*
Steward sipped his beast and watched the crowd. More people had come in. The level of conversation had risen, sometimes drowning out the music.
He thought he knew which one was Spassky—a small, active kid dressed in blue jeans, half boots, a bright yellow short-sleeved jacket with lots of zips and straps. His hair was done in black cornrows that turned into jagged vertical tattoos that marched down his face. He had pointed metal teeth, sharpened and staggered to fit into sockets in the gums so that he wouldn’t bite himself every time he closed his mouth. He wore glasses with video screens set into the backs.
There were a girl and two boys at the same table. The girl hung onto the small boy’s arm, ignoring the fact that he paid her no attention. Her forehead was tattooed and there was a bandage across the middle of her face. Steward figured she’d just had her nose altered.
The boys were big, six and a half feet tall at least. Heavy boots. Shaved heads with tattoos. One was fat, one was thin. The fat one wore video shades, the thin one had transparent eye implants that let you see the circuitry inside. Steward wondered if they had combat thread woven into their brains and concluded that they probably did.
Steward could see their heads turn slightly every time the door scanners flashed the green light for someone to come in. They never looked at the door directly. It would have made them seem anxious. But they were clearly waiting for something.
The music stopped abruptly. The people who were dancing stopped, hesitated, and returned to their chairs, looking lost.
A pale boy, about fifteen, walked onto the stage. He had a spotty, sunken chest and wasn’t wearing any clothes. He carried a pouch in one hand. There was scattered applause. A microphone lowered itself from the ceiling. Colored floods turned the boy’s skin pastel green. He shouted into the mic, “The deathworm coils in their hearts!” His voice broke on the last word. The boy took a six-inch alloy needle from his pouch. Holding the needle in his right hand, he put it through the middle of his left palm. Blood gleamed on the alloy. The applause became general.
Steward felt the tang of metal in his mouth. This was interesting.
“In the hearts of the dog pack that eases through the tear-streaked streets,” the boy said. He bent and picked up another needle. His skin was pastel pink.
There were cheers. Steward watched carefully to see how it was done. It was possible, with the pastel lights, that there was a trick here. The boy put the needle through the loose skin under his arm, chanting his poetry. More needles went in. Steward decided it was real. After that he lost interest.
Instead of being a technician with an interesting trick, the boy had become another fool who couldn’t think of a way to attract attention than to hurt himself in public.
Darwin Days, he thought. Natural selection, right here on stage.
Steward ordered another star beast and waited for the bartender to bring it. He pointed at the table with the people who looked like they were waiting for someone. “Is that Spassky?” he asked.
The bartender gave him a wary look. “That depends on who you are,” he said.
Steward took his drink. “Thanks,” he said, and walked to Spassky’s table. Video shades turned toward him.
“I’m from Griffith.”
“Sit down.” Spassky’s voice was alto, so young that Steward was surprised. He chided himself. The reflexes hadn’t come back yet. When he was a Canard, when he was Spassky’s age, this was the sort of thing he dealt with every day.
Steward gazed at the boy as he sat down. He saw that the glasses had two tiny cameras set above the nose bridge, and mind-interface pickups in the bows so that Spassky could change channels by thinking about it, without having to go through the bother of pressing buttons. Mind and video grown together.
Steward tasted his beast. Fire touched his palate, made him wary.
On the stage, the boy was bending over to put a needle through his foot. His fingers were growing slippery with blood and he was having a hard time. His head was down, away from the mic, and his voice had faded away, but he was still talking.
The girl on Spassky’s arm was watching the show with pleasure. Steward saw bruises around her eyes, revenants of recent surgery.
He looked at Spassky. “You have my Starbright?”
Spassky nodded. He moved his chair back. “Let’s go to my place. I have it there.”
Steward shook his head. “We do this in a public place. That’s the agreement.”
Spassky gazed at him in an odd way, as if he was dialing new settings on his spectacles, looking at Steward in as many ways as possible.
“I don’t have the money on me.”
“Maybe I don’t have the package, either,” Steward said.
The boy on stage was beginning to breathe hard. The pain grew raw in his voice.
“You and Griffith,” said Spassky, “are both too old to be in this business.”
“Do you have the money or don’t you?” Steward asked.
“Come to my place and I’ll give it to you.”
“Fuck you,” Steward said. He pushed his chair back. So did the two big boys. Steward stood up, gazed into their flat tattooed faces.
Spassky was still looking at him in his strange way, as if Steward were a vid show he didn’t quite understand.
“It’s my city, buck,” he said.
Steward turned and walked away. Lightning danced through his nerves. A surge of adrenaline hit him, and his hand trembled as he reached for his chit, walked through the detectors, and then put it in the machine.
No cabs in this town. No time to call one. He looked behind, through the open door.
The fat boy and the skinny boy were following, taking their time. It was their town after all. He could see chits in their hands, ready to reclaim whatever was being held at the door.
Behind them the pastel blue boy was sobbing onstage as he tried to put a needle through his foreskin.
The machine coughed up Steward’s tote. He took it and ran.
*
Griffith was pale. He seemed drained of blood, emotion, feeling. “The Powers came then, and it was all over. A whole lot of them on the move. Hundreds of ships, big ones. The Gorky ships in-system didn’t dare to try anything against them, just pulled out and ran. Left us on the ground.” His hands were trembling again. He reached for a tissue, blew his nose, then stood up and walked into the bathroom. Steward heard water running. When Griffith came back, he seemed better; his color was back. He sat in the chair by the silent video and took a few long breaths.
“That was when the Captain and the Icehawks had their showdown. The Captain didn’t want to come in, didn’t want to admit it was over. We told him this was the end, that we weren’t going to fight against a whole alien species. He was like a crazy man, fighting to keep the war going. He had become the whirlwind and he didn’t want the whirlwind to stop. I thought it would be Major Singh all over again, that we’d fight it out then and there. But then I figured out how to bring him over, to make him see reason. I told him that if we went on fighting, he’d never see Natalie again.” Griffith took a breath, let it out slowly. “That brought him over,” he said.
Griffith hung his head. “He put down his pistol and walked away, back into his little command center. I could see he was crying. A few minutes later he came back out, told us to destroy our codes and break our weapons. We took our transport to where the Powers were waiting.” He gave a short laugh. “De Lopez was there. The guy with the atom bomb on the moon. He’d just sat in his tunnel for months and listened to the war on the radio. He was fat, healthy, laughing…. He looked at us like we were some other species.
“I don’t know why the Powers didn’t just wipe us out like a bunch of bugs, especially after what we’d done to their planet. The place was a mess—cratered, looted, poisoned. But they took care of us. Fed us some of their own food, distributed whatever Earth medicines and clothing were left. They even asked us how to dispose of the dead. It was important
to them to do it right.
“I was scared of them at first. The way they look, the way they move, the sounds they make—it’s like discordant organ music. We didn’t really have a way of communicating yet. But I realized, eventually, that they were better than we were. By the end of the first month, I didn’t want to be anywhere else. A lot of us had that reaction.
“When we came back, there wasn’t any Coherent Light. The people who guided its policies were in prison. No one had responsibility for us, no company hospitals, no benefits. We were on the streets. And we found out how we’d been sold.
“CL didn’t plan to win. The Icehawks were like a bargaining chip that CL was using to get leverage out of other companies. Coherent Light decided Far Jewel had the best chance of winning control over one of the other systems, so they put all their logistical effort into supporting Far Jewel’s efforts in return for a share of the loot. All the attacks we were ordered to make—they were designed to tie up Far Jewel’s enemies in the Sheol system, so they couldn’t fight Far Jewel elsewhere. When I found that out—well, I’d just had it with humanity. When we came back to Earth, I went to work for the Powers, like a lot of the others. I was rated a translator, but I didn’t really have the skills for it. Then the Powers moved offplanet, and I was out of work. In a way, losing the Powers was worse than Sheol. I don’t know how to explain it. I was sick in bed for a week. Literally sick.”
*
Down a side street, through an alley. Heading for someone else’s turf, but zigzagging, trying to keep out of their line of sight. Steward reached into his tote, pulled out the monowire, and jammed it into a jacket pocket. He turned off the crystal display on his shirt by way of changing his profile. He looked behind him.
The big boys were moving faster now, eating up the street with their long stride and heavy boots. They hadn’t missed his evasions, which argued for good scanners in their eyewear. They’d stopped to put chits into the weapons detector at the club entrance, and Steward didn’t want to know what they’d come out with. Maybe even guns.
Steward was riding the adrenaline boost now, the first shock over. Moving easy. A liquid feel in his limbs. Ready for Zen.
Another alley. This one was of old concrete, T-shaped, with a turn at right angles. There were no lights at all. Steward began to run, putting distance between himself and his pursuers before they turned the corner. The warm summer air burned his throat as he ran. He neared the T-intersection, skidded, and ducked behind a dumpster. A damp brick wall slammed against his back, jarred breath from his lungs. He put the monowhip next to him on the concrete, then reached into his tote for the nautical flares. Their surface was cool against his palms. He held one in each hand and waited.
Heavy footsteps, coming fast, then slowing. Good eyewear, then. They’d seen body heat and warm breath radiating from behind the dumpster and knew to expect him. He gathered his legs under him, ready to spring. The cautious footsteps were coming closer. Ten meters? Eight? Five?
Steward felt sweat gathering at his nape.
He scratched the fuzes against the old concrete, saw them strike, and tossed them into the alleyway, toward his pursuers, just as the fire and smoke began to boil out. He heard a pair of cries as IR scanners were overloaded by sudden thermite heat.
Steward clawed for the monowhip and sprang. Orange smoke gushed into the alley. The big boys were moving fast, already striking out blindly, knowing he was there. One of them had a neural sword; the other, some kind of short hand weapon. Reflexes hardwired in, a union of implant thread and boosted nerve, speed Steward couldn’t match.
He struck for the face of the nearest, wrapped the wire around his head, pulled. There was a shriek, blood spurting into the smoke. The other had disappeared into the billowing orange haze. The neural sword hummed near Steward’s head and he ducked. He lashed out with the whip again, felt it wrap around something, hit the toggle. The line should have straightened into a sword, cutting right through whatever it was wrapped around, but there was resistance. Maybe the line had gone around a pipe, something too strong to cut through.
Cries were echoing from the brick walls. Tears filled Steward’s eyes. He toggled again, but the wire was yanked from his hand, and he fell backward in pure reflex as the neurosword sang through the place where he’d been. Steward kept moving backward, found a wall with his hand, followed it to a turning, ducked around it. He was out of the smoke and he could breathe. He drew in the hot summer air, jogged slowly so he wouldn’t trip over something, and wiped his streaming eyes. There wasn’t enough air in all of Los Angeles to fill his aching lungs. Screams pursued him as he ran.
He reached into the tote and dropped another lit flare behind him. He was beginning to see again. Brightness flickered at him from the end of the alley.
Steward burst into the street. Lights dazzled his eyes. The Pink Blossom logo reeled overhead.
Darwin Days, he thought. Whirlwind days.
There was a cab right in front of him. It was the only one he’d seen in the entire town. He dove for the door, shouted the address of his hotel.
Behind him, the skinny boy came out of the alley. The monowire was still wrapped around the armored sleeve of his jacket. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand, stared at the bright lights of the carnival.
The taxi was already out of range.
*
“I never saw the Captain again. He had Natalie to go back to, and I didn’t have anything like that. Eventually I got a job, got married, tried to have those kids. Having broken chromosomes bothered me a lot more than it did my wife. She just kind of shrugged and said, okay, no kids. But I wanted to start something new, something that wasn’t poisoned. I kept falling apart, my wife kept putting me back together. Eventually she quit trying. I can’t blame her. She gave me much more than I ever gave her.”
Griffith fell silent. He had his arms folded over his eyes. Steward rose slowly from his chair, feeling blood pouring into his awakening limbs. His head spun, then righted. “Thank you,” he said.
“If it was anyone but you, Captain,” Griffith said, “I would’ve told ’em to fuck off. But…I owed you, I guess.” His voice was drained of color, of emotion. He shook his head, blindly. “What time is it?” he asked.
“Two o’clock.”
“Shit. I had a sales meeting at one-thirty.” He sat upright, reached for the phone.
“Sorry.”
“My own fucking fault. Goddammit.”
Steward, feeling the package against his ribs, let himself out while Griffith was on the phone, walked to Ardala’s condeco, let himself in. He wanted to be alone for a while.
He sat cross-legged on the bed and thought about Sheol, the wind whipping across the long prairies, scattering snow across the entrances to the old, narrow tunnels…people moving across the white in reflective camo suits that chilled their exteriors to outside temperatures so as to fool infrared detectors, walking hunched over and carrying weapons, their faces masked against gas and bacteria…a storm rising far away on the flat horizon, conjuring a wall of white, advancing like a cloud. The whirlwind that Sheol had summoned, that Steward had become.
Steward took a breath and wondered if he could summon the wind here, ride it outside the gravity well to the source of himself, to the origin of the voice he’d heard on the blurred video, the grating phantom voice that was his own, his Alpha. Who had gone through his own process of becoming, of finding the heart of himself on the skin of the frozen prairies and in the cold tunnels that led into Sheol’s secret womb, in these places and in the howling Coriolis madness that had become his mind.
CHAPTER SIX
It was dark in the hotel room save for a soundless rain of color from the vid. Steward lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, his hair and body still damp from the shower. A wisp of smoke from his Xanadu twisted into his field of vision, gaining tint, faint green and faint flesh, from the wall video. Steward was coming down now, feeling the adrenaline draining from him, pouring away like rain
down a gutter.
The telephone receiver adhered warmly to his mastoid, plastered over his short wet hair. The receiver signal went straight to the audio centers of his brain, bypassing the imperfect human ear. Griffith’s voice echoed in his head in perfect audio clarity. “Jesus, man. Spassky did that?”
“I fucked somebody up bad, Griffith. That monowire might have taken his head right off.”
“Jesus.” Steward heard, very loud in his skull, Griffith’s hacking smoker’s cough. He winced. The cough went on and on. Then Steward heard the hiss of Griffith’s inhaler. When the man’s voice returned, his tone had changed. It was faster. Hyped. Angry.
“That fucking fastbuck punk. I’ve still got friends. He’ll regret the fucking day.”
“It seems to me you don’t quite know who your friends are,” Steward said. Tinted smoke curled in his vision. “It seemed to me that Spassky had perfect confidence in his ability to take me off and retain your friendship. If your friendship meant anything to him.”
There was a moment of silence. “Look. You’re okay, right?”
“No damage.” The Xanadu marijuana tendrils were creeping through his muscles, replacing the fading adrenaline, turning the ebbing high into a buzz of another kind.
“And you’ve still got the Thunder.”
“I put it in a deposit box before I went to the meet. I didn’t like the neighborhood.”
“Look. Don’t even bother to get the stuff. It’ll be safe where it is.”
“That suits me.”
“I’ll give you your fee. Then you give me the key, and I’ll have someone else pick it up.”
“Sure,” Steward said. “Let’s just do it in a public place, okay?”
“Shit, buck. Whatever you say. I’m sorry this thing happened.”
The Xanadu was relaxing the muscles in the back of Steward’s neck. He pushed his head back into his pillow, making an arch of his neck. Vertebrae crackled, the sound more intimate even than Griffith’s hoarse voice. He relaxed, felt his body awareness dissolving, sleep creeping closer.
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