by George Foy
Beside him, Ela touched the pilot’s hand, and squeezed. PC looked up at them, and the shadows made on his face by the table lamp seemed to darken. The pilot slipped into the kitchen, and went outside to the woodshed, where he pried up a plank and dug out the wooden box full of Maria Teresa gold coins he kept next to his mother’s stash of canned kidney beans, for emergencies.
Chapter Twenty-Five
‘The heart has the best eyesight.’
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Le Petit Prince
The next week was filled with the housekeeping of flight.
Portuguese rooming houses smelling of coffee and disinfectant in the Saint Louis section of Montreal. The pilot used up much of his Canadian UCC-card on payphone calls to arrange for long plastic, and new UCC-cards with embedded passports for Ela and Rocketman.
This was a complicated business, based on personal knowledge of forwarding services. He bought a throwaway digital camera and snapped pictures of their faces, then downloaded them, via the ECM, onto floppies. He Fedexed a boxful of the salvaged Maria Teresas with the floppies to the forwarding service in New York. Tony at the forwarding service, recognizing the pilot’s voice and password, would transfer the floppies and twenty-eight thousand dollars to the forwarding service and through that to a couple of Sabras who specialized in international UCCs.
While they waited, the pilot went to a node market in Saint Denis. Using more of his Maria Teresas he bought 140 megabytes’ worth of hot Fujitsu-Cray encryption chips – enough to fill a baby’s sock, or a condom – from a pair of hackers who were so nervous about Mountie surveillance they kept looking, quite literally, over their shoulders as they made the deal.
Four days later, a messenger delivered two UCC-cards with State Department validations, and a letter, via Tony, to a mailbox service in Saint Denis.
The plastic was legal in all but the names embossed on the face. The cards carried the coded magnetic strips that would swipe them back to the State Department computer bank for verification of identity. The identities were clean and credit chips held seven thousand dollars each.
Both cards were guaranteed for a month.
The letter was from Françoise, the crippled girl in Bayou Noir. His boat was safe and under cover, she told him. She would like to see him when he picked it up, if he had time. But her words did not affect the pilot as they might once have done. All the free receptors in the parts of his brain that dealt with women increasingly were taken up with Ela.
As soon as they got the fake plastic they went to the airport and took the next 777 to Berlin.
Humming isolation of transatlantic travel. Servo-control. Total life support. Four massive Rolls Royce/GE jet engines gulping down the refined and flammable shit of swamp creatures that had been dead so long their oozy homes had turned into deserts; all in order to warm and oxygenate and maintain 368 humans at forty-five thousand feet of altitude and a speed of 525 knots.
Inside, the generic luxury of German champagne and French cologne. The hiss of air-conditioning, the distant thunder of those engines. The four of them, belted and blanketed, cushioned and fed. Ela straining against the seat belt in her dreams and saying, ‘It’s all the condor thing. That’s what.’ The thrown-clutches of sleep, and time zones. A crying infant.
Outside, minus-sixty degrees Centigrade. So far north the stars looked unfamiliar. Landscapes so blue cold and icebound no one ever saw them except from this high up.
The airline rented disposable face-suckers. The film was cheap VR, a laser Western. A hundred travelers swinging their heads in unison, dodging 3-D fists over Cape Farewell.
As they swung south and flew over Ostend, the pilot went into a rest room. He poured the encryption chips from their envelope into a lubricated condom. He dropped his pants then, sitting half on the toilet, very slowly squeezed the condom up his rectum. It was uncomfortable work but he did not think twice about doing it. This was a Trade imperative, part of the discipline, for high-grade encryption was risky cargo. If he was caught by the Kriminal Polizei they would hand him straight over to BON and even if no one connected him with his real identity he would get the standard fifteen-to-life in Oakdale as a matter of course. When he was finished his asshole was sore but he could sit with no more than a slight pressure in his colon and it would take an X-ray scan, or a body-cavity search, to reveal the hot memory.
They landed at Tempelhof around noon and caught a feeder flight that landed them at Breslau/Strachowice Airport an hour later. The airport was busy with Bavarian businessmen in double-breasted jackets and EU troops with Bundeswehr shoulder patches carrying H&K carbines. They took a cab to a hotel the airline recommended, a modern place on the Ringstrasse, south of the city center.
The Hotel Silesia felt exactly like the jet. It was high, altitude-wise. It was pressurized and air-conditioned and structurally strengthened. Its perimeters were guarded by soldiers and barricades. It hummed with distant servomotors. Announcements came faint in several languages over loudspeakers. Large TV screens showed canned movies. The decor was molded plastic. Even the soap and toilet covers were like the plane’s, and the toilet water was bright blue.
Jet lag affected them all. The German plainclothesmen in the lobby were looking out for Polish irredentists, not smugglers, but their hard cop gazes felt threatening just the same. Rocketman made comments from old war movies about ‘Krauts’ and the Gestapo. He looked around carefully for ODESSA agents. He put on dark glasses, extracted a Deutschmark credit chip from a terminal. The information VDT told him there was a flea market in Solny Square. He slunk out immediately to buy local clothing.
The jet lag hit Ela with the force and effect of a welterweight punch. She lay down to rest on the couch in her room and was asleep within two minutes.
PC opened the door connecting his room to the pilot’s. He leaned on the jamb while the pilot took out the traveling cage Roman Marak had made for God.
This was a carved applewood box, about ten inches by seven, with a trough for nuts, a water bottle, and a latch on the outside.
‘She’s the most desirable woman I’ve met in at least a year,’ PC said.
The pilot opened the door. The rat raced in circles around the hotel carpeting.
‘I’ve been trying to get through to her all week.’
The pilot unlocked his ECM-pak and started setting it up.
‘She’s beautiful,’ PC continued, ‘not in the usual ways, but subtle. I mean it’s bone prettiness, not skin beauty. Way down in her mouth, and in how straight her nose is, except for that bump of course. Deep in her eyes. You expect whole Latin American revolutions to come charging out of those eyes on horseback, waving wide hats, firing pistols in the air and yelling “Arriba!” You know? Like, that’s how deep they are. And her laugh,’ PC went on. ‘She doesn’t laugh easily, but when she does – well, that’s the core of her. It’s like a million birds being released from cages all at once.’
The pilot still said nothing. He wore on his face the nauseated half-smile of a man with broken loyalties.
‘But all she does is sleep,’ PC went on, unhappily. ‘And when she talks, she mostly talks to you.’
PC looked carefully at the pilot, who devoted equal care to dusting off the half-sucker’s jack and plugging it precisely into its com-port.
‘You’re not sleeping with her, are you?’ he asked anxiously.
‘Hell, no,’ the pilot replied. But he said it too loud, and PC looked away, his eyes full of doubt and questions.
*
As soon as PC had left the pilot put on the half-sucker, swiped in a SAP account number, and did a scan of the surroundings. He was getting hooked on VR scanning – he could sense a small lust in him for this. It was the same impulse he’d felt switching on the VR at the Double Headed Shot Cays. Part of it, he figured, was just the itch for sexy medium, the almost physical ease of turning symbols back into things – objects you could move around, touch, play with.
But some of it was
real. In the short time he had owned the VR program he found that his 3-D ‘swim’ through the structures and lines of information offered a visceral body-knowledge of the changes in traffic that you didn’t get from watching a flat screen. And these changes might warn of danger, a focusing of security forces.
But today the subtlety was lost on him because he was not familiar with the patterns of info flow here, on the border between EU-occupied Silesia, or Schlesien as the Germans called it, and what remained of independent Poland only a couple of miles across the Oder River.
A red, pulsing glow in the corner of his vision indicated abnormal current in the suite’s workstation, probably a voice-activated passive device, which was to be expected. In any case he never said anything worth saying in hotel rooms. The ECM would give him scrambled communications, should he need it.
There were a lot of scarlet-coded hotspots that the scan program tagged as Bundeswehr radio. The dark-red lines of other security frequencies were heavy, bright, and evenly distributed; if anything, the southern Ringstrasse area, where the Hotel Silesia stood, had (with the exception of the railroad station) less traffic than the rest.
Red dots tagged as EU drones flew up and down the Oder frontier, sending home realtime video. The pilot switched to Wildnet scan.
The feeling of swimming grew stronger; only this time it was in a sea far lonelier than the one he’d dived in before. Under the great throbbing ceiling of the Web, the points of light indicating Secure Access Providers were so few they stood out like beacons and he had to joystick forward at full speed for five or six seconds to get close without getting bored. Most of the datalines were thin and, as far as he could tell, innocuous. One of the rare thick lines was a graphics download, probably softporn video, from a server-link in Srinagar to one in San Diego. The tampered Fedchips of these SAPs glowed with the energy of traffic. A ’server mostly dedicated to Cybermilitia Usegroups was pretty active, and so was one small FBI ferret – blue light blinking steadily – trying to follow that scan.
He dove to escape the ferret’s attention.
The same Neta maintenance, in Florida, he had seen from Sandworm Cay.
Apart from that, nothing but vacuum; dark space in which swimming, or flying or joysticking, became an act of loneliness, like solitaire, or masturbation.
Although the vacuum was not all empty.
He became aware of datalines so dark they were all but dead. Only housekeeping blips, like the EEG of a stroke victim, marked their difference from the night.
He pushed the joystick forward, diving deeper, longer. He found himself holding his breath, and forced his lungs full again. The darkness increased. The charcoal lines passed overhead, to the side, like tree limbs in a thick jungle. Following one to its source, he found a box so black he would have missed it altogether had it not been for the line and its thirty-second blip of carrier-beam activity.
Even the site acronym was erased.
Beside it, in script that looked like an absence of light – stark Futura font etched in velvet vacuum against the dark – you could read the single word: CONTROL.
He did not wait, this time. He hit the reset immediately and watched his liquid VR world blackhole into a dark circle. Waited for it to negative into a dot of light, and die.
And it did.
But just before that happened, an image appeared on the face-sucker screen before him. A landscape stretching endlessly to a bruised horizon. It was a country so flat, so dark, so devoid of life that it looked almost abstract. Each grain of detail was a variation on ebony and onyx, and the gradations of shadow. Every square foot of terrain was pocked with shell craters and chunks of exploded wood. The sky coiled in banks of smoke. Where evidence of something animate existed – a burnt-out battle tank, a shattered oak – it had been twisted until it looked different, as if a force that was not human had altered it to suit its own concept of form.
The image lasted only a second – came and went so fast the pilot was not sure he’d seen it right. He winced, and shut his eyes.
When he opened them again he saw only the blank sheen of the top half of his face-sucker, and the screensaver icon of his Wildnet program, three squares hooked up by bars of green, turning on and off as they crossed and recrossed his line of sight.
*
When he had locked up the ECM-pak again the pilot went into the bathroom and extracted the condom full of memory. He emptied the chips into a Hotel Silesia envelope, washed up, and put the envelope in the hidden pocket of his travel jacket. Then he went to look for the ‘Kneipe Spargnapani.’
It was not easy to find. The info-terminal said ‘WE HAVE NO DATAS CORRESPONDING TO YOUR INPUT.’ The concierge said basically the same thing. An overweight German woman next to him at the concierge’s desk explained, in excellent English, that a ‘kneipe’ was some kind of bastard mix of bar, café, and restaurant. There were thousands in Berlin, she said wistfully, glancing at her husband, a tubby man in a Borsalino hat. A few dozen kneipes had cropped up here, her husband continued smoothly; they were the kind of couple who looked at each other when talking to strangers. Many of the kneipes were unlicensed and illegal. They were located mostly in the red light districts, to serve EC troops.
‘Spargnapani’ was not listed in the Breslau telephone book. With the couple’s help he finally found it mentioned, next to the listing ‘Rosenbaum Allee,’ under ‘experimental performances’ in an alternative music guide.
The pilot hailed a cab, a creaky Skoda, from the rank out front. The driver, who knew no English, had to look up Rosenbaum Allee in a taximan’s index. He drove west down Pilsudski Strasse, then across a park marking the old fortifications of the city, past grim domino-rows of Stalinist-era housing. The car plunged suddenly into a warren of narrow, older streets. The predominant gray colors turned charcoal, umber. Women in tight leather stood in doorways. Soldiers strolled down the cobblestones.
The Spargnapani occupied the lower basement of a building one block from the old Breslau synagogue. The building was new, Gierek-modern, reinforced concrete; but it had been built, perhaps wisely, on foundations that had withstood the Russian shellings of World War II, and numerous contretemps before. The lower basement was very old. It had a stone floor and vaulted ceilings built of massive chunks of limestone. The light was bad and black shadows filled the arches. It reminded the pilot, uncomfortably, of the place he’d just glimpsed in the deeper regions of the Wildnet.
Smoking was not yet illegal in occupied Poland and cigarette smoke fully dominated the upper atmosphere in the kneipe’s three rooms. A couple of tables were solid with French soldiers, but the majority of the customers were civilians. Thin Poles with bristly haircuts and shaded Jaruzelski-style glasses sipped shots of bimber acquavit, their backs carefully to the wall. Intense and angular Germans hunched over small round tables, showing each other notebooks whose contents were obscured by the flaps of leather jackets; huddling for clarity and survival beneath the fug even as they lit up and puffed on long black cigarettes to generate yet more smoke.
The faces were generally thinner and starker than in America, and few people smoked like this at home anymore, even in the illegal places where you could light up, but the feel of this bar was familiar to the pilot.
It was a Trade hangout. You could almost smell the pervasive suspicion, the burnt odor, not of cigarettes but of deals set up, or discarded.
Everyone wore leather jackets. Almost everyone was playing, or pretending to play, Akmba, an African version of chess newly popular among those who kept up with what was newly popular. A handful of immigrant workers, Turks and Pakistanis and Filipinos, was mixed in with the soldiers and Poles and Germans. A bar of wood and brass supported mountains of shiny steel espresso gear, latte bowls, and pastry displays in one corner. A small stage in another corner featured a trio of thin transvestites playing, with feigned boredom, electric violins and talking-drums; syncopating their beat to a George Collins riff meshed in turn with a sample of honeybee buzz-har
monics on the kneipe’s sound system.
Shift-shin. The sign on their drum set read ‘Central Dada Sex Office.’ The sign above the stage read Willkommen Zum Bunker. Everyone turned to peer at the pilot when he came down the stairs, wondering if he was KriPo.
The bartender cleaned the espresso steam nozzles. He was large and bearded and spoke bartenders’ English and was more forthcoming than your typical bartender in this kind of joint. Yes, he’d heard of Alois van der Lubbe. Tall guy, with glasses and a moustache, no? He’d not seen him for a few days. He’d be around. All you had to do was sit here, and sooner or later everybody showed up. Even actors from the Jerzy Grotowski Experimental Theatre. The bartender seemed very impressed by the fact that Grotowski actors came to his kneipe.
The pilot hung around for a couple of hours. The Spargnapani offered newspapers wound on little varnished sticks for the benefit of patrons. Among the Frankfurter Allgemeins and Herald Tribunes and Neue Breslauer Zeitungs the pilot found a hard-copy of Hawkley’s Gazette, dated 4:33.72 p.m., Sept. 7. The Gazette was the only paper he knew of that published its actual time of printing. It had something to do with the navigational religion thing. Flipping through the paper he found an ad that read: ‘Don’t be a prisoner of your own thalamus: learn neurosurgery in your spare time! Glia-sculpture, emotional tuning using 122.03-series cryolasers. Contact Box L.’
The Gazette also featured the annual rating of US airports according to how hard they were to smuggle through (Fort Lauderdale, the pilot noted, was voted ‘most risky’ for the second year running) as well as a half-page photo of a row of thin brown corpses lined up under a veranda roof. Three white men wearing camo gear and night-vision goggles, but with no insignia of unit or rank visible, looked down at them impassively. The headline read ‘WHY DID LITEWORLD NOT SEE THIS? Smuggled Photos Show BON Eliminated Manila Node.’