by Allen Steele
Following the map’s directions, he went along the upward-sloping corridor towards the tram station. First, he would get to his room at the hotel. A shower, a short rest in bed, then the necessary rituals before he checked his arsenal.
In a little while he would be ready to begin the hunt.
Simon McCoy, also having just disembarked from the Lone Star Clipper, paused in the corridor outside the TexSpace Third-Class lounge and watched as the heavy-set man who had collided with him walked away in the opposite direction. McCoy watched Henry Ostrow until he disappeared up the corridor, noting the hit man’s appearance. Another principal character had arrived on stage.…
McCoy tucked his hands into his trouser pockets and continued sauntering down the corridor. The wide passageway took him through Torus N-9, past Clarke County General, the colony’s hospital and medical clinic. He strode past the doors leading to the reception area; white-robed doctors, patients, and medrobots passed him until, almost halfway around the torus, he reached the private sector.
Here were the offices and suites rented to various private-sector medical firms, mainly the R&D lads, most of them specializing in low-gravity pharmaceutical research. Most, but not all. Simon McCoy slowly walked past the rows of doors, scanning the nameplates in a way which would, to the eyes behind the ceiling-mounted security cameras, suggest the casual if thoughtful interest of a tourist making a walkabout of the colony. Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Spacemed, Harvard, all the usual names—he walked past them until he spotted one particular plate.
The plate read: THE IMMORTALITY PARTNERSHIP.
His hands involuntarily clenched in his pockets. McCoy resisted the urge to push through the door, to walk inside. Instead, he turned as if to walk the other way, like a tourist bored with the sights. As he did, he ducked his head and quickly studied the lock from the corner of his eye. It was a digital. No problem.
He then began to mosey down the corridor the way he had come. When he had the time he’d come back here for a visit. When no one else was around.
6
Blind Boy Grunt Strikes Again
(Saturday: 11:47 P.M.)
If there was any one human aspect that made Clarke County most like a small town it was the fact that no major event went unnoticed, or untalked about, for very long. This was especially true since the colony had an official town gossip.
Sheriff Bigthorn had peddled his trike down from North Station through Big Sky’s bamboo suburbs into the town center, being careful to stop and get off the trike before entering Settler’s Square. It was about noontime, and the square was becoming crowded with residents and a handful of tourists who happened to wander down from LaGrange. It was a typical lunchtime scene, since most residents worked a six-day week. Sunday, not Saturday, was usually everyone’s day off, and since noon was the universally accepted lunch hour, many people took the opportunity to hang around Settler’s Square: farmers talking to beamjacks, scientists playing backgammon with students from the International Space University, individuals with reflector boards leaning against the base of the statue while improving their tans.
Generally, people talked about nothing much, but today there was a buzz in the air. As he walked his tricycle through the square, heading for the town hall, Bigthorn noticed that many people had sheets of PSA flimsy in their hands. Along with mail from Earth, the Big Sky post office routinely deposited public service announcements in residential boxes each day: changes in shuttle schedules, new job openings, reminders about tax-filing dates, and so forth. Once a weekly newspaper became established in the colony—the Newhouse and Gannett chains were still competitively negotiating with the Clarke County Corporation for exclusive rights—most of this fodder would be eliminated. Until then, the news came in the form of half-sheet bamboo-paper printouts which people dug out of their boxes, read once, and usually shoved down the nearest recycling chute.
Today, however, residents had found something in their mail boxes which they didn’t toss out. Clusters of people were reading and re-reading the printouts, with varied reactions: amusement, anger, consternation, rejoicing. Unfortunately, it seemed as if everyone believed that Bigthorn already knew what was going on. As he walked his trike through the square, the sheriff noticed people looking towards him as if he had an answer to all this. Whatever all this was.
Bigthorn, however, had another matter on his mind: the priority message from the FBI. He was prepared to ignore the “whatever it was” until after he was through dealing with the feds, when one of Big Sky’s more vocal residents walked up to him.
“Does this mean we’re going to war?” Roxanne Barnes demanded.
“Umm? Excuse me?” Bigthorn replied.
“They could close us down, you know that, Sheriff,” Roxanne insisted. “We’re playing with fire here. What are we supposed to do about it when the 2nd Space Infantry lands?”
Roxanne Barnes was on the all-time list of Bigthorn’s least-favored people, the type that any police officer in any town got to know all too well. Roxanne fell into the subcategory of Constantly Complaining Nuisance. She was the person who called the police department every day with real and imaginary (and usually trivial) gripes.
In another town her complaints would have been: dogs overturning her garbage, neighbors making too much noise, kids playing in the street, child molesters lurking in the neighborhood, aircraft flying too low over her home, strangers spying through her windows, bad reception on her TV and radio, and Communists, the CIA, the IRS, Kenya Congress terrorists, and/or the police themselves tapping into her comlink. For Roxanne, it was: the colony rotating too fast (or too slow), her apartment too cold (or too hot), late mail service, hippies from the New Ark spying on her, clogged recycling chutes, neighbors making too much noise, trash littering the corridors, and the Communists, the CIA, the IRS, Kenya Congress terrorists and especially the police department tapping into her comlink. Bitch bitch bitch, whine whine whine.
Roxanne, too, had a sheet of computer flimsy clutched in her fist. “May I, please?” Bigthorn asked, and before she could say yea or nay, he snapped it out of her hand, uncurled it and read:
INDEPENDENCE!
CLARKE COUNTY CITIZENS, UNITE!
Now has come the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their space colony.
In a closed-door session this morning among executive members of the Clarke County Board of Selectmen, it was announced by Jennifer Schorr that the residents of Clarke County were ready, willing and able to seek total control of their destiny from the running dog lackeys of corporate sponsorship.
We are now in control! We shall establish Clarke County as its own independent nation! The future is unwritten, but the writing is on the wall. What was inevitable is now upon us. We must seize the opportunity to formally and irrevocably declare Clarke County to be the master of its own destiny. In this way we shall shed these surly bonds of Earth.…
Attend next Monday night’s town meeting at Big Sky town hall to make plans for the coming era of independence and self-determination. Let your voices be heard. Live free or die!
“The times they are a-changing …”
—Blind Boy Grunt
“Running dog lackeys?” Bigthorn murmured. “What the hell does that mean?”
Roxanne didn’t hear him. She was running off about how the 2nd Space Infantry Division of the U.S. Marines was going to invade the colony and kill everyone in sight, and how it would all be the sheriff’s fault because he didn’t act sooner to control the anarchists, Communists, hippies, terrorists, Democrats, or whoever was at fault for this revolution.
Only a little bit of it soaked through Bigthorn’s attention. He glanced at the message again, and knew at once that it was also on every electronic bulletin board in Clarke County. If that was so, the message had undoubtedly been received on Earth as well, for there was little which happened in Clarke County that the companies in New York, Alabama, London, and Tokyo did not hear.
He looked at the
signature. Blind Boy Grunt.
Goddammit. Whoever he was, he had done it again.
“And what are you going to do about this?” Roxanne was demanding.
Bigthorn looked up. Roxanne was staring at him. Most of the people within his range of vision were, too. He cleared his throat, slowly and deliberately folded the bamboo scrim, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. “Roxy,” he said softly. “Will you go get your Happydaze prescription refilled, please?”
He didn’t wait to see her expression change, but simply pushed his trike past her and marched the rest of the way across the square to the entrance of the town hall. All things considered, this was starting out to be a really lousy day.
The architect who had designed Big Sky’s town hall had intended the offices to look like a quaint small-town municipal building. It ended up having all the character and rustic charm of a boot camp shower-house, which it faintly resembled. Long, low, drab and ugly, it contained the offices of various county officials who preferred to do their work at home. The Clarke County Sheriff’s Department, located at the end of the long hallway leading down the middle of the building, was seemingly the only office in the town hall that was ever open. Small wonder. It was in a building only a cop could love.
Bigthorn made a stop in the adjacent kitchenette to grab a bran doughnut and a cup of coffee before going in. As he pushed through the glass-front doors, he said to no one in particular, and thus everybody in general, “Has anybody found out who Blind Boy Grunt is and just not bothered to tell me?”
Wade Hoffman was slouched behind his desk, in front of the wall of TV monitors which displayed scenes from various parts of the colony. He was browsing through a back issue of Sports Illustrated when the sheriff appeared. The magazine disappeared beneath his desk as he self-consciously straightened his posture. “Beg pardon?” he said.
“Stop reading on duty, willya, Wade?” Bigthorn walked behind the front counter and stopped beside Hoffman’s desk, absently running his eyes across the screens. “Blind Boy Grunt,” he repeated. “I wanted that idiot investigated and found. What has come of that?”
Hoffman coughed and tapped a command into his computer terminal’s keyboard. The public service announcement Bigthorn had read a few minutes earlier appeared on the screen. “Well, this was fed into the public system about an hour ago.…”
“Wade, why do you think I’m asking?” Bigthorn replied testily. “Before I find Jenny and ask her what the hell’s going on, I want to find out how Grunt knew what went on in an executive session. And how does he hack into the mail system, anyway?”
With a glance, Hoffman silently deferred the question to another uniformed officer in the office. Roland Binder was bent over his own terminal, intently studying his screen. “I traced the input to a public-access terminal in Torus S-Eight,” Binder said without looking up. “That’s one of the habitation areas, of course. Same MO as always. He must have used a back door and a hidden password to get into the system, and he was in for only about a minute, just enough time to download his message into the system and get out. Could have been done by anyone with a PC.” He glanced over the top of his terminal. “Want to guess how many PCs are in the colony?”
“Never mind. I get the idea.” Bigthorn took a bite out of his doughnut. It was stale; he swallowed the morsel with effort and dumped the remainder down a chute. It was time to get on the Ark’s bakeries about not supplying his office with fresh sinkers. “Was it the same terminal he used last time?”
Binder checked his file. “Not the last time, but he’s used this particular one before … um, on May twelfth, when he posted an obscene limerick. But earlier today, before he got this message into the post office computer, he entered another message on the bulletin board. The Declaration of Independence. United States, that is.”
“Guess it was kind of a warm-up.” Hoffman chuckled.
Bigthorn ignored him. “Where did he enter that message, Rollie?”
Binder didn’t bother to recheck his file. “A public terminal on the Strip. He spent about the same amount of time there. Twenty minutes later, he posted the second message from the Torus Eight terminal.”
Rollie looked back at the screen. “He moves fast, John. Far as I can tell, he picks his entry ports at random. Never uses the same one twice in a row.”
The sheriff nodded his head thoughtfully as he sipped his coffee. Twenty minutes was about the amount of time it took for someone to get from the Strip, in Torus N-S on the North side of Clarke County, to Torus S-8, on the South side of the colony. A person wouldn’t even have to run to make the connection. And since virtually everyone in Clarke County possessed at least one laptop computer or datapad, there were at least 7,036 possible suspects—the current population of the colony, not counting tourists. Blind Boy Grunt had been around too long to be a tourista.
“Terrific,” Bigthorn murmured. “Anything else?”
Binder checked his file, then grinned. “Only one thing. I figured out his name.”
“Blind Boy Grunt?”
The department’s resident wirehead nodded enthusiastically. “I got it after cross-referencing Music History in the library subsystem, just for the hell of it. ‘Blind Boy Grunt’ was a pseudonym used by Bob Dylan in the early nineteen-sixties, when he sat in as a session musician on other people’s albums.” Binder shrugged. “I don’t know if that makes any difference. Before you ask, I checked our roster. There’s nobody here named Dylan.”
“I didn’t think it would be that obvious,” Bigthorn said. “Okay, so he’s a Bob Dylan fan. At least that’s something to go on. Good work.”
One corner of Rollie’s mouth rose briefly. “For what it’s worth.”
Precious little. Blind Boy Grunt had been haunting Clarke County’s information system for the past year, beginning a few months after the colony began operating as an inhabitated world-let. Without warning, without discernible pattern, anonymous messages had begun to appear on computer screens. One day, they were public announcements, like today’s entries on the bulletin board and the post office computer. Other days, they were private messages, appearing only on a particular individual’s screen. Sometimes their meanings were obvious and direct. In other instances they were obscure quotations from sources as diverse as history texts, song lyrics, The Quotations of Chairman Mao, the Holy Bible, the Koran, Alice in Wonderland, or The Origin of the Species. Their content ranged from the ribald to the inconsequential, from pointed political commentary to outright libel.
On occasion, Blind Boy Grunt had even dropped notices into the cop shop’s own computer, items that further enhanced his (or her) mystique as a know-all, see-all oracle. Once, Bigthorn had been trying to find out who was spray-painting obscenities on corridor walls in the North tori. Blind Boy Grunt unexpectedly left a notice identifying the culprit as a teen-ager who lived with his parents in Torus N-11. The lead turned out to be correct. Later, the shopkeepers in LaGrange had a problem one week with a shoplifter who was pilfering items from the stores around O’Neill Square, someone who was swift enough to evade their mirrors and security cameras. Blind Boy Grunt dropped word that the person was a tourist from California, an incurable kleptomaniac. When a mean-spirited practical joker was draining air supplies from the life-support packs of the beamjacks building the remaining tori in the North section, Grunt fingered the guilty party, and when an anonymous bomb threat was made against the windows in the main sphere, a message appeared on Bigthorn’s own terminal, which stated that the threat was a hoax perpetrated by a ten-year-old boy in Big Sky.
Despite these favors, Bigthorn regarded Blind Boy Grunt as a royal pain in the ass. He didn’t like the idea that Clarke County contained a hacker skillful enough to penetrate computer security throughout the colony. Yet tracking down Blind Boy Grunt had, so far, been impossible. Whoever he or she was, the hacker had eluded the Sheriff’s Department. Even Wanker Central, the lair of the arch-wireheads, had not been able to track down Blind Boy Grun
t, although Bigthorn privately suspected it was someone in Main-Ops itself.
“Well, keep on it,” Bigthorn said as he headed for his private office. “Wade, get me in touch with FBI headquarters. I’ll take the call in my office.… Oh, and how did Danny do with those goats?”
Hoffman grinned over his shoulder. “Your trick didn’t work. He got butted before he gave up and used his stunner on them. He’s really pissed at you now.”
“Oh, well. Log in a bonus for him. Hazardous duty pay. I’ll be in my office.”
Sherman Brooks wore the usual gray suit, high-collared white dress shirt, and plain bolo tie of an FBI official. He sat, with legs crossed, in a chair in the corner of the sheriff’s office; the illusion of his corporeal presence was spoiled by the scene through the window behind him. The rotunda of the Capitol, surrounded by cherry trees in full blossom, was a plausible vista only if one was on Earth. Out here, it was an obvious, if not ridiculous, piece of backdrop scenery. Bigthorn tried not to smile.
You’re probably wondering why we called you, Sheriff, Brooks said from the hologram tank.
“Well, as an offhand guess, it probably has something to do with a passenger who arrived today on a TexSpace shuttle,” Bigthorn replied casually. There was a momentary pause, then a puzzled expression appeared on Brooks’s wide brown face, and the sheriff shrugged. “Just a guess,” he added.
Another brief pause as Bigthorn’s words were relayed across space and time to FBI headquarters. A moment lapsed, then Brooks’s face became even more worried. Has anyone spoken to you about this matter, Sheriff? he asked.
Bigthorn shook his head. What was he supposed to say? Well, last night I took some peyote—don’t worry, a former President said it was okay—and a coyote came to me and said that something dangerous was aboard the incoming passenger shuttle? Even if the man wasn’t technically an Anglo, he was still a gringo. He could not understand. “Just a wild guess. What’s on your mind?”