Strings (2 page)

Nauc, April 6—7

HOW DID A caterpillar feel when it opened up in the butterfly business?

Small, Cedric thought.

Lonely.

The hotel room was cramped and dingy, stinking worse than the streets outside. Fungus flourished around the shower pad. The wallpaper looked like beans fried in blood. The single chair was hard and unsteady, and the bed would be too short for him.

For the third time he checked his credit. He had a clear choice: he could either call home to Madge at Meadowdale, or he could eat breakfast in the morning. That was not a hard decision. He pulled his chair closer to the com, but then he got distracted again by the action. God in Heaven! Were they going to…Yes, they were. Again! He squirmed with embarrassment. But he watched. Holo shows at Meadowdale had never been like this. And the quality of the image was so good! He could have sworn that he was looking through a window into the next room where a couple was—was doing certain things he had never seen done before. Doing, in fact, some things he had not known were possible. Great Heavens! At Meadowdale the images had been fuzzier, and there had been long periods of fog, on one channel or another, with nothing visible at all.

Everything was visible here.

Suddenly he became disgusted at his own reactions. He barked an order, switching to com mode. In two minutes Madge was standing on the other side of the window, smiling at him. Before she even spoke he knew he had erred. He had forgotten the time difference and caught her in the middle of putting youngsters to bed. But she did not complain; she merely smiled and sat down.

“I promised to call,” he said.

“So you did. And you’ve survived your first day in the Big Wide World!” Rosy cheeks and white hair—no one could have looked more motherly than Madge. But when had she grown so small? She could hardly have shrunk since he had left that morning.

“I didn’t buy Brooklyn Bridge, like Ben said I would.”

“Ben didn’t mean that!”

But Ben had meant the other things he had warned about. Cedric might think he owned nothing of value except the camera Gran had given him, Ben had said, but any healthy nineteen-year-old must look out for bodyshoppers, or he would soon discover he was a mindless zombie in one of the darker corners of the vice industry, with every prospect of eventual promotion to a freezerful of spare parts.

“I hired a percy,” Cedric said. “Can you see it?” Madge leaned sideways and looked where he pointed. She said yes, she could. The big metal cylinder stood in a corner, dominating the room—a blank, blue, bullet-shaped pillar.

“I buzzed around all over the place like a native,” Cedric said proudly. No one could get knocked off in a percy, which was why all city dwellers used them.

Percy: Personal Survival Aid.

“Doesn’t look big enough,” Madge said doubtfully.

“It’s okay,” Cedric insisted. “I was lucky. It’s an XL, and they just happened to have it in stock.”

In a percy, the occupant stayed upright, half sitting, half standing. It would have been quite comfortable, had his legs not been so damned long. His neck was still stiff.

“Did you see all the sights?” Madge asked.

He told her about his day, or most of it—his trip on the super, his sightseeing, and how he had tried to go to a ball game, but the new stadium was not complete yet and the old one had finally been abandoned after Hurricane Zelda last fall. He did not describe how he had gaped at the ads for surgical improvements to various body parts, nor did he detail the varieties of chemical and electronic stimulation he had declined, or the educational opportunities both erotic and exotic, some of them even promising real girls. He had not been tempted, and he had had no money anyway.

Nor did he mention that he had gone window shopping, because he had been choosing gifts he was going to give Madge herself, and Ben, and all the others. Of course, he had not been able actually to buy anything, but as soon as he started earning money he was going to send gifts to everyone at Meadowdale. Well, not truly everyone, but all the adults, certainly. Maybe some of the older kids, although all his own group had gone long since. He had been the oldest for almost a year now.

And then he asked if Gavin had used his fishing rod yet, and if Tess had had her pups, and stuff like that.

“Did you eat properly?” Madge asked, mother instincts roused.

“I had a pizza.”

She pouted disapprovingly at the mention of pizza. “I’ll get Ben. He took some of the small fry out to watch a calving.”

But Cedric had just realized that his credit was about to die. The call would end without warning and Madge would guess why, and then she would worry. “I’d better go,” he said. He sent his love to everyone and disconnected. He checked his credit and discovered that he had cut it very fine. He would not even be able to buy a Coke in the morning; but he had his ticket to HQ, and the percy was prepaid, so he was all right.

It was nice to know that Meadowdale was still there. It was the only home he had ever known.

He stayed where he was and watched the holo again for a while, seeming to jump from one bedroom to another—did the audiences never get tired of the same stuff? On an unfamiliar channel he found Dr. Eccles Pandora doing the news. Pandora had always been a Meadowdale favorite, being Garfield Glenda’s cousin. And Glenda had certainly been a Cedric favorite.

Cedric abandoned the news halfway through the floodings—Neururb, now, and Thailand. That was after the food riots in Nipurb and before the usual update on the Mexican plague. He found an old Engels Brothers rerun and watched that instead.

Later he stared out for a long time at the shining towers of the city and the streets far below, still quite busy. He had never seen all this, except in the holo, and he had expected it to look more real than it did. Apparently streets full of racing percies seemed much the same whether one saw them directly or in three-dee image. These streets had more garbage lying around, that was all.

He set his watch alarm for 0800 and went to bed. The bed was not only too short, it was lumpy and it smelled wrong.

He had trouble sleeping, and that was another new experience.

He wondered about Madge.

Madge had not wept when he said goodbye. And when he called on the com she had smiled. Madge always wept when someone left. Of course, he was older than the others had been. Of course, he had tried to leave on his own a few times in the past, but he did not think she resented those attempts. Strange that she had smiled and not cried. She had never hinted that she loved him any less than any of the others, so he could not help but be surprised that she had not cried, and surprised that he should care…and surprised that he should be surprised…

He slept.

When the lights came on he blinked at his watch; it registered 0316. Then he rolled over on his back and tried to focus on the gun lens at the end of his nose.

It had to be a gun, although it was as thick as his arm. He could not read the label, but it might very well be a Mitsubishi Hardwave, and one flash from a thing like that would vaporize him and his bed and the people downstairs.

He blinked a few times. He wanted to rub his eyes, but moving his hands might be risky. As his vision adjusted, he saw that the room was full of percies, at least five of them. His own was still standing in the corner—doing nothing, bloody nothing, two and a half meters of useless crysteel and whiskerfab.

So much for survival. First time off the farm, and he had crashed already.

On the safe end of the gun was a large, thick person, anonymous inside bulky combat gear that looked as if it were made of black leather. Just possibly it was a bull suit, in which case it would stop anything short of a fusion torch and the limbs would have full power assist. Or it might be only armor—not many could afford a real bull suit, and they took years of practice to manage. Its face was a shiny nothing, as noncommittal as the door of an icebox.

“Got you at last!” the intruder said in a voice like the San Andreas. It was male.

“M-M-Me?”

“Harper Peter Olsen!”

“No, sir! I’m Hubbard Cedric Dickson!”

“What kind of sap do you take me for?” the faceless helmet demanded. Actually it was not faceless—its shiny blackness bore a faint reflection of Cedric’s own pale features, distorted into a wide-eyed omelet by the curve of the crysteel and by sheer witless terror. “Three years I’ve waited for this, Harper!”

“I’m not Harper!” Cedric shouted. “I’m Hubbard! Hubbard Cedric Dickson. Check my thumb.” He had pulled his hand from under the covers before he remembered that sudden moves were supposed to be unwise.

The intruder did not seem worried—if anything, he was merely more contemptuous. “Thumbprints can be altered.” The gun moved higher, blocking out Cedric’s view of almost everything else. He saw his eyes reflected in the lens.

Cedric had rarely needed ID for anything, but on holo shows they used thumbs, or retinas. Or a sniffer. He had not known that thumbs could be changed in the real world. He had no other ID at all.

There was something completely unbelievable about all this.

If the intruder was a thief, then he was going to be sadly disappointed—and therefore, likely, irked. Cedric had the square root of fresh air left in his balance, but theft by enforced credit transfer was a crime for morons anyway. That left ransom, or possibly bodyshopping—and that brought up the curious question of why he had ever been allowed to wake up. But…his first day out in the world and he had spilled the whole bucket.

And yet, oddly, he felt no more scared than he had as a twelve-year-old when Greg and Dwayne had taken him behind the horse barns and explained what they were planning for him. That had been real terror, but although he had endured a nasty experience, he had suffered no real damage. Of course, this character was not in the same league as two muddled fifteen-year-olds.

“I’ve got nothing here worth taking, but help yourself,” Cedric said, and was pleasantly surprised at how calm he sounded.

“I don’t want your money, Harper. I want to watch you burn.”

Breathe slow, he told himself. “Well I’m not Harper, whoever he is. So either shoot me in error, or go away and let me get back to sleep.”

“Oh…big
brave
man!”

Cedric attempted to shrug. It was tricky while lying flat. “What else can I say, sir? I’m not Harper. Check my thumb.”

The faceless intruder seemed to hesitate. “Thumbs get faked. I’ll check your retinas, then.”

Cedric felt relief in floods. “Go ahead.”

The man barked an order, and one of the percies floated closer to the bed, while the others made way for it. He must have brought four of them with him. They looked very much the same as the one Cedric had hired at the station, and he could not tell if they were occupied. Bull Suit might be running them himself. The room was not large enough for all that equipment.

“Retina scanner,” the man said, without moving his gun from the end of Cedric’s nose. Something whirred faintly, a small hatch opened, and a binocular device dropped out, hanging on a helical cord. That was no standard percy.

Cedric had watched enough holodramas to know that he was supposed to put the gizmo to his eyes and focus on the center marks in the red glow, but he did not expect the sudden bright flash. Ouch!

“Well?” he said as he released the gadget. It whirred back out of sight again, and the percy floated away. “I’m not Harper.” Green afterimages coated everything, and he felt sick. His throat hurt.

“Who?” the man asked.

“Harper—the guy you thought I was.”

“Never heard of him. Appendectomy scar?” He whipped off the covers. Cedric yelped, but he was relieved to see that the gun was no longer pointing at him. “Yup,” the man agreed. “Appendectomy scar.”

“Then you know who I am?”

“Always did. Just like to confirm things.” The stranger tipped back his helmet to reveal a completely bald head and a round, jowled face lacking both eyebrows and eyelashes.

“You mean all that crud about Harper…” Cedric’s fear began to turn to anger, mostly anger at his own fear. He tried to sit up and was poked flat again by the cold tubular end of the gun. The safety catch was on, but it was a good club.

“Just relax, sonny. Yes, you’re Hubbard Cedric. I checked out your pheromones before I opened the door.”

“How did you open—”

“Quiet! You’ve got some explaining to do. Do you know where you are?”

An apology would be nice, Cedric thought. “North American Urban Complex.”

The intruder’s eyes narrowed.

The lack of hair, and the shiny, unnatural skin—the man’s face had been regenerated with dermsym. That meant a major accident, or perhaps an illness or a bad cancer job. The gravelly voice might mean extensive work on his throat, too. Cedric could not even guess at his age. The man was reptilian—his scalp smooth and shiny and quite hairless, everything below his mouth concealed by the neck ring of his suit, as though his head had sunk into his shoulders, turtle fashion. His eyes were almost invisible, hooded by drooping flaps of skin below craggy overhanging brows. The slivers that did show were blue-gray as winter sky, and no more friendly.

“Nauc’s a big place, sonny. Try to be a little more specific.”

“The sixteenth floor of the President Lincoln Hotel.” Cedric was resenting being exposed there like jam on bread, with only a few grams of cotton between him and total nudity. He groped for the covers, and the stranger flipped them out of reach with his gun.

“One more chance.”

Damn you! “Well, with a name like that it must be somewhere between the Canadian border and the Mason-Dixon line.”

The gun muzzle slammed into Cedric’s solar plexus hard enough to double him up in a choking, gasping tangle of limbs. He had never been hit that hard before. He could not have guessed how bad it would feel. For a long age there was only pain and shock and lack of air. He heaved and strained, and there was no air in the world. Black fog and terror…then something seemed to snap, and he sucked in one long, shuddering breath, and the black fog began to clear. Agony! His assailant stood in patient silence, waiting as though the force of the impact had been calculated precisely, its effects guaranteed to wear off after an exactly predetermined interval.