Madlands

by K. W. Jeter

  He must’ve caught that one. Pulled himself upright. “I’m sorry, Mr. Trayne. I hope you’ll forgive my woolgathering.” The nice-guy smile dazzled in my direction. “We’ve all been working pretty hard, gearing up for this. And it’s something we all really believe in.”

  “Great. God hates a half-devil.”

  Harrison actually laughed. I could see the silver in his molars. “That’s good. I like that. There are no half-devils out here, are there?”

  I shook my head. “There aren’t even any half-saints. It’s not that kind of a place.”

  “It’s good to know where you stand. Eliminate all the grey shades, and then you can start to do business.”

  That’s just what I was hoping for. “So, uh, just what is it? That you’re doing out here. That you wanted to talk to me about.”

  He looked smug, pleased with himself and his bomb-dropping capacity. “We’re going after Canal Ultime.”

  It took a moment for that to register. The old wheeze about fish not knowing what water is. I didn’t do a lot of thinking about Canal Ultime on a day-to-day basis, simply because it was more or less the world I swam in. Me and Identrope; CU made our operations possible. The air we breathed.

  ‘Going after’?” I had fallen a step behind, and caught up with Harrison. “What, you’re talking about putting them out of business?” That was hard to believe. Canal Ultime were pretty locked down. They owned that world.

  “Good Christ, no.” Harrison smiled and shook his head. “Really—you people outside the corporate loop . . . you tend to get overdramatic about business maneuvers. One company goes up against another, nobody’s going to wind up being put out of business. In this regard, we do have to tolerate grey areas. It’s not like boxing or something, where you can think about knocking the other guy out of the ring. No, we’re talking about relative market share here. Much less dramatic.”

  “Yeah, but isn’t CU’s market share one hundred percent right now?” Where did that put these New Moon people?

  Shake of the head. “Not quite. There are still some fringe cable operations. Very specialized markets—stock quotes, deviant music enthusiasts, things like that.”

  “Still, you’re talking about the high nineties for CU’s market share.”

  Harrison shrugged. To show he wasn’t impressed, intimidated. “High ninety-nines, actually. Point something or other. Really, Trayne, we wouldn’t be targeting them if they didn’t have the meat in their jaws.”

  “Yeah, right. That’s good thinking.” Maybe. For me, when I thought about things with jaws, I usually also considered the big long teeth they carried around in them. “But this New Moon thing—you people are a start-up operation, right? So your market share now is at zero. Am I correct on that?”

  “Oh, sure.” No big deal—for him. “But you have to remember, Mr. Trayne. Zero is a starting point.”

  In the worlds I ran in, zero was the end point.

  We had walked on farther into the junkyard. Even more signs of activity. Fences with razor wire strung along on top had been thrown up, to keep the pesky rats out. Harrison got us through a card-locked gate. On the other side, the empty spaces were scraped even wider, the shiny new earth-moving equipment arrayed on either side.

  Harrison led the way into this mini-zone’s heart. His pace had picked up from the previous meditative stroll. He looked back over his shoulder at me, his eyes holding a genuine excited spark.

  “Near one hundred market share—you’re absolutely right about that, Mr. Trayne. But it’s not going to be that way for long.”

  He’d have to work hard to convince me on that point. You didn’t have to be big into history to know that when some entity has a monopoly situation, it can go way beyond rational limits in defending it. Especially a high-profit corporate entity such as Canal Ultime, where a particularly vicious defense could be paid for out of the petty-cash accounts.

  Canal Ultime had started out—I knew this from my archive rummaging—as a fairly low-level special-effects outfit, contracting services out to what had been the majors back then. An influx of Euro-capital had enabled them to get into feature production, and finally, picking up a piecemeal distribution network. Somewhere along the line, the dog-French name change—The Last Channel—had come about, along with some distinctly Napoleonic empire-building ambitions.

  All of which they’d made good on.

  One hundred market share; forget those splinter cable deals, ticks on a rhino’s back, so big it wouldn’t even know they were there. On the battlefield of broadcast communications, Canal Ultime was the big winner. Omnivorously so; they hadn’t just beaten their competition, they’d eaten them. If it was being broadcast, and somebody was watching it, then it was CU’s game. One hundred percent.

  New Moon thought it was going to cut into that kind of locked action? They were crazy. Harrison’s smile was a loon’s smile.

  That loony smile widened as Harrison watched the thoughts bouncing around behind my forehead. You didn’t need telepathy to know what I was thinking.

  “‘O ye of little faith—’”

  “Little faith, hell.” I was trying to remember if he’d left the gun on his desk, or whether he’d slipped it into his pocket on the way out of his office. I didn’t care for people with everything packed in tight waving those things around in close proximity to my flesh; I really didn’t like that kind of hardware in the hands of people with this much exposed wiring. “If that’s what you’re up to, I can only wish you and your friends the best of luck.” I scanned around for whatever would be the quickest way out of this ’yard sector.

  Harrison laughed. “I can appreciate your skepticism, Mr. Trayne. When I signed on with New Moon—and believe me, I was recruited fairly late in the process—when they told me what they were planning, I thought the venture capital they’d rounded up would be better invested in lottery tickets. At least there’s a measurable chance on those. But all that was before I saw . . . certain things, let’s say.” He gestured with a curl of his index finger. “Step over here.”

  We’d come to a hangar-like building of riveted sheet metal. It bounced the sun into my eyes, all fire and tears. I heard, rather than saw, Harrison draw back a big rattling door. Another welcome blast of air-conditioning bathed my face. Generator hum massaged the darkness.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  I blinked and looked around. Harrison had left my side and now stood in the middle of the high-ceilinged space. A proprietary hand rested on the flank of a white cylinder, its curve higher than his head.

  I could see fins and the dark snouts of a propulsion system at one end, tapered nose at the other. A missile lying on its side. This was it? Their big deal? Their idea of competing in the marketplace was to go military? That wasn’t even all that original—you watch enough of those noir films dug up from the archives, you could pretty easily get the notion that organized crime was just ordinary corporate activity with better firepower.

  “This something you found here in the ’yard?” I looked the missile over. It was a blank, no identifying insignia.

  Harrison shook his head. “Most of the old ballistic stuff left around here—even if you could get it to work—it’s all short-range hardware. Basically, we needed something that could get us out of atmosphere, up to an orbital level.” He rubbed his hand on the slick white. “This is pretty much your standard commercial piece, right off the shelf from our supplier in Jakarta. The import license was a bit tricky. We finally had to smuggle the pieces in, flatbed trucks down from a hydraulics plant in Ottawa. Everything was labeled as sewage treatment components, right down to the control electronics.”

  It had been the big criminal enterprise of his life; he radiated a happy smugness about it.

  “So this is just a freight jobbie?” I rapped my knuckles on the metal and got a hollow bwonng in return. “No exploding payloads?”

  A little smile as Harrison shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

  “Oh.” I was
actually a little disappointed. Some part of me had been hoping for something a little more fun, crazier. I could see where this one was going, and it wasn’t anywhere special.

  “You see—”

  “No; let me guess.” Arms folded, I leaned a shoulder against the missile. “You’re going to put up some kind of home-brew communications satellite. And that’s your big blow against the empire. That’s how you’re going to go up against Canal Ultime.” It was sad, really. They’d get creamed into something you could spread on toast. What were they going to do for programming, for one thing?

  “It’s not as simple as that, Mr. Trayne. Come over here.”

  He led me around to the other side. The missile’s cargo bay hung open; wires dangled out to a squat ovoid riding on an equipment cart.

  “It’s true we brought the missile system in ourselves. But we brought it in, to this spot, for a reason. What we’re going to be putting up with it isn’t something we’ve built ourselves. To put it bluntly, we’ve found something out here that is of, let’s say, considerable interest. A really fine piece of technology. And it is of military origin.”

  Harrison was obviously referring to the big egg on the cart. It radiated that dull grey nonsheen of the old stuff, mysterious and sinister. Personally, I wouldn’t have trusted it, no matter where they’d dug it up.

  “Yeah?” I laid a finger on it and got a small static shock, a blue spark in the dry air. “What’s it do?”

  “Well, it is a communications satellite. You were right about that—”

  I’m always right about these things. To my great disappointment.

  “—but it is a little different from the ordinary run of those things. As I said, it’s a military device—”

  Big deal. They could’ve been using it to beam down armed forces video to the troops in the field. Tit shows and reruns of old sitcoms.

  “—and it has some rather unusual capabilities. That’s why New Moon is investing the money to get it up and running. Under our control, of course.” The smile blossomed on Harrison’s face again. “Basically, it’s the device’s anti-jamming abilities that attracted us to it. That we could see the commercial possibilities in. Some of our technicians refer to it as sneak-wave propagation. Up till now, Canal Ultime has been able to shove any possible competition off the band, blank them right out of the sky. This baby—” He gave the egg an affectionate pat. “It can use Canal Ultime’s own signals as a carrier medium, without affecting the original signal’s content; CU won’t even be able to drag us before their pet FCC on any bullshit jamming charges their lawyers might be able to come up with. And the beauty of it is that they won’t be able to use their own jammers on us. Our signal becomes a parasite on theirs, that can’t be destroyed without killing the original. It’s a bulletproof arrangement. We can be on the air with this thing, and Canal Ultime will never know what hit them.”

  The guy was in love with this device; it showed. They probably all were, the techs and the money bosses alike.

  “Well, that’s real fine.” I folded my arms across my chest. “Let’s assume that your people have got this thing working, and it can do all that neat stuff. You’ve still forgotten a few things. Canal Ultime still has all the programming and the advertisers. Technically, you might have this wired, but your economics are screwed. Nobody’s going to switch over from a CU broadcast to watch your test pattern.”

  “That’s a good point.” Harrison nodded. “I like talking to someone who can anticipate these things. It makes it so much easier. You’re right; Canal Ultime has a lock on the software and the revenue accounts. That’s where you come in.” He reached into his jacket pocket.

  Christ, he did have the piece with him. I should have spotted the gun’s weight tugging his jacket askew. He hauled it out and displayed it to me, the muzzle pointing up in the air for a welcome change. His smile metamorphosed to a wacked grin.

  “We’d like you to accept a little commission on our behalf, Mr. Trayne.”

  “Yeah?” I was ready to duck around the other side of the missile, just in case he lost all control. “Like what?”

  “It’s Identrope.” Smile and nod. “We’d like you to kill him.” Harrison held the gun butt-first out toward me.

  That was it? I had to laugh.

  My laughing echoed up in the high ceiling. Harrison kept watching me and smiling.

  The smile grew nervous when the laughing didn’t stop. “What’s so funny?”

  I couldn’t tell him. It was too good a joke.

  The laughing went on until I couldn’t see Harrison any longer, tears squeezing under my eyelids. I threw my head back and tasted one drop at the corner of my mouth. Like drowning in a small salt ocean, sinking beneath furious self-damning waves. Identrope’s corpse floated by, his throat blossoming in a red cloud where a shark with one of my faces had razored him

  That was the joke. To pay the shark that had been circling in my heart for so long, pay for murder that had already been sealed in my long-night dreaming a thousand times . . .

  Who wouldn’t laugh?

  TWELVE

  MEMORY, not dream; my laughing had triggered it.

  Someone else laughing, and I was in my original body, the one that was sleeping up in the web now. This must have been before I’d gone disguised and wound up working for Identrope. Because he’d been the one laughing, standing at the entrance of his headquarters, with a bunch of his studio hacks standing around him. Laughing at what, I didn’t know; I’d been standing yards away, scoping things out. Long ago. But I remembered the sound of Identrope’s laughter, and it had been easy to remember.

  Shuffling bodies, you find out that sensory inputs differ from one person to another. Shifts and gradations, filters and processing variations. Nearsighted or slightly deaf, and subtler than that: a slide up the spectrum in this one’s optic tract, an accent on the treble in another’s cochlea. Things always looked a little different, sounded a little different—like getting into a car and adjusting to the tilt of the steering wheel.

  But one thing I’d noticed. Whenever, over the years, I’d heard Identrope’s laughter, it had always sounded the same. As though it skipped over the crude sense receptors, and wired straight into my skull. Even my own laughing, echoed in bone and sinus cavity, had never stayed just the same from body to body. Just Identrope’s. That had been spooky and I’d come to hate it.

  But it wasn’t why I’d be happy to kill him . . .

  Harrison and I went walking back to the field office.

  My hilarity had died down, an ocean receding on the rocks of Harrison’s dud personality. All that smiling, and if he’d ever found anything funny in his life, I was the Pope of Iguanas.

  We finally got back down to business. My dark heart faded behind the numbers, but didn’t entirely disappear.

  “You figure offing Identrope is going to do it for you, huh?”

  Harrison nodded. “That’s our projection.”

  “As corporate warfare goes, that’s pretty much hardball.”

  He shrugged. “We don’t really see any alternative. New Moon is well capitalized, but there’s a limit. Our investors want to see black ink on the bottom line pretty quickly. Even with our satellite’s ability to elude Canal Ultime’s jamming efforts, we don’t want to spend years nibbling away at their market share. We want results. Also, we don’t want to take a heavy hit, spending time and money on programming development and kissing advertiser ass. We want those people to switch en masse, over to us. We think we can take CU’s market share from one hundred down to fifty, easily, if we play our cards right.”

  Maybe, maybe not; I couldn’t see it myself. “What’s Identrope got to do with all that?”

  Harrison tried out a thoughtful expression. “I don’t think you realize, Mr. Trayne, exactly what a pivotal figure your employer is; his exact importance to Canal Ultime’s operations.”

  “Identrope pays them a lot of money to carry his broadcasts.” I knew; I’d seen the account book
s.

  “That’s true. The receipts from Identrope constitute a nice piece of Canal Ultime’s revenues. Hardly enough, though, on its own, to put them into profit mode, given their overhead. No, that’s not where the real value of Identrope to CU lies. It’s something just a little deeper than that. Consider, Mr. Trayne: do Identrope’s people—his accountants and such—they get ratings from CU, don’t they? A readout on how well the broadcasts are doing, number of households watching, that sort of thing?”

  “Of course.” That was how the payment to Canal Ultime was figured, an incentive ratchet: the more people tuned in to Identrope’s broadcasts, the more we paid CU.

  Harrison raised an eyebrow. “And do you trust those figures?”

  I hadn’t thought about it before. “What, you think CU’s padding them?”

  “On the contrary—and this isn’t a matter of what I think, this is what New Moon Ultime is sitting on those ratings, keeping them low.”knows—Canal

  That didn’t make any sense to me. “Why would they do that? That would just be cutting into their own revenues.”

  “They’d have to have very good reasons, wouldn’t they? Now, we have certain key people—employees of Canal Ultime, some of them quite high on the ladder—whose, shall we say, allegiances have switched over to New Moon. While they’re still at CU. And these people have told us some very interesting things about CU’s accounting and viewer-tracking practices. Suffice it to say that CU has been deliberately underreporting Identrope’s ratings—”

  “Yeah? By how much?”

  “A lot, Mr. Trayne. A whole lot. The figures before CU’s people screw around with them show that Identrope’s broadcasts—your broadcasts also, Trayne—are the most popular thing on all of the Canal Ultime’s distribution networks. More popular than all the rest of the programming combined.”

  If that were true—and just looking at Harrison, I started to get the feeling it was—then that wasn’t just a matter of fudging a little around the edges. There was some mega-money involved.