Strange Trades (21 page)

“Hey, man,” he called with bewilderment, “I didn’t say you could go yet.” He trailed off into silence, shaking his head.

What a mess this was turning out to be. How come nothing ever lived up to expectations?

Rafe turned away from the metamedium node to reach for a joint from the pack on the table beside his couch. A ping brought his attention back to the node.

His agent had returned. With him was the same female agent.

“Nice you could make it, man,” Rafe said bitterly. “And with a friend, too. Why not just invite the whole world?”

His agent seemed to be looking at something over Rafe’s shoulder, and took no notice of him. Rafe had the eerie feeling it wasn’t totally present.

Without warning, his agent began to strangle the other.

Rafe was horrified. To see his own image throttling the beautiful woman was too creepy. What if it represented some awful thing his agent was doing in reality?

“Hey, stop it, man!” Rafe yelled.

His agent took no heed.

Finally, Rafe looked around for some way of thwarting his agent. There was nothing.

What the hell was he going to do? He couldn’t just let this murder happen.

The address of the female agent’s overseer was fresh in his mind. Maybe she could help.

Rafe bolted out his door.

Down to the sublevel of the arcology where the mag-lev station was, Rafe raced. Escalators and slipstrata went by in a blur, until at last he stood in the gleaming tiled station. His cyberlung felt disconcertingly heavy in his chest, and he wondered if he could possibly overload it. Why hadn’t he listened more closely to the doctor-agent, on that distant day when he had had the world in his pocket?

Hopping nervously from foot to foot, everyone on the platform regarding him as if he were crazy, Rafe prayed the uptown express would be quick.

After an interminable wait, he heard the air-lock doors opening far away down the tunnel. In seconds the train rolled in on its lowered wheels.

Rafe rushed through the barely open doors, bulling past the exiting passengers. He hurried through the connecting umbilicals between the next several cars, as if by riding in the first car he could hasten the train.

At last the train took off. Soon it was in the evacuated portion of the tunnel, its wheels retracted as it sped over the guide-track.

Rafe had plenty of time to imagine what his crazed agent was doing.

At his stop he dashed aboveground, onto the sidewalks of Central Park West.

The building facing him identified itself as 328.

Through the adjacent building’s open doors, past the agent on duty, who shouted, “Stop!”

Rafe stopped.

What the hell apartment was she in?

“Maycombe,” he panted. “Evelyn Maycombe. What number? I think she’s in big trouble.”

The agent paused a moment, as if debating. Its overseer must have taken direct control, for it asked him again whom he wanted.

Rafe repeated himself. His sincerity must have been evident for the agent said, “Number 1202. You wait right there until I come down.”

Rafe ran for the elevator.

At the door to 1202, he halted.

Water was trickling out the crack at the bottom of the frame.

Rafe hurled himself at the door. Nothing gave. A second time, a third—

On the fourth assault the door opened just before Rafe hit it, and he went flying in, to skid on his chest across the soppy carpet.

He jumped up. His agent was still battling the female one. He looked about for the overseer. There was no one but some poor crip lying on the floor. A wheelchair lay atop her, spinning its rubber wheels.

Rafe tossed the chair off, picked up the unconscious woman, and stepped out into the hall.

The overseer of the doorman-agent was just arriving.

“Call the rescue, man. This lady’s hurt.”

The doorman summoned his agent from a wall-nexus and sent it for the rescue squad. He bent over the lady where Rafe had gently laid her and said, “Miz Maycombe—are you okay?”

Maycombe? This sad wreck? Oh Jesus, there went all his dreams of getting in good with a beautiful
chica
. Oh well, maybe she had some sort of pull she would exert in his favor, after the mess his agent had caused.

Suddenly there was utter silence in the apartment that had been destroying itself. Only the slow dripping of water came to them in the hall.

From the node in the corridor wall, an agent materialized.

It was Maycombe’s.

Rafe and the doorman waited for it to speak.

At last it said, “I won.”

18.

In the Metamedium, Part Penultimate

Agent Freundlich is now disabled… Active task is now: incorporation… Enter learning mode in parallel with normal activities… Copy Freundlich subversion routines… Copy complete… Assessment of enhancement to Agent Maycombe: 74.32… Survival in any such future encounters is assured… Risk-benefit analysis of sharing routines with other agents: positive… Jump, jump, jump…

Imprinting is a funny phenomenon. It makes baby geese follow human trainers, and young humans follow older writers. Early on in my own reading, I imprinted on the work of Samuel “Chip” Delany. The following story is my homage to his wonderful “We, In Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move On a Rigorous Line,” which I first read as the cover story in the May 1968 issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, where it appeared under the supposedly more reader-friendly title, “Lines of Power.” Chip’s story exhibits a wonderful, almost archetypical patterning: outsiders who are representatives of a larger power structure (literally a power company, in Chip’s story) intrude upon a cloistered, backwards, yet strangely seductive community. The vast potential for explosive drama is obvious and irresistible.

In fact, I intend to steal Chip’s inspirational brainstorm all over again in another story soon!

Harlem Nova

Human societies exhibit a certain optimal diversity beyond which they cannot go, but below which they can no longer descend without danger.… We must recognize that to a large extent, this diversity results from the desire of each culture to resist the cultures surrounding it, to distinguish itself from them—in short, to be itself.

—Claude Levi-Strauss,
The View from Afar

1.

One-eyed Cassiopeia glared.

August, and the stern old matron was upside down, about thirty degrees below the north celestial pole, tied in a market basket as punishment for defying Perseus, favored of the gods and her prospective son-in-law. Bit of a prenuptial disagreement—choice of silver pattern, reception guest list, perhaps—had led to her petrification and subsequent life as an asterism. Guess she had reason enough to glower.

Behind me, a hot wind blew off the superheated pavement of St. Nicholas Avenue, carrying diesel odors from the idled heavy equipment of the Gold Crew. It had been a scorching summer, and darkness brought no relief.

Sledge lay on the sidewalk, unconscious from shock, the still center of a boiling crowd of Bricks and Goldies. I had seen someone get a makeshift tourniquet on him, improvised from the stained old bandana he always wore across his forehead. I could recognize Zora’s crying, Holly’s indrawn sobs. Growing louder, sirens spoke to each other across the Harlem night. A boombox played a party tape of the latest crank-up hits unheard.

Just about where I imagined Cassiopeia’s eye might be, the new nova burned, brighter than Venus. It had flared in May, not unheralded, a burst of neutrinos preceding the visible light, quantum outriders to the photon cavalry. Tycho Brahe had witnessed one in the same constellation in 1572, almost four hundred and twenty-five years ago to the day. For all anyone knew, this was the same star, kicking up again, filling the world’s eye with renewed wonder.

It is not recorded what Brahe’s culture made of his nova, what terrors it might have inspired in the common man, what awe in the savant, what mystical illumination it shed over the pages of the alchemist’s text. What was known was how our era regarded this one. As a good sign, generally, befitting the tenor of the times.

The ambulance roared up, pushing a cone of light and sound ahead of it. Coming from Harlem Hospital over on West 135th, they must have driven straight across the acres of construction site, for the vehicle was coated with dust. The paramedics jumped out and pushed through the crowd to the fallen man.

“Where the hell is it?” yelled one.

“Here, here, I’ve got it.”

“Ice it down quick. They might be able to reattach it.…”

Three black-and-whites spilled out twice as many cops. They had the wide snouts of their beanbag guns levelled at the crowd before they realized no one was in any mood to riot. No need for leadshot-filled sacks upside the head. All the tension had already been defused by the confrontation between Sledge and me.

Tonight I couldn’t regard the new star as an emblem of anything but terror. Tonight, with a slight twist of vision, I could see Cassiopeia as the Arabs saw it: a disembodied hand, stained red with henna—or blood. And the nova, then, no glaring eye, but perhaps a sparkling ring on one finger.

A big clumsy ring, fashioned from plastic scraps and the culture’s detritus, astride a thick knuckle forested with black hairs.…

I think back to a point in time a mere week earlier than that night, and I am sucked down into the past. Time is a whirlpool that can swallow whole societies, whole cities, whole cultures.…

As usual, the inside of my trailer could have served to illustrate a doctoral thesis in chaos theory. I was hoping that today would be the day order would emerge from the random components.

Rebuilding half a city was a complex task. The infrastructure is a harsh mistress. My personal inclinations were to get the job done and let the paperwork slide. It showed.

“I had the plans right here,” I said, rummaging through a stack of papers half as high as the Moscow Hilton. Invoices, job orders, OSHA reports, RFPs, memos from Mama Cass.…

“No sweat,” said Drucker. “Ill have the home office fax us another set.”

Kerry Drucker was one of the architects involved in the New York operations of the UCC. In the spirit of the whole project, his firm was donating all its time. Young, round-faced, black-framed glasses perched on a snub nose, Drucker wore a look of easy competence. I marvelled at how relaxed he looked, how much he seemed to be enjoying his stint as a volunteer. During the Hollow Years, not so long ago, someone in his position couldn’t have spared a scheme like this a minute of his precious time—if such a scheme could even have gotten off the ground.

But today, with the Urban Conservation Corps a flourishing reality, with our enlistment up over that of the Armed Services by fifty percent, with the victory in last year’s presidential election by the incumbent serving as validation of his daring policies, everyone wanted a part of the glory. Self-interest and altruism, each somewhat leery of the other, had mated, and the offspring were thriving, with godparents aplenty.

Drucker pulled at the knot of his tie. It was patterned with colorful metagraphix, in the latest style. “Jesus, it’s hot in here. What a summer.”

I notched up the noisy air conditioner. It was a new Czech model, and a little balky. But what the hell—now that we were running a trade surplus, we could afford to help the former satellite countries get back on their economic feet.

“If those cytofabbed phytoplankton take up as much cee-oh-two as they claim, we should notice a change in a few years.”

“I hope so. My place on Fire Island is now five feet from the water.” Drucker seemed struck by a new thought then. “You don’t have access to a metamedium node, do you? I could call up those plans then—”

“No such luck. It’s ironic, I know. Here we are, trying to wire the city, along with everything else, and we’re temporarily off-line ourselves. Something about a bunch of hackers reprogramming the signal repeaters for this part of Manhattan. Unilink doesn’t want to add any new nodes until they get the whole mess straightened out. It’s been three weeks now, but they claim they’re working on it all the time. We should get hooked in real soon. In fact, that’s one of the things I have to check on today. Maybe we could add a stop to our tour?”

“Sure,” said Drucker agreeably. “I just need to have a look at how the demolition is going, to see if we’re keeping to schedule.”

I stood. “Let’s go then.” At the trailer door, I grabbed a couple of yellow plastic hardhats off a pile of dirty clothes. I gave Drucker the one with the NASA decal: Snoopy riding Space Station Alpha.

Outside, the mixture of brick dust and soil that covered roughly a hundred and fifty acres in the heart of Harlem baked in the sun, reminding me of how Benares had smelled, the few times I had managed to get in from the countryside. My trailer was stationed on the northern periphery of the dusty clearing, 135th Street. (The project acreage was bounded on the west by St. Nicholas Avenue, on the east by Lenox, and on the south by 125th Street.) My headquarters was hooked into the city’s utilities, and reachable by car. Surrounding it, like some sort of modern gypsy encampment, were the dozens of other trailers that housed the UCC crewmembers. They were decorated with each crew’s totems and slogans: THE BLUE CREW RULES!, TOPAZ CREW HAS BIGGER SHOVELS AND BUCKETS, GOLDIES EAT GREENS FOR BREAKFAST.