Transcendence (35 page)

The following tea, he demonstrated a space dogfight. After putting up with old Mr. Akins’ bragging about his EConaut service during the Lunar Equality War of 2141, Pehr invited him to a duel. In less than a minute, Pehr disabled Akins’ little DCR7—a Lunar War period warship—by carefully puncturing the life support and propulsion systems without hitting a fuel tank or letting out all the air. Akins worked up a mighty panic-sweat trying to give the boy at least a few knocks before the atmosphere could destroy his powerless vessel.

Then the old man’s face turned blue. Pehr saw it through the ultraglas canopy on a close pass.

Pehr immediately shut down the program. Akins still looked blue, intheflesh.

An hour later, Akins had to have a synth heart put into his chest. The old one had given out, but that wasn’t the real issue. The serious problem was that Akins had sustained minor brain damage, and not even the best doctors could do anything about that.

The next morning, at breakfast in the white-tiled kitchen, Emma explained that she and Geoff couldn’t have such a rebellious youngster living with them. They were too old for such nonsense. “We are very sorry to have to let you go,” she said, as if he were being fired like a servant.

“
I hope you crash!” Pehr had shouted, his voice echoing tinnily against the brass cabinets. He was unexpectedly angry; wasn’t this what he wanted, to be set free? But it was how Emma had said it.

It was what Pehr had done to be “let go.” He had hurt a man, nearly killed him.

As he stepped out the big, wooden front doors, the newest servant put her arms around him and gave him a tight hug. She even cried. That was very strange to Pehr, who couldn’t remember her name. She kissed him on the neck and handed him a big gold-and-pearl brooch.

“
A going-away present from Emma,” she said. “Don’t let her know about it. You’ll need it sometime. Remember me then.”

Then the door closed behind him. Pehr looked down at the four bags around his feet, packed with clothes, a mini-server he could wear like a belt around his waist, a ticket-card he could use to take the bus any time he wished, and various odds and ends Geoff thought “the boy might need in setting up house.” In a pocket inside his half-vest, the picture of Mom in front of the eighter lay like a weight.

Soon a taxi arrived and delivered him to the Oberlicht Towers, 112 stories of apartments and offices. Emma and Geoff had rented him a small bachelor’s room.

That afternoon, as he stepped out of the elevator and walked along the narrow hallway in search of room 101203, he met Megan. In later years, Pehr couldn’t recall how she looked, what color were her eyes or hair or skin, her age or height. He would remember that she was kind, loving, gentle, and held him against her at night in such a sweet way. He would remember that her breasts and belly and thighs were soft as she slept spooned behind him, that she sighed softly just before waking. She didn’t like 3VRD programs, nor did she like visiting people intheflesh, except for with Pehr. She was a passionate lover. When he revealed himself to her in bed one night after lovemaking, when he told her about his past, she had declared her love for him and her undying devotion.

“
I’ll never leave you, my Pehr,” she said in response to his stories of abandonment. Even 16 years later, on board
Bounty
’s escape pod, he could remember how those words had sounded on her lips: whisper-soft yet firm, wet, soothing, his name spoken in the same note as a distant rocket’s. She had sounded completely honest, and perhaps she had been.

Two months later, Pehr watched her waiting by the elevator with tears cascading down her cheeks. In her hands were suitcases, and on her back a long pack. She was going back to a husband about whom Pehr hadn’t heard anything. Pehr pushed Emma’s brooch into the breast pocket of Megan’s singlesuit.

“
You might need this some day,” he said. “Remember me then.”

That night, Pehr had a bottle of whiskey sent up to his room. He charged it to Geoff, who froze the account from alcohol purchase immediately afterward; Pehr discovered this the following morning, when he tried to order another bottle.

He had wanted to find out just what it was about whiskey that his mother found so appealing. And he found out. That night, he met a dozen new friends and played hours of combat in space and in Confrontation. He met several girls who greatly admired his skill and appearance, and had 3VRD sex with two of them—something that gave him great waves of laughter later, thinking about how serious they had been even though they were states away from him. He found he could make friends and find lovers easily. No longer would he have to be alone.

Whiskey taught him this. Sober, he hadn’t been able to seek friends or lovers online.

His winnings in athletics kept him fed and clothed, so Pehr wasn’t dependent on his adoptive parents, except for rent. But it also caused him trouble.

About one month and six bottles later, he walked along the pedway that passed Oberlicht Towers. A forest of skyscrapers rose up all around him, shutting out the sunset. Light came mainly from shop signs, 3VRD projections, and floating billboards. Steady air traffic hummed and roared above him in four stacked lanes, and far overhead he could see the occasional spacecraft light its rockets once it had reached the altitude limit of the maglevs.

He hadn’t noticed a scuffle nearby. A rising series of shouts drew his attention.

At first, he thought the seven boys were engaged in an unfamiliar 3VRD game of Confrontation. One of the boys pulled an antique gunpowder-pistol, a type common on the street since the Severs Act of 2107 outlawing the sale of powered arms to anyone but police and military outfits. Pehr nearly laughed, until the pistol exploded.

The shooter dropped the gun, his hand bloody and limp. The boy he had targeted held his stomach, and blood began to seep between his fingers. No game would have such graphics; they should have been removed from play. Pehr shot a quick glance into the local net and discovered those kids were present intheflesh. He had just witnessed an intheflesh shooting.

“
Are you guys all right?” he asked, running across the bare pedway toward them. The pedways were almost always empty at night, and held little traffic even during the day; people mostly stayed at home and traveled via the net, or took a car if they had to be somewhere intheflesh.

Two of the boys jerked, as if startled out of a trance, and ran away. The one with the belly wound dropped slowly to his knees, grinning halfway yet scowling at the same time. The shooter turned to face Pehr just as Pehr came to a stop.

“
You didn’t see nothing,” the boy said, holding his damaged hand; it looked like ground meat. “Get out of here.”

“
What are you talking about?” Pehr asked. “Have you called an ambulance? I’ll do it—” and he tapped back into the net.

Some time later, the ambulance driver woke him.

“
What happened, kid?” the man asked.

Pehr tried to sit up and answer, but his sides seemed to be filled with glass. His head throbbed at the temples, forehead, base of the skull. He coughed as he tried to speak.

“
Whoa, boy,” the man said. “Let’s get you to the hospital. Don’t go into your card until we get a pic. They might have done something nasty in there, and you don’t want to touch it.”

Pehr later learned that his curiosity had earned him six broken ribs, a number of stab-wounds, a concussion, and a fractured elbow. Luckily, none of the wounds was poisoned, and his card was also uninfected.

During his two-day stay at the hospital, Pehr became obsessed with violence, watching the news feed hour after hour. A whole new panorama had opened up to him, a part of life previously unseen. Every day in the Minneapolis/St. Paul sprawl, reports revealed six people were murdered, a hundred virtual-raped and 20 intheflesh-raped, thousands assaulted virtually or intheflesh, and tens of thousands more violated in some way by netpluckers and hackers—some so seriously that they had to have new cards installed, at their own expense.

So began what he later called his Crusades. He armed himself with only a long-range stunstick he bought from a shop that advertised, “Leather, Armor, Poly, Blades. Personal Protection.” The sign was hand-painted, and the sunken-eyed owner didn’t take credit. For the stunstick, Pehr traded a silver water-bottle—full of whiskey—that he had won for taking first place in a recent Confrontation competition. A few days later, he traded a dummy EM pistol for a full suit of armorweave.

Each night, he walked the pedways of New Downtown Minneapolis in the flexible armor, searching for trouble. Indignation and fear kept his feet moving, even though he feared violence—one more step might make him a statistic. Weeks passed, and he saw nothing unusual. Some arguments, but nothing that required his attention. Pehr began to wonder how in the world newsfeed could report such staggering violence statistics when he spent hours every day walking his beat and saw nothing.

A month later, he heard gunshots. Stunstick in hand, Pehr sprinted two blocks, then turned into a disused alleyway, cluttered with the uncollected detritus of city life: rotting garbage, chunks of masonry, junk, an abandoned ground-car. Ten or twenty kids were moving among the heaps, and at least three held guns that they were firing at one another.

“
Stop this!” Pehr called, taking shelter behind an iron drum. The shots and shouts continued unabated. A few seconds later, one of the shooters presented a good target; Pehr fired the stunstick at the boy, barely within range at ten meters. The shooter’s muscles clenched so tight Pehr could see them stand out on the bare skin of his forearms, and then the boy collapsed into temporary paralysis atop a heap of plastic pallets.

“
Thanks, man,” another shooter called; he promptly ran over to the paralytic and fired three bullets into his chest.

Pehr jerked with each shot as if he, too, were being shot. Essentially, he had caused the boy to be killed. His plans to save the city from itself had backfired. Now he, too, was a criminal. He had added one more to the daily tally of deaths. Maybe that boy wouldn’t have died if it hadn’t been for Pehr Jackson, criminal, murderer. The indignation that had fed him so well rose up within him like a coiled snake.

He reacted by stunning the second shooter. A third boy approached the second fallen shooter and raised a mallet made from a length of plastic with steel spikes driven through one end. So Pehr shot him, as well, just before the mallet reached the high point of its arc.

Now he attracted the gunfire of the one remaining shooter, and two shadows began working their way in Pehr’s direction. Adrenaline pumped into his blood, and his brain recalled the tactics of Confrontation. The odds here were worse than most games, but Pehr had one of the two long-range weapons and the experience of dozens of victories in such situations. The only difference here was that it was real, and these boys hadn’t taken oaths of sportsmanship. And if Pehr were injured, the computer wouldn’t pluck him from the game before his body was fooled into thinking it was hurt or dead. Still, rather than fear, Pehr felt anger.

Bullets rang against the iron drum like missiles pounding the hull of a spaceship in some show, thunder and lightning and headache all in one. When the bullets stopped, when a pair of gauntleted hands grabbed him from behind, Pehr was still stunned from the pounding. Deft fingers bound him in a matter of seconds.

When he was rolled over, Pehr saw a police whirlyjet roar down from the sky and land beside a second one already quiet on the pedway. Dozens of police—luckily not MHZ beatcoats, but regular officers armed with heavy stunners—took position behind portable shields on the cracked expanse of concrete.

“
Halt!” the air seemed to shout from all places at once. Scurrying feet shook trash loose in the alley. A few seconds later, the police began firing bolts of energy that made the air crackle and glow for a moment and smell of ozone. The alley lit up like daylight with the bolts; boys’ voices cracked for a moment in odd fractions of screams and then froze. Less than a minute later, the battle was over. Two policemen loaded Pehr and five other boys into the hold of the whirlyjet just as onlookers began to throw chunks of concrete and other junk at the police.

Down at the station, a young officer looked with a lopsided smile through a panel of shockglas at Pehr. The interrogation quarters were partitioned like a glass maze, and only the police knew how to find the way out. Pehr was held motionless by an invisible force in a comfortable chair.

“
Pehr Jackson, I know you. First place in Confrontation, two years in a row. What the fuck you doing in a gang fight?”

“
I was trying to stop the violence,” Pehr responded.

The policeman laughed. Pehr felt his cheeks flush. It was stupid, he realized as the words came out. Absurd. Who did he think he was, some twentieth century super-hero?

“
Boy, you’ll do a lot more good if you join the Police Academy. I hear they’re taking recommendations. I’ll give you a good one if you want. Of course, we’ll have to clear you of charges first. We’re assembling the feed someone took from across the pedway; looks like your story’ll hold up. But let me tell you something. If you ever do something so stupid again, you’ll get sentenced to head-lockup. I’ll make sure of it, for your own damned good. Understand?”