. All my life I had floated back and forth across a world in chains, picking every lock I came across. And now this nobody was tying me in knots. Whatever I gave him, he parried; and what came back from him was getting increasingly bizarre. He was working with an algorithm I had never seen before and was having serious trouble solving. After a little while I couldn’t even figure out what he was doing to me, let alone what I was going to do to cancel it. It was getting so I could barely execute. He was forcing me inexorably toward a wetware crash.

  “Who are you?” I yelled.

  He laughed in my face.

  And kept pouring it on. He was threatening the integrity of my implant, going at me down on the microcosmic level, attacking the molecules themselves. Fiddling around with electron shells, reversing charges and mucking up valences, clogging my gates, turning my circuits to soup. The computer that is implanted in my brain is nothing but a lot of organic chemistry, after all. So is my brain. If he kept this up the computer would go and the brain would follow, and I’d spend the rest of my life in the bibble-bibble academy.

  This wasn’t a sporting contest. This was murder.

  I reached for the reserves, throwing up all the defensive blockages I could invent. Things I had never had to use in my life, but they were there when I needed them, and they did slow him down. For a moment I was able to halt his ballbreaking onslaught and even push him back. And give myself the breathing space to set up a few offensive combinations of my own. But before I could get them running, he shut me down once more and started to drive me toward crashville all over again. He was unbelievable.

  I blocked him. He came back again. I hit him hard and he threw the punch into some other neural channel altogether and it went fizzling away.

  I hit him again. Again he blocked it.

  Then he hit me and I went reeling and staggering, and managed to get myself together when I was about three nanoseconds from the edge of the abyss.

  I began to set up a new combination. But even as I did it, I was reading the tone of his data, and what I was getting was absolute cool confidence. He was waiting for me. He was ready for anything I could throw. He was in that realm beyond mere self-confidence into utter certainty.

  What it was coming down to was this. I was able to keep him from ruining me, but only just barely, and I wasn’t able to lay a glove on him at all. And he seemed to have infinite resources behind him. I didn’t worry him. He was tireless. He didn’t appear to degrade at all. He just took all I could give and kept throwing new stuff at me, coming at me from six sides at once.

  Now I understood for the first time what it must have felt like for all the hackers I had beaten. Some of them must have felt pretty cocky, I suppose, until they ran into me. It costs more to lose when you think you’re good. When you know you’re good. People like that, when they lose, they have to reprogram their whole sense of their relation to the universe.

  I had two choices. I could go on fighting until he wore me down and crashed me. Or I could give up right now. In the end everything comes down to yes or no, on or off, one or zero, doesn’t it?

  I took a deep breath. I was staring straight into chaos.

  “All right,” I said. “I’m beaten. I quit.”

  I wrenched my wrist free of his, trembled, swayed,
went toppling down on the ground.

  A minute later five cops jumped me and trussed me up like a turkey and hauled me away, with my implant arm sticking out of the package and a security lock wrapped around my wrist, as if they were afraid I was going to start pulling data right out of the air.

  * * *

  Where they took me was Figueroa Street, the big black marble ninety-story job that is the home of the puppet city government. I didn’t give a damn. I was numb. They could have put me in the sewer and I wouldn’t have cared. I wasn’t damaged—the automatic circuit check was still running and it came up green—but the humiliation was so intense that I felt crashed. I felt destroyed. The only thing I wanted to know was the name of the hacker who had done it to me.

  The Figueroa Street building has ceilings about twenty feet high everywhere, so that there’ll be room for Entities to move around. Voices reverberate in those vast open spaces like echoes in a cavern. The cops sat me down in a hallway, still all wrapped up, and kept me there for a long time. Blurred sounds went lalloping up and down the passage. I wanted to hide from them. My brain felt raw. I had taken one hell of a pounding.

  Now and then a couple of towering Entities would come rumbling through the hall, tiptoeing on their tentacles in that weirdly dainty way of theirs. With them came a little entourage of humans whom they ignored entirely, as they always do. They know that we’re intelligent but they just don’t care to talk to us. They let their computers do that, via the Borgmann interface, and may his signal degrade forever for having sold us out. Not that they wouldn’t have conquered us anyway, but Borgmann made it ever so much easier for them to push us around by showing them how to connect our little biocomputers to their huge mainframes. I bet he was very proud of himself, too: just wanted to see if his gadget would work, and to hell with the fact that he was selling us into eternal bondage.

  Nobody has ever figured out why the Entities are here or what they want from us. They simply came, that’s all. Saw. Conquered. Rearranged us. Put us to work doing godawful unfathomable tasks, Like a bad dream.

  And there wasn’t any way we could defend ourselves against them. Didn’t seem that way to us at first—we were cocky, we were going to wage guerilla war and wipe them out—but we learned fast how wrong we were, and we are theirs for keeps. There’s nobody left with anything close to freedom except the handful of hackers like me; and, as I’ve explained, we’re not dopey enough to try any serious sort of counterattack. It’s a big enough triumph for us just to be able to dodge around from one city to another without having to get authorization.

  Looked like all that was finished for me, now. Right then I didn’t give a damn. I was still trying to integrate the notion that I had been beaten; I didn’t have capacity left over to work on a program for the new life I would be leading now.

  “Is this the pardoner, over here?” someone said.

  “That one, yeah.”

  “She wants to see him now.”

  “You think we should fix him up a little first?”

  “She said now.”

  A hand at my shoulder, rocking me gently. “Up, fellow. It’s interview time. Don’t make a mess or you’ll get hurt.”

  I let them shuffle me down the hall and through a gigantic doorway and into an immense office with a ceiling high enough to give an Entity all the room it would want. I didn’t say a word. There weren’t any Entities in the office, just a woman in a black robe, sitting behind a wide desk at the far end. It looked like a toy desk in that colossal room. She looked like a toy woman. The cops left me alone with her. Trussed up like that, I wasn’t any risk.

  “Are you John Doe?” she asked.

  I was halfway across the room, studying my shoes. “What do you think?” I said.

  “That’s the name you gave upon entry to the city.”

  “I give lots of names. John Smith, Richard Roe, Joe Blow. It doesn’t matter much to the gate software what name I give.”

  “Because you’ve gimmicked the gate?” She paused. “I should tell you, this is a court of inquiry.”

  “You already know everything I could tell you. Your borgmann hacker’s been swimming around in my brain.”

  “Please,” she said. “This’ll be easier if you cooperate. The accusation is illegal entry, illegal seizure of a vehicle, and illegal interfacing activity, specifically, selling pardons. Do you have a statement?”

  “No.”

  “You deny that you’re a pardoner?”

  “I don’t deny, I don’t affirm. What’s the goddamned use.”

  “Look up at me,” she said.

  “That’s a lot of effort.”

  “Look up,” she said. There was an odd edge on her voice. “Whether you’re a pardoner or not isn’t the issue. We know you’re a pardoner. I know you’re a pardoner.” And she called me by a name I hadn’t used in a very long time. Not since ’36, as a matter of fact.

  I looked at her. Stared. Had trouble believing I was seeing what I saw. Felt a rush of memories come flooding up. Did some mental editing work on her face, taking out some lines here, subtracting a little flesh in a few places, adding some in others. Stripping away the years.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m who you think I am.”

  I gaped. This was worse than what the hacker had done to me. But there was no way to run from it.

  “You work for them?” I asked.

  “The pardon you sold me wasn’t any good. You knew that, didn’t you? I had someone waiting for me in San Diego, but when I tried to get through the wall they stopped me just like that, and dragged me away screaming. I could have killed you. I would have gone to San Diego and then we would have tried to make it to Hawaii in his boat.”

  “I didn’t know about the guy in San Diego,” I said.

  “Why should you? It wasn’t your business. You took my money, you were supposed to get me my pardon. That was the deal.”

  Her eyes were gray with golden sparkles in them. I had trouble looking into them.

  “You still want to kill me?” I asked. “Are you planning to kill me now?”

  “No and no.” She used my old name again. “I can’t tell you how astounded I was, when they brought you in here. A pardoner, they said. John Doe. Pardoners, that’s my department. They bring all of them to me. I used to wonder years ago if they’d ever bring you in, but after a while I figured, no, not a chance, he’s probably a million miles away, he’ll never come back this way again. And then they brought in this John Doe, and I saw your face.”

  “Do you think you could manage to believe,” I said, “that I’ve felt guilty for what I did to you ever since? You don’t have to believe it. But it’s the truth.”

  “I’m sure it’s been unending agony for you.”

  “I mean it. Please. I’ve stiffed a lot of people, yes, and sometimes I’ve regretted it and sometimes I haven’t, but you were one that I regretted. You’re the one I’ve regretted most. This is the absolute truth.”

  She considered that. I couldn’t tell whether she believed it even for a fraction of a second, but I could see that she was considering it.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked after a bit.

  “I stiff people because I don’t want to seem too perfect,” I told her. “You deliver a pardon every single time, word gets around, people start talking, you start to become legendary. And then you’re known everywhere and sooner or later the Entities get hold of you, and that’s that. So I always make sure to write a lot of stiffs. I tell people I’ll do my best, but there aren’t any guarantees, and sometimes it doesn’t work.”

  “You deliberately cheated me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you did. You seemed so cool, so professional. So perfect. I was sure the pardon would be valid. I couldn’t see how it would miss. And then I got to the wall and they grabbed me. So I thought, that bastard sold me out. He was too good just to have flubbed it up.” Her tone was calm but the anger was still in her eyes. “Couldn’t you have stiffed th
e next one? Why did it have to be me?”

  I looked at her for a long time.

  “Because I loved you,” I said.

  “Shit,” she said. “You didn’t even know me. I was just some stranger who had hired you.”

  “That’s just it. There I was full of all kinds of crazy instant lunatic fantasies about you, all of a sudden ready to turn my nice orderly life upside down for you, and all you could see was somebody you had hired to do a job. I didn’t know about the guy from San Diego. All I knew was I saw you and I wanted you. You don’t think that’s love? Well, call it something else, then, whatever you want. I never let myself feel it before. It isn’t smart, I thought, it ties you down, the risks are too big. And then I saw you and I talked to you a little and I thought something could be happening between us and things started to change inside me, and I thought, Yeah, yeah, go with it this time, let it happen, this may make everything different. And you stood there not seeing it, not even beginning to notice, just jabbering on and on about how important the pardon was for you. So I stiffed you. And afterwards I thought, Jesus, I ruined that girl’s life and it was just because I got myself into a snit, and that was a fucking petty thing to have done. So I’ve been sorry ever since. You don’t have to believe that. I didn’t know about San Diego. That makes it even worse for me.” She didn’t say anything all this time, and the silence felt enormous. So after a moment I said, “Tell me one thing, at least. That guy who wrecked me in Pershing Square: who was he?”

  “He wasn’t anybody,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”