Walter Jon Williams - Videostar

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Videostar

by Walter Jon Williams

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Ric could feel the others closing in. They were circling outside the Falcon

Quarter as if on midsummer thermals, watching the Cadillacs with glittering

raptor eyes, occasionally swooping in to take a little nibble at Cadillac

business, Cadillac turf, Cadillac sources. Testing their own strength as well

as the Cadillac nerves, applying pressure just to see what would happen, find

out if the Cadillacs still had it in them to respond...

Ric knew the game well: he and the other Cadillacs had played it five

years before, up and down the streets and datanets of the Albaicin, half-grown

kids testing their strength against the gangs entrenched in power, the

Cruceros, the Jerusalem Rangers, the Piedras Blancas. The older gangs seemed

slow, tentative, uncertain, and when the war came the Cadillacs won in a

matter of days: the others were too entrenched, too visible, caught in a

network of old connections, old associations, old manners ... the young

Cadillacs, coming up out of nowhere, found their own sources, their own

products and connections, and in the end they and their allies gutted the old

boys' organization, absorbing what was still useful and letting the rest die

along with the remnants of the Cruceros, Rangers, and Blancas, the bewildered

survivors who were still looking for a remaining piece of turf on which to

make their last stand.

At the time Ric had given the Cadillacs three years before the same

thing started happening to them, before their profile grew too high and the

next generation of snipers rose in confidence and ability. The Cadillacs had

in the end lasted five years, and that wasn't bad. But, Ric thought, it was

over.

The other Cadillacs weren't ready to surrender. The heat was mounting,

but they thought they could survive this challenge, hold out another year or

two. They were dreaming, Ric thought.

During the hot dog days of summer, people began to die. Gunfire echoed

from the pink walls of the Alhambra. Networks disintegrated. Allies

disappeared. Ric made a proposition to the Cadillacs for a bank to be shared

with their allies, a fund to keep the war going. The Cadillacs in their

desperation agreed.

Ric knew then it was time to end it, that the Cadillacs had lost

whatever they once had. If they agreed to a proposition like this, their nerve

and their smarts were gone.

So there was a last meeting, Ric of the Cadillacs, Mares of the

Squires, Jacob of the Last Men. Ric walked into the meeting with a radar-aimed

dart gun built into the bottom of his briefcase, each dart filled with a toxin

that would stop the heart in a matter of seconds. When he walked out it was

with a money spike in his pocket, a stainless steel needle tipped with liquid

crystal. In the heart of the crystal was data representing over eighty

thousand Seven Moons dollars, ready for deposit into any electric account into

which he could plug the needle.

West, Ric thought. He'd buy into an American condecology somewhere in

California and enjoy retirement.

He was twenty-two years old.

He began to feel sick in the Tangier to Houston suborbital shuttle, a

crawling across his nerves, pinpricks in the flesh. By the time he crossed the

Houston port to take his domestic flight to L.A. there were stabbing pains in

his joints and behind his eyes. He asked a flight attendant for aspirin and

chased the pills with American whiskey.

As the plane jetted west across Texas, Ric dropped his whiskey glass

and screamed in sudden pain. The attendants gave him morphine analogue but the

agony only increased, an acid boiling under his skin, a flame that gutted his

body. His vision had gone and so had the rest of his senses except for the

burning knowledge of his own pain. Ric tried to tear his arms open with his

fingernails, pull the tortured nerves clean out of his body, and the

attendants piled on him, holding him down, pinning him to the floor of the

plane like a butterfly to a bed of cork.

As they strapped him into a stretcher at the unscheduled stop in

Flagstaff, Ric was still screaming, unable to stop himself. Jacob had poisoned

him, using a neurotoxin that stripped away the myelin sheathing on his nerves,

leaving them raw cords of agonized fiber. Ric had been in a hurry to finish

his business and had only taken a single sip of his wine: that was the only

thing that had saved him.

He was months in the hospital in Flagstaff, staring out of a glass wall at a

maze of other glass walls -- office buildings and condecologies stacked

halfway to Phoenix, flanking the silver alloy ribbon of an expressway. The

snows fell heavily that winter, then in the spring melted away except for

patches of white in the shadows. For the first three months he was completely

immobile, his brain chemically isolated from his body to keep the pain away

while he took an endless series of nerve grafts, drugs to encourage nerve

replication and healing. Finally there was physical therapy that had him

screaming in agony at the searing pain in his reawakened limbs.

At the end there was a new treatment, a new drug. It dripped into his

arm slowly via an IV and he could feel a lightness in his nerves, a humming in

his mind. Even the air seemed to taste better. The pain was no worse than

usual and he felt better than he had since walking out of the meeting back in

Granada with the money spike in his pocket.

"What's in the IV?" he asked, next time he saw the nurse.

The nurse smiled. "Everyone asks that," he said. "Genesios Three. We're

one of the few hospitals that has the security to distribute the stuff."

"You don't say."

He'd heard of the drug while watching the news. Genesios Three was a

new neurohormone, developed by the orbital Pink Blossom policorp, that could

repair almost any amount of nerve damage. As a side effect it built additional

neural connections in the brain, thus raising the IQ, and made people high.

The hormone was rare because it was very complex and expensive to synthesize,

though the gangs were trying. On the west coast lots of people had died in a

war for control of the new black labs. On the street it was called Black

Thunder.

"Not bad," said Ric.

The treatment and the humming in Ric's brain went on for a week. When

it was over he missed it. He was also more or less healed.

The week of Genesios therapy took fifteen thousand dollars out of Ric's spike.

The previous months of treatment had accounted for another sixty-two thousand.

What Ric didn't know was that Genesios therapy could have been started at once

and saved him most of his funds, but that the artificial intelligences working

for the hospital had tagged him as a suspect character, an alien of no

particular standing, with no work history, no policorporate citizenship, and a

large amount of cash in his breast pocket. The AIs concluded that Ric was in

no position to complain, and they were right.

Computers can't be sued for malpractice. The doctors followed their

advice.

All that remained of Ric's money was three thousand SM dollars. Ric

could live off of that for a few years, but it wasn't much of a retirement.

The hospital was nice enough to schedule an appointment for him with a

career counselor, a woman who would find him a job. She worked in the basement

of the vast glass hospital building, and her name was Marlene.

Marlene worked behind a desk littered with the artifacts of other people's

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