The Shockwave Rider (5 page)

On her own terms, of course—no one else’s.

Last year she’d rejected five offers. This year, so far only one. Next year?

Having a daughter out of step like Kate—hell! Why couldn’t the stupid slittie act normal like everybody else, dig up her roots and plug them in some other socket, preferably on a different continent?

If Anti-Trauma Inc. had started up soon enough
…!

Tactless people sometimes wondered publicly why Ina insisted on remaining in the same city as her daughter who was, after all, twenty-two and had had her own apt since entering college and was not noticeably clinging or dependent. But Ina hated to be asked about that.

She never like being asked questions she couldn’t answer.

One week into her two-week vacation Ina wanted to be cheered up but the man she’d kept company with since arrival had left today. That meant dining alone. Worse and worse. Eventually, with much effort she put on her favorite red-and-gold evening gear and went to the open-air dining terrace where soft music mingled with the hush of waves. She felt a little better after two drinks. To put the regular sparkle back in her world, what about champagne?

And a minute later she was shouting at the waiter (this being an expensive and exclusive establishment instead of the cast-from-a-mold type where you dealt always with machines that kept going wrong … not that human beings were immune from
that
): “What the hell do you mean, there isn’t any?”

Her shrill voice caused heads to turn.

“That gentleman over there”—pointing—“just ordered the last bottle we have in stock.”

“Call the manager!”

Who came, and explained with regret that was probably unfeigned (who likes to find his pride and joy deeveed by a mere bunch of circuitry?) why there was nothing he could do. The computer in charge of resources utilization at the HQ of the chain controlling this and a hundred other hotels had decided to allot what champagne was available to resorts where it could be sold at twice the price the traffic in the Sea Islands could bear. The decision was today’s. Tomorrow the wine list would have been reprinted.

Meanwhile the waiter had faded in response to a signal from another table, and when he returned Ina was struggling not to scream with fury.

He laid a slip of paper in front of her. It bore a message in firm clear handwriting, unusual now that most literate kids were taught to type at seven. She read it at a glance:

The lucky shivver with the champagne has an idea. Share the bottle?—Sandy Locke

She raised her eyes and found grinning at her a man in a fashionable pirate shirt open to the waist, a gaudy headband, gilt wristers, one long lean finger poised at arm’s length on the cork.

She felt her anger fade like mist at sunrise.

He was a strange one, this Sandy. He dismissed her complaint about how ridiculous it was never to have any more champagne at this hotel and steered the conversation into other channels. That made her ill-tempered all over again, and she went to bed alone.

But when the breakfast-trolley rolled automatically to her bedside at 0900, there was a bottle of champagne on it tied with a ribbon and accompanied by a posy. When she met Sandy by the pool at eleven, he asked whether she had enjoyed it.

“So it was you who fixed it! Do you work for this hotel chain?”

“This slumpy linkage? I’m insulted. Third-rank operations aren’t my framework. Shall we swim?”

The next question died on her lips. She had been going to ask what pull he had, whether it was government or a hypercorp. But another explanation fitted, and if that were the right one, the implications were so enticing she dared not broach the matter without a buildup. She said, “Sure, let’s.” And peeled off her clothes.

The wine list was not reprinted after all, and the manager wore a very puzzled expression. That convinced Ina her guess might be correct. Next morning while they were breakfasting in bed she put it squarely to Sandy.

“Poker, I think you must be a CSC.”

“Only if this bed isn’t bugged.”

“Is it?”

“No. I made sure. There are some things I simply don’t care to let computers know.”

“How right you are.” She shivered. “Some of my colleagues at G2S, you know, live at Trianon, where they test new life-styles. And they boast about how their actions are monitored night and day, compare the advantages of various ultramodern bugs … I don’t know how they can stand it.”

“Stand?” he echoed sardonically. “Not a matter of standing, except social standing, I guess. More, it kind of props them up. A few years and they’ll forget they have feet of their own.”

All day Ina was near to shaking with excitement. To think that by pure chance she had bumped into a genuine three-vee tactile-true member of that prestigious elite, the tiny secretive tribe of computer-sabotage consultants … ! It was a perfectly legal discipline, provided its practitioners didn’t tamper with data reserved to a government dept under the McBann-Krutch “greatest-good-of-the-greatest-number” act, but its experts didn’t advertise themselves any more than industrial spies, and it would have been politer to ask whether he was into DDR, “difficult data retrieval.” Luckily he’d taken no offense.

Delicately she hinted at what was worrying her. How much longer was she still going to be able to move upward, not crosswise, when she changed jobs? At first his response was casual: “Oh, turn freelance, why not, the way I did? It’s not so much different from the regular plug-in life-style. When you get adjusted to it.”

Echoes underlying “freelance” resounded in her head: the lone knight riding out to champion his lady fair and Christian justice, the King’s Messenger, the secret agent, the merchant venturer …

“I’ve thought about it, naturally. But I’d dearly like to know what G2S has added to my file before I decide.”

“You could try asking me to find out.”

“You mean”—hardly daring to hope—“you’re for rent?”

“Right now?” He put the nip into nipple with sharp well-cared-for teeth. “No, my jiggle-oh rating is strictly O. This kind of thing I do for free.”

“You know what I mean!”

He laughed. “Don’t slidewise out of control. Of course I know. And it might be kind of fun to poke G2S.”

“Are you serious?”

“I could be, when my vacation’s over. Which it isn’t.”

Musingly, at two in the morning—her sleeping time was being eroded, but what the hell?—she said, “It isn’t knowing that the machines know things about you which you wouldn’t tell your straightener, let alone your spouse or chief. It’s not knowing what the things
are
which they know.”

“Sweedack. The number of people I’ve seen destabled by just that form of uncertainty, clear into paranoia!”

“Sweedack?”

“Ah, you don’t follow hockey.”

“Now and then, but I’m not what you’d call a ’fish for it.”

“Nor me, but you have to stay in circuit. It’s French. Came south with Canadian hockey players. Short for
je suis d’accord.
Thought everybody had picked up on it.”

Before she could guard her tongue she had said, “Oh, yes! I’ve heard Kate say it to her friends.”

“Who?”

“Uh … My daughter.” And she trembled, imagining the inevitable sequence:

I didn’t know you had a daughter. She in high school?

No—uh—at UMKC.

Followed by the brief silence full of subtraction which would all too closely betray her location on the age scale.

But this man, ultimately tactful, merely laughed. “Quit worrying. I know all about you. Think I’d have generated so much champagne on spec?”

That figured. In seconds she was laughing too. When she recovered, she said, “Would you really come to KC?”

“If you can afford me.”

“G2S can afford anybody. What do you usually click on as?”

“A systems rationalizer.”

She brightened. “Fantastic! We lost our head-of-dept in that area. He broke his contract and—Say, you didn’t know that too, did you?” Suddenly suspicious.

He shook his head, stifling a yawn. “Never had any reason to probe G2S until I met you.”

“No. No, of course not. What attracted you to your line of work, Sandy?”

“I guess my daddy was a phone freak and I inherited the gene.”

“I want a proper answer.”

“I don’t know. Unless maybe it’s a sneaking feeling that people are wrong when they say human beings can’t keep track of the world any more, we have to leave it up to the machines. I don’t want to be hung out to dry on a dead branch of the evolutionary tree.”

“Nor do I. Right, I’ll get you to KC, Sandy. I think your attitude is healthy. And we could do with a blast of fresh air.”

SOLD TO THE MAN AT THE TOP

“I am not bleating you. This shivver is escape-velocity type. And we’ve been short one systems rash since Kurt bailed out and not wishing to cast nasturtiums at George she hasn’t made my job any less of a bed of nails—let alone yours, hm?

“Sure, he asked for a trial period himself. Eight weeks, maybe twelve, see how he meshes with the rest of us.

“Right now he’s on vacation. I told you: I met him in the Sea Islands. You can reach him there.

“Great. Here, take down his code. 4GH …”

UNSETTLEMENT PROGRAM

The palisade of thousand-meter towers around Mid-Continental Airport had two gaps in it, memorializing not—for once—buildings that had been riot-blown or tribaled but the crash sites of two veetol airliners, one taking off and one landing, which had slidewised simultaneously off their repulsors last week. Rumor had it the reason might be found in the launch of Ground-to-Space’s latest orbital factory from their field westward in the cross-river state of Kansas; allegedly someone had omitted to notify the airlines of the volume and extent of the blast wave. But an inquiry was still in progress, and anyhow G2S was far too much of a Power in the Land hereabouts for any negligence charge to emerge from the hearings.

Nonetheless the outcome was a popular subject for bets on illegal short-term Delphi pools. Legal pools, naturally, were forbidden to pre-guess a court’s verdict.

The façades of the remaining towers, whether homes or offices, were as blank as ancient gravestones and as gloomy. They had mostly been erected during the shitabrick phase architecture had suffered through in the early nineties. There was a more flattering term for the style—antideco—but it was too lame to have caught on. Such structures were as dehumanized as the coffins employed to bury the victims of the Great Bay Quake, and stemmed from the same cause. The damage sustained when San Francisco, plus most of Berkeley and Oakland, collapsed overnight had come close to bankrupting the country, so that everything but
everything
had to be designed with the fewest possible frills.

In a desperate attempt to make a virtue of necessity, all such buildings had been made “ecofast”—in other words, they were heavily insulated, they incorporated elaborate garbage-reclamation systems, every apartment was supplied with a flat area outside that caught at least some sunlight, allegedly large enough to be hydroponically planted with sufficient vegetables and fruit to meet the requirements of an average family. The consequence had been to fix in the public mind the impression that any genuinely efficient building must be stark, ugly, undesirable and dull.

It seemed that necessity was too hateful for anybody to enjoy being virtuous.

Thanks to some smart route adjustment by his airline’s computers, his plane was a few minutes early. Ina had agreed to meet him on the main concourse, but when he emerged, tingling slightly, from the static-discharge chamber by the plane gate, she wasn’t in sight.

It would be out of character for him to waste spare minutes. Rubbing his arms, reflecting that even if electric lift for aircraft was efficient, economical and non-polluting it was damnably hard on the passengers when they had to shed their accumulated volts, he caught sight of a sign pointing the way to the public Delphi boards.

Most of his belongings, bought to fit his new identity, were on their way direct to G2S’s recruit-settlement block. But he did have a travel bag weighing nine kaygees. From under the nose of a sour woman who favored him with a string of curses he nabbed an autoporter and—after consulting the illuminated fee table on its flank—credded the minimum: $35 for an hour’s service. Rates were higher here than at Toledo, but that was to be expected; the cost of living at Trianon, a hundred kilometers away, was the second highest in the world.

From now until his credit expired the machine would carry his bag in its soft plastic jaws and follow him as faithfully as a well-trained hound, which indeed it resembled, down to the whimper it was programed to utter at the 55-minute mark, and the howl at 58.

At 60 it would drop the bag and slink away.

With it at his heels he stood surveying the high-slung display, tracking the shifting figures with the ease of much practice. He looked first at his favorite sector, social legislation, and was pleased to see he had two won bets due to be collected shortly. Despite all the pressure that had been applied, the president would not after all be able to make jail sentences mandatory for slandering his personal aides—it would cost him his majority if he tried. And Russian math-teaching methods were definitely going to be introduced here, given that money was still piling in when the odds had shortened to five-to-four. Well, if the U.S. team were ever to make a decent showing in the Mathematical Olympiads, there was no alternative.