Cyberpunk (38 page)

Payne’s voice went low and gutteral. “Don’t you
ever
call the

Colonel a fascist again. His parents carried him across the San Francisco

Wall when he was two years old.” (Baker flagged my blank look. “New

Osaka,” he whispered.) “You’ll never meet a man who loved freedom

more; if he could rise from the dead to stop this, he would.”
Payne

glared at Feinstein, hard.
His eyes were like cold, steel buttons.

Feinstein shot a furtive glance at Payne, then threw a stick on the

fire. “All the same, I’m quitting. Anyone else?”

Schmidt looked twisted. “Me. Don’t think I like the new smell

around here.”

“I’ll make it three,” Minelli added.

We all turned to look at Payne. This was it; I’d seen the vid a zillion

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times. This was the scene where Payne was going to stand up and make

us all feel like gutless cowards. This was the time for him to give us the

Big Speech, about how we had to do it for the Colonel, and the Gipper,

and Truth Justice and the Soviet American Way.

What he did was pause in the act of throwing a pine cone on the fire,

look at his feet, and say, “I think you’ve got Gary wrong. He’s not an

idealogue; he’s worse. He’s an opportunist trying to exploit idealogues.”

For a mo, Payne stared at the pine cone he held in his hand. Then he

dropped it into the dirt.

My blood stopped flowing.
He’d stopped feeding the fire
. Payne

looked up, at me; our eyes interlocked, and my brain felt a wash of

black. I’d never seen anyone look so defeated.

He broke off the contact—I couldn’t have—and looked back into the

fire. “But aside from that, yeah, I guess you’re right. There’s no point in

trying to fight them. The colonel’s ex controls 70 percent of the voting

stock, and what Gary wants, Gary gets. It’s over.” He shuffled his feet in

the dust a little, then looked up. “Only, let’s stick it out a year, okay?

Long enough to get our good students placed at other schools.” He

looked at me, sideways. “We owe the cadets that much, don’t we?”

In a vague, grumbly way, everyone there sort of agreed. I got up,

and wandered away from the fire.

So much for heroes.

#

About two weeks before the start of Fall quarter, Gary called me

into his office. He was on the phone with his back to me when I walked

in, so I took a few minutes to scope the place out.

Not much had changed. The furniture was still spartan; the carpet

still a bit rattish. The only changes I noticed right off were no

photocube, no display of medals on the wall, and a whole pile of printout

and account books stacked on the desk, right next to an overflowing

ashtray. I frowned. The Colonel would never have let the place get that

messy. Gary finished his phone call, hung up, and turned around.

My first reaction was to laugh. He must have shopped at the same

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place that Mohler clown did, ‘cause he was wearing some kind of formal

dress uniform straight out of a bad comic opera, with frilled epaulets and

gold piping and braid all over everywhere.

My second reaction was to puke. Now I knew where all the

Colonel’s medals had gone; Gary was wearing them. Badly. The

campaign ribbons, the silver star, the Distinguished Service Cross all

hung like cheap costume jewelry in strange places on the jacket.

Even the Purple Heart. For just a mo, I flashed on helping Gary
earn

that Purple Heart ...

He misinterpreted my smile. “Hi!” he said, bright, and stuck out his

hand. I took it, shook it, and returned it to him. “So you’re Mike Harris.

I understand I have you to thank for this really terrific computer network

here.”

I nodded, deferential. “Yes, sir.”

Shaking his head, he laughed and sat down on the corner of the desk.

“No no, don’t bother with that military crap. You call me Gary, okay?”

I nodded, smiled, kept my mouth shut. He leaned back to shuffle

some folders around his desk, and came up with my personal record.

“Now Mike—can I call you Mike?—it seems my old man thought very

highly of you.” He flipped open the folder and pretended to read

something. Looking up, he said, “I just want you to know that I have the

fullest confidence in you, too.”

Right
, I wanted to say.
That’s
my
record you’re reading?

He flipped the folder shut and tossed it back on the desk. “And that’s

why I’m so pleased to be the guy who brings you this good news. Mike,

my old man thought so highly of you that he left a special bequest in his

will. Your tuition is paid up for the full year already. Isn’t that great?”

He smiled at me, broad. I nodded.

“But you’re more than a student,” he went on. “I like to think that

you’ve made a special contribution to this Academy. This computer

network you’ve built, I’m really impressed with it, did I say that? And I

hope that in the months to come, you can teach me all about it.”

“I’ll try, sir.”

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He shook his head and laughed again. “No, really, forget the military

jive! I know I’ve got the uniform—,” he fondled the DSC, and laughed

at himself, “—stage dressings, to impress the yokels, y’know? But I

don’t want you to think of me as your commanding officer. Think of me

as your
friend
, okay?”

And this is the part where he puts his arm around my shoulders,

right?

He did. “Sure, Gary,” I said. He didn’t know me well enough to flag

the sarcasm.

“That’s better. Cigarette?” He fished a silver case out of his jacket

pocket and offered one. I declined.

“Hey, that’s cool. I can relate.” He lit himself a cigarette, and

stepped back over to the desk. “So, tell you what,” he said, “now that

we’re friends, maybe you can answer one question for me. Correct me if

I’m right, but I’ve been looking through all this shit,” he lifted the

system design manual and shook it at me, “and I still can’t figure out

how our system connects to the outside world.”

All my nerves went on maximum alert, and a million little warning

flags went up. Sure,
I
had spent two years begging Nuttbruster for a

SatLink, but all the cues I was getting from Gary made me real

suspicious. I just didn’t
trust
the man, it was simple as that. So why was

he so hot for my computer?

I smiled, casual. “Tell me what you want it to do, Gary. Maybe we

can work it out.”

He dropped the system manual on the desk. “Well, to get right to the

crotch of the matter, I was really hoping we could tap the Utah

Genealogical Database,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be neat? To build up

background information about our applicants? Y’know, see if there are

genetic factors that influence ... uh, influences?” He went silent,

studying me, and took a deep, nervous drag on his cigarette.

Okay, Harris
, a little voice in the back of my thinkspace said,
this is

it. How badly do you want the SatLink? Bad enough to give Gary and his

little gang of fascists a way to screen applicants by race? Bad enough to

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negate everything the Colonel tried to build?

Get thee behind me! Sudden, I spun off this idea that maybe some

hardcodes were wrong. Maybe the war games, maybe the tactical

training—maybe even the Colonel’s Advanced Theory class, with all his

carefully refined Clausewitz and Mao Zedong —maybe that was all

wrong.

Maybe sometimes you
do
reinforce lost positions.

See, there’s this thing called integrity. And sometimes it can drive

you to actions that, at first glance, seem like truly bad tactical. Stupid

actions, pointless actions, actions that have only one redeemer: They’re

right
. So what if Payne and the rest were ready to give up;
I
still felt I

owed something to the Colonel.

Basic insurrection theory holds that defeat on the battlefield is just

the first stage in a guerilla campaign. If I stuck around the academy

another year, I could make life
real
miserable for Gary Von Schlager.

“Sorry,” I said, and I threw him a big, fake smile. “Can’t be done.

All this archaic junk your dad’s bean counter saddled me with, you

know.”

The disappointment on Gary’s face was intense; half the cigarette

went up in his next drag. “Oh, that’s a bummer,” he said. “That’s bad.”

Then he looked at me, and smiled brightly. “But we can work on this,

okay Mike? There might be another way?”

I smiled big. “Sure, Gary. We’ll work on it. We got the whole school

year to work on it.” For just a moment I flashed on the Spartan

commander at Thermopylae, committing himself to that final, really

stupid
tactical, all in the name of his personal integrity.

After five years, I finally understood why he’d done it.

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Chapter 20

FLASHBACK: It’s a raw, rainy day, ugly even for late March.

Clouds hang low and dark in the sky like ghost battleships; the cold

wind knifes through every crack and chink in the walls and rattles the

panes loose in the window sashes. Come June, I intuit, a lot of Grade

Twos are going to be learning the care and handling of caulk guns.

But that will be in June. For Now, for the particular timeframe that

defines this image, we Advanced Theory students are sitting taut in our

seats, paying sharp attention to the Colonel in hopes of keeping our

minds off our cold, aching bladders, and trying to lean just a few

imperceptible millimeters closer to the Franklin stove—without
looking

like we’re trying to get closer.

After you’ve split a few cords of firewood, you learn that the trick is

to out-stoic everybody else. Unless, of course, you want to volunteer to

split the
next
cord.

So here we are, wrapped up in extra sweaters and bits of blanket

looking just like some of Washington’s soldiers recently thawed out

from Valley Forge, while up at the front of the classroom the Colonel

paces stiffly back and forth, hands clasped behind his back, that sharp

look on his face that means he’s going to toss a real poser at us just as

soon as he figures out the toughest way to phrase it. Every few laps he

stops, turns with a wicked smile on his face, starts to reach for the

whiteboard—

Then he catches himself and goes back to pacing. The Colonel
hates

the whiteboard.

And this, I guess, is the essential dichotomy of the Von Schlager

Military Academy. On one side of the classroom we have a cast-iron

Franklin stove, design unchanged in 250 years, cooling slow because no

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