Island Worlds (6 page)

Now it was a run-down, outdated slum area. It had been outdated before its completion. Such structures were too laborious to construct and could not keep up with the tide of immigration. In its early years, there had been fierce competition for housing in the Watts development. Now even the L.A. Police were reluctant to enter it.

As they slid from the freeway into the web of streets surrounding the development, Thor took manual control of the little vehicle. Fu pointed to a flashing sign which shifted to several languages in turn. The English part read: "Safe Parking." There was also an image of a car inside a stylized cage: the universal illit symbol for a guarded parking facility. They drove into the small lot and were stopped by a boy who stood in the center of the drive approach, holding a fire ax at port arms. As they climbed from the car, another boy, perhaps fourteen years old, emerged from a shack next to the drive. Inside the shack, they could see a group of younger boys and girls, most of them with holo masks on their faces.

"You going into the Big W?" the boy asked. He wore a coverall of red imitation leather and had a chromed ball-peen hammer thonged to his chain-belt. His shaven scalp was covered by a tattooed spider and contact film transformed his eyes to scarlet orbs.

"For a couple of hours," Fu said. "How much?"

"Two C," the boy said, rubbing the thumb and fingers of his raised right hand in the gesture which had appeared coincidentally with the invention of paper money.

"Capitalist pig!" Fu protested. "Quarter-C, tops."

The boy grinned, displaying teeth enameled the color of blood. "One C, exploiter of the masses. Less buys less protection."

"Three-quarter C, enemy of the people," Fu said.

"Done," the boy said. "Three-quarter C for two hours. For every hour or partial hour after that, one half C. After ten hours, we declare you dead and ransom the car back to the rental company."

"Agreed," Fu said.

"Three-quarter C in advance. " The boy took a slotted credit box from his belt and Thor thrust his card into it, transferring seventy-five dollars. The boy in red turned and said something to the ax-bearer, speaking fast in a dialect Thor couldn't follow, although it seemed to have some English words in it. The other boy tossed his ax into the back of the car, climbed in and drove the little vehicle into a caged area. There were several other conveyances there, some of them expensive models. Thor and Fu began to walk the two blocks to the Watts development.

"What was that language that little bandit was speaking?" Thor asked.

"Yankrainian. It's a youthspeak like Burmex, used by the twelve-to-sixteen crowd. There's two L.A. holo stations that use nothing else. On your toes, now. We're in Injun country."

A sour smell hung over the whole district, as if the sanitation systems had been failing for years. There were few people on the streets at this hour, and they displayed little curiosity toward Thor and his companion. The general attitude was one of dejected apathy,

"Stop looking around like you were expecting these poor losers to jump us," Fu said. "Relax. Nobody's going to bother us except groups of three or more. The gangs mostly hang out inside the complex."

"And that's where we're going," Thor said uneasily.

"You want to see what's happening, you have to take the risks." The hulking building was getting closer, looking more like a cliff than an artifact.

"Do you come down here often?" Thor asked.

"Maybe once a month. Down here is where the politics of despair are generated. To get the other end of the spectrum, I hire out part-time to a catering firm that supplies waiters for rich people's parties in the silicon-and-wine territory. They like the feeling of having humans act as servants for them. I can pick up a lot by listening to them talk."

"I'm surprised the McNaughtons haven't picked that up yet. They're still high-tech, only robot servants."

Now they were at the base of the structure. The walls were covered with luminescent graffiti to a height of twenty feet. Splintered glass crunched under their feet as they walked through a wide entranceway from which the doors had long since disappeared. The entrance opened onto a huge atrium twenty stories in height. Lining the atrium were twenty elevator tubes. Four or five of the elevators seemed to be in working order. The other tubes were filled with several stories of trash cast in by upper-level dwellers.

On the lowest levels, lurid neon and holographic signs enticed passersby into establishments catering to every possible taste. Bizarrely-costumed groups wandered about aimlessly. In the center of the atrium, a group of perhaps fifty persons in all-enveloping sackcloth robes and masked hoods constantly blew the same two notes on battered trumpets.

"Slaves of the New Apocalypse," Fu said, nodding toward the horn-blowers. "They've been blowing those two notes in shifts for more than a year now. They figure if they keep it up long enough, God will notice and destroy the world and take them up to heaven."

They mounted a stair to the second level, where entertainment was the order of the day or night. Everywhere, huddled against the walls or sprawled in the walkways, were the inert forms of drunks and druggies. Colored smokes emerged from dim doorways and the sound of music was raucous and unending. Holographic shills appeared outside entranceways and clamored for attention, promising untold delights to be had within.

Most of the dense crowds wore the shabby clothing of the proles or the idiosyncratic uniforms of youth gangs. Some were in the native dress of whatever part of the world they had fled to come to this place. Dozens of languages were to be heard. Here and there were individuals or small groups in expensive, fashionable clothes; the bored rich out for low amusements among their inferiors. They were invariably accompanied by hulking bodyguards.

Thor found it a disturbingly stimulating place. It was far livelier than the dismal streets outside, but its grotesque combination of gaiety and misery was disorienting. He leaned on a railing overlooking the atrium floor and nodded to a crowd of Francophone Asians filing into a restaurant. "What do they come here for?" he asked. "I mean, not just here, but L.A. Hell, all of the U.S. is headed down the tubes. That's no surprise, of course, what with the insane redistribution of productive middle-class income to dole-hungry lower classes, while upper classes are immune to serious taxation. Not to mention the socially self-destructive educational policies and the legislations catering only to the special interest groups. What draws all these immigrants here?"

"Because, compared to whatever Third World hellhole they come from, this is still heaven."

"It's appalling," Thor said. "What is there for them to do when they get here?"

"Very little," Fu said, pushing back his hat, his eyes following a richly-dressed woman trailed by a security robot. "This country was always the immigrant's dream, but it was built by taking land away from Indians and giving it to the immigrants. When most of the Indian land was gone, there was industry opening up and needing lots of labor. Now that's gone, too.

"The frontier's in space now, and space unfortunately isn't a frontier for the masses. If all the resources of the planet were devoted to building ships and sending out as many people as possible, it wouldn't put a dent in the annual birth rate." He shifted his grip on his stick slightly as four youths in leather masks walked by, studying the two truculently through slanted goggles. The four wore metal-plated gloves. They passed on and Fu relaxed slightly.

"What's left," Fu went on, "is despair and envy."

"Despair I can understand," Thor commented, "but why envy?"

"That brings us back to holo programming. You saw some of this in your sampling today, but it pervades all of popular programming, not just the space-oriented series like
Asteroids
. Everywhere, the emphasis is on the doings and possessions of the absurdly rich. These people we see all around us here spend most of their day, vicariously, amid the surroundings of the filthy rich and they know that they'll never have access to a life like that. Worse, they can't even have the illusion that the rich and powerful are somehow superior to themselves. They see that those people are just jerks like everybody else."

"So what can they do?" Thor asked.

"They can vote," Fu said. "With any degree of solidarity, the unemployed or semi-employed underclass forms the most powerful voting bloc in any nation that has a popular vote at all. That's too much potential political power to just leave lying around unexploited. Earth First has figured a way to make use of them." He nodded to a group of men who had just entered the complex. They looked like factory workers just coming off shift from some light industry facility nearby. They wore coveralls with a company logo on the breast that Thor couldn't make out, but each wore another device on his back that was large enough to read from the second level; it was the symbol ©1.

"Now they're being told that it's the offworlders that're bleeding them," Fu said. "Precious tax money is going into expensive projects in space from which they derive no benefit. It's a stroke of genius, really."

"Why do you say that?" Opposite them on the same level, he saw a sign advertising a drug service which tailored its product to the body chemistry of the buyer.

"Well, because you can have great big demonstrations and mass rallies without ugly pogroms. After all, the people they're learning to hate are millions of klicks away."

Suddenly, Thor was profoundly depressed. The sheer immensity of the problem paralyzed the mind. "Come on," he said, "let's go."

"But there's lots more to see," Fu protested. "You haven't even gone inside one of the pain palaces yet."

"Not tonight," Thor said. "I'll come back later. I've had enough for now."

"It's a little too much to take in all at once," Fu agreed, leading the way back down to the entrance. "Rest up tomorrow and I'll take you to some other places. There's a religious revival over on Cahuenga that's been going on for three months. You have to see it to understand what despair is all about."

They walked back out through the littered entrance and found the four leather-masked men waiting outside. "You belong to the Baron," intoned one in a hieratic voice.

Fu smiled. "We're just sightseers, friends. We don't even have anything valuable on us." He held his stick lightly by the middle, balanced casually over one shoulder.

"We don't steal," said one. "We've vowed two goats to Baron Samedi. You're it." With no more warning than that, they attacked.

If Thor had had to think about it, he would have died in the next second. The attack was so sudden, so unprovoked, so
unbelievable
, that the conscious part of his mind still had no idea what was happening. The unconscious part, though, had been conditioned by thousands of hours in the
dojo
, so that thought was unnecessary. He sidestepped the knife before his senses even registered its presence and his right hand shot out into the bump in the center of the mask, between the slanting eyepieces of the goggles. The deadly
shomen-ate
crushed the man's nose to a pulp, jerking his head backward. A second man was already swinging a chain overhand toward his head and Thor stepped inside its arc, blocking overhead with his left forearm as the stiffened fingers of his right hand lanced upward beneath the man's sternum. The attacker doubled up, gasping. The vicious blow to the solar plexus could easily render a man unconscious, and this one did.

Thor looked about wildly and saw the other two masked men lying peacefully on the sidewalk. Fu leaned with both hands on the top of his cane, his hat at a jaunty angle, looking fresh and elegant and absurdly resembling a soft-shoe dancer. Thor hadn't heard the impacts of the stick, but they had been effective. A number of people went into or out of the building, sparing no more than a glance for the aftermath of the little battle.

"It worked," Thor said, wonderingly. "It really worked!" He began to notice a burning pain across his back, where the chain had connected after his block.

"Worked just fine," Fu said. "You've never done it for real?"

Thor shook his head and knelt by his first attacker. "I might have killed this one," he said, tugging at the mask. The mask came off, revealing a blotchy, pale face. The man was around thirty and had a scraggly red beard. He was breathing stertorously and was bleeding from the nose, but seemed otherwise undamaged.

"He's fine," Fu said. "A skull that thick would be hard to damage. They'll all live. As I advised earlier, we won't bother the police. These vacuum-heads would just sue us. Come on."

Thor got up and walked with Fu back toward the parking lot. He began to tremble slightly with delayed reaction and thrust his hands into his pockets to hide it. "Would they have killed us?"

"Deader'n hell," Fu assured him. "The courts won't touch them, but don't despair. Baron Samedi is going to be very pissed off at them. Probably turn them into zombies." He thought for a moment. "Not that it'd be much of a change. "

Something struck Thor. "That one I unmasked was white. I thought
voudon
followers were all black. Haitians, mostly."

"Not any more," Fu said.

They retrieved the car and set out for Fu's apartment. For once, Thor was glad to have an autopilot. The sudden, shocking outburst of violence had shaken him badly. When they were out on the freeway, Fu broke the silence.

"Thor, there's someone you need to contact when you get to Luna. Man by the name of Martin Shaw. He's a cousin, sort of. The name Shaw is Chinese, by the way, not English, like George Bernard Shaw. He doesn't look very Chinese, though. He's a Eurasian from Singapore. Kind of like Lenin, he looks slightly Asiatic to Westerners and slightly European to Asians. Anyway, he's a smuggler these days, strictly respectable, though. And he's a revolutionary, which is what got him kicked off Earth in the first place. He was sent out from Singapore after some indiscretions involving explosives and government buildings. Of course they would've shot him for that, so he let them pick him up for publishing his unlicensed newspaper before the other things could be pinned on him.