I unfastened the quick-release hooks and the airfoil’s canopy billowed, dragged along the ground, and wrapped itself around a tree. I slithered out of the EV suit and tried to get my bearings at the same time. The Col du Marchairuz was cool, not much above freezing, and very, very quiet. Although I was wearing standard-issue isothermals, the skin on my hands and neck pebbled and I shivered. The silence of the place was unnerving. I was losing it again, lagged out: too damn many environments in too short a time. An old story. I liked to live fast, race up that adrenalin peak where there was no time to think, just survive the now and to hell with the sordid past and the shabby future. But nothing lasts, nothing. I had dropped out of the sky like air pollution; the still landscape itself seemed to judge me. The mountains did not care about Django’s stolen corporate secrets or the caper story I would produce to give some jaded telelink user a Wednesday night thrill. I had risked my life for some lousy juice and a chance at the main menu; the cliffs brooded over my reasons. So very quiet.
“Eyes!” Django dropped from a boulder onto the road and trotted across to me. “You all right?”
I nodded. I couldn’t let him see how close to the edge I was. “You?”
There was a long scratch on his face and his knuckles were bloody.
“Walking. Tangled with a tree. The chute got caught—had to leave it.”
I nodded again. He stooped to pick up my discarded suit. “Let’s lose this stuff and get going.”
I stared at him, thought about breaking it off. I had enough to put together one hell of a story and I had had more than enough of Django.
“Don’t freeze on me now, Eyes.” He wadded the suit and jammed it into a crevice. “If the satellites caught our jump, these mountains are going to be crawling with mindkillers—not to mention the plugging Swiss Army.” He hurled my helmet over the edge of the cliff and began to gather up the shrouds of my chute. “We’re gone by then.”
I switched on and got thirty seconds of him hiding my chute. I didn’t have a whole lot of disk space left and I thought I ought to start conserving. He was right about one thing; it wasn’t quite time. If the mindkillers caught me now they’d confiscate my disks and let the lawyers fight it out. I’d have nothing to peddle to Jerry Macmillan at Infoline but talking heads and text. And the Swiss had not yet made up their minds about spook journalism; I could even end up in prison. As soon as I starting moving again, I felt better. Which is to say I felt nothing at all.
The nearest town was St. George, about four kilometers down the crumbling mountain road. We started at a jog and ended at a drag, gasping in the thin air. On the way Django stopped by a mountain stream to wash the blood from his face. Then he surprised me—and probably himself as well—by throwing up. When he rejoined me he was shaking: crazy Django might actually be human after all. It would make great telelink. He made a half-serious feint at the microcam and I stopped shooting.
“You okay?”
He nodded and staggered past me down the road.
St. George was one of those little ghost towns that the Swiss were moth-balling with their traditional tidiness, as if they expected that the forests and vineyards would someday rise from the dead and that the tourists would return to witness this miracle. Maybe they were right; unlike other Europeans, the Swiss had not yet given up on their acid-stressed alpine lands, not even in the unhappy canton of Vaud, which had also suffered radioactive fallout from the nuking of Geneva. We stopped at a clearing planted with the new Sandoz pseudo-firs that overlooked the rust-colored rooftops of St. George. It was impossible to tell how many people were left in the village. All we knew for sure was that the post office was still open.
Django was having a hard time catching his breath. “I have a proposition for you,” he said.
“Come on, Django. Save it for the whores.”
He shook his head. “It’s all falling apart … I can’t…” He took a deep breath and blew it out noisily. “I’ll cut you in. A third: Yellowbaby’s share.”
According to U.S. case law, still somewhat sketchy on the subject of spook journalism, at this point I should have dropped him with a swift kick to the balls and started screaming for the local gendarmerie. But the microcam was off, there were no witnesses and I still didn’t know what WISEGUY was or why Django wanted it. “The way I count, it’s just us two,” I said. “A third sounds a little low.”
“It’ll take you the rest of this century to spend what I’m offering.”
“And if they catch me I’ll spend the rest of the century on a punkfarm in Iowa.” That was if the mindkillers didn’t blow my fuses first. “Forget it, Django. We’re just not in the same line. I watch—you’re the player.”
I’m not sure what I expected him to do next but it sure as hell wasn’t to start crying. Maybe he was in shock, too. Or maybe he was finally slowing down after two solid days of popping fast-forwards.
“Don’t you understand, I can’t do it alone! You have to—you don’t know what you’re turning down.”
I thought about pumping him for more information but he looked as if he were going critical. I didn’t want to be caught in the explosion. “I don’t get it, Django. You’ve done all the hard work. All you have to do is walk into that post office, get your message, and walk out.”
“You don’t understand.” He clamped both hands to his head. “Don’t understand, that was Babe’s job.”
“So?”
“So!” He was shaking. “I don’t speak French!”
I put everything I had into not laughing. It would have been the main menu for sure if I had gotten that on disk. The criminal mind at work! This scrambled punk had raped the world’s largest corporation and totaled a stolen reentry wing and now he was worried about sounding like a touriste in a Swiss bureau de poste. I was croggled.
“All right,” I said, stalling, “all right, how about a compromise. For now. Umm. You’re carrying heat?” He produced a Mitsubishi penlight. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll switch on and we’ll do a little bit for the folks at home. You threaten me, say you’re going to lase your name on my forehead unless I cooperate. That way I can pick up the message without becoming an accessory. I hope. If we clear this, we’ll talk deal later, okay?” I didn’t know if it would stand up in court, but it was all I could think of at the time. “And make it look good.”
So I shot a few minutes of Django’s threatening me and then we went down into St. George. I walked into the post office hesitantly, turned and got a good shot of Django smoldering in the entryway and then tucked the microcam glasses into my pocket. The clerk was a restless woman with a pinched face who looked as if she spent a lot of time wishing she were somewhere else. I assaulted her with my atrocious fourth form French.
“Bonjour, madame. Y a-t-il des lettres electroniques pour D. J. Hack.”
“Hack?” The woman shifted on her stool and fixed me with a suspicious stare. “Comment cela s’ecrit-il?”
“H-A-C-K.”
She keyed the name into her terminal. “Oui, la voici. Tapez votre autorisation à la machine.” She leaned forward and pointed through the window at the numeric keypad beside my right hand. For a moment I thought she was going to try to watch as I keyed in the recognition code that Django had given me. I heard him cough in the entryway behind me and she settled back on her stool. Lucky for her. The postal terminal whirred and ground for about ten seconds and then a sealed hardcopy clunked into the slot above the keypad.
“Vous êtes touristes americaines.” She looked straight past me and waved to Django, who ducked out of the doorway. “Baseball Yankees, ha-ha.” I was suddenly afraid he would come charging in with penlight blazing to make sure there were no witnesses. “Avez-vous besoin de une chambre pour la nuit? L’hôtel est fermé, mais…”
“Non, non. Nous sommes presses. A quelle heure est le premier autobus pour Rolle?”
She sighed. “Rien ne va bien. Tout va mal.” The busybody seemed to be speaking as much to herself as to me.
I wanted to tell her how lucky she was that Django had decided not to needle her where she stood. “Quinze heures vingt-deux.”
About twenty minutes—we were still on schedule. I thanked her and went out to throw some cold water on Django. I was surprised to find him laughing. I didn’t much like all these surprises. Django was so scrambled that I knew one of these times the surprise was bound to be unpleasant. “I could’ve done that,” he said.
“You didn’t.” I handed him the hardcopy and we retreated to an alley with a view of the square.
It is the consensus of the world’s above and below ground economies that the Swiss electronic mail system is still the most secure in the world. It has to be: all the Swiss banks, from the big five to the smallest locals, use the system for the bulk of their transactions. Once it had printed out Django’s hardcopy, the PTT system erased all records of the message. Even so, the message was encrypted and Django had to enter it into his computer cuff to find out what it said.
“What is this?” He replayed it and I watched, fascinated, as the words scrolled along the cuff’s tiny display:
“Lake Leman lies by Chillon’s walls: / A thousand feet in depth below / Its massy waters meet and flow; / Thus much the fathom-line was sent / From Chillon’s snow-white battlement…”
“It’s called poetry, Django.”
“I know what it’s called! I want to know what the hell this has to do with my drop. Half the world wants to chop my plug off and this scut sends me poetry.” His face had turned as dark as beaujolais nouveau and his voice was so loud they could probably hear him in France. “Where the hell am I supposed to go?”
“Would you shut up for a minute?” I touched his shoulder and he jumped. When he went for his penlight I thought I was cooked. But all he did was throw the hardcopy onto the cobblestones and torch it.
“Feel better?”
“Stick it.”
“Lake Leman,” I said carefully, “is what the French call Lake Geneva. And Chillon is a castle. In Montreux. I’m pretty sure this is from a poem called “The Prisoner of Chillon’ by Byron.”
He thought it over for a moment, chewing his lower lip. “Montreux.” He nodded; he looked almost human again. “Uh—okay, Montreux. But why does he have to get cute when my plug’s in a claw? Poetry—what does he think we are, anyway? I don’t know a thing about poetry. And all Yellowbaby ever read was manuals. Who was supposed to get this anyway?”
I stirred the ashes of the hardcopy with my toe. “I wonder.” A cold wind scattered them and I shivered.
* * *
Of course, I was wrong. Chillon is not in Montreux but in the outlying commune of Veytaux. It took us a little over six hours from the time we bailed out of the wing to the moment we reached the barricaded bridge which spanned Chillon’s scummy moat. All our connections had come off like Swiss clockwork: postal bus to the little town of Rolle on the north shore of Lake Geneva, train to Lausanne, where we changed for a local to Montreux. No one challenged us and Django sagged into a kind of withdrawal trance, contemplating his reflection in the window with a marble egg stare. The station was deserted when we arrived. Montreux had once been Lake Geneva’s most popular resort but the tourists had long since stopped coming, frightened off by rumors—no doubt true, despite official denials from Bern—that the lake was still dangerously hot from the Geneva bomb. We ended up hiking several kilometers through the dark little city, navigating by the light of the gibbous moon.
For that matter, Byron was wrong, too. Or at least out-of-date. Chillon’s battlement was no longer snow-white. It was fire-blackened and slashed with laser scars; much of the north-eastern facade was rubble. There must have been a firefight during the riots after the bomb. The castle was built on a rock about twenty meters from the shore. It commanded a highway built on a narrow strip of land between the lake and a steep mountainside.
Django hesitated at the barrier blocking the wooden footbridge to the castle. “It stinks,” he said.
“You’re a rose?”
“I mean the setup. Poetry was bad enough. But this—” he pointed up at the crumbling towers of Chillon, brooding beside the moonlit water—“this is fairy dust. Who does this scut think he is? Count Dracula?”
“Maybe he is. Only way you’re going to find out is to knock on the door and…”
A light on the far side of the bridge came on. Through the entrance to Chillon hopped a pair of oversized dice on pogo sticks.
“Easy, Django,” I said. He had the penlight ready. “Give it a chance.”
Each pogo was a white plastic cube about half a meter on a side; the pips were sensors. The legs telescoped at a beat per second; the round rubber feet hit the wooden deck in unison. Thwocka-thwocka-thwock.
“Snake-eyes.” There was a single sensor on each of the faces closest to us. Django gave a low ugly laugh as he swung a leg over the barrier and stepped onto the bridge.
They hopped up to him and bounced in place for several beats, as if sizing him up. “I am sorry,” said the pogo nearest to us in a pleasant masculine voice, “but the castle is no longer open to the public.”
“Get this, scut.” Django ignored the pogo and instead shook his penlight at the gatehouse on the far side of the bridge. “I’ve been through too much to play games with your plugging remotes, understand? I want to see you—now—or I’m walking.”
“I am not a remote.” The lead pogo sounded indignant. “I am a self-contained unit capable of independent action.”
“Stick that.” Django jabbed at his cuff and it emitted a high-pitched squeal of code. “Now you know who I am. So what’s it going to be?”
“This way, please,” said the lead pogo, bouncing backward toward the gatehouse. “Please refrain from taking pictures without expressed permission.”
I assumed that was meant for me and I didn’t like it one bit. I clambered over the barricade and followed Django.
Just before we passed through Chillon’s outer wall, the other pogo began to lecture. “As we enter, notice the tower to your left. The Strong Tower, which controls the entrance to the castle, was originally built in 1402 and was reconstructed following the earthquake of 1585.” Thwock-thwocka.
I glanced at Django. In the gloom I could see his face twist in disbelief as the pogo continued its spiel.
“… As we proceed now into the gatehouse ward, look back over your shoulder at the inside of the eastern wall. The sundial you see is a twentieth century restoration of an original that dated back to the Savoy period. The Latin, ‘Sic Vita Fugit,’ on the dial translates roughly as ‘Thus Life Flies By.’”
We had entered a small dark courtyard. I could hear water splashing and could barely make out the shadow of a fountain. The pogos lit the way to another, larger courtyard and then into one of the undamaged buildings. They bounded up a flight of stairs effortlessly; I had to hurry to keep up and was the last to enter the Great Banqueting Hall. The beauty and strangeness of what I saw stopped me at the threshold; instinctively I tried to switch on the microcam. I heard two warning beeps and then a whispery crunch. The status light went from green to red to blank.
“Expressed permission,” said the man who sat waiting for us. “Come in anyway, come in. Just in time to see it again—been rerunning all afternoon.” He laughed and nodded at the flatscreen propped against a bowl of raw vegetables on an enormous walnut table. “Oh, God! It is a fearful thing to see the human soul take wing.”
Django picked it up suspiciously. I stood on tiptoes and peeked over his shoulder. The thirty-centimeter screen did not do the wing justice and the overhead satellite view robbed the crash of much of its visual drama. Still, the fireball that bloomed on Mont Tendre was dazzling; Django whooped at the sight. The fireball was replaced by a head talking in High German and then close-ups of the crash site. What was left of the wing wouldn’t have filled a picnic basket.
“What’s he saying?” Django thrust the flatscreen at our host.
“That there has not been a c
rash like this since ’55. Which makes you famous, whoever you are.” Our host shrugged. “He goes on to say that you’re probably dead.”
The banqueting hall was finished in wood and stone. Its ceiling was a single barrel vault, magnificently embellished. Its centerpiece was the table, some ten meters long and supported by a series of heavy Gothic trestles. Around this table was ranged a collection of wheelchairs. Two were antiques: a crude pine seat mounted on iron-rimmed wagon wheels and a hooded Bath chair. Others were failed experiments, like the ill-fated air-cushion chair from the turn of the century and a low-slung cousin of the new aerodynamic bicycles. There were powered and push models, an ultralightweight sports chair and a bulky mobile life-support system. They came in colors; there was even one that glowed.
“So the mindkillers think we’re dead?” Django put the flatscreen back on the table.
“Possibly.” Our host frowned. “Depends when the satellites began to track you and what they saw. Have to wait until the Turks kick the door in. Until then call it a clean escape and welcome to Chillon prison.” He backed away from the table; the leather seat creaked slightly as his wheelchair rolled over the uneven floor toward Django. “François Bonivard.” With some difficulty he raised his good hand in greeting.
“I’m Django.” He grasped Bonivard’s hand and pumped it once. “Now that we’re pals, Frank, get rid of your goddamned remotes before I needle them.”
Bonivard winced as Django released his hand. “Id, Ego, make the rounds,” he said. The pogos bounced obediently from the banqueting hall.
François de Bonivard, sixteenth century Swiss patriot, was the hero of Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon.” Reluctantly, I stepped forward to meet my host.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 53