Perry gave him a mock glare. “You have no right to say anything on this score.” He darted a glance at Suzanne and saw that she was blushing. Tjan took this in and nodded, as though his suspicions had just been confirmed.
“Fair enough,” Tjan said. “Let’s make some inquiries about the young lady. What’s her name?”
“Hilda Hammersen.”
Tjan’s eyebrows shot up. “Hilda Hammersen? From the mailing lists? That Hilda?”
Hilda was the queen of the mailing lists—brash, quick, and argumentative, but never the kind of person who started flamewars. Hilda’s arguments were hot and fast, and she always won. Perry had watched her admiringly from the sidelines, only weighing in occasionally, but he seemed to remember now that she’d taken Tjan to the cleaners once on an issue of protocol resolution.
“That’s the one,” Perry said.
“I always pictured her as being about fifty, with a machete between her teeth,” Lester said. “No offense.”
“Lyenitchka, go get my phone from my bed-stand,” Perry said, patting the girl on the shoulder. When she got back he went through his photos of Hilda with them.
Lester made a wolf-whistle and Suzanne punched him in the shoulder and took the phone away.
“She’s very pretty,” Suzanne said, disapprovingly. “And very young.”
“Oh yes, dating younger people is so sleazy,” Lester said with a chuckle. Suzanne squirmed and even Perry had to laugh.
“Guys, here it is. I need to spring Hilda, and we need to do something about all those customers and supporters and so on who went to jail today. We need to fight all the injunctions—all of them—and prevent them from recurring.”
“And we need to eat breakfast, which is ready,” Lester said, gesturing at the table behind him, which was stacked high with waffles, sausages, eggs, toast, and pitchers of juice and carafes of coffee.
Lyenitchka and Sasha looked at each other and ran to the table, taking seats next to one another. The adults followed and soon they were eating. Perry managed a waffle and a sausage, but then he went off to his room. Hilda was in the slam in Madison, and who the hell knew what the antipersonnel stuff the Madison cops used had done to her. He just wanted to get on a fucking plane and go there.
Halfway through his shower, he knew that that was what he was going to do. He packed a shoulder-bag, took a couple more painkillers, and walked out into the living room.
“Guys, I’m going to Madison. I’ll be back in a day or two. We’ll work everything out over the phone, OK?”
Lester and Suzanne came over to him. “You going to be OK, buddy?” Lester said.
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“We can spring her from here,” Tjan said. “We have the Internet, you know.”
“I know,” Perry said. “You do that, OK? And tell her I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
The security at the airport went bonkers over him. The perfect storm: a fresh arrest, a suspicious cast, and a ticket bought with cash. He missed the first two flights to Chicago, but by mid-afternoon he was landing at O’Hare and submitting to an interim screening procedure before boarding for Madison. His phone rang in the middle of the screening, and the wrinkly old TSA goon-lady primly informed him that he might as well get that since once the phone rings, they have to start the procedure over again.
“Tjan,” he said.
“They can’t spring her today. Tomorrow, though.”
He closed his eyes and shut out the TSA goon. She had a huge bouffant of copper hair, and a midwesterner’s sense of proportionality when it came to eye-shadow and rouge. She was the kind of woman who could call you “honey” and make it sound like “Islamofascist faggot.”
“Why not, Tjan?”
There was a pause. “She’s in the infirmary and they won’t release her until tomorrow.”
“Infirmary.”
“Nothing serious—she took a knock on the head and they want to hold her for observation.”
He pictured a copper’s electrified billy-club coming down on shining blond hair and felt like throwing up.
“Perry? Buddy. She’s OK, really. I had our lawyer visit her in the prison infirmary and she swears she looks great. The lawyer’s name is Candice—take a cab to her office from the airport. OK?”
“Why is she in the prison infirmary, Tjan? Why can’t she be moved to a real hospital?”
“It’s just a liability thing. The police don’t want to risk the suit if she goes complicated on them between hospitals.”
“Jesus.”
“Seriously, she’s fine. We’ve got a good lawyer on the scene.”
But Perry had a bad feeling. The TSA goon picked up on it and gave him a little bit of extra attention. Acting nervous or agitated in an airport was a one-way ticket to a cavity search.
But then he was lifting off and headed for Madison, and though the time crawled on the one-hour flight, it was, after all, only an hour. He even napped briefly, though a sky marshall woke him shortly after for a random bag-search. His fellow passengers—badly dressed midwesterners and a couple of hipster students—all turned their bags out in the cramped cabin and then got back in their seats for the landing.
Perry had meant to phone in a car reservation at O’Hare, but the extra search had eaten up the time he’d allocated for it, and now all the rental counters were sold out. Reluctantly, he got into a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the office of the lawyers that Tjan had hired.
The cabbie was a young African kid with a shaved head. He had a dent in one temple and more dents in one of his wrists, visible as he let his long hands drape over the steering wheel.
“I know where it is,” he said when Perry gave him the address. “That lawyer, she is very good. She helped me with the Homeland Security.”
The kid was young, 21 or 22, with a studious air, despite his old injuries. He reminded Perry of the shantytowners, people who didn’t always get medical attention for their ailments, people who were often missing a tooth or two, who had mysterious lumps from badly-set bones or scars or funny eyebrows like his. The midwesterners on the plane had been flawless as action-figures, but Perry’s friends and this African kid looked like something carved out of coal and chalk.
Perry was one big jitter from the trip and the coffee and the pills for his arm, but he found himself drawn into conversation as they whizzed past the fields and malls, the factories and office-parks.
“I’m from Gulu, in Uganda. There has been civil war there for thirty five years. I studied chemical engineering through the African Virtual University wiki-program, and qualified for a Chavez scholarship here in Madison.” His accent was light but exotic, the African rolling of the Rs, the British-sounding vowel-shifts. “But the Homeland Security didn’t want to renew my visa last year. They said I had financial irregularities. I was paypalling to a friend in Kampala who withdrew it in shillings and sent it to my family in giros. Homeland Security said that I was money laundering. I thought I’d be sent away or put in prison, but Ms Candice wrote them a letter and they vanished.” He snapped his long, knuckly fingers for emphasis.
“Jesus. Well, that’s good. She’s going to help me get my girlfriend out of jail.” Perry realized he’d just called Hilda his girlfriend, which would be news to her, but there it was.
“You don’t need to worry. She’ll get your friend free.”
Perry nodded and tried to close his eyes and relax. He couldn’t. What the hell had happened to the world. It had seemed so exciting when his father was bringing home new shapes he’d spun off his CAD/CAM rig. When Perry had started to trade designs with people, to effortlessly find people on the net who wanted to collaborate with him and vice-versa. When Perry had started a business making cool art out of free junk and selling it off an Internet connection that was likewise free.
Free, free, free. No need to talk to a government, or grovel for a curator, or put up with an agent or a boss. He’d just assumed all along that he’d end up living in a world where all those parasites and bullies and middlemen would just blow away in the wind.
But they’d all found jobs in the new world. They weren’t needed anymore, but that didn’t mean that they went away. Now they were wanding him in airports and suing him for trademark infringement and busting his girlfriend and breaking his arm and giving hassle to this poor African kid who’d taught himself to be an engineer with a ferchrissakes wiki.
He dry-swallowed another pain-killer and then remembered that taking the pills meant he wouldn’t be able to get a drink, which he could sure as shit use.
“My name’s Perry,” he said.
“Richard,” the driver said. “We’re almost there, Perry. I wish you the very best of luck.”
“You too,” he said. The driver shook his hand warmly after getting his luggage out of the trunk, a limp handshake by North American standards, but gentle and friendly nonetheless. His dented wrist flexed oddly as the half-knit bones there moved.
The lawyer’s office was not what Perry was expecting. It looked like someone’s living room, with a couple of overstuffed sofas, a dozing cat, and the lawyer, Candice, who was a young-looking woman in her mid-twenties. She dressed in jeans and an oversized UW sweatshirt, with a laptop perched on one knee. She had a friendly, open face, framed with lots of curly brown hair.
“You must be Perry,” she said, setting the laptop down and giving him an unexpected hug. “That was from Hilda. I saw her a couple hours ago. She was very adamant that I pass it on to you.”
“Nice to meet you, he said, accepting a cup of tea from an insulated jug on a cardboard side-board. “Hilda is all right?”
“Sit down,” the lawyer said.
Perry’s stomach turned a somersault. “Hilda’s all right?”
“Sit.”
Perry sat.
“She was gassed with a neurotoxin that has given her a temporary but severe form of Parkinson’s disease. Normally it just renders people immobile, but one in a million has a reaction like this. It’s just bad luck that Hilda was one of them.”
“She was gassed?”
“They all were. There was a hell of a fight, as I understand it. It really looks like it was the cops’ fault. Someone told them that there were printed guns in the ride-location and they used extreme and disproportionate force.”
“I see,” Perry said. His blood whooshed in his ears. Printed guns? No frigging way. Sure, ray-guns in some of the exhibits. But nothing that fired anything. He felt tears begin to stream down his face. The lawyer moved to his sofa and put her arm around his shoulders.
“She’s going to be fine,” Candice said. “The Parkinson’s is rare, but it goes away in 100 percent of the the cases where it occurs. What this means is that we’ve got an amazing chance of taking a huge bite out of the local law that we can use to fund future defense. Tjan told me that that’s the strategy and I think it’s sound. Plus the harder we hit the law today, the more reluctant they’ll be to rush off half-cocked the next time someone trumps up a BS trademark claim. It could be much worse, Perry. There’s a kid who lost an eye to a rubber bullet.”
Perry fisted the tears away. “Let’s go get her,” he said.
“They say she shouldn’t be moved,” Candice said.
“What does our doctor say?”
“I phoned a couple MDs this afternoon and got conflicting stories. Everyone agrees that not moving her is safer than moving her, though. The only disagreement is about how dangerous it would be to move her.”
“Let’s go see her, then.”
“That we can do.”
Perry had trouble with the search at the prison hospital. His cast and their scanners didn’t get along and they couldn’t be satisfied with a hand search. For a couple minutes it looked like he was going to be kept out, but Candice—who had changed into a power-suit before they left the office—put on a stern voice and demanded to speak to the duty sergeant, and then to his commanding officer, and in ten minutes, they were on the hospital ward, where the metal-railed beds had prisoners handcuffed to them.
“Hilda?” She looked sunken and sick, her face slack and her jaw askew. Her eyes opened and rolled crazily, they focused on him. Her body shook through two waves of tremors before she was able to raise a shaking hand toward him, trailing IV tubes. She was trying to say his name, but it wouldn’t come out, just a series of plosive Ps.
But then he took her hand and felt its fine warmth, the calluses he remembered from all those months ago, and he felt better. Actually better. Felt some peace for the first time in a long time.
“Hello, Hilda,” he said, and he was smiling so broadly his face hurt, and tears were running down his cheeks and dripping off his nose and running into his mouth. She was weeping, too, her head vibrating like a bobble-doll. He bent over her and took her head in his hands, burying them in her thick blond hair, and kissed her on the lips. She shook under him, but she kissed him back, he could feel her lips move on his.
They kissed for a long time. He subconsciously took note of the fact that Candice had moved back, giving them some privacy. When the kiss broke, he had an overwhelming desire to tell her he loved her, but they hadn’t taken that step yet, and maybe a prison hospital bed wasn’t the right place to make pronouncements of love.
“I love you,” he said softly, in her ear, kissing the lobe. “I love you, Hilda.”
She cried harder, and made choking sobs. He hugged her as hard as he dared. Candice came back and stood by them.
“They think that she’ll be better in the morning. She’s already much better off than she was just a couple hours ago. Sleep’s the only thing for it. They’ve got her mildly sedated, too.”
Hilda smelled like he remembered, the undersmell beneath her shampoo and the chemicals clinging to her hair. It took him back to their night together, and he stroked her cheek.
“I’ll stay here,” he said.
“I don’t think that they’re going to let you do that, Perry. This is a prison, not a hospital.”
“I’ll stay here,” he said again. “Just make it happen, OK? We’re going to sue them into a smoking hole, right? That’s got to give us some leverage. I’ll stay here.”
She sighed and looked at him for a long time, but he wouldn’t take his eyes off of Hilda. His broken arm throbbed and he was out of painkillers. They’d have painkillers here.