A Good Old-Fashioned Future (19 page)

People underestimated Chattanooga, Deep Eddy thought with a local boy’s pride. Chattanooga had a very high per-capita investment in spexware. In fact Chattanooga ranked third-highest in NAFTA. Number One was San Jose, California (naturally), and Number Two was Madison, Wisconsin.

Eddy had already traveled to both those rival cities, in the service of his Chattanooga users group, to swap some spexware, market a little info, and make a careful study of the local scene. To collect some competitive intelligence. To spy around, not to put too fine a point on it.

Eddy’s most recent business trip had been five drunken days at a blowout All-NAFTA spexware conference in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. Eddy had not yet figured out why Ciudad Juarez, a once-dreary maquilladora factory town on the Rio Grande, had gone completely hog-wild for spexing. But even little kids there had spex, brightly speckly throwaway kid-stuff with just a couple dozen meg. There were tottering grannies with spex. Security cops with spex mounted right into their riot helmets. Billboards everywhere that couldn’t be read without spex. And thousands of hustling industry zudes with air-conditioned jackets and forty or fifty terabytes mounted right at the bridge of the nose. Ciudad Juarez was in the
grip of rampant spexmania. Maybe it was all the lithium in their water.

Today, duty called Deep Eddy to Düsseldorf in Europe. Duty did not have to call very hard to get Eddy’s attention. The mere whisper of duty was enough to dislodge Deep Eddy, who still lived with his parents, Bob and Lisa.

He’d gotten some spexmail and a package from the president of the local chapter.
A network obligation; our group credibility depends on you, Eddy. A delivery job. Don’t let us down; do whatever it takes. And keep your eyes covered—this one could be dangerous
. Well, danger and Deep Eddy were fast friends. Throwing up tequila and ephedrine through your nose in an alley in Mexico, while wearing a pair of computer-assisted glasses worth as much as a car—now
that
was dangerous. Most people would be scared to try something like that. Most people couldn’t master their own insecurities. Most people were too scared to live.

This would be Deep Eddy’s first adult trip to Europe. At the age of nine he’d accompanied Bob and Lisa to Madrid for a Sexual Deliberation conference, but all he remembered from that trip was a boring weekend of bad television and incomprehensible tomato-soaked food. Düsseldorf, however, sounded like real and genuine fun. The trip was probably even worth getting up at 07:15.

Eddy dabbed at his raw eyelids with a saline-soaked wipey. Eddy was getting a first-class case of eyeball-burn off his spex; or maybe it was just sleeplessness. He’d spent a very late and highly frustrating night with his current girlfriend, Djulia. He’d dated her hoping for a hero’s farewell, hinting broadly that he might be beaten or killed by sinister European underground networking-mavens, but his presentation hadn’t washed at all. Instead of some sustained and attentive frolic, he’d gotten only a somber four-hour lecture about the emotional center in Djulia’s life: collecting Japanese glassware.

As his jet gently lifted from the Chattanooga tarmac,
Deep Eddy was struck with a sudden, instinctive, gut-level conviction of Djulia’s essential counter-productivity. Djulia was just no good for him. Those clear eyes, the tilted nose, the sexy sprinkle of tattoo across her right cheekbone. Lovely flare of her body-heat in darkness. The lank strands of dark hair that turned crisp and wavy halfway down their length. A girl shouldn’t have such great hair and so many tatts and still be so tightly wrapped. Djulia was no real friend of his at all.

The jet climbed steadily, crossing the shining waters of the Tennessee. Outside Eddy’s window, the long ductile wings bent and rippled with dainty, tightly controlled antiturbulence. The cabin itself felt as steady as a Mississippi lumber barge, but the computer-assisted wings, under spexanalysis, resembled a vibrating sawblade. Nerve-racking.
Let this not be the day a whole bunch of Chattanoogans fall out of the sky
, Eddy thought silently, squirming a bit in the luscious embrace of his beanbag.

He gazed about the cabin at his fellow candidates for swift mass death. Three hundred people or so, the European and NAFTA jet-bourgeoisie; well-groomed, polite. Nobody looked frightened. Sprawling there in their pastel beanbags, chatting, hooking fiber-optics to palmtops and laptops, browsing through newspads, making videophonecalls. Just as if they were at home, or maybe in a very crowded cylindrical hotel lobby, all of them in blank and deliberate ignorance of the fact that they were zipping through midair supported by nothing but plasma jets and computation. Most people were so unaware. One software glitch somewhere, a missed decimal point, and those cleverly ductile wings would tear right the hell off. Sure, it didn’t happen often. But it happened sometimes.

Deep Eddy wondered glumly if his own demise would even make the top of the newspad. It’d be in there all right, but probably hyperlinked five or six layers down.

The five-year-old in the beanbag behind Eddy entered a paroxysm of childish fear and glee. “My e-mail, Mom!” the kid chirped with desperate enthusiasm, bouncing up
and down. “Mom! Mom, my
e-mail
! Hey Mom, get me my e-mail!”

A stew offered Eddy breakfast. He had a bowl of muesli and half a dozen boiled prunes. Then he broke out his travel card and ordered a mimosa. The booze didn’t make him feel any more alert, though, so he ordered two more mimosas, Then he fell asleep.

Customs in Düsseldorf was awash. Summer tourists were pouring into the city like some vast migratory shoal of sardines. The people from outside Europe—from NAFTA, from the Sphere, from the South—were a tiny minority, though, compared to the vast intra-European traffic, who breezed through Customs completely unimpeded.

Uniformed inspectors were spexing the NAFTA and South baggage, presumably for guns or explosives, but their clunky government-issue spex looked a good five years out-of-date. Deep Eddy passed through the Customs chute without incident and had his passchip stamped. Passing out drunk on champagne and orange juice, then snoozing through the entire Atlantic crossing, had clearly been an excellent idea. It was 21:00 local time and Eddy felt quite alert and rested. Clearheaded. Ready for anything. Hungry.

Eddy wandered toward the icons signaling ground transport. A stocky woman in a bulky brown jacket stepped into his path. He stopped short. “Mr. Edward Dertouzas,” she said.

“Right,” Eddy said, dropping his bag. They stared at one another, spex to spex. “Actually, fraulein, as I’m sure you can see by my online bio, my friends call me Eddy. Deep Eddy, mostly.”

“I’m not your friend, Mr. Dertouzas. I am your security escort. I’m called Sardelle today.” Sardelle stooped and hefted his travel bag. Her head came about to his shoulder.

Deep Eddy’s German translator, which he had restored
to life, placed a yellow subtitle at the lower rim of his spex. “Sardelle,” he noted. “
‘Anchovy’?”

“I don’t pick the code names,” Sardelle told him, irritated. “I have to use what the company gives me.” She heaved her way through the crowd, jolting people aside with deft jabs of Eddy’s travel bag. Sardelle wore a bulky air-conditioned brown trenchcoat, with multipocketed fawn-colored jeans and thicksoled black-and-white cop shoes. A crisp trio of small tattooed triangles outlined Sardelle’s right cheek. Her hands, attractively small and dainty, were gloved in black-and-white pinstripe. She looked about thirty. No problem. He liked mature women. Maturity gave depth.

Eddy scanned her for bio data. “Sardelle,” the spex read unhelpfully. Absolutely nothing else; no business, no employer, no address, no age, no interests, no hobbies, no personal ads. Europeans were rather weird about privacy. Then again, maybe Sardelle’s lack of proper annotation had something to do with her business life.

Eddy looked down at his own hands, twitched bare fingers over a virtual menu in midair, and switched to some rude spexware he’d mail-ordered from Tijuana. Something of a legend in the spexing biz, X-Spex stripped people’s clothing off and extrapolated the flesh beneath it in a full-color visual simulation. Sardelle, however, was so decked-out in waistbelts, holsters, and shoulderpads that the X-ware was baffled. The simulation looked alarmingly bogus, her breasts and shoulders waggling like drug-addled plasticine.

“Hurry out,” she suggested sternly. “I mean hurry
up
.”

“Where we going? To see the Critic?”

“In time,” Sardelle said. Eddy followed her through the stomping, shuffling, heaving crowd to a set of travel lockers.

“Do you really need this bag, sir?”

“What?” Eddy said. “Sure I do! It’s got all my stuff in it.”

“If we take it, I will have to search it carefully,” Sardelle informed him patiently. “Let’s place your bag in this locker, and you can retrieve it when you leave Europe.” She offered him a small gray handbag with the logo of a Berlin luxury hotel. “Here are some standard travel necessities.”

“They scanned my bag in Customs,” Eddy said. “I’m clean, really. Customs was a walk-through.”

Sardelle laughed briefly and sarcastically. “One million people coming to Düsseldorf this weekend,” she said. “There will be a Wende here. And you think the Customs searched you properly? Believe me, Edward. You have not been searched properly.”

“That sounds a bit menacing,” Eddy said.

“A proper search takes a lot of time. Some threats to safety are tiny—things woven into clothing, glued to the skin.…” Sardelle shrugged. “I like to have time. I’ll
pay
you to have some time. Do you need money, Edward?”

“No,” Eddy said, startled. “I mean, yeah. Sure I need money, who doesn’t? But I have a travel card from my people. From CAPCLUG.”

She glanced up sharply, aiming the spex at him. “Who is Kapklug?”

“Computer-Assisted Perception Civil Liberties Users Group,” Eddy said. “Chattanooga Chapter.”

“I see. The acronym in English.” Sardelle frowned. “I hate all acronyms.… Edward, I will pay you forty ecu cash to put your bag into this locker and take this bag instead.”

“Sold,” Deep Eddy said. “Where’s the money?”

Sardelle passed him four wellworn hologram bills. Eddy stuffed the cash in his pocket. Then he opened his own bag and retrieved an elderly hardbound book—
Crowds and Power
, by Elias Canetti. “A little light reading,” he said unconvincingly.

“Let me see that book,” Sardelle insisted. She leafed through the book rapidly, scanning pages with her pinstriped fingertips, flexing the covers and checking the
book’s binding, presumably for inserted razors, poisoned needles, or strips of plastic explosive. “You are smuggling data,” she concluded sourly, handing it back.

“That’s what we live for in CAPCLUG,” Eddy told her, peeking at her over his spex and winking. He slipped the book into the gray hotel bag and zipped it. Then he heaved his own bag into the travel locker, slammed the door, and removed the numbered key.

“Give me that key,” Sardelle said.

“Why?”

“You might return and open the locker. If I keep the key, that security risk is much reduced.”

“No way,” Eddy frowned. “Forget it.”

“Ten ecu,” she offered. “Mmmmph.”

“Fifteen.”

“Okay, have it your way.” Eddy gave her the key. “Don’t lose it.”

Sardelle, unsmiling, put the key into a zippered sleeve pocket. “I never lose things.” She opened her wallet.

Eddy nodded, pocketing a hologram ten and five singles. Very attractive currency, the ecu. The ten had a hologram of René Descartes, a very deep zude who looked impressively French and rational.

Eddy felt he was doing pretty well by this, so far. In point of fact there wasn’t anything in the bag he really needed: his underwear, spare jeans, tickets, business cards, dress shirts, tie, suspenders, spare shoes, toothbrush, aspirin, instant espresso, sewing kit, and earrings. So what? It wasn’t as if she’d asked him to give up his spex.

He also had a complete crush on his escort. The name Anchovy suited her—she struck him as a small canned cold fish. Eddy found this perversely attractive. In fact he found her so attractive that he was having a hard time standing still and breathing normally. He really liked the way she carried her stripe-gloved hands, deft and feminine and mysteriously European, but mostly it was her hair. Long, light reddish-brown, and meticulously braided by
machine. He loved women’s hair when it was machine-braided. They couldn’t seem to catch the fashion quite right in NAFTA. Sardelle’s hair looked like a rusted mass of museum-quality chain-mail, or maybe some fantastically convoluted railway intersection. Hair that really
meant business
. Not only did Sardelle have not a hair out of place, but any unkemptness was
topologically impossible
. The vision rose unbidden of running his fingers through it in the dark.

“I’m starving,” he announced.

“Then we will eat,” she said. They headed for the exit.

Electric taxis were trying, without much success, to staunch the spreading hemorrhage of tourists. Sardelle clawed at the air with her pinstriped fingers. Adjusting invisible spex menus. She seemed to be casting the evil eye on a nearby family group of Italians, who reacted with scarcely concealed alarm. “We can walk to a city bus-stop,” she told him. “It’s quicker.”

“Walking’s quicker?”

Sardelle took off. He had to hurry to keep up. “Listen to me, Edward. If you follow my security suggestions, we will save time. If I save my time, then you will make money. If you make me work harder I will not be so generous.”

“I’m easy,” Eddy protested. Her cop shoes seemed to have some kind of computational cushion built into the soles; she walked as if mounted on springs. “I’m here to meet the Cultural Critic. An audience with him. I have a delivery for him. You know that, right?”

“It’s the book?”

Eddy hefted the gray hotel bag. “Yeah.… I’m here in Düsseldorf to deliver an old book to some European intellectual. Actually, to give the book back to him. He, like, lent the book to the CAPCLUG Steering Committee, and it’s time to give it back. How tough can that job be?”