Svaha, page 3
It took playing the white man's game, using his own strengths against him, for the tribes to finally win back their respect, their lands, their harmony with the manitou, their rightful place as the guardians of Mother Earth. Playing the white man's game, but remembering the medicines of the People.
A sweat lodge vision changed everything.
* * *
It came to Daniel Hollow Horn, the Lakota musician whose madjimadzuin led in an unbroken line back to John Hollow Horn, who had performed a medicine sun dance at Manderson in 1929 in defiance of the Indian agency, pierced his skin and performed the dance for the sake of the sacred lands of the Black Hills. After the love affair North America held with the musics of England, Jamaica, then Africa, in the early 1990s the music industry finally turned to that of America's own Native Peoples for the source of a new sound, and Daniel Hollow Horn was there.
In a time of megahits and superstars, Hollow Horn's music surpassed the sales of any previous artist in the history of the industry. It was rock 'n' roll, it was tribal medicine music, it was a new sound that was imitated but never reproduced with the same fevered intensity that took Hollow Horn straight to the top of the charts. At one time he had an unprecedented five CD singles in Billboard’s top twenty at the same time, including the number one and number three spots. Hit followed hit, the money rolled in, and he used it to breathe life into his vision.
He sent young men and women of the People to the white man's universities, a few at first, then in ever-increasing numbers, as the phenomenon of Native rock continued in quantum leaps and bounds, his financial worth skyrocketing with it. What began with only reluctant support from the tribal elders of the various Nations, was soon embraced wholeheartedly as the results began to appear.
By the late 1990s, the first science graduates were working in laboratories funded by Hollow Horn, seeking to make real the physical aspects of the Lakota's sweat lodge vision. Native lawyers took their grievances to World Courts that had been set up to mediate the madness in South America, the Middle East, and Indochina. While the world powers continued their puppet wars and blustering, the Native Nations were taking back their own.
When New York and Los Angeles were destroyed by terrorist warheads, the tribes had won back their lands and the first barriers were raised, forming the Lakota Enclave in the Black Hills and the Navajo/Hopi Enclave in the American Southwest. By the time Europe was suffering the chaos of the Food Riots, while the United States and Russia had fallen in a limited nuclear exchange, the Japanese claimed Canada, and the Chinese much of Russia and the States, there were twelve Enclaves in North America, two in South America, two in Australia, one in Africa, and the Soyot Enclave in Siberia. And the tribes had their first two space stations in orbit with skyhooks connecting them to the Lakota and Haida Enclaves. A decade later they added a third space station, connected by skyhook to the Wadi Enclave in Australia.
The tribes withdrew completely from the Outer Lands. Radiation and the escalating greenhouse effect were unable to penetrate the Enclave barriers. The west coast of the United States and Florida were under water. The southwestern deserts and Canadian prairies had become jungles. The massive TOPQ Corridor—overgrown brainchild of the Japanese that vied only with a similar industrial complex in China—had fallen from producing fully one-half of the world's technological needs to be a deserted warren of abandoned factory complexes, warehouses, living quarters, and commercial properties hundreds of kilometers long. Only a handful of Megaplexes survived.
Though they could do nothing to prevent the nations of the world from killing themselves and the land, the tribes could still wait. Wait for the time when they could cleanse all of Mother Earth. They had learned patience. They had finally won their first battle after a century and a half of poverty and a constant undermining of their self-esteem. They could wait a little longer. In their Enclaves, safe from the madness of the Outer Lands, each with its monument to their greatest hero, Daniel Hollow Horn, they could wait forever.
* * *
When the sun rose, it was only a brighter smudge behind the overhanging buildup of carbon dioxide that choked the sky. The silence was vast, disturbed twice a day by the rumble of the subway speeding between the Megaplexes in its underground vacuum tunnels with a sound like the voices of the grandfather thunders. Gahzee could already feel a tightening in his chest from the unclean air despite the immunity boosters he had taken before he left the Enclave.
How do they live in this world they made? he asked himself as he continued through the TOPQ ruins. With no songbirds, only scavengers. No rich greens of meadow grass and forest, only these sickly growths that played at being tree and shrub. Save for Nanabozho and his coyote brothers, no deer or other large mammals, only rodents and bugs.
How do they live? He would find out. For having left the Enclave, there was no return for him. No tribe now, save the tribe he made for himself.
"Hey, Nanabozho!" he called to the coyote who was still trailing him, hoping for more handouts. He could tell it was the same one by its odd eye colouring—the right one was brown, the other a steely blue-grey. "Ni'tckiwe Myeengun." Wolf's brother. "Shall we be a tribe—you and I?"
The coyote ducked away behind some rubble at the sound of his voice. Gahzee laughed quietly. Run and be wise, he thought. You've learned that much in these dead lands. But you'll be back. We'll be friends, you and I, before this journey is done. A tribe of two.
And that night, Nanabozho did return. Gahzee was working on the longbow that would be his primary weapon in the Outer Lands, for the Enclave allowed none of its technology beyond its barriers except for the biochip com-link implanted behind his left ear—the one physical thread still connecting him with what he had left behind. The coyote wolfed down the offering of meat that Gahzee had put out for him, well away from the small campfire but still in its light, then lay down and watched Gahzee work on his bow.
"I could have brought a bow," Gahzee said conversationally, smiling as the coyote's ears pricked up at the sound of his voice, "but I knew there'd be many nights when my hands would be looking for work. And what of my arrows, you ask? See? I have fletches and tips that need only the straight shafts that I've yet to find. Have you seen such wood in this place, brother?"
The coyote was still there when Gahzee rolled himself in his blanket to sleep, and though he was gone in the morning, he rejoined the medé in time for a noon handout, which Gahzee laid on a stone a few yards closer than the food had been the night before.
"A tribe of two," Gahzee said softly.
His fingers itched to touch the thick grey pelt, but he forbore any movement until they were both done their meals and it was time to travel once more.
2
The doorman at the Ch'ing-jen Fan eyed Lisa's striped messenger tattoos and slowly shook his head as she approached.
"Nobody's got nothing to send, little sister. Better take a hike, tung ma?"
Lisa understood. He was a big, pureblood white with long yellow hair and grey-blue eyes, and he liked to think that what he was doing meant something, even if it was just watching the door of a rat's nest like the Ch'ing-jen Fan. His bare chest was overhung with cheap medallions—the centerpiece being a dried ear that he'd supposedly cut off a yak—but full of machismo though he might be, it still wouldn't be that smart to argue with the antique shotgun lying across his knees. What was an antique in the Plex, was a source of power in the squats.
"The Ragman," she said, adding in Mandarin, "Wo hen hsiang chien t'a." I want to see him.
"You got a name?" he asked, also switching from patois.
Lisa flipped him a hard credit.
The doorman caught it easily. He let the smooth coin run up and down his knuckles with a practiced motion, then made it disappear into a pocket of his vest. "Ch'ien Hsiao-chieh, ma?" he asked. Little Miss Credit, eh?
Come on, asshole, Lisa thought, but she hid her impatience behind masked features and merely shrugged.
He held her gaze until she broke eye contact, then grinned. "Go ahead," he told her, waving her through.
"Hsieh-hsieh," Lisa said with a quick bob of her head. Thanks. I'd like to see you eat my shit, she added to herself as she stepped by him.
She hated kowtowing to assholes who let the smallest taste of power turn them into a tin god. But this was a tong bar, the Ragman had an office in back, and he'd be gambling in here for hours. If she wanted to get hold of him and be on her way before dawn, she didn't really have a whole lot of choice.
The Ch'ing-jen Fan was a squats equivalent of a yak meat bar in the Plex. All it took to get in was hard credits, and you'd better be prepared to leave some behind unless you had some real strongarms in tow, or the kind of luck that operated beyond the tables, because the tongs didn't like to see their money leaving.
This time of night, the place was packed, the air thick with clouds of opiate and Tabaccanin smoke. There were chinas and tongs at the long gambling tables playing mahjong and pachinko. A dim vid flickered in one corner, pumping out a bootlegged Plex channel. Tinny music blared from the speakers that had nothing to do with the movie on the vid, where a couple of leather boys were beating on a mulatto made up to look like a Enclave dojin no, complete with red body armour and a feathered war bonnet. On a small dance floor a few couples were going through the motions, grinding their hips against each other, a flickering solar lantern strobing over their slow moving bodies.
Along one wall was a long narrow bench where wire-heads were popping fiberdiscs into their temple-noded interfaces. Tarted-up geishas, male and female, were serving drinks. They looked more like they'd stepped out of a porn vid than a yak meat bar in their shimmery bodysilvers that left their breasts and genitalia bare. The silvery tinkle of disc dealers' bells cut across the music as she stepped into the room, but she motioned the sudden approaching crowd of them away. One of them spat on the floor at her feet, but she was already turning to the tables, looking for the Ragman. He wasn't hard to spot.
There was only one Ragman in the squats. He was sitting with some chinas and a fat mulatto, his midnight black skin gleaming in the flickering lights from the dance floor. The sides of his head were shaven, but he had a mohawk swatch of knotty dreadlocks that ran down the center of his skull, falling to either side of his head and down to the small of his back like fat brown snakes. When he looked up, sensing Lisa's gaze on him, he flashed her a white-toothed grin that was so broad it seemed to split his face.
"Business or pleasure, darling?" he called out to her.
"Business."
The Ragman gave the other players a shrug. "Sorry, girls. Duty calls and all that shit, ma?"
When one of the chinas started to protest, the Ragman's strongarm pushed himself away from the wall where he'd been standing and stood behind the Ragman, his arms folded across his massive chest, his gaze nailing the china to his seat. The Ragman had found J.D. wandering out past the squats, out of his head and repeating over and over again, "Jah's dead, mon, Jah's dead," whereupon the Ragman christened him J.D. and took him in. The only voice the big strongarm would listen to was that of the man who'd pulled him up from the gutters and given him a sense of place in the world again.
"Let's go into my office," the Ragman said, ushering Lisa towards the back of the bar where various rooms were for hire. J. D. followed like an enormous shadow, loosened from its moorings to come floating across the room behind them.
* * *
"I hate to lose you, darling," the Ragman said.
His office was a wizard's nest of electric, solar, and computer equipment, a hedge of wires and machinery that took up one entire wall of shelves and spilled out across a worktable, the Ragman's desk, and all over the floor. The Ragman sat behind his desk, his face flickering in the light from the screen of his tabletop console screen. Lisa perched across from him on the edge of a crate that was padded with a cushion. After closing the door behind them, J.D. had taken up his usual stance against it, arms folded across his chest. Lisa could almost feel the weight of his gaze on her back.
"I've got no choice," Lisa said. "I've gotta run, or my ass is grass."
"There's always a choice."
Lisa shook her head. "You don't understand. Goro's yaks are already out gunning for me. And don't talk to me about his meat bars, because—"
"I'd never insult your intelligence, darling. Your good sense sometimes, but never your natural smarts."
"Gimme a break."
The Ragman smiled. "I know you too well, Lisa. I've been keeping an eye on you. You're a cut above the usual rat. You take time to find things out. You're interested in what's going on—and not just in the squats. There's places for people like you."
"Sure. Lying on the street with a yak boot up my butt. Look, I know you like me. The feeling's mutual, okay? But time's running out. All I need from you right now's a couple of maps and—" She started to reach for her pack, but thought better of it when J.D. shifted behind her. She straightened in her seat. "I've got a Steeljack in there that I need encoded."
The Ragman's eyebrows lifted.
"I can pay."
"I don't doubt you, darling," he said. "I just want you to listen to an idea I've had. Can you spare a poor old man just a few more minutes of your time?"
"Old man?"
To laugh, Lisa thought. The Ragman might look around sixty, but he could out-think, out-drink, out-talk, out-gamble, and plain out-do anyone she knew. The only thing he couldn't be was out-pushed. Or out-waited. So if he had something he wanted to say…
"Sure," she said with a sigh. "Fire away."
"The Jones Co-Op is always looking for talent," he told her.
Lisa shook her head. "Oh, no. The toms feed on us rats—or didn't you ever notice?"
"That's Plex prop talking in you—crap you picked up off the vids."
"I don't call Black Bobby choking on bricks propaganda," Lisa replied.
Black Bobby had been a junkwalker—a rat who made his living salvaging out beyond the squats. He'd been found two nights ago with a brick stuffed down his throat and the mark of the toms slashed onto his forehead.
"Black Bobby was screwing around," the Ragman said. "Selling shit to the yaks that they had no business knowing."
Lisa regarded him in a new light. While nobody knew exactly who made up the Jones Co-Op, what everyone did know was that they were buying up Plex shares, infiltrating the Kaisha with their own people. Supposedly, they had a revolution brewing—a planned overthrow of the Plex—but their biggest impact in the squats was on the black market where they sold Plex goods to eager consumers who didn't have a hope in hell of buying themselves citizenship, but still wanted a taste of the good life. They also liked to squash rats.
"You're in with them, aren't you?" she said finally.
The Ragman nodded.
"So what's the deal? How come you're always beating on your own people? I mean, you're not called toms 'cause you're such pussycats. It's 'cause you feed on rats."
"I told you—it's Plex prop, that's all. When their leather boys go hunting fun in the squats, we're the ones that take the fall."
"So what do you do? Are you really trying to take down the Plex?"
The Ragman shook his head. "We just want to even things out a bit, that's all. We're like a virus, darling, running through their security, crashing a system here, freeing up some tech for the squats there. Guerrilla tactics."
"Yeah, I always took you for a monkey man."
It was easier to make light of what he was telling her, than to think about what it meant. Because now that she knew, who was to say she could even walk out of this room in one piece without signing up? Why, she wondered, did the shit just get deeper every time she took another step?
"I don't need this," she told him. "Look, help me out with the Steeljack and maps, I'll give you my credits, and then I'm outta here. Long gone. All you'll see is my heels."
The Ragman shook his head. "No threats, darling. If you don't want to sign up, you're free to walk. I trust you to keep your mouth shut."
Lisa thought about J.D.'s bulk, guarding the door behind her. Yeah. Sure. Except this was the Ragman, and he'd never put it to her before.
"Why now?" she asked. "Why'd you wait until now to try to recruit me?"
"I told you—I like you, darling. I didn't want you in over your head, except now you've done yourself the favour all on your own. See, this gig could turn sour anytime. We've got the Kaisha on our ass. We've got the triads, the tongs, the yaks…"
Lisa laughed. "So what's the bad news?"
The Ragman's features settled into a serious expression. "Word is, the package you lost was a chip of Claver data, darling. Think about that shit in Goro's hands. Now think about the Kaisha getting their mitts on it."
"Claver…"
The dojin no of the Enclaves were supposed to live in utopian splendor behind their barriers. They had tracts of unspoiled land. Clear skies. Skyhooks linking them to orbiting space stations. If the Kaisha got hold of that technology…
"They'd cut us right off," she said slowly.
"I told you you weren't stupid. The Jones Co-Op wants that technology, darling. For everyone."
"But what can I do to help? I'm just—"
"You saw the chinas that made the snatch. If you can finger them, we can make them talk."
"You're forgetting something real important here," Lisa said. "I'm the one who the yaks want to skin for losing that package. I can't go anywhere in the squats without getting my butt shot off."
"No problem. We can suit you up as a swagger girl, darling—mask, ID, all the gear."
The leather boys and swagger girls were kids from the Plex who came slumming in the squats, looking for thrills. The only reason most of them survived to go back to the Plex when their day's fun was over was that if they didn't, the Plex sent out its rent-a-cop drones to stomp rat butts until the rats finally got it through their heads: Don't mess with the Plex babies.
