Mountain of Black Glass (46 page)

Distracted by his observations, Paul kicked something which rolled across the stone with a heart-stopping clatter. Some of the sheep moved nervously, and for a moment the tone of the ogre's snores changed; Paul and Azador stood frozen until the rhythm stabilized again. The human skull, which had come to a halt upside down, teetering on its cranium, seemed to look back at them with grave if inverted amusement.

The job was Azador's now, and Paul would have liked nothing better than to stay near the door while his companion got on with it, but shame and something like loyalty forced him on. He groped his way forward a few inches at a time until he stood near the monster's feet, each one as long as he was tall and almost the same distance across, the skin more leathery and wrinkled than an elephant's hide. Azador inched around toward the creature's head, clearly torn as to which of his planned targets to strike, the lidded eye or unprotected throat. The Cyclops lay on his back with head tilted and a massive arm draped across his forehead: the angle was not good for reaching either spot. Azador climbed onto a rock shelf that brought him above the level of the giant's head, looked at Paul for a moment, then gripped the spear tightly and bent his knees before jumping down onto the Cyclops' chest.

As he sprang, one of the sheep bleated in alarm. The giant moved only a little, rolling in his heavy sleep, but it was enough for Azador's blade to miss the pit of the throat and tear down the side of the giant's neck instead.

Polyphemus woke, roaring like a jet engine, and slapped Azador off his chest. Paul's companion flew across the room, thudded into a corner, and did not rise.

Still roaring, his voice so loud in that closed place that it seemed he would shake the entire cavern into stone-dust, Polyphemus rolled onto his knees and then rose to his full height. His great, shaggy head swung around and his eye fixed on Paul, who took a stumbling step backward.

I was right,
he thought as the giant's bloody hand reached out to close on him and crush him into paste,
it really wasn't a very good plan. . . .

I
T was hard to watch the little kids running around on the playground with their nice Mamapapa-type clothes and their clean faces and not wonder what that would feel like. But although he could imagine a boy
like
him doing those kind of things, he could never imagine
himself
doing it—not Carlos Andreas Chascarillo Izabal. Not Cho-Cho.

He saw her come close to his hiding place, wandering by herself. He looked to make sure that the two teachers were still standing in the shade near the classroom, then he rattled the bushes. She didn't hear him, so he rattled them louder, then whispered as loud as he dared, “Hey, weenit! You deaf?”

She looked up, startled, and even when she recognized him she still looked frightened. It made him angry, and for a moment he thought of just leaving and telling
El Viejo
he hadn't found her. “Come here,” he said instead. “I gotta ask you something,
m'entiendes
?”

The little girl turned and checked the teachers, just as he had done. He found himself admiring her just a bit: for a little rich white girl, she wasn't all stupid. She wandered closer to the fence, but still kept a short distance away, as though he might reach out and grab her.

“What?” she asked; then, “Is Mister Sellars sick?” She looked really worried.

Cho-Cho made a face. “He ain't sick. He wants to know how come you don't come see him or nothing?”

She looked like she wanted to cry. It made Cho-Cho want to hit her, but he didn't know why. Probably just because the old cripple liked her so much, had him running errands to see how she was doing, like she was some kind of princess or something.

“My . . . my daddy took the Storybook Sunglasses. He says I shouldn't have them.” A nearby shriek made her jump. One of her classmates had grabbed another kid's sweater, but was running off with it in the opposite direction, away from the fence, a couple of kids chasing after him. “He's trying to find out why I have . . . why I have them . . . and he won't let me go out and play or anything until I tell him.”

Cho-Cho frowned. “So you getting all punished? 'Cause you won't tell them where the glasses from?”

The little girl—he could never remember her name right, even when the old man said it all the time: Crystal Ball or something stupid like that—nodded. Cho-Cho wasn't surprised she was keeping her mouth shut, since where he grew up nobody told their parents anything about what
really
happened, if they even had parents, but he thought it was pretty interesting that she wasn't folding up right away. Rich little girl like that, he would have thought she'd give up as soon as they started the whippings, and they must have started those already.

“I'll tell
El Viejo,
” he said.

“Does he want me to come see him?” she asked. “I can't—I'm grounded.”

Cho-Cho shrugged. He was just doing his job. He wasn't going to waste time telling her all kinds of cheerful shit to make her feel better.

“La caridad es veneno,”
his father had always said, his poor, stupid, crazy father—
Charity is poison.
“It makes you weak, boy,” was the explanation. “They give it to us like they give poison to rats. We're the rats in the walls, understand? And they want to make us weak so they can kill us.”

Carlos Sr. could tell his family not to take handouts from the government or the church, but the problem was, he couldn't keep a job. He was a hard worker and a pretty smart one (one of the reasons it was still better to get fruit picked by hand), and if the man in the truck chose him to go to the citrus fields outside Tampa for the day, all morning that truck man would be thinking about what a good choice he'd made, because Carlos Sr. would be storming up and down the rows, filling twice as many orange or grapefruit bins as anyone else. But then someone would look at him funny, or one of the foremen would ask him a question that felt like an insult, and then someone would be lying on the ground with a bloody nose. Sometimes it was Carlos Sr., but usually it was the other person. And that would be that. Another job lost, another field where he couldn't work until they had a different man on the truck, a different foreman.

But he didn't take charity, as he was always pointing out. Carlos Jr.—never called Carlito, “little Carlos,” because for some reason that, too, would have been an insult to his father—heard the speech so many times he could have recited it for him.

Carlos Sr.'s wife was not such a stickler for integrity, although she was never stupid enough to let her husband know that some of what she brought home to the honeycomb underneath Highway 4 to help feed their five children was not merely earned from her job at a grocery store, where she mopped the floors when things spilled and carried boxes from one side of the warehouse to the other, but in fact came from the very charity he hated, in the form of state assistance to indigent families. Food vouchers.

It wasn't that Carlos Jr. particulary disagreed with any of his father's philosophical positions. At a very basic level, he even understood and agreed with Carlos Sr.'s distrust of helping hands; neither would he have liked to be known as “Carlito,” so he felt no loss there. His objection to his father was far more basic. He hated him. Carlos Sr.'s bullying and bragging would have been more tolerable if the Izabal family had lived a life of even middle-of-the-road poverty, but they were poor as dirt. The father's comparison of their position to that of rats was horrifyingly true.

Carlos Jr. considered himself a man by the time he was eight. Did he and his friends not bring in at least as much to their families as their benighted, hopeless fathers? What difference was there between what others earned by sweat and what they earned by thievery, except that the latter was less work and infinitely more exciting? When he first met his friends Beto and Iskander and they tried to call him Carlito, he hit Iskander in the eye and kicked Beto so hard that the smaller boy had run home crying. His reasons for not using that name were different than his father's, but his determination was just as great. He had nothing against nicknames, though. Later, when Iskander started to call him “Cho-Cho” after a brand of rice candy that he particularly liked to shoplift, he accepted the name graciously.

He and Beto and Iskander did a lot of things together, most of which were meant to put money in their pockets, candy in their sweaty fists, and dermal patches on whatever areas of their skin could be spit-scrubbed clean enough for the chemical transfer. They had a business, that was the truth of it, with diverse interests, some of which were as interesting and inventive as anything conceived by people with college degrees. In fact, they were busy with one of their projects—”tending the herd,” as they called it—on the night the terrible thing happened.

The International Vending Corporation had come up with a new twist on the basic concept of food and drink delivery, something they rather preciously named “Walkabots”—vending machines on silent tank treads that covered entire neighborhoods, directed by simple codes to move from place to place. IVC did not expect to make even as much money from them as from simple stationary machines, but the big boxes were also mobile advertisements, playing up-tempo advertising jingles and greeting customers (once they came within range of the infrared eye) with cheerful canned chatter. It didn't take long for Cho-Cho and his friends (and hundreds like them in every major city) to realize that the machines could be physically removed to other neighborhoods, so that the IVC service people could not locate them (something a simple chip could have prevented if the vending machine executives had been a little less naive.) Once the machines were set roving on their new turf, the profits could then be safely harvested by Cho-Cho and his tiny business consortium until the box ran out of goodies. After they had jammed the credit slots which most people would have otherwise used, each machine still took in enough old-fashioned coin to deliver a tidy little profit at the end of each day.

Within a couple of months they had a free-range herd of Walkabot vending machines operating all over Tampa, so many that Cho-Cho and his friends had to surf the tramline for hours every night to collect all their takings. They were living so high that Cho-Cho even got himself an aspirational, Goggleboy-type neural access shunt installed in a dirty backroom surgery by a streetcorner can man, but they all knew that the time was short—the IVC people were busy snatching back every machine they could get their hands on—so they were pushing the enterprise as far and as fast as they could.

On the night the terrible thing happened, little Beto had located an unsheperded machine in Ybor City, an impressive new model with a holographic display of a fizzing drink being poured from a bottle hovering like a halo above a two-and-a-half-meter plasteel box. Beto was delirious with pleasure—he declared this would be the king of their herd—and despite Cho-Cho's reluctance to kidnap such an unusual-looking machine without investigating it first, he let Beto and Iskander have their way. In a matter of moments they had jacked it up onto the machine-rustling dolly which they had liberated from an auto garage and were heading across town.

The IVC Model 6302-B was meant to solve the problem that had plagued the last generation of mobile machines; many others beside Cho-Cho and his friends had discovered how to kidnap the mobile dispensers, and the company was sick of being a laughingstock. The worried executives at International Vending Company did not realize that they had made things dramatically worse.

As Cho-Cho and his partners took advantage of a late-night lull in traffic on the expressway to get their machine across—they were only boys, after all, and could not possibly have lifted such a large machine up the stairs to the pedestrian walkway—the Model 6302-B crossed the border of its designated vending area, which set off its defensive systems. An alarm as loud as an ambulance siren began to shriek, warning lights to strobe, and a theoretically harmless vegetable dye with ultraviolet trace elements sprayed from ports along the side of the drink machine to mark the machine rustlers.