Wil McCarthy - Murder In The Solid State

VIP免费
2024-12-20 0 0 369.8KB 99 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Scanned & Proofed by Cozette
"This fast-paced adventure will appeal to techo-freaks and antitotalitarians. Highly recommended."
—Library Journal
"It's always seemed to me that the murder mystery is a great vehicle for showing a new world. Murder in the Solid
State is an exceptionally good illustration of the point. Besides being an excellent mystery, it is a convincing look at
the near future of nanotechnology."
—Vernor Vinge
"Nanotechnology, cyberspace, and glitzy weapons technology spice up McCarthy's third novel but take a backseat to
fast and frequently graphic action and exciting plot twists. Well-written, escapist futurism."
—Booklist
"McCarthy does an exceptional job developing both the SF and mystery elements, and the fact that he has a fine cast
of characters doesn't hurt any."
. —Science Fiction Chronicle
oo;
"McCarthy's story weaves politics and science so deftly that the mystery shines."
—Midwest Book Review
Also by Wil McCarthy
Aggressor Six
Flies from the Amber
The Fall of Sirius
Bloom
MURDER
IN THE
SOLID STATE
WIL McCarthy
ATOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK
Note: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and
destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
MURDER IN THE SOLID STATE Copyright © 1996 by Wil McCarthy
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http://www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
ISBN: 0-812-55392-6
Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 95-52863
First edition: August 1996
First mass market edition: November 1998
Printed in the United States of America 0987654321
This book is dedicated to the memory of artist and teacher Evelyn B. Higginbottom, who remains a lady even now.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Shawna McCarthy, Amy Stout, Walter Jon Williams, and especially David Hartwell
for suffering through early drafts and helping to shape this novel into its current form. For technical
assistance, I am deeply indebted to the following people: In the field of nanotechnology, K. Eric Drexler, J.
Storrs Hall, and all the regulars on sci.nanotech. In the area of law enforcement and courtroom procedure,
J. Michael Schell and Donald Polk. In the martial arts, Gaku Homma Sensei and Michael Fuhriman of
Aikido Nippon Kan and Sherry Woodruff of the Cheyenne Fencing Society.
A number of other people are also very much in need of thanks. For character inspiration and notes on
acade-mia: Richard M. Powers and Gary Snyder. For clearing the path for me in large ways and small:
Charles C. Ryan, Dorothy Taylor, Ed Bryant, Rose Beetem, Doug and Tomi Lewis, Karen Haber, Robert
Silverberg,
Richard Gilliam, Al and Penny Tegen, and Bruce Holland Rogers, all of whom believed in me on the very
flimsiest of evidence. For musical inspiration: Enya, Phil Collins, David Crosby, Lemon Interrupt, and
Antonio Vivaldi. Literary influences are too numerous to mention, but I would like to extend special thanks
to Vernor Vinge, John Stith, and Walter Jon Williams for showing how it ought to be done. For moral and
logistical support: my parents, Michael and Evalyn McCarthy, and especially my wife, Cathy, who puts up
with an awful lot.
When tyrants tremble in their fear
and hear their death-knell ringing,
when friends rejoice both far
and near how can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile
our thoughts to them are winging,
when friends by shame are undefiled
how can I keep from singing?
—Anne Warner, 1864
CHAPTER ONE
It was the sort of night in which careers were built or broken, in which connections were made that,
with the ponderous inexorability of scientific advancement, would alter the course of human affairs. It was
the sort of night David Sahger would kill for. The hum of the elevator seemed to echo his own nervous
energy, his anticipation of the reception that waited below.
A bunch of old farts puffing and posturing at each other, Marian had warned when he'd tried to
invite her along. My theory is better than your theory, blah, blah, blah. She'd spoken in the deep
mock-masculine tone she reserved for satirizing academics in general and, when she felt he needed it,
David himself in particular. Molecular fabrication is important, he'd countered somewhat irately. You
could cover it for the Bulletin. Your readers should know more about what we 're doing. But she'd just
laughed at that, and launched into a dry narration of what she thought such an article might sound like.
Annoyed at the memory, David glared across the elevator car at his own face, reflected back at him
through the ripply burnished brass of the doors. Dummy. He knew the excitement of his work, felt it fresh
every morning as he pedaled to the U of Phil campus, his mind snapping and buzzing with solutions to the
problems of the previous day. But he could not express this feeling to Marian, and after two years of
staccato romance he should know better than to try.
Have a nice time, she'd said by way of mollification. And stay away from Vandegroot, hey?
Easy for her to say. Big Otto's grudge was like a force of nature, everywhere at once and impossible to
quell. Henry Chong, David's faculty sponsor, would of course shield him as best he could, but David did not
like the dependence that implied.
The floor indicator, counting slowly but steadily downward, floated above the reflection of his face—
green holographic numerals that stood out from the wall, hovering above the door with an inch or two of air
between them and the gloss-black projector plate. Something was not quite right with the numbers;
solid-looking and yet less substantial than mist, they jarred the eye, like the view through someone else's
glasses. Immature technology, David thought, rushed to production for the luxury markets. He shrugged.
Costume jewelry for buildings, a tiny and irrelevant victory of glitz over substance. David thought of himself
as a substance man, willing to let the little victories go.
Presently, the floor indicator clicked down to 04, and then to 03. His stomach began to feel a little
heavier as the car slowed. His eyes studied the green, misfocused letters for a moment, at once drawn and
repelled by their strangeness. He considered himself well informed even outside the narrow discipline of
molecular fabrication, and yet he had not known that synthetic holography had progressed so far, that
real-world applications like this existed.
So much news every day, so much crime and unemployment, so many protests and plane crashes and
little countries going to war, so much damn stuff going on, you had to filter it if you ever wanted to leave
the house. But how to pick and choose? In what ways might the world be changing, behind his back? The
question troubled him for half a moment, but then the floor indicator went to LOBBY and a chime rang out,
quietly startling in this close and quiet chamber.
The brass doors slid open with lazy grandeur, and, like Dorothy stepping from her dichromatic Kansas
porch to the Technicolor vistas of Oz, David left the elevator and strode out into the cavernous spaces of
the lobby. White ceilings high above him, skylights alternating with haute couture fixtures that cast warm
rays all around. Marble pillars held it up, brass-shod at their bases. The black-and-red carpet sank beneath
his feet like a paving layer of marshmallow.
Dodging potted ferns and knots of well-dressed strangers, David made his way to the entrance of the
grand ballroom, some fifty paces distant. He walked for once without hurry, taking in the view he had
earlier ignored. This was a far cry from his normal accommodations, and he didn't mind taking a moment or
two just to appreciate it. He reached the ballroom.
The line at the security detectors was not long; David had come down a little early, both to beat the rush
and to quell his own restlessness. He'd been to AMFRI conferences before, but this time around he had
patents to brag about, papers to present, colleagues and contacts with whom to rub elbows. This time
around he was no mere observer. He also had Vandegroot, the Sniffer King, to worry about, yes, but this
did little to dampen his enthusiasm.
Half a dozen people were cycled efficiently through the security system ahead of him, each taking no
more than a few seconds. Then his turn came, and he stepped through the doorwaylike frame and into the
short false-wood tunnel of the detector itself. Feeling, as always, the prickly and entirely hallucinatory
sensation of "being scanned." In fact, in the soft fluorescent light the detector was harmlessly and invisibly
flashing his body with radio waves, imaging it magnetically and positronically, sniffing it for traces of
suspicious chemicals. Using a Vandegroot Molecular Sniffer for this task, of course, and all the more
humiliating for that.
Like Big Otto himself, the machine seemed more interested in impugning your background than
protecting your safety; it sniffed not only for explosives and tear gas and gunpowder residue, but for a
broad range of other chemicals, from drugs to machine oils to smuggled perfumes, and what in God's name
did that have to do with the security of an AMFRI reception?
His eye caught something in the dim light, and he turned to see a graffito scribbled low on one wall, in
bright orange ink. A drawing, a deadly accurate caricature of Otto Vandegroot, roly-poly and with
grossly enlarged nostrils and a caption beneath: you are being SNIFFED. PLEASE BEND OVER.
A wave of snickering swept David's discomfort aside. Whoever had done this had chutzpah for sure,
and judging by the freshness of the ink, he or she was an AMFRI scientist, and not long gone. Still
snickering, and wishing he could have done the deed himself, David shook his head and stepped out of the
detector.
He was greeted, almost immediately, by giants.
CHAPTER TWO
Above the crowd, a huge banner announced: BALTIMORE WELCOMES THE ASSOCIATION
FOR MOLECULAR FABRICATION RESEARCH, INTERNATIONAL. Crepe paper hung along the
walls and spread out like telecom wires from the chandeliers, and a solid layer of helium balloons covered
the ceiling, long strings of shiny Mylar dangling just out of reach of the crowd beneath.
The display was obviously intended to be festive, but the color scheme, beige and peach and subtle
maroon, simply made it look expensive. Or perhaps that was the intent after all. The buffet, which by itself
must have cost tens of thousands of dollars, sprawled across a dozen tables, filling nearly half the cavernous
ballroom. Anything David might possibly want to eat, be it sashimi or spaghetti or
Schwarzwaldekirschtorte, could be found somewhere nearby.
Indeed, the very world seemed similarly laid out for him, or at least that portion of the world he'd
worked so hard to become a part of. Had you asked him to name the five most significant inventions of
recent decades, he might well have answered: the Chong precision epitaxy assembly, the Yeagle, the Quick
sorter, the Busey trap, and the Henders/Shatraw ion gate. And here, within arm's reach, stood Adam
Yeagle, Denzl Quick, Elaine Busey, and the Robert G. Shatraw! And Henry Chong, of course, but after
eight years at the U of Phil, three of them under Chong's direct supervision, David thought of the man more
as an aging and slightly bumbling relative than a Serious Heavy Hitter in the molecule biz. His genius
seemed deeply mired beneath layers of bureaucratic malaise. The cost of living in academia, David
supposed.
"I'm afraid classical nanotech is in a state of full retreat," Professor Shatraw was saying mournfully. "You
hardly see even the word in the journals anymore."
David nodded respectfully. Only twenty minutes into the reception, and he thought he was doing quite
well, thank you kindly. Vandegroot v. Sanger was a much hotter topic du jour than he would have
guessed; it proved quite easy to trade on, so long as he kept his voice down. Speaking of which ... He
looked around again, trying to spot the shine of grease-slicked hair or, failing that, the knot of Germans and
Swedes that seemed so often to surround it. Inexplicably, David thought, since Big Otto was about as Ugly
American as they came.
The Japanese and Koreans tended to cluster together as well, despite the official tensions between
them, as if they realized after all that they had more in common with each other than with the wider world.
The Chinese, of course, kept their own company, except for Hyeon "Henry" Chong, who flitted between
them and the masses of English speakers like a kind of pollinating insect. And David ... Well, it seemed he
could go where he liked. He knew enough people this year that he could leap from conversation to
conversation, finding welcoming handshakes the way a rhesus monkey finds new branches to swing from.
It was a new sensation for him, and quite welcome.
"I couldn't agree more," Elaine Busey said to Shatraw. "The mol-bio crowd soured the whole concept
for us. Ten years ago they were honest-to-god calling the aspirin molecule a prototypical nanomachine.
Hemoglobin I could forgive, since it does have moving parts, but aspirin? Come on; that kind of statement
just makes us all look goofy, never mind who's doing the actual work."
She glanced several times at David as she spoke. While hardly youthful in appearance, Busey was the
youngest of the Serious Heavy Hitters, and visibly sympathetic toward him for some reason he hadn't
figured out yet. Maybe he reminded her of someone. Maybe she had a son or a daughter his age. Or
maybe she was just a nice lady who wanted to put him at ease. In any case, he sensed his moment, and
leaped.
"That's what nobody understands anymore," he said. "Most everyone here is a brilliant scientist, but it's
ass-in-chair that gets the job done. Trying to let protein folding do all the work for you is a cheat, and it's a
dead end. You'd do better building a car engine out of pasta shells."
He paused. Had he said too much? He suddenly felt socially off-balance, for perhaps the first time that
evening. Would they frown, raise eyebrows, raise accusing fingers at him? But to his relief the Heavy
Hitters simply chuckled and nodded appreciatively, as if he'd voiced their thoughts, but in words they would
not themselves have chosen.
"Your pupil has a sense of humor," Professor Yeagle said to Henry Chong. "Wherever did he get it?
Not from you, I'd guess."
"I've tried to discourage the boy," said Chong, with a not-half-bad attempt at good cheer.
"Well," David admitted, "I was only partly joking. Everyone wants to be a gene-sequence programmer
these days, when what we really need is ship-in-a-bottle types."
"Have you ever built a ship in a bottle?" Elaine Busey asked with a smile.
David nodded. "Yeah."
At age twelve he'd put the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria in an eyedropper. The following year he'd
copied the Eiffel Tower in spidersilk, the whole structure less than a millimeter wide at the base, kept safe
inside a tiny magnifier box of clear plastic. When he dropped the box and its lid popped off and the model
vanished forever into his bedroom carpet, he had cried hysterically for two days, until the family doctor
knocked him out with an adult-strength sedative cocktail.
Weeks of depression had followed and, deeply worried for him, David's father had finally offered to buy
him a new tool for his hobby, any kind he wanted. Taking Dad at his word, David had asked for—and
received!—a precision dual-probe scanning/tunneling microscope that cost as much as a car, and which
was capable not only of imaging individual atoms, but of picking them up and moving them. From that day
forward, the SPM had been the center of David's world.
When he'd finally gotten to college and linked up with others who shared his interest in very small things,
he'd been shocked and disappointed to learn that their attitudes, for the most part, differed sharply from his
own. "Why mess around with scanning probe microscopes when God gave us the ribosome? Why build up
from individual atoms when you can design proteins that fold up into any shape you need?"
He remained shocked to this day. Had you asked the throngs of people in this room about the five most
important inventions, most would certainly name the free-culture ribosome and the RNA
sequencer/multiplier, and possibly the PanProteia VR modeling system. And that, by itself, said damn near
everything that needed to be said about the current state of molecular fabrication research.
Fact was, proteins would fold up into messy squiggles that might or might not approximate some crude
machine parts. OK for medicinal applications when you just needed something like a molecular cage or
sieve or catcher's mitt, but for serious manipulation, for gears and levers and gripping appendages, they
were useless. Fragile and floppy, they waited for even a mild fluctuation in temperature or contaminant
levels to cross-link them into useless goop.
Real, classical machinery was commonplace these days on the micrometer scale, though in David's
opinion it wasn't good for much. Cooling systems for computer chips, yes, and a few lumbering "microbots"
that were little more than windup toys, too small to move a dust speck and far too large and clumsy to move
an atom. Even David's childhood SPM had better motor control.
The microbots were also both too large and too small for most medical applications, sized just right, in
fact, to provoke a massive immune response: tens of millions of antibodies, the body's own nanomechanical
soldiers, swarming them, gluing and trapping them until the kidneys could flush them away with the rest of
the garbage.
Building machinery on the nanoscale, a thousand times smaller than this ungainly microtech, was
perhaps the most important thing the human race had ever attempted, and certainly by far the most difficult.
Accommodation was necessary not only with the Newtonian laws, but with the voodoo of quantum
mechanics and the plain orneriness of atomic chemistry as well. You couldn't image a work in progress,
either, except by methods so indirect and so imprecise that you felt like a blind, groping mechanic with
boxing gloves on.
Mere brilliance was not enough for a task like that. Not nearly enough. And yet brilliance seemed the
most you could ask from most of the AMFRI membership, who were content to spend their lives playing
origami with pond slime.
"You seem a little down, suddenly," Denzl Quick opined. "Nothing we've said, I hope." He chuckled a
little.
David shook his head and forced a grin. "No, sir. Just thinking how badly the world needs saving."
"Ah," said Quick, "then you are Henry's student after all. Now, you've been talking to us for five
minutes, and not a word about your court case. I'm sure we're all dying to hear about it, so come across."
David shuffled. "Well, sir, it wasn't a court case at all, fortunately for me. Vandegroot could have
bankrupted me if he hadn't been so sure he was going to win. He's tightfisted, that man."
"Please forgive my pupil," Henry Chong said, putting a hand on David's shoulder and looking around at
the Heavy Hitters in mock sorrow. His accent was terrible, as usual, but the words were spaced and
clearly enunciated. "His education has crowded out his manners. Very unfortunate, considering his
education."
Surprisingly, Henry chuckled. "Let me be fair: I think he remembers some original substance of our
discipline, even if he has forgotten the details. Molecular fabrication is that way, for some students. For
others it's the push and pull of a thousand tiny influences. Like warfare, eh? If you're so smart, David
Sanger, we'll let you work out the ju of numerical techniques for yourself."
He made a light fist and mimed with it as if knocking on David's forehead. "The boy's head is like a
rock. I warned him, repeatedly, not to get in Vandegroot's way. So many bodies on that field, I didn't want
to be responsible for another. But does David Sanger listen to me? No, he does not."
"It was a binding arbitration, wasn't it?" Elaine Busey asked with a laugh.
"Yeah," David said. "ECS express, no appeal. Even 1 can afford that one. What I can't figure out is
why everyone thought I was going to lose. I mean, Big Otto never actually invented anything."
And once again, David went silent, fearing he'd spoken too boldly. But again, the Heavy Hitters laughed.
And a good thing; had you asked David to name off the biggest obstacles to human progress, he would
have said "Vandegroot" five times. David had little understanding and even less respect for Big Otto,
who had slapped together Heavy Hitting inventions in what was, after all, rather an obvious
configuration to produce the Vandegroot Molecular Sniffer. It bewildered David that in the process of this
development, Vandegroot had been awarded a series of sweeping patents that gave him broad power over
the molecular fabrication industry. The fact that he was Grayer than a district court judge might have had
something to do with that.
Really, the road from lab to marketplace was long and arduous enough without Vandegroot and his
lackeys crouching like buried mines beneath it. But crouch they did, and on occasion they would rise up to
blast otherwise-promising inventions. Not merely block or delay them or subject them to stiff royalties, but
literally blast them with subpoenas and infringement suits and restraining orders, literally remove them from
the remotest possibility of manufacture by their developers or by anyone else.
It was one of the great ironies of the industry that the sniffer, one of its few commercial successes
outside the
medical and pharmaceutical markets, was a device whose smallest version OSHA had labeled with the
words: caution: two-man carry. So much for nanotechnology. A universe of possibilities lurked behind the
Otto Barrier, and yet the whole thing was a farce! Vandegroot was a talented administrator, and admittedly
a deft hand at manufacturing shortcuts, but his contributions to the science extended no further than that.
David and his lawyer had proved as much in the three days of the arbitration.
Certainly, though, the barrier remained. David could commercialize his latest research only so long as he
didn't cross another Vandegroot patent, and God knew that was easy enough to do. But he'd swept a few
mines off the field, at least, and hopefully other researchers would follow behind him in the fight to clear the
path entirely.
"Are we boring you?" Robert G. Shatraw asked David, in a friendly but pointed tone. "You look like
you're off in the ozone somewhere."
David smiled, shook his head, made a huffing sound of self-deprecation. "I really am sorry, Dr. Shatraw.
Life's been very busy; I've got a lot on my mind. It's no excuse for rudeness, of course."
"We don't all go head-to-head with Big Otto," Elaine Busey admitted. "That's got to be a drain on your
mental resources, I would think. It would certainly steal a lot of momentum from your work."
"Yeah." David's grin widened, and he nodded vigorously. "I swear that guy would patent dirt, and find
some way to put a trademark on the name, so he could sue anybody that so much as mentioned it. He'd
patent the carbon atom if he thought he could get away with it."
Elaine Busey's eyes flashed a warning.
"You know," said a gruff voice behind David. He turned and saw standing there, no more than fifteen
feet away, the Sniffer King, the Duke of Search and Seizure, Big Otto Vandegroot himself. He wore his
usual spider-silk tweeds, his usual greased-back hair and neatly sculpted beard. And his usual sneer, a little
exaggerated tonight. In his fist he held a very tall glass filled with ice cubes and amber liquid.
"Otto," David said, nonplussed.
"You know, one thing about me," Vandegroot said, his voice oozing with derision, "is that I have
excellent hearing."
Henry Chong held up a" hand, palm out toward Vandegroot in a placating gesture. "The boy was just—"
"You little vermin," Vandegroot said, ignoring Henry, brandishing his drink and taking a step toward
David. "You haven't got a grain of respect. When you were potty training I was changing the world."
A surge of anger ran through David, tensing his muscles. He matched Vandegroot's sneer. "The
sniffer? Oh yeah, that's been a real boon. Thank you very much."
"What the hell do you know, boy?" Vandegroot's face was bright red.
" 'Boy'? How very Gray of you. You know, two of my friends got mugged last year. Mugged bad, right
on the U of Phil campus. Bare fists and a bad case of mean. Can a sniffer detect that, Otto?"
"You don't know a damn thing." He paused, shifted his balance. "You go ahead, boy, build your stupid
nanoscale chain drive. We'll see if the world beats a path to your grotty little door."
Vandegroot turned as if to go. Then, seemingly as an afterthought, he looked down at the drink in his
hand, dropped an elbow, cocked his arm back, and hurled the glass directly at David. Light from the
chandeliers flashed off it as it flew, spinning scotch and ice cubes off in every direction.
Unthinkingly, David stepped back and turned aside, the standard "when in doubt" move they had taught
him in Street Defense. Cold wetness splashed the front of his shirt, followed by a burning sensation, and
then a slam of pain where the edge of the glass had caught him and bounced away.
"Hey!" he shouted, his mind completely at a loss to explain or react to this development.
"You cross my path again and I'll take you down," Vandegroot said in his hoarse and gravelly drawl. His
eyes burned beneath slicks of hair that had fallen out of place.
David blinked, and then spoke mildly, with surprise and disdain: "You asshole. Don't throw things at me."
Otto Vandegroot's face reddened further, his scowl deepening to an expression of active rage.
Suddenly, he moved his right arm horizontally, as if straightening his shirt cuff, then snapped the hand
downward in a whiplike gesture. Then, somehow, he had an object in his fist, a little white rod about half an
inch thick and five or six inches long. He turned his hand in a peculiar way. The rod made a clicking and
scraping noise, and something sprang from the front of it, growing. In less than half a second the rod had
snapped out to a length of three feet, with a narrow taper at the end. No, a sharp point at the end.
Something else was happening at the wide end of the device: it was puffing out, like a balloon—no, like
an umbrella. A conical handguard had unfolded just in front of Vandegroot's fist, locking into place with a
final snap. And all at once, David recognized what Vandegroot had in his hand: it was a "drop foil," the
newest weapon of choice in the circles of the well-to-do.
Spring-loaded, readily concealable in an ejector that strapped to the forearm, the drop foil was fashioned
from ordinary plastic and could therefore pass through the security detectors that marked the entrances of
most public buildings. But drop foils were sharp, and expensive, and (he'd heard) very intimidating to the
average street thug, who had no interest in getting poked full of holes for the contents of one man's wallet.
Drop foils were illegal, of course, and very much against the spirit of public helplessness the Gray Party
had worked so hard to foster. They were the sort of thing snobby college kids showed off to their friends,
with a swagger and a little tough talk, and not at all the sort of thing David expected to see dropping from
the jacket sleeve of a puffball like Otto Vandegroot.
"I'll teach you some fucking manners," Vandegroot spat, taking another step forward and brandishing the
newly sprung weapon. He'd arranged his feet into a fighting stance, drawn his left arm behind him, the hand
hovering six inches off his hip. His right arm straightened, and the tip of the foil dropped until it was pointing
directly at David's face, only a couple of feet away.
David felt his eyes widening, sensed his vision growing narrow, his breath growing shallow and quick.
He tried to step back but found he was up against one of the buffet tables. Working on its own initiative, his
left hand reached behind him and grabbed at whatever was nearest, coming forward with a load of small,
soft objects, candies or berries or something. He lifted them up as if he might throw them, then thought
better of it and opened his fingers. Small things pattered softly against the carpet. The room, all four and a
half acres of it, had gone deathly silent.
"Professor Vandegroot, wait," Da3vid said, in what he hoped was a conciliatory tone. Shit, where was
hotel security now?
"Oh. So now it's 'Professor Vandegroot' again, is it? That's good. I may just carve it into your forehead
so you don't forget."
David dodged to the side, colliding with a knot of people. He felt someone thrust something into his open
right hand, and then the knot gave, the people fading back, avoiding the scuffle. Vandegroot took a sliding
step sideways, arranging himself in front of David once again.
David let his glance flick down for a moment, and he saw what had been placed in his hand: a little
white cylinder, much like the one Vandegroot had so recently held. It was much heavier than he would
have expected, much springier, much more squeezable in his hand. He squeezed it.
Instantly, the thing jerked in his grip and sprang out to its full length.
"Ha!" Vandegroot called out, seeing the three-foot plastic blade, stepping forward, and slapping it aside.
"The mouse has teeth, does he?" Vandegroot's own blade lanced in and out quickly, piercing David's shirt,
lightly pricking the flesh beneath it.
"Ow!" Startled, David tried to pull back again, came up hard against the buffet table again. There was
nowhere to go; there was no way for him to step out of reach of Vandegroot's foil. He was struck all at
once by the absurdity of the situation—here he was, twenty-five years old and striving desperately for the
respectability of adulthood, yet somehow he was having a sword fight in front of all the people he most
wanted to impress. And he was losing, badly!
Vandegroot lunged forward again, lithe and strong despite his bulk, his blade coming straight in toward
David's heart. I have to block; I have to parry, David thought, but by the time he'd brought his blade
around, Vandegroot had pricked him again and stepped back. David didn't know how to parry. David didn't
know how to fence at all.
"It's a difficult lesson," Vandegroot said, and David saw the bastard wasn't even breathing hard. "It's a
painful—"
Vandegroot lunged forward again, his front leg moving out, his body sliding down and forward above it.
Arm projecting straight out from the shoulder, elbow locked. The extended arm is both a target and a
lever, said the voice of David's Street Defense instructor, and suddenly David knew exactly what to do.
His right arm was forward, the elbow up, the sword pointing vertically downward in his grip. A useless,
ludicrous pose, but now he rotated the blade upward with a vicious, snapping gesture that brought it around
hard against Otto Vandegroot's drop foil. The two swords, crossing with a plastic CLACK, were jerked to
the right, so that Vandegroot's sword now pointed off past David's shoulder.
Without pausing, David stepped forward with his left foot, pivoting at the waist and bringing his left hand
forward as he did so. His fingers closed around the wrist of Otto's sword hand. His right hand disengaged
the sword, came up and around in a wide, graceful arc as he turned on the ball of his left foot. The
movement was mechanical and yet fluid, loose, like a dance step. In half a second, David had swung
around until he was back-to-back with Vandegroot, both arms extended as if in a ballet parody of
crucifixion. His right hand held the sword out loosely, while his left took a tighter grip on Vandegroot's
wrist. His chin was high, and for a moment he saw the astonished faces of Henry Chong and Elaine Busey,
of Yeagle and Quick and the other Heavy Hitters.
But the dance had not yet finished. He stepped out and sideways with his right foot, then put his weight
down on it and turned, sliding his left foot and pivoting until he faced Vandegroot once again.
This was Wrist Twist Number Three, one of the first moves they had taught him in Street Defense.
David was not doing it as quickly as it should be done, but then again he was young and long of reach and
he hadn't been drinking, and he could do this much better than he could fence.
Vandegroot gaped at him, looking shocked and outraged. I was ready for you, his expression seemed
to say, but you didn't make the right move. What the hell are you doing? And then, comprehension
dawned as David applied the pressure. Like magic, he had jerked Vandegroot off-balance and danced his
wrist around until the sword pointed off in a useless direction. The position was awkward at best, and when
the victim's hand was pushed and twisted in the Street Defensive way the pain was sudden and
excruciating.
"Aah. Aah!" A look of alarm flashed across Otto's face. This hurt. This hurt. Good.
"Drop the sword," David said. He sounded remarkably calm, much calmer than he actually felt.
"Let. . . You're . . ."
"Drop it!"
Otto's face relaxed, and his arm relaxed in David's grip, and his hand opened, and the drop foil tumbled
free, bouncing off Otto's bicep and knee on its way to the carpet. I surrender, the body language was
saying. I don't know what you 're doing, but it hurts me and I would like you to please stop doing it!
But David did not back off on the pressure. Vandegroot had been all too willing to inflict pain and
embarrassment on him, and he found he couldn't let that go quite so easily. He twisted a little more.
"Ow!" Vandegroot cried out with more than a hint of panic in his voice.
David sneered angrily. "On your ass, old man. It's the only way."
His eyes were locked on Vandegroot's, and understanding flashed between the two of them like a
telecom signal. In order to relieve the pain, Vandegroot must bend his knees and fall backward, right onto
his generous rear end. He must drop himself, quite literally, at David's feet. He knew this, and David knew
that he knew it, and he saw that David knew and hated him for it. And thusly, he fell.
CHAPTER THREE
David took off his pierced, blood-specked zipper tie and threw it on the dresser even before he'd kicked
the door shut. The room was bland, unwelcoming, its colors pale in the harsh lighting. White diode arrays
striped across the ceiling, bright and tough and economical, drawing very little current for the illumination
they gave. But there was nothing welcoming about them. Comfort was what he needed right now, but the
hotel had reserved all its posh splendor for the public spaces, and this room was a place of convenience,
nothing more. Actual, soul-soothing comfort was not this hotel's forte; that sort of thing came dearer than
even AMFRI would shell out for.
He'd handled things badly; he knew that. Hell, the evening could hardly have turned out worse. He had
no doubt that the tale would be told again and again, haunting him down the long decades of his career.
Don 'tmess with Sanger. He once beat up Otto Vandegroot, you know. Yeah, broke his arm right in
the middle of a cocktail party in Baltimore. David had not, in fact, broken Otto's arm, but a lot of people
seemed to think that he had, and no doubt that was how the incident would be remembered.
This was not the sort of reputation David wanted, not at all, but he couldn't even work up a sense of
outrage about it; he had crossed the line, and had done it knowingly. Disarming an attacker was one thing,
but publicly dumping a respected scientist on his ass was something else again. Whether or not the scientist
had earned such treatment (or worse) was hardly the point. David ran over and over the events in his mind,
hunting for the moment of his error, the moment at which he could have chosen differently, defusing the
tension and still retaining his pride. Facing down Vandegroot without pissing him off... But somehow, the
moment eluded him. Each of his actions seemed ordained, inevitable, outside the realm of rational control.
Henry Chong had spoken up for him when the hotel's security guards had finally materialized. He had
told them that Vandegroot started the fight, that David had had no way to escape and so had been forced to
defend himself.
"I wasn't going to hurt him," Otto had shouted as the guards pulled him away. He cradled his arm and
glared poison at David. "Stupid little punk. I don't respect him enough to hurt him!"
But the sword and the two dime-sized spots of blood on David's shirt had told them all they needed to
know. Congratulations had followed, some of the onlookers stepping forward to clap David on the back, to
praise him, to ask him if he was all right, and hey, where did he learn a trick like that? He'd answered
vaguely, uncomfortable with the attention, with the juvenile gloating and bravado that lay behind it. Unlike
his young colleagues, the Heavy Hitters had withdrawn, their smiles now more polite than warm. Treating
him like a dog that had bristled and growled unexpectedly. Good lord, what else is this young man
capable of? He understood their reaction perfectly, and it made him sad.
And then, without warning the shakes had come, a great and uncontrollable trembling in his hands and
body as the meaning of the fight, the danger of it, sank in. To hell with his ruined reputation; he might have
lost an eye. He and Vandegroot had been waving swords at one another. Jesus, he might have lost his life.
It took three shots of vodka to get the shaking under control, and three more to really calm him down.
Even then, even now, he didn't feel the least bit drunk. He felt a little bit like crying, or like tearing the TV
set off the wall and heaving it through the window to smash down among the city lights.
Instead, he threw himself down on the bed and reached for the vidphone.
Marian Fouts either was or was not his girlfriend, depending on what sort of mood she was in when you
asked her. And David was or was not in love with her, depending on how determinedly she was ignoring
him that day. Marian's life was, to say the least, a full one; she had been part of the cooperative effort to
revive the defunct Philadelphia Bulletin, and revive it she had. It thrived now as a free, ad-supported
newspaper, and her days were filled with writing and editing and investigative reporting, and with the
business minutiae that she, as a major shareholder, could never quite escape.
At night she put her work firmly out of mind but had another vice to replace it: NEVERland. Networked
Virtual Reality Simulations were for her like a kind of secret identity, a second life entirely distinct from the
first and impinging upon it in no way. She was a "closet sorceress," one of millions, but quite good if David
was to believe her stories. So at twenty-six years of age, Marian ran both a newspaper and a magic
kingdom—a full plate indeed.
She answered the phone on the sixth ring, her color image appearing on the phone's screen just before
her voice mail could pick up.
"Yeah?" she said, her image pushing a VR helmet up off its face with a what-the-hell-do-you-want sort
of air. David had flagged the call for priority ring, else she probably would not have answered at all.
"I need to talk to you," he said.
"So talk," she replied, simply and without inflection. "I'm dying for the sound of your voice."
Perversely, this was exactly what David loved about Marian. He had the constant feeling that she'd be
happier without him, without the constant distraction that he represented, and this spoke to a part of his
brain in urgent tones: Be worthy of her! Hold onto her for another day! And another, and another... They
had gone on like that for almost two years, now. It seemed a childish sort of relationship, and one which
David kept expecting one or the other of them to outgrow. But the sex between them was very good, and
anyway, David suspected he wouldn't have time for a girlfriend who actually had time for him.
"You're busy in NEVERland," he said to Marian. The remark was not a question, but a question lay
unconcealed behind it: however important your game is, will you interrupt it for me?
In the same neutral tone: "The borders are under attack right now. It's amateurs, I think,
thirteen-year-olds or something. I'm dug in for a slow night, so I suspect the guards and wards will take
them out without my having to be there." Now Marian peered closely at him through the vidphone screen,
and her face softened. "You look terrible. Did something happen?"
"Oh, yeah," he said, and launched into a troubled account of the evening's events. Marian, God love her,
seemed fiercely determined not to be impressed with his bravery or his wounds, though her eyes sparkled a
little as he talked.
"Do you love me tonight?" he asked her at one point, his voice a bit more wheedling than he would have
liked.
"What, after you just trashed your career?" She smirked, to show that she didn't believe that had
happened. "After you beat up on the Sniffer King? Boy, you don't make it easy on a girl."
Well, comfort was not exactly Marian's forte either.
David awoke suddenly, with sunlight tearing at the edges of his sleep mask and a loud pounding noise
assaulting his ears.
"Police! Open up!"
Who?" David said quietly, more to himself than to the wider world. He pulled the mask off, letting the
light flood in against his eyelids. Where was he? What was going on? Then, squinting against the painful
glare, he saw the hotel room around him, and the events of the previous night flashed into his mind like a
spray of bitter acid. He groaned.
CLUMP! CLUMP CLUMP! The whole door seemed to shudder with the noise, as if someone were
kicking it with a heavy boot.
"This is the police! Open the door!"
"OK!" he said, kicking the bedcovers away and sitting up, fighting back his amazement and
disorientation. This was a hell of a way to wake up on a Saturday morning. "OK, just a second. I'm
coming."
He threw his feet down on the floor and got himself up on top of them. Hopped quickly to the door,
unlatched it, opened it. See how eager I am, Officer?
Two police stood in the hallway outside: a uniformed black woman and a white male in shirt and tie,
badge dangling from a strap around his neck. The woman's thumbs were hooked at her utility belt, the
man's jammed into his front pockets. Both their faces were identically grim and set. David regarded them
blearily. "Yeah? What is it?"
"We'd like to talk to you about last night," the female officer said. "May we come in please?"
"Huh?" David blinked, then nodded and stepped away from the door. "Yeah, sure. Is this about
Vandegroot?"
The officers shared a look between them, and then considered David, eyeing his jockey-shorted form as
if guessing how much he weighed.
"Yes," the female officer said, "it's about Vandegroot. We have about a thousand witnesses that saw
you fighting with him last night."
"That's right," David said. "Listen, can we do this later? I already said I'm not pressing charges."
The female officer blinked, as if that remark made no sense to her. Her male counterpart, a beefy man
in his late thirties, leaned forward slightly and spoke: "Detective Volhallen, Violent Crimes. You used an
摘要：

Scanned&ProofedbyCozette"Thisfast-pacedadventurewillappealtotecho-freaksandantitotalitarians.Highlyrecommended."—LibraryJournal"It'salwaysseemedtomethatthemurdermysteryisagreatvehicleforshowinganewworld.MurderintheSolidStateisanexceptionallygoodillustrationofthepoint.Besidesbeinganexcellentmystery,i...

展开>> 收起<<
Wil McCarthy - Murder In The Solid State.pdf

共99页,预览20页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：99 页 大小：369.8KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-20

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 99
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注