The Long Run

by The Long Run (new ed) (mobi)

  Johnny Johnny broke in. "Tell Jodi Jodi that her brother says hello."

  Denice smiled again. "I'll do that. Bird's okay; he was arrested on pickpocket charges, but Beth got him out--Chief Devlin's been really good to everybody since you left. Jodi Jodi's fine too; talking about leaving the Red Line and starting her own business as a fashion consultant, but I don't think she's going to. They keep giving her raises."

  Trent glanced at the clock in the corner of the field. "I'm running out of time, Denice. This is costing more than I can afford right now."

  She nodded. "Send me a letter when you're settled."

  "I will." Trent checked the clock again; he'd spent nearly four hundred CU already. "Denice...."

  Denice Castanaveras said, "I know, Trent. I love you too." The field went dead.

  Trent leaned back slowly in his chair, and sat there, arms crossed over his chest, looking at the empty phonefield.

  "Boss?" Johnny Johnny's voice held genuine concern. "You okay?"

  "No. Not really, Johnny."

  His Image was silent for a moment. "Boss, do you love her?"

  Trent closed his eyes and thought about it. "I don't know, Johnny. I don't know what that is. She--she thinks I do," said Trent slowly. "I suppose she would know." He opened his eyes, stared into the glowing empty phonefield. "You know, it's strange. There's only one thing I've ever wanted, Johnny." Trent's features were completely still. "And she's it."

  "Boss?"

  "Seven years, Johnny. And then I got three months."

  There was silence from the handheld. When Johnny Johnny spoke his voice was smooth and even, almost uninflected. "I don't know what to say, Boss. I'm sorry."

  "I wish I could stop missing her."

  "Trent, it's time to go."

  After a long cold moment Trent touched his handheld to the terminal's payment strip, waited for the light to go green, and then did leave.

  The biosculptor had used her art upon herself; she was a walking advertisement.

  Her offices were near the Hotel Copernicus, just south of the Flight Caverns, with a view of the Luna City Gardens; it was easily the most expensive office space anywhere off Earth itself. The wall facing to the northwest was simply sheer one-way glassite, looking out over the gaunt and lanky oaks and redwoods in the Gardens. The lighting was subdued, glowpaint adjusted to a clean, professional white.

  Katrina Trudeau was a Russo-Canadian who had emigrated to the Moon fifteen years prior. Her amber-red hair was styled in a pageboy cut, setting off gold-flecked eyes and skin that was the precise color of aged oak. At first glance her cheekbones seemed too high, but after a few moments Trent realized that they served to balance a mouth that would otherwise have been too wide. She wore a jumpsuit that changed colors when she moved, odd patches going transparent without warning.

  She was, in a word, stunning.

  "This is the disclaimer," Trudeau said pleasantly. "I am required by law to inform you that Image coprocessor hardware and Image software are illegal on Luna. Further, it is against the law to engage in biosculpture for the specific purpose of evading legal responsibilities. It is illegal to engage in biosculpture if there is currently a warrant for your arrest extant on any part of Earth or in any part of Luna that is under the control of the United Nations. It is illegal to engage in biosculpture if there is currently a warrant for your arrest extant in Free Luna, the SpaceFarers Collective, or any of the Belt CityStates, where such warrants have been issued for behavior that is covered under applicable United Nations statutes or treaties with any of the foregoing parties. Got it?"

  "Oh, absolutely," Trent assured her. "What I have in mind is something that'll leave me looking amazingly normal and totally different than I do now. So I can go to parties and surprise my friends and acquaintances. I also want the best inskin Credit can buy."

  "That sort of thing costs a great deal."

  "Everything," said Trent, "costs a great deal. And when it doesn't it ends up costing more."

  The woman looked him up and down in much the same way that the man at the teller window had not an hour earlier. "You're quite the sensible boy. What do you need?"

  "Palm and fingerprints have to change. Retinal print has to change. Features need to change. The voice box can stay the same, which is good, because I like the way I sound. Height--" Trent paused.

  Katrina looked at him speculatively. "I can make you taller without too much trouble. Shorter is hard, and not very safe; it involves removing one or more of the vertebrae in your back and reshaping the new vertebrae so they'll ride together comfortably--all without damaging the spinal cord."

  "Pass. I'm already tall enough that it gets noticed. Any taller and I'd be into loonie territory."

  "Is that bad?"

  "I want to return to Earth some day, ma'am."

  "Very well. I presume, 'Sieur," she said dryly, "that you're interested in a face somewhat less gorgeous than the one you've got now."

  "Uhm. Not necessarily. Different, yes, but--you think I'm gorgeous?"

  Trudeau's teeth nibbled gently at the underside of her lower lip. "With that silly makeup taken off, you would be. You didn't hide the bone structure very well. At any rate, I have a series of holos you can look at to choose your new face. What about your inskin?"

  "About six months ago Tytan Electronics shipped an inskin that accepts and transmits data via either radio packet or traceset."

  Trudeau looked startled for the first time. She sat up straighter. "That's not an inskin, 'Sieur Vera. You're talking about the Tytan NN-II?"

  "Yes."

  "'Sieur, that's a nerve net that's designed to sit in high memory and model what's happening in your brain. It's entirely experimental." Trent started to speak and she overrode him. "Let me talk. I don't know a lot about inskins; I just implant the damn things. But I know what they do once they get inside your skull. Your brain has on the order of ten billion neurons. You can store between ten and fifteen quintillion bytes of information. The average inskin, even one with an Image coprocessor built into it, has less than ten thousand processors and an insignificant permanent storage capability; a few gigabytes at most. Even as simple as they are--five to six hundred connections internally--once it goes into your skull it never comes out again."

  Trent said, "Never is a long time."

  "Today," she said patiently, "it is not possible to safely remove even a simple inskin. The NN-II--I'd guess it'll be twenty-five years, at least, before anyone knows how to take out something like this. 'Sieur Vera, the NN-II is essentially an AI nerve net. It has nearly half a million processors; it makes a discrete connection, somewhere inside your brain, for every one of those processors. I wouldn't even be connecting the damn thing, I'd simply insert it into the fluid layer between your skull and the outer surface of your brain. The thing's about half biochip; it connects itself, grows into place over the space of about half a year. You're not supposed to put Image software into it, though it's possible; the NN-II's designed to transparently model the way you normally think, and then let you offload some of your thought processes into it--in essence, speeding up your thought processes. Making you smarter."

  "I've read about it in the trades, 'Selle. That's why I want it."

  "Strictly speaking, 'Sieur Vera, it is not an inskin. During the acclimation period it's common for even standard inskins to render the patient more susceptible to concussion, due to the difference in specific gravity between the inskin and the neural tissue it's attached to. On rare occasions that can become a permanent weakness, I'm sure you know. The point is that the NN-II has insufficient track record for me to tell you if that might be one of its side effects, or for that matter what side effects you might reasonably expect. I do not know if it's safe."

  "Me neither. I do know its specific gravity is a lot lower than that of most inskins, which I'd guess--lacking data, as we both do--would mean it's safer than your average inskin. As far as not being an inskin, it does radio packet communications, and it doesn
't choke on a traceset; that's close enough." Trent leaned forward. "Besides, the idea of walking around with a visible socket in my skull--well, it's always seemed so, so, tacky. You know?"

  "Tacky?" Trudeau's lips curved into a reluctant half smile.

  "Like wearing the big floppy clown feet without the clown suit. I hate people who do that."

  "That, too, is--tacky?"

  "Well, of course."

  "I see."

  "For example, once I was going to go to mass dressed up as a clown, but--do you go to a temple? Or a church?"

  Humor danced in her eyes. "On occasion."

  "Great. Would you like to go with me sometime?"

  "No."

  "Are you sure? We could wear clown suits. Or we could not wear clown suits if--"

  "'Sieur Vera, I don't date men--or women, for that matter --who are better than twenty-five years younger than I am. And I never, never date clients." The woman touched a stud on her desk, and the windows that let out onto the view of the Gardens went dark. "If you'll come in back with me," she said, standing, "I have some holos of naked young men for you to look at."

  Following her, Trent said, "Couldn't we have naked young girls instead?"

  Walking down the dim hallway, 'Selle Trudeau glanced back at Trent.

  Despite the short speech she had just made, Trent was almost certain she was thinking about it.

  Katrina Trudeau said, "Maybe later."

  Nathan was not there when Trent returned to Nathan's home at Aristillus Crater. It was considerably more luxurious than the bolt hole; seven rooms beneath ground, at the edge of Aristillus crater, only four kilometers from the remains of the Aristillus mining complex.

  Forty-four years prior, with the wounds of the Unification War on Earth still fresh, the United Nations had nationalized both the orbital construction facilities at Halfway and the SpaceFarers' Collective colony at L-5. By way of retaliation the SpaceFarers' Collective, eight Lunar cities with close ties to Belt CityStates, and all but a few of the CityStates themselves, had declared independence. The United Nations had been in no mood for further war, not after the hideous price it had paid in the subjugation of America and Japan. Though it had never officially recognized the governments as such, the U.N. had been in no real position to prevent the Belt or the SpaceFarers or Free Luna from proclaiming and maintaining their independence; and for nearly a decade after that, the CityStates had refused to send metals to either Earth itself or to United Nations territory on Luna. In that decade, the Aristillus Mining Company had been the premier source of aluminum and silicon, titanium and magnesium, for both U.N.-controlled Luna and Halfway. Today, with Free Luna grown to some twenty-five cities with over three million inhabitants, with the SpaceFarers' Collective the undisputed carrier of all non-military interplanetary trade, and with the closer cooperation of the CityStates and the United Nations, the Aristillus Mining Company's emphasis on mining grew smaller and smaller. By the end of the 2060s the company's Investment branch produced better than two thirds of the company's revenues, and all of its profits. The mining operation ran, when it ran, at a loss, and had since the early years of the decade; and the crater's six-kilometer-long mass driver received shipments of ore at the catapult head at progressively greater intervals.

  There were only about two hundred people living in the crater, and they all knew one another. Trent was not surprised that nobody tried to call or visit Nathan in the three days that Trent was there and Nathan was not; probably everyone in the crater knew exactly when Nathan had left and when he was expected back.

  When the approach alarm went off, three days after Trent's arrival, he suited up and in long, gliding strides walked down the tunnel leading from the garage to the surface. The entrance was hidden well, nearly as well as the entrance to Nathan's bolt hole. Standing in the concealing shadow, Trent wondered what he was going to do if the approaching vehicle were, say, a group of Peaceforcers rather than Nathan. There was a slug-thrower that tossed explosive slugs--devastatingly lethal, completely illegal--at the entrance to the tunnel; certainly Trent did not intend to use it on anyone.

  At first Trent saw nothing except the long, rising line of the mass driver that was used to boost ore into orbit. Moving up onto the surface proper, through the entrance, past the slug-thrower, Trent scanned the desert by eye. A patch of chalky gray covered a shadow on the Lunar surface, and Trent focused on it. It was almost certainly Nathan's crawler, a sturdy, dependable machine that Nathan referred to as "the chameleon." Nathan owned two crawlers; the chameleon was covered in a coat of polypaint that could shade the machine into its environment in an uncanny way. The most intensive satellite surveillance was unlikely to detect it. To protect against infra-red surveillance the chameleon used a series of small heat sinks that had waste heat fed into them until they were incandescent; they were then fired away from the chameleon in random directions.

  There was a faint crackle of sound, and then Nathan's voice came clearly through the earphones in Trent's helmet. "Good news, Trent, of sorts."

  "In the long run, 'good news' is an oxymoron, Nathan. Second law of thermodynamics." Trent headed back into the tunnel, toward the apartment and air.

  "Your Complex 8-A came," Nathan said. "I brought it back with me. You're supplied."

  Entering the apartment, Trent removed his helmet and stripped off his pressure suit. He touched the pressure point at the airlock entrance, activating the inside speakers. "Thank you, Nathan."

  There was a noticeable pause before Nathan said, "You're welcome."

  Trent walked into the kitchen, raising his voice as he moved away from the speaker. "Have you eaten?"

  "No."

  "I'll put something together."

  "There's steak in the cold spot. I'll be there in about ten minutes." The line went dead.

  Trent had finished cooking by the time Nathan was done rubbing down his suit.

  Entering the kitchen, Nathan said, "You didn't dust down your suit when you took it off."

  Sitting on the kitchen table were two bulbs of beer and two sandwiches on wheat, one chicken, one steak. There was a plate of stir-fried vegetables, carrots and celery and bean sprouts, and two bowls. The chicken sandwich was missing a bite.

  Around a mouthful of chicken sandwich Trent said, "Sorry. I'll remember next time."

  "Forget it often enough," Nathan said sourly, "and you won't get a chance for a next time. Ever seen what happens to a knee joint with a pebble worked into it? Wears down in a couple of months' steady use. Eventually it blows." Nathan seated himself at the table. He seemed tired; for the first time since Trent had known him his beard had not been depilated recently.

  "Point made. I won't do it again." Trent gestured at the steak sandwich on wheat in front of Nathan. "You know, you really shouldn't eat stuff like that. You'll need a heart transplant before you're--how old are you, anyhow?"

  Nathan said shortly, "Sixty-two."

  "Before you're seventy," said Trent conclusively.

  Nathan ignored him, tearing into the steak sandwich. "When are you going to leave?"

  "The stuff's in the chameleon?"

  Nathan glanced up from his food, nodded wordlessly.

  "After lunch, then."

  Nathan nodded again and resumed eating. Halfway through his sandwich he put it down suddenly and said flatly, "Trent ..."

  "Yes?"

  "Damn it, Trent, you cannot beat them."

  Trent smiled broadly at Nathan. "I just can't get over it. It's really amazing."

  "What is?"

  "This conversation," said Trent, looking at Nathan, "has just started and it's already boring me." He held Nathan's eyes a moment longer, letting the smile fade, and then returned to his sandwich.

  "I have," Nathan began deliberately, "been auditing the stories about you. On the Boards."

  "So?"

  "You were raised among the Castanaveras telepaths."

  Trent said mildly, "You've been auditing the System Enquirer again.
"

  "The Peaceforcers killed them. This Vance fellow who was chasing you, there's some people think he was the one who gave the order to nuke them."

  Trent took a long drink from his beer, wiped his mouth with his napkin. "Nathan, I've audited the same stories. I know all this."

  "And you don't want to talk about it."

  "Not really."

  "Where are you going?"

  "Luna City. I've got a bioscupltor there who's going to work on me."

  "And after that?"

  "It depends." Trent was silent for a moment. "There's someone I'd like to have join me, but she's not going to be able to until I've set myself up."

  "Set yourself up how?"

  "Credit, largely. I have a couple of accounts left on Earth I haven't touched, but that's because I'm not sure whether they're still safe. For practical purposes they don't exist anymore. Professional boosting," said Trent, "is a very Credit-intensive occupation."

  Nathan nodded thoughtfully. "What sort of numbers are you talking about? Computerist jobs pay pretty well up here. You could--"

  Trent sighed. "Nathan."

  "--take a job with one of the--"

  "Nathan."

  It brought the older man up short. "What?"

  "Nathan, I made over two million CU before I was eighteen."

  Nathan opened his mouth once, closed it again. "Are you joking?"

  "No. I'm not."

  The man seemed at a loss for words. "You--you--what the hell did you spend it on?"

  "Over four years, from the time I got out of the Temple Dragons, I had about three quarters of a million in expenses. Getting out of the Fringe cost a lot. The balance--" Trent shrugged. "Three hundred and forty thousand CU went to the World Food Bank. My friends and I spent the rest."

  "That's incredible."

  Trent nodded. "It's good."

  "... but off the subject."

  Trent said in exasperation, "Nobody listens. Nobody ever listens. You're determined to have this conversation, aren't you?"

  The old man said carefully, "Trent, I just don't understand. What are you going to do?"

  "You really want to know?"

  "I really do."