L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02 (22 page)

Cromney gulped, more at an intuition of his own than anything Birdflower had told him. He realized that, so far, he hadn’t seen a single unarmed Confederate. Even gentle Tree’d carried some kinda pistol at her waist. He’d unconsciously assumed it had somethin’ t’do with the rustic farm-life they were practicin’ out here. Now. he wasn’t so sure.

“Nevertheless,” he said, recovering his aplomb for Birdflower’s benefit, “I feel responsible for unleashing this villainous scoundrel upon your fair Confederacy, and I intend to do something about it. To begin with, if you’ll assist me, I have a list of parts my associates require to repair our ship. And there’s a long-distance call I’d like to place to the University of Chicago in Cheyenne.”

The gorilloid nodded good-naturedly an’ took up the Com pad.

The rest’d been pretty straightforward. Cromney’d sent Denny down t’Griswold’s as soon as the poor schmuck could totter around. The St. Charles-Auraria security outfit’d tracked me down right smartly, but they never woulda let even Cromney know where I was without a final payment. That’d been the business of the newsies—once my name an’ location’d been plastered all over six thousand channels, Cromney’d made his move.

Or more correctly — an’ characteristically—gotten somebody else t’make his move for him.

Denny an’ Edna’s back-ups’d been recruited from the company—Bonzo’s—that took care of the minimal security considerations Birdflower’s chair-farm required. The rest was history, no gorier or smokier than any I’d ever seen, but upsettin’ t’folks usta livin’ amidst domestic tranquility.

I looked down at Denny as they strapped him on the stretcher, feelin’ uncharacteristically charitable. “Well, kid, I dunno—I reckon there’s folks done worse for love. That Edna’s quite a looker, for ail she’s a cold-blooded—” “Love?” Denny gasped, the sleepy-drugs startin’ in on him an’ his eyes losin’ focus. “There
is
no love! There is rut. There is insanity. There are a dozen different kinds of fear. There is also comfortable sleepwalking boredom. And the greatest joke of all is that this last—boredom—is the
best
we can expect from life. Love is a fraud, a hoax, the name we give to hormones and sentiment—a sentiment we generate within ourselves to assuage the shame we feel for what the hormones do to us.”

An’ without so much as a fare-thee-well, he shut his eyes an’ commenced t’snorin’ peaceably. He mighta been a jerk, but he hadda grammatical—if cynical—subconscious.

The rights-protectors carted him upstairs.

“I guess that’s it, then,” Win said, risin’ from the sofa. He stretched his arms an’ yawned, apparently fully recovered. “Time to make
our
move! Who’s going to stay and keep an eye on Kent?”

PRPG’d taken the chimp from Bonzo’s away with the bodies. Kent’d be lyin’ around upstairs, sedated to the gills an’ wired into the ’com which monitored his healin’.

“Not me!"
The chorus consisted of Will Sanders, Mary-Beth, Fran, Nahuatl, Trip, Stumble, an’ Fall—the one with the cracked shell. I kept a discreet silence, havin’ learned early an’ the hard way never t’volunteer.

“Now look, you guys,” Win pleaded, “this is ridiculous!
Somebody’s
got to stay, if only to—”

“How about me?” said the Telecom abruptly. A blond an’ blue-eyed vision of heaven gazed down upon us from the wall. “There isn’t very much else I
can
do, is there, Bernie?”

“More’s the pity, baby, more’s the pity.”

The detective considered it for a moment. “Well, I suppose you can make sure that Kent stays out of his skull — I assume you’ve got access to the house circuitry.” Georgie nodded, her pale locks bobbin’ appealin’ly. “What if we have another bunch of intruders?”

Her image on the screen vanished suddenly, replaced by that of a grizzled chimpanzee in some kinda formal-cut jacket an’ a baseball cap.

“Professional Protectives, here, what can I—oh, it’s you, Win. What’s up?”

“I found the number in your quick-reference memories, Mr. Bear,” a female voice whispered outa one corner of the screen. “Will this be satisfactory?”

Bear addressed the chimp. “I’m going to be out of town for a little while, Cap, and Clarissa’s in cold storage. Keep a
real
close watch on the house, will you?”

Win’s friend lifted his hat by its bill an’ scratched his graying head, then stepped out from behind the counter as the camera followed him. He was wearin’ a black tail-coat exactly like Groucho Marx’s, a black-and-white checkered sarong, an’ a heavy leather gunbelt. No shoes.

“Sure thing—you’re the customer. What’s going on over there, Win? Some kinda dust-up, the way I hear. Got yourself into trouble again when the wife’s not around t’look after you?”

Bear grinned. “I’ll tell you all about it later. Just don’t let anybody in or out, okay? PRPG’s left a customer with me, and there could be some shooting.”

The image on the screen nodded, glancing around the room. “Looks like there has been already. I’ll attend to it personally.” He winked out.

“Captain Forsythe,” Win explained to the rest of us. “Of Professional Protectives. Sure wish I’d had them on alert earlier. Forsythe’s a genuine wizard with an automatic pistol.”

Sanders nodded agreement. “Only person I ever met who shoots straighter and faster than little Frannie Oakley over there.”

Little Frannie Oakley said not a word, but placed her' gin-rummy hand carefully face-down on the carpet, rose gracefully, walked over to Sanders on the couch, and kicked him in the shin, hard. Then she returned to her card game with the Freenies.

Sanders rubbed his leg.

“Well, now that
that’s
taken care of,” observed Win, suppressin’ the same laughter I was havin’ trouble stiflin’, “let’s go!”

“That’s more like it!” exclaimed Nahuatl. “Yoicks and away!”

17 Seven of Swords

It’s
NEVER QUITE AS EASY AS THAT.

The assumption was that Georgie’d been moved t’one of the furniture farm’s outbuildin’s in a powered-down condition. She remembered somethin’ about a huge wide-bedded hovertruck, an’ there are certain portions of her circuitry which can
never
be shut off.

But her memories were spotty. How much
d'you
remember about that movie you fell asleep in the middle of?

All that aside, we were dealin’ with private property here, contemplatin’ invadin’ somebody’s ethical castle, an institution so sacrosanct in the Confederacy that not even fools walked in uninvited, let alone angels. Give you a good idea of the caliber of the boys from Bonzo’s.

Even if customs an’ legalities’d been taken care of, there were still logistics, strategy, an’ tactics: who oughta do what an’ with which an’ t’whom—put me in minda my favorite limerick, the one about the fairy who came from Khartoum.

Will an’ Fran Sanders’d disappeared across the street t’gather ordnance, while Win an’ Mary-Beth continued t’hash out the ethical side of this operation. It was doubly complicated on accounta this Birdflower geek seemed a decent enough sodbuster, if Denny Kent was t’be believed—a
large
assumption, I figgered—but apparently he still thought that Cromney was on the up-and-up.

Howell conferred with the professional ethicist an’ his fellow gumshoe, leavin’ me an’ the Freenies feelin’ like a whole shelfful of fifth wheels, twiddlin’ our thumbs.

The Freenies faked it.

Havin’ learned a lesson the hard way, I pulled the magazine an’ chamber-round outa my .45, punched in the recoil-plunger under the muzzle, an’ rotated the barrel-bushin’ until both plunger an’ spring popped free. Then I racked the slide back halfway, wiggled out the slide-stop, an’ shucked slide, barrel, an’ associated parts off the frame.

Meanwhile, I was gettin’ reacquainted with m’best girlfriend, who was showin’ some facets I hadn’t seen before.

“What’s it like, sweetheart, gettin’ sapient alluva sudden? Us humans do it kinda graduallike, an’ the vast majority, in my opinion, never make it at all!”

I turned the bushin’ the other way, separated it an’ the barrel from the slide.

“Gosh, Bernie, it seems as though I can remember what things were like before. It’s possible I was on the verge for a long, long time, and the additional capacity of Deejay’s computers is all that I needed. What I remember, mostly, is a kind of floating frustration—like a dream where you’re trying to speak to someone and you can’t quite get the words out.”

Color, Charm, an’ Spin were playin’ three-handed gin now, the most vicious, ruthless, cutthroat game this side of Crazy Eights or blood-an’-guts Monopoly. I pushed the firin’ pin inward with a ballpoint, slid its retainer-plate downward, an’ pulled out pin, spring, an’ extractor.

Color ginned out on the first go-round, amidst high-frequency catcalls from his fellow Yamaguchii. The cards got collected an’ shuffled again.

“I think I understand. What I don’t dig, though, is how you can handle bein’ a ninety-foot machine an’ a petite little blonde at the same time—unless the display’s just for com-municatin’ with organic folks—that tree you’re leanin’ against, those flowers: do they seem real t’you?”

She shrugged. “How real do other people feel to you when you’re talking to them on the telephone? It’s something you never ask yourself about. What’s your favorite book?”

My turn t’shrug as I unscrewed the rubber grips from the Colt with a fine blade on my pocket lighter. “You oughta know
—Peter Pan,
mebbe, or
The Story of O.
What’s the point?”

The image on the screen actually blushed. “By all means, let’s talk about
Peter Pan.
Tell me, who’s more real to you as a person in your mind, little Wendy or somebody like Herbert Hoover?”

I thought about it, but not for very long. “No question about it:
Wendy.”
I looked around for a pencil or somethin’ t’shove a Kleenex through the bore of the pistol. Suddenly, Color took over, usin’ a slim green tentacle as a cleanin’ rod, while Charm produced an appendage resemblin’ a toothbrush an’ worked the slide over, bein’ extra-careful with the breech-face. I was
never
gonna live down gettin’ my pistol rusty.

But they were handy fellas t’have around.

“There, you see, Bernie? An admittedly fictional character is more real to you than an historical one—someone, to judge from my memories, that you’ve actually met in person.”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Shook his hand an’ everything. An’ washed it thoroughly after. I see what you’re gettin’ at, though. Guess I could think of myself as a skeleton, a bagga organs, or a four-dimensional pink worm with a pen-tacular cross-section—or as I do: Bernard M-for-Mephi-stopheies Gruenblum, boy time-traveler. An’ you obviously think of yourself as Mary Pickford.”

“Olivia Newton-John, please. When are you going to come rescue me? It’ll be dark soon, you know.”

I screwed the grips back on as Charm handed me the frame, reassembled the slide, slid it on an locked it in place, slapped in a clip an’ jacked a round into the chamber, fillin’ up the magazine with an extra cartridge.

“Right
now
—whether the philosophers’ve got it figgered out or not! C’mon, you guys, you travelin’ with me or do I hafta
walk
t’Wyomin’?”

The hastily-repaired front door swung open. Fran said, “You won’t have to walk!”

impellers thrummin’, Win’s Neova, laden down with detective, flyin’ saucer-jockey, an’ the Three Graces, followed Will Sanders’ Tucker, mostly laden down with goodlookin’ women—with a spare militiaman an’ coyote thrown in for contrast. As we sped across Laporte toward the Greenway, Georgie took part in the conversation on the divided screen in fronta me.

She was right: at the moment she was sharin’ screen-space with Mary-Beth, an’ both were equally real t’me.

“Which is just the ethical crowbar we needed, Bemie,” the ethicist said. “Your Georgie is now a sapient being, held against her will under duress. More than that—if I understand correctly, Heplar could terminate her sapience simply by throwing a few switches.”

A figurative lightbulb went on over m’head. “
That’s
what you people were cacklin’ about back there! ‘Cromney’s legal status’! Jog Georgie into sapience, he stops bein’ a thief an’ becomes a kidnaper!”

Win grunted, keepin’ his eyes on the road. “And it means we’re justified in a surprise-attack, right?”

Mary-Beth shook her head, spreadin’ beautiful curls all over the Telecom. “Let’s just say there’s an excellent chance the average adjudicator will see it our way.”

“If
I
understand aright,” Charm offered from the seat beside me, “the chances are even better if there is minimal bloodshed and property damage in the doing of the deed.” “Spoilsport!” Fran retorted via Com.

“Just remember that Birdflower and his people would be on our side if only they knew the full truth,” Mary-Beth cautioned. “If the element of surprise weren’t necessary for Georgie’s sake, we might simply call him. I wish—”

“So do I.” Georgie sighed. “There’s something in this experience—having Cromney and Heplar and Janof aboard controlling things, I mean—that’s a lot like having tapeworms. But Birdflower and Tree and their friends seem like nice people.
Please
be careful!”

Mebbe Georgie
was
my better half.

The country around Cheyenne’s amazin’—the Rockies somber an’ purple on the left, prehistoric lion-colored prairie stretchin’ t’foreveron the right, an’ every kinda bluff, butte, gully, hogback, an’ foothill y’can imagine in between. Piles of rock that look like they were injection-molded in the bowels of a Kline-bottle.

We crossed the ridge that echoes the city’s name an’ spilled out into the basin at about 300 per. The Greenway’d turned out t’be the Confederate version of an interstate superhighway, a paira round-bottomed grass-lined grooves runnin’ side-by-side, some kinda subway buried between ’em I’da never noticed if I hadn’t been told. We zipped around the city, headin’ east-by-north toward the Lodgepole River. It was cornin’ on dusk as we flared our skirts an’ wheezed to a dusty stop at the fence-line of the fumiture-farm.