L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02 (23 page)

I could see a field fulla antique cobbler’s benches wavin’ in the wind.

We piled out t’confer by the barrow-ditch. Howell looked longingly at a weathered fencepost, trotted outa sight down the rutted back-country road a moment, an’ came back lookin’ more cheerful.

“Will you kindly help me with my pistols, Bernie?”

“Your
what?”
I looked down at his paws an’ back t’his yellow eyes reflectin’ the day’s-end sky. Some kinda evenin’ bird’d started up tweetlin’, an’ there was sage-pollen in the air. The sun was flirtin’ with the mountain-tops in a way no hallucinogenic drug or fireworks display coulda ever touched.

“My pistols. Here, I’ll show you!” He leaped back into Will Sanders’ car an’ came back with a canvas bag in his teeth.

Inside was a brace of automatics,
sans
trigger-guards an’ triggers, symmetrically engineered—one ejectin’ to the left, the other to the right—an’ firmly attached to a fetchin’ little fiberglass bonnet with a pod of electronics at the nape an’ a wire danglin’.

“I getcha!” I said to the coyote. “But what happens when y’run outa ammo?”

He thrust his head into the rig as I held it for him. A strap snaked itself beneath his chin, an’ the danglin’ wire plugged itself into his collar, but he needed a little help with the protective earpads—important, as the muzzles of the weapons protruded just beyond the corners of his jaw. I snapped the safety-goggles over his eyes, noticin’ the crosshairs.

“I try not to run out. But the pistols are a high-velocity .23 caliber, fifty rounds to the magazine. The whole thing operates off the electronics implanted in my brain.”

Reminded me of the story about a neighborhood so tough even the dogs had guns.

The plan—if that’s the word for it—was that Howell, bein’ smaller, faster, an’ sneakier, would scout on ahead through the chiffoniers an’ bedroom sets, while we took up the rear. Win an’ the Freenies an’ me. The Sanderses, as soon as we were through palaverin’ here’d circle around an’ come in from the north, I could see the big gray corrugated buildin’ already an’ was gettin’ excited.

i parked myself on the fender of Win’s Neova an’ did some real careful Yoga-breathin’ t’kinda settle m’self. Don’t do t’go into battle all keyed up. Then I leaned into the car so Georgie could see me.

“Won’t be long now, baby. Papa’s cornin’. Anything y’want me t’bring you? Jujubes, silicone-lube, integrated circuits?”

She smiled, though the strain was visible on her imaginary face. “Just yourself, Bernard M-for-macho Gruen-blum, and don’t get hurt or anything.”

“You got it, kiddo. I—what?”

I backed outa the car abruptly, smackin’ the backa my noggin on the coamin’. “What’s up, Win?”

“Nothing,” the detective answered, hikin’ up his black, tooled-leather gunbelt. That big .4I of his’d pull anybody’s pants down. He pulled the little hand-made single-shot derringer from his pocket, the one I’d noticed in his gun case back home, unscrewed the stubby barrel t’make sure it was plugged up real good with cartridge, an’ screwed it tight again..

“I just thought Georgie might like to see what’s going on,” he said, reachin’ past me to the dashboard. He pulled up an’ out on the Telecom eye; it followed his hand on a little hair-fine cable, an’ he clipped it to the chrome at the top of the windshield. “How’s that, Georgie?”

“Fine, Mr. Bear—though a little bit scarier, I must admit. Is that the building I’m in?”

“It would appear to be—and call me Win.” He slapped the tiny pistol in his palm. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of there.”

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t wanna shoot that thing with
your
hand!”

He grinned. “I’ve only used it once, and to tell the truth, I was a little surprised I survived the experience myself. Let’s go!”

We did a brief piece of slapstick gettin’ through the three-strand barbed-wire fence an’ were on our way, Nahuatl way out in the lead, men an’ Freenies followin’. Never saw so goddamned many knick-knack shelves an’ bookends in one place in m’life. An’ fancy-grained toilet seats.

Stoop labor, obviously.

Bear halted suddenly, one hand to his ear an’ a vacant look in his eyes. He nodded, looked at me, an’ said, “Howell’s on his way across the farm yard. Says it looks pretty deserted. The bam is locked up tight and he can’t get in. He’ll wait for us under the farmhouse porch.”

We mushed on through the dinin’-room section, the kitchen cabinetry, an’ about fifty-eleven acres of kiddie furniture, until we reached the edge of the field. I crouched down behind a paira bunkbeds that wasn’t quite ripe an’ whispered, “What now, O Leatherstockin’?”

Win smiled, tryin’ t’resist liftin’ the lid of a half-grown toy-box t’see what was inside. “We wait for the Three Musketeers to get into position. How fast can the little guys run?”

I nodded toward Wilbur, Orville, an’ Frank Lloyd: “How about it, fellas, can y’keep up with Jim Thorpe, here?” “When have we ever failed you, O Lord?” Spin—identifiable by the semiheaied crack in his carapace—answered sarcastically. Less worshipful they got, the better I liked ’em. Guess I’m just contrary, myself.

“Ah, how soon they forget.” I sighed. “Okay, you’re on your own—but be careful.”

Win put the tiny Com capsule to his ear again, waited.

“Now!” he whispered harshly, makin’ a choppin’ motion with his hand. I woulda felt better about it if it hadn’t been fulla Smith & Wesson an’ pointed more or less in my direction.

I drew my Colt an’ snicked off the safety.

We ran, crouchin’ low, toward the farmhouse. I’d wanted t’go right for the bam but’d allowed myself t’be persuaded that the big guns’d be needed elsewhere. Fran, with her plasma-burner for breakin’ an’ enterin’, was supposed t’get to Georgie while we were securin’ everything else.

Open yard was past, an’ I was on the whitewashed porch, kickin' in the door an’ gettin’ myself tangled up in the screenin’.

Howell leaped aheada me an’ through the kitchen, outa sight. Win was right behind me. I crossed the kitchen in one giant step, slammed my shoulder-blades against the woodwork ’round the next door, an’ levered around, just like in the movies, my pistol lookin’ for a target.

A short hallway with a braided Early American rug— wondered what kinda farm they grew
those
on.

Growlin’ cornin’ from somewhere up ahead.

i could feel Win breathin’ on my neck, an’ stepped forward, zipped across the hall an’ against the wall, front sight tryin’ t’be everywhere at once. Along the wall like I was glued to it, an’ out into the parlor.

They were gathered around the table: hadda be Bird-flower an’ Tree. Someone else, facin’ away. I aimed at the broad, black, shaggy back.

“Freeze, you motherjumpers!
Where’s my flyin’ saucer?”

The figure set its teacup down daintily. “See, I told you they’d show up, didn’t I?”

It turned slowly. “Why Bemie, is
that
any way to come calling? And just at suppertime, too!”

Koko Featherstone-Haugh reached down an’ scratched G. Howell Nahuatl between the shoulder-blades. His hind foot rattled on the hardwood floor.

“I appreciate your exasperation, my dear. Some of
my
best friends are human, too.”

18 Background Music

“
I
’
M
SORRY,
B
ERNIE,
G
EORGIE ISN'T HERE.”
K
OKO’S STATEMENT WAS BELIED, IN THAT INCREASIN’LY FAMILIAR SURREALISTIC WAY, BY THE SPARKLIN’ IMAGE OF MY GORGEOUS BLONDE ON
B
IRDFLOWER’S LIVIN’-ROOM SCREEN.
T
HE GORILLA SPEARED HERSELF ANOTHER HOT-DOG, SLAPPED IT IN A BUN, SQUIRTED MUSTARD ALONG ITS LENGTH. “
I
F YOU’D BEEN A HALF-HOUR LATER—
I
TRIED TO CALL, BUT ONLY GOT
G
EORGIE HERE, APPARENTLY AFTER YOU’D LEFT THE EARS AT THE FENCE.”
C
ROMNEY HAD HAD
G
EORGIE MOVED RIGHT AFTER
E
DNA AND
D
ENNY LEFT FOR
W
IN’S PLACE.
E
VEN IF HE’D BEEN AWAKE, THAT SELF-MADE LOSER,
K
ENT, COULDN’TA TOLD US ANYTHING USEFUL.

Win shook his head. “Six years I’ve been taking a ribbing about having the only pocket-pager in the Confederacy. By god, I’ll carry it with me from now on!”

I turned down a fourth foot-longer. Tree got a hurt look in her eyes, probably the same expression if I’d been declinin’ my fourteenth. “Well, I reckon we’re back t’square one,” I said t’Georgie. “You locked up somewhere an’ us havin no more idea—”

“Not
quite
no idea, Captain Gruenblum,” Birdflower offered. “At least Tree and I finally know what’s going on— got confusing after Cromney Telecommed Norrit Grega:-mer.”

Griswold’s turned out to be the same dead end for me (said Koko) that it proved to be for your friend Mr. Bear. By the way, I’m glad to meet you. Uncle Olongo talksabout you all the time.

All right, then,
Win.

I saw the “coverage” of your arrest when I got back to Laporte, but I figured (a) that you didn’t need another helpful friend underfoot, and (b) that, all the same, you
did
need help. Besides, it gave me a great excuse to cut classes.

I tried everything with Griswold’s: Uncle Olongo’s name and influence, not to mention the fact that he’s a major stockholder—he seems to be a stockholder in practically
everything
these days! After Denny Kent skipped out on them, they were willing enough to cooperate, but they couldn’t tell me what they didn’t know. I even ran down a few of their people, who were changing shifts while he was in the office, in hopes they could remember and describe his car.

Why
thank
you, Georgie. I was sort of proud of that myself.

Anyway, I’m afraid the rest wasn’t very inspired. Remembering the two- or-three-hundred kilometer range Ber-nie mentioned for the Emergency Escape Drive—and I had to look up “kilometer” in the Encyclopedia: it’s an obsolete eighteenth-century utopian system of measurement that never caught on—I drew a circle on a map display.

Then, given the Hamiltonian inclination to underhandedness and violence, I keyed my Com to look for strange, unusual, or criminal events within that radius. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for—gee, I wasn’t even sure when I
had
found it—but it was the one thing I could see that was out of the ordinary at all.

What was it? Nothing much, just a little note in the local news about someone finally renting a giant 100-foot flatbed hovertruck that had been gathering oxidation for a decade. What made it newsworthy is that the thing had been built ‘hat long ago and there’d never been much of a practical use for it. Too big for the Green way, and besides, freight-dirigibles are more effcient. It had changed hands several times in the last few years.

Yes, of
course
I noticed right away that it was just the perfect size for moving an inert flying saucer.

But the story, interesting as it was, wasn’t good enough to get out onto the net. If I hadn’t subscribed to everything within that circle on the map, I’d have missed it. I used up all of next month’s allowance, but I figured there might be a pretty good reward for a lost time machine. That’s not
too
mercenary, is it?

The more I checked, the stranger the story got. The truck turned out to have been rented by, of all people, a college professor of Alternative Moral Philosophy in Cheyenne. Several hours after he rented it, he reported it stolen. Naturally, the truck’s owners were-ecstatic—they’d finally gotten their investment back from the insurance!

The professor had specified two destinations and drove it himself. The final location, according to the lease he signed, was the University of Chicago extension in downtown Cheyenne. He never made it that far. He was at a truck-stop on a back road wide enough to take the thing, having a cup of chocolatl, when person-or-persons unknown made off with the vehicle, supposedly full of cultured hardwood school desks.

The first stop he’d listed, obviously, was this farm.

Win leaned back in his chair, grinning from ear to ear. “That was some pretty fair detectiving, Koko! Look me up when you finish school—or if you want a part-time job before that. I could use an apprentice to do
that
kind of legwork.”

“But he sure didn’t take any furniture, that Gregamer!” protested Birdflower vehemently. “They loaded Bemie’s machine on that big truck—it had a crane for that—and smashed a whole lot more of my rocking chairs. He gave me
this
trash in return!”

The gorilloid contemptuously threw a half-dozen coinlike discs on the table. One side was a blank expanse with a number in the center: 1789; the obverse, a symbol I’d seen before, though not nearly often enough, printed on the backa the number-one best-sellin’ literature on the North American Continent
I’d
been brought up on. Shucks, it was the very same logo the Academy uses.

The Eye-in-the-Pyramid.

Seemed t’upset Win. Made a note t’ask him about it. The gold-platin’ was already wearin’ off the high spots, exposin’ a browny bronze. If writin’ a bad check’d get y’plastered all over the Corn-net, I wondered about passin’ phony coins.

Birdflower shook his head sadly. “Gregamer said they’d be redeemed one day. I sure hope—”

“Don’t hope
too
hard,” Win interrupted. “That wasn’t an economic promise he was making, but a
political
one. Imagine what Georgie could do, used as a weapon. Cromney might wind up with a society to rule, after all!”

Which brought a certain sombemess to the occasion.

“I wouldn’t cooperate!” insisted the blonde vision on the screen; then more meekly: “At least I’d
try
not to...”

“All right,” I said with more determination than I felt. “They
still
gotta get the field-density frammis, an’ it’s locked up tight. Failin’ that, they gotta build another, an’ I give Heplar as much chance of doin’ that as crankin’ Shakespeare plays outa ten million typewriters operated by ten million ... er, uh... you get my meanin’, anyway.”