by Tad Williams
He saw her come close to his hiding place, wandering by herself. He looked to make sure that the two teachers were still standing in the shade near the classroom, then he rattled the bushes. She didn't hear him, so he rattled them louder, then whispered as loud as he dared, "Hey, weenit! You deaf?"
She looked up, startled, and even when she recognized him she still looked frightened. It made him angry, and for a moment he thought of just leaving and telling El Viejo he hadn't found her. "Come here," he said instead. "I gotta ask you something, m'entiendes?"
The little girl turned and checked the teachers, just as he had done. He found himself admiring her just a bit: for a little rich white girl, she wasn't all stupid. She wandered closer to the fence, but still kept a short distance away, as though he might reach out and grab her.
"What?" she asked; then, "Is Mister Sellars sick?" She looked really worried.
Cho-Cho made a face. "He ain't sick. He wants to know how come you don't come see him or nothing?"
She looked like she wanted to cry. It made Cho-Cho want to hit her, but he didn't know why. Probably just because the old cripple liked her so much, had him running errands to see how she was doing, like she was some kind of princess or something.
"My . . . my daddy took the Storybook Sunglasses. He says I shouldn't have them." A nearby shriek made her jump. One of her classmates had grabbed another kid's sweater, but was running off with it in the opposite direction, away from the fence, a couple of kids chasing after him. "He's trying to find out why I have . . . why I have them . . . and he won't let me go out and play or anything until I tell him."
Cho-Cho frowned. "So you getting all punished? 'Cause you won't tell them where the glasses from?"
The little girl—he could never remember her name right, even when the old man said it all the time: Crystal Ball or something stupid like that—nodded. Cho-Cho wasn't surprised she was keeping her mouth shut, since where he grew up nobody told their parents anything about what really happened, if they even had parents, but he thought it was pretty interesting that she wasn't folding up right away. Rich little girl like that, he would have thought she'd give up as soon as they started the whippings, and they must have started those already.
"I'll tell El Viejo," he said.
"Does he want me to come see him?" she asked. "I can't—I'm grounded."
Cho-Cho shrugged. He was just doing his job. He wasn't going to waste time telling her all kinds of cheerful shit to make her feel better.
"La caridad es veneno," his father had always said, his poor, stupid, crazy father—Charity is poison. "It makes you weak, boy," was the explanation. "They give it to us like they give poison to rats. We're the rats in the walls, understand? And they want to make us weak so they can kill us."
Carlos Sr. could tell his family not to take handouts from the government or the church, but the problem was, he couldn't keep a job. He was a hard worker and a pretty smart one (one of the reasons it was still better to get fruit picked by hand), and if the man in the truck chose him to go to the citrus fields outside Tampa for the day, all morning that truck man would be thinking about what a good choice he'd made, because Carlos Sr. would be storming up and down the rows, filling twice as many orange or grapefruit bins as anyone else. But then someone would look at him funny, or one of the foremen would ask him a question that felt like an insult, and then someone would be lying on the ground with a bloody nose. Sometimes it was Carlos Sr., but usually it was the other person. And that would be that. Another job lost, another field where he couldn't work until they had a different man on the truck, a different foreman.
But he didn't take charity, as he was always pointing out. Carlos Jr.—never called Carlito, "little Carlos," because for some reason that, too, would have been an insult to his father—heard the speech so many times he could have recited it for him.
Carlos Sr.'s wife was not such a stickler for integrity, although she was never stupid enough to let her husband know that some of what she brought home to the honeycomb underneath Highway 4 to help feed their five children was not merely earned from her job at a grocery store, where she mopped the floors when things spilled and carried boxes from one side of the warehouse to the other, but in fact came from the very charity he hated, in the form of state assistance to indigent families. Food vouchers.
It wasn't that Carlos Jr. particularly disagreed with any of his father's philosophical positions. At a very basic level, he even understood and agreed with Carlos Sr.'s distrust of helping hands; neither would he have liked to be known as "Carlito," so he felt no loss there. His objection to his father was far more basic. He hated him. Carlos Sr.'s bullying and bragging would have been more tolerable if the Izabal family had lived a life of even middle-of-the-road poverty, but they were poor as dirt. The father's comparison of their position to that of rats was horrifyingly true.
Carlos Jr. considered himself a man by the time he was eight. Did he and his friends not bring in at least as much to their families as their benighted, hopeless fathers? What difference was there between what others earned by sweat and what they earned by thievery, except that the latter was less work and infinitely more exciting? When he first met his friends Beto and Iskander and they tried to call him Carlito, he hit Iskander in the eye and kicked Beto so hard that the smaller boy had run home crying. His reasons for not using that name were different than his father's, but his determination was just as great. He had nothing against nicknames, though. Later, when Iskander started to call him "Cho-Cho" after a brand of rice candy that he particularly liked to shoplift, he accepted the name graciously.
He and Beto and Iskander did a lot of things together, most of which were meant to put money in their pockets, candy in their sweaty fists, and dermal patches on whatever areas of their skin could be spit-scrubbed clean enough for the chemical transfer. They had a business, that was the truth of it, with diverse interests, some of which were as interesting and inventive as anything conceived by people with college degrees. In fact, they were busy with one of their projects—"tending the herd," as they called it—on the night the terrible thing happened.
The International Vending Corporation had come up with a new twist on the basic concept of food and drink delivery, something they rather preciously named "Walkabots"—vending machines on silent tank treads that covered entire neighborhoods, directed by simple codes to move from place to place. IVC did not expect to make even as much money from them as from simple stationary machines, but the big boxes were also mobile advertisements, playing up-tempo advertising jingles and greeting customers (once they came within range of the infrared eye) with cheerful canned chatter. It didn't take long for Cho-Cho and his friends (and hundreds like them in every major city) to realize that the machines could be physically removed to other neighborhoods, so that the IVC service people could not locate them (something a simple chip could have prevented if the vending machine executives had been a little less naive.) Once the machines were set roving on their new turf, the profits could then be safely harvested by Cho-Cho and his tiny business consortium until the box ran out of goodies. After they had jammed the credit slots which most people would have otherwise used, each machine still took in enough old-fashioned coin to deliver a tidy little profit at the end of each day.
Within a couple of months they had a free-range herd of Walkabot vending machine's operating all over Tampa, so many that Cho-Cho and his friends had to surf the tramline for hours every night to collect all their takings. They were living so high that Cho-Cho even got himself an aspirational, Goggleboy-type neural access shunt installed in a dirty backroom surgery by a street-corner can man, but they all knew that the time was short—the IVC people were busy snatching back every machine they could get their hands on—so they were pushing the enterprise as far and as fast as they could.
On the night the terrible thing happened, little Beto had located an unshepherded machine in Ybor City, an impressive new model with a holographic display of a fizzing dr
ink being poured from a bottle hovering like a halo above a two-and-a-half-meter plasteel box. Beto was delirious with pleasure—he declared this would be the king of their herd—and despite Cho-Cho's reluctance to kidnap such an unusual-looking machine without investigating it first, he let Beto and Iskander have their way. In a matter of moments they had jacked it up onto the machine-rustling dolly which they had liberated from an auto garage and were heading across town.
The IVC Model 6302-B was meant to solve the problem that had plagued the last generation of mobile machines; many others beside Cho-Cho and his friends had discovered how to kidnap the mobile dispensers, and the company was sick of being a laughingstock. The worried executives at International Vending Company did not realize that they had made things dramatically worse.
As Cho-Cho and his partners took advantage of a late-night lull in traffic on the expressway to get their machine across—they were only boys, after all, and could not possibly have lifted such a large machine up the stairs to the pedestrian walkway—the Model 6302-B crossed the border of its designated vending area, which set off its defensive systems. An alarm as loud as an ambulance siren began to shriek, warning lights to strobe, and a theoretically harmless vegetable dye with ultraviolet trace elements sprayed from ports along the side of the drink machine to mark the machine rustlers.
Iskander was hit in the eyes by the dye. Terrified by the screaming alarm and his sudden blindness, he staggered away from the machine. Cho-Cho had also been sprayed in the face, and was rubbing his eyes frantically when Beto screeched in terror. Cho-Cho cleared the worst of the dye in time to see Iskander frozen in the headlights of an oncoming truck. They barely saw the impact, but the wet thump was so shocking that Cho-Cho let go of the heavy vending machine, still howling its warning cry as it teetered atop the dolly. A moment later it began to tip, the weight far too great for Cho-Cho to stop it even when he realized what was happening. Little Beto, wide-eyed as he stared at the spot where Iskander had been only a moment before, did not even see the huge box toppling on him. He disappeared beneath it without a sound.
Stunned, Cho-Cho had stood frozen for long moments. The car that had hit Iskander had stopped several hundred yards up the expressway, and other headlights were appearing now, slowing at the sight of the huge blinking machine lying on its side in the middle lane. Cho-Cho's muscles if not his wits returned to his control; he bolted into the darkness of the roadside, almost tripping on the dolly which was rolling slowly down the sloping expressway toward the shoulder.
The International Vending Company sustained such a blizzard of negative publicity, the tabnets straggling to outdo each other with stories about how a "killer machine" had chased one child to its death on a freeway and killed another outright by crashing his skull, that within a month of the accident they declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy and sold their assets to another firm. Although Cho-Cho would experience other tragedies—his mother and younger sister were asphyxiated a year later when a trucker running his engine to stay warm during an evening's layover underneath the freeway accidentally filled their honeycomb with carbon monoxide—that night had already done much to form his expectations of life.
We are the rats in the walls, was the only thing of his father's that he kept when he ran away, making his way up the East Coast in search of cooler summers and less vigilant police. They will trap us, poison us. They want us dead.
Cho-Cho watched the little girl walk away with her head down, slow and sad like he had just told her he was going to burn up her house or something. Why had the old vato ever got involved with her in the first place? The old guy was weird, but he was pretty smart in his way—he knew lots of shit, that was for sure—so why did he get a little puppy dog like this to help him?
Because he hadn't had any other choice, the boy suddenly realized. He would have taken a street-smart animal like Cho-Cho if he could have, but they hadn't met in time. When they did, he had sent the little girl back to Mamapapa-land pretty quick.
This put a little spring in Cho-Cho's step as he made his way back through the walking park just beyond the school, but he still remembered to keep to the trees and stay out of sight of the paths. He was getting a little tired of eating the military rations the old cripple Sellars kept stacked in the tunnel, but he wasn't that tired of it—it was a lot better than not eating, and it also beat getting meals on trays in one of those kiddie jails, which was where he'd go if they caught him. If he was lucky, of course, and they didn't just take him out back of the base and shoot him instead—"snipe hunting," the azules called it. You couldn't trust the people who ran things. They talked all nice on the net, everyone said, but he knew they didn't like rats at all.
Sellars was different, but Cho-Cho still wasn't sure why. In fact, he wasn't sure about anything where the man in the wheelchair was concerned. The old cripple was hiding from the army men, but doing it right underneath an army base. He was keyed into some kind of crazy part of the net that Cho-Cho had never seen—better than the best games or anything—but he wanted Cho-Cho to be the one to go, even though they could never quite make it work right, or at least not for very long. And he was always mumbling, like Cho-Cho's ahuela in the mountains outside Guatemala City, who his dad had taken him to see once—a horrible sweaty boat ride that lasted days, just to meet an old lady living in some Indian village who didn't even have any teeth, and who kept a scrawny monkey on a leash right in her little house. She had seemed glad to meet her grandchild, but he couldn't understand her language and his father couldn't be bothered to translate much of what she said. He knew he would never as long as he lived forget the smell of that place, boiled corn and monkey shit.
It wasn't much different living with Sellars, although gracias a Dios there was no monkey. But the things the old man mumbled, even if they were in a language that Cho-Cho could actually speak, still didn't make any sense—he talked to himself about his garden, like he still had a house of his own, and mumbled words like "platforms" and "Ay-eye structures" like even if he didn't have a house, he was going to build one. Which was pretty funny, because if ever there was an old vato who couldn't even lift a hammer, let alone use one, it was Sellars. He had arms like broomsticks and had to work so hard to breathe sometimes, even with that "oxygen nation" stuff he kept boiling all the time like some kind of ugly soup, that Cho-Cho sometimes couldn't even sleep for listening to him wheezing and coughing.
It was funny, though. He didn't want the guy to die, even if he was an old cripple. Not just because then he'd be on his own hiding from the army men, and the mu'chita probably wouldn't even bring food no more. There was also something strange about the way Sellars talked to him that he couldn't quite understand. It was almost like the old man liked him or something. Cho-Cho knew better, of course. People like Sellars, white people with houses of their own—or who had once had houses of their own, anyway—didn't like street rats. They said they did if someone was doing a net story on how sad it all was, or if the government or the church was opening some fancy caridad place, but people like that didn't really want to spend time with a dirty little kid with teeth knocked out and sores on his arms and legs that wouldn't stop oozing.
But Sellars was definitely strange. He talked softly and called Cho-Cho "Señor Izabal." The first time he did it, Cho-Cho almost kicked him right out of his chair, but it wasn't a joke, or at least not the kind Cho-Cho was used to. And Sellars thanked him for bringing him things. For a while Cho-Cho had been sure the guy was some kind of babybouncer—why else get friendly with a little gatita like that Christy Bell or whatever her name was?—and so he kept a sharp piece of metal he'd found in one of the base trash cans right in his hand when he went to sleep, his fingers curled around the sticky tape handle. But Sellars never did anything.
So was he just un anciano loco? But if he was, how did he get into that amazing place—a world better than the net, a world Cho-Cho had seen with his own eyes or he wouldn't have believed it? And why would Sellars only bring him online after he
'd fallen asleep? He must have some lockoff big station he didn't want Cho-Cho to see, something worth monster cambio. The whole thing was so strange that it had to mean money somewhere, and Cho-Cho wasn't going to miss out. When you were a rat, you had to take what you could get, any time you could get it. Besides, he had to figure it out just so that if the burned-up old man died, Cho-Cho El Raton could still get back to that place on the net, to that utter tasty, wild place.
"So her father has the sunglasses. . . ." Sellars tried to keep his voice even, but it was shockingly bad news. It had been a dreadful gamble, but at the time he had done it, there had been no other choice—it was either give her the device or risk having her constantly coming to prearranged meetings at his hiding place, and how long could one hope to keep that up with a child before attracting notice?
Cho-Cho shrugged. "Is what she said." He was being unusually opaque today, even by his own standards. At the best of times the boy moved in a permanent dark cloud of suspicion and reflexive anger, but that meant he was fairly easy to read. Sellars had often brooded on the hopelessness of his own cause, but never more so than when he considered that his only real-world allies were the primary-school daughter of the man hunting for him and a boy only a few years older who hadn't slept in a house in years—a boy who at the moment was chewing the corner off a foil sack of RTE pudding so he could suck out the contents like a chimp with a marrowbone.
Sellars sighed. He was so tired, so very tired, but this latest crisis could not wait. It might even be too late already—the Storybook Sunglasses would hold up under a standard examination, but if someone researched the components, which Sellars had assembled over two years of stealthy mail fraud and fiddling with the base's records, they would realize that the receiving range for the device was very short indeed. Even if Christabel did not break under what must be terrible pressure, her father and his staff would know that whoever was narrowcasting to the sunglasses must be almost on top of them. Or beneath them.