The trousers had nineteen separate pockets and they were loaded with all kinds of eerie little items: a matte-black electrode stun-weapon, flash capsules, fingerprint dust, a utility pocketknife, drug adhesives, plastic handcuffs, some pocket change, worry beads, a comb, and a makeup case.
Close inspection revealed a pair of tiny microphone amplifiers inserted in her ear canals. Lyle fetched the tiny devices out with needlenose pliers. Lyle was getting pretty seriously concerned by this point. He shackled her arms and legs with bike-security cable, in case she regained consciousness and attempted something superhuman.
Around four in the morning she had a coughing fit and began shivering violently. Summer nights could get pretty cold in the shop. Lyle thought over the design problem for some time, and then fetched a big heat-reflective blanket out of the empty room. He cut a neat poncho-hole in the center of it, and slipped her head through it. He got the bike cables off her—she could probably slip the cables anyway—and sewed all four edges of the blanket shut from the outside, with sturdy monofilament thread from his saddle-stitcher. He sewed the poncho edges to a tough fabric belt, cinched the belt snugly around her neck, and padlocked it. When he was done, he’d made a snug bag that contained her entire body, except for her head, which had begun to drool and snore.
A fat blob of superglue on the bottom of the bag kept her anchored to the shop’s floor. The blanket was cheap but tough upholstery fabric. If she could rip her way through blanket fabric with her fingernails alone, then he was probably a goner anyway. By now, Lyle was tired and stone sober. He had a squeeze bottle of glucose rehydrator, three aspirins, and a canned chocolate pudding. Then he climbed in his hammock and went to sleep.
Lyle woke up around ten. His captive was sitting up inside the bag, her green face stony, eyes red-rimmed and brown hair caked with dye. Lyle got up, dressed, ate breakfast, and fixed the broken door lock. He said nothing, partly because he thought that silence would shake her up, but mostly because he couldn’t remember her name. He was almost sure it wasn’t her real name anyway.
When he’d finished fixing the door, he reeled up the string of the doorknocker so that it was far out of reach. He figured the two of them needed the privacy.
Then Lyle deliberately fired up the wallscreen and turned on the set-top box. As soon as the peculiar subtitles started showing up again, she grew agitated.
“Who are you really?” she demanded at last.
“Ma’am, I’m a bicycle repairman.”
She snorted.
“I guess I don’t need to know your name,” he said, “but I need to know who your people are, and why they sent you here, and what I’ve got to do to get out of this situation.”
“You’re not off to a good start, mister.”
“No,” he said, “maybe not, but you’re the one who’s blown it. I’m just a twenty-four-year-old bicycle repairman from Tennessee. But you, you’ve got enough specialized gear on you to buy my whole place five times over.”
He flipped open the little mirror in her makeup case and showed her her own face. Her scowl grew a little stiffer below the spattering of green.
“I want you to tell me what’s going on here,” he said.
“Forget it.”
“If you’re waiting for your backup to come rescue you, I don’t think they’re coming,” Lyle said. “I searched you very thoroughly and I’ve opened up every single little gadget you had, and I took all the batteries out. I’m not even sure what some of those things are or how they work, but hey, I know what a battery is. It’s been hours now. So I don’t think your backup people even know where you are.”
She said nothing.
“See,” he said, “you’ve really blown it bad. You got caught by a total amateur, and now you’re in a hostage situation that could go on indefinitely. I got enough water and noodles and sardines to live up here for days. I dunno, maybe you can make a cellular phone call to God off some gizmo implanted in your thighbone, but it looks to me like you’ve got serious problems.”
She shuffled around a bit inside the bag and looked away.
“It’s got something to do with the cable box over there, right?”
She said nothing.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think that box has anything to do with me or Eddy Dertouzas,” Lyle said. “I think it was probably meant for Eddy, but I don’t think he asked anybody for it. Somebody just wanted him to have it, probably one of his weird European contacts. Eddy used to be in this political group called CAPCLUG, ever heard of them?”
It looked pretty obvious that she’d heard of them.
“I never liked ‘em much either,” Lyle told her. “They kind of snagged me at first with their big talk about freedom and civil liberties, but then you’d go to a CAPCLUG meeting up in the penthouse levels, and there were all these potbellied zudes in spex yapping off stuff like, ‘We must follow the technological imperatives or be jettisoned into the history dump-file.’ They’re a bunch of useless blowhards who can’t tie their own shoes.”
“They’re dangerous radicals subverting national sovereignty.”
Lyle blinked cautiously. “Whose national sovereignty would that be?”
“Yours, mine, Mr. Schweik. I’m from NAFTA, I’m a federal agent.”
“You’re a fed? How come you’re breaking into people’s houses, then? Isn’t that against the Fourth Amendment or something?”
“If you mean the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, that document was superseded years ago.”
“Yeah … okay, I guess you’re right.” Lyle shrugged. “I missed a lot of civics classes … . No skin off my back anyway. I’m sorry, but what did you say your name was?”
“I said my name was Kitty Casaday.”
“Right. Kitty. Okay, Kitty, just you and me, person to person. We obviously have a mutual problem here. What do you think I ought to do in this situation? I mean, speaking practically.”
Kitty thought it over, surprised. “Mr. Schweik, you should release me immediately, get me my gear, and give me the box and any related data, recordings, or diskettes. Then you should escort me from the Archiplat in some confidential fashion so I won’t be stopped by police and questioned about the dye stains. A new set of clothes would be very useful.”
“Like that, huh?”
“That’s your wisest course of action.” Her eyes narrowed. “I can’t make any promises, but it might affect your future treatment very favorably.”
“You’re not gonna tell me who you are, or where you came from, or who sent you, or what this is all about?”
“No. Under no circumstances. I’m not allowed to reveal that. You don’t need to know. You’re not supposed to know. And anyway, if you’re really what you say you are, what should you care?”
“Plenty. I care plenty. I can’t wander around the rest of my life wondering when you’re going to jump me out of a dark corner.”
“If I’d wanted to hurt you, I’d have hurt you when we first met, Mr. Schweik. There was no one here but you and me, and I could have easily incapacitated you and taken anything I wanted. Just give me the box and the data and stop trying to interrogate me.”
“Suppose you found me breaking into your house, Kitty? What would you do to me?”
She said nothing.
“What you’re telling me isn’t gonna work. If you don’t tell me what’s really going on here,” Lyle said heavily, “I’m gonna have to get tough.”
Her lips thinned in contempt.
“Okay, you asked for this.” Lyle opened the mediator and made a quick voice call. “Pete?”
“Nah, this is Pete’s mook,” the phone replied. “Can I do something for you?”
“Could you tell Pete that Lyle Schweik has some big trouble, and I need him to come over to my bike shop immediately? And bring some heavy muscle from the Spiders.”
“What kind of big trouble, Lyle?”
“Authority trouble. A lot of it. I can’t say any more. I t
hink this line may be tapped.”
“Right-o. I’ll make that happen. Hoo-ah, zude.” The mook hung up.
Lyle left the beanbag and went back to the workbench. He took Kitty’s cheap bike out of the repair stand and angrily threw it aside. “You know what really bugs me?” he said at last. “You couldn’t even bother to charm your way in here, set yourself up as my roommate, and then steal the damn box. You didn’t even respect me that much. Heck, you didn’t even have to steal anything, Kitty. You could have just smiled and asked nicely and I’d have given you the box to play with. I don’t watch media, I hate all that crap.”
“It was an emergency. There was no time for more extensive investigation or reconnaissance. I think you should call your gangster friends immediately and tell them you’ve made a mistake. Tell them not to come here.”
“You’re ready to talk seriously?”
“No, I won’t be talking.”
“Okay, we’ll see.”
After twenty minutes, Lyle’s phone rang. He answered it cautiously, keeping the video off. It was Pete from the City Spiders. “Zude, where is your doorknocker?”
“Oh, sorry, I pulled it up, didn’t want to be disturbed. I’ll bring the shop right down.” Lyle thumbed the brake switches.
Lyle opened the door and Pete broad-jumped into the shop. Pete was a big man but he had the skeletal, wiry build of a climber, bare dark arms and shins and big sticky-toed jumping shoes. He had a sleeveless leather bodysuit full of clips and snaps, and he carried a big fabric shoulder bag. There were six vivid tattoos on the dark skin of his left cheek, under the black stubble.
Pete looked at Kitty, lifted his spex with wiry callused fingers, looked at her again bare-eyed, and put the spex back in place. “Wow, Lyle.”
“Yeah.”
“I never thought you were into anything this sick and twisted.”
“It’s a serious matter, Pete.”
Pete turned to the door, crouched down, and hauled a second person into the shop. She wore a beat-up air-conditioned jacket and long slacks and zipsided boots and wire-rimmed spex. She had short ratty hair under a green cloche hat. “Hi,” she said, sticking out a hand. “I’m Mabel. We haven’t met.”
“I’m Lyle.” Lyle gestured. “This is Kitty here in the bag.”
“You said you needed somebody heavy, so I brought Mabel along,” said Pete. “Mabel’s a social worker.”
“Looks like you pretty much got things under control here,” said Mabel liltingly, scratching her neck and looking about the place. “What happened? She break into your shop?”
“Yeah.”
“And,” Pete said, “she grabbed the shock-baton first thing and blasted herself but good?”
“Exactly.”
“I told you that thieves always go for the weaponry first,” Pete said, grinning and scratching his armpit. “Didn’t I tell you that? Leave a weapon in plain sight, man, a thief can’t stand it, it’s the very first thing they gotta grab.” He laughed. “Works every time.”
“Pete’s from the City Spiders,” Lyle told Kitty. “His people built this shop for me. One dark night, they hauled this mobile home right up thirty-four stories in total darkness, straight up the side of the Archiplat without anybody seeing, and they cut a big hole through the side of the building without making any noise, and they hauled the whole shop through it. Then they sank explosive bolts through the girders and hung it up here for me in midair. The City Spiders are into sport-climbing the way I’m into bicycles, only, like, they are very seriously into climbing and there are lots of them. They were some of the very first people to squat the zone, and they’ve lived here ever since, and they are pretty good friends of mine.”
Pete sank to one knee and looked Kitty in the eye. “I love breaking into places, don’t you? There’s no thrill like some quick and perfectly executed break-in.” He reached casually into his shoulder bag. “The thing is”—he pulled out a camera—“to be sporting, you can’t steal anything. You just take trophy pictures to prove you were there.” He snapped her picture several times, grinning as she flinched.
“Lady,” he breathed at her, “once you’ve turned into a little wicked greedhead, and mixed all that evil cupidity and possessiveness into the beauty of the direct action, then you’ve prostituted our way of life. You’ve gone and spoiled our sport.” Pete stood up. “We City Spiders don’t like common thieves. And we especially don’t like thieves who break into the places of clients of ours, like Lyle here. And we thoroughly, especially, don’t like thieves who are so brickhead dumb that they get caught red-handed on the premises of friends of ours.”
Pete’s hairy brows knotted in thought. “What I’d like to do here, Lyle ol’ buddy,” he announced, “is wrap up your little friend head to foot in nice tight cabling, smuggle her out of here down to Golden Gate Archiplat—you know, the big one downtown over by MLK and Highway Twenty-seven?—and hang her head-down in the center of the cupola.”
“That’s not very nice,” Mabel told him seriously.
Pete looked wounded. “I’m not gonna charge him for it or anything! Just imagine her, spinning up there beautifully with all those chandeliers and those hundreds of mirrors.”
Mabel knelt and looked into Kitty’s face. “Has she had any water since she was knocked unconscious?”
“No.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake, give the poor woman something to drink, Lyle.”
Lyle handed Mabel a bike-tote squeeze bottle of electrolyte refresher. “You zudes don’t grasp the situation yet,” he said. “Look at all this stuff I took off her.” He showed them the spex, and the boots, and the stun-gun, and the gloves, and the carbon-nitride climbing plectra, and the rappelling gear.
“Wow,” Pete said at last, dabbing at buttons on his spex to study the finer detail, “this is no ordinary burglar! She’s gotta be, like, a street samurai from the Mahogany Warbirds or something!”
“She says she’s a federal agent.”
Mabel stood up suddenly, angrily yanking the squeeze bottle from Kitty’s lips.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Ask her.”
“I’m a grade-five social counselor with the Department of Urban Redevelopment,” Mabel said. She presented Kitty with an official ID. “And who are you with?”
“I’m not prepared to divulge that information at this time.”
“I can’t believe this,” Mabel marveled, tucking her dog-eared hologram ID back in her hat. “You’ve caught somebody from one of those nutty reactionary secret black-bag units. I mean, that’s gotta be what’s just happened here.” She shook her head slowly. “Y’know, if you work in government, you always hear horror stories about these right-wing paramilitary wackos, but I’ve never actually seen one before.”
“It’s a very dangerous world out there, Miss Social Counselor.”
“Oh, tell me about it,” Mabel scoffed. “I’ve worked suicide hot lines! I’ve seen a hostage negotiator! I’m a career social worker, girlfriend! I’ve seen more horror and suffering than you ever will. While you were doing push-ups in some comfy cracker training camp, I’ve been out here in the real world!” Mabel absently unscrewed the top from the bike bottle and had a long glug. “What on earth are you doing trying to raid the squat of a bicycle repairman?”
Kitty’s stony silence lengthened. “It’s got something to do with that set-top box,” Lyle offered. “It showed up here in delivery yesterday, and then she showed up just a few hours later. Started flirting with me, and said she wanted to live in here. Of course I got suspicious right away.”
“Naturally,” Pete said. “Real bad move, Kitty. Lyle’s on antilibidinals.”
Kitty stared at Lyle bitterly. “I see,” she said at last. “So that’s what you get, when you drain all the sex out of one of them … . You get a strange malodorous creature that spends all its time working in the garage.”
Mabel flushed. “Did you hear that?” She gave Kitty’s bag a sharp angry yank. “What c
onceivable right do you have to question this citizen’s sexual orientation? Especially after cruelly trying to sexually manipulate him to abet your illegal purposes? Have you lost all sense of decency? You … you should be sued.”
“Do your worst,” Kitty muttered.
“Maybe I will,” Mabel said grimly. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
“Yeah, let’s string her up somewhere real sunny and public and call a bunch of news crews,” Pete said. “I’m way hot for this deep ninja gear! Me and the Spiders got real mojo uses for these telescopic ears, and the tracer dust, and the epoxy bugging devices. And the press-on climbing-claws. And the carbon-fiber rope. Everything, really! Everything except these big-ass military shoes of hers, which really suck.”
“Hey, all that stuff’s mine,” Lyle said sternly. “I saw it first.”
“Yeah, I guess so, but … Okay, Lyle, you make us a deal on the gear, we’ll forget everything you still owe us for doing the shop.”
“Come on, those combat spex are worth more than this place all by themselves.”
“I’m real interested in that set-top box,” Mabel said cruelly. “It doesn’t look too fancy or complicated. Let’s take it over to those dirty circuit zudes who hang out at the Blue Parrot, and see if they can’t reverse-engineer it. We’ll post all the schematics up on twenty or thirty progressive activist networks, and see what falls out of cyberspace.”
Kitty glared at her. “The terrible consequences from that stupid and irresponsible action would be entirely on your head.”
“I’ll risk it,” Mabel said airily, patting her cloche hat. “It might bump my soft little liberal head a bit, but I’m pretty sure it would crack your nasty little fascist head like a coconut.”
Suddenly Kitty began thrashing and kicking her way furiously inside the bag. They watched with interest as she ripped, tore, and lashed out with powerful side and front kicks. Nothing much happened.
“All right,” she said at last, panting in exhaustion. “I’ve come from Senator Creighton’s office.”
“Who?” Lyle said.
“Creighton! Senator James P. Creighton, the man who’s been your Senator from Tennessee for the past thirty years!”
The Hard SF Renaissance Page 62