Voice of the Whirlwind

by Walter Jon Williams

  “We were still hitting them, though. From the tunnels. Flying in on isolated posts under cover of the storms. Sometimes we’d attack just to steal their food. We’d have to kill any that surrendered. We had no place to put them, no food to give them. If enemy reinforcements came after us, we’d hide in the tunnels.”

  Griffith was shaking now. His hands were trembling, the beer splashing up the sides of the bottle. “They couldn’t get us out of our holes. It would cost too much to dig us out. That’s when they started using gas on us. Extermination drones. And biologicals.” Tears were running down Griffith’s face. He swallowed hard. “That’s when things broke down. That’s when we all knew… we’d been sacrificed. That Coherent Light wouldn’t be coming back for us.”

  *

  The warm night seemed full of sound and light. Todo music throbbed from the small shops crowding the wide alloy street that mirrored the bodies of those who walked on it, the crystal windows and bright holograph displays that soared soundlessly above the walkways. Steward wore a charcoal-colored jacket over a black T-shirt that featured a liquid-crystal display on the front, one that ran the text of Jack Totem’s poem “551” in three-inch rainbow letters across Steward’s chest….

  “Our tongues are electrons, tasting the silicon heart of America.” Magic. An incantation. Invoking the local demons, calling them to Steward’s aid.

  He was spiraling inward to the meet, trying to get a feel for this town, for the connections that existed here and for the rhythm of its life. He couldn’t match any of the locals for knowledge, but maybe he could taste a little of this city’s silicon heart, enough to give him a purchase on the way things worked here. He walked on tennis shoes with red balls on the sides, shoes he’d been unable to resist buying in his last hour in Arizona. A reminder of where he’d been, why he was here.

  He felt the weight of the package in his pocket and wondered whether or not to carry it to the meet. Griffith said it was safe. Not to appear trusting might cost Griffith something with the people he worked with.

  He moved down the bright reflective street, weighing things in his mind.

  *

  Griffith was lying on his bed. Smoking, staring at the ceiling. Breathing easier now. The trembling fit had passed. “A message came through. From Colonel de Prey. He ordered Singh into an alliance with Far Ranger and Gorky against Magnus and OutVentures. Ordered us to take the offensive. They didn’t even know, back home, that Gorky had never landed.

  “We were living behind biologic seals, down in the tunnels. The food vats had been poisoned. Whenever we went out, we had to wear our environment suits, live in them every minute. People were getting sick, wasting away. There were only a thousand of the grunts left, and they’d lost all their heavy equipment…. They were just guerrillas now, like the Icehawks, only not as well trained. Far Ranger was worse off than we were. Singh decided to obey his instructions. You— the Captain—you argued against it. Told him that Coherent Light was months out of touch, couldn’t possibly know the situation. But Singh trusted the Colonel, said that CL must have based their decision on factors we didn’t know, that there was probably help on the way, or alliances that we didn’t know that would work for us.”

  He turned toward Steward. Steward saw the recognition in his eyes, sensed that he wasn’t talking to himself anymore, or to Steward, but to a dead man. To the Captain.

  “I heard you and Singh shouting at each other. But I saw you after the meeting, and you were calm. I remember you quoted Corman at me. Our old martial-arts teacher. Remember when Corman was talking Zen? She said that the world, that reality, was like a whirlwind. That the Zen warrior did not fight the whirlwind, that she gave the whirlwind nothing to strive against, that the whirlwind passed through her and left her unaffected, unmoved.”

  You, Steward thought. He called me “you,” talking about the Captain. I’m enough like him, then. A feeling, cold and then hot, passed through his bones.

  “You were a little sick, like we all were. Feverish. Either the enemy’s biological weapons, or our own preventive vaccines, always had us sick. You’d lost weight, you hadn’t slept in days, kept going with speed. You looked like a fucking phantom, man. We all did. And what you said was, that it wasn’t enough to be unmoved, to let the whirlwind pass. You said that the only way we’d survive was to become the whirlwind.”

  It seemed to Steward that he could see right into Griffith’s head, that his eyes were black holes leading into an emptiness, a place where invisible snow beat against the confines of his skull and the voice of the whirlwind shrieked in his ears.

  “I’ve been through combat,” Griffith said. “I’ve been shot at and gassed and lost in a snowstorm. But I’ve never been as scared as I was when I heard you say that. Because I knew you were the only one who understood what kind of war we were in. And that you accepted it, and that you could still act. You were crazy, I think, out of your mind on combat and speed. But I knew that if I wanted to get out of this, I’d follow you. I wasn’t alone. People were trying to get out of other units, to join the Captain. Trying to find reasons to be with him. People were starting to figure that if anyone was gonna live, it would be him.” His voice dropped, and he spoke with calm authority.

  “You were the whirlwind, Captain,” he said. “The rest of us just followed along. But you were the whirlwind. You were Sheol.”

  *

  No cabs. Steward noticed that right away. Lots of private cars and cycles, but no cabs.

  There were a lot of little neighborhoods here, condecologies on a small scale. Self-contained, easily defined. The buildings were old, sometimes centuries old. On the ground floor only, the facades were recent—clubs, shops, boutiques, all striving for something new.

  Turf, Steward thought. Where the kids who ran the real LA did their business. There weren’t many people over twenty-five here. Not at night.

  Most of the little neighborhoods were full of people in brocade and paint, butterfly-wing eye makeup, hair done in extravagant little braids, with jewelry implanted in their wrists, cheeks, the backs of their hands. Their music was loud, insistent, full of revolution and defiant joy. But another style was creeping in. Cooler, quieter. The music was based on complicated rhythms mixed in complex ways, the stance ambiguous, calculated.

  Steward saw his first Urban Surgery here. Metal tooth implants of sharpened alloy, ears removed and replaced with flat black boxes, audio scanners. Sunglasses with crystal videos on the reverse sides, so that their wearers could see everything as if it were on vid--- or, if reality wasn’t interesting enough, could switch to a video program. Eyes replaced, not with natural-seeming implants but with obvious ones: metal scanners, clear plastic eyes that you could see through, liquid-crystal eye whites that created shimmering, abstract patterns shifting like quicksilver in the eye sockets. Flattening the nose seemed popular, an alteration that made the entire face a canvas for the tattoo artist. Entire heads were covered with monochrome circuit diagrams, mathematical statements, urban skyscapes.

  Steward felt his nerves tingle. Something in him wanted to get out of this. He resisted the impulse to speed up. These people were unsettling.

  A short-lived phenomenon, Steward decided. This extravagant style of self-mutilation wouldn’t appeal to enough people to last. But while it lasted it was going to be powerful.

  He felt again the weight of the Thunder in his pocket and came to a decision. He wasn’t going to go into a club full of these people with anything worth a hundred K of Starbright scrip. He began looking for an all-night safety deposit company.

  They were all over the place. It looked as if there was a lot of business for them.

  *

  Griffith’s eyes were closed. He lay like a dead man on his bed, his arms and legs splayed. His voice was soft now. Steward had to strain to hear it.

  “Our offensive collapsed in two days,” Griffith said. “Far Ranger was worse off than we were and couldn’t give us proper support. The counterattack creamed
us. We lost almost two thousand people. The last of our heavy weapons. The Captain’s command was the only one that survived more or less intact. He disobeyed orders to do it. We hit our preliminary objectives, then took off in captured aircraft before the counterattack developed. We stole some biologic weapons and rode into one of their command centers using some false codes we’d captured, dumped the germs into every ventilator we could find, then flew off again. Hit-and-run stuff. It was all we could do, really. It was weeks before we got back to where Singh had set up his command center. Sometimes I wonder if the Captain ever intended to go back, because Singh had kept the offensive going as long as he could, and the Captain just wasn’t following orders. Maybe Singh was hoping Gorky would come back and help us.

  “But new instructions came in from Colonel de Prey. Coherent Light had concluded that Magnus was ready to stab OutVentures in the back. We were ordered to join Derrotero and Magnus in a new offensive. Even with our united commands we had only about eight hundred men left. The Captain had fifty who’d been with him. The grunts, support people, and scientists had either joined us or died. The winter was supposed to be coming to an end, but there wasn’t any sign of it.”

  Griffith shook his head. “There was another face-off with Singh. He wouldn’t give in. He had faith, he said. CL knew what they were doing. This time the Captain wouldn’t give in, either. He assumed command. Just took over. Major Singh didn’t have anyone left who’d follow him.”

  “Just like that,” Steward said. His own voice sounded loud in the still apartment. Inappropriate. He thought about Singh. Intelligent. Hard. Not an easy man to know, but a fighter. Tenacious. Steward couldn’t picture Singh giving up that way.

  “No, not just like that.” Griffith’s eyes opened. He was staring at the ceiling. Steward couldn’t read his expression.

  “I was there,” Griffith said. “I was right behind the Captain when he took out his pistol and shot Major Singh in the head. Then I held my gun on the staff while they were disarmed and then split up and sent to other units. I didn’t—I didn’t see any other way. The whirlwind had us by then, and Singh was trying to stand against it. He didn’t understand that everything had changed. That was when the Captain gave himself a promotion. After that, he was the only officer we had. The only one we needed. He got us through.”

  *

  “NeoImagery,” said a recorded voice. “More than a philosophy. More than a way of life.”

  A NeoImagist street carnival burbled in one of the streets. Sullen girls in brocade handed out literature. They belonged to an affiliated gang, Steward assumed. Displays, live and on holo, showed orbital second-stage habitats, smiling people, sleek zero-g humans modified for space, models of the DNA helix that you could alter yourself to new configurations.

  The Pink Blossom logo rotated over the street. Major contributors to the cause.

  “We are reconstructing the human race,” the voice said. It was female, friendly but authoritative. A software construct, designed to attract attention and inspire trust.

  Darwin Days. Steward thought about people on top of glass towers hurling windows into the void, unconscious agents of evolution. Reconstructing the human race in their own irreverent fashion—that was as close to messing with the gene pool as Steward ever wanted to get.

  *

  “The Captain knew that Magnus was going to hit Outward Ventures pretty soon, allied with Derrotero. So he let Magnus know he was joining them, and as he made plans with Magnus, he established covert relations with OutVentures and let them know exactly what Magnus was up to. Magnus noticed OV making their preparations and accelerated their own schedule. Then we just stood back while they preempted each other. They blew each other apart while we hid in the tunnels. We weren’t a part of it. We were on the move all the time, nibbling at the enemy, stealing their equipment so we could live. When they’d come after us in the tunnels, we’d ambush them, then come up again somewhere else. The Captain called it eating the dead.”

  *

  There was a hologram running over the counter. Our business is run on trust, it said. we trust you will pay in advance.

  There was an advanced scanner in the doorframe that would detect any weapons that weren’t actually implanted in the body and precision lasers hanging from the ceiling.

  The sign on the outside said loans, sporting goods. The interior said pawn shop.

  Trust, Steward thought. Right.

  A thin woman with bad skin, about thirty, stood behind the counter, her arms folded across her chest.

  “Monowire,” Steward said, pointing. “The Officier Suisse.”

  She looked up at his French pronunciation, then reached behind the counter and took out the weapon. It was about the size and shape of a switchblade knife. “Hold on a second,” she said. “Gotta hit the deadman. Stay inside the tape.”

  “D’accord,” he said.

  She stepped behind a clear plastic shield and pressed a button on the floor with her foot. If the pressure was removed, the house lasers would cut him up in a fraction of a second.

  Steward made certain he was inside a ten-foot square marked with duct tape on the floor, then pressed the On button on the end of the wire, then pressed the thumb toggle. The stabilized monofilament line, with a little lead weight on the end, extruded from the handle to about two and a half feet. Steward whipped the sword through the air.

  It made no sound at all.

  Steward rocked the thumb toggle back, and the monofilament lost its rigidity, hanging from the handle by its weight.

  “I don’t take any responsibility for what happens next, jack,” the woman said. “You cut off your own head, it’s nothing to do with me.”

  Steward began to move the whip, gently at first until he got his reflexes back. Icehawk reflexes. He’d never had the nerve to try these when he was a Canard. The possibility of damaging himself with the unpredictable weapon was too high.

  He began to move faster, whirling the line through long arcs, changing from whip to sword to whip again. The woman watched, expressionless.

  He turned off the monowire and put it back on the counter. He stepped away. The woman disarmed the deadman.

  “How’s it go through detectors?” Steward asked.

  The woman shrugged. “Depends on the detector. Don’t try wearing it through my door.”

  Steward glanced at the lasers above his head. “Okay,” he said. He put a credit spike on the countertop next to the monowhip, then stepped off to look at something beneath the glass top of one of the other counters. Nautical flares, the kind that burned even underwater. “I’ll take the flares, too,” he said. He’d been thinking of making a trip to the oceanfront for just this item.

  In a boutique next door he bought a tote bag to carry them in. It was made in Malaysia of white linen, with an abstract black pattern on one side and the words fine white appreciation set of wheels on the other. The first three words were in black, the others in red. Steward had no idea what it meant.

  He hitched the tote bag over his shoulder. His T-shirt talked to the metal streets.

  He began to spiral inward, toward the club that was his destination. Picking up vibrations, the Zen of the city, as he went.

  *

  “Gorky came back, allied with Far Ranger. It was their last shot. Their landing force got beat off, so they just took the moon and held it. Captured asteroids with their mass drivers and started dropping them on the planet, wherever they saw life. Magnus and OutVentures tried to throw atomics back at them, and some got through. There was no real spring on the planet. Too much shit in the atmosphere. All we had was a kind of half-winter, sleet storms instead of ice storms. With dead people in tunnels, piled in the drifts.”

  *

  Steward put the tote bag in the slot outside the club entrance. The machine accepted the bag and gave him a chit, a piece of paper with magnetic code written on it. He put the chit in his pocket and walked in.

  He’d concluded that it would be embarrass
ing to walk into the club and have every alarm in the place go off. It was the sort of thing guaranteed to start him off at a disadvantage. He’d decided to check the monowhip at the door instead.

  The holo outside said club bag in letters that looked like molten bronze, and he could see through the open doorway that the interior featured concrete floors and walls of sprayfoam, both painted black. Tables were clear plastic on chrome stands that doubled as computer terminals. About half the people inside wore Urban Surgery or at least made a bow in that direction.

  People at tables looked at him as he walked through the doors. Tattoos, drinks in strange colors, heads nodding to music. Steward looked back at the crowd for a moment and then walked to the bar. The bartender was a middle-aged man with a massive chest, vast arms, and the hoarse voice of an old prizefighter. “Star beast,” Steward told him.

  Trebles shrilled off the walls. The bass was lost somewhere in the void. People were dancing to recorded music in front of an empty stage. None of them looked very interested.

  The night was young. Things really hadn’t started yet.

  *

  “I wonder why we never surrendered. It would have made so much sense.” Griffith rubbed his mustache. “Because our loyalties were so strong, I guess. The Icehawks had esprit. We couldn’t disappoint each other by surrendering. And after a while, there was no one to surrender to. We were all living in the tunnels like savages. Fighting over food. We couldn’t accept surrender because there was no food for the prisoners, and we couldn’t surrender because we’d be killed for the same reason. So we’d kill everyone, there being no choice. A lot of them were just corporation grunts, cannon fodder. Little girls from Korea, street kids from Rio. Just there to get swept away.” He shook his head. “We would have eaten one another, eventually.”