Ascendancies (58 page)

“Run away, Raf,” Aino said.

“What's that, my dear?” said Raf.

“Run, Raffi. Run for your life. I'll stay here with your stupid hookers, and your drunken, naked, mercenary losers, and when the cops come, I'm going to shoot some of them.”

“That's not a smart survival move,” Starlitz told her.

“Why should I run like you? Should I let my revolution collapse at the first push from the authorities, without even a token resistance? This is my sacred cause!”

“Look, you're one little girl,” Starlitz said.

“So what? They're going to catch all your stupid whores, the men and the women, in a drunken stupor. The cops will put them all in handcuffs, just like that. But not me. I'll be fighting I'll be shooting. Maybe they'll kill me. They're supposed to be good, these SWAT cops. Maybe they'll capture me alive. Then, I'll just have to live inside a little stone house. All by myself. For a long, long time. But I'm not afraid of that! I have my cause. I was right! I'm not afraid.”

“You know,” said Khoklov brightly, “if we took that speed launch we could be on the Danish coast in three hours.”

Spray whipped their faces as the Ålands faded in the distance.

“I hope there aren't too many passport checks in Denmark,” Khoklov said anxiously.

“Passports aren't a problem,” Raf said. “Not for me. Or for my friends.”

“Where are you going?” Khoklov asked.

“Well,” said Raf, “perhaps the Ålands offshore bank scheme was a little before its time. I'm a visionary, you know. I was always twenty years ahead of my time—but nowadays maybe I'm only twenty minutes.” Raf sighed. “Such a wonderful girl, Aino! She reminded me so much of…well, there have been so many wonderful girls.… But I must sacrifice my habit of poetic dreaming! At this tragic juncture, we must regroup, we must be firmly realistic. Don't you agree, Khoklov? We should go to the one locale in Europe that guarantees a profit.”

“The former Yugoslavia?” Khoklov said eagerly. “They say you can make a free phone call anywhere in the world from Belgrade. Using a currency that doesn't even exist any more!”

“Obvious potential there,” said Raf. “Of course, it requires operators who can land on their feet. Men of action. Men on top of their profession.”

“Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Khoklov breathed, turning his reddened face to yet another tirelessly rising sun. “The new frontier! What do you think, Starlitz?”

“I think I'll just hang out a while,” Starlitz said. He gripped his nose with thumb and forefinger. Suddenly, without another word, Starlitz tumbled backward from the boat into the dark Baltic water. In a few short moments he was lost from sight.

PART IV:

THE CHATTANOOGA STORIES

Deep Eddy

The Continental gentleman in the next beanbag offered “Zigaretten?”

“What's in it?” Deep Eddy asked. The gray-haired gentleman murmured something: polysyllabic medical German. Eddy's translation program crashed at once.

Eddy gently declined. The gentleman shook a zigarette from the pack, twisted its tip, and huffed at it. A sharp perfume arose, like coffee struck by lightning.

The elderly European brightened swiftly. He flipped open a newspad, tapped through its menu, and began alertly scanning a German business zine.

Deep Eddy killed his translation program, switched spexware, and scanned the man. The gentleman was broadcasting a business bio. His name was Peter Liebling, he was from Bremen, he was ninety years old, he was an official with a European lumber firm. His hobbies were backgammon and collecting antique phone-cards. He looked pretty young for ninety. He probably had some unusual and interesting medical syndromes.

Herr Liebling glanced up, annoyed at Eddy's computer-assisted gaze. Eddy dropped his spex back onto their neck chain. A practiced gesture, one Deep Eddy used a lot—
hey, didn't mean to stare, pal
. A lot of people were suspicious of spex. Most people had no idea of the profound capacities of spexware. Most people still didn't use spex. Most people were, in a word, losers.

Eddy lurched up within his baby-blue beanbag and gazed out the aircraft window. Chattanooga, Tennessee. Bright white ceramic air-control towers, distant wine-colored office blocks, and a million dark green trees. Tarmac heated gently in the summer morning. Eddy lifted his spex again to check a silent take-off westward by a white-and-red Asian jet. Infrared turbulence gushed from its distant engines. Deep Eddy loved infrared. That deep silent magical whirl of invisible heat, the breath of industry.

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 Juárez, Chihuahua. Eddy had not yet figured out why Ciudad Juárez, 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 Juárez 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 spex-analysis, 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 plasmajets 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.”