Dealer's Choice w-11

by George R. R. Martin

Wyungare looked around at his new — temporary, he hoped — home. It looked like a medieval monk’s cell, or something out of a dungeon, which figured, considering what he could deduce about Bloat’s maturity level and range of interests. He put his palm against the wall. Hard, cold stone blocks. Unyielding.

  The cell had no furniture. The only amenities were a hummock of loose straw in one corner, a galvanized steel bucket in the corner opposite. Wyungare shook his head. Obviously Bloat wasn’t expecting many guests.

  But the environment didn’t matter. It was time to work.

  He would make the formal acquaintance of his fellow prisoner later. Then he stopped. He heard the woman weeping softly and his heart went out to her. It didn’t take supernormal powers to pick up her feelings. The dark terrified her. So did the loss of power that came with imprisonment. Wyungare took a deep breath and let his soul range out.

  The black cat yowled low in his throat just a short distance away. He had followed Wyungare and Kafka first up, then down to the cell block. Wyungare pushed just a little, made a suggestion.

  The cat purred and ambled up to the barred door of the woman’s cell. He flowed between the bars almost as fluidly as quicksilver.

  There was silence for a few seconds. Then, “Kitty?” said the woman. Wyungare felt the sense of arms wrapping tightly around the cat, hot tears spotting his warm fur. Wyungare offered thanks to the mirragen’s spirit.

  Then he sat cross-legged on the stone, conscious of the fissures of the irregular surface imprinting in his flesh. He took a deep breath, another, began deliberately to control his respiration. Wyungare let the rhythm of his breathing fall into synch with the cycles of his body. One breath, four beats of his heart, then six beats. He slapped the stone with the heels of his hands. If he had no drum, he could make one.

  And he descended into the lower world.

  Wyungare found himself in something that looked like swampland. Good, that was what he had hoped for.

  In the distance, he heard the mournful cries of a harmonica. He walked toward the sounds.

  He had to circle the huge complex trunks of cypress. Most of the sun was shut out by the foliage canopy. The water now lay on either side of him, brackish and green with moss.

  Finally, as the music grew louder — it was a French ballad, he finally decided — Wyungare rounded a clump of scrub oak and found a young boy, perhaps eight or ten, sitting on a fallen log and playing his juice harp.

  The boy stopped when he saw Wyungare.

  “You can keep on if you like,” said the Aborigine.

  “I don’t mean to bother you, sir,” said the boy shyly. His hair and eyes both were the black of starless nights.

  “It’s no bother,” said Wyungare. “Hello, Jack.”

  “Do I know you, sir?”

  Wyungare nodded. “We’ll take a walk, young man. We need to talk. I have a favor to ask of you.”

  Jack looked at him curiously, but got up from the log.

  By the time he neared the Brooklyn Bridge, Tom knew what he had to do. Hartmann was curled up on top of the shell, his bloody hand pressed to his chest, moaning. “Hospital… my hand…”

  “I can’t,” Tom said. “They’d be on you in no time. The Hunt’s only five blocks behind me. I’ve been doubling back, dodging through alleys and over rooftops, trying to lose them, but they’ve got the scent, I can’t shake them.”

  Thunder pealed behind them. The storm went before the Huntsman, it seemed.

  “… hurts… “ Hartmann whispered.

  “I’m sorry. Hang on a little longer.”

  There was no reply. Tom glanced up at his overhead screen. The senator’s eyes had closed. He started to slide down the curve of the shell. Tom caught him with his teke, shoved him back up top. Hartmann whimpered in pain.

  The great stone arches of Brooklyn Bridge loomed ahead of him. Tom slowed, hovered, looked around. There wasn’t much to work with, except…

  “This is going to make me real fucking popular with the natives,” Tom muttered. But he didn’t see that he had a whole lot of choice. He summoned all his concentration.

  A half-dozen cars parked along the bridge approach floated into the air, yanked upward by his teke. One slipped from his mind’s grasp. The windshield shattered as it hit the ground. “Fuck,” Tom said. The sound of the Huntsman’s horn came echoing through the night, and he heard the baying of hounds. There was no time.

  He thought of a net.

  He held it high in the air, above the street lamps, and began scooping parked cars into it, fast as he could. Three, five, ten, twelve, he grabbed them with his teke, shoveled them up into the net, where they slammed together. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty…

  A dozen hounds came howling around a corner, a block away.

  Tom fled, dragging his net behind the shell. Metal screeched, glass broke, and sparks shot off concrete as the jumble of cars bounced along in his wake.

  The Hunt came howling after him.

  He pushed harder. The shell picked up speed. He started gaining on his pursuers. The baying grew more frantic.

  At the approach to the bridge, the Turtle stopped, hovered, and began to slam the shattered cars into place.

  By the time the hounds reached him, the wall was there: a solid barrier of twisted metal, not as high as the one in his junkyard, but high enough to shut off the roadway.

  A yellow cab, coming on too fast and braking too late, fishtailed and sideswiped the barrier. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE,” Tom roared down at him. The cabbie must have seen the hellhounds in his rearview mirror. He smoked his tires backing up, then lit out of there. One of the hounds bounded right over the taxi, staving in the hood as it bounced off.

  Tom flew back over his barrier, onto the bridge.

  More traffic was coming from Manhattan. “TURN AROUND,” the Turtle told them. “YOU DON’T WANT TO BE HERE.” A big limo saw the wall, slowed, stopped. “MOVE IT,” Tom thundered down. A taxi swerved around in a sudden U-turn. The limo began to back up. It got rear-ended by a Mercedes. “OUT OF HERE!”

  If the drivers had any doubts, the sight of the first hound coming over the cars made up their minds.

  The wall of wrecks barely slowed them. They were climbing it in the blink of an eye, leaping down the far side, baying up at the shell. The Mercedes reversed, backed, fled. The limo followed. Other traffic was turning back halfway over the span.

  More hounds were bounding onto the bridge now. Behind came the Hunt. The Huntsman sounded his horn again, and took the barrier in full gallop. The great black stallion leapt clean over it, with a good five feet to spare. The other riders followed.

  “OKAY, YOU CAN JUMP,” Tom said. “BIG FUCKING DEAL.”

  He pushed higher, taunting them, way up in the air out of their reach, watching his cameras until the mob came into view.

  Tom zoomed in on the faces. Cops, streetwalkers, bums, bikers, old women who’d taken their poodles out for a walk and gotten caught up in the blood lust as the hunt went by. People, that’s all. They had no part in this.

  He thought of a portcullis. Made it a gate. Wide, solid, heavy, strong as iron. He pictured it in his mind’s eye. Then he brought it down. The metal barrier jumped with the impact. Cars crunched. A biker tried to ride his Harley over the wrecked cars, hit the invisible wall, and went flying. The mob found they could go no farther. They groped at nothingness, hit it, clawed at it.

  “NO WAY PAST,” he told them. Nobody listened. This bunch wasn’t going to give up and go home. Lightning fingered the cables of the bridge like a demon harpist. Close, too close. Thunder swept over the shell. Beyond the wall, the mob was howling louder than the hellhounds.

  He had to keep the wall in place, Tom thought wildly. He moved the shell out over the span. “The wall,” he muttered to himself, a frantic mantra. “The wall, wall.” The microphone caught his plea, sent it booming out into the storm. He held the wall firmly in his mind even as he left it behind.

  The Hunt came howling afte
r him.

  He’d never moved the shell so fast before. He was forty feet above them, skipping along like a twenty-ton Frisbee. The massive stone arches of the bridge loomed overhead. Far below, the East River churned and foamed. The storm was whipping the river into a frenzy. Whitecaps danced a madman’s frenzy, waves crested and broke against the huge stone pylons. Lightning played among the drooping cables and lashed at the waters. The world had gone mad.

  “The Wall,” Tom prayed. He clung desperately to the image.

  The Huntsman had outdistanced the hounds and the other riders. For a moment it almost seemed as if the great bridge was shaking beneath him. His eyes were fixed on the Turtle’s shell, burning like two green stars. He blew his great horn, and now the bridge did shake. The hellhounds and the other riders followed, hot for blood.

  “COME ON, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS,” the Turtle roared down at them. “COME TO POPPA.”

  The Huntsman drew up beneath him, lifted his spear, threw.

  There was a flash of green light that burned the eyes, and Tom felt his shell shudder, heard the scream of tortured metal. He blinked. Four feet of spear was sticking out of the floor, not a foot in front of his face. Smoke was still rising from the carpet where it had punched through. He could smell fused metal. The spear was golden, ornate, crackling with green fire. Without thinking, Tom reached for it, but it faded and dissolved before his fingers could touch it.

  Wind whistled through the hole in the floor. Solid battleship plate, Tom thought numbly. He was too stunned to be afraid. The wall was forgotten. He only prayed the mob wasn’t on the bridge yet.

  He thought of a hammer.

  Bigger than that.

  Bigger than that.

  The biggest fucking hammer in the world.

  He pictured it, half as wide as the East River, hanging in the air above the bridge. The hammer trembled. It was heavy. It was too fucking heavy for him to support it. He made it heavier still. Down below, the Huntsman raised another spear.

  Tom let the hammer fall.

  The center span of the Brooklyn Bridge exploded.

  Stone, steel, and pavement blew apart like paper. The cables snapped with a screech straight out of hell. A huge fragment of roadway came spinning up past the shell. Tom barely had an instant to savor his glimpse of hounds, horses, and hunters all tumbling toward the river.

  Then the shock wave hit, and swept him away.

  Once Modular Man returned he reported to Bloat, who he found awake, with a few members of his staff and a bodyguard of fish-knights. Travnicek was nowhere to be seen. Modular Man made his report, then looked up at the vast figure. “May I speak with you, Governor?”

  “Is it important?”

  “To me.”

  “Very well.”

  “You know,” the android began, “if you’ve been in my creator’s head, that I’m here involuntarily. Seeing as that’s so, I’d like the same opportunity to surrender as was given your other followers.”

  Bloat looked startled, then confused. “That’s Dr. Travnicek’s decision,” he said. “Not mine.”

  Travnicek. So Bloat knew Travnicek’s name, presumably having plucked it from his mind. The android wondered if Travnicek would even care.

  “As I understand it,” Modular Man continued, “your society on the Rox is based on ideals. Presumably your ideals don’t condone slavery.” The next piece had to be run several times through the android’s macro-atomic mind so that he could phrase it properly without disobeying his creator’s orders. He found himself having to phrase it as a theoretical problem.

  “If someone brought a slave onto the Rox,” he said,

  you could make it a condition of that person’s presence that the slave be freed.”

  Even that was misleading: there was no way, short of ripping out circuits, that Bloat could “free” Modular Man from Travnicek. But Bloat could refrain from assigning him to any dangerous tasks.

  “This is ridiculous!” Kafka said. “You’re a machine! The governor might as well free a Mixmaster!”

  The android turned to him and tried to put quotes in his voice. “’The governor might as well free a roach.’ I am a sentient being, as are you. Either we are equal under Rox law, or we are not.”

  “We are a society of ideals,” Bloat said. His high-pitched voice did not point to justice. “We’re fighting for our freedom, for our new country. All we ask is to be left alone.”

  “I will leave you alone, if I can.”

  “We hope you will join us of your own free will.”

  “I am programmed to fight the enemies of society, barring my creator’s intervention. You would seem to be society’s enemy.”

  “The enemy of what society? Have you noticed there’s more than one? How do you know George Bush ain’t the enemy of society?”

  “I’m very careful in assigning those labels, if it’s left up to me.”

  “That’s big of you, Mister Judge Your Honor Sir. We want nothing from the outside, let alone your labels.”

  “You want nothing except the money you’ve stolen. The bodies you’ve stolen. The drugs and arms you’ve brought in illegally. The criminals to whom you give shelter, and the kidnap victims you permit them to bring here. And of course you want me to fight for your right to do that.” Bloat’s voice was getting more insistent. “We’ve only taken what we’re owed. The outside doesn’t care about jokers! We do! That’s why we came here! We are a principled people.”

  “If you wished to act with principle, you could have come out here with your group of idealistic jokers and occupied the place and issued your proclamations —”

  “And starved to death.” Kafka’s voice was scornful. “That’s what happened to us — no one gave a damn. We needed those others to make it work.”

  “As I understand it, idealists often suffer for their beliefs. It would seem to be part of the job description. And f you had starved here, you might have attracted favorable attention to your cause, sympathy, perhaps aid. But you didn’t want to suffer that way, so you let in the jumpers and the murderers and the drug dealers and the kidnappers and the arms merchants and the fugitives from the law.”

  “The signers of the Declaration of Independence were criminals in the eyes of the British government,” Bloat said. “I don’t see any difference.”

  “With respect, Governor, I see a number of differences between Thomas Jefferson and Governor Bloat. Not the least being that Jefferson and his allies were fighting to keep a land they already possessed, and hold it free from tyranny, while the other is trying to steal a land owned by others, with money he’s filched from strangers who have nothing to do with him, and in doing so is imposing tyranny on a rather wide variety of people, including myself, and I presume Pulse, and all those other people whose bodies the jumpers have stolen and hold in bondage.”

  “Jefferson had slaves.”

  “He didn’t create that system; he inherited it, and he had the decency to be embarrassed about it. What is more to the point, he didn’t demand that they fight for slavery.”

  “Yeah?” There was a sneer on Bloat’s face. “Since you admire Jefferson so much, I tell ya what — I’ll follow his example. Jefferson didn’t free his slaves till after his death, right? I’ll give you the same consideration. Once I’m dead, you can leave.” If that’s the way you want it. The cold thought rolled through the android’s circuitry. He knew better than to say it.

  He had used the wrong approach, he knew. He had expected to argue with an idealist, a figure knowledgeable on political and revolutionary theory. He hadn’t quite realized that Bloat was a barely educated adolescent whose political thought derived more from MTV than the Federalist Papers.

  He was the pawn of a willful, desperate, and ignorant teenager.

  If that’s the way you want it. That was always an option.

  “Go away!” Kafka made shooing gestures with his hands. “We’ve got important things to consider! Go help your creator!”

  “I am not a
ware that my creator needs any help.”

  “He’s with the Wild Hunt! Go help him kill Hartmann and make yourself useful!”

  Calculations snarled through the android’s circuits, ran into brick-wall hardwired imperatives. “That storm?” he said. “You let him go?”

  “Hey, it wasn’t my idea.” Bloat laughed. “The guy jumped down from his tower, knocked Roly-poly right off his horse, hopped on, and rode off. He must have been susceptible to Herne’s message.”

  Modular Man’s programming lifted him into the air and fired him out of the room like a gunshot. He had an image of Kafka and Bloat gaping in surprise and then the night and fog enveloped him.

  He shot straight up to get out of the radar clutter and the fog, then took visual bearings. The dark storm was prowling over the eastern approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge, and Modular Man fired himself straight for it, streamlining his guns back over his shoulders to decrease air resistance.

  He didn’t know what to hope for.

  The storm seemed to lose intensity even as he raced for it — the lightning ceased to crackle, and the thunder died away. There was the brief radar image of a small flying object — the Turtle? — racing off to the north.

  And then Modular Man was above the broken bridge, absorbing the shattered image of the shattered span, watching as emergency vehicles poured up the bridge approaches.

  What if his creator was dead but never found? he wondered. He’d have to obey the dead man’s orders forever, defending the Rox till there was nothing left.

  In cold panic he spiraled toward the water. A few figures splashed forlornly in a boiling tide that carried them toward Sandy Hook. The android floated down over the cold, choppy water, saw hands raised toward him in pleading. Stag horns jabbed high above the water, and the android sped toward them.

  “Where is my creator!” he shrieked.

  “Ah dinnut ken!” This did not seem to be Received

  Standard English. Herne gulped water, spat it out. “Find the hoern!”

  Both Herne’s horns seemed to be all right. Modular Man ignored the frantic cry and began a swift spiral in search of Travnicek.

  He found him close to the Brooklyn shore, swimming strongly across the tide toward land. Modular Man dropped into the water beside him, lifted him with arms across the chest, and brought him to the end of Brooklyn Pier 5.