Trouble and her Friends

by Melissa Scott

“Are you on line? I—we’d like to talk to you.”

  “If I was on line,” Trouble said, “I wouldn’t be answering you.” She stopped, took a deep breath, backing away from the bravado of the nets. “Sorry. Who’s we?”

  “Me, Oba, Mike, and Terri Lofting.”

  At least half of the Management Committee, plus whoever was doing the talking. Trouble took a deep breath, feeling the sudden chill run along her spine. “I’ll be right up.”

  She took the time anyway to shut things down properly, so that no one could complain of her work as syscop, and went upstairs. The delegation was waiting at the main door, the evening sky behind them glowing red and orange between the layers of clouds, like embers in a banked fire. She studied them for an instant as she opened the door—it was the entire Management Committee, plus Judy Merric, who had once been a paralegal and did most of the legal talking for the coop—and beckoned them into the brightly lit kitchen.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “You tell us,” Teresa Lofting said. She was the oldest member of the committee, grey-haired and soft-bodied, but there was a will of iron beneath the grandmotherly exterior. She had built the co-op almost out of nothing, and was fiercely protective of its rights.

  “Let’s sit down,” Alvarez said hastily. “If you don’t mind, India.”

  “No,” Trouble said, without sincerity, and waved them on into the living room. She thought for a moment of offering coffee and tea, but, looking at the grim faces, suspected that it would only put off the inevitable. “What’s this all about?” she said again, and sat down on the chair beside the unused stove.

  The others took their places reluctantly, exchanging glances, and at last Alvarez said, “The Treasury agents, the ones who were here the other day. What do they want with you?”

  “They were asking about a cracker who may have been going through my—our—nodes,” Trouble said, and wondered why she bothered. “I told them I hadn’t seen anything, and gave them a copy of the sheriff’s report—my report to the sheriff. That’s all.”

  “And had you?” Lofting asked. Trouble frowned, and the older woman amplified, her voice still sweetly reasonable. “Had you seen anything?”

  “No,” Trouble said, and didn’t bother hiding her annoyance.

  “Hey, people,” Merric said softly, and Mike Ishida said, “Yeah, let’s begin at the beginning. India doesn’t know what’s been going on today.”

  Trouble looked warily at them, already not sure she wanted to know, and Alvarez said, “All right, Mike, you tell her.”

  Ishida gave a wry smile, careful to include all of them—but Lofting, at least, wasn’t buying, Trouble thought, and Alvarez didn’t look too happy, either. And if Merric’s here—she might only have been a paralegal, but she had a good sense of the legal process. If she was worried, then Treasury might well be close to an arrest.

  ‘“We’ve been getting a lot of attention from the authorities all of a sudden,” Ishida said. “I got a phone call from a Mr. Levy, who says he’s with the Treasury, asking about you, India—asking how you came to work for us, what we know about you—asking me in my capacity as a committee speaker. Oba and Terri got the same kind of inquiries, and when I asked around, a lot of people had been getting informal questions. So what’s going on?”

  Trouble spread her hands. “I don’t entirely know. What they told me was, they tracked a cracker using my nodes, my net. I checked into it, of course, and didn’t find any signs of anyone, but what I hear on the net is, there’s a cracker come back from the dead, somebody nobody’s heard of in years, who’s causing a lot of trouble. What the connection is with me, I don’t know.” And everything except the last sentence was absolutely true.

  The other four exchanged glances, Lofting still with that gentle, implacable moue of distaste that was more alarming than any overt threat. Merric leaned forward slightly. “India—”

  “Very well,” Lofting said, riding over whatever the ex-paralegal would have said, “I can accept that you don’t quite know what’s happening, I can even believe that you didn’t know that this—cracker—was back in business, but I find it hard to believe that you didn’t know this person. If that’s what you tell us, however—” She paused, clearly waiting for a denial. Trouble made her expression as guileless as possible, and, after a moment, Lofting continued. “—then we have to accept it. But I—we of the Management Committee—cannot support you if you’ve been involved in illegal activities. I want that clearly understood.”

  “We knew perfectly well when India came to us that hiring any syscop out of the shadows might present problems,” Ishida began. “And we agreed then—”

  “Do you understand?” Lofting said, as if the younger man hadn’t spoken.

  Oh, yes, Trouble thought, I understand, and bit her tongue to keep from speaking it aloud. You’re washing your hands of me, regardless of what I’ve done—or, more precisely, because you believe I’ve done whatever it is they’re accusing me of…. Which of course I did do, once upon a time and sort of, because I was—I am—Trouble. It would be funny, if it wasn’t so serious—hell, it is funny. She sat still for a moment longer, considered and discarded three different answers. It was quiet in the condo; she could hear, in the far distance, the dulled, steady rush of traffic on the flyway. She said at last, “You don’t leave me many options. As it happens, I haven’t been running shadow jobs here—” She used the cracker’s phrase deliberately, and saw Merric wince. “—but that doesn’t seem to matter, to you or to Treasury. Like Mike said, you knew—I told you—what I’d done before I came here, back when it wasn’t illegal, and you said then it didn’t matter. However, I don’t intend to involve you, the co-op, in my troubles.”

  Ishida flinched at that, and Alvarez looked up, as though he would protest. Even Lofting had the grace to look faintly uncomfortable, but she rallied quickly. “The co-op can’t afford your troubles—can’t afford cracker troubles,” she said. “The law—Evans-Tindale is very clear about what makes an accessory. You know that.”

  She had been looking at Trouble, but it was Alvarez who nodded. “I’m sorry, India,” he said.

  “So,” Trouble began, and Lofting cut in.

  “I want you to understand that we, the co-op as a whole, will do whatever we can to cooperate with the Treasury’s investigation.”

  “Make sure you fill out the reward form correctly,” Trouble said. “But remember to clear out your personal systems first.” She had meant that as a threat—she had dealt with plenty of grey-market programmers for the co-op, trying to get good programs at prices the artists could afford—and she was pleased when Alvarez looked away.

  Lofting ignored her, looked around the room, visibly gathering her delegation. “That’s all we came to say. I appreciate your time, India.”

  “Not at all,” Trouble said, and bit down hard on a profane response. It wouldn’t work—wouldn’t impress Lofting, wouldn’t anger her, would merely be what she’d expected, and Trouble wouldn’t give her that satisfaction. She walked them to the door, moving with care, and was surprised when Merric hung back at the doorway, glancing over her shoulder as the others moved away into the growing dark.

  “If you need it,” she began, scowling, and then her tone changed abruptly. “If they come down on you, India, remember, you don’t have to talk to them. Even if they arrest you, you don’t have to talk to them without a lawyer, and we have a contract with my old firm.” She reached into her pocket, the movement screened from the others by her body, and came out with a thin piece of pasteboard. “The callcode’s there, and our account number. You’ll still have access.”

  Trouble took the card wordlessly, and knew from Merric’s shiver that her fingers as they brushed against her hand were as cold as ice. “Thanks,” she said, and was remotely pleased that her voice remained steady.

  “I hope to hell you don’t have to use it,” Merric said, and turned away.

  Trouble shut the door quite gently behind her,
and went upstairs to her bedroom. There was no point in putting it off, and no point in staying here any longer; with Lofting firmly ranged against her, the rest of the co-op would soon fall into line. Which meant she needed the toolkit right away, and the new implant as soon as possible, and the machines downstairs would no longer be safe…. She put those thoughts aside, recognizing incipient panic, and began methodically to pack.

  It didn’t take her long. She had accumulated more things than she’d realized, clothes and books and disks and the plain-but-decent furniture, but most of it would have to stay behind. She collected what she could carry, what would help her in the weeks ahead—Trouble’s clothes, the best of her pieces, costume from the old days and the few new things that matched that image—and then went downstairs to break up the system. Some of the hardware would have to stay—she couldn’t risk having the node simply vanish, tempting as it was to deprive the co-op of its connection to the outside world—but she stripped the more portable machines away, reaching awkwardly around the shelves to unhook dusty cables. She had done this before, and shied away from the memory, suppressing the thought that Cerise would say it served her right. She sneezed, startled, and went back upstairs for a rag, cursing herself for her carelessness. She’d never stayed in any one place long enough for that to be a problem. Finally, however, she had everything broken down; she folded the last cable neatly into its housing, took a last look at the net monitor obligingly blinking on the main screen—everything was green, most of the house machines shut down for the night, a single blue-toned icon that was Mineka Konstenten, working late on one of her designs—and turned away. It had never been particularly hard to leave, before. Even leaving Cerise had been easier.

  She paused in the living room, set the system carrybag on the floor beside the lighter backpack that held her clothes. It was a strange thought, not something she’d really considered before. It wasn’t so much that it was hard to leave the co-op—though, given the choice, she would have stayed, and that was startling—as that it had been, well, easy to leave Cerise. Not that I wasn’t right to do it, she thought, but still…. She could remember packing that day, loading the machines and the clothes haphazard into the only bag she had, wrapping the delicate brainbox at the center of a cocoon of jackets and shirts, packing the storage blocks in underwear, hurrying because she couldn’t stand the thought of arguing anymore, because Evans-Tindale had become law and she’d known Cerise wouldn’t see reason, because if she hurried she didn’t have to think too much about what Cerise would say, coming home to the empty flat. No, easy wasn’t the right word, but she hadn’t felt this same regret, a nostalgia, almost, for the time she’d spent. It had been fear then, certainly, and anger. She was angry now, too, but she hadn’t expected the co-op to support her. She had expected Cerise to come with her, in the end.

  She checked the kitchen controls a final time, making sure the household systems had spooled down to standby, set the environmental system at fifteen degrees, then left the remote conspicuously in the center of the table. She pocketed the old-fashioned keys, and let herself out the sliding door, locking it carefully again behind her. She hesitated then, weighing the keys in her hand, then turned not toward the gate but into the compound, walking back along the row of houses, skirting the pools of light that spread from the porches. At Konstenten’s house she hesitated, but made herself step up onto the porch, and tapped gently on the reflecting glass. For a moment she thought the other hadn’t heard her, that she’d been too immersed in her work to hear, but then the mirror-image rippled, the line of trees, her own brighter shape wavering, and the door slid open a few inches.

  “What is it, India?” Konstenten asked, and slid the door open the rest of the way. She was a tall woman, chestnut hair held back by an embroidered scarf; threads clung to her T-shirt and the legs of her jeans. Behind her, light gleamed on her quilting frame, spotlighted in the center of the room. “Or should I ask?”

  “I’m leaving,” Trouble said. She held out her keys, and Konstenten took them mechanically, stood holding them still with her hand up, as though she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with them. “I may be back—I hope I’ll be back, but I wanted to ask if you’d keep an eye on my stuff.”

  There was a little silence, and then Konstenten said, “You’re leaving me responsible for your place. And whatever’s in it. All with Treasury breathing down your neck, and the talk everywhere that you’re going to be busted any day now. Fuck you, Indy.”

  “There’s nothing in there that could get you into trouble,” Trouble said. “They think I’m a cracker, you’re not involved in that.”

  “Fuck you,” Konstenten said again, and threw the keys at Trouble’s feet. They landed with a splash of metal against concrete. “Why do you even bother telling me you’re going?”

  Because I didn’t tell Cerise, Trouble thought. But that was not an answer that Konstenten would understand. She said, “Because I thought I owed you.”

  “Because you needed my help,” Konstenten answered. The keys lay gleaming at Trouble’s feet.

  “Fine,” Trouble said. She shifted the bags on her shoulder, took a step backward, letting the keys lie where they’d fallen. “Yeah, I could’ve used some help, but it’s OK. Leave it, let the committee, whoever, deal with it. But I wanted to let you know.”

  She turned away, started walking fast into the shadows, heading toward the edge of the standing trees and the path that led to the main gate. Behind her, she heard a scrape of metal against concrete, but did not look back to see if Konstenten had picked up the keys.

  She caught the night shuttle into Irish Point, the train chugging down the center of the flyway that gleamed like an oil slick in the headlights and the silver glare of the rising moon. To the south, the city lights filled the horizon, the distant buildings little more than shadows behind the broken geometry of their lights, further distorted by the scratched windows. She watched them, trying not to think too much, until the flyway split away to either side, ramps spiraling down to the ground roads, and the shuttle itself dipped toward the terminus. She had made sure that Jesse’s still existed, was still in the same ratty storefront where he had always kept shop; that was all she could do, and she put her worries and the anger aside for later.

  She took a trolley from the terminus into the town center, got off at the familiar end-of-Main stop. Main Street was less crowded here, toward the edge of Irish Point’s shopping district, fewer cars in sight. Less than two miles away, the street ended at the concrete of the sea wall, and Trouble could see the lights of the Coast Guard tower rising above the distant buildings. She made her way past the closed storefronts, their windows protected by metal grills or heavier solid shutters. Here and there, someone had tried to pry one of the barriers away, leaving a corner curled up, and everywhere red and green pinlights glowed in corners, signaling wide-awake security systems.

  There weren’t many people on the street, either—a young woman hurrying past, who vanished through the locked door that led to an upstairs apartment; a couple of middle-aged men who walked slow and unsteady, arguing about something in an unfamiliar creole; a twenty-something man in jeans and a too-tight T-shirt, hands in his pockets, scowling—and Trouble felt vaguely that she ought to be afraid. She was too angry for fear, however, beyond the always present need to keep an eye on the shadows, too angry still even to admit her anger, except as a white-cold intensity that she honed like a weapon, focusing her thoughts on the meeting. She would not think of Konstenten, of the co-op, not yet. She turned off Main Street at last, striding through the orange glow of a streetlight, and saw the familiar sign ahead of her.

  Jesse’s was a small place, a clapboard storefront with a dirty display window filled with faded posters and a few old-fashioned pocketbooks and travel decks. The door was open, however, just a screen separating the main room from the street, and she could hear the music two doors away. It was old music, familiar rhythms, and she found herself falling into step as she came
up to the door.

  The main room was just the same as it had always been, bare wood floors badly in need of polishing, shelves filling the side walls and the wall behind the bare metal counter with its row of open outlets. Just inside the door, an overfilled notice board advertised everything from used chips and bioware to a secondhand tricycle. A quartet, all young, all nondescript in jeans and military surplus, none of them familiar to her, sat at the center table, a notebook’s internal works spread out among them like a card game or the entrails of some sacrificial animal. They all looked up at the sound of the door, and she felt their eyes on her as she walked past them to the counter. None of them would be of significance—if they were at all important, they would be in one of the back rooms—and she ignored them, fixing her eyes on the woman behind the counter. She would be one of Jesse’s innumerable girls, one of the harem who cooked and cleaned and did the tech work and kept the store running while Jesse played on the nets, and Trouble approached her with the same wary respect she used to all of Jesse’s women. The woman, tall, stringy, very black, her hair fastened in a club of braids at the base of her neck, looked back at her with a weary, deliberately unnerving stare.

  “What you need, honey?”

  “I’ve got some shopping to do,” Trouble answered. “And I want to talk to Jesse.”

  “We got stock out here,” the woman answered, with a vague wave of her hand at the crowded shelves, “but Jesse’s on-line. You’ll have to make do with me.”

  Behind her, Trouble could hear a soft sound from the group at the table, a rustle that might have been a stifled laugh. She ignored it, still looking at the stringy woman. “I need custom work. And I still want to talk to Jesse.”

  There was a little silence, and the woman said, “Will Jesse want to talk to you?”

  “Tell him Trouble’s here.”

  The woman’s head came up, her mobile face drawing down into an angry scowl. “I don’t take kindly to pretenders, sweetheart, and we don’t deal with hot merchandise—”