Eastern Standard Tribe Page 13

Fede." Artrings the comm off and snarls at it, then switches it off, switches off theemergency override, and briefly considers tossing it out the goddamned windowonto the precious English paving stones below. Instead, he hurls it into thesoft cushions of the sofa.

  He turns back to Linda and makes a conscious effort to wipe the snarl off hisface. He ratchets a smile onto his lips. "Sorry, sorry. Last time, I swear." Hecrawls over to her on all fours. She's pulled her robe tight around her, and heslides a finger under the collar and slides it aside and darts in for a kiss onthe hollow of her collarbone. She shies away and drops her cheek to hershoulder, shielding the affected area.

  "I'm not --" she starts. "The moment's passed, OK? Why don't we just cuddle,OK?"

  12.

  Art was at his desk at O'Malley House the next day when Fede knocked on hisdoor. Fede was bearing a small translucent gift-bag made of some cunningcombination of rough handmade paper and slick polymer. Art looked up from hiscomm and waved at the door.

  Fede came in and put the parcel on Art's desk. Art looked askance at Fede, andFede just waved at the bag with a go-ahead gesture. Art felt for the catch thatwould open the bag without tearing the materials, couldn't find it immediately,and reflexively fired up his comm and started to make notes on how a revisedversion of the bag could provide visual cues showing how to open it. Fede caughthim at it and they traded grins.

  Art probed the bag's orifice a while longer, then happened upon the release. Thebag sighed apart, falling in three petals, and revealed its payload: a small,leather-worked box with a simple brass catch. Art flipped the catch and easedthe box open. Inside, in a fitted foam cavity, was a gray lump of stone.

  "It's an axe-head," Fede said. "It's 200,000 years old."

  Art lifted it out of the box carefully and turned it about, admiring the cleantool marks from its shaping. It had heft and brutal simplicity, and a thin spotwhere a handle must have been lashed once upon a time. Art ran his fingertipsover the smooth tool marks, over the tapered business end, where the stone hadbeen painstakingly flaked into an edge. It was perfect.

  Now that he was holding it, it was so obviously an axe, so clearly an axe. Itneeded no instruction. It explained itself. I am an axe. Hit things with me. Artcouldn't think of a single means by which it could be improved.

  "Fede," he said, "Fede, this is incredible --"

  "I figured we needed to bury the hatchet, huh?"

  "God, that's awful. Here's a tip: When you give a gift like this, just leavehumor out of it, OK? You don't have the knack." Art slapped him on the shoulderto show him he was kidding, and reverently returned the axe to its cavity. "Thatis really one hell of a gift, Fede. Thank you."

  Fede stuck his hand out. Art shook it, and some of the week's tension meltedaway.

  "Now, you're going to buy me lunch," Fede said.

  "Deal."

  They toddled off to Picadilly and grabbed seats at the counter of a South Indianplace for a businessmen's lunch of thali and thick mango lassi, which coatedtheir tongues in alkaline sweetness that put out the flames from the spicedveggies. Both men were sweating by the time they ordered their second round oflassi and Art had his hands on his belly, amazed as ever that something asinsubstantial as the little platter's complement of veggies and naan could fillhim as efficiently as it had.

  "What are you working on now?" Fede asked, suppressing a curry-whiffing belch.

  "Same shit," Art said. "There are a million ways to make the service work. Therights-societies want lots of accounting and lots of pay-per-use. MassPike hatesthat. It's a pain in the ass to manage, and the clickthrough licenses andwarnings they want to slap on are heinous. People are going to crash their carsfucking around with the 'I Agree' buttons. Not to mention they want to require afirmware check on every stereo system that gets a song, make sure that thisweek's copy-protection is installed. So I'm coopering up all these user studieswith weasels from the legal departments at the studios, where they just slaverall over this stuff, talking about how warm it all makes them feel to make surethat they're compensating artists and how grateful they are for the reminders tokeep their software up to date and shit. I'm modeling a system that has aclickthrough every time you cue up a new song, too. It's going to be perfect:the rights-societies are going to love it, and I've handpicked the peer reviewgroup at V/DT, stacked it up with total assholes who love manuals and followingrules. It's going to sail through approval."

  Fede grunted. "You don't think it'll be too obvious?"

  Art laughed. "There is no such thing as too obvious in this context, man. Theseguys, they hate the end user, and for years they've been getting away with itbecause all their users are already used to being treated like shit at the postoffice and the tube station. I mean, these people grew up with *coin-operatedstoves*, for chrissakes! They pay television tax! Feed 'em shit and they'll askyou for second helpings. Beg you for 'em! So no, I don't think it'll be tooobvious. They'll mock up the whole system and march right into MassPike with it,grinning like idiots. Don't worry about a thing."

  "OK, OK. I get it. I won't worry."

  Art signalled the counterman for their bill. The counterman waved distractedlyin the manner of a harried restaurateur dealing with his regulars, and saidsomething in Korean to the busgirl, who along with the Vietnamese chef and theCongolese sous chef, lent the joint a transworld sensibility that made it afavorite among the painfully global darlings of O'Malley House. The bus-girlfound a pad and started totting up numbers, then keyed them into a Point-of-Saleterminal, which juiced Art's comm with an accounting for their lunch. Thisbusiness with hand-noting everything before entering it into the PoS had drivenArt to distraction when he'd first encountered it. He'd assumed that theterminal's UI was such that a computer-illiterate busgirl couldn't reliably keyin the data without having it in front of her, and for months he'd cited it innet-bullshit sessions as more evidence of the pervasive user-hostility thatcharacterized the whole damned GMT.

  He'd finally tried out his rant on the counterman, one foreigner to another,just a little Briton-bashing session between two refugees from the ColonialJackboot. To his everlasting surprise, the counterman had vigorously defendedthe system, saying that he liked the PoS data-entry system just fine, but thatthe stack of torn-off paper stubs from the busgirl's receipt book was a goodvisualization tool, letting him eyeball the customer volume from hour to hour bychecking the spike beside the till, and the rubberbanded stacks of yellowingpaper lining his cellar's shelves gave him a wonderfully physical evidence ofthe growing success of his little eatery. There was a lesson there, Art knew,though he'd yet to codify it. User mythology was tricky that way.

  Every time Art scribbled a tip into his comm and squirted it back at the PoS, heconsidered this little puzzle, eyes unfocusing for a moment while his visionturned inwards. As his eyes snapped back into focus, he noticed the young ladsitting on the long leg of the ell formed by the counter. He had bully shorthair and broad shoulders, and a sneer that didn't quite disappear as he shoveledup the dhal with his biodegradable bamboo disposable spork.

  He knew that guy from somewhere. The guy caught him staring and they locked eyesfor a moment, and in that instant Art knew who the guy was. It was Tom, whom hehad last seen stabbing at him with a tazer clutched in one shaking fist, facetwisted in fury. Tom wasn't wearing his killsport armor, just nondescriptathletic wear, and he wasn't with Lester and Tony, but it was him. Art watchedTom cock his head to jog his memory, and then saw Tom recognize him. Uh-oh.

  "We have to go. Now," he said to Fede, standing and walking away quickly, handgoing to his comm. He stopped short of dialing 999, though -- he wasn't up foranother police-station all-nighter. He got halfway up Picadilly before lookingover his shoulder, and he saw Fede shouldering his way through the lunchtimecrowd, looking pissed. A few paces behind him came Tom, face contorted in asadistic snarl.

  Art did a little two-step of indecision, moving towards Fede, then away fromhim. He met Tom's eyes again, and Tom's ferocious, bared teeth spurred him o
n.He turned abruptly into the tube station, waved his comm at a turnstile and doveinto the thick of the crowd heading down the stairs to the Elephant and Castleplatform. His comm rang.

  "What is *wrong* with you, man?" Fede said.

  "One of the guys who mugged me," he hissed. "He was sitting right across fromus. He's a couple steps behind you. I'm in the tube station. I'll ride a stopand catch a cab back to the office."

  "He's behind me? Where?"

  Art's comm lit up with a grainy feed from Fede's comm. It jiggled as Fedehustled through the crowd.

  "Jesus, Fede, stop! Don't go to the goddamned tube station -- he'll follow youhere."

  "Where do you want me to go? I got to go back to the office."

  "Don't go there either. Get a cab and circle the block a couple times. Don'tlead him back."

  "This is stupid. Why don't I just call the cops?"

  "Don't bother. They won't do shit. I've been through this already. I just wantto lose that guy and not have him find me again later."

  "Christ."

  Art squeaked as Tom filled his screen, then passed by, swinging his head fromside to side with saurian rage.

  "What?" Fede said.

  "That was him. He just walked past you. He must not know you're with me. Go backto the office, I'll meet you there."

  "That dipshit? Art, he's all of five feet tall!"

  "He's a fucking psycho, Fede. Don't screw around with him or he'll give you aTesla enema."

  Fede winced. "I hate tazers."

  "The train is pulling in. I'll talk to you later."

  "OK, OK."

  Art formed up in queue with the rest of the passengers and shuffled through thegas chromatograph, tensing up a little as it sniffed his personal space forblack powder residue. Once on board, he tore a sani-wipe from the roll in theceiling, ignoring the V/DT ad on it, and grabbed the stainless steel rail withit, stamping on the drifts of sani-wipe mulch on the train's floor.

  He made a conscious effort to control his breathing, willed his heart to stoppounding. He was still juiced with adrenaline, and his mind raced. He needed todo something constructive with his time, but his mind kept wandering. Finally,he gave in and let it wander.

  Something about the counterman, about his slips of paper, about the MassPike. Itwas knocking around in his brain and he just couldn't figure out how to bring itto the fore. The counterman kept his slips in the basement so that he could sitamong them and see how his business had grown, every slip a person served, aring on the till, money in the bank. Drivers on the MassPike who used trafficjams to download music from nearby cars and then paid to license the songs. Onlythey didn't. They circumvented the payment system in droves, running bootlegoperations out of their cars that put poor old Napster to shame for sheervolume. Some people drove in promiscuous mode, collecting every song in everycar on the turnpike, cruising the tunnels that riddled Boston like mobile pirateradio stations, dumping their collections to other drivers when it came time toquit the turnpike and settle up for their music at the toll booth.

  It was these war-drivers that MassPike was really worried about. Admittedly,they actually made the system go. Your average fartmobile driver had all of tensongs in his queue, and the short-range, broadband connection you had onMassPike meant that if you were stuck in a jam of these cars, your selectionwould be severely limited. The war-drivers, though, were mobile jukeboxes. Thehighway patrol had actually seized cars with over 300,000 tracks on theirdrives. Without these fat caches on the highway, MassPike would have to spend afortune on essentially replicating the system with their own mobile libraries.

  The war-drivers were the collective memory of the MassPike's music-listeners.

  Ooh, there was a tasty idea. The collective memory of MassPike. Like Dark Agesscholars, memorizing entire texts to preserve them against the depredations ofbarbarism, passing their collections carefully from car to car. He'dinvestigated the highway patrol reports on these guys, and there were hintsthere, shadowy clues of an organized subculture, one with a hierarchy, wherenewbies tricked out their storage with libraries of novel and rare tuneage in abid to convince the established elite that they were worthy of joining thecollective memory.

  Thinking of war-drivers as a collective memory was like staring at an opticalillusion and seeing the vase emerge from the two faces. Art's entire perceptionof the problem involuted itself in his mind. He heard panting and realized itwas him; he was hyperventilating.

  If these guys were the collective memory of the MassPike, that meant that theywere performing a service, reducing MassPike's costs significantly. That meantthat they were tastemakers, injecting fresh music into the static world ofBoston drivers. Mmmm. Trace that. Find out how influential they were. Someonewould know -- the MassPike had stats on how songs migrated from car to car. Evenwithout investigating it, Art just *knew* that these guys were offsettingmillions of dollars in marketing.

  So. So. So. So, *feed* that culture. War-drivers needed to be devoted to make itinto the subculture. They had to spend four or five hours a day cruising thefreeways to accumulate and propagate their collections. They couldn't *leave*the MassPike until they found someone to hand their collections off to.

  What if MassPike *rewarded* these guys? What if MassPike charged *nothing* forpeople with more than, say 50,000 tunes in their cache? Art whipped out his command his keyboard and started making notes, snatching at the silver rail with hiskeyboard hand every time the train jerked and threatened to topple him. That'show the tube cops found him, once the train reached Elephant and Castle and theydid their rounds, politely but firmly rousting him.

  13.

  I am already in as much trouble as I can be, I think. I have left my room, hitand detonated some poor cafeteria hash-slinger's fartmobile, and certainlydamned some hapless secret smoker to employee Hades for his security lapses.When I get down from here, I will be bound up in a chemical straightjacket. I'llbe one of the ward-corner droolers, propped up in a wheelchair in front of thevideo, tended twice daily for diaper changes, feeding and re-medication.

  That is the worst they can do, and I'm in for it. This leaves me asking twoquestions:

  1. Why am I so damned eager to be rescued from my rooftop aerie? I am sunburnedand sad, but I am more free than I have been in weeks.

  2. Why am I so reluctant to take further action in the service of gettingsomeone up onto the roof? I could topple a ventilator chimney by moving thecinderblocks that hold its apron down and giving it the shoulder. I could dumprattling handfuls of gravel down its maw and wake the psychotics below.

  I could, but I won't. Maybe I don't want to go back just yet.

  They cooked it up between them. The Jersey customers, Fede, and Linda. I shouldhave known better.

  When I landed at Logan, I was full of beans, ready to design and implement mywar-driving scheme for the Jersey customers and advance the glorious cause ofthe Eastern Standard Tribe. I gleefully hopped up and down the coast, chillingin Manhattan for a day or two, hanging out with Gran in Toronto.

  That Linda followed me out made it all even better. We rented cars and drovethem from city to city, dropping them off at the city limits and switching totop-grade EST public transit, eating top-grade EST pizza, heads turning tofollow the impeccably dressed, buff couples that strolled thepedestrian-friendly streets arm in arm. We sat on stoops in Brooklyn with oldladies who talked softly in the gloaming of the pollution-tinged sunsets whiletheir grandchildren chased each other down the street. We joined a pickup gameof street-hockey in Boston, yelling "Car!" and clearing the net every time afartmobile turned into the cul-de-sac.

  We played like kids. I got commed during working hours and my evenings wereblissfully devoid of buzzes, beeps and alerts. It surprised the hell out of mewhen I discovered Fede's treachery and Linda's complicity and found myselfflying cattle class to London to kick Fede's ass. What an idiot I am.

  I have never won an argument with Fede. I thought I had that time, of course,but I should have known better. I was har
dly back in Boston for a day before themen with the white coats came to take me away.

  They showed up at the Novotel, soothing and grim, and opened my room's keycardreader with a mental-hygiene override. There were four of them, wiry and fastwith the no-nonsense manner of men who have been unexpectedly hammered byoutwardly calm psychopaths. That I was harmlessly having a rare cigarette on thebalcony, dripping from the shower, made no impression on them. They droppedtheir faceplates, moved quickly to the balcony and boxed me in.

  One of them recited a Miranda-esque litany that ended with "Do you understand."It wasn't really a question, but I answered anyway. "No! No I don't! Who thehell are you, and what are you doing in my fucking hotel room?"

  In my heart, though, I knew. I'd lived enough of my life on the hallucinatoryedge of sleepdep to have anticipated this moment during a thousand freakouts. Iwas being led away to the sanatorium, because someone, somewhere, had figuredout about the scurrying hamsters in my brain. About time.

  As soon as I said the f-word, the guns came out. I tried to relax. I knewintuitively that this could either be a routine and impersonal affair, or ascreaming, kicking, biting nightmare. I knew that arriving at the intake in acalm frame of mind would make the difference between a chemical straightjacketand a sleeping pill.

  The guns were nonlethals, and varied: two kinds of nasty aerosol, a