

Hardwired

Copyright © 1986, 2011 by Walter Jon Williams

Smashwords Edition published by Walter Jon Williams

# All Rights Reserved

#

#  Books by Walter Jon Williams

**Novels**

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_

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_Ambassador of Progress_

_Angel Station_

_Hardwired (complete novel)_

_Knight Moves_

_Voice of the Whirlwind_

_Days of Atonement_

_Aristoi_

_Metropolitan_

_City on Fire_

_The Rift (originally as by Walter J Williams)_

**Divertimenti**

_The Crown Jewels_

_House of Shards_

_Rock of Ages_

**Dread Empire's Fall**

_The Praxis_

_The Sundering_

_Conventions of War_

_Investments (short novel)_

**Dagmar Shaw Thrillers**

_This Is Not a Game_

_Deep State_

_The Fourth Wall_

**Collections**

_Facets_

_Frankensteins & Foreign Devils_

_The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories_

**Privateers & Gentlemen (historical novels, originally as by Jon Williams)**

_To Glory Arise_  (originally published as  _The Privateer_ )

_The Tern Schooner_  (originally published as  _The Yankee_ )

_Brig of War_  (originally published as  _The Raider_ )

_The Macedonian_

_Cat Island_

BY MIDNIGHT HE knows his discontent will not let him sleep. The panzerboy drives north from Santa Fe, over the Sangre de Cristos on the high road through Truchas, heading for Colorado, wanting to get as close as possible to the night sky. He drives without the use of hands or feet, his mind living in the cool neural interface that exists somewhere between the swift images that pass before his windscreen and the electric awareness that is the alloy body and liquid crystal heart of the Maserati. His artificial eyes, plastic and steel, stare unblinking at the road, at twisting dirt ruts corrugated by the spring runoff, tall stands of pine and aspen, high meadows spotted with the frozen black shapes of cattle, all outlined in the rushing, almost liquid light of his high beams as he pushes the Maserati upward. The shapes that blaze in the headlights stand boldly against the darkness of their, own shadows, and Cowboy can almost see himself in a monochrome world like a black-and-white celluloid image projected before his windscreen, flickering with the speed of his passage. It's almost like flying.

He'd thought, when he got his new Kikuyu eyes, that he'd ask for a monochrome option, amused by the idea of flicking some mental switch in his head and being plunged into the action of some black-and-white fantasy, an old moving picture starring the likes of Gary Cooper or Duke Wayne, but there hadn't been much demand for monochrome and the option had been discontinued. He'd also wanted irises of chrome steel, but the Dodger, his manager, had talked him out of that, saying they were too conspicuous for a man in Cowboy's line of business. Cowboy agreed reluctantly, as he always did when the Dodger came up with a new restriction on his fantasy. Instead he'd taken pupils of a storm-cloud gray.

But here in these mountains named after the Blood of Christ are fantasies older than any on celluloid. They pass in montage before his steel and plastic eyes: an old whitewashed church, the area around its doors painted like a turquoise heaven, clashing with the reds and yellows that form a pyramid and all-seeing eye at the rounded cap of the arch; some massive white castle in the Moroccan style, the playhouse of a long-vanished Arab, its crumbling minarets streaked with brown, its rococo iron grillwork scored with advancing rust. Suddenly around a curve a pair of pale ghosts appear like figures of supernatural warning, Indian pilgrims dressed in white, from the cloth binding their foreheads and braiding their long hair to the white doeskin moccasins that wink with silver buttons. Walking patiently by moonlight, a penance, to the sanctuary at Chimayo, there to give thanks to the carved santos or ask the Virgin for a favor. Visions like outposts of another time, preserved here on the high rim of Earth, shimmering in the sudden brightness of Cowboy's eyes.

Cowboy pushes the machine to the max, redlining the scales on the dashboard. Flying at night is the thing he does best. The engine whine echoes from the trees, the hills. Wind gusts through the open windows, bringing the sharp smell of pine. Cowboy pictures the celluloid speeding through the projector, moving faster, images blurring. Neurons pulse their messages to the crystal in his head, transmitting his will to the throttle, the gears, the jouncing wheels. Now the Maserati is moving downhill, gaining speed as it races through the switchbacks, finally tearing across the surface of the ford in front of Penasco, throwing up a wall of mist that, for a short moment, reflects the headlights in rainbows, a hallucinatory shimmer on the edge of vision, a foreshadowing of color here in the monochrome world.

It's dawn when the Maserati blurs across the Colorado line, and early morning by the time the bronze machine enters Custer County. The mountains are brown and green now, alive with pine and the mountain wind, the monochrome fantasy gone. Cowboy has friends here. He turns into a private dirt road, knowing there are electronics suddenly taking an interest in him.

The road twists upward and ends at a high mountain meadow landscaped flat and crisscrossed by the alpha of a private airstrip. Where the black deltas once flew on their occult midnight errands, grasses and flowers now grow in the cracks of the paving. Still visible is a gouge in the bright green aspens, where one jock overshot the strip with his wounded delta and splashed himself and his cargo over a half mile of mountainside, but the furrow is green again with saplings. The airfield is turning dreamlike now, a little fuzzy around the edges; but Cowboy does not intend that the memory should ever die. There are memories that live for him as his present reality does not, and he shines them daily, like the finish of a fine new car, to keep them bright.

For eleven generations Cowboy's ancestors farmed an area of southeastern New Mexico, living as dots on a featureless red plain as different from the world of the Sangre de Cristos as is the Ukraine from Peru. Every so often one of Cowboy's family would shoulder a rifle and march off to fight for the United States, but they concentrated most of their energies on fighting the state of Texas. The Texans were water-hungry, consuming more than they could ever replenish, building at the finish vast pumps just a few inches over the Texas side of the border, sucking the alkaline New Mexico water across the line, stealing what others had so carefully preserved. Cowboy's people fought them, holding on to what they could until the last pump rattled dry and the dusty red earth rose on the wind and turned the world into a sandblasting hurricane.

Cowboy remembers his days in the dust bowl, living at his uncle's ranch after his father broke himself trying to hang on. Existing inside a gray assortment of bleached planks on the edge of the desert the Texans had made a place where red earth drifted inches deep behind the door whenever the wind blew, and days passed without seeing the sun as anything brighter than a ruddy warm vagueness behind the scouring sand. Farming was impossible, and the family ran cattle instead, an occupation only slightly less precarious. The nearest town bragged about the number of churches it had and Cowboy was raised in one of them, watching the congregation grow bleaker week by week, their skin turning gray, their eyes ever more desperate as they asked the Lord to forgive whatever sin had led them to this cleansing. Texans, once the enemy, wandered through on their way to somewhere else, living in cardboard boxes, in old automobiles that sat on blocks and had long ago lost their paint to the sand. The Rock War came and went, and things got harder. Hymns continued to be sung, liquor and cards foresworn, and notices of farm auctions continued to be posted at the courthouse.

The Dodger was an older man who had moved to Colorado. When he came home he drove a shiny automobile, and he didn't go to church. He chewed tobacco because chewing didn't interfere with his picking when, in his free time, he played left-handed mandolin with a jug band. The gray people in the church didn't like to talk about how he'd made his money. And one day the Dodger saw Cowboy riding in a rodeo.

The Dodger visited Uncle's ranch and arranged to borrow Cowboy for a while, even paid for his time. He got Cowboy some practice time on a flight simulator and then made a call to a thirdman he knew.

Cowboy was sixteen when he took up flying. In his cracked old leather boots he already stood three inches over six feet, and soon he stood miles taller, an atmosphere jock who spread his contrails from one coast to the other, delivering the mail, mail being whatever it was that came his way. The Orbitals and the customs people in the Midwest were just another kind of Texan– someone who wants to rape away the things that keep you alive, replacing nothing, leaving only desert. When the air defenses across the Line got too strong, the jocks switched to panzer– and the mail still got through. The new system had its challenges, but had it been up to Cowboy he would never have left the skies.

Now Cowboy is twenty-five, getting a little old for this job, approaching the time when even hardwired neural reflexes begin to slacken. He disdains the use of headsets; his skull bears five sockets for plugging the peripherals directly into his brain, saving milliseconds when it counts. Most people wear their hair long to cover the sockets, afraid of being called buttonheads or worse, but Cowboy disdains that practice, too; his fair hair is cropped close to the skull and his black ceramic sockets are decorated with silver wire and turquoise chips. Here in the West, where people have an idea of what these things mean, he is regarded with a kind of awe.

He has his nerves hardwired to the max, and Kikuyu Optics eyes with all the available options. He has a house in Santa Fe and a ranch in Montana that his uncle runs for him, and he owns the family property in New Mexico and pays taxes on it like it was worth something. He has the Maserati and a personal aircraft–– a "business jet"–– and a stock portfolio and caches of gold.

He's also got this place, this little meadow in the Colorado mountains; another cache, this one for memories that won't go away. And a discontent, formless but growing, that has led him here.

He parks by the big camouflaged concrete hangar and unfaces the Maserati before the engine gives its final whimper. In the silence he can hear the sound of a steel guitar from somewhere in the hangar and a stirring in the grass that is the first directionless movements of the afternoon's thermals. He walks to the hangar, unreels a jack from the lock, studs it into his head, and gives it the code.

Past the heavy metal door there is a Wurlitzer, shiny chrome and bright fluorescent plastic, venting some old Woody Guthrie song into the huge cathedral space. Looming above are the matte black shapes of three deltas, their rounded forms obscure in the dim light but giving an impression of massive power and appalling speed. Obsolete now, Cowboy bought them for little more than the price of their engines when the face riders started using panzers.

Warren stands at his workbench in a pool of light, tinkering with a piece of a fuel pump. His lined face flickers blue with the video pictures Cowboy's arrival has prompted– he's got security cameras all over the place and cares for them with the same methodical diligence with which he keeps the deltas ready to fly.

He was a crew chief at Vandenberg on the day of the Rock War, and he did his duty knowing that he could expect nothing for his diligence but to feel on the back of his neck, for a fragment of a second, the overpressure of a nickel-iron missile coming down through the atmosphere, followed by termination... but he did what he was trained to do and got his cutterjocks up to fight for Earth against the Orbitals, wishing them well with all his heart, hoping that a few, maybe, would say "Here's one for Warren" when they burned an enemy. But the scenario turned out different from what he'd expected: looking up into the night sky for the meteor that had his name on it, he saw the falling, blazing arcs all right, but it wasn't descending rocks that lit the night sky–– it was his boys and their craft, the young, bright men with their azure silk neck scarves and their bright needle cutters, coming down in pieces, failing systems giving their last electronic cries, blood streaking the insides of broken faceplates, ruptured oxidant tanks gushing white crystal plumes into the near-vacuum... The last hope of Earth blown apart in the post-boost phase by the Orbital knights.

For hours he waited at Vandenberg, hoping one of them might bring a cripple in. None came. Next thing Warren knew, Earth had surrendered. The Orbitals occupied Vandenberg, along with Orlando, Houston, and Cuba, and Warren survived because he was stationed at a place that was too valuable to destroy.

There was a lot of talk about the Resistance afterward, and Warren did his share of talking... probably more than talking, if the story about a sabotaged shuttle, carrying a cargo of executives from Tupolev I.G. to an impact on the Mojave, could be given any credence. Warren's history after that grew a little more obscure, until he appeared working for the thirdmen in Colorado and met Cowboy. And then they made a little obscure history together.

"Hi, C'boy," Warren says. He pronounces it "Cubboy." He doesn't turn from his work.

"Hi." Cowboy opens the front of the Wurlitzer– the lock hasn't worked in decades– and collects some quarters. He tells the machine to play some scratchy old country swing and then walks across the darkened hangar.

"Low-pressure fuel turbopump," Warren says. Disassembled, the pump looks like a plastic model kit for a Galapagos turtle. "Running red lights on my tests. See where the metal's bright, here, where the blade is rubbing? I think I may have to machine a new part."

"Need a hand?"

"I just might."

Warren's face is craggier than usual in the bright overhead light, his eyes and forehead shadowed by the brim of his cap so that his beaky nose seems bigger than it is. He's erect and intense, and though he's flabby in places, these are places where flab doesn't matter much. Behind him the soft colored lights of the Wurlitzer shine on the matte-black nose of a delta. He's the actual owner of the airfield, with Cowboy as secret partner. Cowboy doesn't like data trails that point in his direction.

Warren fiddles with the part a while more, then takes measurements. He moves over to the lathe and puts on his goggles. Cowboy readies himself to hand him the tools when necessary. Spare parts are hard to find for military-surplus jet engines, and the parts that are available often have too many questions attached.

The lathe whines. Sparks spill like tiny meteors against the concrete floor. "I'm making a run Wednesday night," Cowboy says. "In five days."

"I can come down Monday and start my checks on the panzer. Is that too late?"

"Not for where I'm going." There is resentment in Cowboy's voice.

"Iowa again?"

"Hell, yes." Anger flares in Cowboy's soul. "Arkady and the others... they keep looking at their damn analyses. Saying that the privateers are undercapitalized, all we have to do is wait and keep them from taking any cargoes."

"And?"

"And it's wrong. You can't beat the heat by playing their own game. We should be running into Missouri every night. Making them eat fuel, ammo. Rock them if that's what it takes." He snorts. "Undercapitalized. See what the loss of a dozen aircraft will do for their cash flow."

Warren looks up from the spinning lathe. "You running for Arkady on Wednesday night?"

Cowboy nods.

"I don't like the man. I wonder about him." Warren, in a studied way, is working the lathe again. His white hair, sticking out from under his cap, flashes in the light of sparks.

Cowboy waits, knowing Warren will make his point in his own time. Warren turns off the lathe and pushes his goggles up above the brim of his cap. "He came from nowhere in particular. And now he's the biggest thirdman in the Rockies. He's got sources of supply that the others can't match. Dresses in all those cryo max fashions from the Florida Free Zone."

"So? He's got organization. And I don't like his clothes either. "

Warren holds up his gleaming alloy creation to the light. Narrowing his eyes. "He's supposed to be getting it through cutouts. Hijackings, corrupt Orbital executives. That sort of thing. The usual. But in this kind of quantity? You can't get that much in the way of goods without the Orbitals knowing."

A protesting whisper runs through Cowboy's mind. In it for the ride, not for the cargo.

He's said it often enough. An ethic, this, a kind of purity. Half the time he hasn't even known what he's been carrying.

"I don't know if I want to hear this," he says.

"Don't hear it, then." Warren turns away and goes back to the pump. He puts on a headset and runs through some checks.

Cowboy thinks for a moment about Arkady, the burly man who runs half the traffic across the Line these days, who exists in a strange swirl of assistants, bodyguards, helpers, techs, hangers-on of no apparent function who imitate his fashionable dress and his mannerisms. Women always present, but never a part of business. An existence cognate with what Cowboy can understand of Arkady's mind: convoluted, filled with violent prejudices and hatreds, sudden anger juxtaposed with sudden sentimentality, suspicious in a strange, offhand Russian way, as if paranoia were a way of life, not merely a set of reasonable precautions but a religion.

Cowboy doesn't like Arkady, but hasn't so far bothered to dislike him. Arkady considers himself an insider, a manipulator, but he's outside what really counts; outside the life of the panzerboy, the mutant creature with turbine lungs and highpressure turbopump heart, crystal implanted in his skull, eyes like lasers, fingers that point missiles, alcohol throbbing through his veins... Arkady thinks he's running things but he's really just an instrument, an excuse for the panzerboys to make their runs across the Line and into legend. And if Arkady doesn't understand that, his thoughts don't count for much in the scheme of thing.

Warren is reassembling parts of the pump, ready to run his tests, and will be busy for a while. Cowboy leaves the pool of light and walks into the blackness of the hangar. The deltas loom above him, poised and ready, lacking only a pilot to make them living things. His hands reach up to touch a smooth underbelly, an epoxide canard, the fairing of a downward-gazing radar. Like stroking a matte-black animal, a half-wild thing too dangerous to be called a pet. It lacks only a pilot, and a purpose.

He moves a ladder from an engine access panel to a cockpit and climbs into the seat that was, years ago, molded to his body. The familiar metal and rubber smells warm up to him. He closes his eyes and remembers the night splattered with brightness, the sudden flare of erupting fuel, the mad chase as, supersonic, he bobbed and weaved among the hills and valleys of the Ozarks, the laws on his tail as he burned for home...

His first delta was called Midnight Sun, but he changed the name after he'd figured out what was really going on. He and the other deltajocks were not an abstract response to market conditions but a continuation of some kind of mythology. Delivering the mail across the high dome of night, despite all the oppressors' efforts to the contrary. Keeping a light burning in the darkness, hope in the shape of an afterburner flame. The last free Americans, on the last high road...

So he'd begun to live what he suddenly knew. Accepting the half-scornful, condescending nickname they'd given him, living it, becoming Cowboy, the airjock. Answering to nothing else. Becoming the best, living in realms higher than any of the competition. He called his next delta Pony Express. And in it he delivered the mail as long as they'd let him. Till times changed, and modes of delivery changed. Till he had to become a boy instead of a jock. The eyes that could focus into the night blackness, straining to spot the infrared signature of the laws riding combat air patrol over the prairie, were now shut in a small armored cabin, all the visuals coming in through remotes. He is still the best, still delivering the mail. He shifts in his seat. The country swing fades and all Cowboy can hear in the echoing silence is the whirr of Warren's lathe. And sense the restlessness in himself, wanting only a name...

TODAY/YES

BODIES AND PARTS of bodies flare and die in laserlight, here the translucent sheen of eyes rimmed in kohl or turned up to a heaven masked by the starry-glitter ceiling, here electric hair flaring with fashionable static discharges, here a blue-white glow of teeth rimmed in darkglow fire and pierced by mute extended tongue. It is zonedance. Though the band is loud and sweat-hot, many of the zoned are tuned to their own music through crystal wired delicately to the auditory nerves, or dancing to the headsets through which they can pick up any of the bar's twelve channels... They seethe in arrhythmic patterns, heedless of one another. Perfect control is sought, but there are accidents–– impacts, a flurry of fists and elbows–– and someone crawls out of the zone, whimpering through a bloodstreaked hand, unnoticed by the pack. To Sarah the dancers at the Aujourd'Oui seem a twitching mass of dying flesh, bloody, insensate, mortal. Bound by the mud of earth. They are meat. She is hunting, and Weasel is the name of her friend.

MODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODER

Need a Modern Body?

All Electric-Replaceable-In the Mode!

Get One Now!

NBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODY

The body designer had eyes of glittering violet above cheekbones of sculptured ivory. Her hair was a streaky blond that swept to an architecturally perfect dorsal fin behind her nape. Her muscles were catlike and her mouth was a cruel flower.

"Hair shorter, yes," she said. "One doesn't wear it long in freefall. " Her fingers lashed out and seized Sarah by the chin, tilting her head to the cold north light. Her fingernails were violet, to match her eyes, and sharp. Sarah glared at her, sullen. The body designer smiled. "A little pad in the chin, yes," she says. "You need a stronger chin. The tip of the nose can be altered; you're a bit too retrousse. The curve of the jawbone needs a little flattening– I'll bring my paring knife tomorrow. And, of course, we'll remove the scars. Those scars have got to go." Sarah curled her lip under the pressure of the violet-tipped fingers.

The designer dropped Sarah's chin and whirled. "Must we use this girl, Cunningham?" she asked. "She has no style at all. She can't walk gracefully. Her body's too big, too awkward. She's nothing. She's dirt. Common."

Cunningham sat silently in his brown suit, his neutral, unmemorable face giving away nothing. His voice was whispery, calm, yet still authoritative. Sarah thought it could be a computer voice, so devoid was it of highlights. "Our Sarah has style, Firebud," he said. "Style and discipline. You are to give it form, to fashion it. Her style must be a weapon, a shaped charge. You will make it, I will point it. And Sarah will punch a hole right where we intend she should." He looked at Sarah with his steady brown eyes. "Won't you, Sarah?" he asked. Sarah did not reply. Instead, she looked up at the body designer, drawing back her lips, showing teeth. "Let me hunt you some night, Firebud," she said. "I'll show you style."

The designer rolled her eyes. "Dirtgirl stuff," she snorted, but she took a step back. Sarah grinned.

"And, Firebud," Cunningham said, "leave the scars alone. They will speak to our Princess. Of this cruel terrestrial reality that she helped create. That she dominates. With which she is already half in love.

"Yes," he said, "leave the scars alone." For the first time he smiled, a brief tightening of the cheek muscles, cold as liquid nitrogen. "Our Princess will love the scars," he said. "Love them till the very last."

WINNERS/YES LOSERS/YES

The Aujourd'Oui is a jockey bar, and they are all here, moonjocks and rigjocks, holdjocks and powerjocks and rockjocks– the jocks condescending to share the floor with the mudboys and dirtgirls who surround them, those who hope to become them or love them or want simply to be near them, to touch them in the zonedance and absorb a piece of their radiance. The jocks wear their colors, vests, and jackets bearing the emblems of their blocs– Hughes, Pfizer, Toshiba, Tupolev, ARAMCO– the blazons of the Rock War-victors borne with careless pride by the jocks who had won them their place in the sky. Six feet three inches in height, Sarah stalks among them in a black satin jacket, blazoned on its back with a white crane that rises to the starry firmament amid a flock of chrome-bright Chinese characters. It is the badge of a small bloc that does most of its business out of Singapore, and is hardly ever seen here in the Florida Free Zone. Her face is unknown to the regulars, but it is hoped they won't think it odd, not as odd as it would seem if she wore the badge of Tupolev or Kikuyu Optics I.G.

Her sculpted face is pale, the Florida tan gone, her eyes dark-rimmed. Her almost-black hair is short on the sides and brushy on top, her nape hair falling in two thin braids down her back. Chrome-steel earrings brush her shoulders. Firebud has broadened her already-broad shoulders and pared down the width of her pelvis; her face is sharp and pointed beneath a widow's peak, looking like a succession of arrowheads, the shaped charge that Cunningham demands. She wears black dancing slippers laced over the ankles and dark purple stretch overalls with suspenders that frame her breasts, stretching the fabric over the nipples that Firebud has made more prominent. Her shirt is gauze spangled with silver; her neck scarf, black silk. There is a receiver tagged to the optic centers of her forebrain, at the moment monitoring police broadcasts, a constant Times Square of an LED running amber, at will, above her expanded vision.

Gifts from Cunningham. Her hardwired nerves are her own. So is Weasel.

I LOVE MY KIKUYU EYES, SEZ PRIMO PORNOSTAR ROD MCLEISH, AND WITH THE INFRARED OPTION, I CAN TELL IF MY PARTNER'S REALLY EXCITED OR IF I'M JUST ON A SILICON RIDE...

-Kikuyu Optics I.G.,

A Division Of Mikoyan-Gurevich

She first met Cunningham in another bar, the Blue Silk. Sarah ran Weasel as per contract, but the snagboy, a runner who had got more greedy than he had the smarts to handle, had been altered himself–– she is nursing bruises. She recovered the goods, fortunately, and since the contract was with the thirdmen, she was paid in endorphins, handy since she needs a few of them herself.

There is a bone bruise on the back of her thigh and she can't sit; instead, she leans back against the padded bar and sips her rum and lime. The Blue Silk's audio system plays island music and soothes her played-up nerves.

The Blue Silk is run by an ex-cutterjock named Maurice, a West Indian with the old-model Zeiss eyes who was on the losing side in the Rock War. He's got Chip sockets on his ankles and wrists, the way the military wore them then. There are pictures of his friends and heroes on the walls, all of them with the azure silk neck scarves of the elite space defense corps, most of them framed with black mourning ribbons turning purple with the long years.

Sarah wonders what he has seen with those eyes. Did it include the burst of X rays that preceded the 10,000-ton rocks, launched from the orbital mass drivers, that tore through the atmosphere to crash on Earth's cities? The artificial meteors, each with the force of a nuclear blast, had first fallen in the eastern hemisphere, over Mombasa and Calcutta, and by the time the planet had rotated and made the western hemisphere a target, the Earth had surrendered–– but the Orbital blocs felt they hadn't made their point forcefully enough in the West, and so the rocks fell anyway. Communications foul-up, they said. Earth's billions knew better.

Sarah was ten. She was doing a tour in a Youth Reclamation Camp near Stone Mountain when three rocks obliterated Atlanta and killed her mother. Daud, who was eight, was trapped in the rubble, but the neighbors heard his screams and got him out. After that, Sarah and her brother bounced from one DP agency to another, then ended up in Tampa with her father, whom she hadn't seen or heard of since she was three. The social worker held her hand all the way up the decaying apartment stairs, and Sarah held Daud's. The halls stank of urine, and a dismembered doll lay strewn on the second-floor landing, broken apart like the nations of Earth, like the lives of the people here. When the apartment door opened she saw a man in a torn shirt with sweat stains in the armpits and watery alcoholic eyes. The eyes, uncomprehending, had moved from Sarah and Daud and then to the social worker as the papers were served, and the social worker said, "This is your father. He'll take care of you," before dropping Sarah's hand. It turned out to be only half a lie.

She looks at the fading photographs in their dusty frames, the dead men and women with their metallic Zeiss eyes. Maurice is looking at them, too. He is lost in his memories, and it looks as if he is trying to cry; but his eyes are lubricated with silicon and his tear ducts are gone, of course, along with his dreams, with the dreams of the billions who had hoped the Orbitals would improve their lives, who have no hope now but to get out somehow, out into the cold, perfect cobalt of the sky.

Sarah wishes she herself could cry, for the dead hope framed in black on the walls, for herself and Daud, for the broken thing that is all earthly aspiration, even for the snagboy who had seen his chance to escape but had not been smart enough to play his way out of the game his hopes had dealt him into. But the tears are long gone and in their place is hardened steel desire– the desire shared by all the dirtgirls and mudboys. To achieve it she has to want it more than the others, and she has to be willing to do what is necessary– or to have it done to her, if it comes to that. Involuntarily her hand rises to her throat as she thinks of Weasel. No, there is no time for tears.

"Looking for work, Sarah?" The voice comes from the quiet white man who has been sitting at the end of the bar. He has come closer, one hand on the back of the bar stool next to her. He is smiling as if he is unaccustomed to it.

She narrows her eyes as she looks at him sidelong, and takes a deliberately long drink. "Not the kind of work you have in mind, collarboy," she says.

"You come recommended," he says. His voice is sandpaper, the kind you never forget. Perhaps he's never had to raise it in his life.

She drinks again and looks at him. "By whom?" she says.

The smile is gone now; the nondescript face looks at her warily. "The Hetman," he says.

"Michael?" she asks.

He nods. "My name is Cunningham," he says.

"Do you mind if I call Michael and ask him?" she says. The Hetman controls the Bay thirdmen and sometimes she runs the Weasel for him. She doesn't like the idea of his dropping her name to strangers.

"If you like," Cunningham says. "But I'd like to talk to you about work first."

"This isn't the bar I go to for work," she says. "See me in the Plastic Girl, at ten."

"This isn't the sort of offer that can wait."

Sarah turns her back to him and looks into Maurice's metal eyes. "This man," she says, "is bothering me."

Maurice's face does not change expression. "You best leave," he says to Cunningham.

Sarah, not looking at Cunningham, receives from the corner of her eye an impression of a spring uncoiling. Cunningham seems taller than he was a moment ago.

"Do I get to finish my drink first?" he asks.

Maurice, without looking down, reaches into the till and flicks bills onto the dark surface of the bar. "Drink's on the house. Outta my place."

Cunningham says nothing, just gazes for a calm moment into the unblinking metal eyes.

"Townsend," Maurice says, a code word and the name of the general who had once led him up against the Orbitals and their burning defensive energies. The Blue Silk's hardware voiceprints him and the defensive systems appear from where they are hidden above the bar mirror, locking down into place. Sarah glances up. Military lasers, she thinks, scrounged on the black market, or maybe from Maurice's old cutter. She wonders if the bar has power enough to use them, or whether they are bluff.

Cunningham stands still for another half second, then turns and leaves the Blue Silk. Sarah does not watch him go.

"Thanks, Maurice," she says.

Maurice forces a sad smile. "Hell, lady," he says, "you a regular customer. And that fella's been Orbital."

Sarah contemplates her surprise. "He's from the blocs?" she asks. "You're sure?"

"Innes," Maurice says, another name from the past, and the lasers slot up into place. His hands flicker out to take the money from the bar. "I didn't say he's from the blocs, Sarah," he says, "but he's been there. Recently, too. You can tell from the way they walk, if you got the eyes." He raises a gnarled finger to his head. "His ear, you know? Gravity created by centrifugal force is just a little bit different. It takes a while to adjust."

Sarah frowns. What kind of job is the man offering? Something important enough to bring him down through the atmosphere, to hire some dirtgirl and her Weasel? It doesn't seem likely. Well. She'll see him in the Plastic Girl, or not. She isn't going to worry about it. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other, the muscles crackling with pain even through the endorphin haze. She holds out her glass. "Another, please, Maurice," she says.

With a slow grace that must have served him well in the high starry evernight, Maurice turns toward the mirror and reaches for the rum. Even in a gesture this simple; there is sadness.

¿VIVE EN LA CIUDAD DE DOLOR?

¡DEJENOS MANDARLE A HAPPYVILLE!

– Pointsman Pharmaceuticals A.G.

She takes a taxi home from the Blue Silk, trying to ignore Cunningham's calm eyes on the back of her head as she gives the driver her address. He is across the street under an awning, pretending to read a display in a store window. How much is she throwing away here? She doesn't turn to see if he registers dismay at her retreat, but somehow she doubts his expression has changed.

With Daud she shares a two-room apartment that hums. There is the hum of the coolers and recyclers, more humming from the little glowing robots that move about randomly, doing the dusting and polishing, devouring insects and arachnids, and cleaning the cobwebs out of corners. She has a modest comp deck in the front room and Daud has a vast audio system hooked to it, with a six-foot screen to show the vid. It's on now, silently, showing computer-generated color patterns, broadcasting them with laser optics on the ceiling and walls. The computer is running the changes on red, and the walls burn with cold and silent fire.

Sarah turns off the vid and looks down at the cooling comp deck, the reds fading slowly from her retinas. She empties the dirty ashtrays Daud has left behind and thinks about the man in brown, Cunningham. The endorphins are wearing off and the bone bruise on her thigh is hammering her with every step. It's time for another dose.

She checks her hiding place on a shelf, in a can of sugar, and sees that two of her twelve vials of endorphin are gone. Daud, of course. There aren't enough places to hide even small amounts of stuff in an apartment this size. She sighs, then ties her tourniquet above the elbow. She slots a vial into her injector, dials the dose she wants, and presses the injector to her arm. The injector hums and she sees a bubble rise in the vial. Then there is a warning light on the injector and she feels a tug of flesh as the needle slides on its cool spray of anesthetic into her vein. She unties, watches the LED on the injector pulse ten times, and then she feels a veil slide between her and her pain. She takes a ragged breath, then stands. She leaves the injector on the sofa and walks back to the comp.

Michael the Hetman is in his office when she calls. She speaks to him in Spanglish and he laughs.

"I thought I'd hear from you today, mi hermana," he says.

"Yes?" she asks. "You know this orbiter Cunningham?"

"So-so. We've done business. He has the highest recommendations. "

"Whose?"

"The highest," he says.

"So you recommend that I trust him?" Sarah asks.

His laugh seems a little jangled. She wonders if he is high. "I never make that kind of recommendation, mi hermana," he says.

"Yes, you would, Hetman," Sarah says. "If you are getting a piece of whatever it is Cunningham is doing. As it is, you're just doing him a favor."

"Do svidaniya, my sister," says Michael, sounding annoyed, and snaps off. Sarah looks into the humming receiver and frowns.

The door opens behind her and she spins and goes into her stance, balanced to jump forward or back. Daud walks carelessly in the door. Behind him, carrying a six-pack of beer, comes his manager, Jackstraw, a small young man with unquiet eyes. Daud looks up at her, speaks through the cigarette held in his lips. "You expecting someone else?" he asks.

She relaxes. "No," she says. "Just nerves. It's been a nervous day."

Daud's eyes move restlessly over the small apartment. He has altered the irises from brown to a pale blue, just as he'd altered the color of his hair, eyebrows, and lashes to a white blond. He is tanned, and his hair is shoulder-length and shaggy. He wears tooled leather sandals, and a tight white pair of slacks under a dark net shirt. He is taking hormone suppressants, and though he is twenty he looks fifteen and is beardless.

Sarah moves over to him and kisses him hello. "I'm working tonight," he says. "He wants to have dinner. I can't stay long."

"Is it someone you know?" she asks.

"Yes." He gives a shadowy grin, meant to be reassuring. His blue eyes flicker. "I've been with him before."

"Not a thatch?"

He shrugs out of her embrace and goes to sit on the sofa. "No," he mumbles. "An old guy. Lonely, I guess. Easy to please. Wants to talk more than anything." He sees the plastic pack of endorphins and picks it up, searching through it. Sarah sees two more vials vanish between his fingers.

"Daud," she says, her voice a warning. "That's our food and rent– I've got to get it on the street."

"Just one," Daud says. He drops the other back in the bag, holds up one to let her see it.

Cigarette ash drifts to the floor.

"You've already had your share," Sarah says.

His pale eyes flicker in his dark face. "Okay," he says. But he doesn't put the vial down. His need is too strong. She looks down and shakes her head. "One," she agrees. "Okay." He pockets it, then picks up the loaded injector and dials a dosage–– a high dosage, she knows. She resists the urge to check the injector, knowing that someday if he goes on this way he'll put himself in a coma, but knowing how much he'd resent her concern. Sarah watches as the endorphin hits his head, as he lies back and sighs, his twitchy nervousness gone.

She takes the injector and frees the vial, then puts it in the plastic bag. There is a half smile on Daud's face as he looks up at her. "Thanks, Sarah," he says.

"I love you," she says.

He closes his eyes and strops his back on the sofa like a cat. His throat makes strange whimpering noises. She takes the bag and walks into her room and throws the bag on her bed. A wave of sadness whispers through her veins like a drug of melancholy. Daud will die before long, and she can't stop it.

Once it had been she who stood between him and life; now it is the endorphins that keep him insulated from the things that want to touch him. Their father had been crazy and violent, and half her scars were Daud's by right; she had suffered them on his behalf, shielding him with her body. The madman's beatings had taught her to fight back, had made her hard and quick, but she couldn't be there all the time. The old man had sensed weakness in Daud, and found it. When Sarah was fourteen she'd run with the first boy who'd promised her a place free from pain; two years later, when she'd bought her way out of her first contract and come back for him, Daud had been shattered beyond repair, the needle already in his arm. She'd led him to the new house where she worked–– it was the only place she had–– and there he'd learned to earn his living, as she had learned in her own time. He is broken still, and as long as they are in the streets, there is no way of healing him.

If she hadn't cracked, if she hadn't run away, she might have been able to protect him. She won't crack again.

She returns to the other room and sees Daud lying on the sofa, one sandal hanging with the straps tangled between his toes. Tobacco smoke drifts up from his nostrils. Jackstraw is sitting next to him on the sofa and drinking one of his beers. He glances up.

"You look like you're limping," Jackstraw says. "Would you like me to rub your legs?"

"No," Sarah says quickly; and then realizes she is being too sharp. "No," she says again, with a smile. "Thank you. But it's a bone bruise. If you touched me, I'd scream."

ARTIFICIAL DREAMS

The Plastic Girl is a hustler's idea of the good life. There is a room for zonedance, and there are headsets that plug you into euphoric states or pornography or whatever it is you need and are afraid to shoot into your veins. Orbital pharmaceutical companies provide the effects free, as advertising for their products. There are dancers on the mirrored bar in the back, a bar equipped with arcade games so that if you win, a connection snaps in one of the dancer's garments and it falls off. If you win big, all the clothes fall off all the dancers at once.

Sarah is in the big front room: brassy music, red leather booths, brass ornaments. She does not, and will probably never, rate the quiet room down the hall, all brushed aluminum and a lot of dark wood that might have been the last mahogany tree in Southeast Asia–– that room is for the big boys who run this fast and dangerous world, and though there isn't a sign that says NO WOMEN ALLOWED, there might as well be. Sarah is an independent contractor and rates a certain amount of respect, but in the end she is still meat for hire, though on a more elevated plane than she once was.

But still, the red room is nice. There are holograms, colors and helixes like modeled DNA, floating just above eye level, casting their variegated light through the crystal and sparkling liquor held in the patrons' hands; there are sockets at every table for comp decks so that the patrons can keep up with their portfolios; and there are girls with reconstructed breasts and faces who come to each table in their tight plastic corsets, bring you your drink, and watch with identical and very white smiles as you put your credit needle into their tabulator and tap in a generous tip with your fingernail.

Sarah is ready for the meet with Cunningham, wearing a navy blue jacket guaranteed to protect her against kinetic violence of up to 900 foot-pounds per square inch, and trousers good for 750. She has invested some of the endorphins and bought the time of a pair of her peers. They are walking loose about the bar, ready to keep Cunningham or his friends off her back if she needs it. She knows she needs a clear head and has kept the endorphin dose down. Pain is making her edgy, and she still can't sit. She stands at a small table and sips her rum and lime, waiting. And then Cunningham is there. Bland face, brown eyes, brown hair, brown suit. A whispery voice that speaks of clean places she has never been, places bright and soft against the black and pure diamond.

"Okay, Cunningham," she says. "Business."

Cunningham's eyes flicker to the mirror behind her. "Friends?" he asks.

"I don't know you."

"You've called the Hetman?"

She nods. "He was complimentary," she says, "but you're not working for him; he's repaying you a favor, maybe. So I'm cautious."

"Understandable." He takes a comp deck out of an inner pocket and plugs it into the table. A pale amber screen in the depths of the dark tabletop lights up, displaying a row of figures. "We're offering you this in dollars," he says.

Sarah feels a touch of metal on her nerves, on her tongue. The score, she thinks, the real thing. "Dollars?" she says. "Get serious."

"Gold?" Another set of figures appears.

She takes a sip of rum. "Too heavy. "

"Stock. Or drugs. Take your pick."

"What kind of stock? What kind of drugs?"

"Your choice."

"Polymyxin-phenildorphin Nu. There's a shortage right now."

Cunningham frowns. "If you like. But there'll be a lot of it coming onto the market in another three weeks or so."

Her eyes challenge him. "Did you bring it down from orbit with you?" she asks.

His face fails so much as to twitch. "No," he says. "But if I were you, I'd try chloramphenildorphin. Pfizer is arranging an artificial scarcity that will last several months. Here are the figures. Pharmacological quality, fresh from orbit."

Sarah looks at the amber numbers and nods. "Satisfactory," she says. "Half in advance."

"Ten percent now," Cunningham says. "Thirty on completion of training. The rest on completion of the contract, whether you succeed or not."

She looks up at one of the bar's moving holograms, the colors clean and bright, as pure as if seen through a vacuum. A vacuum, she thinks. The stock isn't bad, but she can do more with the drugs. Cunningham is offering her the drugs at their orbital value, where they are made and where the cost is almost nothing. The street value is far more, and with it she can buy more stock than the amount they were offering. Ten percent of that figure is more than she'd made last night, when she'd gone after the snagboy.

To get into the Orbitals you have to have skills they need, skills she can never acquire.

There is another way: they can't refuse someone who owns enough shares. They are sucking up all of Earth's remaining wealth, and if you help them and buy up enough stock, they might free you from the mud forever. This is almost enough, she calculates. Almost enough for a pair of tickets to the top of the gravity well.

She brings her drink to her lips. "Let's say a quarter now," she says. "And then I'll let you buy me a drink, and you can tell me just what you want me to do to earn it."

Cunningham turns and signals to one of the smiling corset girls. "It's very simple," he says, and he looks at her with his ice-cold eyes. "We want you to make someone fall in love with you. Just for a night."

IS YOUR LOVER LOOKING FOR SOMEONE YOUNGER? YOU CAN BE THAT SOMEONE!

"The Princess is about eighty years old," Cunningham says. The holo he gives Sarah shows a pale blond girl of about twenty, dressed in a kind of ruffled blouse that exposes her rounded shoulders, the hollows of her clavicles. She has Daud's watery blue eyes and freckles above her breasts. She projects an air of vulnerable innocence.

"We think he was originally from Russia," Cunningham goes on, "but the Korolev Bureau has always been secretive and we don't have a complete list of their senior staff and designers. When he rated the new body, he asked to be a woman. He's important enough so that they gave it to him, but they gave him a demotion–– they rotate out all their old people to make way for the new. She's doing courier duty now. "

Not unusual, Sarah thinks. These days you can get pornography read straight into the brain, plenty of chances to sample whatever pleasures you like and then, if rich enough, get yourself a new body to suit your tastes. But the technology of personality transfer is imperfect--- sometimes bits get left behind: memories, abilities, traits that might be useful. A succession of bodies can mean successive senility. If you get a new body and aren't so powerful you can't be moved, you are often demoted until you can prove yourself.

"What's her new name?" she asks.

"She'll tell you, I'm sure. Let's just call her Princess for now."

Sarah shrugs. There are half a dozen imbecilic security rules in this operation, and she guesses that most of them are simply to test her capacity for obedience.

"Her new body doesn't seem to have altered his sexual orientation, just his manner of expressing it," Cunningham says. "Princess has exhibited some characteristic behaviors since she's started her new job. When she's on the ground, she likes to go slumming. Find herself a working girl--- sometimes a dirtgirl, most often a jock– and take her home for a night or two. She wants a pet, but a dangerous one. Not too clean. A little rough. Not too removed from the street. But civilized enough to know how to please. Not a thatch. "

"That's me?" Sarah asks, with no surprise. "Her new pet?"

"We've researched you. You were a licensed prostitute for five years. And rated highly by your employers. "

"Five and a half," she says. "And not with girls."

"He's a man, really. An old man. Why should it be hard for you?"

Sarah looks at the blond freckled girl in the holo, trying to find the old Russian in those eyes. The look that was always the same, wanting her to be some piece of private fantasy, real but not too real, orgasms genuine but never with genuine passion. The plastic girl, an object for things that grew hidden in their minds, something they could get rid of quickly and never have to take home. They were upset, somehow, if you didn't understand their fantasy right away. After a while she had got so that she could.

No different from all the other old men, she thinks as she looks at the picture. Not really. They want power, over their own flesh and another's. Pay not so much for sex, but for power over sex, over the thing that threatens to control them. And so they take their passion and use it to control others. She understands control all right.

She looks up at Cunningham. "Did they give you a new body as well?" she asks. "Guaranteed inconspicuous? Or did you have Firebud make you over, so that you had no style at all?"

He gazes at her steadily, the same calm gaze. She can't seem to touch it, or him. "I can't say," he says.

"How long have you worked for them?" she asks. "You were a mudboy once– you don't have the look that they do. But you work for them now. Is that what they promised you? A new body when you get old? And if you die on one of these jobs here in the mud, a nice funeral with the corporate anthem sung over your body?"

"Something like that," he agrees.

"Got you heart and soul, have they?" she asks.

"That's how they want it." Dryly, accepting. He knows the price of his ticket.

"Control," she says. "You understand that. You are owned by people who worship control, and so you control yourself well. But you're a pressure cooker, and the steam is just under the surface. Do you go slumming in your off hours, like Princess? To the clubs, to the houses? Are you one of my old customers?" She gazes into his expressionless eyes. "You could be," she says. "I never remembered faces."

"As it happens, I'm not," he says. "I never saw you before I was given this assignment."

He is beginning to look a little out of patience.

Sarah grins. "Don't worry," she says, and throws the holo of Princess on the table. "I'll do your owners proud."

"I'm sure you will," he says. "They won't have it any other way."

IN THE ZONE/YES

Like Times Square neon, the amber LED tracks across the upper limits of Sarah's vision, just where the shadow of her brows would be.

PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING...

The Aujourd'Oui is Princess's favorite spot, but there are others. Sarah should be ready to move at need.

The washroom at the Aujourd'Oui is a conglomeration of mirrors and soft white lights, red flock on the gold wallpaper, bronze waterspouts above the sinks, chromed tissue dispensers. Sarah shoulders through the door, and a pair of dirtgirls standing in front of the mirrors glance at her. There is envy in their glance, and a kind of desperate awe, and then the eyes turn self-consciously back to the mirrors. The satin jacket represents something they want and will most likely never have, the freedom of the white crane to climb into the sky amid the silver glitter of stars. Sarah is suddenly aware of the sound of sobbing, magnified by the low ceiling, the hard edges of the room. The dirtgirl's eyes stay fixed in their own reflections as she passes and steps into a stall.

It is the girl in the next stall who is weeping, pausing only to draw massive shuddering breaths before bringing the air out again through the tortured muscles of the throat. It hurts to cry that hard, Sarah knows. The ribs feel as if they are breaking. The stall shudders to the impact as the girl drives her head against its wall, and Sarah knows that it is pain the girl is seeking, perhaps to drive out pain of another kind.

Sarah makes it a policy not to get between people and what they need.

To the sound of the impacts Sarah takes her inhaler from her belt, puts it to her nose, and triggers it. There is a brief hiss of compressed gas. Sarah throws her head back, feeling the rush of hardfire racing along her nerve paths. The stall quakes. Sarah inhales again, using the other nostril, and she feels her body go warm and then cold, the hair on her forearms prickling. Her lips peel back from her teeth, and she feels at once abnormally sensitive and abnormally hard, as if her skin is made of razor blades that can feel every mote of dust. She needs the bite of the drug, needs it to give herself that extra piece of conviction. She hadn't mentioned it to Cunningham. The hell with him-she'll play it her own way...

PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING...

The other girl's weeping is a whining, grating sound, like a saw on bone, syncopated with the hysterical crashing as she smashes again and again into the divider. Sarah can see flecks of blood daubing the floor of the next stall. She opens her door and sweeps through the room, past the dirtgirls, whose eyes stand out pale amid their rimming of kohl as they gaze at each other and wonder what to do about the sobbing casualty.

PRINCESS AUJOURD'OUI REPEAT AUJOURD'OUI

AM SWITCHING POLICE TRANSMISSIONS

GOOD HUNTING CUNNINGHAM.

Sarah blinks as she steps into the darkness of the club, feeling the hardfire impelling her limbs to motion, and she rides the drug like a jock on the flaming roman candle of a booster, climbing for the edge of the sky and still in control. The corners of the room, the dancers and fixtures, flare like liquid-crystal kaleidoscopes.

And then Princess comes, and Sarah's motion freezes. Princess is surrounded by dirtboy muscle, but she stands out clearly in the dark---there is an aura about her, a glow. She has the Look as none of them have, a soft radiance that speaks of luxury, soft and carefree joys, freedom even from gravity. A life even the jocks can't share. It seems as if there is a pause in the music, as the room inhales in mutual awe. Two hundred eyes can see the glow and a hundred mouths, hungry for it, begin to salivate. Sarah feels her body tingle, flares of nerve warmth at her fingertips. She is ready.

Sarah gives a soft private laugh, as if her triumph were already a fact, and walks long-legged across the darkened bar as Firebud has taught her, swinging her broad shoulders in counterpoint to her hips, insinuant animal style. She gives a grin to the muscle and holds her hands palms out to show them she carries no weapons, and then Princess stands before her. She is a good four inches shorter and Sarah looks down at her, hands cocked on her hips, challenging. Princess's soft blond hair is worn long, ringlets playing with her cheeks, her ears. Her eyes are circled with vast blooms of purple and yellow makeup, to look like bruises, making public the secret wish of a translucent white face that has never known pain. Her mouth is a deep violet, another laceration. Sarah cocks her head back and laughs low, baring her teeth, and thinks of the sounds hyenas make on the hunt.

"Dance with me, Princess," she says to the wide cornflower eyes. "I am your wildest dreams."

PRACTICE CREATES PERFECTION

PERFECTION CREATES POWER

POWER CONQUERS LAW

LAW CREATES HEAVEN

–– A helpful reminder from Toshiba

Nicole has a cigarette in the corner of her mouth and wears a jacket of cracked brown leather. She has dark blond hair that reaches down her back in tawny strands, and long deep gray eyes that look up at Sarah without a flicker.

Cunningham stands behind her with his two assistants. One is huge, a muscleman with no neck. The other is small, blond, and has even less to say than Cunningham. Sarah thinks the smaller is the more dangerous of the two.

"You can't hesitate for a second, Sarah," Cunningham says. "Not even the fragment of a second. Princess will know it and know there's something wrong. Nicole is here for that. You are to practice with her."

Sarah looks at Nicole for a moment of surprise and then barks a laugh. Anger bubbles in her, whitely, coolly, like flares on the night horizon. "I suppose you plan to watch, Cunningham," she says.

He nods. "Yes," he says. "I and Firebud. You seemed uncertain at first about making love to a woman." Nicole draws slowly on her cigarette and says nothing.

"Make a vid record, perhaps?" Sarah asks. "Give me post-game critique?" She curls her lip. "Is that your particular pleasure, Cunningham?" she demands. "Does watching this kind of vid keep your demons away?"

"We'll destroy the vids together, if you like...afterward," Cunningham says. His no-neck assistant grins. The other watches her, expressionless as his chief.

Sarah has been two months in training, has had her body altered and surgical work done, and all along she has been their willing dirtgirl. But however many candidates had been in Cunningham's files, she is sure she's the only hope now, the only charge Cunningham will have shaped by the time Princess next comes down from orbit, and she knows now she has power of her own. They will have to go with her or the project will fail, and it is time they knew it.

She shakes her head slowly. "I don't think so, Cunningham," she says. "I'll be ready on the night, but I'm not now and I'm not going to be. Not for you, not for your cameras."

Cunningham does not reply. He seems to squint a little, as if suddenly the light is stronger. Nicole watches Sarah with smoky eyes, then shakes her long hair and speaks. "Just dance with me, then." Her words come a little too abruptly, as if impelled by some form of desperation, and Sarah wonders what she has been promised, how she has been made vulnerable to them. When she speaks, her voice gives her away; it is so much younger than her pose. "Just dance a little," she says. "It'll be all right."

Sarah turns her gaze from Cunningham to Nicole and back, then nods. "Will a few dances satisfy you, Cunningham?" she asks. "Or do we end the program where we stand?"

His jaw muscles tighten, and for a moment Sarah thinks the business is done, that it's over. Then he nods, still facing her. "Yes," he says. "If it has to be that way."

"That's how it has to be," she says. There is a moment of silence, then Cunningham nods again, as if to himself, and turns away. Nicole gives a nervous smile, wanting to please, not knowing who is her ticket to whatever it is she needs. Cunningham walks to the sound deck and presses a switch. Music buffets the walls. He turns back and folds his arms, waiting.

Nicole closes her eyes and shrugs out of her jacket. Either they have gone out of their way to find a woman of Princess's build or they have been lucky. Sarah watches as Nicole sways her body to the music, the plastic girl, waiting blindly to take an impression.

She steps forward and takes the girl's hands in her own.

DELTA THREE EMERGENCY ATTEMPTED SUICIDE AUJOURD'OUI EMERGENCY

Deep in her zone, Sarah shakes her head to clear the sweat from her eyes and feels the hardfire biting her veins. Princess has been her partner all night. She leaps and spins, and Princess watches with gleaming eyes, admiring. She feels like the crane on her back, arms stretching out to fly on pinions of purest silver. Sarah changes zones and Princess follows, letting her give a name to their motion, their liquid pattern. She is bringing Princess in closer until, like a wave, she can fall upon her from her crest of foaming white.

There is an intrusion into the zone, an attempted alteration in the pattern. Sarah whirls, an elbow digging deep into ribs, the zoneboy doubling with the impact. She slices at his neck with a sword hand and the boy flies from the zone whimpering. Princess is watching, rapt with glowing admiration. Sarah steps to her and catches her about the waist, and they spin like skaters on the edge of sharpened blades.

"Am I the danger that you want?" she asks. The blue eyes give an answer. I know you, old man, Sarah thinks in triumph, and bends her head to devour the violet lips, feasting like a raptor on her prey. The eyes of Princess widen, held in Sarah's gaze.

Her lips taste of salt, and blood.

MODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERN

You Can't Claim You're a CYBORG Till You Have a

MODERNBODY SEXUAL IMPLANT

Undetectable...

Gives You the Power to Last All Night...

Orgasm Chips Optional...

Your Partner Will Thank You for It!

RNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODY

Cunningham's car hisses through the night on speed-blurred wheels. Holograms slide past the windows in neon array. Sarah watches the back of the driver's neck as it swells from its collar. "It'll be best if you go alone to the club," Cunningham says. "Princess may send some of her people ahead, and you don't want to be seen with anyone."

Sarah nods. He's given these instructions before and she can recite them word for word, even do a fair imitation of the whispery monotone. She nods to show she's listening. Earlier this afternoon she'd collected the second payment of chloramphenildorphin, and her mind is occupied chiefly with ways of putting it on the street.

"Sarah," he says, and reaches into a pocket. "I want you to have this. Just in case." His hand comes up with a small aerosol bottle.

"Yes?" she asks. She sprays it on the back of her hand, touches it, sniffs.

"Silicon lubricant," he says. "The scent is right, and should last for hours. Use it in the washroom if you find that you aren't really...attracted to her. "

Sarah caps the bottle and holds it out to him. "I don't plan for it to go that far," she Says.

He shakes his head. "Just in case," he says. "We don't know what happens when you go behind her walls."

She holds it out, expectant, then when he doesn't respond, she shrugs and puts it in her belt pouch. She rests her reshaped jaw on her hand and stares out the window, the hologram adverts reflecting in her dark eyes, until the car slides to a stop at the door of her apartment.

She reaches for the latch and opens it, steps out. The heat of the outside covers her like a smothering blanket, and she can feel the sweat springing up on her forehead. Cunningham sits huddled in his seat, somehow smaller than he had been. Up until now, until the firing of his shaped charge, he'd been in control–– but now he's committed her to action and all he is able to do is watch the result and hope he calculated the ballistics correctly. His jaw muscles twitch in a tight smile and he raises a hand.

"Thanks," she says, knowing he's wished her luck without actually risking a curse by saying it, and she turns away and breathes out and feels a lightness in her body and heart, as if the gravity were somehow lessened. All she has left is the job. No more pleasing Cunningham, no more rules or training, no more listening to Firebud criticizing the very way she walked, the way she held her head. All that is behind.

The apartment is splashed with video color and she knows Daud is home. He's cleared the coffee table from the center of the room and is doing his exercises, the weights in his hands, the burning holograms outlining his naked body, his hairless genitals. She kisses his cheek. "Dinner?" she asks.

"I'm going with Jackstraw. He wants me to meet someone."

"Someone new?"

"Yes. It's a lot of money." He drops the weights and lowers himself to the floor, begins strapping another set of weights to his ankles. She stands over him with a frown.

"How much?" she asks.

He gives her a quick glance, green laserfire winking from his eye whites, then he looks down. His voice is directed to the floor. "Eight thousand," he says.

"That's a lot," she says.

He nods and stretches his back on the ground, raising his legs against the strain of the weights. He points his feet and she can see the muscles taut on the tops of his thighs. She slips out of her shoes and flexes her toes in the carpet.

"What does he want for it?" she asks. Daud shrugs. Sarah crouches and looks down at him. She feels a tightness in her throat.

She repeats her question.

"Jackstraw will be in the next room," he says. "If anything goes wrong, he'll know."

"He's a thatch, isn't he?"

She can see the Adam's apple bob as Daud swallows. He nods silently. She takes a breath and watches him strain against the weights. Then he sits up. His eyes are cold.

"You don't have to do this," she says.

"It's a lot of money," he repeats.

"Tomorrow my job will be over," she says. "It'll pay enough for a long time, almost enough for a pair of tickets out."

He shakes his head, then springs to his feet and turns his back. He walks toward the shower. "I don't want your money," he says. "Your tickets, either."

"Daud," she says. He whirls around and she can see his anger.

"Your job!" he spits. "You think I don't know what it is you do?"

She rises from her crouch, and for a moment she can see fear in his eyes. Fear of her? A wedge of doubt enters her mind.

"You know what I do, yes," she says. "You also know why."

"Because some man went thatch once," he says. "And because when you got loose you killed him and liked it. I know the stories on the street."

She feels a constriction in her chest. She shakes her head slowly. "No," she says. "It's for us, Daud. To get us out, into the Orbitals." She comes up to him to touch him, and he flinches. She drops her hand. "Where it's clean, Daud," she says. "Where we're not in the street, because there isn't a street. "

Daud gives a contemptuous laugh. "There isn't a street there?" he asks. "So what will we do, Sarah? Punch code in some little office?" He shakes his head. "No, Sarah," he says. "We'd do what we've always done. But it will be for them, not for us."

"No," she says. "It'll be different. Something we haven't known. Something finer."

"You should see your eyes when you say that," Daud says. "Like you've just put a needle in your veins. Like that hope is your drug, and you're hooked on it." He looks at her soberly, all his anger gone. "No, Sarah," he says. "I know what I am, and what you are. I don't want your hope, or your tickets. Especially tickets with blood on them." He turns away again, and her answer comes quick and angry, striking for his weakness, for the heart. Like a weasel.

"You don't mind stealing my bloody endorphins, I've noticed," she says. His back stiffens for a moment, then he walks on. Heat stings Sarah's eyes. She blinks back tears. "Daud," she says."Don't go with a thatch. Please."

He pauses at the door, hand on the jamb. "What's the difference?" he asks. "Going with a thatch, or living with you?"

The door closes and Sarah can only stand and fight a helpless war with anger and tears. She spins and stalks into her bedroom. Her hardwired nerves are crackling, the adrenaline triggering her reflexes, and she only stops herself from trying to drive a fist through the wall.

She can taste death on her tongue, and wants to run the Weasel as fast as she can.

The holograph of Princess sits on her chest of drawers. She takes it and stares at it; seeing the creamy shoulders, the blue innocence in the eyes, an innocence as false as Daud's.

TOMORROW/NO

Sarah and Princess follow the ambulance men out of the Aujourd'Oui. They are carrying the girl from the washroom stall. She has clawed her cheeks and breasts with her fingernails. Her face is a swollen cloud of bruises, her nose blue pulp; her lips are split and bloody. She is still trying to weep, but lacks the strength.

Sarah can see Princess's excitement glittering in her eyes. This is the touch of the world she craves, warm and sweaty and real, flavored with the very soil of old Earth. Princess stands on the hot sidewalk, while her dirtboys circle and call for the cars. Sarah puts her arm around her and whispers in her ear, telling her what Sarah knows she wants. "I am your dream. "

"My name is Danica," Princess says.

In the back of the car there is a smell of sweat and expensive scent. Sarah begins to devour Danica, licking and biting and breathing her in. She left the silicon spray at home but won't be needing it: Danica has Daud's eyes and hair and smooth flesh, and Sarah finds herself wanting to touch her, to make a feast of her.

The car passes smoothly through gates of hardened alloy, and then they are in the nest. None of Cunningham's people ever got this far. Danica takes Sarah's hand and leads her in. A security man insists on a check: Sarah looks down at him with a contemptuous stare and spreads the wings of her jacket, letting his electronic marvel scout her body: She knows Weasel is undetectable by these means. The boy confiscates her hardfire inhaler. Fine: it is made so as not to acquire fingerprints. "What are these?" he asks, holding up the hard black cubes of liquid crystal, ready for insertion into a comp deck.

"Music," she says. He shrugs and gives them back. Princess takes her hand again and leads her up a long stair.

Her room is soft azure. She laughs and lies back on sheets that match her eyes, arms outstretched. Sarah bends over and laps at her. Danica moans softly, approving. She is an old man and a powerful one, and Sarah knows this game. His job is to rape Earth, to be as strong as spaceborn alloy, and it is weakness that is his forbidden thing, his pornography. To put his bright new body into the hands of a slave is a weakness he wants more than life itself.

"My dream," Danica whispers. Her fingers trace the scars on Sarah's cheek, her chin. Sarah takes a deep breath. Her tongue retracts into Weasel's implastic housing, and the cybersnake's head closes over it. She rolls Danica entirely under her, holding her wrists, molding herself to the old man's new girl body. She presses her mouth to Danica's, feeling the flutter of the girl's tongue, and then Weasel strikes, telescoping from its hiding place in Sarah's throat and chest. Sarah holds her breath as her elastic artificial trachea constricts. Danica's eyes open wide as she feels the touch of Weasel in her mouth, the temperature of Sarah's body but somehow cold and brittle. Sarah's fingers clamp on her wrists, and Princess gives a birth-strangled cry as Weasel's head forces its way down her throat. Her body bucks once, again, her breath warm in Sarah's face. Weasel keeps uncoiling, following its program, sliding down into the stomach, its sensors questing for life. Daud's eyes make desperate promises. Princess moans in fear, using his strength against Sarah's weight, trying to throw her off. Sarah holds him crucified. Weasel, turning back on itself as it enters Danica's stomach, tears its way out, seeks the cava inferior and shreds it. Danica makes bubbling sounds, and though Sarah knows it is impossible, although she knows her tongue is still retracted deep into Weasel's base, Sarah thinks she can taste blood.

Weasel follows the vein to Danica's heart. Sarah holds her down, her own chest near bursting with lack of air, until the struggling stops and Daud's blue eyes grow cloudy and die.

Purple and black rim Sarah's vision. She heaves herself off the bed, partly retracting Weasel as she gasps for air through the constricted passage in her throat. She stumbles for the washroom, falls and crashes into the sink. The impact drives the air from her. Her hands turn the spigots. Her hands put Weasel in the sink and feel the water running chill. Her breath comes in rasps. Weasel is coated with a gel that supposedly prevents blood and matter from adhering, but she doesn't want even a chance of Danica's flesh in her mouth. The cybersnake is tearing at her breast. The water thunders until she can feel nothing but the speed with which she is falling into blackness, and then she falls back and sucks Weasel into her and can breathe again and taste the cool and healing air.

Her chest heaves up and down, and her eyes are still full of darkness. She knows Daud is dead and that she has a task. She whips her head back and forth and tries to clear it, tries to scrabble upward from the brink, but Weasel is eating her heart and she can scarcely think from the pain. Sarah can hear herself whimper. She can feel the prickle of the carpet against the back of her neck as she raises her arms above her head and tries to drag herself along, crawling away, crawling, while Weasel throbs like thunder in her chest and she thinks she can hear her heart Crack.

Sarah comes to herself slowly, and the black circle fades from her sight. She is lying on her back and the water is still roaring in the sink. She sits up and clutches at her throat. Weasel, having fed, is at rest. She crawls back to the sink and turns the spigots off. Grasping them, she hauls herself to her feet. She still has work to do.

In her room, Princess is spread-eagled on the bed. Dead, it is easier to see the old man in her. Sarah's stomach turns over. She should drag Princess across the bed and tuck her under the covers, delaying the moment when they find her, but she can't bring herself to touch the cooling flesh; and instead she turns her eyes away and steps into the next room.

She pauses as her eyes adjust to the dim light, and listens to the house. Silence. She reads the amber lights above her vision, and can find only routine broadcasts. Sarah takes a pair of gloves from her belt pouch and walks to the room's comp deck. She flicks it on, then opens the trapdoor and takes from her pouch one of the liquid-crystal music cubes Cunningham has given her. She puts it in the trapdoor and waits for the deck to signal her.

The cube would, in fact, have played music had anyone else used it. Sarah has the code to convert it to something else. The READY signal appears.

She taps the keys in near-silence as she enters the codes. A pale light flashes in the corner of the screen: RUNNING. She leans back in her chair and sighs.

Princess was a courier, bringing from orbit a liquid-crystal cube filled with complex instructions, instructions her company dared not trust even to coded radio transmissions. Princess would not have known what she carried, though presumably it contained inventory data, strategies for manipulating the market, instructions to subordinates, buying and selling strategies. Information worth millions to any competitor. The crystal cube would have been altered to a new configuration once the information was removed to the company computer–– a computer sealed against any outside tampering, but which could presumably be accessed through the terminals in the corporate suites.

Sarah also has no clear idea what is on the cube she is carrying. Some kind of powerful theft program, she presumes, to break its way through the barriers surrounding the information so that it can be copied. She does not know how good her program is, whether it's setting off every alarm in Florida or whether it's accomplishing its business stealthily. If it's very good, it will not only copy the information, but alter it as well, planting a flow of disinformation at the heart of the enemy code, perhaps even altering the instructions as well, sabotaging the enemy's marketing patterns.

While the RUNNING light blinks, Sarah stands and goes over every part of the suite she might have touched, stroking anything that could retain a print with her gloved fingertips. The house, and Princess, are silent.

It is eleven minutes before the computer signals READY. Sarah extracts the cube and returns it to her belt. She has been told to wait a few hours, but there is someone dead in the next room and every nerve screams at her to run. She sits before the comp deck and puts her head between her legs, gulping air. For some reason she finds herself trembling. She battles the adrenaline and her own nerves, and thinks of the tickets, the cool dark of space with the blue limb of Earth far below, forever out of reach.

In two hours she calls a cab and walks down the cold, echoing stair. The security man nods at her as she walks out: his job is to keep people from coming in, not to hinder their leaving. He even gives her the inhaler back.

She takes a dozen cabs to a dozen different places, leaving the satin jacket in one, cinching her waist in tighter and removing the suspenders in another, in a third reversing her T-shirt and her belt pouch, both now glowing yellow like a warning light. The jockey persona is gone, and she is dirt again. She finishes her journey at the Plastic Girl, the place still running flat-out at four in the morning. As she enters, the sounds of dirt life assault her, and she takes comfort. This is her world, and she knows all the warm places where she can hide. She takes a room in the back and calls Cunningham. "Come and get your cube," she says, and then orders rum and lime.

By the time he arrives, she's rented an analyzer and some muscle. He comes in alone, a package in his hand. He closes the door behind him.

"Princess?" he asks.

"Dead."

Cunningham nods. The cube is on the table before her. She holds out a hand. "Let's see what you've got," she says.

She checks three vials at random and the analyzer tells her it's chloramphenildorphin, purity 99.8 percent or better. She smiles. "Take your cube," she says, but he plugs it into the room's deck first, making sure it has what he wants. Then he puts it in his pocket and heads for the door.

"If you have another job," she says, "you know where to find me."

He pauses, a hand on the knob. His eyes, flicker. She receives an impression of sadness from him, as if he were mourning something newly dead.

He is an earthly extension, Sarah knows, of an Orbital bloc. She doesn't even know which one. He is a willing tool and an obedient one, and she has fed him her scorn on that account, but that doesn't disguise what they both know–– that she would give all the contents of the packet, and everything else besides, if she could have his ticket, and on the same terms.

"I'll be on the ramp in an hour," he says. "Going back to orbit. "

She gives him a grin. "Maybe I'll be seeing you there," she says.

He nods, his eyes on hers. He starts to say something, then turns himself off again, as if he realizes it's pointless. "Be careful," he says, and leaves without another glance. One of her hired muscle looks in at her.

"It's clear," she says. The muscle nods.

She looks at the fortune in her hand and feels suddenly hollow. There is a vacuum in her chest where the joy should be. The drink she has ordered tastes as flat as barley water, and a headache throbs in time to the LED light burning in her forehead. She pays off her hired muscle and takes a cab to an all-night bank, where she deposits the endorphin in a rented box. Then she takes the cab home. The apartment hums softly, emptily. She finds the control to her LED and turns it off, then throws her clothing in the trash. Naked, she steps into her room and sees the holo of Princess on her night table. Hesitantly, she reaches out to it, then turns it face down and falls into the welcoming blackness.

LOVELY AND WAITING FOR YOU

TERRY'S TOUGH 'N' TENDER

NOW

SIt is still night when she awakens to the sound of the door. "Daud?" she asks, and is answered by a groan.

He is wrapped in a sheet and covered with blood. Jackstraw holds him up, panting, his neck muscles straining. "Bastard," he says.

She picks Daud up like a child and carries him to her bed. His blood smears her arms, her breasts. "Bastard went thatch," Jackstraw says. "I was only gone a minute."

Sarah arranges Daud on the bed and unwraps the sheet. A whimpering sound forces its way up her throat. She puts her hand to her mouth. Daud is striped in blood–– the thatch must have used some kind of weighted whip. Weakly, he tries to move, raises a hand as if to ward off a blow.

"Lie back," Sarah says. "You're at home."

Daud's face crinkles in pain. "Sarah," he says, and begins to cry.

Sarah feels tears stinging her own eyes and blinks them away. She looks up at Jackstraw.

"Did you give him anything?" she asks.

"Yeah. Endorphin. First thing."

"How much?"

He looks at her blankly. "Lots. I don't know."

"You weren't supposed to leave the next room," she says.

His eyes slide away. "It was a busy night," he says. "I was only gone a minute."

She turns her eyes back to Daud. "It took more than a minute for this," she says. "Get the fuck out."

"It's not–"

There is a savage light in her eyes. She wants to tear him but she has other things to do.

"Get the fuck out," she repeats. He hesitates for another instant, then turns away.

She cleans the cuts and disinfects them. Daud cries silently, his throat working. Sarah looks for his injector and finds it, loads it with endorphins from his cache, and guesses at a dosage. She puts it in his arm, and he says her name and goes to sleep. She watches for a while, making sure he hasn't taken too much, and then puts the covers over him and turns down the light.

"Just lie back," she says. "I've got the price of your ticket." She leans down to kiss his beardless cheek. The bloody sheet goes in the trash.

Daud normally sleeps on the convertible sofa in the front room, and after making sure he is asleep, she moves to the other room and, without bothering to open the sofa, lies down on it. The room hums, and for a long while she listens.

TAMPA'S TOTALS OVERNITE, AS OF 8 THIS MORNING–

TWELVE FOUND DEAD IN CITY LIMITS...

LUCKY WINNERS COLLECT AT ODDS OF 5 TO 3

The explosion has enough force to throw the sofa against the far wall. Sarah feels a hot rush of wind that tears the breath from her throat, the elevator sensation of the world falling away, and then a final impact as the wall comes up. Screams are ricocheting from every corner, all the screams that Princess never uttered. There are fires licking like red laserlight.

She heaves herself to her feet and runs for the other room. She can see by the light of the burning bed. Daud is sprawled in a corner of the room, and parts of his body are open and other parts are on the walls. She is screaming for help, but alone she manages to get the burning bedding through the hole in the wall.

Outside, the hot tongues of morning are rising in the east. She thinks she can hear Daud call her name.

BODY NEEDING WORK?

WE DELIVER

The ambulance driver wants payment in advance, and she opens her portfolio by comp and transfers the stock without questioning the prices he gives her. Daud dies three times before the driver's two assistants can get him out of the apartment, and each time they bring him back the prices go up. "You got the money, lady, and he'll be fine," the driver tells her. He looks at her nakedness with appreciative eyes. "All kinds of arrangements can be made," he says.

Later, Sarah sits in the hospital room and watches the doctors work and is told their rates of payment. She will have to make plans to convert the endorphin quickly, within a few days. Machines attached to Daud hiss and thump. The police surround her and want to know why someone would fire a shaped charge at her apartment wall from the building across the street. She tells them she has no idea. They have a lot of questions, but that seems to be the most frequent. Eventually she puts her head in her hands and shakes her head; and they shuffle for a while and then leave.

She wishes she had the inhaler: she needs the bite of hardfire to keep herself alert, to keep her mind functioning. Thoughts hammer at her. If Cunningham's people had been in her apartment, they would have known that she had slept in the back room, Daud in the front. They waited till the lights went down and she had the time to get to sleep, then fired with a weapon that would smash through the wall and scatter burning steel through the inside. They hadn't trusted that she wouldn't tell someone or that she wouldn't try to use the pieces of knowledge she had gained as leverage for some shifty little dirtscheme of her own.

Who would I tell? she wonders.

She remembers Cunningham at that last moment in the Plastic Girl, the sadness in him. He had known. Tried, in his way, to warn her. Perhaps the decision had not been his; perhaps it had been made over his objection. What did the Orbitals care for one more dirtgirl when they had already killed millions, and kept the rest alive only so long as they were useful currency?

The Hetman glides into the room on catlike feet. He wears a gold earring, and his wise, liquid eyes are surrounded by the spiderwebs of the old hustler's dirtbound life. "I am sorry, mi hermana," he says. "I had no indication it would come to this. I want you to understand."

Sarah nods numbly. "I know, Michael."

"I know people on the West Coast," the Hetman says. "They will give you work there, until Cunningham and his people forget you exist."

Sarah looks up at him for a moment, then looks at the bed and the humming, hissing machines. She shakes her head. "I can't go, Michael," she says.

"A bad mistake, Sarah." Gently. "They will try again."

Sarah makes no reply, feeling only the emptiness inside her, knowing the emptiness would never leave if she deserted Daud again. The Hetman stands for an uncomfortable moment, then is gone.

"I had the ticket," Sarah whispers.

Outside she can see the mud boiling under the lunatic sun. All Earth's soil, looking for their tickets, plugging into whatever can give them a fragment of their dream. All playing by someone else's rules. Sarah has her ticket, but the rules have turned on her like a weasel, and she must shred the ticket and spread it on the street, spread it so she can watch the machines hum and hiss and keep what she loves alive. Because there is no choice, and the girls have no option but to follow the instructions and play as best they can.

AS HE STANDS in the hot summer of eastern Colorado, a steel guitar is playing a lonesome song somewhere in the back of Cowboy's mind.

"For the laws I have a certain respect," he says. "For mercenaries I have none."

Arkady Mikhailovich Dragunov stares at him for a half second. His eyes are slitted against the brightness of the sun. The whites seem yellowed Faberge ivory, and the irises, old steel darkened like a sword. Then he nods. It's the answer he wants.

Discontent rises in Cowboy like a drifting wave of red sand. He doesn't like this man or share his strange, suspicious, involuted hatreds. Excitement is tingling in his arms, his mind, the crystal inside his skull. Missouri. At last. But Arkady is oblivious to the grandeur of what is going to take place, wants only to fit Cowboy into place with his own self-image, to remind Cowboy again that Arkady is not just a boss but the big boss, that Cowboy owes him not simply loyalty but servitude. A game that Cowboy will not play.

"Goddamn right," Arkady says. "We know they're offering their services to Iowa and Arkansas. We don't want that."

"If they find me, I'll do what I can," Cowboy says, knowing that in this business, talk is necessarily elliptical. "But first they've got to find me. And my op plan should give me a good chance of staying in the clear."

Arkady wears an open-necked silk shirt of pale violet, with leg-of-mutton sleeves so wide they seem to drag in the dust; an embroidered Georgian sash wound twice around his waist; and tight, polished cossack boots over tighter black trousers that have embroidery on the outer seams. His hair, at intervals, stands abruptly on end and flares with static discharges, a different color each time. The latest thing from the Havana boutiques of the Florida Free Zone. Cryo max, he says proudly. Cowboy knows Arkady couldn't be cryo max if he spent his life trying; it isn't in him. In fashion he is a follower, not a leader. Here he's just impressing the hicks and his toadies.

Arkady is a big, brusque man, fond of hugging and touching the people he's talking to; but he's got a heart like superconducting hardware and eyes to match, and it would be foolish to consider him a friend. Thirdmen do not have cargo space for friends.

Arkady crimps the cardboard tube of a Russian cigarette and strikes a match. His hair stands on end, suddenly bright orange. Imitating the match, Cowboy thinks, as the steel guitar bends notes in his mind...

The Dodger, Cowboy's manager, strolls from where the panzer is being loaded for the run. "Best make sure your craft is trimmed," the Dodger says.

Cowboy nods. "See you later, Arkady." Arkady's hair turns green.

"I could see you were getting impatient," the Dodger says as soon as they're out of earshot. "Try not to be so fucking superior, will you?"

"It's hard not to be when Arkady's around."

The Dodger flashes him a disapproving look.

"He must have to butter his ass," Cowboy says, "to get into those pants." He can see the lines around the Dodger's eyes grow crinkly as he tries to suppress his laughter.

The Dodger is an older man, rail-lean, with a tall forehead and straight black hair going gray. He's got a poetic way of speaking when the mood is on him. Cowboy likes him–– and trusts him, too, at least to a point, the point being giving the Dodger the codes to his portfolio. He might be naive, but he is not stupid.

Cowboy watches as the last pieces of cargo are stowed, making sure the panzer is trimmed, that all's ready for the run across what the Dodger, in an evocative mood, had once christened Damnation Alley.

"What's my cargo?" Cowboy asks. He smiles diffidently, wondering if the Dodger can see the thoughts behind his artificial eyes. The suspicions, the discontents. "Just for the record."

The Dodger is busy cutting a plug of tobacco. "Chloramphenildorphin," he says. "There's going to be a shortage on the East Coast. The hospitals will pay a lot. Or so the rumors say." He grins. "So be of good cheer. You're going to make sure a lot of sick people stay alive."

"Nice to be sort of legal," Cowboy says. "For a change."

He looks at the panzer, all angular armor and intakes, ugly and graceless compared to a delta. He owns this one but he hasn't given it a name, doesn't think of it in the same way. A panzer is just a machine, not a way of life. Not like flying.

Cowboy calls himself Pony Express now. It's his radio handle, another nickname. He wants to keep the idea alive, even if it can't take wing.

Cowboy climbs on top of the panzer, worms through the dorsal hatch, and sits down in the forward compartment. He studs a jack in his right temple and suddenly his vision is expanded, as if his two eyes were stretched around his head and a third eye surfaced on top. He calls up the maps he has stored on comp, and displays begin pulsing like strobes on the inside of his skull. His head has become a ROM cube. Inside it he sees fuel trucks spotted down the Alley, ready to move when he needs to be topped up; there is his planned route, with deviations and emergency routes marked, drawn in wide bands of color; there are old barns and deep coulees and other hiding places spotted like acne on the displays, all marked down by Arkady's scouts.

Cowboy fishes a datacube out of his jacket pocket and drops it into the trapdoor. The display flares with another series of pinpricks. His own secret hiding places, the ones he prefers to use, that he keeps up to date with scouting forays of his own. Arkady, he knows, wants this trip to succeed; but Cowboy doesn't know everyone in the thirdman's organization, and some of them might have been bought by the privateers. Best to stick with the places he knows are safe. The panzer rocks slightly and Cowboy can hear the sound of footsteps on the Chobham Seven armor. He looks up and sees the Dodger's silhouette through the dorsal hatch. "Time to move, Cowboy," the Dodger says, and then spits his chaw over the side.

"Yo," says Cowboy. He unplugs himself and stands up in the cramped compartment. His Kikuyu pupils contract to pinpricks as he puts his head out the hatch and looks west, in the direction of the wine-dark Rockies he knows are somewhere over the horizon. He feels, again, the strange lassitude infecting his heart, a discontent with things as they are.

"Damn," he says. There is longing in the word.

"Yeah," says the Dodger.

"I wish I was flying."

"Yeah." The Dodger looks pensive. "Someday, Cowboy," he says. "We're just waiting for the technology to roll around the other way again. "

Cowboy can see Arkady standing by his armored Packard, sweating in the shade of a cottonwood, and suddenly the discontent has a name. "Chloramphenildorphin," he says. "Where's Arkady get it?"

"We're not paid to know those kind of things," the Dodger says.

"In quantities like this?" Cowboy's voice turns thoughtful as he gazes across the gap of bright sky between himself and the thirdman. "Do you think it's true," he asks, "that the Orbitals are running the thirdmen, just like everything else?"

The Dodger glances nervously at Arkady and shrugs. "It don't pay to make those kind of speculations out loud."

"I just want to know who I'm working for," Cowboy says. "if the underground is run by the overground, then we're working for the people we're fighting, qué no?"

The Dodger looks at him crookedly. "I wasn't aware that we were fighting anybody a-tall, Cowboy," he says.

"You know what I mean." That if the thirdmen and panzerboys are just participating in a reshuffling of finances on behalf of the Orbital blocs, then the dream of being the last free Americans on the last free road is a foolish, romantic delusion. And what is Cowboy, then? A dupe, a hovercraft clown. Or worse than that, a tool.

The Dodger gives him a weary smile. "Concentrate on the privateers, Cowboy, that's my advice," he says. "You're the best panzerboy on the planet. Stick to what you're good at."

Cowboy forces a grin and gives him the finger, and then closes the dorsal hatch. He strips naked and sticks electrodes to his arms and legs, then runs the wires from the electrodes to collars on his wrists and ankles. He attaches a catheter, then dons his g-suit and boots, sits on his acceleration couch and attaches cables to the collars, straps himself onto the couch. While his body remains immobile, his muscles will be exercised by electrode to keep the blood flowing. In the old days, before this technique had been developed and the jocks were riding their headsets out of Earth's well and into the long diamond night, sometimes their legs and arms got gangrene.

Next he plugs jacks into the sockets in his temples, the silver-chased sockets over each ear, the fifth socket at the base of his skull. He pulls his helmet on over them, careful not to stress the laser-optic wires coming out of his head. He closes the mask across his face. He tastes rubber and hears the hiss of anesthetic, loud here in the closed space of the helmet.

His body will be put to sleep while he makes his run through the Alley. He is going to have more important things to do than look after it.

Cowboy does the chore swiftly, automatically. All along, there is a feeling: I have done this too often not to know what it's about.

Neurotransmitters awaken the five studs in his head and Cowboy watches the insides of his skull blaze with incandescent light, the liquid-crystal data matrices of the panzer molding themselves to the configuration of his mind. His heart beats faster; he's living in the interface again, the eye-face, his expanded mind racing like electrons through the circuits, into the metal and crystal heart of the machine. He can see around the panzer a full 360 degrees, and there are other boards in his strange mental space for engine displays and the panzer systems. He does a system check and a comp check and a weapons check, watching the long rows of green as they light up. His physical perceptions are no longer in three dimensions: the boards overlap and intertwine as they weave in and out of the face, as they mirror the subatomic reality of the electronics and the data that are the dying day outside.

Neurotransmitters lick with their chemical tongues the metal and crystal in his head, and electrons spit from the chips, racing along the cables to the engine starters, and through a dozen sensors Cowboy feels the bladed turbines reluctantly turn as the starters moan, and then flame torches the walls of the combustion chambers and the blades spin into life with a screaming whine. Cowboy monitors the howling exhaust as it belches fire. On his mental displays Cowboy can see the Dodger and Arkady and the ground crew watching the panzer through the blurred exhaust haze, and he watches fore and aft and checks the engine displays and sees another set of green lights and knows it's time to move.

The howling of the engines beats at his senses. Warren's spent the last week tuning them, running check after check, making certain they will perform beyond expectations. They're military surplus jets, monsters. They aren't built to ride this close to the ground, and without Cowboy's straddling this mutant creature every inch of the way they're going to run away with him.

Inside the rubber-tasting mask his lips draw back from his teeth and he grins: he will ride this beast across the Alley and through the web of traps set up this side of the Mississippi and add another layer of permeable sky to the distance separating him from the lesser icons of glory that are the other panzerboys, more proof that the flaming corn-alcohol throbs through his chest like blood and that the shrieking exhaust flows from his lungs like breath, that his eyes beam radar and his fingers can flick missiles forth like pebbles. Through his sensors he can taste the exhaust and see the sky and the prairie sunset, and part of his mind can feel the throbbing radio energies that are the enemy's search planes, and it seems to him that the watchers and the escort vehicles are suddenly lessened, separated from him by more than a few hundred yards–– he will be taking the panzer over the Line, and they will not, and he looks at them from within his interface, from his immeasurable height of radiant glory and pities them for what they do not know.

At the moment the ultimate beneficiaries of his run–– the hospitals in New England, the thirdmen, his own portfolio, possibly the immeasurably distant, insanely gluttonous creatures who ride their Orbital factories and look down on the Earth as a fast-depleting treasure house to be plundered–– all these fade down long redshifting lines, as if blurred by distance and the flaming jet's exhaust. The reality is here in the panzer. Discontent is banished. Action is the thing, and All.

He diverts a part of the jets exhaust and another set of fans whine into life, lifting the ground-effect panzer with a lurch onto its inflatable self-sealing cushion. The Pony Express will deliver the mail or know the reason why. Microwave chatter spins around his ears like gnats, and he wishes he could brush it away with his hands.

"Arkady wants to say a few words, Cowboy." The voice is the Dodger's, and Cowboy can tell he knows this isn't a good idea.

"I'm sort of getting ready here," Cowboy says.

"I know that." Shortly, sounding as if his mouth is full of tobacco: "Arkady thinks it's important."

Cowboy concedes, watching the green lights, seeing maps flash behind his eyes. "Whatever Arkady wants," he says.

Arkady has the mic too close to his lips. His p's and b's sound like cannon shots. Put the damn headset on your head, Cowboy thinks in irritation. That's what it's for, not to hold it to your fucking mouth.

"I've got a lot at stake here, Cowboy," Arkady says. "I'll be in the plane and with you all the way."

"I am comforted as hell to hear that, Arkady Mikhailovich." Cowboy knows Arkady will have paid off a lot of his costs with the other thirdmen, who wanted the Missouri privateers broken as much as he did.

There is a pause on the other end as Arkady digests this:

"I want you to come back," Arkady says. Cowboy can hear the sounds of temper as if from far away. The thirdman's voice drums on and on, every plosive a barrage. "But I fixed up that machine for a reason, and I don't want you to come back without it. And I don't want you to come back without having used it. Understand? Those fucking privateers are gonna get what's coming to 'em."

"Ten-four," Cowboy says, and before Arkady can ask what the fuck ten-four is supposed to mean, Cowboy opens his throttles and the howl, heard with utter clarity over Arkady's mic, buries Arkady's speech beneath its alcohol shriek. Though he can't hear Arkady anymore, Cowboy is fairly certain that the distant yammering he's hearing through his sockets contains a fair amount of abuse. He smiles.

"Adios, muchachitos." Cowboy laughs, and takes the panzer off the road. The farmer here, a friend of free enterprise and true, is getting paid for his wheat being trampled every so often, and Cowboy is going to have a clear run for the Line. The radar detectors pick up only weak signals from far away and Cowboy knows no one's looking at him.

The beast roars like the last lonely dinosaur and trembles as it gains way. Mental indicators climb their columns from blue to green to orange. Ripe wheat straw flies out behind in a plume. Cowboy has a steel guitar playing a lonesome cadenza somewhere in his mind. He cranks up the flame and is doing over a hundred when he blazes through some poor citizen's bobwire and crosses the Line.

His lidar is forward-looking and strictly limited: it's to keep him out of pits and gullies and let him know when there might be a house or vehicle sitting in his way. It sends out a fairly weak signal and it shouldn't be detected by anything unless the detector is so close the first contact would be visual anyway. Kansas has most of its defenses out this way, and if he trips anything, it should be now.

The horizon is a blur of dark emptiness marked by an occasional silo. Any enemy radars are far away. The moon rises and the engines howl and Cowboy keeps his speed in check so as not to raise a dust signature that might be picked up on radar. He wants to save his systems for the real test. Missouri. Where the privateers crouch in the sky, snarling and ready to spring. Cattle scatter from the panzer's scream. Robot harvesters sweep through the fields, standing like stately alien sentinels in pools of brilliant light, moving alone, unable to detect the panzer as it sweeps across the land. Cowboy gets a stronger radar signal to the north and knows a picket plane is coming his way. The panzer's absorbent camouflage paint sucks up radar signal like a thirsty elephant, but Cowboy slows and turns, lowering his infrared profile and making a wide swing away from any trouble. The picket plane moves on, undisturbed. Mobile towers loom up like Neolithic monuments, awesomely expensive derricks built to inject a special bacteria into the bedrock below the eroded topsoil, bugs that will break down the stone and make new soil. Another eroded farm foreclosed by an Orbital bloc–– no small farmer could afford to replace topsoil this way. Cowboy suppresses a desire to ram the derricks and snarls at them instead.

The panzer crosses the Little Arkansas south of McPherson, and Cowboy knows he'll make it across Kansas without trouble. The defenses are behind him. The only trouble will come if he rides right across the track of a state trooper when crossing a road, and even then the authorities will have to somehow scramble a chopper in time. He doesn't think it will happen.

And it doesn't. In the deep violet shadow of some crumbling grain silos near Gridley the panzer sweeps out of the darkness and scares the bejesus out of the sleeping kid in the cab of the fuel truck. Cowboy cycles his engines down and waits for the sweet cool alcohol to settle into the tanks. Already he can feel the pulsing radars questing out from the Missouri line. Stronger than anything he's seen yet. The privateers are not going to be easy.

"They're undercapitalized, Cowboy," Arkady had told him. "They can't afford to lose any equipment. They've got to score a lot of successes right away and get some cargo. Otherwise they're in trouble."

Since the Rock War, the U.S.A. had been balkanized far beyond the wildest dreams of the old states' rights crowd. The so-called central government no longer had its hands on interstate commerce and the result was a wild rush to impose tariffs all across the Midwest. In the West, close to the spaceports in California and Texas where the finished goods came down from the factories in orbit, the borders were free, but the Midwest saw no reason why it shouldn't profit from anything crossing its territory. A heavy duty was slammed on goods that passed through the states en route to elsewhere.

Which left the Northeast out of luck, as far as the distribution of Orbital-built products was concerned. They got some from the spaceports in the Florida Free Zone, but the Free Zone was under bloc control, and the Orbitals like to keep the market hungry for their product. Artificial scarcity was the name of the game, and the Northeast paid with its dwindling wealth for the scraps the Orbitals doled out. The West had more to offer the Orbitals, and the goods were cheaper and more abundant there–– cheap enough to ship them to the markets in the Northeast at a fat profit, so long as there wasn't much duty to pay along the way.

And so the first atmosphere jocks rode their supersonic deltas across the Alley with their midnight loads of contraband. And the Midwest responded, first by sending up radar planes and armed interceptor aircraft, then, when the action shifted from planes to panzers, by strengthening their ground defenses.

And now, in Missouri, by licensing privateers. The states were unable to keep up with the changes in smuggling technology, and so they decided instead to license a local corporation to chase the contraband for them. The fact that the Constitution authorized only the federal government to grant letters of marque and reprisal had been ignored; the Constitution is a dead letter anyway, in the face of Orbital superiority.

The privateers are authorized to shoot to kill, and in addition to a hefty bounty are rewarded by ownership, free and clear, of whatever contraband they can secure. Reports spoke of impressive arrays of airborne radar, of heat sensors and weird sound detectors and aircraft full of sensing missiles and bristling with guns.

From Gridley Cowboy moves slowly northeast, taking his time, mapping the flying radar arrays. They are drone aircraft, ultralights under robot control, solar-powered to stay aloft forever, rising with the sun and gliding slowly earthward at night, only having to return to base for servicing every couple of months or so. They are in constant microwave communication with computers on the ground, ready to scramble aircraft if anything suspicious pops up. They are so light that radar-homing missiles can't find them to shoot them down, and antiradiation homers would be spotted as they climbed, in plenty of time for the arrays to switch off before the missile arrives.

Cowboy is aiming for the wide area between New Kansas City and the Ozarks. People in the Ozarks are friendly, he knows, with a tradition of resistance to the people they call "the laws" that goes back at least to Cole Younger, but the terrain is too restrictive. Cowboy wants a fast run over the flat. The fact that this part of the state is where the privateers have concentrated their defenses is just a pleasant coincidence.

The sensor drones are turning lazy circles in the air as they glide downward on battery power, and Cowboy thinks he sees a pattern building that will allow him to slide into a blind spot that might last until he's fifty miles the other side of the Missouri border. As his panzer slides down the crumbling banks of the Marais des Cygnes and tears across flat mudbanks and muddy water, it extrudes a directional antenna and spits a coded message to the west, to where Arkady and the Dodger wait in Arkady's aircraft, turning its own circles over the plains of eastern Colorado.

The answering signal comes quickly, a strong broadcast to Arkady's people on the Kansas– Missouri border. There are other panzerboys out there, standing ready by their vehicles, waiting for the word... and when they receive it, their own panzers will hit the plains, moving swiftly and then stopping, tearing through fields in zigzag patterns, sending dust signatures aloft, tracking radar and infrared patterns across the computer displays of the privateers. The laws will have to expend a lot of effort tracking them down and apprehending them. And when found, the decoy panzerboys will surrender meekly enough---since they carry no contraband and will only be fined for the amount of bobwire they flattened during their runs, and maybe do a little time for reckless endangerment. Arkady will cover the fines and legal fees, as well as their generous salaries. If the worst happens, their widows and orphans will have the benefit of insurance. It's well-paid work, and a training ground for ambitious panzerboys who want to run the Line.

But after the signal to the other panzerboys comes the Dodger's voice, dry as the Portales plains. "Arkady Mikhailovich would appreciate a little more information, here, Cowboy," he says. "He wants to know why you didn't report earlier. "

"They can trace a message these days, Dodger."

The Dodger is silent for a while, getting a lecture from Arkady no doubt, and when his voice returns, it is less good-humored. "A squirt transmission via microwave is next to untraceable," he says. "Arkady says you should have reported when you got past the Kansas Defenses."

"Sorry," Cowboy says cheerfully. "But I'm damn close to the Missouri line right now and I would just as soon not have to keep up this conversation while I'm trying to work."

There is another pause. "Arkady reminds you that he has a big investment in your panzer, and he wants to be kept informed of what his investment is doing."

"I aim to give him a nice return on his money," Cowboy says. "I don't plan to waste time with a lot of chatter. I've got a window right now, and I'm taking it. See you." And he switches off, making a note to send Arkady some worry beads from the East when he gets there.

The panzer climbs out of the Marais des Cygnes and increases its speed as it begins its run east. The drumming of corn on the bow increases to a steady hammer. Engine gauges are running orange to red. Green lights everywhere else. Steel guitars sing like angels in the mind and Missouri wails a siren song in accompaniment. Delivering the mail is a splendid thing. The decoy panzerboys are causing a stir, and more radar arrays are being turned on, the ones unused so far in the hope their sudden appearance will catch the smugglers by surprise.

Cowboy's blind spot is still a blank. He throws caution to the wind and decides to red out the engines. A half-heard message from his body signals he is being punched back in his seat, but he's got other things to think about. The panzer is airborne half the time, tearing up the low hills and flying over the crests, throwing corn and scattering wire, its voice a madwoman's wail.

Neurons flicker in Cowboy's mind, pulsing their messages to his crystal, keeping the craft stable as it punches up and down. He's deep into the face as the control surfaces invade his mind, riding the wire edge of stability, skating the brink. Cowboy knows there will be deep bruises under his restraining straps, even through the padding.

He crosses the Missouri line between Louisburg and the rusting monument to the Marais des Cygnes Massacre. Parched Missouri is waiting for rain, and his dusty rooster tail is towering a hundred yards, but there's no one to see it. The control surfaces are getting used to the buffeting they're taking, and the movement is easier.

And then radar pulses from directly above as a new sensor drone is switched into the array. Cowboy's blind spot has become pistol-hot and the dust signature must look like a flaming arrow in the night. Cowboy is shutting systems down from red to orange to amber and trying to make himself smaller, but the radar is right overhead and there's no way to get out of its way. He slows down the lunging panzer and dives over the banks of the South Grand. His water plume is a lot lower than the dust and he wonders if he's made a successful evasion, but then other airborne arrays begin to flick into existence in the nearby sky and he knows what's going to happen. His own radar shows a fishing rowboat frozen in place on the still water, and the panzer lunges for the bank, avoiding it. He cools the engines from amber to green-best to save fuel for later. He decides it's time to listen to what the laws have to say and switches on his police-band antenna. The privateers' transmissions are coded but the state cops' are not, and with a part of his expanded mind he listens to their calls of frustration as they try, with four-wheel vehicles, to follow the panzerboys as they whip their way across country. Occasionally a privateer controller comes on the air to give them advice. Cowboy has the impression that the state laws are somewhat reluctant to cooperate with free-lance mercenary enforcement, something he more or less suspected.

The radars seem to be circling more randomly now, as if they've lost him at least part of the time. The panzer is into Johnson County before Cowboy detects a radar boring toward him from the east, low enough to be attached to an aircraft. He triggers the explosive bolts that release the shrouds covering his weapons pods; the panzer will be less aerodynamic now and will require watching at speed. Cowboy cycles his engine displays from green to blue and makes a wide swing to the south, hoping to avoid the craft, and for a moment it seems to be working; the aircraft continues on to the north, but then suddenly it jinks, swooping directly for the panzer. Cowboy feels a wave of alcohol leaping through his heart as the engine displays rocket up to red, the panzer shuddering as it spits flame. For a moment it tries to climb aloft, the wind humming through the weapons pods like the southeast trades through a windjammer's rigging, but gravity pulls hard on its vector and the panzer crashes down onto its cushion. As the indicators max out, Cowboy looses a radar decoy missile and kicks the panzer into a shuddering left turn, its starboard side scraping soil as the panzer mashes its cushion down. The missile continues on a straight course, its wide wings extended, keeping low to the ground. It has no radarabsorbent paint and so its signature should look about the size of an absorbent panzer; and its exhaust should attract anyone looking at infrared.

Cowboy kicks on the afterburners and makes tracks for the Father of Waters. Behind him he can see flashes in the night sky as the aircraft fires off its weaponry at his decoy. He hopes there are no citizens below: those sheaf rockets look really unpleasant.

There are no explosions he can see; the privateer aircraft continues its course for a while, slowing, and Cowboy slows, too, minimizing his infrared signal. Strong radar pulses are still coming from right overhead. Cowboy hears from the state laws that two of the decoys have been caught, which means more resources available for chasing him. The privateer is beginning to circle back in his direction, and Cowboy sees the strange silhouettes of a metal forest on the horizon; he changes course again and dives into it.

It's a forest of rectennas, miles wide, receiving the low-energy microwave coming down from a solar power satellite high above, a burning fixed star in the heavens that symbolizes the prostrate Earth's dependence on the Orbital power. Cowboy threads his way neatly through the metal web on night vision alone. He's probably confused any signal the enemy radars are getting, but the privateer craft is still getting closer. The panzer emerges into a clearing, where a metal maintenance shack rusts on its slab of concrete, and in that brief moment Cowboy fires a chaff rocket straight up and dives among the alloy trees once more.

The chaff rocket climbs three miles and bursts, and suddenly Cowboy's gear is picking up radar signals and low-energy microwaves bouncing from everywhere. The chaff, wafting gently down from altitude, is composed of aluminum strips, one out of ten of which are implanted with a minichip and a tiny power source that records and then plays back any radio signal it receives. On Cowboy's radar displays it looks as if a vast radio Christmas tree has suddenly bloomed above the prairie. The people controlling the power grid are probably going crazy. Once out of the rectenna forest, Cowboy kicks in the afterburners again. The aircraft's signal is lost in all the chaff and he figures it's time to run. His computer maps show a riverbed ahead. It seems a good time to go fishing.

The riverbed is dry and winding, but it leaves the enemy craft far behind. There's a lot of coded radio traffic flying around, each message echoed by the chaff as it slowly flutters down. There's a frantic quality to it, and there's one message from the privateers that requests assistance from the state cops, broadcast in the clear and repeated with endless, echoing lunatic efficiency by the chaff. Cowboy grins and climbs out of the riverbed, running northeast.

It looks as if the chase craft are all down and fueling because he's well across the Missouri north of Columbia before he runs into any more trouble. He is expecting it, cooling his engines on green and utilizing cover, because the police radios are telling him another two of his decoy panzerboys have been taken and the rest driven to ground. Suddenly there's radar pulsing from directly overhead again and another radar dopplering in from the northwestern horizon, as if it's just hopped up from somebody's airfield. Cowboy slows and turns away: no good. He looks for a piece of extensive woods and can't find one, and suddenly there's another radar signature arcing in fast from the south. He fires another chaff rocket and alters course once again. The two seem confused for a moment by the chaff, but then the southern one corrects its course, followed by the northern craft. The southern craft has probably spotted him on infrared and is vectoring the other one in.

Targeting displays flash like scarlet madness in the interior of Cowboy's mind. A snarl from his throat echoes the amplified roar of the combustion chambers, and the panzer gouges earth as it spins right, toward the oncoming southern radar source. Cowboy turns his own radar off to discourage homing missiles and navigates on his visual sensors alone, his mind making lightning decisions, neurotransmitters clattering against his headswitches like hail, the interface encompassing the whole flashing universe, the panzer and its systems, the corn thundering under the armored skirts, the blithering chaff, the two hostile privateers burning out of the night. His craft threatens to leave the Earth; its bones moan with stresses and the weapons pods shriek in the wind. The air is full of dismembered corn. Two fences are flattened, and the tall silhouette of a silo spears the blackness, the panzer's optics making it seem to curl in toward him, threatening. He can see the enemy now, a conventional helicopter speeding toward him at tree level, its minigun flashing. He fires an antiradiation homer right between the privateer's eyes just as the Chobham over his head begins to ring to the sound of cannonfire. Sparks flood his exterior displays and he flinches as he loses an eye.

Then he is past, and through the armor and the bucking of the vehicle he can hear the roar of the chopper as its blades flog apart the overhead sky. The antiradiation homer missed: too much chaff confusing things, or the copter got its radars off in time. But now there's another sound; the tone of a heat-seeker asking its permission to fly, and Cowboy triggers the bird and hauls the panzer to the left, feeling as from a dim distance the lurch as the craft slaloms over a hillcrest in a spray of corn dust; sliding sideways on its cushion.

The chopper dies in a flame of blazing glory, scoring the field in an eruption of fuel and weaponry. The silo stands in rearview like a tombstone, flickering red. There is mad chatter on the radio, a scrambled microwave screaming, still recognizably human, amplified and echoed to the point of yammering lunacy by the falling chaff. The privateer coming from the northwest has just seen what happened to his comrade. The panzer is trying to turn on a reverse camber, skidding on a bed of corn silk as gravity and momentum try to turn it over. Cowboy can feel the spin of the gyros in his head, trembling as the hovercraft rides the brink.

The privateer craft wails overhead with a banshee shriek and Cowboy can see its underbody reflecting the red flickering of its comrade's pyre. A coleopter, turbines throbbing inside the rotating shrouds that top the stubby wing tips. It's a light jet fighter that can take off vertically and hover, combining the best qualities of a subsonic pursuit craft and helicopter, though at a considerable expense in fuel consumption. Cowboy hopes to find a window to launch another missile, but the blazing fuel just over the rise is confusing his sensors and the coleopter suddenly banks into a swift turn, scattering thermite decoys that burn like miniature parachute suns, and the window that fluttered open for a second is gone. The panzer hurls itself above the rise again and skates along the edge of the red glare cast by the scattered chopper, heading for the spire of a silo in the distance.

Plans flicker through Cowboy's liquid-crystal switches with the fluid electric grace of heat lightning. The smartest thing for the privateer to do is to keep the panzer in sight and guide others in without risking itself. In that case, Cowboy will have to go after the coleopter; but on the other hand, radar is still hopelessly confused and the coleopter can't sort out the infrared signal of the panzer from that of the wreck, and this is Cowboy's chance to fly. He decides to cycle up to red and run for the safety of Egypt on the other side of the Mississippi.

But the privateer pilot must have eyes like singularities, devouring worlds, or there's some remarkably fine equipment on the 'opter–– maybe one of those sound detectors?–– because the coleopter comes out of its bank and heads right for the panzer's exhaust. No error. Cowboy cuts in the afterburners and hopes there's some cover just over the horizon. His antiradiation homers won't work in the chaff, and neither will his radar-directed missiles. He can't get a good infrared signature from the coleopter's bow and so the heat-seekers won't be lucky, either. The terrain is irregular, and suddenly the corn is replaced by hemp, high as an elephant's eye and bursting with resin. That will make the ground less slick than the corn did, maneuver less critical. The enemy pilot is burning right for him in apparent anger over what happened to his friend, and Cowboy knows he can use that anger as an aikido master uses his opponent's kinetic energy against him–– but first the engines have to max red, afterburners bleeding alcohol fire, and the panzer has to take some punishment.

Cowboy is airborne as he floats across the crest of a rise, and a tug on the controls slews the skimming panzer to starboard just as the coleopter triggers a weapons pod and half a dozen shaped-charge rockets set the hemp ablaze. There is pounding on the Chobham, and a blaze of red lights on Cowboy's displays tells him that one of his own weapons pods has been penetrated by a jug-sized minigun round that's wiped out a couple hundred K's worth of advanced electronics. The sensors aiming his own minigun are shot away just as he decides to trigger some rounds. The neurotransmitters clattering against Cowboy's brainchips are smoking with the sour tang of adrenaline, and the coleopter pilot seems to have tempered anger with caution because he's matching speed without overshooting, and so Cowboy has no choice but to rocket on across the good earth of Missouri, building momentum, jinking left and right, clawing against the hemp for the leverage that will send his enemy cartwheeling to the mat. The minigun hammers, hammers. The panzer's sensors flare and die.

And then Cowboy opens new floodgates of alcohol and his engines cry in anguish as in calculating fever he slams in his thrust reversers. Even through its chemical slumber his body wails as the straps dig in. Half the comp displays are frozen in utter shock. The coleopter staggers as it tries to maintain its position, but it's too close to the earth to stall in hope of losing momentum and its flaps are already fully deployed. The pilot knows what's going to happen and is loosing thermite flares even before his half-controlled and thoroughly doomed craft whispers overhead and the tone sounds on Cowboy's aural crystal. Cowboy's missiles leap from his remaining pod, the port turbine explodes with red energy, and the coleopter whimpers in metallic pain and corkscrews in.

The panzer flees across the red-scored night. Egypt is near, but so is the dawn.

Staggering systems reawaken; Cowboy gentles the engines and manages to keep them alive. Time to find a place to hide and wait out the day.

Cowboy gets across another fifty miles of country before being reined in by dawn and the sense of an approaching wave of enemy. There are thousands of abandoned farms and barns here, old privately owned places that couldn't compete with the Orbital-controlled agriplexes and their robot farms. Cowboy knows of quite a few where the old buildings, next to the robot-farmed cornfields, remain empty.

A new taste comes through the face mask as Cowboy's body is reawakened. A barn appears on his sensors, one of the long, narrow type, rectangular in cross section, designed to store baled hay in the days before the Orbitals built their big warehouses, one for every hundred farms. Carefully, with gentle precision, he shoulders aside the heavy double doors and guides the panzer into the concrete-walled barn. He remembers, just before he shuts off the engines, that he forgot to send Arkady a message.

Well, let him watch the news and find out that way. Cowboy will just tell him he couldn't get a signal through all the chaff.

With a touch of regret, Cowboy unfaces. Waves of delayed pain flame into his mind as the displays slip into night. His body is bruised and aching and slick with sweat. He takes the carbine from its scabbard and pops the hatch.

The barn smells like must and unburnt hydrocarbons. Cowboy turns the Kikuyu eyes to infrared and scans the barn. He can hear the scuttle of rats. With his hardwired nerves he can fire the carbine with perfect accuracy at anything the eyes can see.

And the eyes can see two people, huddled under some ancient straw in a concrete corner.

Cowboy pauses for a moment, straining to find the signature of weapons, and then, keeping the carbine in his hand, he reaches below for a trade pack.

The cooling engines give out metallic crackles, and the doorframe, behind, is silvered with approaching dawn. Cowboy drags himself out of the hatch and climbs down the long frontal slope of armor, his boots sliding in the sticky hemp resin.

"Where you folks from?" he asks.

"New York. Buffalo." The voice is young and scared. Cowboy nears them and sees a pair of ragged kids of sixteen or so, a boy and a girl, the both of them huddled in a single sleeping bag atop a small pile of old straw. A pair of threadbare rucksacks sits in a forlorn heap near them.

"Heading west?" Cowboy asks.

"Yes, sir."

"I'm going east. Bet you're tired of living on a diet of roasting ears," Cowboy says. He lofts the trade pack and it thumps on concrete next to the pair. They flinch at the sound. "There's some real food in there, freeze-dried and canned. Some good whiskey and cigarettes. And a check postdated to next Monday, for five thousand dollars."

There is silence, broken only by the sound of breathing and the scuttle of rats.

"In case you don't get the picture," Cowboy says, "the check will only be good if I finish my run."

The two look at each other for a moment, then at Cowboy. "You don't have to pay us," the boy says quietly. "We wouldn't–– we're from the East, you know. We know what you're doing. I wouldn't be alive if it weren't for some bootleg antibiotics."

"Yeah. Well. Just consider the money a goodwill gesture," Cowboy says, and turns away to place some remote sensors outside and close the barn doors.

Time for a rest.

Back in the panzer the cabin smells of sweat and adrenaline. Cowboy takes off the g-suit and removes the electrodes, then gives himself a sponge bath from one of his jerricans. He eats some prepared food that's heavy on protein, drinks something orange-flavored and packed with replacement electrolytes. He rolls into the little bunk.

The adrenaline still has him pumped up and all he can see behind his closed lids are the burning afterimages of maps and displays and engine grids climbing toward orange, of exploding fuel and rockets flaming through the night with pyrotechnic abandon. And, somewhere behind the neon throbbing visions, a little claw of resentment.

It has always been enough to run the Alley, to mesh his soul with throbbing turbopumps and wailing afterburners, bringing the mail from one free zone to another. There was an ethic in it, clean and pure. It was enough to be a free jock on a free road, doing battle with those who would restrict him, keep him bound to the Earth as if he were nothing more than a mudboy. It hadn't mattered what he was carrying. It was enough to know that, whatever the state of the rest of the country, the blue sky over his own head was the air of freedom.

But of late there has been a suspicion that adherence to the ethic may not be enough. He knows that while it is one thing to be a warrior noble and true, it is another to be a dupe.

Suppose you are an Orbital manufacturer, interested in keeping control of your markets on the planet. You've won all the political control that is necessary, and you've kept prices high by controlling supply. But still, you're smart enough to know that where there is scarcity, black markets will develop. Most of the stuff–– the drugs and a lot of the hardware, anyway, if not the special alloys–– can still be made Earthside, but more expensively.

If you know that the black market will develop anyway, why not develop it yourself? You can keep the thirdmen supplied with a trickle of product, enough to make themselves rich. You can afford enough muscle to keep the competition down, and in the meantime you are not only dominating the legitimate market, you are controlling supply in the underground as well. You can create and supply a demand in two separate markets, the legitimate and illegitimate.

Where does Arkady get his cargo? The question was beginning to have an important sound to it.

But now the adrenaline has burned out of Cowboy's body and his aches are dragging him down. He won't find any answers in a deserted barn in Missouri and his thoughts have become muddled. It's time to slip under the narrow wool trade blanket, marked with the line that means its value had once been equated with a beaver pelt, and prepare his mind and body for the last lunge across the Alley.

It's late afternoon before he wakes, and finds the kids gone. The postdated check flutters from one of the panzer's aerials. Cowboy plucks it from the spike and looks at it for a while, wonders about ethics and debts, symbols and actions, and the thing that in olden times they called honor. Somewhere near here, he knows, two young people walk beneath another piece of free and lucid sky.

He does his chores, replacing the sensors that were blown away by the privateers, scraping off most of the hemp resin along with the corn and wheat chaff that's adhered to it, spraying antiradiation paint over the dings in the Chobham. The minigun has really given the craft a working over, and it's lucky more systems weren't breached. He doesn't have much in the way of weapons left, but then there's only a few miles to the Big Muddy.

He sits in his padded couch and goes into the eye-face, listening to his sensors for a few minutes. Traffic seems normal. But then, as the day wanes, there's a lot of talk to and from some airport tower in the neighborhood. The place must be only a few miles away because he can hear each syllable clearly. The chatter is uncoded and seems innocuous, but a lot of the aircraft seem to have the same prefixes. Cowboy begins to find this interesting.

Suppose you were a privateer commander angry over a couple of losses the previous night. Suppose you'd worked out that the panzer you were chasing was beaten up, possibly disabled, and in any case couldn't have made it over the Mississippi before dawn. Suppose you wanted to get some revenge for your friends who had been burned beyond recognition in a Missouri cornfield the previous night.

You'd concentrate your forces on the airfield nearest to where the panzer is waiting for nightfall, and you'd have some picket planes move over the area with the best in detection technology, and the rest would be sitting on the runway apron ready to vector in on the panzer once it's spotted, and turn it into a lightly armored grease spot in some scorched little piece of prairie. That's what you'd do.

Cowboy puts a map on the display and finds something called the Philadelphia Community Airport only four miles away. It's far too small to have this kind of traffic coming in and out, and it's just over a ridge and through some woods. Cowboy begins to smile.

_To be continued..._

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Turn the page to read about the origins of Hardwired, a brief essay by Walter Jon Williams

# The Origins of _Hardwired_

My novel _Hardwired_ occurred because I was freeloading with my friends Howard Waldrop and Leigh Kennedy, who were living in Austin. We had attended Aggiecon, a science fiction convention in College Station, and I was staying with Howard and Leigh for a few nights before driving home.

It was a small apartment. Because another writer--- probably Edward Bryant--- was sleeping in the living area, I crashed in a sleeping bag in the dining area. We were on the second floor, and the dining area was directly above the apartments' laundry room, where the dryers ran hot day and night. Vast sweltering clouds of smothering heat rose through the floor, and I spent an uncomfortable night, sweltering in the terrible heat.

At some point I fell asleep, sort of. During this deeply uncomfortable interval I dreamed a horrific scene that was the kernel for _Hardwired_ , the scene in which Sarah employs her Weasel. I woke immediately, and thought about the scene as I lay sweating and unable to sleep. (I can still see the scene in my mind's eye.) I thought about the scene for the rest of the night, and then on the twelve- or fourteen-hour drive home. I kept trying to think of a world in which a scene that horrific could occur. By the end of the journey, I had _Hardwired_ plotted.

I had just signed a contract for another book, unfortunately, and it was the better part of a year before I could seriously set to work on the new novel. But I could not contain _Hardwired_ completely, and I broke off the other novel to write the ghastly scene inspired by my dream, "Sarah Runs the Weasel," which in the latter part of the year I sold to _Omni_ , then SF's top short fiction market, edited by Ellen Datlow. Due to the complex publishing situation at _Omni_ , the story wasn't published for over two years, and even then- because advertising had sold at the last minute- it was serialized in two issues, becoming the world's only serialized novelette.

I was reminded of Bruce Sterling's remark that selling to _Omni_ was like having your story buried in the nicest coffin available at the undertaker.

The better part of a year after I had conceived it, I was finally free and clear to make a run at the novel.

Due to complications at the publisher, the book was delayed by another year or so, but eventually _Hardwired_ was released to the public. Reaction was evenly split between those who loved the book and those who _absolutely loathed_ it.

The former seem to have won out over time. _Hardwired_ was my best-selling novel then, and it's still my best-selling novel decades later. It's the novel with which I'm most identified, and the title will probably be carved on my tombstone.

Not that I'd mind, particularly.

Walter Jon Williams

July, 2014
Hardwired

Copyright © 1986, 2011 by Walter Jon Williams

Smashwords Edition published by Walter Jon Williams

All Rights Reserved

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Other Books by Walter Jon Williams

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

The Origins of Hardwired

Copyright
