The Devil Delivered and Other Tales (16 page)

Don’t be surprised if you can’t read this! EM rads are getting scary high from all those flicked Biks, messing up wave bands everywhere. It’s getting so no one can hear all those doomsayers out there telling us it’s all over and the fat lady’s too sick to sing so no point in waiting for it.…

Val Marie, the third night

“It’s all gone out of proportion. I wasn’t doing anything worth noticing.”

Jim glanced across at Stel, then shrugged at William’s claim, and said, “Makes no difference to me. It’s what comes of talking so people can hear you, anyway. They listen, and then they put their own spin on things. Nothing you can do about it.”

A faint smile from the cracked, peeling lips. “You mean I can absolve myself of all responsibility?”

“Depends on your ego,” Stel said, with a dark grin. “Wasn’t you starting all those wars, was it?”

He looked away. “Field observations. Punctuated equilibrium. I noticed the insects first. Imagine my surprise when I discovered higher orders were in on the game. And then … it was just logical … to take a new, hard look at the Lakota. At Daniel. That double blink—when you could get him without the shades on. That’s what tipped me. That inner transparent eyelid, coming up from below, all the way up—I saw it shooting pool with him.”

Stel said, “She said she’d be back tomorrow morning. To take you home.”

William looked at her, then nodded.

“Well?” she asked. “Is that what you want?”

“No.”

“Fine. Good. What do you want us to do?”

Jim watched the boy studying them both, and wondered what he was thinking. Nobody can know anyone else. Nobody can get into someone else’s brain. Nobody knows even himself. But you could always wonder, couldn’t you?

“Take me back out.”

“Under the Hole,” Jim said, nodding, as Stel snorted in disgust.

“Yes.”

“You’ll die this time,” Jim said. “You know that, don’t you?”

William said nothing.

Aw, hell, what a stupid thing to say.

“Goddammit,” Stel growled, “we went out and found you—”

“He didn’t ask us to,” Jim cut in.

“Just take me out,” William said. “Tonight.”

“We ain’t got a bootsuit—”

“I don’t want one.”

“Expect to do some evolving of your own?” Jim asked, brows lifting.

William shook his head. “Jack Tree was right. Not for me. I’m not the one. Never was. The wrong ghosts.” The red-shot eyes fixed on Jim. “Your ghosts, I think.”

Jim said nothing. The lad had guessed right. Assuming he’d guessed. Then he shrugged and said, “It’s the world we got, but that doesn’t mean it has to make sense.”

“I know. Too bad that so much of it does.”

Yes. We poisoned. We doctored. We raped. We pillaged. Barbarians at nature’s gate, what a joke that we kept insisting that what scared us was on the other side. Jim rose from the chair. “All right, we better get ready, then.…”

Net

PACEMAKER:
All right, folks, I shook the dust out of my printer and now there’s hard copy. Somebody needs to keep a record of all this, before the plug’s pulled.

FREE WHIZZY:
Make copies, tick-tock.

PACEMAKER:
I have no problem with that. It all comes down to interpretation, anyway, so the more the merrier.

FREE WHIZZY:
I’ve picked up a streamer, says someone gassed most of the Lapland Republic. Killed everyone. And now they’re collecting bodies for research or something.

LUNKER:
I heard it different. Gassed, yeah, but some kind of knockout, since they need living subjects to work on.

PACEMAKER:
Last I heard, it went south. The whole thing, because the incursion was cracked and leaked, meaning when the bastards arrived they found no one. The peripherals were all gone.

FREE WHIZZY:
Guess there’s no news fit to print anymore. Who to believe?

William staggered after stepping clear of the vehicle.

Dropping his goggles over his eyes, Jim climbed out from behind the wheel and walked round until he stood at William’s side.

He wanted to see something good in this, but it wasn’t working. He felt sick inside. Stel had refused to come, saying she’d rather stay at the hotel and run interference if it proved necessary. Jim knew she’d had other reasons, and she’d earned the right to keep them private.

“I don’t understand,” William said, struggling with his backpack straps.

Jim stepped close and helped him. “About what?”

“There was nothing … uh, revelatory in my entries. Beyond the evolutionary data. I was musing on the notion of extinction—”

“Except for all the ghosts.”

William winced and looked away.

Not much to see. It was 2
A.M
. and the sky was overcast. There was nothing definite out there, nothing at all.

“Did you really see them, William? Those ghosts?”

“I’m seeing them right now, Jim.” A faint laugh. “Alas, sanity proves irretrievable.”

“Is this … is that all you wanted?”

“An interesting question. Can you answer it for yourself? Look back on all those years and ask the same question?”

“Alas, the past proves irretrievable.”

“But can it be redeemed? Can we? Can you?”

“Is that what you’re out here looking for, William? Redemption?”

“It’s a universal longing, isn’t it?”

Jim shook his head. “Don’t know about that. Sometimes you just have to write it off. The whole damned thing.”

“Like the Martians did.”

“What?”

“Nothing important. Tell me, what do you hate?”

Jim grunted. “What don’t I hate? I hate it all, William. The fucking endless ways of dying that never just gets it over with and takes everybody, every damned one of us. No, some of us got to live on. And on. With our sack full of hurts. For what? I don’t know.” His shoulders fell, a new wave of exhaustion taking him.

“I want to believe … in something. The new animals,” William looked over at him. “That’s something. It makes me … optimistic. Not personally. But in the sense of life refusing to give up.”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing?” Jim asked. “Giving up?”

“You and me, Jim.
Homo sapiens sapiens.
We’ve been pushed to the wayside.”

“So what if we have? Go find some shelter. Live out what’s left to you.”

“A life spent hating? Sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound like an attack. I guess I’m having doubts.”

“Good. Let’s get back into the crawler and have a beer with Stel.”

William smiled, then shook his head. “Not about that, Jim. It’s just the misplaced faith. When I walk a path, I don’t expect other people to follow it. Even vicariously.” His smile grew rueful. “Then again, I was posting, wasn’t I? I should have anticipated what would happen. But what I can’t seem to get across is, my dialogue is with myself. No one else, certainly not anything like God. It’s with my own past.”

“Well,” Jim said, “I haven’t been reading your mail. But it seems people are needing something. They were waiting, that’s all, waiting for someone to follow.”

“But I’m not offering anything. There’s nothing implicitly apocryphal in musing on evolution and tossing in the occasional fictitious conversation.”

“That’s the thing about intentions,” Jim said, grinning, “nobody gives a fuck. So, are you the one who’s been breaking into secured files and releasing classified information?”

“No, that’d be Max Ohman. Bound for Ur.”

“He told you?”

“No. I sniffed back. He’s pretty good at covering his trail.”

“You found him anyway.”

William shrugged. “I had to get … intuitive on occasion. Anyway, lots of other hackers joined in before too long. It’s where this war is being fought.”

Jim grunted. “Until someone blows up the Tar Sands, or nukes a city.”

“Maybe our species is indeed insane. Determined to go out with a bang, and if possible, take the others with them. Out of spite—if we can’t have this world neither can you.”

“It still sounds impossible to me,” Jim said, feeling the cool wind on his face as he stared skyward. “Evolution was supposed to be slow.”

“Yes. But very few missing links in the fossil record. That should have provided a clue. You don’t get missing links, creatures sharing traits from what came before and what’s to come. Well, a few, but not nearly as many as there should have been. If the jump is sudden, and absolute, there are no missing links, and that fits the fossil record. Oddly enough, the peripherals might well be such a transition population, since they possess traits still nascent in functionality. Anyway,” William said, adjusting the straps on his backpack, “I wish I could wash my hands of all this. It wasn’t what I wanted. None of it.” He laughed then. “Sitting Bull tried to show me, back at the very beginning, during the first storm, but I didn’t understand.”

Jim slowly looked down, studied William in the darkness. “Sitting Bull?”

“Well, his ghost. ‘White man on a vision quest? Impossible. To go on a vision quest is to go in, as far inside as possible. But whites go out, always out. They walk the wrong path.’ He never said that, but he might as well have. Can someone vision quest out in the Net? On frequencies and pulses? How do you remove the intent, the physical requirements of choice and direction?” He suddenly crossed his arms. “Nodes, implants, and lid screens, but still, is it possible to riff? To slide into trance and just …
go
?”

“You’ve lost me,” Jim said.

William glanced over, blinking. Then he nodded. “Fair enough. Thanks, Jim, for delivering me.” His arms dropped away, as if all that had troubled him had simply vanished.

The gesture made Jim nervous; then he grimaced, disgusted with himself. The boy was out here to die, after all. Best he do that in a state of peace, rather than some kind of distress. “All right. I’ll go now. Chances are Stel’s had to beat Jenine senseless and lock her in the cellar, so I’d better get back before she goes and commits murder.”

William’s smile was odd. “I expect you’ll find them in the bar, having a beer. Thanks again, for all of it.”

With an awkward nod, Jim turned about and walked back to the buggy. There was something to be said, he told himself, for choosing the when and the where.

*   *   *

“How long ago?”

“About an hour,” Stel said. “You going to give us trouble on this, Doctor?”

Jenine MacAlister frowned, then stepped past Stel and walked to the nearest table. “I’d like a drink,” she said, sitting down. “Bourbon, straight.”

Stel studied the woman. “We figured you’d … object.”

“Do you sell cigarettes?”

“Have you got a license?”

“No.”

“I could sell you a pack, but then you could arrest me.”

“I don’t have law enforcement powers, Stel.”

“You can have one of mine,” she said, walking over with the drink. “Though if necessary I’ll swear you stole it.”

Jenine rubbed at her eyes. “Are you always this paranoid?”

“I’m a smoker, what do you think?”

Stel moved back behind the bar counter and watched the city woman sip her bourbon, then fish out a smoke from the pack on the table and light it. “I should scatter pills and a few syringes on your table,” Stel said, “and you’d make a hell of an ad.”

Jenine looked over, raised an eyebrow. “Against all the vices?”

“No, for them.”

“I’ve seen those, on the Net. The counter-ad campaign. Some are real works of art. There’s two-hour screen showings of them at art-flick houses in New York. I had a student do her thesis on them.” She tilted her head back, exhaling smoke, then recited, “‘Norms and Abnorms in Modern Culture: the social function of the digital counter-ad campaign.’ What a dreadful title. Sounds like a head-bashing scuzz group. Norm and the Abnorms. Still, the student made some good observations. A handful, maybe. The puritans needed a kick up the ass. Still do. Annually at the very least.”

Stel leaned on the counter. “All right, Doctor. You’ve stumped me.”

“Bring over the bottle and join me, Stel. I’m not in the mood to be monstrous.”

“I might, but first, some questions.”

“Fire away.”

“You know he’s gone out there to die.”

“That’s not a question.”

“You did a lot to treat him, and now it’s all out the window.”

“Wasn’t my money, Stel. Besides, if I hadn’t, he wouldn’t be out there right now, would he?”

“So, you wanted him to go back. Out under the Hole.”

“I’m still waiting for your first question, Stel.”

“Why?”

Jenine stole another cigarette and lit it with the first one. “I don’t know if I can answer you. But I’ll try. Have you seen his entries on the Net?”

“No.”

“Start with the coyote thread. As of yesterday, there were approximately nine and a half million streamers tied to that thread. If you slip your set on and kick in any logi-run program, electing any theme you like as your riff, you’ll go for a long, long ride. Hours and hours, the montage taking you sequentially along the theme you chose. They’re calling it God’s Riff. Each one of William’s entries is like that, a node, from which whole universes open up, thread after thread. Strangest of all, some of those streamers lead to unmanned servers, so the chips are in on the act—and no one has a clue why. It is like a massive bible is writing itself online. Does any of it make sense? That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. But every damn runner will tell you it does … almost. Right there, on the edge, the tip of your tongue. A sense, hovering, whispering, drawing you on, and on.”

During this, Stel had collected the bourbon bottle and another glass, and had walked over to sit down opposite Jenine. “Sounds like the ultimate computer game,” she said.

Jenine snorted, then said, “It’s no game, Stel. But if it was, the maker would haul in trillions. In any case, it seems to be evolving, self-evolving, maybe. An increasing number of those streamers are live feeds. Hot spots. Disease control labs, private engineering firms, hospitals, digital courtrooms, rogue com sats, handhelds, you name it.”

“Well,” Stel said, “that will spell the end of it all making sense.”