Michael Swanwick - Dogfight

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2024-11-24 0 0 36.12KB 14 页 5.9玖币

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Michael SWANWICK and William GIBSON

Dogfight

[from LIB.RU]

He meant to keep on going, right down to Florida. Work passage on a gunrunner, maybe wind up

conscripted into some ratass rebel army down in the war zone. Or maybe, with that ticket good as long

as he didn't stop riding, he'd just never get off Greyhound's Flying Dutchman. He grinned at his faint

reflection in cold, greasy glass while the downtown lights of Norfolk slid past, the bus swaying on tired

shocks as the driver slung it around a final corner. They shuddered to a halt in the terminal lot, concrete lit

gray and harsh like a prison exercise yard. But Deke was watching himself starve, maybe in some

snowstorm out of Oswego, with his cheek pressed up against that same bus window, and seeing his

remains swept out at the next stop by a muttering old man in faded coveralls. One way or the other, he

decided, it didn't mean shit to him. Except his legs seemed to have died already. And the driver called a

twenty-minute stopover Tidewater Station, Virginia. It was an old cinder-block building with two

entrances to each rest room, holdover from the previous century.

Legs like wood, he made a halfhearted attempt at ghosting the notions counter, but the black girl behind it

was alert, guarding the sparse contents of the old glass case as though her ass depended on it. Probably

does, Deke thought, turning away. Opposite the washrooms, an open doorway offered GAMES, the

word flickering feebly in biofluorescent plastic. He could see a crowd of the local kickers clustered

around a pool table. Aimless, his boredom following him like a cloud, he stuck his head in. And saw a

biplane, wings no longer than his thumb, blossom bright orange flame. Corkscrewing, trailing smoke, it

vanished the instant it struck the green-felt field of the table.

"Tha's right, Tiny," a kicker bellowed, "you take that sumbitch!"

"Hey," Deke said. "What's going on?" The nearest kicker was a bean pole with a black mesh Peterbilt

cap. "Tiny's defending the Max," he said, not taking his eyes from the table.

"Oh, yeah? What's that?" But even as he asked, he saw it: a blue enamel medal shaped like a Maltese

cross, the slogan Pour le Merite divided among its arms.

The Blue Max rested on the edge of the table, directly before a vast and perfectly immobile bulk wedged

into a fragile-looking chrome-tube chair. The man's khaki work shirt would have hung on Deke like the

folds of a sail, but it bulged across that bloated torso so tautly that the buttons threatened to tear away at

any instant. Deke thought of southern troopers he'd seen on his way down; of that weird, gut-heavy

endotype balanced on gangly legs that looked like they'd been borrowed from some other body. Tiny

might look like that if he stood, but on a larger scale a forty-inch jeans inseam that would need a

woven-steel waistband to support all those pounds of swollen gut. If Tiny were ever to stand at all for

now Deke saw that that shiny frame was actually a wheelchair. There was something disturbingly childlike

about the man's face, an appalling suggestion of youth and even beauty in features almost buried in fold

and jowl. Embarrassed, Deke looked away. The other man, the one standing across the table from Tiny,

had bushy sideburns and a thin mouth. He seemed to be trying to push something with his eyes, wrinkles

of concentration spreading from the corners....

"You dumbshit or what?" The man with the Peterbilt cap turned, catching Deke's Indo proleboy denims,

the brass chains at his wrists, for the first time. "Why don't you get your ass lost, fucker. Nobody wants

your kind in here." He turned back to the dogfight.

Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff,

libertyheaded dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stampand-coin stores, while more cautious bettors

slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a trio of red

planes, flying in formation. Fokker D Vhs. The room fell silent. The Fokkers banked majestically under

the solar orb of a two-hundred-watt bulb.

The blue Spad dove out of nowhere. Two more plunged from the shadowy ceiling, following closely. The

kickers swore, and one chuckled. The formation broke wildly. One Fokker dove almost to the felt,

without losing the Spad on its tail. Furiously, it zigged and zagged across the green flatlands but to no

avail. At last it pulled up, the enemy hard after it, too steeply and stalled, too low to pull out in time. A

stack of silver dimes was scooped up. The Fokkers were outnumbered now. One had two Spads on its

tail. A needle-spray of tracers tore past its cockpit. The Fokker slip-turned right, banked into an

Immelmann, and was behind one of its pursuers. It fired, and the biplane fell, tumbling.

"Way to go, Tiny!" The kickers closed in around the table.

Deke was frozen with wonder. It felt like being born all over again.

Frank's Truck Stop was two miles out of town on the Commercial Vehicles Only route. Deke had

tagged it, out of idle habit, from the bus on the way in. Now he walked back between the traffic and the

concrete crash guards. Articulated trucks went slamming past, big eight-segmented jobs, the wash of air

each time threatening to blast him over. CVO stops were easy makes. When he sauntered into Frank's,

there was nobody to doubt that he'd come in off a big rig, and he was able to browse the gift shop as

slowly as he liked. The wire rack with the projective wetware wafers was located between a stack of

Korean cowboy shirts and a display for Fuzz Buster mudguards. A pair of Oriental dragons twisted in

the air over the rack, either fighting or fucking, he couldn't tell which. The game he wanted was there: a

wafer labeled SPADS&FOKKERS. It took him three seconds to boost it and less time to slide the

magnet which the cops in D.C. hadn't even bothered to confiscate across the universal security strip. On

the way out, he lifted two programming units and a little Batang facilitator-remote that looked like an

antique hearing aid.

He chose a highstack at random and fed the rental agent the line he'd used since his welfare rights were

yanked. Nobody ever checked up; the state just counted occupied rooms and paid.

The cubicle smelled faintly of urine, and someone had scrawled Hard Anarchy Liberation Front slogans

across the walls. Deke kicked trash out of a corner, sat down, back to the wall, and ripped open the

wafer pack.

There was a folded instruction sheet with diagrams of loops, rolls, and Immelmanns, a tube of saline

paste, aDd a computer list of operational specs. And the wafer itself, white plastic with a blue biplane

and logo on one side, red on the other. He turned it over and over in his hand: SPADS&FOKKERS,

FOKKERS&SPADS. Red or blue. `He fitted the Batang behind his ear after coating the inductor

surface with paste, jacked its fiberoptic ribbon into the programmer, and plugged the programmer into

the wall current. Then he slid the wafer into the programmer. It was a cheap set, Indonesian, and the

base of his skull buzzed uncomfortably as the program ran. But when it was done, a sky-blue Spad

darted restlessly through the air a few inches from his face. It almost glowed, it was so real. It had the

strange inner life that fanatically detailed museum-grade models often have, but it took all of his

concentration to keep it in existence. If his attention wavered at all, it lost focus, fuzzing into a pathetic

blur.

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Michael Swanwick - Dogfight

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