The Alien Years (51 page)

He didn’t need their help, anyway. It wasn’t hard for a good freelance pardoner to find buyers. You could see the need in their eyes: the tightly controlled anger, the smoldering resentment at whatever it was that the mindless, indifferent Entity-controlled bureaucracy had done to them. And something else, something intangible, a certain sense of having a shred or two of inner integrity left, that told you right away that here was a customer, which meant somebody willing to risk a lot to regain some measure of freedom. Andy was in business within fifteen minutes.

The first one was an aging surfer sort, barrel chest and that sun-bleached look. Surfing, once such a big thing along the coast, was pretty much extinct, Andy knew. The Entities hadn’t allowed it for ten, perhaps fifteen years—they had their plankton seines just offshore from Santa Barbara to San Diego, gulping in the marine nutrients that seemed to be their main food, and any beach boy who tried to take a whack at the waves out there would be chewed right up.

But this guy must have been one hell of a performer in his day. The way he moved through the park, making little balancing moves as if he needed to compensate for the irregularities of the Earth’s rotation, it was easy to see what an athlete he had been. He sat down next to Andy and began working on his lunch. Thick forearms, gnarled hands. A wall-laborer, most likely. Muscles knotting in his cheeks: the anger, forever simmering just below boil.

Andy got him talking, after a while. A surfer, yes. At least forty years old, and lost in the faraway and gone. He began sighing about legendary beaches where the waves were tubes and they came pumping end to end. “Trestle Beach,” he murmured. “That’s north of San Onofre. You had to sneak through Camp Pendleton, the old LACON training base. Sometimes the LACON guards would open fire, just warning shots. Or Hollister Ranch, up by Santa Barbara.” His blue eyes got misty. “Huntington Beach. Oxnard. I got everywhere, man.” He flexed his huge fingers. “Now these fucking Entity hodads own the shore. Can you believe it? They
own
it. And I’m pulling wall, my second time around, seven days a week for the next ten years.”

“Ten?” Andy said. “That’s a shitty deal.”

“You know anyone who doesn’t have a shitty deal?”

“Some,” he said. “They buy their way out.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“It can be done, you know.”

The surfer gave him a careful look. That was sensible, Andy thought. You never knew who might be a quisling. Collaborators and spies were everywhere. An amazing number of people
loved
working for the Entities.

“It can?” the surfer asked.

“All it takes is money,” Andy said.

“And a pardoner.”

“That’s right.”

“One you can trust.”

Andy shrugged. “There are pardoners and then there are pardoners. You’ve got to go on faith, man.”

“Yeah,” the surfer said. Then, after a while: “I heard of a guy, he bought a three-year pardon and wall passage thrown in. Went up north, caught a krill trawler, wound up in Australia, right out there on the Reef. Nobody’s ever going to find him there. He’s out of the system. Right out of the fucking system. What do you think that would have cost him?”

“About twenty grand,” Andy said.

“Hey, that’s a sharp guess!”

“No guess.”

“Oh?” Another careful look. “You don’t sound local.”

“I’m not. Just visiting.”

“That’s still the price? Twenty grand?”

“I can’t do anything about supplying krill trawlers. You’d be on your own once you were outside the wall.”

“Twenty grand just to get through the wall?”

“And a seven-year labor exemption.”

“I pulled ten,” he said.

“I can’t get you off a ten. It’s not in the configuration, you follow? It would draw too much attention if I tried to nix you out of a ten-year term. But seven would work. You’d still owe them three when the exemption was up, but you could get so far from here in seven years that they’d lose you forever. You could goddamned
swim
to Australia in that much time. Come in low, below Sydney, no seines there.”

“You know a hell of a lot.”

“My business to know,” Andy said. “You want me to run an asset check on you?”

“I’m worth seventeen five. Fifteen hundred real, the rest collat. What can I get for seventeen five?”

“Just what I said. Through the wall, and seven years’ exemption.”

“A bargain rate, hey?”

“I take what I can get,” Andy said. “You have an implant?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. Give me your wrist. And don’t worry. This part is read-only.”

He keyed the surfer’s data implant and patched his own in. The surfer had fifteen hundred in the bank and a collateral rating of sixteen thou, exactly as he claimed. They eyed each other very carefully now. This was a highly illegal transaction. The surfer had no way of knowing whether Andy was a quisling or not, but Andy couldn’t be sure of the surfer, either.

“You can do it right here in the park?” the surfer asked.

“You bet. Lean back, close your eyes, make like you’re snoozing in the sun. The deal is that I take a thousand of the cash now and you transfer five thou of the collateral bucks to me, straight labor-debenture deal. When you get through the wall I get the other five hundred cash and five thou more on sweat security. The rest you pay off at three thou a year plus interest, wherever you are, quarterly key-ins. I’ll program the whole thing, including beep reminders on payment dates. It’s up to you to make your travel arrangements, remember. I can do pardons and wall transits but I’m not a goddamned travel agent. Are we on?”

The surfer put his head back and closed his eyes.

“Go ahead,” he said.

It was fingertip stuff, straight circuit emulation, Andy’s standard hack. He picked up all his identification codes, carried them into Central, found the man’s records. He seemed real, nothing more or less than he had claimed. Sure enough, he had drawn a lulu of a labor tax, ten years on the wall. Andy wrote him a pardon good for the first seven of that. Then he gave him a wall-transit pass, which meant writing in a new skills class for him, programmer third grade. The guy didn’t think like a programmer and he didn’t look like a programmer, but the wall software wasn’t going to figure that out.

With these moves Andy had made him a member of the human elite, the relative handful who were free to go in and out of the walled cities as they wished. In return for these little favors he signed over the surfer’s entire life savings to various accounts of his, payable as arranged, part now, part later. The surfer wasn’t worth a nickel any more, but he was a free man. That wasn’t such a terrible trade-off, was it?

And it was a valid pardon, too. Andy didn’t intend to write any stiffs while he was here. The guild might require its pardoners to write the occasional stiff, but he wasn’t working with the guild just now. And though Andy could understand the need to fudge up a pardon now and then if you were going to work the same territory for any prolonged period, he had never cared for the idea of doing it. It was offensive to his professional pride. He didn’t plan to be in town long enough, anyway, this time around, for anybody—the Entities, their human puppets, or, for that matter, the guild itself—to be unduly disturbed by the skill with which he was practicing his trade.

The next one was a tiny Japanese woman, the classic style, sleek, fragile, doll-like. Crying in big wild gulps that Andy thought might break her in half, while a gray-haired older man in a shabby blue business suit—her grandfather, perhaps—was dying to comfort her. Public crying was a good indicator, Andy knew, that someone was in bad Entity trouble. “Maybe I can help,” he said, and they were both so distraught that they didn’t even bother to be suspicious.

He was her father-in-law, not her grandfather. The husband was dead, killed by burglars the year before. There were two small kids. Now she had received her new labor-tax ticket. She had been afraid they were going to send her out to work on the wall, which of course wasn’t likely to happen: the assignments were pretty random, but they seemed rarely to be crazy, and what use would a ninety-pound girl be in hauling stone blocks around?

The father-in-law, though, had some friends who were in the know, and they managed to bring up the hidden encoding on her ticket. The computers hadn’t sent her to the wall, no. They had sent her to Area Five. That was bad news. And they had given her a TTD classification. Even worse.

“The wall would have been better,” the old man said. “They’d see, right away, she wasn’t strong enough for heavy work, and they’d find something else, something she could do. But Area Five? Who ever comes back from that?”

“So you know what Area Five is, do you?” Andy said, surprised.

“The medical experiment place. And this mark here, TTD. I know what that stands for too.”

She began to moan again. Andy couldn’t really blame her. TTD meant Test To Destruction. So far as he understood the TTD program, it had to do with a need the Entities felt for finding out how much physical labor humans were really capable of doing. The only reliable way to discover that, apparently, was to put a sampling of the populace through tests that showed where the endurance limits lay.

“I will die,” the woman wailed. “My babies! My babies!”

“Do you know what a pardoner is?” Andy asked the father-in-law.

Which produced a quick excited response: sharp intake of breath, eyes going bright, head nodding vehemently. And just as quickly the excitement faded, giving way to bleakness, helplessness, despair.

“They all cheat you,” he said.

“Not all.”

“Who can say? They take your money, they give you nothing.”

“You know that isn’t true. Sometimes things don’t work out, sure. It isn’t an exact science. But everybody can tell you stories of pardons that came through.”

“Maybe. Maybe,” the old man said. The woman sobbed quietly.

“You know of such a person?”

“For three thousand dollars,” Andy said quietly, “I can take the TTD off her ticket. For five I can write an exemption from service that’ll be good until her children are in high school.”

He wondered why he was being so tenderhearted. A fifty percent discount, and he hadn’t even run an asset check. For all he knew the father-in-law was a millionaire. But no, if that was so he’d have been off long ago cutting a deal for a pardon for her, then, and not sitting around like this, weeping and wailing in Pershing Square.

The old man gave Andy a long, deep, appraising look. Peasant shrewdness coming to the surface.

“How can we be sure you’ll do what you say you’ll do?” he asked.

Andy might have told him that he was the king of his profession, the best of all pardoners, a genius hacker with the truly magic touch. Who could slip into any data network there was and get it to dance to his tune. That would have been nothing more than the truth. But all he said was that the man would have to make up his own mind, that Andy couldn’t offer any affidavits or guarantees, that he was available if they wanted him and otherwise it was all the same to him if she preferred to stick with her TTD ticket.

They went off and conferred for a couple of minutes. When they came back, the old man silently rolled up his sleeve and presented his implant. Andy keyed his credit balance: thirty thou or so, not bad. He transferred eight of it to his accounts, half to Seattle, the rest to Honolulu. Then he took the woman’s wrist, which was about two of his fingers thick, and got into her implant and wrote her the pardon that would save her life.

“Go on,” Andy said. “Home. Your kids are waiting for their lunch.”

Her eyes glowed. “If I could only thank you somehow—”

“I’ve already banked my fee. Go. If you ever see me again, don’t say hello.”

“This will work?” the old man asked.

“You say you have friends who know things. Wait seven days, then tell the data bank that she’s lost her ticket. When you get the new one, ask your pals to decode it for you. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

He didn’t seem convinced. Andy suspected the man was more than half sure that he had just been swindled out of one fourth of his life’s savings. The hatred in his eyes was all too visible. But in a week he would find out that Andy really had saved his daughter-in-law’s life, and then he would rush down to the Square to tell Andy how sorry he was that he had had such terrible feelings toward him. Only by that time Andy expected to be somewhere else far away.

They shuffled out the east side of the park, pausing a couple of times to look back over their shoulders at Andy as if they thought he was going to transform them into pillars of salt the moment their backs were turned. Then they were gone.

In short order Andy had earned enough now to get him through his week in L.A. But he stuck around the park anyway, hoping for a little more. That proved to be a mistake.

The next customer was Little Mr. Invisible, the sort of man no one would ever notice in a crowd, gray on gray, thinning hair, mild bland apologetic smile. But his eyes had a shine. He and Andy struck up a conversation and very quickly they were jockeying around trying to find out things about each other. He told Andy he was from the Silver Lake neighborhood. That conveyed very little to Andy. Said that he had come down here to see someone at the big LACON building on Figueroa Street. All right: probably an appeals case. Andy smelled a deal.