8
It was a five-hour drive to Seahaven, under grid control, four hours on manual. Cerise, driving alone, kept the runabout off the grid. She flashed past the corporate vehicles in the grid lanes to her right, barely aware of the figures outlined against the bright-gold windows. Crossing the Merrimack, it was foggy—it was never not foggy at night up here, drifts rippling past in the cones of light from the headlamps—and Cerise cut her speed, the engine easing down from the shrill whine that had annoyed her for the past four hours. Multiplane’s loaner fleet was generally underpowered, whether for economic reasons or security she didn’t know, but a few days driving at what she considered to be a reasonable speed would generally send the borrowed machines back for a tune-up. She smiled to herself, thinking of the mechanics’ faces when she returned this one, and settled herself more comfortably against the padded seat.
A light clicked in the heads-up display at the base of the windscreen, and in the same moment a sign flashed past on the side of the road: one mile to the border toll station. She read the information almost without thinking, feet automatically shifting on the pedals, her hands easing the wheel. Another limo slid past, this time on her left, overtaking her on manual. She caught a brief glimpse of the bright interior, two men in suits seated facing each other across a display console, and then it passed completely, and she saw only the flickering taillights. The driver’s compartment had been blacked out, without even the glimmer of red that usually outlined the section. Going to Seahaven? she wondered, and the toll station loomed ahead.
At this hour, almost midnight, most of the gates were on automatic. The grid was signaling to her, more letters and arrows streaking past in the windscreen, and she hit the thumb button to signal that she would obey. The grid computers shunted her toward a middle lane, as she had expected—they would be considering that she was on manual and, driving fast in a small car, would respond more quickly than the heavier limos—and she smiled once to herself at the accuracy of her prediction. A single light flickered in the tollkeeper’s booth; the row of gates stretched empty across the road, display lights proclaiming that they were on automatic. Cerise worked the window controls, reached for the passcard as she slid into the gate. The reader was set high, positioned for a limo running on the grid, and she had to stretch to slide the card through the manual sensor. There was a brief pause while the computers considered the verifications and the money was deducted from Multiplane’s traffic account, and then the orange-and-white barrier folded back. She touched the accelerator gently, and the runabout slid out into the warm orange light of the toll station. There was a beeping sound behind her, and she glanced up at the mirror screen. The grid had brought one of the limos into the gate badly, and the gate sensors couldn’t read the low-powered pass button. She could see the tollkeeper, a stocky man in jeans and a T-shirt, dashing across the pavement toward the beeping car.
Another good reason to stay off the grid, she thought, and returned her attention to the road. The lights from the toll station formed a band of orange across the roadway, the fog drifting through it in seemingly solid clouds. Beyond the lights, the night seemed very black. She timed her acceleration so that she slid into the darkness at the point where the road narrowed again to five lanes, touched the controls to close the window. The fog smelled of peppermint and tobacco, and she wondered what had drifted in from the open sea this time. She was three minutes away from Seahaven.
She reached the Seahaven cutoff in five minutes, slowed by the appearance of a phalanx of state militia in their dull green fast-tanks, coursing along the outer lanes. She pulled over, into the slowest of the manual lanes, watching the warning lights stream along her display band: rear- and side-scan radar, automatic identity query and response, machine check. She kept her speed cautious even after they had passed. At the Seahaven exit, more lights flashed, demanding that she link with the local grid. This was Seahaven: she obeyed, lifting one hand from the wheel to punch in the link codes. An instant later she felt the controls shifting against her touch, and she made herself relax. The runabout swung south, turning along the access road that ran almost parallel to the main north-south flyway. Seahaven—or, more precisely, The Willows at Seahaven, the secure hotel that was the town’s economy—preferred to control all vehicular traffic within its borders, and made access to the town as complicated as possible. The commuter trains did not stop there, nor did the buses. They were particularly careful about anything coming in over the causeway; the town grid was both competent and aggressive in its attempts to gain control. She touched a final code, temporarily disabling her controls, and leaned back against the padding, suddenly aware of her own tiredness. It had been a long day, longer than she’d realized: meetings all morning trying to get her department into order and to make sure Baeyen would be able to handle the transferred authority, and then going onto the net to find the message waiting, the unfamiliar packet that she had known, even before she touched it, felt the codes, had to be from her Trouble. It had just been one word, just “Seahaven,” but that had been enough: Trouble was back in the game, and willing to share what she’d found. It had taken her three hours to convince Coigne of that, though, and she grinned, savoring the victory. Best of all, though, Trouble was back.
At least for now. Cerise felt her smile turn wry, the old pain stabbing her again. Trouble had left once before, left her in the lurch; there was no guarantee it wouldn’t happen again. And even that was getting ahead of things: there was no reason to think that she would see Trouble again even on the nets, no reason to think that Trouble would want to do more than this, this one message. Cerise stared at the lights of the heads-up display without really seeing them, thinking about Trouble. She could almost see her, was tired enough that it took very little to conjure her, tall and broad-shouldered and smiling, tiger stripes vivid in her thick hair. And that was not what she wanted to think about. She shook the image away, frowning now, shook away too the recognition that she still wanted Trouble, after everything, and fixed her eyes on the darkened screen.
The roadway lifted, rising up on pilings to cross the bands of salt marsh that lay between the main highway and Seahaven itself. The dome of the local nuke glowed on the horizon to the south, whitening the fog. Security had to be tight there, with Seahaven on its doorstep, though whether it was to protect The Willows’ exclusive clientele or to keep out the lowlifes who lived in the town and along the Parcade, she had never been entirely sure. Closer in, she could see the Ferris wheel at the end of the Parcade glowing through the fog like a monster icon. She would check there tomorrow, she decided, see if she could get word of either Trouble in the shops and cubicles that lined the street.
The roadway curved, swinging to cross the Mill Race at its narrowest point, and she looked sideways and back, looking for The Willows. She could barely find it—the road had been laid to make it hard to see, from any approach angle—just the white roofs floating, floodlit, above a screen of trees that was all but invisible in the dark. She had even been there once, when Multiplane had been negotiating to buy out a competitor, had stayed in the cool and perfect rooms, screened from electronic snooping, live spies, and the threat of raiders real or virtual and had hated every minute of it. The staff had been perfect, discreet, all but invisible in the conference center at the heart of the compound, attentive and cheerful in the perimeter buildings; the food had been exquisite, the evening entertainment, tapes and sports, of course, nothing live, well chosen. But she had remembered the people she had known, the summer she had lived in Seahaven, the ones who worked at The Willows and the ones who wanted to, the ones who would indenture themselves to the hotel and the ones who didn’t dare, and had found it hard to meet the service people’s eyes. The Willows had saved Seahaven, there was no question about it: when the beaches died, there had been no other jobs, no other employers, and the hotel had taken up the slack, employed the fishermen and their children, the small businessmen who suddenly had no clientele. The town had always
lived partly off the tourists; it had not been difficult to find people who knew the service trades. But The Willows had also made sure it would have no competition—security reasons, they said, but it allowed no other corporations to settle in the town limits. The Parcade they tolerated only because it brought extra and expensive business; both the bright-light corporations whose people liked the game of a walk on the wild side and the greyer ones who had some dealings with the shadows.
Cerise shook the thought away. She shouldn’t have to deal with The Willows, or its security, not this trip, and if she did, Multiplane had clout enough to handle it. Ahead now she could see the lights of Harborside, on the higher ground across the Eel Ditch. Her own hotel was there, a subsidiary of The Willows, of course, built to accommodate spouses and families who couldn’t be allowed in the more secure buildings of The Willows itself. Harborside was the nicer part of town, where the better-paid service trades had their houses, and the better shops and entertainment centers were; beyond the Blind Creek it became plain Seahaven again, the acceptable face of poverty, hardworking, stubborn, some of it subsidized to astonish the visitor. But the harbor still held its share of fishing boats, though you had to sail a long way, the fishermen said, push the boats’ limits, before you dared eat what you caught, and there were only a few jobs there that had no connection to The Willows.
Lights flashed across her display, and Cerise glanced at the string of query codes. The inboard systems responded automatically—destination, reservation codes, a request that the hotel be informed of her arrival—and the message bar flashed green in acknowledgment. The runabout slowed, the sound of its tires changing as it hit the older pavement of the town roads, and the grid shunted it neatly into the middle lane of Willows Road. Cerise smiled to herself—the locals still called it Ashworth Avenue, a last stubborn gesture of the independence they had already sold—and saw the lights flashing from the drawbridge that spanned the Harbormouth. Beyond it lay the unnamed neighborhoods that lay between the main town and the Parcade, still Seahaven but cut off from the town and The Willows and the jobs by the one-lane bridge: her eventual destination was the Parcade, which she had once known better than she had known the town where she was born. She closed her eyes, shutting out the fog-damp street and the forlorn neon, remembering her Seahaven. There were tiny gardens there, wedged in between the candy-colored houses, with raised boxes of store-bought dirt to fight the sand and the encroaching chemicals from the beach. There were triple- and quadruple-deckers, porches jutting off at odd angles, and families crowded into low bungalows never meant to stand the winter, and tidy capes where someone still cared enough to paint and clean and sweep the sand from the concrete before the doorways. She had had a flat on the top floor of what had been a tall vacation house, two rooms and a bath, but with a balcony from which she could see the ocean. It had been hot, even with fans running and all the windows open, and she had slept on the roof with the rest of the housemates more than once, but at least it had been warm through the interminable grey winter.
The runabout slowed and tilted, turning, and Cerise opened her eyes to see the low buildings of Eastman House looming out of the fog. She glanced once to her right, to see the guardhouse at the end of the smaller causeway that led to The Willows, and then looked back toward the doorway, mustering a smile for the uniformed man who appeared to greet her. She touched the interior lock, and he opened the runabout’s door for her, smiling with apparently genuine welcome.
“Ms. Cerise. Can I take your luggage?”
Cerise nodded, touched the controls a final time to open the storage compartment, and levered herself out of the driver’s seat while the doorman collected her single bag. She pulled the hardware case from its place behind the seat, waving the doorman away when he offered to take it from her, and followed him into the lobby. It was dimly lit, warm amber light, and music drifted gently from the bar beyond a screen of broad-leafed plants—someone singing the blues, Cerise recognized, the sort of music Trouble had liked, in her more mellow moods. She turned to the woman who waited behind the all-but-hidden counter.
“Ms. Cerise?” the woman said, making it a question even though the town grid had signaled Cerise’s arrival, and Cerise nodded. “If you’ll just look over our form, make sure everything is as requested….”
Cerise took the flashprinted form, scanned it quickly—single room, full media suite and net ties, unlimited signing privileges, courtesy of Multiplane’s account—and scrawled her name where indicated. The woman took it back, smiling her thanks. She had perfect teeth, like all The Willows’ employees, very white against the deep red lipstick.
“Thank you, ma’am.” She reached beneath the counter to retrieve a glittering disk of iridescent plastic and a sensor board. Recognizing the system, Cerise laid her hand against the board, and waited while the woman recorded palm and fingerprint and the heat pattern and recorded them on the disk itself. It was a double-check system, the prints recorded both in the disk that served as a key, so that only the registered guest could use it, and in the lock itself. It wasn’t impossible to defeat, Cerise knew—she’d done it herself—but it did take more time and equipment and a knack for social engineering that not every cracker possessed.
“You’re all set,” the woman said, and Cerise slipped the proffered disk into her pocket. “George will take you up, bring anything you need to get settled.”
“Thanks,” Cerise said, and let the doorman lead her through the lobby to the double elevator. They rode up in silence, and Cerise followed him down the short hall to her room. It was on the end of one of the three wings, she realized as the doorman unlocked the door and held it for her, then followed her inside. In daylight, she would have a clear view of the slough and The Willows itself. She tipped the doorman automatically, declined his offer of a drink from the bar or a late dinner, and let the door close behind him.
There was a kitchen console, coffee machine and hot-water dispenser above a little cabinet of supplies, set into the wall of the main room, and she started a pot of coffee before she turned her attention to the net console. It was pretty much the same setup that she had remembered from her first visit to The Willows, and, at least at first glance, she was certain she carried the right programs to deflect any lurkers in the system. She hesitated a moment, wondering if she should wait until she’d had some sleep, wait until morning before venturing onto the net, then reached for her hardware carrier. She would stick to the local net, take a quick look around tonight, when the local crackers would be out in force, and tomorrow she would look in earnest for Trouble. She put together her system, then poured herself a cup of coffee before coming back to settle herself in front of the console. As she had expected, the management did not provide chairs that would be comfortable for netwalking. She wriggled against the too-tilted chair back, then brought the pillows from the bed to prop herself more comfortably into position. She slipped the jack into the dollie-slot, and dropped easily onto the local net.
She tunes the brainworm low, enough to feel but inconspicuous to others, and begins to wander, following the spiral curves of the local net. It’s a plain system, heavily controlled—she sees watchdogs everywhere, some sleeping and benign, others ranging purposefully, one or two guarding specific gateways, and she marks those last for later investigation. Not that there’s anything she wants from behind those IC(E)-walled doors, but the challenge intrigues her.
The local trade-net lies ahead, a chain of BBS, a spiral within the spiral, an eddy curling in opposition to the main system that becomes a series of spherical spaces like beads on a string or the chambers of a nautilus. She considers it for an instant, then lets herself drift down to that plane: it is here, if anywhere, that she will find either Trouble. Her feet touch solid ground, or its illusion, and she walks along a road whimsically marked with yellow bricks.
The BBS surround her, the first sphere filled with gaudy advertising, the icons fizzing against her skin, dancing around her like a cloud of insects.
She ignores it—this is a trade space; she recognizes most of the product, and knows this is not worth her while—and the images fade as she leaves that chamber. The next space is brighter still, badged with neon shapes stolen from the Parcade, and she doesn’t bother to hide her sneer. This is for the tourists, the ones who want the illusion of the shadows without the danger, a place that plays at being the grey market. She looks close, and sees the watchdogs and the trackers, the silent IC(E) woven into the very fabric of the images, all to protect the people the market is designed to cheat. They have the feel of The Willows, of the security she has already tasted from a distance, and she quickens her pace, knowing this is not a place to linger.
Beyond it lie cocktail spaces, crowded with icons not all of whom represent netwalkers—the local system believes in the illusion above all—and she slows, scanning the space for likely trapdoors. There are fewer watchdogs here, and most of those are focused on the obvious flashpoints, where the BBS intersects most directly with the abstract plane. She walks past, searching for familiar symbols, and finds an icon that she recognizes, tainted by a well-known hand, a touch like a whisper of perfume against the air. She smiles, approaches, and the icon rotates toward her as though there were a live hand behind it. She can feel that fake, however, the chill unreality radiating from it, and doesn’t bother to answer the preprogrammed greeting.
Trouble and her Friends Page 21