The Shockwave Rider (23 page)

For the first year and a half, they were informed, the builders used nothing but scrap. Plus a great deal of imagination, to compensate for a near-total absence of money.

Additionally, the newcomers were immediately involved. Pausing to chat to a big husky man repairing an electrical connector, they were casually requested to help him lever the covering flagstone back into place; on being introduced to one Eustace Fenelli, who ran a popular bar and restaurant, they found themselves carrying a vast pot of minestrone out of the delectably aromatic kitchen—“since you happen to be going that way!” Strolling toward the main square with Lorna Treves, and passing a house from which a white-faced man emerged at a run, overjoyed to find Lorna because—as he said—he’d just called and heard she wasn’t home, they wound up standing by with sterile dressings and a bowlful of blood while she delicately removed a huge splinter of glass from the leg of a screaming child.

“I never found this before,” Kate whispered later. “This sense that everybody is ready to help everybody else. I’d heard it was possible. But I thought it was obsolete.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “On top of that, there’s a sense that being helped doesn’t demean you. That’s what I like most.”

Naturally, among the first places they asked to visit was the actual headquarters of Hearing Aid. With a warning that they might not find it particularly impressive, Brad Compton introduced them to the director, Sweetwater. Just Sweetwater. She was a tall, gaunt woman in her sixties, with long-faded traces on her face and arms of what, she commented, had once been elaborate medicine tattoos. She had believed herself to be a reincarnation of a great Shawnee chief, in touch with the spirit of the beyond, and had operated a clairvoyance and prediction business in Oakland.

“But”—with a wry smile—“not one of my spirits warned me about the quake. I had a son, and … Oh, it’s ancient history. But before I became a medium I’d been a switchboard operator, so I was one of the first people to volunteer to help with what developed into Hearing Aid. You know how it all started? No? Oh! Well, at all the places where the refugees were forced to settle, most of which were a lot less attractive than our own site—though you should have seen it the day we were stopped at gunpoint by the National Guard and told thus far, no further … Where was I? Oh, yes: of course everybody, once they’d calmed down, wanted to tell their friends and relatives they’d survived. So the Army spliced in some manual sound-only field telephone trucks, and people were allowed one call apiece not to last more than five minutes, or one other try if the first number didn’t answer. I saw people go right back to the end of the line time after time, because their second call had failed and they weren’t allowed a third immediately.”

As she talked, she was leading Kate and Sandy away from the library—characteristically, the largest single building in Precipice—down a narrow alley they had not traversed.

“It was a terrible time,” Sweetwater went on. “But I’m not sorry to have lived through it … Then, of course, as soon as it was known that there was a phone service, people started jamming every circuit in and into California because they hadn’t heard from their friends or kinfolk, and kept at it all night and all day regardless of how many pleas were made over the TV to get off the phone so they wouldn’t hold up the rescue work. They had to cut some cities out of circuit altogether, I remember. Just withdraw the phone service completely.”

She shook her head sorrowfully.

“In the end they had to rig facilities for incoming calls because people who got an answer instead of a circuit-overload signal tended not to come back and bother you until tomorrow. Like I say, I volunteered to run a board handling incoming traffic. At first I was kind of sharp with people. You know—brisk, brusque, whatever the hell. ‘You will be notified if your son/daughter/mother/father has survived but you’re holding up essential rescue work and how’d you like it if someone dear to you were dying
right now
because you’re using this circuit?’’

“And then I made this peculiar discovery. A lot of the calls were from people not trying to trace friends and relatives at all. Just—I don’t know—wanting contact with the disaster, I guess. As though their last consolation was to know that other people were even worse off. So sometimes, especially at night, I let them talk. They were pretty good about it—just a few minutes’ catharsis and that was that. Round about this time the people from Claes came in, and they found the same thing among the refugees. People simply needing to talk. Not just the older folk, who’d lost fine homes and prized possessions, but the youngsters. They were worse. I recall one kid—well, nineteen, twenty, she must have been—who ought to have become a famous sculptor. She was so good, they’d fixed her a one-man show at a San Francisco gallery. And she had to cling to a tree and watch as the earth gobbled up everything she’d got ready, plus her home, her studio, the lot. She never carved another thing; she went insane. And there were others. … They didn’t want counseling, they just wanted to tell people what their lives used to be like. The plans they had for an extension to the house; the way they meant to lay out the garden, only the house headed north and the garden went south; the trip around the world they were going to take next year—lives charted on a course the quake destroyed.”

Pausing now before an unremarkable door, she glanced at them.

“Hence—Hearing Aid. Which gave us a common purpose while we reconstructed, and then simply kept on snowballing.”

“Is that what made Precipice such a success compared to the other paid-avoidance towns?” Sandy demanded. “Offering a service that other people valued instead of just accepting charity and public money?”

Sweetwater nodded. “Or at any rate one of the things that helped. Common sense in using our few resources was the other. And here’s the central.”

She ushered them into a surprisingly small room, where some dozen comfortable chairs were occupied by people wearing headphones. There was another dozen vacant. The place was as hushed as a cathedral; only the faintest buzz of sound escaped the headphones. Eyes turned, heads nodded, but otherwise there was no break in the concentration.

The newcomers’ attention was instantly riveted by the expression of dismay on the face of one listener, a pretty black woman in her thirties. Sweetwater advanced on her, looking a question, but she shook her head, shut her eyes, set her teeth.

“A bad one there,” Sweetwater murmured, returning to the visitors. “But so long as she thinks she can stand it …”

“Is the job a great strain?”

“Yes.” Sweetwater’s tone was like herself: thin and long-drawn-out. “When someone vents a lifetime of hate on you and then makes sure you hear the hideous guggle as he cuts his carotid with a kitchen knife—yes, it’s a strain. Once I had to listen while a crazy woman threw spoonfuls of vitriol at her baby, tied in a feeding chair. She wanted to get back at its father. The poor kid’s screams!”

“But was there nothing you could do?” Kate blurted.

“Yes. Listen. That’s the promise that we make. We’ve always kept it. It may not make a lonely hell less hellish, but it makes it a fraction less lonely.”

They pondered that a while. Then Kate inquired, “Are these the only people on duty?”

“Oh, no. This central is for people who can’t stand their tour at home—interruptions from small children mainly. But most of us prefer to work from home. Granted, the traffic’s light right now; you should see our load come Labor Day, the end of the peak vacation season, when people who hoped against hope the summer would improve their lives realize there really will be another winter.”

“How soon do you want to call on us?” Sandy asked.

“No hurry. And it doesn’t have to be both of you. I gather Kate can’t stay.”

But it was only the following night that she said suddenly, “I think I will.”

“What?”

“Stay. Or rather, go away and come back as quickly as I can. Depending on a permit to move Bagheera.”

He started. “Do you really mean it?”

“Oh, yes. You plan to stay, don’t you?”

For a while he didn’t answer. At last he said, “Were you eavesdropping?”

“No, it’s nothing I’ve heard you or anybody else say. It—well, it’s the way you’ve acted today. All of a sudden you’re confident. I can literally scent it. I think maybe you’ve found the confidence to trust people.”

His voice shook a little. “I hope I have. Because if I can’t trust them … But I think I can, and I think you’re right to say I’ve finally learned how. Bless you, Kate. It was you who taught me. Wise woman!”

“Is
this a safe place? The one from which you can’t be dragged back to Tarnover?”

“They promised me it would be.”

“Who did?”

“Ted, and Suzy, and Sweetwater. And Brynhilde.”

“What?”

“It was like this. …”

They had been invited for dinner by Josh and Lorna. Josh loved to cook; now and then he took over at Fenelli’s for the hell of it, feeding fifty people in an evening. Tonight he’d settled for ten, but when the company was sitting around in the garden afterward other people wandered up, by ones and twos, and accepted a glass of wine or a mug of beer and eventually there was a full-sized party numbering at least forty.

For a long time he stood by himself in a dark corner. Then Ted Horovitz and Suzy came toward him, intending—he gathered—to join Sweetwater, who was just arriving on her own. Catching sight of him, Ted said, “Sandy, you settling in okay?”

It was a moment of decision. He took that decision. He squared his shoulders and stepped from shadow.

“I’d like a word with you. And I guess it ought to be with Brad, too.”

They exchanged glances. Suzy said, “Brad won’t be here—he’s listening. But Sweetwater’s the first alternate councilman.”

“Fine.”

His palms sweated, his belly was taut, but in his head there was a great cool calm. The four of them found chairs and sat down a little apart from the rest of the party.

“Well, what is it?” Ted rumbled eventually.

Sandy drew a deep breath. He said, “I realized a few hours ago that I know something about Precipice that you don’t.”

They waited.

“Tell me first, though: am I right in thinking Hearing Aid is defended by a tapeworm?”

After a brief hesitation Sweetwater said with a shrug, “I’d have thought that was self-evident.”

“The Fedcomps are getting set to kill it.”

That provoked a reaction. All three of his listeners jolted forward on their chairs; Ted had been about to light his favorite pipe, and it was instantly forgotten.

“But they can’t without—” Suzy began.

“I don’t want the details,” Sandy interrupted. “I’m just assuming that you have the biggest-ever worm loose in the net, and that it automatically sabotages any attempt to monitor a call to the ten nines. If I’d had to tackle the job, back when they first tied the home-phone service into the net, I’d have written the worm as an explosive scrambler, probably about half a million bits long, with a backup virus facility and a last-ditch infinitely replicating tail. It should just about have been possible to hang that sort of tail on a worm by 2005. I don’t know whether yours has one or not and it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that while I was a systems rash with G2S recently I moused around the net considerably more than my employers required of me, and I ran across something I only today spotted as significant.”

They were hanging on his every word now.

“For about eighteen months they’ve been routinely copying Class-A Star data from G2S and every other hypercorporation with a maximum-national-advantage rating and lifting the copies clear of the net for storage. I thought maybe they were tired of hypercorp execs pulling the White House Trick and other similar gimmicks, so they needed a standard reference to appeal to. It didn’t occur to me that this might be the preliminary stages of a worm-killing job. I never guessed that big a worm was free and running. Now I see the implications, and I guess you do too, hm?”

Very pale, Ted said, “Too true! That makes nonsense of the virus facility, let alone the simple scrambler aspect. And in fact our worm doesn’t have the kind of tail you mentioned. Later, we were vaguely hoping we could add one … but Washington’s tolerance of Hearing Aid was wearing thin, and we didn’t want to irritate the authorities.”

“They must hate us,” Sweetwater said. “Really, they must loathe Precipice.”

“They’re scared of us, that’s what it is,” Suzy corrected. “But … Oh, I find it hard to believe they’d be willing to clear up the sort of mess our worm could cause. I’ve always understood it works in two stages: if someone tries to monitor a call to Hearing Aid it scrambles the nearest major nexus, and if they did try to kill it, they’d find over thirty billion bits of data garbled randomly but not know where the damage had been done. It might be years before the returns all came in. We never found out whether that virus facility actually works, but the front end—the scrambler—that works fine, and the BDP once proved it to their cost.”

Sandy nodded. “But they’re prepared to cope with the virus aspect now. Like I said, they’ve lifted the max-nat-ad stuff out of the net altogether, ready to be slotted in again afterward.”