William Gibson & Michael Swanwick - Dogfight

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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/William%20Gibson%20&%20Michael%20Swanwick%20-%20Dogfight.txt

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,

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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.

He practiced until the battery in the earset died, then slumped against the wall and fell asleep.

He dreamed of flying, in a universe that consisted entirely of white clouds and blue sky, with no

up and down, and never a green field to crash into.

He woke to a rancid smell of frying krillcakes and winced with hunger. No cash, either. Well,

there were plenty of student types in the stack. Bound to be one who'd like to score a programming

unit. He hit the hall with the boosted spare. Not far down was a door with a poster on it: THERE'S

A HELL OF A GOOD UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR. Under that was a starscape with a cluster of multicolored

pills, torn from an ad for some pharmaceutical company, pasted over an inspirational shot of the

"space colony" that had been under construction since before he was born. LET'S GO, the poster

said, beneath the collaged hypnotics.

He knocked. The door opened, security slides stopping it at a two-inch slice of girlface. "Yeah?"

"You're going to think this is stolen." He passed the programmer from hand to hand. "I mean

because it's new, virtual cherry, and the bar code's still on it. But listen, I'm not gonna argue

the point. No. I'm gonna let you have it for only like half what you'd pay anywhere else."

"Hey, wow, really, no kidding?" The visible fraction of mouth twisted into a strange smile. She

extended her hand, palm up, a loose fist. Level with his chin. "Lookahere!"

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