Voice of the Whirlwind (11 page)

“I fucked somebody up bad, Griffith. That monowire might have taken his head right off.”

“Jesus.” Steward heard, very loud in his skull, Griffith’s hacking smoker’s cough. He winced. The cough went on and on. Then Steward heard the hiss of Griffith’s inhaler. When the man’s voice returned, his tone had changed. It was faster. Hyped. Angry.

“That fucking fastbuck punk. I’ve still got friends. He’ll regret the fucking day.”

“It seems to me you don’t quite know who your friends are,” Steward said. Tinted smoke curled in his vision. “It seemed to me that Spassky had perfect confidence in his ability to take me off and retain your friendship. If your friendship meant anything to him.”

There was a moment of silence. “Look. You’re okay, right?”

“No damage.” The Xanadu marijuana tendrils were creeping through his muscles, replacing the fading adrenaline, turning the ebbing high into a buzz of another kind.

“And you’ve still got the Thunder.”

“I put it in a deposit box before I went to the meet. I didn’t like the neighborhood.”

“Look. Don’t even bother to get the stuff. It’ll be safe where it is.”

“That suits me.”

“I’ll give you your fee. Then you give me the key, and I’ll have someone else pick it up.”

“Sure,” Steward said. “Let’s just do it in a public place, okay?”

“Shit, buck. Whatever you say. I’m sorry this thing happened.”

The Xanadu was relaxing the muscles in the back of Steward’s neck. He pushed his head back into his pillow, making an arch of his neck. Vertebrae crackled, the sound more intimate even than Griffith’s hoarse voice. He relaxed, felt his body awareness dissolving, sleep creeping closer.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Steward said.

“Yeah. Listen. I had no idea that little punk was gonna—”

“Tomorrow,” Steward said. His hand went to the phone and broke the connection, then reached for the receiver on his mastoid. The adhesive tried to take some of his hair along with it, and he peeled it away carefully.

He took the Xanadu from his mouth and dropped it into the hotel ashtray. Video colors prowled along the ceiling.

Steward shut his eyes. Lights moved on the roof of his closed lids, video of his own devising. He willed the lights to coalesce, become a mirror image of himself, lying on a bed, spread-eagled, eyes closed. At the center, in the air.

*

Griffith looked as if he had the flu. His eyes were red, his nose was running. He was shaking. Every time he tried to puff on his cigarette he began to cough uncontrollably. He hadn’t even bothered to order breakfast, just coffee. The surly waitress looked as if she wanted to tear the bones from his back.

“Here.” Griffith pushed a credit spike across the table. “Two thousand Starbright, plus five hundred. Call it hazardous duty pay, okay?”

“Thanks.” Steward took the spike and went to the public telephone by the men’s room. He put in a coin, jacked in the spike, and transferred the dollars to an account he created for himself at the Canyon State Insured. He called again a minute later to make certain the money was there and hadn’t disappeared and that his password was working. Canyon State’s banking software should have made such an event impossible, but all manner of things had been known to happen.

Griffith’s money was good, Steward concluded, even if his knowledge of his business associates was a little shaky.

He returned to the table. Griffith was coughing again.

“Maybe you better invest in a new body,” Steward said.

Griffith scowled. “It’s expensive.”

“It looks like you have outside sources of income.”

“It all passes through my hands, buck. I’ve got overhead, payoffs…shit. I don’t want to talk about it anyway.”

Steward reached into his pocket and took a spike from his spike ring. “Here you go. The place is called SourceBank, it’s on Winnetka, and the code is malafides.”

Griffith patted his pockets for a pen. “Better write that down,” he said. He wrote it on his plastic reusable napkin and pocketed it. Across the room, the waitress glared.

“I’m gonna spend the rest of the day in bed,” he said. “And I’m leaving tomorrow. But I’ll still try to call my friend in Starbright.”

“I’d appreciate that. Thank you.”

Steward sipped his coffee, feeling the lights in his body going green in long, slow rows, and hoped Griffith’s friend in Starbright was a better friend than the people he knew in LA.

*

Steward lay shirtless on the floor of Ardala’s apartment, his arms thrown up above his head. He’d just come in from a walk outside and this seemed the best way of dealing with the heat. Faint, cool patterns of air stirred on his chest.
Alien Inquisitor
babbled at him from the vid.

One of Ardala’s cleaning robots moved toward him on the floor, sensed his presence, turned away. Ran into a pair of Ardala’s discarded jeans, thought for a moment, turned again, moved back the way it came. Steward guessed it ought to be used to these situations by now.

The door swept open and Ardala came in. She dumped her briefcase in the hallway and stood over Steward. She bent to work at the fasteners to her high-heeled shoes. He gazed up at her frowning face.

“Lightsource is a funny company,” she said. “It doesn’t recruit. I didn’t have any literature on it.”

“So it’s small,” Steward said.

She kicked off one shoe, began working on the other with her toes. “It’s privately owned anyway. I found that much out. And it’s based in Los Angeles.”

She kicked the other shoe off. It landed in front of the cleaning robot, which thought for a moment, then moved in another direction.

“They
do
consult on communications problems,” she said. “I called a friend of mine who works for Macrodata and asked.”

“Thanks,” Steward said.

“So why did your friend send you to his own home base with a package? He could have delivered it himself.”

“Maybe he was in a hurry. Maybe he wanted to do me a favor.”

“Some favor.”

Steward sat up, flexed his shoulders and neck. Cervical vertebrae crackled, the snaps and pops echoing inside his skull. He wondered what it would be like never to work out as heavily as he did, never to have to feel his bones crack every time he changed position.

“It’s over now,” he said. “Whatever it all meant, I don’t have anything to do with it anymore.”

“You got Sheol. And that’s what you wanted. Right?”

Steward rolled to his feet. The Alien Inquisitor was doing something to a captive girl’s toenails. “I’m surprised your condeco management lets that program in here,” he said.

“
Alien Inquisitor
comes from Network Noir, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Destinarian Party. Our condeco management rents time on the artificial intelligence of the Marketplex in order to run our investment program, and Marketplex has adopted official Destinarian ideology. Network Noir was part of the deal. We make it available and we get a break on use of the AI.”

Steward stared at the screen. The feet were small, plump, photographed with care as pink objects of love. Thin streams of blood ran in artistic patterns. “Pulling toenails serves the Destinarian philosophy?” he asked.

Ardala shrugged. “Demonstrates the fragility of flesh as opposed to hardware. I’m going to take a bath.”

Steward turned the video off and watched as the liquid-crystal display turned into a random mutating kaleidoscope pattern. The sound of pouring water began to echo from the bathroom. Steward padded into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of wine. The cleaning robot had preceded him and seemed to have trapped itself in a dead end formed by the cabinets and refrigerator. Steward nudged the white plastic bubble around with his foot, and the machine moved happily back toward the living room. Steward followed it. From the bathroom he heard the tap cut off, then the sound of Ardala lowering herself into the tub. He watched the fluffed carpet that marked the robot’s passage, seeing its twisted pattern on the floor as it encountered bodies, litter, furniture.

Moving like a rat in its maze. Programmed. Performing a function that it was not capable of understanding, on behalf of people whose entire existence was outside its knowledge, detected only as feet occasionally planted in its way.

Steward looked out of the polarized terrace window, seeing the pyramids and blocks of the condecologies, each serving the purposes of its builders, performing its tasks of reinforcement, providing shelter from disturbing patterns, offering ideological or religious programming as necessary. Each as self-contained as technology could provide, invulnerable as possible to leakage of realities from the outside.

Steward felt a sudden intuition, bordering on certainty, that his money had just vanished, had become unreal. He went to the telephone and called Canyon State Insured.

The money rested in its account, having gained an insignificant amount of interest since that afternoon.

He broke the connection and walked to the bathroom. Ardala was submerged to her chin, her extravagant eye makeup providing a surprising contrast to her tanned body. Steward sat down on the edge of the tub and offered her his glass of wine. She thanked him and took a sip.

“I’ve got money now,” he said. “I’ve increased my personal wealth by a factor of ten in the last twenty-four hours.”

“It’s still not enough to get into Starbright.”

“It’s enough so that I could pay you what I owe you.”

Ardala closed her eyes and leaned back against a foam neck cushion. She raised her knee and rested her calf on the side of the tub, pressing her wet foot against Steward’s leg. “You don’t owe me anything,” she said.

“Two weeks’ rent, at least.”

“Put your money into the funds here in the condeco,” she said. “You’ll get a much higher rate of return. Our AI is one of the best.”

“If I put them there, I can’t get to them if I need them.”

Ardala opened her green eyes and looked at him. She nudged him with the foot. Dampness was spreading on his trouser leg. “So where are you going, ex-Canard, that you’re gonna need access to this money anytime soon?” she asked.

“Space,” he said.

“You’re dreaming.”

“That’s where the answers are.”

“So you say.”

Steward gazed back at her, saw the strands of fair hair plastered to the side of her neck by the bathwater. “I think I owe you some money, Ardala.”

She held his gaze for a moment, then leaned back against the foam pillow and closed her eyes. “Whatever you think is fair,” she said.

Steward took a drink of his wine. “It’s Darwin Days all over the universe,” he said. “Whole cultures are being selected out. The Outward Policorps all disappeared, and so did their monopoly, and that means every institution, every ideology or philosophy that hopes to have a future, is pushing into interstellar space. So there’s always a chance for another Artifact War out there, with even more groups involved, even more uncontrolled than the last one. With the Powers around to pick up the pieces.

“Paranoia is becoming a way of life. We’ve got hundreds of little communities in space, all tens of thousands of klicks apart, and the isolation is making them funny. They’re tightly wrapped and conscious of trade secrets and security, and they’re scared of all these other communities they don’t know anything about. The NeoImagists are breeding their own populations in artificial wombs rather than import people and ideas from outside. People are looked on as contamination. And what are Earth condecologies but ways of imitating that way of thinking?

“We’ve got machines that are smarter than we are, and people have put them in charge. We’re being pushed around for reasons that we can’t even fathom. It’s not just people that are evolving, it’s their machines. Their institutions. The whole situation is scary. People are looking for cover.”

He stood up, feeling his spine crackle. He put his hands on the edge of the sink and leaned forward, watching himself in the mirror. Dark skin, dark eyes, thick black brows. Words coming out reasoned and slow. “Most people cluster in anthills for security, like this condeco. Base their lives on investment strategies or religion or a return to obsolete modes of life like feudalism. NeoImagists are trying to evolve themselves ahead of any trouble. Destinarians plug themselves into machines that’ll live longer than they will and hope that artificial intelligence can span the gap between themselves and what they don’t understand. They think they’re safer because they can process data faster than the competition. But data’s just numbers that represent a way of looking at things. Destinarians confuse it with reality, and it isn’t. It’s just their preconceptions in an ordered form.”

Steward heard the bright splash of water as Ardala adjusted herself in the bath. “So what’s the correct strategy, O Mighty One?” she asked. Her voice took on a singsong tone, emphasizing each syllable of a downward-tending scale. “Ex-Ca-nard. Ex-Ice-hawk. Ex-men-tal pa-tient.”

He looked at himself. “Stay at the center. Look for such of the truth as seems to matter. Watch the winds of change.”

Or maybe become a change wind. The voice seemed to come from the mirror, from a darker image of himself. Steward fell silent for a moment, wondering if the voice was his own, if Ardala had heard it.

Ardala’s tone was flat. “This truth of yours is in space, I take it?”

Steward frowned at himself and turned away from the mirror. “It looks that way.”

“None of this nonsense about the secure life for you. You want to be right out there all by yourself in the middle of the hurricane.”

“Security is a delusion. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that.” He leaned his back against the sink and drank his wine. “Tomorrow morning your condeco’s investment AI could find itself outsmarted by someone else’s AI and lose every penny of the investment bank. Then your condeco could get taken over by the Krishna Firm and you find yourself with a choice of living by ashram rules or losing everything you’ve worked for. What do you do then?”

“Learn to contemplate my navel. At a guess.”

Steward smiled into his wineglass. Ardala turned over in the bath, lying on her side facing away. Steward saw the bare wet shoulder, hair pinned up on top of her head.