Witpunk

by Claude Lalumiere; Marty Halpern

  "The fast-food philosophy is inherently French," Abalain said. "It's a peasant philosophy, not some tarted-up bourgeois hautecuisine thing. It's like the epoxy cobbles you and your 'Old Paree Hands' are so dismissive about. They're perfectly in keeping with the scientific rationalism of the original revolution." He spoke in crisp, rapid French. He'd caught me listening too intently to one of his phone conversations the week before and confronted me with a barrage of French. When my facial expression made it clear that I understood every word, he'd nodded smartly and went back to his conversation, as though he'd suspected it all along.

  "Unless they're laid down by Disney," I said.

  "Then it's cultural imperialism," Abalain said. I'd have liked him just a little if he'd smiled, or showed any sign of having a sense of humor. But he was deadly serious, and I hated him even more for it.

  "So what's your part in all this?" I asked. "You a spook?"

  "I'm nothing of the sort, Monsieur Rosen. And if I was, I certainly wouldn't tell you." He blew a jet of smoke past my left ear; I smelled burning garbage. "I'm just a servant of the Commune," he said. "I do what I can to bring France back into the sunlight of scientific rationalism. Please know that we are all grateful for the assistance you have been providing."

  And that you've been taking credit for, I thought. "I could do more," I said, "if I had access to more information." What I'd been given so far wouldn't have been enough to help a fundamentalist preacher track down sin. I had to be able to make a big score in order for my plan to work.

  "I've been impressed with what you've given me to date," Abalain said. Jesus, I thought. If they're impressed by that merde, this will be easier than I thought. "Granted it hasn't had much direct tactical value. But already we've been able to wrong-foot the Penistes at least twice in the media. We've taken the lead in the propaganda campaign; in the long run that may be as important as anything our fighters do."

  "At least let me see the uncensored field reports." I pulled a handful of crumpled flimsies from a pants pocket. Two-thirds of the text had been blacked or blanked. "I should be the judge of whether or not information is usable."

  "I'll see what I can do," he said.

  The next morning an unhappy-looking frère kicked a plastic box into my office. The papers, flimsies, and chips were chaos illustrated, but I didn't care. I always get a rush from a fresh source of data, and the rush was greater this time because the stakes were so much higher.

  One of the first things I learned when I finally got down to analysis was that my old ami Commandant Ledoit was dead. The first reference was in a press release from a couple of weeks ago; he'd been killed, it was claimed, by the Blancs. But it didn't take much sleuthing to suss out that he had in fact been dusted by the Commune. I found a reference to a series of denunciations by Abalain's juniors, and while the accusations weren't detailed the result was still clear enough. If I hadn't already had my suspicions raised, that would have set my spideysense tingling.

  As it was, I was more grimly satisfied than surprised. Every revolution eventually eats its young, someone once said. For the Paris Commune, the buffet had apparently begun. That was fine for me; in fact, my plan depended on it.

  I worked hard over the next week. After what I'd been through, there was a deep, almost rich pleasure in being able to throw myself into investigation. Little by little I spun my web – making sure that I also took the time to generate some truly killer conclusions about what the Blancs and Penistes were up to. It was actually pretty easy. Compared with most corporations, governments are as complex as nap time at a daycare. And neither the Blancs nor the Penistes – nor the Commune, come to that – was even a government by any normal conception of that word. So it was only a few days after I started when Abalain brought me a bottle of really good Remy by way of congratulating me on my utter fabness. I'm more of a bourbon than a cognac type, but I accepted the bottle anyway. It was the least Abalain could do for me; I intended to make sure of that.

  After he gave me the bottle, I didn't see the sergeant for two weeks. I took advantage of the break to wander around the building, and eventually even the neighborhood. It hadn't taken long for word to get out that Abalain had himself a pet spook, and nobody really paid any attention to the grubby guy in the soiled white suit. That dusted whatever doubts I may have had about Abalain's juice within the Commune; the man wore his sergeant's stripes like sheep's clothing.

  Discovering the truth about Sissy's fate did not create my resolve to kill Abalain; it only deepened it. I'd hardly spared her a thought since the fresh lieutenant used me for a decoy, but in one raft of papers, I turned up an encoded list of inductees from the Dialtone. It was nicely divided by sex and nationality, though the names themselves were encrypted. Only one female Canadian appeared on the list. I realized then that it had been weeks since I'd thought of Sissy, and I felt myself poised atop a wall of anguish so high that I couldn't bear to look down. Instead, I went back to work, and turned up an encrypted list of bunk assignments – it was nearly identical to the list of inductees, but a number of the female names were missing, including the lone Canadian one.

  Putting two and two together is what I do. I couldn't stop myself, then. Sissy and any number of young, carefree trustafarians had been conscripted for a very different kind of service to the Commune – the kind of service that required a boudoir rather than a bunk.

  Up until then, I'd been trying to formulate a plan that would put paid to Abalain while I walked away scot-free. When I saw the second list, I felt a return of the unreal, uncaring fatalism I'd felt when I walked out into the street lugging the bag of ammunition. Abalain would die, and I would die, too.

  The freedom to move around that Abalain's patronage afforded also gave me all the opportunity I needed to type in some new reports from a variety of unsecured terminals and wireless keypads, using the IDs I'd picked up from the uncensored reports Abalain had given me. There was nothing flamboyant or, God forbid, clumsy about these reports. I even managed to duplicate the horrible grammar some of the frère field agents had used. And most of the information I put into them could easily be verified, since it was just cribbed from other sources or from my own validated speculation on what the other side was doing. That's how you do it, you see: you put in so much truth that the few bits of fabulation go more or less unnoticed.

  More or less, that is, until somebody decides that all those trees must mean something and makes a point of looking at the forest. I was pretty sure that, like all revolutions, this one had its share of tree counters.

  I have to admit, though, that I was pretty nervous by the end of the second week. You like to think that you know your job, that the outcome of something you start is predictable within the limits of your experience. But every job carries with it the fear of complete catastrophe, and if this job went down in flames . . . It didn't bear thinking of.

  So I was more than a little shocked when Abalain burst into my office late one afternoon, looking as though he'd just learned that capitalism really was the most effective economic philosophy.

  "We have to go, you and I," Abalain said.

  "Go where?" I asked. I hadn't expected to see him again; had, in fact, expected to read his obituary in the next batch of Commune press releases.

  "I'll explain later. But take your notepad with you." He cut the pad free from its lock and cable and handed it to me. "We're going to need this to get through the lines."

  "Through the lines?"

  "Don't be dense, and just do as I say." Abalain seemed to be reverting to the bourgeois martinet I'd always suspected him of being. "I have some things to do. Meet me in the lobby in five minutes. Be there, Rosen, or I'll have you shot."

  Normalement, I'm not so slow on the uptake. I guess that only the fact that I was so sure I'd done for Abalain had blinded me to what had really happened: the bastard had found out that he was going to be denounced and had decided to take his leave of his frères before they removed his head from his shoulders
, or however it was that they dispatched those who no longer fit with the Commune's vision of the past-into-future.

  I was only thrown off my game for a moment, though. My business forces you to think on your feet, and I was on mine in a second. I slipped into Abalain's office and started filling my pockets with whatever was lying about. I made sure that I grabbed his wearable; the computer was locked, of course, but I was rapidly formulating a plan for dealing with that.

  My suit may have looked a little bit rumpled when I got to the lobby, but the frères were a pretty sartorially challenged bunch at the best of times, so I wasn't surprised that nobody noticed my bulging pockets.

  "What's happened?" I asked Abalain as soon as we were outside and walking on the poly-resin cobbles. He'd headed us north, presumably toward the toney arrondissements of the northeast where the Blancs still held sway.

  "A friend let slip that I was going to be denounced before the Central Committee," he said. "There's no justification for such a thing, of course."

  "Of course," I said.

  "But a man in a position such as mine inevitably seems to inspire jealousy, and justified or not I'm pretty sure things wouldn't go well for me if I let myself be called. So with regret I have to end my service to the revolution and the Commune. It's their misfortune."

  "And me?" I stuffed my hands in my pockets in case Abalain got too curious about their shape.

  "But I thought you were eager to return to your home." Abalain made a sympathetic little moue with his mouth, and it was all I could do to keep from kicking him in the balls. "You, Monsieur Rosen, are my ticket through the lines, of course."

  "Of course."

  As usual, Abalain was ahead of the curve on the whole denunciation thing. His casual wave was enough to get us through the various checkpoints and posts we encountered as we walked through the Communard zone; nobody'd been told yet that he was now an enemy of the revolution. I began to regret not spreading my disinformation a little more widely.

  "Do you want to tell me how you plan to do this?" I asked him as we walked away from yet another group of fawning, tooserious-for-words frères. "I feel like someone being told to invest without seeing the prospectus."

  "Capitalist humor. How droll," he said. "It's quite simple, really. We're headed toward a checkpoint in a comparatively stable part of the front. I'll talk us through our – the Commune's – lines. We're doing some field intelligence work, you and I. Once we're through our lines, we duck out of sight, approach the Blanc lines from a different angle, and then you provide me with my entree to the Blanc sector. Simple, no?"

  "And how do I play my part in this clever plan?"

  "Patience, my old. Patience. I'll explain when you need to know, and not before." I shrugged. It wasn't a question of whether Abalain intended to dust me, but when and how. I felt the weight of his wearable around my waist and hoped he'd at least wait until we reached the Blanc lines so that I could surprise him before he surprised me.

  The checkpoint showed all the signs of a front that hadn't changed in weeks, possibly months. The smart-wire had accumulated a patina of grime and pigeonshit you just didn't see on the more active parts of the city. Dogs danced around the feet of the listlessly patrolling frères; there was no Power-Armor in sight. Someone had liberated a video lottery terminal from somewhere and set it up in the observation post Abalain dragged me into; the VLT's reader slot was stuffed with an override card that made play free but also eliminated any payout, and as Abalain drawled his lies to the lieutenant I joined a group of bored frères watching the symbols flash in pointless sequence across the terminal's screen. You'd never know, looking at the crap that had accreted around this corner, that there were parts of Paree where bits were being blown off bodies and buildings as the world's most pointless renovation project continued on its nasty way.

  "We go now," Abalain said from behind me. "Do you think that you can tear yourself away from this excitement?" I bit back my reply and turned to follow. He hadn't even waited for me, and I had to jog for a moment to catch up with him. We ducked into a building, descended to the basement and spent a freaky few seconds in a dark, humid tunnel that brought back nightmares of my brief sojourn as a hot-wired guinea pig, before emerging into the wreckage of an old Metro station. In the distance, I thought I saw a flash of light – reflection from a sniper's scope?

  I stopped, imagining the weight of the sniper's gaze on my chest, just below my sternum, and had a sudden vision of Sissy standing just as I was now. Who knew how many trustafarians had been sacrificed to flushing out the Blancs and then had their bunks reassigned. I felt a strange mixture of sorrow and relief – it had been quick then, for her; not the drawn-out nightmare of serial rape that had been slithering through my subconscious.

  Abalain showed no hesitation; I'll give him that much. He grabbed my arm and pulled me out into the street. This close to freedom I found myself a lot less cold-blooded about being shot than I had been a couple of weeks before. Then we were safely across the road, and inside an abandoned block of flats sheltered from both Communard and Blanc eyes. We were able to traverse a couple of hundred meters of picturesque ruins without being exposed to any more than electronic surveillance. I figured we'd be nearly on top of a Blanc outpost before the frères finally copped to what Abalain was doing.

  "So what are you going to do once you're out of Tomorrowland and back in the real world?" I asked him when he stopped us in what seemed to have once been a pretty nice courtyard. "How does a scientific revolutionary make his way in a bourgeois schematic?"

  "I'll pretend that was a serious question and not just another pathetic attempt at snideness," he said. "Never try to out-sneer the French, monsieur. We're the masters." You be expansive, you little shit, I thought. Expand away; it'll be more fun to watch you collapse. "The fact is, Monsieur Rosen, I'm an extremely adaptable man. I won't have any trouble fitting into my new life. I'll probably have to move from Paris, and that will be a shame. But even if Bucharest or Buenos Aires isn't the City of Light, I can be comfortable."

  He produced a small pistol and pointed it at me. "After all, competitive intelligence work can be done anywhere."

  If he was expecting me to look shocked, I disappointed him. I hope I did, anyway. Frankly, I'd expected something a bit more clever. I was grateful, though, that an identity switch was the best he could come up with. After looking at me expectantly for a moment, he scowled and waved the pistol. "Let's go, Sergeant Abalain," he said.

  The Blancs had seen us, of course, and a well-armed reception party was waiting when we emerged from the ruins and into the street across which their checkpoint sat. Abalain pushed me forward, then raised his hands above his head. A Blanc in stained coveralls gestured for me to do the same.

  "I hope you guys can help me," Abalain said when we reached the Blancs. His English was almost completely unaccented, and I gave him points for that. A resourceful fellow, our sergeant. "I've been a prisoner of those bastards for months," he continued. "This is one of them. His name's Abalain. He's my gift to you if you'll call my embassy and get me out of here."

  That set everyone to babbling. I smiled. "Thanks," I said to Abalain. "I always wanted to be famous." He didn't break character, not that I'd expected him to.

  An officer showed up. His uniform was tailored, clean and crisply pressed. He wore aviator sunglasses and carried a swagger stick. No wonder you guys can't retake the city, I thought. "So this is the infamous Sergeant Abalain," he said to me.

  " 'Fraid not," I told him. "But that is." I nodded at Abalain.

  His face spasmed in pretty convincing outrage. "He lies!" he shouted. "He kidnapped me and killed my friends! You can't let him get away with this!"

  "Oh, come on," I said. I turned to the officer. "Isn't there anyone here who's seen a picture of Abalain?" I already knew the answer to that – like many of his erstwhile companions, Abalain had been pretty thorough about avoiding cameras – but I was playing a role now myself.

  The o
fficer smiled, obviously pleased with himself. "Perhaps the thing to do is to try the both of you. You can't both be Abalain, but on the chance that one of you is . . ."

  It was time. I unbuttoned my jacket. "We can settle this easily," I said, and unbuckled Abalain's wearable. Abalain's jaw dropped

  along with his new persona. I paused, savoring the moment. This was no substitute for Sissy, or even for the weeks he'd ripped from my life. But it was all I was likely to get, so I wanted it to last.

  I showed the wearable to the officer. "Retinal lock," I said.

  "If you want to see your cousin again, monsieur, stop now."

  That pissed me off. "You pathetic son of a bitch," I said. I pulled the flimsies – the list of inductees and the bunk assignments – from my pocket. I held them up in his face. "Where's the Canadian female, François? Look," I stabbed the flimsy as though it were Abalain's heart. "She was inducted – now look here," I rattled the bunk assignments. "No bunk – what happened to her, Monsieur le sergeant? Sent to Montmarte? Target practice?" A note of hysteria crept into my voice. I swallowed, balled up the flimsies and tossed them against his chest.