L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02

by Nagasaki Vector

  Or more correctly — an’ characteristically—gotten somebody else t’make his move for him.

  Denny an’ Edna’s back-ups’d been recruited from the company—Bonzo’s—that took care of the minimal security considerations Birdflower’s chair-farm required. The rest was history, no gorier or smokier than any I’d ever seen, but upsettin’ t’folks usta livin’ amidst domestic tranquility.

  I looked down at Denny as they strapped him on the stretcher, feelin’ uncharacteristically charitable. “Well, kid, I dunno—I reckon there’s folks done worse for love. That Edna’s quite a looker, for ail she’s a cold-blooded—” “Love?” Denny gasped, the sleepy-drugs startin’ in on him an’ his eyes losin’ focus. “There is no love! There is rut. There is insanity. There are a dozen different kinds of fear. There is also comfortable sleepwalking boredom. And the greatest joke of all is that this last—boredom—is the best we can expect from life. Love is a fraud, a hoax, the name we give to hormones and sentiment—a sentiment we generate within ourselves to assuage the shame we feel for what the hormones do to us.”

  An’ without so much as a fare-thee-well, he shut his eyes an’ commenced t’snorin’ peaceably. He mighta been a jerk, but he hadda grammatical—if cynical—subconscious.

  The rights-protectors carted him upstairs.

  “I guess that’s it, then,” Win said, risin’ from the sofa. He stretched his arms an’ yawned, apparently fully recovered. “Time to make our move! Who’s going to stay and keep an eye on Kent?”

  PRPG’d taken the chimp from Bonzo’s away with the bodies. Kent’d be lyin’ around upstairs, sedated to the gills an’ wired into the ’com which monitored his healin’.

  “Not me!" The chorus consisted of Will Sanders, Mary-Beth, Fran, Nahuatl, Trip, Stumble, an’ Fall—the one with the cracked shell. I kept a discreet silence, havin’ learned early an’ the hard way never t’volunteer.

  “Now look, you guys,” Win pleaded, “this is ridiculous! Somebody’s got to stay, if only to—”

  “How about me?” said the Telecom abruptly. A blond an’ blue-eyed vision of heaven gazed down upon us from the wall. “There isn’t very much else I can do, is there, Bernie?”

  “More’s the pity, baby, more’s the pity.”

  The detective considered it for a moment. “Well, I suppose you can make sure that Kent stays out of his skull — I assume you’ve got access to the house circuitry.” Georgie nodded, her pale locks bobbin’ appealin’ly. “What if we have another bunch of intruders?”

  Her image on the screen vanished suddenly, replaced by that of a grizzled chimpanzee in some kinda formal-cut jacket an’ a baseball cap.

  “Professional Protectives, here, what can I—oh, it’s you, Win. What’s up?”

  “I found the number in your quick-reference memories, Mr. Bear,” a female voice whispered outa one corner of the screen. “Will this be satisfactory?”

  Bear addressed the chimp. “I’m going to be out of town for a little while, Cap, and Clarissa’s in cold storage. Keep a real close watch on the house, will you?”

  Win’s friend lifted his hat by its bill an’ scratched his graying head, then stepped out from behind the counter as the camera followed him. He was wearin’ a black tail-coat exactly like Groucho Marx’s, a black-and-white checkered sarong, an’ a heavy leather gunbelt. No shoes.

  “Sure thing—you’re the customer. What’s going on over there, Win? Some kinda dust-up, the way I hear. Got yourself into trouble again when the wife’s not around t’look after you?”

  Bear grinned. “I’ll tell you all about it later. Just don’t let anybody in or out, okay? PRPG’s left a customer with me, and there could be some shooting.”

  The image on the screen nodded, glancing around the room. “Looks like there has been already. I’ll attend to it personally.” He winked out.

  “Captain Forsythe,” Win explained to the rest of us. “Of Professional Protectives. Sure wish I’d had them on alert earlier. Forsythe’s a genuine wizard with an automatic pistol.”

  Sanders nodded agreement. “Only person I ever met who shoots straighter and faster than little Frannie Oakley over there.”

  Little Frannie Oakley said not a word, but placed her' gin-rummy hand carefully face-down on the carpet, rose gracefully, walked over to Sanders on the couch, and kicked him in the shin, hard. Then she returned to her card game with the Freenies.

  Sanders rubbed his leg.

  “Well, now that that’s taken care of,” observed Win, suppressin’ the same laughter I was havin’ trouble stiflin’, “let’s go!”

  “That’s more like it!” exclaimed Nahuatl. “Yoicks and away!”

  17 Seven of Swords

  It’s NEVER QUITE AS EASY AS THAT.

  The assumption was that Georgie’d been moved t’one of the furniture farm’s outbuildin’s in a powered-down condition. She remembered somethin’ about a huge wide-bedded hovertruck, an’ there are certain portions of her circuitry which can never be shut off.

  But her memories were spotty. How much d'you remember about that movie you fell asleep in the middle of?

  All that aside, we were dealin’ with private property here, contemplatin’ invadin’ somebody’s ethical castle, an institution so sacrosanct in the Confederacy that not even fools walked in uninvited, let alone angels. Give you a good idea of the caliber of the boys from Bonzo’s.

  Even if customs an’ legalities’d been taken care of, there were still logistics, strategy, an’ tactics: who oughta do what an’ with which an’ t’whom—put me in minda my favorite limerick, the one about the fairy who came from Khartoum.

  Will an’ Fran Sanders’d disappeared across the street t’gather ordnance, while Win an’ Mary-Beth continued t’hash out the ethical side of this operation. It was doubly complicated on accounta this Birdflower geek seemed a decent enough sodbuster, if Denny Kent was t’be believed—a large assumption, I figgered—but apparently he still thought that Cromney was on the up-and-up.

  Howell conferred with the professional ethicist an’ his fellow gumshoe, leavin’ me an’ the Freenies feelin’ like a whole shelfful of fifth wheels, twiddlin’ our thumbs.

  The Freenies faked it.

  Havin’ learned a lesson the hard way, I pulled the magazine an’ chamber-round outa my .45, punched in the recoil-plunger under the muzzle, an’ rotated the barrel-bushin’ until both plunger an’ spring popped free. Then I racked the slide back halfway, wiggled out the slide-stop, an’ shucked slide, barrel, an’ associated parts off the frame.

  Meanwhile, I was gettin’ reacquainted with m’best girlfriend, who was showin’ some facets I hadn’t seen before.

  “What’s it like, sweetheart, gettin’ sapient alluva sudden? Us humans do it kinda graduallike, an’ the vast majority, in my opinion, never make it at all!”

  I turned the bushin’ the other way, separated it an’ the barrel from the slide.

  “Gosh, Bernie, it seems as though I can remember what things were like before. It’s possible I was on the verge for a long, long time, and the additional capacity of Deejay’s computers is all that I needed. What I remember, mostly, is a kind of floating frustration—like a dream where you’re trying to speak to someone and you can’t quite get the words out.”

  Color, Charm, an’ Spin were playin’ three-handed gin now, the most vicious, ruthless, cutthroat game this side of Crazy Eights or blood-an’-guts Monopoly. I pushed the firin’ pin inward with a ballpoint, slid its retainer-plate downward, an’ pulled out pin, spring, an’ extractor.

  Color ginned out on the first go-round, amidst high-frequency catcalls from his fellow Yamaguchii. The cards got collected an’ shuffled again.

  “I think I understand. What I don’t dig, though, is how you can handle bein’ a ninety-foot machine an’ a petite little blonde at the same time—unless the display’s just for com-municatin’ with organic folks—that tree you’re leanin’ against, those flowers: do they seem real t’you?”

  S
he shrugged. “How real do other people feel to you when you’re talking to them on the telephone? It’s something you never ask yourself about. What’s your favorite book?”

  My turn t’shrug as I unscrewed the rubber grips from the Colt with a fine blade on my pocket lighter. “You oughta know—Peter Pan, mebbe, or The Story of O. What’s the point?”

  The image on the screen actually blushed. “By all means, let’s talk about Peter Pan. Tell me, who’s more real to you as a person in your mind, little Wendy or somebody like Herbert Hoover?”

  I thought about it, but not for very long. “No question about it: Wendy.” I looked around for a pencil or somethin’ t’shove a Kleenex through the bore of the pistol. Suddenly, Color took over, usin’ a slim green tentacle as a cleanin’ rod, while Charm produced an appendage resemblin’ a toothbrush an’ worked the slide over, bein’ extra-careful with the breech-face. I was never gonna live down gettin’ my pistol rusty.

  But they were handy fellas t’have around.

  “There, you see, Bernie? An admittedly fictional character is more real to you than an historical one—someone, to judge from my memories, that you’ve actually met in person.”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “Shook his hand an’ everything. An’ washed it thoroughly after. I see what you’re gettin’ at, though. Guess I could think of myself as a skeleton, a bagga organs, or a four-dimensional pink worm with a pen-tacular cross-section—or as I do: Bernard M-for-Mephi-stopheies Gruenblum, boy time-traveler. An’ you obviously think of yourself as Mary Pickford.”

  “Olivia Newton-John, please. When are you going to come rescue me? It’ll be dark soon, you know.”

  I screwed the grips back on as Charm handed me the frame, reassembled the slide, slid it on an locked it in place, slapped in a clip an’ jacked a round into the chamber, fillin’ up the magazine with an extra cartridge.

  “Right now—whether the philosophers’ve got it figgered out or not! C’mon, you guys, you travelin’ with me or do I hafta walk t’Wyomin’?”

  The hastily-repaired front door swung open. Fran said, “You won’t have to walk!”

  impellers thrummin’, Win’s Neova, laden down with detective, flyin’ saucer-jockey, an’ the Three Graces, followed Will Sanders’ Tucker, mostly laden down with goodlookin’ women—with a spare militiaman an’ coyote thrown in for contrast. As we sped across Laporte toward the Greenway, Georgie took part in the conversation on the divided screen in fronta me.

  She was right: at the moment she was sharin’ screen-space with Mary-Beth, an’ both were equally real t’me.

  “Which is just the ethical crowbar we needed, Bemie,” the ethicist said. “Your Georgie is now a sapient being, held against her will under duress. More than that—if I understand correctly, Heplar could terminate her sapience simply by throwing a few switches.”

  A figurative lightbulb went on over m’head. “That’s what you people were cacklin’ about back there! ‘Cromney’s legal status’! Jog Georgie into sapience, he stops bein’ a thief an’ becomes a kidnaper!”

  Win grunted, keepin’ his eyes on the road. “And it means we’re justified in a surprise-attack, right?”

  Mary-Beth shook her head, spreadin’ beautiful curls all over the Telecom. “Let’s just say there’s an excellent chance the average adjudicator will see it our way.”

  “If I understand aright,” Charm offered from the seat beside me, “the chances are even better if there is minimal bloodshed and property damage in the doing of the deed.” “Spoilsport!” Fran retorted via Com.

  “Just remember that Birdflower and his people would be on our side if only they knew the full truth,” Mary-Beth cautioned. “If the element of surprise weren’t necessary for Georgie’s sake, we might simply call him. I wish—”

  “So do I.” Georgie sighed. “There’s something in this experience—having Cromney and Heplar and Janof aboard controlling things, I mean—that’s a lot like having tapeworms. But Birdflower and Tree and their friends seem like nice people. Please be careful!”

  Mebbe Georgie was my better half.

  The country around Cheyenne’s amazin’—the Rockies somber an’ purple on the left, prehistoric lion-colored prairie stretchin’ t’foreveron the right, an’ every kinda bluff, butte, gully, hogback, an’ foothill y’can imagine in between. Piles of rock that look like they were injection-molded in the bowels of a Kline-bottle.

  We crossed the ridge that echoes the city’s name an’ spilled out into the basin at about 300 per. The Greenway’d turned out t’be the Confederate version of an interstate superhighway, a paira round-bottomed grass-lined grooves runnin’ side-by-side, some kinda subway buried between ’em I’da never noticed if I hadn’t been told. We zipped around the city, headin’ east-by-north toward the Lodgepole River. It was cornin’ on dusk as we flared our skirts an’ wheezed to a dusty stop at the fence-line of the fumiture-farm.

  I could see a field fulla antique cobbler’s benches wavin’ in the wind.

  We piled out t’confer by the barrow-ditch. Howell looked longingly at a weathered fencepost, trotted outa sight down the rutted back-country road a moment, an’ came back lookin’ more cheerful.

  “Will you kindly help me with my pistols, Bernie?”

  “Your what?” I looked down at his paws an’ back t’his yellow eyes reflectin’ the day’s-end sky. Some kinda evenin’ bird’d started up tweetlin’, an’ there was sage-pollen in the air. The sun was flirtin’ with the mountain-tops in a way no hallucinogenic drug or fireworks display coulda ever touched.

  “My pistols. Here, I’ll show you!” He leaped back into Will Sanders’ car an’ came back with a canvas bag in his teeth.

  Inside was a brace of automatics, sans trigger-guards an’ triggers, symmetrically engineered—one ejectin’ to the left, the other to the right—an’ firmly attached to a fetchin’ little fiberglass bonnet with a pod of electronics at the nape an’ a wire danglin’.

  “I getcha!” I said to the coyote. “But what happens when y’run outa ammo?”

  He thrust his head into the rig as I held it for him. A strap snaked itself beneath his chin, an’ the danglin’ wire plugged itself into his collar, but he needed a little help with the protective earpads—important, as the muzzles of the weapons protruded just beyond the corners of his jaw. I snapped the safety-goggles over his eyes, noticin’ the crosshairs.

  “I try not to run out. But the pistols are a high-velocity .23 caliber, fifty rounds to the magazine. The whole thing operates off the electronics implanted in my brain.”

  Reminded me of the story about a neighborhood so tough even the dogs had guns.

  The plan—if that’s the word for it—was that Howell, bein’ smaller, faster, an’ sneakier, would scout on ahead through the chiffoniers an’ bedroom sets, while we took up the rear. Win an’ the Freenies an’ me. The Sanderses, as soon as we were through palaverin’ here’d circle around an’ come in from the north, I could see the big gray corrugated buildin’ already an’ was gettin’ excited.

  i parked myself on the fender of Win’s Neova an’ did some real careful Yoga-breathin’ t’kinda settle m’self. Don’t do t’go into battle all keyed up. Then I leaned into the car so Georgie could see me.

  “Won’t be long now, baby. Papa’s cornin’. Anything y’want me t’bring you? Jujubes, silicone-lube, integrated circuits?”

  She smiled, though the strain was visible on her imaginary face. “Just yourself, Bernard M-for-macho Gruen-blum, and don’t get hurt or anything.”

  “You got it, kiddo. I—what?”

  I backed outa the car abruptly, smackin’ the backa my noggin on the coamin’. “What’s up, Win?”

  “Nothing,” the detective answered, hikin’ up his black, tooled-leather gunbelt. That big .4I of his’d pull anybody’s pants down. He pulled the little hand-made single-shot derringer from his pocket, the one I’d noticed in his gun case back home, unscrewed the stubby barrel t’make sure it was plugged up real good with cart
ridge, an’ screwed it tight again..

  “I just thought Georgie might like to see what’s going on,” he said, reachin’ past me to the dashboard. He pulled up an’ out on the Telecom eye; it followed his hand on a little hair-fine cable, an’ he clipped it to the chrome at the top of the windshield. “How’s that, Georgie?”

  “Fine, Mr. Bear—though a little bit scarier, I must admit. Is that the building I’m in?”

  “It would appear to be—and call me Win.” He slapped the tiny pistol in his palm. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of there.”

  I shook my head. “I wouldn’t wanna shoot that thing with your hand!”

  He grinned. “I’ve only used it once, and to tell the truth, I was a little surprised I survived the experience myself. Let’s go!”

  We did a brief piece of slapstick gettin’ through the three-strand barbed-wire fence an’ were on our way, Nahuatl way out in the lead, men an’ Freenies followin’. Never saw so goddamned many knick-knack shelves an’ bookends in one place in m’life. An’ fancy-grained toilet seats.

  Stoop labor, obviously.

  Bear halted suddenly, one hand to his ear an’ a vacant look in his eyes. He nodded, looked at me, an’ said, “Howell’s on his way across the farm yard. Says it looks pretty deserted. The bam is locked up tight and he can’t get in. He’ll wait for us under the farmhouse porch.”

  We mushed on through the dinin’-room section, the kitchen cabinetry, an’ about fifty-eleven acres of kiddie furniture, until we reached the edge of the field. I crouched down behind a paira bunkbeds that wasn’t quite ripe an’ whispered, “What now, O Leatherstockin’?”

  Win smiled, tryin’ t’resist liftin’ the lid of a half-grown toy-box t’see what was inside. “We wait for the Three Musketeers to get into position. How fast can the little guys run?”