A Good Old-Fashioned Future (24 page)

The door broke in downstairs, with a concussive blast. Screams echoed up the stairs. “That’s torn it!” Eddy said.

He snatched up a multiplugged power outlet, dashed across the room, and kicked the office door open. With a shout, he jumped onto the landing, swinging the heavy power-strip over his head.

The Critic’s academic cadre were no physical match for the Referee’s knights-in-armor; but their fire extinguishers were surprisingly effective weapons. They coated everything in white caustic soda and filled the air with great blinding, billowing wads of flying, freezing droplets. It was clear that the defenders had been practicing.

The sight of the desperate struggle downstairs overwhelmed Eddy. He jumped down the stairs three at a time and flung himself into the midst of the battle. He conked a soda-covered helmet with a vicious overhead swing of his power-strip, then slipped and fell heavily on his back.

He began wrestling desperately across the soda-slick floor with a half-blinded knight. The knight clawed his visor up. Beneath the metal mask the knight was, if anything, younger than himself. He looked like a nice kid. He clearly meant well. Eddy hit the kid in the jaw as hard as he could, then began slamming his helmeted head into the floor.

Another knight kicked Eddy in the belly. Eddy fell off his victim, got up, and went for the new attacker. The two of them, wrestling clumsily, were knocked off balance by a sudden concerted rush through the doorway; a dozen Moral raiders slammed through, flinging torches and bottles of flaming gel. Eddy slapped his new opponent across
the eyes with his soda-daubed hand, then lurched to his feet and jammed the loose spex back onto his face. He began coughing violently. The air was full of smoke; he was smothering.

He lurched for the door. With the panic strength of a drowning man, he clawed and jostled his way free.

Once outside the data-haven, Eddy realized that he was one of dozens of people daubed head to foot with white foam. Wheezing, coughing, collapsing against the side of the building, he and his fellow refugees resembled veterans of a monster cream-pie fight.

They didn’t, and couldn’t, recognize him as an enemy. The caustic soda was eating its way into Eddy’s cheap jumpsuit, reducing the bubbled fabric to weeping red rags.

Wiping his lips, ribs heaving, Eddy looked around. The spex had guarded his eyes, but their filth subroutine had crashed badly. The internal screen was frozen. Eddy shook the spex with his foamy hands, fingersnapped at them, whistled aloud. Nothing.

He edged his way along the wall.

At the back of the crowd, a tall gentleman in a medieval episcopal mitre was shouting orders through a bullhorn. Eddy wandered through the crowd until he got closer to the man. He was a tall, lean man, in his late forties, in brocaded vestments, a golden cloak, and white gloves.

This was the Moral Referee. Eddy considered jumping this distinguished gentleman and pummeling him, perhaps wrestling his bullhorn away and shouting contradictory orders through it.

But even if he dared to try this, it wouldn’t do Eddy much good. The Referee with the bullhorn was shouting in German. Eddy didn’t speak German. Without his spex he couldn’t read German. He didn’t understand Germans or their issues or their history. In point of fact he had no real reason at all to be in Germany.

The Moral Referee noticed Eddy’s fixed and calculating gaze. He lowered his bullhorn, leaned down a little
from the top of his portable mahogany pulpit, and said something to Eddy in German.

“Sorry,” Eddy said, lifting his spex on their neck chain. “Translation program crashed.”

The Referee examined him thoughtfully. “Has the acid in that foam damaged your spectacles?” he said, in excellent English.

“Yes sir,” Eddy said. “I think I’ll have to strip ’em and blow-dry the chips.”

The Referee reached within his robe and handed Eddy a monogrammed linen kerchief. “You might try this, young man.”

“Thanks a lot,” Eddy said. “I appreciate that, really.”

“Are you wounded?” the Referee said, with apparently genuine concern.

“No, sir. I mean, not really.”

“Then you’d better return to the fight,” the Referee said, straightening. “I know we have them on the run. Be of good cheer. Our cause is just.” He lifted his bullhorn again and resumed shouting.

The first floor of the building had caught fire. Groups of the Referee’s people were hauling linked machines into the street and smashing them to fragments on the pavement. They hadn’t managed to knock the bars from the windows, but they had battered some enormous holes through the walls. Eddy watched, polishing his spex.

Well above the street, the wall of the third floor began to disintegrate.

Moral Knights had broken into the office where Eddy had last seen the Cultural Critic. They had hauled their hydraulic ram up the stairs with them. Now its blunt nose was smashing through the brick wall as if it were stale cheese.

Fist-sized chunks of rubble and mortar cascaded to the street, causing the raiders below to billow away. In seconds, the raiders on the third floor had knocked a hole in the wall the size of a manhole cover. First, they flung down an emergency ladder. Then, office furniture began turnbling
out to smash to the pavement below: voice mailboxes, canisters of storage disks, red-spined European law-books, network routers, tape backup-units, color monitors.…

A trenchcoat flew out the hole and pinwheeled slowly to earth. Eddy recognized it at once. It was Frederika’s sandpaper coat. Even in the midst of shouting chaos, with an evil billowing of combusting plastic now belching from the library’s windows, the sight of that fluttering coat hooked Eddy’s awareness. There was something in that coat. In its sleeve pocket. The key to his airport locker.

Eddy dashed forward, shoved three knights aside, and grabbed up the coat for himself. He winced and skipped aside as a plummeting office chair smashed to the street, narrowly missing him. He glanced up frantically.

He was just in time to see them throw out Frederika.

The tide was leaving Düsseldorf, and with it all the schooling anchovies of Europe. Eddy sat in the departure lounge balancing eighteen separate pieces of his spex on a Velcro lap-table.

“Do you need this?” Frederika asked him.

“Oh yeah,” Eddy said, accepting the slim chromed tool. “I dropped my dental pick. Thanks a lot.” He placed it carefully into his black travel bag. He’d just spent all his European cash on a deluxe, duty-free German electronics repair kit.

“I’m not going to Chattanooga, now or ever,” Frederika told him. “So you might as well forget that. That can’t be part of the bargain.”

“Change your mind,” Eddy suggested. “Forget this Barcelona flight, and come transatlantic with me. We’ll have a fine time in Chattanooga. There’s some very deep people I want you to meet.”

“I don’t want anybody to meet,” Frederika muttered darkly. “And I don’t want you to show me off to your little hackerboy friends.”

Frederika had taken a hard beating in the riot, while covering the Critic’s successful retreat across the rooftop. Her hair had been scorched during the battle, and it had burst from its meticulous braiding like badly overused steel wool. She had a black eye, and her cheek and jaw were scorched and shiny with medicinal gel. Although Eddy had broken her fall, her three-story tumble to the street had sprained her ankle, wrenched her back, and barked both knees.

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.”

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 Thirty-four. 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?”