Complete Short Fiction, page 87
“The world is a sign,” I say. “Everything you’ve seen since being born was telling you to stay off that grass.” My restraining harness flops loose. I turn around and get up on my knees, to look out of the back window at my rapidly disappearing campus. The back of the camper is crammed solid with equipment, leaving only a narrow passage to the bathroom in the rear. Dolores has always been a packrat.
“Could you take the wheel? I need to do something.”
I turn, look, and grab desperately for it, because she’s already let go. I have no control over the speed, Dolores has locked down some sort of manic governor, and the traffic is getting heavier as we descend the hill toward the glowing lights of town.
“Shoulda thought of this before. It’s a long shot, but—”
Dolores sits down at the kitchen table, punches something on a screen. Behind us, just as it disappears, I see the surface of the pond split and open up.
“Quite a little historical sight,” she says.
“I always thought it was a pond.” I feel sad that it isn’t.
“It’s an old Minuteman III silo.” Dolores punches more frantically at the panel in her hand as I swerve around a kris-fendered Malaysian sports car, the driver gaping blankly at this apparition from the past. “They cored it right out of the North Dakota topsoil and shoved it down in here, an exhibit for the college’s Department of Mass Annihilation, along with the Zyklon B canisters. Official story is that the missile is nonfunctional. . . .”
“Official story? Yow, Jesus!” I am forced to plough right through a red light. Pushing the brakes makes the van buck and scream, but has no discernable effect on our velocity. The engine is racing too fast, and I think I can feel turbofans kicking in just above the rear wheels. I leave a phalanx of furiously honking cars behind me. I’m still hanging desperately out of my seat, steering with a crick in my neck. The ridged steering wheel is slick under my sweat-drenched fingers. Any moment now I’ll lose my grip and it will spin away on its own course. Whatever happened to the push-button steering we were once promised?
“Oh, for heaven’s. . . .” She slaps at a lever and the engine dies. I take a sharp right off the main drag, balancing us precariously on two wheels. We fall back down with a whump and drift to a halt in a quiet residential neighborhood. Howling police cars tear past the end of the street. “I think we’re far enough away now. Yeah, official. Your college isn’t qualified for antisatellite gear, you know that? Kinda lower’s your Peterson’s rating, even getting the cheerleaders to bare their breasts at the Homecoming game doesn’t really make up for it. . . .”
A dome of light rises up above the hill that now conceals the campus from view, then narrows down to a single bright flare: The missile has been launched.
Dolores breathes through her teeth, watching tensely. One of her eyes is covered with the black disk of a Head-Up Display, pumping direct trajectory data onto her retina. I hear the shriek of shoulder-launched, crowd-control sound disrupters, painful even at this distance—Campus Security is making a Mace-and-cattle-prod-assisted sweep of the dorms, seeking the fraternity-initiation-addled culprits who are the immediate suspects for the launch.
“Come on, baby.” The flaming rocket pauses, seems to hang in space . . . then a single sealing streak shoots up from it, as the rest detonates, inaudible in the high atmosphere. Flaming chunks come showering down, tracked by the computerized home telescopes of Age of Space souvenir seekers, who soon will be squabbling over the smoking shards of metal embedded in someone’s lawn. Not too many of them old launch vehicles left, after all. “Go for it! Seven, six . . .” she counts down under her breath.
“Three, two . . .” It’s an old anti-satellite missile, of course, probably experimental, configured to piggyback on the obsolete Minuteman hardware. “One, now . . . Yes! Go, go, go!” She takes a deep, excited breath, though the sky shows no sign of whatever just happened. “Let’s switch places, Kalhorn, I got stuff to do.”
The sky is blank and featureless, bleached out by the lights of the city and the glow of the Moon. I feel a mysterious sense of loss. Dolores’s ASAT hit the geosynchronous satellite that usually hangs low down in the sky to the south, a part of the Company’s communications linkages. It also provided surveillance for this part of the globe. For now, at least, we are invisible to it, and I am alone with my dear Dolores.
IV.
THE ARTERIAL IS JAMMED WITH CARS—
DASHBOARD DISPLAYS SPILL SHORT-TERM
EXPIRATION COUPONS
NO ONE WILL MAKE IT TO THE STORE SOON ENOUGH TO USE
A glowing route map spreads thickly through our windshield. We’ve moved about fifteen feet in the past twenty minutes. I see that shaped charges placed by gullible humans duped by frenetically persuasive hyperlingual chimpanzees and bonobos demanding their own cable channel have blocked Cahuenga pass. Further delays expected. . . .
“Tell me, Kalhorn,” Dolores says. “Who do you work for?” She sits with her feet propped up on the dashboard, exactly as if every worldwide corporate asset is not now dedicated to her destruction.
“The Company, Dolores. The Company. Can’t say the name, you know that, it’s just an access code, a multidimensional logo, a series of conjugations in cognitive space. Try to pronounce it, I’d tear my tongue, I’d need cosmetic surgery. . . .”
“What’s its NYSE symbol?”
“Not publicly traded. Not that way, in discrete chunks, in tedious shares. It’s more holographic, existing everywhere simultaneously, hitching rides on the undersides of other transactions, things like bulk purchases of rat kibble for home neuromod experiments, interbank fund transfers, Federal Witness Protection cards getting traded in school yards—you know, by the time you discover you’re popular with the undescended-testicle set it’s too damn late, there’s nothing you can do—”
“Oh, bullshit. You’re just trying to weasel out of a commitment.”
Teenagers thunder overhead on powered roller skates, leaping from car roof to stranded car roof. Any one of them could be etching an identifying bar code on the Winnebago’s roof, as if the damn thing is hard to spot in the first place. Traffic stutters forward a couple of feet, then stops again.
“Dolores—”
“You dumped me, Kalhorn. Remember? You told me you were going to the corner for a quart of milk—”
“You said we were out—”
“—And you never came back!”
“I had to go,” I say. “It was the only way.”
“So what was I supposed to put on my cereal the next morning? Orange juice?”
“I’ll get you some milk. I said I would.”
“I don’t need any milk!”
This is getting too heavy. To distract myself, I rake my thumb across the pill dispensers above the climate controls. Growth hormone, ibogaine, Flintstone multiple vitamins . . . there they are. I knew they had to be. The traffic jam is making me edgy. I balance three Fugits on my tongue, feeling the sear of their jalapenomint coating, then dry swallow.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “We’ll be out of this in no time.”
“Kalhorn,” Dolores says. “Why are you talking so slowly?”
Her voice jabbers past me. The Fugit is taking hold, slowing my body’s reactions.
“Relax. I’ll tell you more when we finally get out of this.” My explanation probably takes five minutes, and she’s lost interest before I’m even halfway through.
Most of the other drivers are probably on Fugit too. Nothing like it for a traffic jam. As the drug hits, things start to pick up. Cars jerk forward like spastic chickens. Traffic signals strobe, their information no longer meaningful. We drift down the street, faster and faster, until it is no longer boring; until, in fact, it is sweatily terrifying. I skin my lips back from my teeth, and my teeth are dry instantly.
I invented a game to play on Fugit. But you’d need a big dose. Massive. The game is called Pangea Pool, and it takes advantage of continental drift. Once, millions of years ago, the continents were all unified in one big lump, Pangea. That split up, and they drifted around, smashing into each other, raising mountains, sinking lifts. But there was no scoring, no way of telling who was ahead. Just random stuff. But if you move slowly enough, you can push the continents around, make it a competitive thing, score it by mountain uplift height, by angle of impact. I’ve figured out all the rules, but it’s been hard starting a league. Innovators always suffer. Around me, the cars are moving so fast they flicker like some kind of quantum effect, and the Moon rises overhead like a thrown basketball, but the motion of the continents is not yet perceptible.
Suddenly I’m slammed back into real time. Dolores has jabbed a chelating blocker into my carotid.
“Get ready,” she says.
“Jesus, Dolores, you’re such a killjoy—hey!” My words are blotted out by the thunder of helicopter blades overhead. The windows flare as searchlights stab down at us.
Giant scooper blades close in, shatter the windows, and dig into the underside of the roof. A negligent heave from the heavy-lift ’copter and we float free of the street, swinging back and forth above the receding car roofs. Several drivers, jealous of what they perceive as a piece of unsportsmanlike jam jumping, fire pull-claws up at the helicopter’s underbelly. One, a tiny Eritrean threewheeled sandbug, succeeds in catching on and it, too, floats free of the traffic, flashing gleefully obscene signs from its rear-window LED display at its erstwhile compatriots, who blow their horns in dissonant rage.
We feel the massive ‘copter yaw ponderously, trying to eliminate the stowaway. A cool breeze blows through our shattered windows. The city is turning into a glowing gridwork below us as we spin slowly above it. The searchlights have gone off, and it is dark around us.
“Just what I need,” Dolores says in exasperation as specs on the ’copter flicker holographically through the shattered remains of the driver’s-side window. It’s a McDonnell-Douglas/Sikorsky dual-rotor, turboshaft Cheops, designed to assist in field-pacification campaigns by dropping full-scale sports stadiums into remote guerrilla-controlled locations.
“What do you suppose its max load is?” Dolores peers out of the windshield at the whale of the helicopter. Its two rotors gleam like nebulae in the reflected light of the city. The interactive logos of sponsoring pro-ball teams covering its belly can just be heard shouting the dates of upcoming games.
Finally irritated into action by the freeloader, it unlimbers a UV-cutting laser. A spot on the sandbug’s line glows red, then flares white. The line pails. Instead of falling, the sandbug deploys an emergency hang-glider and sails serenely off across the L.A. basin, several hours cut off its evening commute. I’d forgotten how much fun it was just to have a regular job and go home at the end of the day.
“Honey, that thing picked Fenway Park up and set it down on top of a Skindancer training camp in Yucatan without popping a gasket.”
“Yeah, and the Mayan guerrillas converted it into a ceremonial ball court, with the big stone rings. They sacrifice the losers in the sky boxes and let the blood drip down the carpeted stairs. . . .”
“I’m not sure that the loss of an American League franchise, tragic though it was, is relevant to your concern about the load capacity of the Cheops—”
Exploded cross-sections of hydraulic landing legs and ergonomic pilot’s lower-back massage pads swell in fly’s-eye multiplicity through the fragments of window. Dolores thumbs the display off.
“The turbo-assist won’t be enabled,” she says decisively. “The damn things have three hours of downtime for every hour of operation. They don’t need that extra lift for a puny little Winnebago, now do they, honey? And without the turbo-assist, a Winnebago is barely within spec for it. Big maintenance money for the contractor. Isn’t that a damn shame? Somebody should do something.”
Her chipper tone makes me nervous. Dolores tends to fragment under stress, and I recognize this subordinate personality, one that often shows up in such circumstances, a cocktail-shaker-meatloaf-and-pineapple-chunk homemaker she bought from a street vendor while on vacation in New Orleans. It’s got a strong somatic component: her breasts suddenly look conical and her eyebrows arch as if savagely plucked.
“I suppose not,” I say.
“That’s great, honey. But I need to give that ’copter a false read. Before your first Manhattan, that’s a dear. It’s GPS-satellite linked. Adjust the timing on the location signal and . . .” Her tone gets low, suggestive. “I’ll do that tiling you like.”
That thing I like . . . It’s been so long, I’m no longer even sure what that is.
V.
THE MARINA ROAD HUGS THE SIDE OF THE RESERVOIR
WHICH GLOWS REACTOR-POOL BLUE
WITH THE LIGHTS OF SUBMERGED CAMPERS
EVADING INCOMPREHENSIBLE EMANATIONS
FROM A HOSTILE GALAXY
I lay sweating on the Formica kitchen table. My vestibular system spins and I almost throw up again. But my mission is accomplished. We’ve ducted the helicopter’s orientation process and sent it south of its projected path. Lake Meade now lies below us. The once-populous RV hookups on its shores are now occupied by oxygen pumps supporting the subsurface colonies.
“Yucca Flat,” I gasp. “That’s where they built it, you know. Company HQ. Right under the nuclear waste disposal site, shielded from detection by a 50-meter layer of vitrified plutonium waste. HQ is powered by a self-contained, sodium-cooled breeder reactor, a portable spinoff of the French Superphenix program, bought on the promise to the Ministry of Culture that we’d practice French conjugations daily.”
The control panels were all in incomprehensible pseudo-Francophone ordinateur-speak, and several near-detonations had already led to some raucous TGIM (Thank God It’s Meltdown) parties among the younger Company staffers. I miss the security of my training days there.
“That’s nice, dear.” Dolores flips up her welding mask, having cut a hole through the Winnebago’s rear door. She kicks open an equipment closet, her spike heel leaving a deep dent. Revealed is a gigantic roll of hose. “Could you feed that out? There’s a good boy.”
You could pour her voice on pancakes. I do as she says, letting the hose slither out through the hole.
Dolores peers out of the rear window. “Come on, you bastard,” she mutters. “Just a little lower, yes, just a little—yes!”
She flips a switch and the roar of a pump struts up somewhere in the wall. Reservoir water gets sucked up, pouring into the reserve water tank. But Dolores has opened the clean-out hatch. The tank fills in moments, and then water pom’s out of the hatch.
“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Dolores smiles toothily at me. “Let’s tuck into some chop suey and watch Ed Sullivan. I love that talking mouse, don’t you?”
Water begins to fill the rear of the Winnebago. We claw our way up the increasingly slanted hallway to the seats in front. Kitchen cabinets fly open, flinging cans of okra and creamed corn at our heads. Dolores makes it, I don’t. While she rests back in her control couch, I find myself dangling from the rear of my seat. Water swirls beneath my feet.
“Not long now,” she says. Overhead, I hear the helicopter laboring at the unexpected weight. Servoes scream in protest. The ripples of the reservoir surface approach my feet. Deep within, I can see the gleam of the luminescent giant squid the subaqueous campers keep to protect their coolers from marauding bass. Their many limbs gesture at me, wig-wagging obsolete semaphore codes that represent the power of file Company. I should let go, drop down into that informational morass, rejoin the symbolic propagations that are the Company. . . .
The rear of the Winnebago hits the water. I lose my grip on the seat back, and fall down into the whirlpool. As the water pours in, I see the helicopter swing, held tight by its line, until one of its rotors touches the water’s surface. It smashes in then, blades ripping loose and flying through the air.
Dolores pushes a button on the panel. There is a brief rumble as irritated campers disturbed at their submerged rest pound on the undercarriage. An algae-covered hand rises from the water and gives us the finger, as well as it can webbed to the second joint. The vehicle rights itself and we churn along, powered by waterjets. I struggle to my feet. The Company. It almost had me . . . I look down at my shoe, which is marked by a line of large squid suckers. I must have kicked my way free, without even knowing it. Dolores beams at me. She pulls off the fins she was putting on, if I needed saving. She is fetching in a pink bathing cap with a plastic gardenia applique.
She slaps the dashboard. “This thing’s the finest Detroit metal, Kalhorn. Not one of those pesky Javanese things you see all over. Look like a hairball the cat baited up.”
“Speaking of which,” I say, “any of your famous chop suey left?” It’s the only way. Really.
“Do that thing you like yourself then, you bastard!”
“Actually, that’s the way I like it best.”
Furious, she finds the silver cocktail shaker where it rolls back and forth in the muck on the floor and chugs directly from it, while driving with one hand.
The Winnebago hits shore and we climb up on solid ground. It will be a while before she talks to me, but she’ll be fine when she does. She really should get that personality adjusted, but she’s afraid of screwing with it. The thing is a classic.
VI.
THE TWO-LANE BLACKTOP STRETCHES OUT AHEAD
LETTING US KNOW THAT
THERE ARE SOME DREAMS THAT NEVER DIE
It’s deep, dark night and we thunder along the road, the Winnebago rocking gently.
“You still haven’t told me,” she said.
“What?” The broken segments of the center line blink hypnotically at me in the headlights.
“Why you left me.”
“You know why . . . you know, it’s different, it’s not like I told you. The Company, I mean. That business about Yucca Flat. I’ve been stuck in my dorm room, you know, busy. Not up to working through the kinked logic connections of those damn gigabyte, hypertext, interoffice memos they kept sending me.”
