Daniel Keys Moran - A Tale of the Continuing Time 02 - The Long Run

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2024-12-24 0 0 790.81KB 350 页 5.9玖币
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THE LONG RUN
A Tale of the Continuing Time
Daniel Keys Moran
BANTAM BOOKS
I killed my love to set him free For fear I'd cause him pain
I killed him—we were very young And now I'm old again
We lived a life together once
And I was so afraid For every life I've lived, I've died
For every life I've made
I killed my love to set him free
He wasn't hard to kill He ran into another life
I guess he's running still
—Mahliya Kutura Many Lives Street Songs, 2078 Gregorian
THE LONG RUN
On July 3, 2062, the United Nations Peace Keeping Force, under the
command of Peaceforcer Elite Sergeant Mohammed Vance, used tactical
thermonuclear weapons to destroy a group of genetically engineered
telepaths living at the Chandler Complex in lower Manhattan.
Men and women who would not be slaves to the Peaceforcers.
On July 3, 2062, over two hundred and forty telepathic adults and
children died in nuclear fire.
In the battle preceding their destruction, the telepaths sent better than
a quarter of the population of the state of New York into permanent
insanity; caused the two years of the Troubles, as legal and social systems
throughout metropolitan areas broke down beyond hope of repair. The old
order could not be resurrected; the Peaceforcers created the Patrol
Sectors, and left the vast bulk of what had once been New York City to
become the lethal, desolate area known as the Fringe.
Three children from the Chandler Complex survived the destruction of
the telepaths. Two of them were the nine-year-old twins David and Denice
Castanaveras, the children of Carl Castanaveras and Jany McConnell.
The third child was not a telepath. He was a webdancer.
A Player.
His name was Trent.
Seven years have passed. ...
The Last Summer of His Youth
2069 Gregorian
1-
You're Trent."
"I am?"
The young man was conservatively dressed: a gray jacket and black
pants, and a white silk shirt that shone brilliantly even in the dim light
from L'Express's outdoor glowfloats. He wore immaculately clean white
running shoes; there was a single flat ruby stud in the lobe of his left ear.
Trent's temples, where an inskin InfoNet link might have been implanted,
were merely smooth skin. His hair was sandy blond, cut short, and he
either wore no makeup or had turned it off.
He wore flat black sunglasses though they were hardly necessary.
It was ten minutes after six o'clock.
"You're younger than I'd expected," said the middle-aged man who had
said his name was Jerry Jackson. On the phone Trent had not noticed it,
but in person his voice held the faint but definite traces of a Southern
accent.
"Am I?"
"And you're late," the man said. Despite the air, heavy with ozone as
though a thunderstorm were about to strike, Jackson had taken a table
outside beneath the gray-black skies, on the balcony level overlooking the
eternally crowded streets.
"Ten minutes late . . ." Trent shrugged. "Ten minutes older."
He seated himself across the table from Jerry Jackson. To the waitbot
which had led him to the table he said, "A pot of coffee. With cream, no
sugar."
The waitbot paused, then said mildly, in the rich baritone characteristic
of opera singers, newsdancers and politicians, "Monsieur, that item is not
on the menu."
"Waiter, please," said Trent. They both waited while the waitbot rolled
away out of listening range.
L'Express sat on the western edge of what had once been the Brooklyn
Navy Yard, and was now one of the most expensive residential areas in all
the Patrol Sectors. From where he sat Trent could see to the northwest, on
the other side of the East River, the scarlet sparks of spacecraft rising and
descending at Unification Spaceport in lower Manhattan. The dull, distant
boom of craft breaking through the sound barrier touched him every
twenty seconds or so.
Eight spacescrapers reared high above the skyline, eight three- to
five-kilometer-tall buildings; two of them did nothing but house
Peaceforcers and the babychasers from the Ministry of Population
Control: the Left and Right Hands of the Devil Himself, Secretary-General
Charles Eddore.
Trent said, "How did you get referred to me?"
Jackson said smoothly, "You're in the Directory."
"That wasn't the question."
Jerry Jackson was drinking something cold and green, with crushed ice
in it. He wore an exquisitely tailored blue pinstripe suit. A brushed
aluminum attaché case stood upright beside his chair. The cuffs of his
sleeves were fastened European style, folded back upon themselves.
"Actually, Booker Jamethon gave me your name."
"Booker's a great guy," said Trent.
"He said I shouldn't hire you, that you're not dependable."
"Of course," said Trent instantly, "all those years on the juice, they
weren't good for him."
Jerry Jackson smiled for the first time. " 'Sieur Jamethon wanted the
job himself. He only gave me your name—for a fee—after I turned him
down."
"Tell me about the job."
"You know CalleyTronics?"
Trent's pause was very brief. "It's located on the eighth floor of the
Down Plaza. They sell inskins and image coprocessors, MPU hardware,
like that. Half the webdancers I know buy from them."
"Frank Galley," said Jerry Jackson with a very convincing display of
anger, "is a thief. He lifted fifteen terabytes of hot RAM, a hundred and
five thousand Credit Units worth of room-temperature superconductor
memory, from mah warehouse in Georgia." Under the stress of anger, the
accent became more audible.
A single drop of rain touched down on the transparent tabletop in front
of Trent.
"Let me guess," Trent said.
"Guess?"
"You want me to get your RTS back."
"Yes."
"What do you think you know about me?"
A touch of the anger was back in his voice. "You're supposed to be a
thief yourself." The word thief was, laced with an astonishing amount of
disdain. "You hire out to steal things for people. You . . ."
A second drop of rain joined the first. Jerry Jackson cut himself off as a
waiter, after an anxious glance at the sky, hurried out to where they were
seated.
"Monsieur," said the waiter hurriedly, with a French accent which
might have been real, "you wished to order a cup of coffee?"
"A pot," Trent corrected him. "A whole big pot of coffee."
"Monsieur, we do not sell coffee by the pot, only by the cup."
"May I speak to your manager?"
The waiter's features stiffened visibly. "Oui. One moment, monsieur."
Trent waited until the waiter had gone back inside. "So you want me to
boost fifteen terabytes of RTS from CalleyTronics?"
"Yes."
Trent counted five drops of rain on the cut-crystal surface of the table.
Six. "It probably can't be done—a straight boost, I mean. Galley's real tight
with the power structure in the Patrol Sectors, and his security's pretty
good. You'd be better off with a con, something that would leave him
wondering if he'd been hit—not sure—and feeling so stupid he wouldn't
dare go to the Peaceforcers with it for fear of being laughed at."
Jerry Jackson leaned forward with what seemed to Trent to be honest
curiosity. "What do you have in mind?"
"I don't know. What's good here?"
"Regarding Galley," Jerry Jackson said with great control, "what do you
have in mind?"
Trent looked at the man blankly. "Nothing. I'm not going to boost Frank
Galley for you, and I'm not going to con him either. Look, have you ever
eaten here before?"
"Never."
"Oh. Too bad. Usually when I go to a new restaurant I like to go with
somebody who's been there before, so I know what's good. You may not
know this," said Trent thoughtfully, "but two years ago a Player scored
some image coprocessor hardware off CalleyTronics, chanted Galley's
accounting computer to believe the hardware had been properly paid for,
and had it shipped to a drop box. It took Galley half a year to find out
who'd done it, but that summer they fished a corpse out of the East River.
His teeth had been pulled with pliers, his eyes were poked out, his fingers
had been chopped off, and his features defaced with acid. They identified
him by his inskin."
"You won't take the job?"
"Am I being asked?"
"Yes."
"No."
Jackson took a deep breath. "Why not?"
Trent shrugged. "No percentage. If I was going to, I'd do a con to get
Galley coming after me, get him to believe I had something he wanted. But
I'm not going to. The guy's mean, but he's also pretty straight; guys like
him always go to the Peaceforcers."
A gorgeous, mature woman in a black evening gown came out to their
table, with the waiter a few steps behind her. "Monsieur?"
"Yes?" said Trent politely.
For some reason his response seemed to throw her. Her accent was
considerably better than the waiter's; Trent would have bet she was
actually French. "You wished to order . . ."
"Coffee."
"An entire pot?"
"Please."
"We do not sell coffee by the pot, monsieur. We do not even have a pot
to put the coffee in; the coffee is brewed in a single large"—she hesitated,
searching for a word—"vat? Yes, vat, brewed in a vat in the morning, and
then put in stasis and poured from stasis a cup at a time."
"Okay. I want five, no, make that seven, seven cups of coffee, each one
about fifteen percent cream, one right after the other. Send the waitbot
out with a cup, give it about five minutes and send it out again. Do that
until I tell it to stop."
"Monsieur," she said, stress making it difficult for Trent to follow her
words, "we have only three waitbots. If we do this we must assign a
waitbot to do nothing but service your table, and this will affect the other
patrons."
"Damn it," Jerry Jackson exploded, "what is this nonsense? Take the
goddamn coffee in a cup. Are you here to talk business or what?"
Raindrops were striking Trent square in the face. The manager looked
back and forth between the two of them in confusion. "You're sure?" Trent
asked her. "It's simply not possible to have the cups just keep coming?"
"Monsieur," protested the manager in such horribly accented English
that Trent could barely follow her, "I do not think we can."
"It's okay," said Trent, standing, "we're done." To Jerry Jackson he said,
"I've really got to go; I'm late for another appointment." He turned back
once before leaving. "Next time," he said as Jerry Jackson stared, "you
have to take me someplace classier."
2-
Once there was a thief, and the thief was God. —The first line in The
Exodus Bible.
It was a twenty-minute slidewalk trip from L'Express, at one end of the
old Brooklyn Navy Yard, through streets lined by gray plastisteel
residential high rises, to the Down Plaza at the other end of the
development. Trent ran all the way. He was delayed just before he reached
the Plaza when a bomb in a baby carriage blew up next to a pair of
patrolling Peaceforcers, killing the Peaceforcers and several of the
bystanders and tearing a hole in the slidewalk that brought the slidewalk
to a shuddering, grinding stop. Despite his hurry Trent stopped running
immediately, and walked without haste through the growing rain, away
from the crowd that was gathering around the site of the explosion,
walked straight as a laser the rest of the way to the Plaza maglev.
There were about twenty fashionable, damp, well-dressed people
crowded onto the air-conditioned maglev platform as it descended
beneath street level.
Trent was not particularly noticeable; because it was necessary for the
job, so that he would not stand out from the other patrons inside
CalleyTronics, Trent had dressed that day every bit as well as the children
of the wealthy and privileged who swarmed through the eight huge,
underground levels of the Down Plaza, the busiest shopping structure in
all of the Patrol Sectors.
Most of those crowded onto the maglev platform, as it sank into the
Down Plaza, were slender; a few of the less well-dressed were gaunt.
Two of them were fat. Somewhere in their mid-thirties, Trent guessed;
they were French and they were female and they were very fat. Not
counting the cyborg French Peace-forcers Elite, who came by their mass
in honest metal and metal-ceramics, Trent had in his entire life never seen
more gross tonnage on two bodies. Between the two of them they must
have massed 250 kilos.
They were the last ones onto the maglev platform, already half loaded
down with their packages and bags and umbrellas, chattering gaily hi
French so perfectly accented that there was no question in Trent's mind as
to their nationality. They could not be employed themselves, not by the
U.N.; the U.N. had maximum weight standards. Wives, then, of United
Nations officials transplanted from France to oversee in the governing of
Occupied America.
Most United Nations officials were French, and most Peaceforcers as
well; by the pure luck of the draw France had, almost alone among
technological nations, come through the Unification War unscathed. In
the rebuilding which took place following the Unification, the French had
become a dominant force.
One of the fat women touched the dark pressure point marked five. The
pressure point lit. Behind the dark lenses Trent's eyelids drooped shut;
through the traceset contact buried in the arms of the sunglasses he sent a
single command to his Image.
The maglev descended five floors in relative silence, as people got on
and off the platform at the various levels. The tower in which the maglev
platform was located thrust up like a spear through the center of the
Down Plaza; the shops were arrayed in a rough rectangle around the
maglev tower. Hanging flat walkways connected the central maglev tower
to the shops at each level; skywalks connected the various levels for those
who preferred walking to using the maglev.
At Level Five, the maglev did not even slow. The two fat women broke
off their conversation in consternation; one of them touched the pressure
point for Level Five again. Trent said softly, "Ladies?"
They turned to look at him.
"Did you know that on Level One there's one of the finest gyms in the
city? And on Level Three there's a biosculptor who vacuums fat cells so
you can't get fat." Trent smiled at them. "Really. It's amazing, she just
vacuums those fat cells right out. Whoosh!"
The two fat women gaped at him. The platform had not stopped at
Level Five; it did at Level Six, and half a dozen of the maglev platform's
occupants got off; a couple more got on.
The gates closed again, and the platform descended.
"On Level Four there's three cafes that serve empty food, no calories at
all," Trent continued enthusiastically. "Lefthanded sugars; you can really
pig out." He stared at them with his sunglasses. "It doesn't taste exactly
the same, but that's not my fault."
Everybody left on the maglev platform was looking at them, at Trent
and the two fat women. The maglev platform skipped Level Seven, where
most of the small businesses were clustered, and opened up finally onto
Level Eight, the bottom level of the huge plaza. People filed off slowly,
stepping over or walking around the prone, twitching form of the juice
junkie who blocked the walkway from the maglev platform, looking back
as they did so at Trent and the French women. Trent turned to leave also
and then suddenly, just the other side of the maglev gates, turned around
to face the French women again.
"Do you speak English?" he demanded.
The one nearest him said in English, haughtily, very clearly, "I do not
speak English."
"Oh." The maglev gates closed on the women, and the power on the
platform suddenly died. The platform went dark. "One hundred and
fifteen million people," said Trent in his best French, "died last year
because there wasn't enough food for them." Behind the gate, on the
maglev platform, the women were pushing frantically at the pressure
points. Trent did not think they had even heard him. He looked at them
for just a moment, stood watching them without expression from the
other side of the gates. The one who was not punching at the pressure
points suddenly became aware of Trent standing and watching them, and
pleaded in French, "Young man, will you call someone to let us out?"
Turning away, Trent shook his head. "I'm already late," he muttered.
He almost tripped over the juice junkie.
The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is
Life.
—The Player's Litany
Heat rises; it was always notably cool on the bottom level of the Down
Plaza.
Walking out onto Eight, those who were new to the Plaza, even New
York natives, tended to gawk like tourists. The upper seven levels of the
Down Plaza were illuminated by yellow light with a greenish tinge: a
mixture of yellow sun-paint and the omnipresent, wavering, flickering
light of the blue-green glowfloats in their eternal migration between the
first and eighth levels of the Down Plaza.
Level Eight was a riot of color: glittering adholo, real neon and
neon-laser and glowpaint. Eight was the only level with a floor, though
those who spent any amount of time down on Eight learned to avoid those
areas around the maglev tower where the ceiling opened up; the
eight-level drop into the crowds was a favorite with jumpers.
Eight was easily the most popular level in the Plaza. There was a
whorehouse behind the furniture shop, and two sen-sable parlors which
catered to those with refined, largely illegal tastes. CalleyTronics was
located there as well, and Players from over a hundred kilometers around
came in person to buy from Galley, who had been, as a young man in the
wistfully remembered days before Data Watch, a rather famous Player
himself.
The BloodSilk Boys were mixed among the crowds at the west end of the
Plaza. Four gendarmes—cops, New York City Police officers—were sitting
in full goldtone riot armor at Googie's Place on the eastern edge of Eight,
watching the Plaza through the coffee shop's glassite walls. Trent did not
so much as glance at either group as he walked away from the diminishing
sound of the swearing French women and went to see Bones.
On the crowded floor of Down Plaza, well back from the jumper zone,
eight floors beneath the surface of Brooklyn, the old black man who was
considered by many the world's greatest contortionist gathered up the
hard Chinese and Space-Farer CU in the basket before his platform and
prepared to take a break from his routine.
Trent came to a stop just off the walkway, beside the low platform on
which Bones worked. Pulling on his shirt, Bones had to raise his voice to
be heard above the loud music and the babble of the crowd.
"Evening, Trent. Take dinner with me?"
"Hi, Bones. Not tonight."
"Something goin', Trent?"
Trent did not even turn his head as Bones spoke to him. "What do you
mean?"
" 'Bout an hour ago I seen Jimmy Ramirez; and Tammy the Rat been
hanging around, and not fifteen minutes ago I seen your midget. And
there was six Peaceforcers, they was here when I got here this morning. I
ain't seen the Left Hand of the Devil in the Plaza that early in, oh, five
years."
Trent heard barely audible popping noises as Bones' joints slowly
realigned themselves. Still he did not look at the old man. "Six
Peaceforcers?"
"I don't trust that midget, Trent." Peering through the crowds and
flickering adholos, Bones tried to see what it was that Trent was looking
at, but could not.
"You don't trust who?"
"That midget working for you."
"Which midget?"
"The pretty one."
"Oh, Bird. Bird's a doll, Bones."
"He's the right size," Bones agreed.
摘要：

THELONGRUNATaleoftheContinuingTimeDanielKeysMoranBANTAMBOOKSIkilledmylovetosethimfreeForfearI'dcausehimpainIkilledhim—wewereveryyoungAndnowI'moldagainWelivedalifetogetheronceAndIwassoafraidForeverylifeI'velived,I'vediedForeverylifeI'vemadeIkilledmylovetosethimfreeHewasn'thardtokillHeranintoanotherli...

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