Voice of the Whirlwind (7 page)

“What sorts of things do you move?”

“Depends.” Griffith shrugged. “It’s pretty irregular. My friends and I ask around and see what’s wanted, what’s available. Take a cut. It’s all amateur league.” He squinted up at the sun and began moving across the park. Steward followed.

“What I have now,” he said, “is a package that I’ve got to deliver to LA. I was going to call someone else to deliver it, but since you’re here, I thought I’d throw the job your way if you want it.”

“What does this involve?”

“Flying to Los Angeles. Looking up some guy. Giving him the package, collecting the fee. Your cut is two percent, which should come to about two thousand dollars in Starbright scrip. That should help you to get into Starbright, if that’s what you want.”

Steward laughed. This situation was striking him as more familiar every minute. He could feel Canard reflexes coming back, fitting him like an old jacket. “Two percent is two thousand Starbright?” he asked. “That doesn’t strike me as amateur league.”

Griffith seemed annoyed. “Give me some credit, man. I
run
this operation, and
my
fee’s five percent. There’s a lot of competition here. For hell’s sake, it’s even legal. There’s no law against possessing what’s in the package, or trading in it. The cops might want to know where you got it, but you’d be within your rights to tell them to fuck off. I’d deliver the damn stuff myself if I weren’t tied up here all week.”

“Yeah. Okay. I see your point.” Steward looked up into the sky, narrowing his eyes against the brightness. A contrail from a suborbital shuttle was scarring the blue, marking a path between fixed orbital stars. “Why are you working as a traveling salesman if you can pick up this kind of money just flying to LA?”

Griffith scowled. “Because of who I’d have to fucking deal with, that’s why. If I keep it small, no one’s interested in taking over my action. But the big leagues play by different rules. If I did this full-time, I’d have every hotshot juvecrime scumbag in the world after my ass. And, shit, they’re faster than I am. These days.”

“I want to know what’s in the package.”

Griffith looked at him sidelong, then nodded. “You have the right. It’s Thunder.”

Steward shook his head. “I remember reading something about it. But I’ve been out of touch for a while.”

Griffith began to walk across the grass. He flipped cigarette ash onto the deep green. “Okay,” he said. “It’s a neurohormone developed by Pink Blossom a couple years ago. The trademark name is Genesios Three, and it’s also called vitamin B-44. On the streets it’s called Thunder, or Black Thunder. It stimulates the nerves to repair damage—it can grow a severed spine together, man. The cripples are skipping in the streets.”

“So why’s there an underground trade in it?”

“Because it gets you high. A nice buzz. Also raises your IQ by twenty points if you take it long enough. But after that, Thunder begins to repress vasopressin and oxytocin levels in the brain, which suppresses brain function, so you need more of the vitamin to restore it, which suppresses brain function even more, so . . .”

“Negative feedback loop. Addiction.”

“
Join the great adventure
.” An amplified voice, from the carnival.

“Yeah,” Griffith replied. “What I said. Not physically addicting, not in the classical sense, but bad enough. Anyway, Pink Blossom’s being cagey about making the stuff and distributing it. And Thunder is so complicated and expensive to make that the underground hasn’t been able to produce it in quantity at a price people can afford. But I have a friend who works on the Orlando shuttle. And he’s got a system.”

“And you get a packet every so often.”

Griffith nodded. “That’s the idea. You want the job?”

“It sounds inviting. Who am I supposed to give this to?”

Griffith wiped his forehead with his handkerchief again. “A faceback named Spassky. Little guy, about fifteen. Runs an unaffiliated mob and wears Urban Surgery.” He looked at Steward. “You seen those?”

“On vid.” The new style, bizarre facial surgery mixed with elaborate, abstract tattooing. A cool style. Deliberately repulsive.

“You can’t tell those little pricks apart,” Griffith said. “That’s why they do it to themselves. It’s city camouflage.”

“Whatever works.’’

“Shit. I can’t look at it. On Sheol I saw what real mutilation was like.”

Steward hesitated for a moment, feeling a wave of coolness moving through his nerves. He looked at the carnival, the flags. The colors and the sky seemed different, as if a cloud had passed across the sun. There was a sense of motion inside himself, a movement like a thrown switch, that suddenly he was on a different side of things, as if he’d crossed a bridge without knowing it.

“I’ll carry your package,” he said.

Griffith dropped his cigarette, stepped on it. “Good,” he said.

“I want something else, Griffith.”

The other man didn’t look at him. Just stood with his hands in his jeans, watching the glass urban horizon, the mirrors that reflected the scarred sky. He was making Steward say it.

“Sheol. I want Sheol.”

A shudder moved through Griffith at Steward’s words. As if they hurt him, somehow.

“Yeah,” Griffith said. “I knew you’d say that.”

Steward’s mouth was suddenly dry. He tried to summon saliva, failed, spoke thickly. “What’s your answer?”

Griffith was still looking away. “Tomorrow,” he said. “When I give you the package.”

Relief flooded Steward’s limbs. He could feel himself getting closer.

“I need to know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Griffith looked down at the grass beneath his feet. “No you’re not,” he said.

Steward reached in his shirt pocket for a Xanadu. He wanted this high to last awhile.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m not sorry in the least.”

*

Steward was on the roof of Ardala’s condeco. It was late at night. Grass-colored carpet, stretched over concrete, scraped against his feet. The open deck was lit by the fluttering blue-and-gold radiance of the swimming pool and by colored spots planted behind metal tubs that held scentless bushes.

Sweat dripped on the carpet. Steward punched forward, repeating the movements over and over, trying to achieve a perfection in his balance, the slick flow of his muscles, the rhythm of heart and breath, his concentration perfect on the invisible target before him, the phantom objective toward which he directed his controlled violence.

He came here often, usually at night, for the long solitary workouts. In the daytime there were too many people, too many distractions, too many disturbed looks. At night there was just the darkness, the nuclear blue glow of the pool, the cold distant hum of the city.

Steward began alternating his punches with kicks. He was full of adrenaline, but he’d been drinking earlier with Ardala and was on the edge of a sugar crash. The result was a strange, disturbing high in which he felt perpetually on the edge of losing control, adrenaline battling insulin for command of his body. The feeling was unsettling but exhilarating, a perpetual fight for possession of his own actions, something like he’d felt when he’d been peddling wetware from his moped and didn’t know whether his customer would pay him with a hot credit spike or a knife, when his arms and legs were trembling with the urge to run but he’d just given the boy a smile from behind the comfort of his shades and asked him if he’d had any money down on the jai alai….

Colors began to flicker at the edge of his vision. The sugar crash was coming in like the shock wave off the ablative nose of a commercial shuttle. Steward decided to face it, ride the shock wave to a last attempt at Zen, at perfection. He set himself, balanced forward, leaning toward the target. His knee cocked up, his foot thrust out, his balance going forward as the kick delivered, as one arm punched forward, withdrew as the other arm drove his power through the target, the target that seemed, for a fractional hallucinatory moment, to bleed like a torn artery at the dark edges of the swaying earth, and then the crash moved through him and the glider swung out of control, spiraling down into the darkness of the dream. As it spun, Steward laughed.

He was there. At the center.

CHAPTER FIVE

L.A. Night. Steward looked down from the window of
his descending aircraft and saw a web of Earthbound stars that marched from the mountains right into the rising ocean, stars that blurred with heat shimmer and promise.

The plane began to buffet as its plastic and alloy skin changed configuration, braking from supersonic to landing-approach speed. Below, Steward could feel Los Angeles reaching up for him with mirrored fingers.

He smiled. At home, though he’d never been here before.

*

Steward put the package in his pocket. He was to deliver it to Spassky in LA tomorrow evening.

“Beer in the refrigerator,” Griffith said. “Make yourself at home.”

Lightsource’s apartment in Flagstaff was furnished in a utilitarian way, very like a hotel room: bed, sturdy chairs, video, refrigerator, cooking range—just like a hundred other apartments in the same building, most owned by corporations. Steward sat on one of the chairs. He felt scratchy brown fabric against the backs of his arms.

Griffith stubbed out his cigarette and disappeared into the bathroom. Steward watched a silent vodka ad on the vid. The vodka was photographed so that it looked like liquid chrome. Griffith reappeared after running the sink for a while. The Welshman took a Negra Modelo longneck from the kitchenette refrigerator and twisted off the foil top. “Want some?” he asked.

Steward shook his head. He watched as Griffith walked to a cloth-covered chair placed next to the vid. He sat down, sipping at his dark Mexican beer.

Steward took a breath. “Tell me about Sheol,” he said.

Griffith looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t like to talk about it,” he said. “You know that.”

“You said you would.” Steward felt a kind of pressure on his neck, like a brush of wind from distant exploding stars. “I need to know what it did to—to the Captain. What I became, out there.”

Griffith looked away. “I know. I wasn’t trying to weasel out. I was just telling you this was going to be hard.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

Griffith’s voice was low. The words came slowly. “I don’t think you can know. Even if I tell you. It was just…not a thing you can understand secondhand.”

Steward just watched him. On the vid, a small child was choking on a piece of food at a birthday party. Adults moved in silent, screaming panic; other children were crying. Colors from the silent drama bled over Griffith’s face. Without looking up, Griffith flung an arm up and snapped off the picture. He looked up. He was pale. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

Steward waited. Saying nothing.

“First thing to realize,” Griffith said, “is that the psychological dimension isn’t all there is. It’s not just a matter of forgetting, or learning to adjust. I got married when I came home. She was a nice lady. Had herself, her life the way she wanted it. Knew where she was going. We tried to have kids, and each time it was a miscarriage…and that turned out to be lucky, because they were all monsters. My genes are all screwed up. From what happened out there. There were biological and chemical weapons that fucked with chromosomes. A lot of the medicines we took with us were experimental Coherent Light pharmaceuticals, and the manuals that gave the dosages were just guessing. Some didn’t work, some had side effects. Some broke chromosomes. Coherent Light didn’t care. The Icehawks were an experiment, too, and even if we failed, we’d generate some interesting data.”

Griffith put a hand on his chest. “I’m marked, wherever I go, by what happened on Sheol. Not just in my mind, but on the microscopic level, in the little bits of DNA that made me. Poisoned. I could die of some new kind of cancer, and that would be Sheol. Or some kind of chemical I’d breathed in years ago could strip the myelin sheathing from my nerves, and I’d be crippled. That would be Sheol, too. It’s happened to other survivors. Like we’re all carrying little time bombs inside us.” Griffith was sweating. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “That’s something I can’t forget, that I’m carrying those little bombs. And the bombs keep reminding me of everything else.” He looked up at Steward. “You’re lucky, you know? You don’t have that stuff in your body.”

“Can’t you get a new one?”

“I didn’t buy the clone insurance, the way you did. I didn’t have family. I just took my hazardous duty bonus and had a big party the week before we took off. And now I can’t afford a new body.” Griffith looked at him. “You knew that,” he said.

Steward pointed a finger at his temple. “Not this memory. These are old recordings.”

Griffith breathed out, a harsh sigh. “Yeah. I keep forgetting. That you’re so much younger than I am. Even if you were born before me.”

*

Ardala leaned back on pillows. She was wearing a white T-shirt, smoking a Xanadu.
Guys
was open, lying unread on her stomach. “Two thousand Starbright,” she said. “Not bad for a day’s work.”

“Not bad,” Steward agreed. He had one of her cram books open in front of him, but he hadn’t looked at it in a while.

Ardala drew up a leg, scratched a bare calf. “I assume this is against the law.”

“It isn’t. I used your comp and checked the library.”

“If it isn’t illegal, then it’s dangerous.”

Steward frowned. “Maybe so. Griffith says not.”

Ardala handed Steward the Xanadu. He inhaled. “How well do you know Griffith?” she asked.

“At one time, very well.”

She sat up, leaned toward him, propping her elbows on her knees. “He’s changed a lot. You said so.”

“Yes.”

“So it’s dangerous.”

Steward shrugged and handed the cigarette back to Ardala. She looked at it in her hand and ignored it. “What was the company he worked for?”

“Lightsource, Limited.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know it, but I’ll check my files. I should be able to find out something about it.”

Steward shrugged again. Ardala’s green eyes narrowed. “You act,” she said, “as if you don’t care whether or not your old friend is going to fuck you over.”