Ascendancies (64 page)

And she had lost her spex.

“You look just fine,” Eddy told her. “You're very interesting, that's the point. You're deep! That's the appeal, you see? You're a spook, and a European, and a woman—those are all very deep entities, in my opinion.” He smiled.

Eddy's left elbow felt hot and swollen inside his spare shirt; his chest, ribs, and left leg were mottled with enormous bruises. He had a bloodied lump on the back of his head where he'd smashed down into the rubble, catching her.

Altogether, they were not an entirely unusual couple among the departing Wende folk cramming the Düsseldorf airport. As a whole, the crowd seemed to be suffering a massive collective hangover—harsh enough to put many of them into slings and casts. And yet it was amazing how contented, almost smug, many of the vast crowd seemed as they departed their pocket catastrophe. They were wan and pale, yet cheerful, like people recovering from flu.

“I don't feel well enough to be deep,” Frederika said, stirring in her beanbag. “But you did save my life, Eddy. I do owe you something.” She paused. “It has to be something reasonable.”

“Don't worry about it,” Eddy told her nobly, rasping at the surface of a tiny circuit-board with a plastic spudger. “I mean, I didn't even break your fall, strictly speaking. Mostly I just kept you from landing on your head.”

“You did save my life,” she repeated quietly. “That crowd would have killed me in the street if not for you.”

“You saved the Critic's life. I imagine that's a bigger deal.”

“I was paid to save his life,” Frederika said. “Anyway, I didn't save the bastard. I just did my job. He was saved by his own cleverness. He's been through a dozen of these damned things.” She stretched cautiously, shifting in her beanbag. “So have I, for that matter.…I must be a real fool. I endure a lot to live my precious life.…” She took a deep breath. “Barcelona,
yo te quiero
.”

“I'm just glad we checked out of that clinic in time to catch our flights,” Eddy told her, examining his work with a jeweler's loupe. “Could you believe all those soccer kids in there? They sure were having fun.…Why couldn't they be that good-tempered before they beat the hell out of each other? Some things are just a mystery, I guess.”

“I hope you have learned a good lesson from this,” Frederika said.

“Sure have,” Eddy nodded. He blew dried crud from the point of his spudger, then picked up a chrome pinch-clamp and threaded a tiny screw through the earpiece of his spex. “I can see a lot of deep potential in the Wende. It's true that a few dozen people got killed here, but the city must have made an absolute fortune. That's got to look promising for the Chattanooga city council. And a Wende offers a lot of very useful exposure and influence for a cultural networking group like CAPCLUG.”

“You've learned nothing at all,” she groaned. “I don't know why I hoped it would be different.”

“I admit it—in the heat of the action I got a little carried away,” Eddy said. “But my only real regret is that you won't come with me to America. Or, if you'd really rather, take me to Barcelona. Either way, the way I see it, you need someone to look after you for a while.”

“You're going to rub my sore feet, yes?” Frederika said sourly. “How generous you are.”

“I dumped my creep girlfriend. My dad will pick up my tab. I can help you manage better. I can improve your life. I can fix your broken appliances. I'm a nice guy.”

“I don't want to be rude,” she said, “but after this, the thought of being touched is repulsive.” She shook her head, with finality. “I'm sorry, Eddy, but I can't give you what you want.”

Eddy sighed, examined the crowd for a while, then repacked the segments of his spex and closed his tool kit. At last he spoke up again. “Do you virch?”

“What?”

“Do you do virtuality?”

She was silent for a long moment, then looked him in the eye. “You don't do anything really strange or sick on the wires, do you, Edward?”

“There's hardly any subjective time-lag if you use high-capacity transatlantic fiber,” Eddy said.

“Oh. I see.”

“What have you got to lose? If you don't like it, hang up.”

Frederika tucked her hair back, examined the departure board for the flight to Barcelona, and looked at the toes of her shoes. “Would this make you happy?”

“No,” Eddy said. “But it'd make me a whole lot more of what I already am.”

Bicycle Repairman

Repeated tinny banging woke Lyle in his hammock. Lyle groaned, sat up, and slid free into the tool-crowded aisle of his bike shop.

Lyle hitched up the black elastic of his skintight shorts and plucked yesterday's grease-stained sleeveless off the workbench. He glanced blearily at his chronometer as he picked his way toward the door. It was 10:04.38 in the morning, June 27, 2037.

Lyle hopped over a stray can of primer and the floor boomed gently beneath his feet. With all the press of work, he'd collapsed into sleep without properly cleaning the shop. Doing custom enameling paid okay, but it ate up time like crazy. Working and living alone was wearing him out.

Lyle opened the shop door, revealing a long sheer drop to dusty tiling far below. Pigeons darted beneath the hull of his shop through a soot-stained hole in the broken atrium glass, and wheeled off to their rookery somewhere in the darkened guts of the high-rise.

More banging. Far below, a uniformed delivery kid stood by his cargo tricycle, yanking rhythmically at the long dangling string of Lyle's spot-welded doorknocker. Lyle waved, yawning. From his vantage point below the huge girders of the cavernous atrium, Lyle had a fine overview of three burnt-out interior levels of the old Tsatanuga Archiplat. Once-elegant handrails and battered pedestrian overlooks fronted on the great airy cavity of the atrium. Behind the handrails was a three-floor wilderness of jury-rigged lights, chicken coops, water tanks, and squatters' flags. The fire-damaged floors, walls, and ceilings were riddled with handmade descent-chutes, long coiling staircases, and rickety ladders.

Lyle took note of a crew of Chattanooga demolition workers in their yellow detox suits. The repair crew was deploying vacuum scrubbers and a high-pressure hose-off by the vandal-proofed western elevators of Floor 34. Two or three days a week, the city crew meandered into the damage zone to pretend to work, with a great hypocritical show of sawhorses and barrier tape. The lazy sons of bitches were all on the take.

Lyle thumbed the brake switches in their big metal box by the flywheel. The bike shop slithered, with a subtle hiss of cable-clamps, down three stories, to dock with a grating crunch onto four concrete-filled metal drums.

The delivery kid looked real familiar. He was in and out of the zone pretty often. Lyle had once done some custom work on the kid's cargo trike, new shocks, and some granny-gearing as he recalled, but he couldn't remember the kid's name. Lyle was terrible with names. “What's up, zude?”

“Hard night, Lyle?”

“Just real busy.”

The kid's nose wrinkled at the stench from the shop. “Doin' a lot of paint work, huh?” He glanced at his palmtop notepad. “You still taking deliveries for Edward Dertouzas?”

“Yeah. I guess so.” Lyle rubbed the gear tattoo on one stubbled cheek. “If I have to.”

The kid offered a stylus, reaching up. “Can you sign for him?”

Lyle folded his bare arms warily. “Naw, man, I can't sign for Deep Eddy. Eddy's in Europe somewhere. Eddy left months ago. Haven't seen Eddy in ages.”

The delivery kid scratched his sweating head below his billed fabric cap. He turned to check for any possible sneak-ups by snatch-and-grab artists out of the squatter warrens. The government simply refused to do postal delivery on the Thirty-second, Thirty-third, and Thirty-fourth floors. You never saw many cops inside the zone, either. Except for the city demolition crew, about the only official functionaries who ever showed up in the zone were a few psychotically empathetic NAFTA social workers.

“I'll get a bonus if you sign for this thing.” The kid gazed up in squint-eyed appeal. “It's gotta be worth something, Lyle. It's a really weird kind of routing, they paid a lot of money to send it just that way.”

Lyle crouched down in the open doorway. “Let's have a look at it.”

The package was a heavy shockproof rectangle in heat-sealed plastic shrink-wrap, with a plethora of intra-European routing stickers. To judge by all the overlays, the package had been passed from postal system to postal system at least eight times before officially arriving in the legal custody of any human being. The return address, if there had ever been one, was completely obscured. Someplace in France, maybe.

Lyle held the box up two-handed to his ear and shook it. Hardware.

“You gonna sign, or not?”

“Yeah.” Lyle scratched illegibly at the little signature panel, then looked at the delivery trike. “You oughta get that front wheel trued.”

The kid shrugged. “Got anything to send out today?”

“Naw,” Lyle grumbled, “I'm not doing mail-order repair work anymore; it's too complicated and I get ripped off too much.”

“Suit yourself.” The kid clambered into the recumbent seat of his trike and pedaled off across the heat-cracked ceramic tiles of the atrium plaza.

Lyle hung his hand-lettered OPEN FOR BUSINESS sign outside the door. He walked to his left, stamped up the pedaled lid of a jumbo garbage can, and dropped the package in with the rest of Dertouzas's stuff.

The can's lid wouldn't close. Deep Eddy's junk had finally reached critical mass. Deep Eddy never got much mail at the shop from other people, but he was always sending mail to himself. Big packets of encrypted diskettes were always arriving from Eddy's road jaunts in Toulouse, Marseilles, Valencia, and Nice. And especially Barcelona. Eddy had sent enough gigabyte-age out of Barcelona to outfit a pirate data-haven.

Eddy used Lyle's bike shop as his safety-deposit box. This arrangement was okay by Lyle. He owed Eddy; Eddy had installed the phones and virching in the bike shop, and had also wangled the shop's electrical hookup. A thick elastic curly-cable snaked out the access-crawlspace of Floor 35, right through the ceiling of Floor 34, and directly through a ragged punch-hole in the aluminum roof of Lyle's cable-mounted mobile home. Some unknown contact of Eddy's was paying the real bills on that electrical feed. Lyle cheerfully covered the expenses by paying cash into an anonymous post-office box. The setup was a rare and valuable contact with the world of organized authority.

During his stays in the shop, Eddy had spent much of his time buried in marathon long-distance virtuality sessions, swaddled head to foot in lumpy strap-on gear. Eddy had been painfully involved with some older woman in Germany. A virtual romance in its full-scale thumping, heaving, grappling progress, was an embarrassment to witness. Under the circumstances, Lyle wasn't too surprised that Eddy had left his parents' condo to set up in a squat.

Eddy had lived in the bicycle repair shop, off and on, for almost a year. It had been a good deal for Lyle, because Deep Eddy had enjoyed a certain clout and prestige with the local squatters. Eddy had been a major organizer of the legendary Chattanooga Wende of December '35, a monster street-party that had climaxed in a spectacular looting-and-arson rampage that had torched the three floors of the Archiplat.

Lyle had gone to school with Eddy and had known him for years; they'd grown up together in the Archiplat. Eddy Dertouzas was a deep zude for a kid his age, with political contacts and heavy-duty network connections. The squat had been a good deal for both of them, until Eddy had finally coaxed the German woman into coming through for him in real life. Then Eddy had jumped the next plane to Europe.

Since they'd parted friends, Eddy was welcome to mail his European data-junk to the bike shop. After all, the disks were heavily encrypted, so it wasn't as if anybody in authority was ever gonna be able to read them. Storing a few thousand disks was a minor challenge, compared to Eddy's complex, machine-assisted love life.

After Eddy's sudden departure, Lyle had sold Eddy's possessions, and wired the money to Eddy in Spain. Lyle had kept the screen TV, Eddy's mediator, and the cheaper virching helmet. The way Lyle figured it—the way he remembered the deal—any stray hardware of Eddy's in the shop was rightfully his, for disposal at his own discretion. By now it was pretty clear that Deep Eddy Dertouzas was never coming back to Tennessee. And Lyle had certain debts.

Lyle snicked the blade from a roadkit multitool and cut open Eddy's package. It contained, of all things, a television cable settop box. A laughable infobahn antique. You'd never see a cablebox like that in NAFTA; this was the sort of primeval junk one might find in the home of a semiliterate Basque grandmother, or maybe in the armed bunker of some backward Albanian.

Lyle tossed the archaic cablebox onto the beanbag in front of the wallscreen. No time now for irrelevant media toys; he had to get on with real life. Lyle ducked into the tiny curtained privy and urinated at length into a crockery jar. He scraped his teeth with a flossing spudger and misted some fresh water onto his face and hands. He wiped clean with a towelette, then smeared his armpits, crotch, and feet with deodorant.

Back when he'd lived with his mom up on Floor 41, Lyle had used old-fashioned antiseptic deodorants. Lyle had wised up about a lot of things once he'd escaped his mom's condo. Nowadays, Lyle used a gel roll-on of skin-friendly bacteria that greedily devoured human sweat and exuded as their metabolic by-product a pleasantly harmless reek rather like ripe bananas. Life was a lot easier when you came to proper terms with your microscopic flora.

Back at his workbench, Lyle plugged in the hot plate and boiled some Thai noodles with flaked sardines. He packed down breakfast with four hundred cc's of Dr. Breasaire's Bioactive Bowel Putty. Then he checked last night's enamel job on the clamped frame in the workstand. The frame looked good. At three in the morning, Lyle was able to get into painted detail work with just the right kind of hallucinatory clarity.