Hardwired

Hardwired

Walter Jon Williams

Chapter One

By midnight he knows his discontent will not let him sleep. The panzerboy drives north from Santa Fe, over the Sangre de Cristos on the high road through Truchas, heading for Colorado, wanting to get as close as possible to the night sky. He drives without the use of hands or feet, his mind living in the cool neural interface that exists somewhere between the swift images that pass before his windscreen and the electric awareness that is the alloy body and liquid crystal heart of the Maserati. His artificial eyes, plastic and steel, stare unblinking at the road, at twisting dirt ruts corrugated by the spring runoff, tall stands of pine and aspen, high meadows spotted with the frozen black shapes of cattle, all outlined in the rushing, almost liquid light of his high beams as he pushes the Maserati upward. The shapes that blaze in the headlights stand boldly against the darkness of their, own shadows, and Cowboy can almost see himself in a monochrome world like a black-and-white celluloid image projected before his windscreen, flickering with the speed of his passage. It’s almost like flying.

He’d thought, when he got his new Kikuyu eyes, that he’d ask for a monochrome option, amused by the idea of flicking some mental switch in his head and being plunged into the action of some black-and-white fantasy, an old moving picture starring the likes of Gary Cooper or Duke Wayne, but there hadn’t been much demand for monochrome and the option had been discontinued. He’d also wanted irises of chrome steel, but the Dodger, his manager, had talked him out of that, saying they were too conspicuous for a man in Cowboy’s line of business. Cowboy agreed reluctantly, as he always did when the Dodger came up with a new restriction on his fantasy. Instead he’d taken pupils of a storm-cloud gray.

But here in these mountains named after the Blood of Christ are fantasies older than any on celluloid. They pass in montage before his steel and plastic eyes: an old whitewashed church, the area around its doors painted like a turquoise heaven, clashing with the reds and yellows that form a pyramid and all-seeing eye at the rounded cap of the arch; some massive white castle in the Moroccan style, the playhouse of a long-vanished Arab, its crumbling minarets streaked with brown, its rococo iron grillwork scored with advancing rust. Suddenly around a curve a pair of pale ghosts appear like figures of supernatural warning, Indian pilgrims dressed in white, from the cloth binding their foreheads and braiding their long hair to the white doeskin moccasins that wink with silver buttons. Walking patiently by moonlight, a penance, to the sanctuary at Chimayo, there to give thanks to the carved santos or ask the Virgin for a favor. Visions like outposts of another time, preserved here on the high rim of Earth, shimmering in the sudden brightness of Cowboy’s eyes.

Cowboy pushes the machine to the max, redlining the scales on the dashboard. Flying at night is the thing he does best. The engine whine echoes from the trees, the hills. Wind gusts through the open windows, bringing the sharp smell of pine. Cowboy pictures the celluloid speeding through the projector, moving faster, images blurring. Neurons pulse their messages to the crystal in his head, transmitting his will to the throttle, the gears, the jouncing wheels. Now the Maserati is moving downhill, gaining speed as it races through the switchbacks, finally tearing across the surface of the ford in front of Penasco, throwing up a wall of mist that, for a short moment, reflects the headlights in rainbows, a hallucinatory shimmer on the edge of vision, a foreshadowing of color here in the monochrome world.

It’s dawn when the Maserati blurs across the Colorado line, and early morning by the time the bronze machine enters Custer County. The mountains are brown and green now, alive with pine and the mountain wind, the monochrome fantasy gone. Cowboy has friends here. He turns into a private dirt road, knowing there are electronics suddenly taking an interest in him.

The road twists upward and ends at a high mountain meadow landscaped flat and crisscrossed by the alpha of a private airstrip. Where the black deltas once flew on their occult midnight errands, grasses and flowers now grow in the cracks of the paving. Still visible is a gouge in the bright green aspens, where one jock overshot the strip with his wounded delta and splashed himself and his cargo over a half mile of mountainside, but the furrow is green again with saplings. The airfield is turning dreamlike now, a little fuzzy around the edges; but Cowboy does not intend that the memory should ever die. There are memories that live for him as his present reality does not, and he shines them daily, like the finish of a fine new car, to keep them bright.

For eleven generations Cowboy’s ancestors farmed an area of southeastern New Mexico, living as dots on a featureless red plain as different from the world of the Sangre de Cristos as is the Ukraine from Peru. Every so often one of Cowboy’s family would shoulder a rifle and march off to fight for the United States, but they concentrated most of their energies on fighting the state of Texas. The Texans were water-hungry, consuming more than they could ever replenish, building at the finish vast pumps just a few inches over the Texas side of the border, sucking the alkaline New Mexico water across the line, stealing what others had so carefully preserved. Cowboy’s people fought them, holding on to what they could until the last pump rattled dry and the dusty red earth rose on the wind and turned the world into a sandblasting hurricane.

Cowboy remembers his days in the dust bowl, living at his uncle’s ranch after his father broke himself trying to hang on. Existing inside a gray assortment of bleached planks on the edge of the desert the Texans had made a place where red earth drifted inches deep behind the door whenever the wind blew, and days passed without seeing the sun as anything brighter than a ruddy warm vagueness behind the scouring sand. Farming was impossible, and the family ran cattle instead, an occupation only slightly less precarious. The nearest town bragged about the number of churches it had and Cowboy was raised in one of them, watching the congregation grow bleaker week by week, their skin turning gray, their eyes ever more desperate as they asked the Lord to forgive whatever sin had led them to this cleansing. Texans, once the enemy, wandered through on their way to somewhere else, living in cardboard boxes, in old automobiles that sat on blocks and had long ago lost their paint to the sand. The Rock War came and went, and things got harder. Hymns continued to be sung, liquor and cards foresworn, and notices of farm auctions continued to be posted at the courthouse.

The Dodger was an older man who had moved to Colorado. When he came home he drove a shiny automobile, and he didn’t go to church. He chewed tobacco because chewing didn’t interfere with his picking when, in his free time, he played left-handed mandolin with a jug band. The gray people in the church didn’t like to talk about how he’d made his money. And one day the Dodger saw Cowboy riding in a rodeo.

The Dodger visited Uncle’s ranch and arranged to borrow Cowboy for a while, even paid for his time. He got Cowboy some practice time on a flight simulator and then made a call to a thirdman he knew.

Cowboy was sixteen when he took up flying. In his cracked old leather boots he already stood three inches over six feet, and soon he stood miles taller, an atmosphere jock who spread his contrails from one coast to the other, delivering the mail, mail being whatever it was that came his way. The Orbitals and the customs people in the Midwest were just another kind of Texan– someone who wants to rape away the things that keep you alive, replacing nothing, leaving only desert. When the air defenses across the Line got too strong, the jocks switched to panzer– and the mail still got through. The new system had its challenges, but had it been up to Cowboy he would never have left the skies.

Now Cowboy is twenty-five, getting a little old for this job, approaching the time when even hardwired neural reflexes begin to slacken. He disdains the use of headsets; his skull bears five sockets for plugging the peripherals directly into his brain, saving milliseconds when it counts. Most people wear their hair long to cover the sockets, afraid of being called buttonheads or worse, but Cowboy disdains that practice, too; his fair hair is cropped close to the skull and his black ceramic sockets are decorated with silver wire and turquoise chips. Here in the West, where people have an idea of what these things mean, he is regarded with a kind of awe.

He has his nerves hardwired to the max, and Kikuyu Optics eyes with all the available options. He has a house in Santa Fe and a ranch in Montana that his uncle runs for him, and he owns the family property in New Mexico and pays taxes on it like it was worth something. He has the Maserati and a personal aircraft–– a “business jet”–– and a stock portfolio and caches of gold.

He’s also got this place, this little meadow in the Colorado mountains; another cache, this one for memories that won’t go away. And a discontent, formless but growing, that has led him here.

He parks by the big camouflaged concrete hangar and unfaces the Maserati before the engine gives its final whimper. In the silence he can hear the sound of a steel guitar from somewhere in the hangar and a stirring in the grass that is the first directionless movements of the afternoon’s thermals. He walks to the hangar, unreels a jack from the lock, studs it into his head, and gives it the code.

Past the heavy metal door there is a Wurlitzer, shiny chrome and bright fluorescent plastic, venting some old Woody Guthrie song into the huge cathedral space. Looming above are the matte black shapes of three deltas, their rounded forms obscure in the dim light but giving an impression of massive power and appalling speed. Obsolete now, Cowboy bought them for little more than the price of their engines when the face riders started using panzers.

Warren stands at his workbench in a pool of light, tinkering with a piece of a fuel pump. His lined face flickers blue with the video pictures Cowboy’s arrival has prompted– he’s got security cameras all over the place and cares for them with the same methodical diligence with which he keeps the deltas ready to fly.

He was a crew chief at Vandenberg on the day of the Rock War, and he did his duty knowing that he could expect nothing for his diligence but to feel on the back of his neck, for a fragment of a second, the overpressure of a nickel-iron missile coming down through the atmosphere, followed by termination... but he did what he was trained to do and got his cutterjocks up to fight for Earth against the Orbitals, wishing them well with all his heart, hoping that a few, maybe, would say “Here’s one for Warren” when they burned an enemy. But the scenario turned out different from what he’d expected: looking up into the night sky for the meteor that had his name on it, he saw the falling, blazing arcs all right, but it wasn’t descending rocks that lit the night sky–– it was his boys and their craft, the young, bright men with their azure silk neck scarves and their bright needle cutters, coming down in pieces, failing systems giving their last electronic cries, blood streaking the insides of broken faceplates, ruptured oxidant tanks gushing white crystal plumes into the near-vacuum... The last hope of Earth blown apart in the post-boost phase by the Orbital knights.

For hours he waited at Vandenberg, hoping one of them might bring a cripple in. None came. Next thing Warren knew, Earth had surrendered. The Orbitals occupied Vandenberg, along with Orlando, Houston, and Cuba, and Warren survived because he was stationed at a place that was too valuable to destroy.

There was a lot of talk about the Resistance afterward, and Warren did his share of talking... probably more than talking, if the story about a sabotaged shuttle, carrying a cargo of executives from Tupolev I.G. to an impact on the Mojave, could be given any credence. Warren’s history after that grew a little more obscure, until he appeared working for the thirdmen in Colorado and met Cowboy. And then they made a little obscure history together.