by George Foy
He walked faster, away from Riverside Drive. Ahead, well down West End Agenue, a New Omega Plan district was rising over the Zabar’s Salient. ‘Old Vienna,’ a sign blinked. ‘Its Kaffee, its waltzes, its Gemutlichkeit – its SHOPPING!’ For the first time since he got back the hangover of travel was vanished from the pilot’s brain.
Eltonjohn was no more dead, he thought – even Eltonjohn, slowly tumbling at the bottom of the Gulf Stream somewhere, small crabs fastened to the last gray shreds of flesh, bones growing whiter as they were buffed and polished by the sand; even Eduard, whose bones had long ago bleached, splintered, granulated, and rolled down the Morava, into the Danube, and finally into the sturgeon-rich dung of the Black Sea; even that unaccountable woman in the jumpseat of the sunken B-17; were no more dead than how most people in a Liteworld society spent their lives.
Sirens moaned far downtown. A flight of Cobra helicopters followed the river to a Special Forces base. The pilot sucked from his flask, gently, like pulling at a nipple.
Smuggling might hurt, it might even be wrong, but wrong or painful, at least it felt. At least it was active, at least it tried. At least, he thought, it got up and took a poke at something.
He bought take-out goat curry from a Vicious Vindaloo, then – realizing that what he’d thought was hunger was ache of a different kind – gave it to a homeless family in Strauss Park.
Down 103rd Street, three men festooned with broken headsuckers, cellphones, radios, and ancient tape players stopped to stare at him as he passed. They were dressed in cast-off clothes. The features of the men were abstract in the manner of all those afflicted with TDF, as if they were listening to the theme song of a faraway serial, as, most likely, they were. They turned and followed the pilot and he had to dodge into a bodega till the tee-dees had drifted off again. While he waited he bought a cheap Venezuelan kitchen knife, and stashed it in the top of his right boot.
He said nothing to Ela when he returned to the apartment, but she had heard him come in, and removed the shutter-goggles. She took one look at him and said, ‘You’re going to do it, aren’t you? What my father told you about.’
He nodded.
‘You’re crazy. You’ll get caught, for sure.’
He looked around for his ECM-pak. It was in the bedroom somewhere. He had not touched it since his last scan, almost four days ago. From Ela’s shucked headpiece, the sounds of unfollowed drama emanated, like roaches singing.
‘Please, Joe?’
He’d not heard that amount of crank in her since the Watap longhouse. He looked up. Her eyes were very bright. Her face was pale. Her hair was snarled, the multicolored ends greasy with popcorn butter. She looked more like an elf than ever.
‘Please, Joe. Why can’t you leave it alone? Look, I’ll turn off the TV?’ She pinched the remote. The screen hissed, and went dark. Silence, in all its richness, flooded the room.
‘It’s important, Ela,’ he said. ‘I do believe in the Trade. I know there’s lots of things wrong with it. But—’
‘He’s using you,’ she said. ‘He won’t do it himself.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘You’ll get hurt!’
‘I’ll be OK. I’ve thought it out. I’ll do a practice run first.’ He sat down on the bed. He felt as if one hundred pounds of poisonous waste that had been sitting in his duodenum for the last week had suddenly lightened – a percentage bled off with hope for movement. ‘Can’t you understand that, Ela? I don’t want to be stuck. I don’t want to live a life where I can’t move. I’m not good, that way.’
Her eyes were pink, from shutter-fatigue. They fixed on him as if he were a screen, out of focus, lousy picture.
‘Draw me a sheep,’ she said abruptly. She was deliberately harking back to The Little Prince, and the common ground of childhood; but he shook his head.
‘You’ll just say it’s a hat,’ he told her, ‘like everyone else.’
Outside the window of PC’s bedroom, illuminated in the glow from a hundred apartments, a peregrine falcon plummeted at eighty m.p.h., talons first into a pigeon flapping peacefully through the air currents surrounding the building. There was an explosion of feathers, turned yellow in the electric light. The falcon spread its pinions to brake its fall, then swept lazily up the darkness toward its ledge, the pigeon lolling in the grip of long claws.
The pilot saw nothing but movement, and a footnote of pigeon fuzz. The event, in any case, was not uncommon in the City.
‘Then go ahead,’ Ela said, flinging her hair back, bending hard to look into his eyes. ‘Smuggle, smuggle everything, everywhere. But don’t go sticking your head down the dragon’s throat!’
Rocketman came into the bedroom, silent, unnoticed.
The pilot stroked Ela’s leg gently under the covers.
‘Maybe we could get back together,’ she said. ‘Like we were in Breslau.’
‘You mean, if I don’t go?’
She nodded.
‘You’re being predictable, Ela.’
She flushed.
‘Then I’m gonna come with you.’
‘Now you’re just being silly.’
‘Just for the “practice run.”’
Rocketman cleared his throat, making them both jump and twist to see him standing next to the door jamb.
‘We all have to do something,’ he announced lugubriously. ‘There’s a couple of dudes in a limo out front, and they’re watching this apartment through nightscopes.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
‘The patron god of smugglers is the Yoruban deity, Exu. God of the absurd, of change and quantum leaps, he is also the god of jokes; for the one thing even BON cannot bust at checkpoints is a cool sense of humor.’
Hawkley
The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook
Twenty-four hours and a series of hasty phone calls later they all went down to the TransCom Building – for different reasons, with different expectations, but all knowing this was most likely the last expedition they would ever embark on together, and deriving some bittersweet pleasure from the fact – took the Number 1 train to Times Square, changed to the shuttle, then caught the Number 6 at Grand Central, and got off at 28th Street.
Ela rode at first with her arms around both her waist and the pilot’s, then pulled back; to arm-in-arm, to hands at her sides, to crossing her arms over her stomach, as the realization of where they were going came to her.
The pilot carried God, safely fastened in his cage. In his pockets were a TransCom security passcard, his UCC-card in the name of ‘Brian Veitch’, six sacks of Korean deli peanuts, and nothing else.
It was just after eleven p.m., and the 28th Street subway stop was empty and hollow with vanished noise when the train had gone. The pilot led them down the steps at the end of the station, into the tunnel. A stigs victim, chased from his place of darkness by their passage, rose confusedly in the light of the emergency lamps, the wounds on his hands and chest gaping wetly, crying ‘Aah!’ Raising his arms in the classic crucifix position so that Ela, who had never seen stigs people in Lakewood, gasped and recoiled.
The passcard still worked, and they filed into the third basement of the TransCom Building and took the backup freight elevator to the 94th floor, two floors down from the penthouse.
As they rode upward, the pilot noticed, scrawled in marker on the lime paint of the elevator above the controls, the words: ‘PILOT GO BACK BON HERE!’ followed by the single initial, ‘O’.
The pilot’s chest tightened. Obregon had tried to warn him. As Roberto had, with his letter. He had a mental picture of the two of them, the big Cuban and the dark, small smuggler, marshaled in the violent sun and gleaming razor ribbon of Oakdale.
God, sniffing the carpet-cleaner and freon aroma of passing floors, twitched his whiskers mightily and sneezed. The pilot, relieved to be distracted from thoughts of his friends, bent to cage level.
‘Almost home, boy,’ he whispered, ‘almost home.’
The 9
4th floor held the airco relay station that fed his former apartment. The pilot flicked the emergency stop switch, carried God’s box onto the landing, and opened the tiny, hand-carved doors. The rat hopped out, whiskers still twitching, and sat up on his hind legs. He checked out all four directions, then scuttled over to sniff at the entry port to the airco complex. The pilot pulled it wide for him, and stashed the peanuts in the opening.
‘Welcome home, old fella,’ he said. He didn’t make any promises about coming back; this was not something he was certain of. It struck him that he was getting used to dumping animals and people that were close to him, and the thought made him wince a little, but did not make him hesitate, because he did not know what choice he had. He returned to the elevator, flicked the emergency switch to ‘off’, and punched the controls, sending the elevator back down to the 30th floor and the air-conditioning relay for that part of the building. There he led them through the humming ventilation systems, up ring ladders in hidden airshafts to the 34th floor. They used successively smaller tunnels till they were all of them lodged in a square duct next to a plastic grate that, by the pilot’s reckoning, lay directly over the hallway leading off the reception area of the only federal government offices listed in the building.
‘You sure you don’t want to can this?’ Ela whispered. Her voice trembled a little. She cleared her throat twice.
‘Yeah. You?’
She shrugged.
‘It’s just a scout, anyway,’ the pilot added. ‘The secretary said no one was around today. And nobody should be here at this hour.’
Minimal lighting and sound seeped from the grate underneath them. Just the hiss of climate-control, the moribund air of overinsulated space.
The pilot pulled up the grate, stuck his head down from the ceiling. He saw no trace of security cameras, or laser alarms. All of that would be at the entrance and in the elevator lobbies. He twisted himself around, lowered his legs and ass through the opening, and dropped gently to the synthetic pile below.
When they were all down they padded here and there along the gray corridors, reading the fake-wood signs that were glued to the various doors, sneezing from the dust. There were no windows off these corridors, no access to the outside. No horizon, the pilot thought, and shivered a little, mentally.
‘Justice Department, Immigration and Naturalization, Office of Professional Responsibility,’ Ela called quietly.
‘Torts Bureau, Civil Division, Admiralty/Aviation?’ Rocketman asked.
‘US Trustees, Bankruptcy,’ the pilot muttered doubtfully.
Finally they all collected around one door at the end of the long ‘C’-plan of corridors.
Two signs were fastened to this door. The first read ‘Department of Defense: NSA Regional Office.’ The second said ‘Bureau of Nationalizations: Technical Development Administration: Northeast Sector/Liaison Office.’
‘This is it,’ the pilot said.
‘Aah,’ Rocketman agreed.
‘I wish I’d brought the ECM,’ the pilot muttered. The pak could have picked up the security wavelengths, the higher impedance that might warn of late-night activity in this office. Without it he felt like he was wearing no clothes – unprotected and cold. He thought, This was how most people went through life, with no control over the forces that affected them, and maybe it was because of this he had taken to walking around half-naked at PC’s, and earlier, on the Flying Boat; to regain contact with most people’s reality. At any rate, it would have been tough to shlep the ECM through the airco ducts, although two weeks ago, he knew, he would have managed it, somehow. ‘Ahh, fuck it,’ he said, and took out his key card.
Ela said nothing. Her hands were twisted together in absolute nervousness. Her eyes were big and dark like a cat’s. The pilot touched her shoulder, gently. She jumped, reached for him in turn, then pulled her hand back, just short of touching.
The pilot slipped the card into the slot beside the door. The handle moved. A tumbler clicked, the door opened. He raised his eyebrows at Rocketman, listened for a second or two, and moved inside.
The office was dark, except for the glow of video terminals. The splash of light from the hallway sketched out a wall lined with floppy files, hard-copy cabinets. VR workstations covered a long workbench. The screensavers moved in slo-mo, all similar, all showing a flat four-color landscape, with living trees and rolling weaponry, being stripped and ruined by an invisible force until nothing was left but bones and craters and blown-out battle-tanks and shapes quite foreign to what they once had been.
A faint hum rose from the massed machines. An even fainter odor, as of orchids left too long in water, tinged the close air.
The lights came on. The pilot glanced around, expecting to see Ela or Rocketman with a hand on the switch. Instead:
*
Three men sit in office chairs on each side of the doorway. One of them holds a small H&K MP5KS machine-pistol in his right hand. He is thick, short, in his forties. His eyes are a little hollow. The thin black beard does little to conceal a chin that is really no more than a slight rest-area between throat and nose. It is the engineer from Chitral; the one who hated nan.
The second man is in his late fifties or early sixties, with thin gray hair cut long enough to hang over the back of his collar. He is stooped, even when seated. He has very fleshy lips, red as liver, compressed downward. His eyes are light, coolly gray, exceedingly clear. He wears a fashionable green monkey jacket with a green paisley handkerchief folded in the breast pocket, and a green bow tie.
The third man is obese. His skin is without color. He wears a cheap anorak much too small for his giant gut. Under the plastic ski colors can be seen a filthy purple waistcoat that has no room to close. He slouches in the ergonomic office chair, arms crossed protectively over the anorak, watching the pilot from beneath eyelids that are so fat they fold, three times, like a lizard’s.
The Cayman.
Time freezes. A great bubble of oxygen lodges in the pilot’s esophagus, asking to be used. The pilot looks at Ela, who stands rigid in the doorway, willing her to sense what is going on, to back out, to run like a scared squirrel – but the second man, the older one with fleshy lips and the pistol, already has seen her. He glances sideways at Ela, the way a barracuda looks at another barracuda. His lips part upward, like a fish smiling.
‘Thank you, Mrs Taylor,’ he says. ‘I never doubted you would bring them in – eventually.’
*
There had to be a threshold of psychological shock, the pilot thought; a threshhold that had just been bulldozed upward by the sight of these men; but even so the only shock, or surprise, came from the fact that he felt so little shock or surprise.
He looked at Rocketman, to share the vacuum, but Rocketman was not there.
Of course, the pilot thought. Rocketman had known. Even, or especially, through the filter of his paranoia, Rocketman had known, just as the pilot had known. Known this was the only resolution to the tension keen within her; this was the only bridge between the opposites in her mind. Betrayal was the one art that could unite opposites, he thought vaguely. Betrayal was an act of universal, as opposed to individual, love, because it brought together what could not be joined. Ela, in her own way, was trying to love him; love him, love her father, love the part of herself that sought escape from the living death of Lakewood – love the part of her that still ached to be a pom-pom football cheerleading girl at Lakewood High.
‘I’m sorry, Joe,’ she muttered, not looking at him.
‘Don’t worry about it.’ There was a gentleness to his voice that surprised even him.
‘I din’ want to. I wouldn’t have done anything if you hadn’t come here.’ She looked at the older man. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.
The pilot shrugged. ‘I’m only going to jail, I guess,’ he said. ‘You’ve got your own jail, all locked up inside you.’
‘Very profound,’ the man with the machine-pistol commented.
‘And you,’ the pilot
said. ‘You were in Chitral. You must have been in Breslau, too?’
The man smiled. ‘We were behind you,’ he said, ‘the whole way. Till Daud Khan. Real cute, that was – faking a kidnap. Gotta hand it to you guys.’
‘Excuse me,’ the fish-faced man said. The sarcasm was heavy in his voice. ‘I know I’m not as important as TransCom, but—’
The man with the beard made a magnanimous gesture with the muzzle of his gun.
‘I haven’t forgotten. BON gets ’em first.’
‘TransCom?’ Ela said.
‘It’s obvious,’ the fish-faced man replied. He had a very light accent, the pilot thought. Not Czech; possibly Austrian, or even Polish. ‘They didn’t like Mr Marak’s trick,’ he told Ela, ‘of bringing in the Korean organic chips. That got them really rather upset, no? Now there is a whole salt marsh system in New England that is breaking their monopoly every day. Free-growing organic micro-chips. The natural-growth patents don’t matter a damn against free-growing algae. It will cost them billions of dollars – billions!’
‘What for me hangin’ here?’ the Cayman interrupted hoarsely. He blinked, and his eyelids rolled over his pupils, folded back. ‘I mira the man, esta todo.’ He licked his lips.
‘You mira him, Fawcett?’ the chinless man said. ‘You confirm he’s the pilot of the pirate jet? Trente Setiembre, Rio Chingado.’
The Cayman hesitated, looking at the pilot now.
‘Well?’ the TransCom man insisted.
The pilot stared back at the Cayman. Looking at his leached features he felt he was smelling the jungle again; the centuries of rot piling up, piling up, covering the corpses that covered the corpses on the rain forest floor.
The Cayman looked away.
‘Claro,’ he said. ‘dat’s de raton run misuyunyu veggie-chips.’
The chinless one, without shifting the aim of his weapon, pulled a folded form and an inkpad from his shirt pocket, and handed them to the Cayman.
‘Put your thumbprint on the line, there.’
‘Enough,’ the fish-faced man interrupted, ‘you can finish your business later.’ He got up from his seat in a bent, circular sort of motion and went over to the workbench. He punched a series of electronic relays, and unlocked a circuit with a passcard. Impatiently he handed Ela the pistol he was carrying, removed a shiny half-sucker from its stand beside the keyboard, and fitted it over his eyes. Settling into the chair, his body seemed to relax into the unyielding curves of it. Then he started tapping at one of the keyboards. On three monitors in front of him the ruined landscapes vanished in a phosphoric blink, as if finally vaporized by an ultimate weapon, and the realization shone in the pilot’s brain with equal luminosity. This was Peter Brodin.