Hardwired (13 page)

“Maybe
we
ought to’ve,” he says.

She seems surprised by the notion. “The two of us?”

“The two of us. And some others:”

Arnold glances over her shoulder, sees no one, and lowers her voice anyway. “What are you getting at?”

“Just that this business is getting real organized. The thirdmen have their networks on both coasts. They bribe people who run labs, work through cutouts. Hire people to hijack the stuff for them. They’re not on the line themselves. The distributors all work for one another. The Orbitals have half the laws in their pockets. What risks are any of those people taking?”

“None,” says Arnold. Just like Cowboy wants her to.

“We put ourselves on the line, Arnold,” Cowboy says. “For piecework. We’re work for hire. Sometimes we have agents working for us, like the Dodger, but if the Dodger cuts a deal that isn’t enforced, he can’t do anything about it. We’re weaker than these other people, and sometimes we pay for it. You spent two days hanging your ass in a damn coulee, and none of it was your fault.”

The bartender brings the new round. Arnold looks over her shoulder again. “I don’t know if I should listen to this, man,” she says. “I’m in it for the ride, not the cargo.”

“I’m just suggesting that the people who take the risks ought to have something to say about what goes on.”

“You’re talking union.”

“Nope. An association of independents. Just to keep the thirdmen up to the mark. To remind them that if it weren’t for people like us, they wouldn’t have their limos, their mountain homes, their cryo max.” Cowboy jabs a finger into the bar to help make his point. “We’re the ones in the field making legends while the thirdmen are knocking back cinnamon vodka in their padded bar chairs. ”

Arnold grins at him. “Cinnamon vodka? Cryo max? You got a particular thirdman in mind?”

Cowboy figures she isn’t ready, just yet, for what he has to say about Arkady. “Not me,” he says.

She shifts closer to him, leaning her elbow on the padded bar. “If it weren’t you saying this, C’boy, I’d turn around and walk right out of this bar. ”

He smiles. “Lucky it’s me, then.”

Her artificial eyes look into his. “How many people have you told about this?”

“Maybe half a dozen. I’m not broadcasting it.”

“You better not be. Shit.” She tosses off the last of her bourbon, then reaches for the new glass. “I still think I ought to walk out of here.”

“Walk then.”

She looks at him again, bites her lip. He holds her gaze for a long moment. She drops her eyes.

“I’ll think about it,” she says. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“Think about it as long as you need to. Think about it next time you have your ass on the line in some coulee.”

She shakes her head, laughs. “If it weren’t you, Cowboy...”

He grins, sips his drink. “It
is
me,” he says. “It’s lucky I exist. ”

Arnold’s warning look appears suddenly as a pop-up minigun. She puts a hand on his arm.

“Not so lucky for some people, if this actually works.”

“I know. ”

“If those people find out about this, you won’t live twenty-four hours. ”

“I told you. I’m being careful.” He swallows bourbon. “Who else do you think I should talk to? Who’s safe?”

She looks over the room, chewing her lip. Red laserlight flickers in her eyes. “Vlemk, maybe. Ella. Soderman. Not Penn, he’s too close to Pancho.”

“Jimi Gutierrez?”

Arnold shakes her head. “Hard to say what that boy thinks. He’s too crazy for his own good. He’s got good instincts, but maybe he likes to talk too much.”

A few more names come up, and Cowboy vetoes them. Arnold seems to take comfort from the fact that he doesn’t take her every suggestion, that he really is being discreet.

The hob thuds to a finish, and dancers begin to disperse. Cowboy finishes his drink.

“Think about it. Talk to me later,” he says. “Right now, I think I’ll dance.”

“Yeah. Talk to you later.” Her eyes abstracted, her face muscles tense. Thinking hard.

He walks up to the girl with the laser earrings. She’s wearing a strange uniform coat across her shoulders and she doesn’t look like one of the locals, but he’s never seen her with the panzer crowd before. She looks up at Cowboy as he approaches, and he notes the curly hair, the inhaler in her hand. She fires a pair of torpedoes up her snub nose, then holds out the inhaler.

“Snapcoke,” she says. “Want some?”

He takes the inhaler. “Is snapcoke your name?” he asks.

She gives a short, wired laugh. “Might as well be. But my name’s Cathy. ”

The snapcoke numbs his nose and fires his nerves. Music begins to slam from the walls.

Cathy turns out to be a surprisingly energetic dancer, doing leaps and kicks that have her laser earrings dancing red on the walls. They dance the next two dances, then Cowboy offers to buy her a drink. While they walk to the bar, he asks her about the uniform coat.

“I’m a lieutenant in the Coast Guard,” she says.

Cowboy’s surprised. He didn’t think the Coast Guard existed anymore. “No shit,” he says. “Tell me more.”

It turns out she runs a lifesaving cutter out of Norfolk, plucking unlucky sailors from the forty-foot steel-gray chop off Hatteras. She’s on a three-week furlough, hitching across the West and free-climbing vertical mountain walls just for fun.

“I’m going to Yellowstone tomorrow. I’m climbing Medlicott Dome.” She looks at him. Her earrings dazzle his eyes. “Want to watch?”

“I don’t think I have any other plans.”

But just then a new wave of panzerboys swarms into the bar, just arrived from setting up a run across the Dakotas. One of them is Soderman, and Cowboy particularly wants to talk to him. He buys Cathy some more snapcoke and apologizes.

“Business. You know.”

She shrugs. “See you later, maybe.” And fires a pair of torpedoes to keep herself company.

Soderman’s reaction is a lot like Arnold’s. He looks at Cowboy with a respect tempered with an uneasiness very close to fear. “I don’t know about this,” he says. “If it were anybody but you...”

Cowboy’s heard this from just about everyone he’s talked to, and it’s doing wonders for his sense of self-esteem. He figures he’s got enough prestige to put the machine together and make it run, that enough panzerboys will think he’s making sense to join the association. But he also knows the thirdmen won’t like this at all, that they might consider it a regrettable necessity to make sure Cowboy doesn’t come back from his next run. So he’s spreading the word. Quietly. Hoping to make the thing a reality before certain people find out about it.

When he finishes talking to Soderman, he looks out on the dance floor for Cathy and doesn’t find her. These athletes, he thinks, they keep sensible hours. So he dances with Arnold and a couple of the local girls, and he accepts a white Stetson somebody wants to hand him. He tips it back on his head and walks up to his third-floor room.

A few minutes after he turns on his light there’s a knock on his window. He’s surprised to see Cathy’s grinning face peering in, her snub nose pressed to the pane. She’s freeclimbed the brick wall, hanging by fingers and bare toes. He opens the window to let her in. “I like the hat, ”she says. Her sneakers hang around her neck by their laces, and she’s stuffed a small bottle of bourbon in one of them. Cowboy closes the window, and about fifteen seconds later they’re in bed together.

She’s got a compact, well-muscled body, and he’s surprised by her strength. “I hang by my fingernails a lot,” she says. “You’ll see tomorrow, if you join me.”

So the next day Cowboy moves his party to the Yellowstone, and he watches in hopeless terror as Cathy spends most of the day free-soloing the granite face of Medlicott Dome, her boots hanging in space while she supports herself by her fingertips. She doesn’t even use safety lines.

When she comes down, Cowboy goes to hug her and is appalled by the state of her hands, the broken nails, the blood running down her wrists... He picks her up and carries her to a sink, runs hot water and soap, then bathes her hands. “You do this for
fun
?” he asks.

Her eyes smile up at him. “I do everything by the book when I’m on my cutter,” she says. “I’ve got the crew to think about. But out here I like to climb everything without a safety line.”

She puts her hands on his shoulders. He can feel soap and water soaking through his shirt. “Everything I can,” she repeats, and she climbs up his front to kiss him, wrapping her wet hands around his neck as her tongue slides deliberately into his mouth. She’s small enough so that he can hold her without strain, and they complete the carnal act standing up, occasionally banging into bathroom fixtures. Later that night her unhealed cuts break open, and in the morning Cowboy finds bloodmarks on his chest and back.

A couple of days later Cowboy finds he can’t watch as she climbs New Dimensions, so he spends the day in the hotel bar with his friends, keeping the party going. Cathy comes back in the early evening with a burrito in one broken hand and an inhaler of snapcoke in the other. They spend the night climbing each other, exploring chimneys, faces, crevasses. Cowboy thinks she’s perfectly crazy.

It’s not a bad party, though.

A week later Cowboy watches as a giant moon walks its slow patrol in the blue midafternoon sky, bracketed at this point of its beat by a pair of silver dots, power satellites in GEO, feeding their junk into the scarred veins of Earth. Below, the aspens writhe up the Western Slope, trying to caress the gibbous face, doomed by gravity to fail. Everything in orbit around Earth is assumed hostile, the aspens therefore are collaborators. It’s an inescapable conclusion, sad but true. Cowboy shakes his head in sorrow and drinks another mescal.

His surroundings remind him of dependency, and that makes him sour. He’s mixing beer and mescal on the terrace of a bar in Colorado with the remnants of the party. It had filled the place the night before, but now it’s down to three.

Today Cathy’s on a hike with Arnold, who’s become her friend. Cowboy’s staying in the bar, looking for the answers to some questions. He’s been asking them these last weeks, quietly, as the party roistered up and down the Rockies, and pretending that the replies don’t mean anything.

Jimi Gutierrez is eighteen, an up-and-comer with a brand new set of sockets planted in his head, the operation so recent that there’s still a bit of shaved scalp surrounding each porcelain node. He grins through a mouthful of metal braces, watches the world through eyes fevered by speed. He’s fast, the word says, but maybe too unstable to be trusted with major cargoes.

The other panzerboy is Chapel. He’s burly; running to fat, nearing thirty. He drinks quietly and doesn’t speak much. There’s a black box on his belt with a wire that’s studded into his head. A junkie of some kind, the electronic high something he can no longer do without. Buttonheads make Cowboy nervous; he doesn’t trust junkies in general and has a particular aversion to this kind– it’s a near desecration, he thinks, an abuse of the interface. The point is to use the interface to reach out, to touch the remotes from the inside, to access the electron world...to feel yourself moving at the speed of light! The run across the Line is the only addiction Cowboy needs, and it’s something real, not just an electronic stimulation of the lizard pleasure centers.

But Cowboy tolerates Chapel. The man runs almost exclusively for Arkady–– these days he’s a free-lancer only by courtesy-and maybe he’s got a few of the answers Cowboy needs.

“Convoy stuff,” Cowboy says. “Saturday, in Florida. No big deal, but the Dodger says they’re offering a lot.”

“When I started, I was running convoys across Utah,” Jimi says. “Armored trucks, guys with no necks riding shotgun.” He shakes his head, then splashes mescal into a shot glass. “Wouldn’t do that now, though. Don’t need it.”

Cowboy hands him the lime. “The panzer’s in the East, so why not?” he says. “I don’t like it to sit idle for too long. Or me. Rev us up for a day, collect some gold.”

“Yeah. Forgot you were in a panzer. That’s okay. ” Jimi licks salt, drains the mescal, bites the lime. The blaze in his eyes grows brighter.

“I started right on deltas, of course,” Cowboy says. “Didn’t have to run convoys. But you should have seen the distribution networks back then. Flying out of blind canyons on the Indian reservations. Convoys moving without lights across old bits of state highway. It wasn’t the competition that would hijack you back then, it was the refugees. Who could blame them? Half the time I’d be sitting on the runway apron past midnight, waiting for the delivery. And it wouldn’t show, the whole mission would have to be scrubbed.”

“Yeah,” says Jimi, and starts off on a speed monologue, all rapping staccatos, about how the distribution is managed today. Cowboy smiles and raises a finger for another round of beers. He receives a quiet nod from the bartender, a Navajo and a refugee, still looking a bit bewildered behind the eyes. A man lacking a center, without a home, and no matter how many Ways are chanted by the Singers, it’s not going to change things. Half of his reservation is as barren as the moon, strip-mined since the war by the Orbitals, and the rest is poisoned by the tailings piles, paved over into parking lots, or dry as the Sahara since the miners sucked off the water to run their operations. Texans, Cowboy thinks, leaving their goddamn dust bowls and their fairy high-heel bootprints from here to fucking Nix Olympica.

The drinks come and Cowboy sips his while listening to Jimi’s stories. Asking questions here and there, but just mostly letting the man talk. Talk of midnight errands to Orbital loading docks, security people paid to look the other way, betrayal, fouled schedules, police raids on thirdman warehouses arranged by the thirdmen themselves so the laws could look good, the cargo quietly bought back later. Foulups, missed connections, real raids, treachery between thirdmen. Two thirdmen running their panzerboys across the same piece of territory on the same night, neither aware of the other until the blaze of radars from above pinned them both.

“Arkady, now,” Cowboy says, “he’s got his networks running smooth. Right, Chapel?”