Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (31 page)

Those feathers were hacks. They were lures and false attacks. Those feathers marked the way the Kentuckians didn’t go.

The math kept quiet and still as it floated through Jenny’s head, through the ignorable defenses of the telephone and the more considerable, but still avoidable, rings of barbed wire around Jenny’s Operator. The math went looking for a Detective or even a Legislator if one were to be found not braying in a pack of its brethren, an unlikely event.

The math stayed well clear of the Commodores in the Great Salt Lick ringing the Parthenon. It was sly math. Its goals were limited, realizable. It marked the way they didn’t go.

The Crows made Soma carry things. “You’re stronger than you think,” one said and loaded him up with a sloshing keg made from white oak staves. A lot of the Crows carried such, Soma saw, and others carried damp, muddy burlap bags flecked with old root matter and smelling of poor people’s meals.

Japheth Sapp carried only a piece of paper. He referred to it as he huddled with the Owl and the blue-eyed boy, crouched in a dry stream bed a few yards from where the rest of the crew were hauling out their goods.

Soma had no idea where they were at this point, though he had a vague idea that they’d described an arc above the northern suburbs and the conversations indicated that they were now heading toward the capital, unlikely as that sounded. His head was still numb and soft inside, not an unpleasant situation, but not one that helped his already shaky geographical sense.

He knew what time it was, though, when the green fall of light speckling the hollow they rested in shifted toward pink. Dull as his mind was, he recognized that and smiled.

The clouds sounded the pitch note, then suddenly a great deal was happening around him. For the first time that day, the Crows’ reaction to what they perceived to be a crisis didn’t involve Soma being poked somewhere or shoved under something. So he was free to sing the anthem while the Crows went mad with activity.

The instant the rising bell tone fell out of the sky, Japheth flung his mask to the ground, glared at a rangy redheaded man, and bellowed, “Where’s my timekeeper? You were supposed to remind us!”

The man didn’t have time to answer though, because like all of them he was digging through his pack, wrapping an elaborate crenellated set of earmuffs around his head.

The music struck up, and Soma began.

It was powerfully odd that the Kentuckians didn’t join in the singing, and that none of them were moving into the roundel lines that a group this size would normally be forming during the anthem.

Still, it might have been stranger if they had joined in.

There was a thicket of trumpet flowers tucked amongst a stand of willow trees across the dry creek, so the brass was louder than Soma was used to. Maybe they were farther from the city than he thought. Aficionados of different musical sections tended to find places like this and frequent them during anthem.

Soma was happily shuffling through a solo dance, keeping one eye on a fat raccoon that was bobbing its head in time with the music as it turned over stones in the stream bed, when he saw that the young Crow who wanted to see a bear had started keeping time as well, raising and lowering a clawed boot. The Owl was the first of the outlanders who spied the tapping foot.

Soma didn’t feel the real connection with the citizenry that anthem usually provided on a daily basis, didn’t feel his confidence and vigor improve, but he blamed that on the drugs the Kentuckians had given him. He wondered if those were the same drugs they were using on the Crow who now feebly twitched beneath the weight of the Owl, who had wrestled him to the ground. Others pinned down the dancing Crow’s arms and legs and Japheth brought out a needle and injected the poor soul with a vast syringe full of some milky brown substance that had the consistency of honey. Soma remembered that he knew the dancing Crow’s name. Japheth Sapp had called the boy Lowell.

The pink light faded. The raccoon waddled into the woods. The trumpet flowers fell quiet and Soma completed the execution of a pirouette.

The redheaded man stood before Japheth wearing a stricken and haunted look. He kept glancing to one side, where the Owl stood over the Crow who had danced. “Japheth, I just lost track,” he said. “It’s so hard here, to keep track of things.”

Japheth’s face flashed from anger through disappointment to something approaching forgiveness. “It is. It’s hard to keep track. Everybody fucks up sometime. And I think we got the dampeners in him in time.”

Then the Owl said, “Second shift now, Japheth. Have to wait for the second round of garbage drops to catch our bundle bug.”

Japheth grimaced, but nodded. “We can’t move anyway, not until we know what’s going to happen with Lowell,” he said, glancing at the unconscious boy. “Get the whiskey and the food back into the cache. Set up the netting. We’re staying here for the night.”

Japheth stalked over to Soma, fists clenched white.

“Things are getting clearer and clearer to you, Soma Painter, even if you think things are getting harder and harder to understand. Our motivations will open up things inside you.”

He took Soma’s chin in his left hand and tilted Soma’s face up. He waved his hand to indicate Lowell.

“There’s one of mine. There’s one of my motivations for all of this.”

Slowly, but with loud lactic cracks, Japheth spread his fingers wide.

“I fight her, Soma, in the hope that she’ll not clench up another mind. I fight her so that minds already bound might come unbound.”

In the morning, the dancing Crow boy was dead.

Jenny woke near dark, damp and cold, curled up in the gravel of the parking lot. Her horse nickered. She was dimly aware that the horse had been neighing and otherwise emanating concern for some time now, and it was this that had brought her up to consciousness.

She rolled over and climbed to her feet, spitting to rid her mouth of the metal Operator taste. A dried froth of blood coated her nostrils and upper lip, and she could feel the flaky stuff in her ears as well. She looked toward the garage and saw that she wasn’t the only one rousing.

“Now, you get back to bed,” she told the car.

Soma’s car had risen up on its back wheels and was peering out the open window, its weight resting against the force-grown wall, bulging it outward.

Jenny made a clucking noise, hoping to reassure her horse, and walked up to the car. She was touched by its confusion and concern.

She reached for the aerial. “You should sleep some more,” she said, “and not worry about me. The Operators can tell when you’re being uncooperative is all, even when
you
didn’t know you were being uncooperative. Then they have to root about a bit more than’s comfortable to find the answers they want.”

Jenny coaxed the car down from the window, wincing a little at the sharp echo pains that flashed in her head and ears. “Don’t tell your owner, but this isn’t the first time I’ve been called to question. Now, to bed.”

The car looked doubtful, but obediently rolled back to the repair bed that grew from the garage floor. It settled in, grumbled a bit, then switched off its headlights.

Jenny walked around to the door and entered. She found that the water sacs were full and chilled and drew a long drink. The water tasted faintly of salt. She took another swallow, then dampened a rag with a bit more of the tangy stuff to wipe away the dried blood. Then she went to work.

The bundle bugs crawled out of the city, crossed Distinguished Opposition Bridge beneath the watching eye of bears floating overhead, then described a right-angle turn along the levy to their dumping grounds. Soma and the Kentuckians lay hidden in the brushy wasteland at the edge of the grounds, waiting.

The Owl placed a hand on Japheth’s shoulder, pointing at a bundle bug just entering the grounds. Then the Owl rose to his knees and began worming his way between the bushes and dead appliances.

“Soma Painter,” whispered Japheth. “I’m going to have to break your jaw in a few minutes and cut out as many of her tentacles as we can get at, but we’ll knit it back up as soon as we cross the river.”

Soma was too far gone in the paste to hold both of the threats in his mind at the same time. A broken jaw, Crows in the capital. He concentrated on the second.

“The bears will scoop you up and drop you in the Salt Lick,” Soma said. “Children will climb on you during Campaign and Legislators will stand on your shoulders to make their stump speeches.”

“The bears will not see us, Soma.”

“The bears watch the river and the bridges, ‘and—”

“ ‘—and their eyes never close,’ ” finished Japheth. “Yes, we’ve seen the commercials.”

A bundle bug, a large one at forty meters in length, reared up over them, precariously balanced on its rearmost set of legs. Soma said, “They’re very good commercials,” and the bug crashed down over them all.

Athena’s data realm mirrored her physical realm. One-to-one constructs mimicked the buildings and the citizenry, showed who was riding and who was being ridden.

In that numerical space, the Kentuckians’ math found the bridge. The harsh light of the bears floated above. Any bear represented a statistically significant portion of the Governor herself, and from the point of view of the math, the pair above Distinguished Opposition Bridge looked like miniature suns, casting probing rays at the marching bundle bugs, the barges floating along the Cumberland, and even into the waters of the river itself, illuminating the numerical analogs of the dangerous things that lived in the muddy bottom.