Bruce Sterling - Bicycle Repairman

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BICYCLE REPAIRMAN

by BRUCE STERLING

[VERSION 1.2 (Mar 04 04). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version

number by 0.1 and redistribute.]

First published in Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology, edited by John Kessel, Mark L.

Van Name and Richard Butner, 1996.

Repeated tinny banging woke Lyle in his hammock. Lyle groaned, sat up, and slid free into

the tool-crowded aisle of his bike shop.

Lyle hitched up the black elastic of his skintight shorts and plucked yesterday's grease-stained

sleeveless off the workbench. He glanced blearily at his chronometer as he picked his way toward

the door. It was 10:04.38 in the morning, June 27, 2037.

Lyle hopped over a stray can of primer and the floor boomed gently beneath his feet. With all

the press of work, he'd collapsed into sleep without properly cleaning the shop. Doing custom

enameling paid okay, but it ate up time like crazy. Working and living alone was wearing him

out.

Lyle opened the shop door, revealing a long sheer drop to dusty tiling far below. Pigeons

darted beneath the hull of his shop through a soot-stained hole in the broken atrium glass, and

wheeled off to their rookery somewhere in the darkened guts of the high-rise.

More banging. Far below, a uniformed delivery kid stood by his cargo tricycle, yanking

rhythmically at the long dangling string of Lyle's spot-welded doorknocker.

Lyle waved, yawning. From his vantage point below the huge girders of the cavernous atrium,

Lyle had a fine overview of three burnt-out interior levels of the old Tsatanuga Archiplat. Once-

elegant handrails and battered pedestrian overlooks fronted on the great airy cavity of the atrium.

Behind the handrails was a three-floor wilderness of jury-rigged lights, chicken coops, water

tanks, and squatters' flags. The fire-damaged floors, walls, and ceilings were riddled with

handmade descent-chutes, long coiling staircases, and rickety ladders.

Lyle took note of a crew of Chattanooga demolition workers in their yellow detox suits. The

repair crew was deploying vacuum scrubbers and a high-pressure hose-off by the vandal-proofed

western elevators of Floor 34. Two or three days a week, the city crew meandered into the

damage zone to pretend to work, with a great hypocritical show of sawhorses and barrier tape.

The lazy sons of bitches were all on the take.

Lyle thumbed the brake switches in their big metal box by the flywheel. The bike shop

slithered, with a subtle hiss of cable-clamps, down three stories, to dock with a grating crunch

onto four concrete-filled metal drums.

The delivery kid looked real familiar. He was in and out of the zone pretty often. Lyle had

once done some custom work on the kid's cargo trike, new shocks and some granny-gearing as he

recalled, but he couldn't remember the kid's name. Lyle was terrible with names. "What's up,

zude?"

"Hard night, Lyle?"

"Just real busy."

The kid's nose wrinkled at the stench from the shop. "Doin' a lot of paint work, huh?" He

glanced at his palmtop notepad. "You still taking deliveries for Edward Dertouzas?"

"Yeah. I guess so." Lyle rubbed the gear tattoo on one stubbled cheek. "If I have to."

The kid offered a stylus, reaching up. "Can you sign for him?"

Lyle folded his bare arms warily. "Naw, man, I can't sign for Deep Eddy. Eddy's in Europe

somewhere. Eddy left months ago. Haven't seen Eddy in ages."

The delivery kid scratched his sweating head below his billed fabric cap. He turned to check

for any possible sneak-ups by snatch-and-grab artists out of the squatter warrens. The

government simply refused to do postal delivery on the Thirty-second, Thirty-third, and Thirty-

fourth floors. You never saw many cops inside the zone, either. Except for the city demolition

crew, about the only official functionaries who ever showed up in the zone were a few

psychotically empathetic NAFTA social workers.

"I'll get a bonus if you sign for this thing." The kid gazed up in squint-eyed appeal. "It's gotta

be worth something, Lyle. It's a really weird kind of routing, they paid a lot of money to send it

just that way."

Lyle crouched down in the open doorway. "Let's have a look at it."

The package was a heavy shockproof rectangle in heat-sealed plastic shrink-wrap, with a

plethora of intra-European routing stickers. To judge by all the overlays, the package had been

passed from postal system to postal system at least eight times before officially arriving in the

legal custody of any human being. The return address, if there had ever been one, was completely

obscured. Someplace in France, maybe.

Lyle held the box up two-handed to his ear and shook it. Hardware.

"You gonna sign, or not?"

"Yeah." Lyle scratched illegibly at the little signature panel, then looked at the delivery trike.

"You oughta get that front wheel trued."

The kid shrugged. "Got anything to send out today?"

"Naw," Lyle grumbled, "I'm not doing mail-order repair work anymore; it's too complicated

and I get ripped off too much."

"Suit yourself." The kid clambered into the recumbent seat of his trike and pedaled off across

the heat-cracked ceramic tiles of the atrium plaza.

Lyle hung his hand-lettered OPEN FOR BUSINESS sign outside the door. He walked to his

left, stamped up the pedaled lid of a jumbo garbage can, and dropped the package in with the rest

of Dertouzas's stuff.

The can's lid wouldn't close. Deep Eddy's junk had finally reached critical mass. Deep Eddy

never got much mail at the shop from other people, but he was always sending mail to himself.

Big packets of encrypted diskettes were always arriving from Eddy's road jaunts in Toulouse,

Marseilles, Valencia, and Nice. And especially Barcelona. Eddy had sent enough gigabyte-age

out of Barcelona to outfit a pirate data-haven.

Eddy used Lyle's bike shop as his safety-deposit box. This arrangement was okay by Lyle. He

owed Eddy; Eddy had installed the phones and virching in the bike shop, and had also wangled

the shop's electrical hookup. A thick elastic curly-cable snaked out the access-crawlspace of

Floor 35, right through the ceiling of Floor 34, and directly through a ragged punch-hole in the

aluminum roof of Lyle's cable-mounted mobile home. Some unknown contact of Eddy's was

paying the real bills on that electrical feed. Lyle cheerfully covered the expenses by paying cash

into an anonymous post-office box. The setup was a rare and valuable contact with the world of

organized authority.

During his stays in the shop, Eddy had spent much of his time buried in marathon long-

distance virtuality sessions, swaddled head to foot in lumpy strap-on gear. Eddy had been

painfully involved with some older woman in Germany. A virtual romance in its full-scale

thumping, heaving, grappling progress, was an embarrassment to witness. Under the

circumstances, Lyle wasn't too surprised that Eddy had left his parents' condo to set up in a squat.

Eddy had lived in the bicycle repair shop, off and on, for almost a year. It had been a good

deal for Lyle, because Deep Eddy had enjoyed a certain clout and prestige with the local

squatters. Eddy had been a major organizer of the legendary Chattanooga Wende of December

'35, a monster street-party that had climaxed in a spectacular looting-and-arson rampage that had

torched the three floors of the Archiplat.

Lyle had gone to school with Eddy and had known him for years; they'd grown up together in

the Archiplat. Eddy Dertouzas was a deep zude for a kid his age, with political contacts and

heavy-duty network connections. The squat had been a good deal for both of them, until Eddy

had finally coaxed the German woman into coming through for him in real life. Then Eddy had

jumped the next plane to Europe.

Since they'd parted friends, Eddy was welcome to mail his European data-junk to the bike

shop. After all, the disks were heavily encrypted, so it wasn't as if anybody in authority was ever

gonna be able to read them. Storing a few thousand disks was a minor challenge, compared to

Eddy's complex, machine-assisted love life.

After Eddy's sudden departure, Lyle had sold Eddy's possessions, and wired the money to

Eddy in Spain. Lyle had kept the screen TV, Eddy's mediator, and the cheaper virching helmet.

The way Lyle figured it -- the way he remembered the deal -- any stray hardware of Eddy's in the

shop was rightfully his, for disposal at his own discretion. By now it was pretty clear that Deep

Eddy Dertouzas was never coming back to Tennessee. And Lyle had certain debts.

Lyle snicked the blade from a roadkit multitool and cut open Eddy's package. It contained, of

all things, a television cable set-top box. A laughable infobahn antique. You'd never see a

cablebox like that in NAFTA; this was the sort of primeval junk one might find in the home of a

semiliterate Basque grandmother, or maybe in the armed bunker of some backward Albanian.

Lyle tossed the archaic cablebox onto the beanbag in front of the wallscreen. No time now for

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