The Long Run Read online

  * * *

  THE LONG RUN

  A Tale of the Continuing Time

  DANIEL KEYS MORAN

  This is a work of fiction. None of the characters in it are real people and any resemblance to anybody, living or dead, is a coincidence.

  It is the author's intention that this work should be freely downloadable, copyable, and shareable in electronic format. It may not be reproduced, shared, or transmitted for a fee by any party to whom the author has not contractually granted permission. The author retains all other rights.

  Copyright (c) 1989 by Daniel Keys Moran

  * * *

  Dedicated to

  Jodi Jodi, Kathy, Kevin and Richard.

  Yeah, yeah, I know. The dedications change with each passing edition. There's no law I'm aware of on the subject. And Jodi, Kathy, Kevin and Richard? They rock.

  And Richard? He's two years old now. While I was proofing this manuscript I told him there was a scene where someone was Floating In Space While Awaiting Rescue, just like in Winnie the Pooh ... and he said wisely, "Christopher Robin saves him." Not a question; he was telling me how it would go.

  Christopher Robin doesn't appear in this book, actually, but it was awfully cool that Richard thought he should, some twenty years after I first wrote the scene where Pooh was mentioned.

  (Richard's eight now. His baby brother, Connor, is five. Time passes. DKM, 2007.)

  * * *

  THE LONG RUN

  A Tale of the Continuing Time

  The Last Summer of His Youth

  2069 Gregorian

  I killed my love to set him free

  For fear I'd cause him pain

  I killed him--we were very young

  And now I'm old again

  We lived a life together once

  And I was so afraid

  For every life I've lived, I've died

  For every life I've made

  I killed my love to set him free

  He wasn't hard to kill

  He ran into another life

  I guess he's running still

  Mahliya Kutura, Many Lives

  "Street Songs," 2078 Gregorian

  * * *

  1.

  "You're Trent."

  "I am?"

  The young man was conservatively dressed: a gray jacket and black pants, and a white silk shirt that shone brilliantly even in the dim light from L'Express's outdoor glowfloats. He wore immaculately clean white running shoes; a single flat ruby stud shone in the lobe of his left ear. Trent's temples, where an inskin InfoNet link might have been implanted, were merely smooth skin. His hair was sandy blond, cut short, and he either wore no makeup or had turned it off.

  He wore flat black sunglasses though they were hardly necessary.

  It was ten minutes after six o'clock.

  "You're younger than I'd expected," said the middle-aged man who had said his name was Jerry Jackson. On the phone Trent had not noticed it, but in person his voice held the faint but definite traces of a Southern accent.

  "Am I?"

  "And you're late," the man said. Despite the air, heavy with ozone as though a thunderstorm were about to strike, Jackson had taken a table outside beneath the gray-black skies, on the balcony level overlooking the eternally crowded streets.

  "Ten minutes late ..." Trent shrugged. "Ten minutes older."

  He seated himself across the table from Jerry Jackson. To the waitbot that had led him to the table he said, "A pot of coffee. With cream, no sugar."

  The waitbot paused, then said mildly, in the rich baritone characteristic of opera singers, newsdancers and politicians, "Monsieur, that item is not on the menu."

  "Waiter, please," said Trent. They both waited while the waitbot rolled away out of listening range.

  L'Express sat on the western edge of what had once been the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and was now one of the most expensive residential areas in all the Patrol Sectors. From where he sat Trent could see to the northwest, on the other side of the East River, the scarlet sparks of spacecraft rising and descending at Unification Spaceport in lower Manhattan. The dull, distant boom of craft breaking through the sound barrier touched him every twenty seconds or so.

  Eight spacescrapers reared high above the skyline, eight three- to five-kilometer tall buildings; two of them did nothing but house Peaceforcers and the babychasers from the Ministry of Population Control; the Left and Right Hands of the Devil Himself, Secretary General Charles Eddore.

  Trent said, "How did you get referred to me?"

  "You're in the Directory."

  "That wasn't the question."

  Jerry Jackson was drinking something cold and green with crushed ice. He wore an exquisitely tailored blue pinstripe suit. A brushed aluminum attaché case stood upright beside his chair. The cuffs of his sleeves were fastened European style, folded back upon themselves. "Actually, Booker Jamethon gave me your name."

  "Booker's a great guy," said Trent.

  "He said I shouldn't hire you, that you're not dependable."

  "Of course, all those years on the juice, they weren't good for him."

  Jerry Jackson smiled for the first time. "'Sieur Jamethon wanted the job himself. He only gave me your name--for a fee--after I turned him down."

  "Tell me about the job."

  "You know CalleyTronics?"

  Trent paused. "It's located on the eighth floor of the Down Plaza. They sell inskins and image co-processors, MPUs, like that. Half the webdancers I know buy from them."

  "Frank Calley," said Jerry Jackson with a convincing enough display of anger, "is a thief. He lifted fifteen terabytes of hot RAM, a hundred and five thousand Credit Units worth of room-temperature superconductor memory, from mah warehouse in Georgia." Under the stress of anger, the accent became more audible.

  A single drop of rain touched down on the transparent tabletop in front of Trent.

  "Let me guess," Trent said.

  "Guess?"

  "You want me to get your RTS back."

  "Yes."

  "What do you think you know about me?"

  A touch of the anger was back in his voice. "You're supposed to be a thief yourself." The word 'thief' was laced with astonishing disdain. "You hire out to steal things for people. You--"

  A second drop of rain joined the first. Jerry Jackson cut himself off as a waiter, after an anxious glance at the sky, hurried out to where they were seated.

  "Monsieur," said the waiter hurriedly, with a French accent that might have been real, "you wished to order a cup of coffee?"

  "A pot," Trent corrected him. "A whole big pot of coffee."

  "Monsieur, we do not sell coffee by the pot, only by the cup."

  "May I speak to your manager?"

  The waiter's features stiffened visibly. "Oui. One moment, monsieur."

  Trent waited until the waiter had gone back inside. "So you want me to boost fifteen terabytes of RTS from CalleyTronics?"

  "Yes."

  Trent counted five drops of rain on the cut crystal surface of the table. Six. "It probably can't be done--straight boost, I mean. Calley's real tight with the power structure in the Patrol Sectors, and his security's pretty good. You'd be better off with a con, something that would leave him wondering if he'd been hit--not sure--and feeling so stupid he wouldn't go to the Peaceforcers with it for fear of being laughed at."

  Jerry Jackson leaned forward with what seemed to Trent to be honest curiosity. "What do you have in mind?"

  "I don't know. What's good here?"

  "Regarding Calley," Jerry Jackson said with great control, "what do you have in mind?"

  Trent looked at the man blankly. "Nothing. I'm not going to boost Frank Calley for you, and I'm not going to con him either. Look, hav
e you ever eaten here before?"

  "Never."

  "Oh. Too bad. Usually when I go to a new restaurant I like to go with somebody who's been there before, so I know what's good. You may not know this," said Trent, "but two years ago a Player scored some image co-processor hardware off CalleyTronics, chanted Calley's accounting computer to believe the hardware had been properly paid for and had it shipped to a drop box. It took Calley half a year to find out who'd done it, but that summer they fished a corpse out of the East River. His teeth had been pulled with pliers, his eyes were poked out, his fingers had been chopped off, and his features defaced with acid. They identified him by his inskin."

  "You won't take the job?"

  "Am I being asked?"

  "Yes."

  "No."

  Jackson took a deep breath. "Why not?"

  Trent shrugged. "No percentage. If I was going to, I'd do a con to get Calley coming after me, get him to believe I had something he wanted. But I'm not going to. The guy's mean, but he's also pretty straight; guys like him always go to the Peaceforcers."

  A gorgeous, mature woman in a black evening gown came out to their table, with the waiter a few steps behind her. "Monsieur?"

  "Yes?" said Trent politely.

  For some reason his response seemed to throw her. Her accent was considerably better than the waiter's; Trent would have bet she was actually French. "You wished to order ..."

  "Coffee."

  "An entire pot?"

  "Please."

  "We do not sell coffee by the pot, monsieur. We do not even have a pot to put the coffee in; the coffee is brewed in a single large--" She hesitated, searching for a word. "--vat? Yes, vat, brewed in a vat in the morning, and then put in stasis and poured from stasis a cup at a time."

  "Okay. I want five, no, make that seven, seven cups of coffee, each one about fifteen percent cream, one right after the other. Send the waitbot out with a cup, give it about five minutes and send it out again. Do that until I tell it to stop."

  "Monsieur," she said, stress making it difficult for Trent to follow her words, "we have only three waitbots. If we do this we must assign a waitbot to do nothing but service your table, and this will affect the other patrons."

  "Damn it," Jerry Jackson exploded, "what is this nonsense? Take the goddamn coffee in a cup. Are you here to talk business or what?"

  Rain drops were striking Trent square in the face. The manager looked back and forth between the two of them in confusion. "You're sure?" Trent asked her. "It's simply not possible to have the cups just keep coming?"

  "Monsieur," protested the manager in such horribly accented English that Trent could barely follow her, "I do not think we can."

  "It's okay," said Trent, standing, "we're done." To Jerry Jackson he said, "I've really got to go; I'm late for another appointment." He turned back once before leaving. "Next time," he said as Jerry Jackson stared, "you have to take me someplace classier."

  * * *

  2.

  Once there was a thief, and the thief was God.

  --The first line in The Exodus Bible.

  It was a twenty minute slidewalk trip from L'Express, at one end of the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, through streets lined by gray plastisteel residential high-rises, to the Down Plaza at the other end of the development. Trent ran all the way. He was delayed just before he reached the Plaza when a bomb in a baby carriage blew up next to a pair of patrolling Peaceforcers, killing the Peaceforcers and several bystanders and tearing a hole in the slidewalk that brought the slidewalk to a shuddering, grinding stop. Despite his hurry Trent stopped running immediately, and walked without haste through the growing rain, away from the crowd gathering around the site of the explosion, walked straight as a laser the rest of the way to the Plaza maglev.

  About twenty fashionable, damp, well-dressed people were crowded onto the air-conditioned maglev platform as it descended beneath street level.

  Trent was not particularly noticeable; because it was necessary for the job, so that he would not stand out from the other patrons inside CalleyTronics, Trent had dressed that day every bit as well as the children of the wealthy and privileged who swarmed through the eight huge, underground levels of the Down Plaza, the busiest shopping structure in the Patrol Sectors.

  Most of those crowded onto the maglev platform, as it sank into the Down Plaza, were slender; a few of the less-well dressed were gaunt.

  Two of them were fat. Somewhere in their mid-thirties, Trent guessed; they were French and they were female and they were fat. Not counting the cyborg French Peaceforcers Elite, who came by their mass in honest metal and metal-ceramics, Trent had never seen more gross tonnage on two bodies. Between the two of them they must have massed 250 kilos.

  They were the last ones onto the maglev platform, already half loaded down with their packages and bags and umbrellas, chattering gaily in French so perfectly accented that there was no question in Trent's mind as to their nationality. They could not be employed themselves, not by the U.N.; the U.N. had maximum weight standards. Wives, then, of United Nations officials transplanted from France to oversee in the governing of Occupied America.

  One of the fat women touched the dark pressure point marked "Five." The pressure point lit. Behind the dark lenses Trent's eyelids drooped shut; through the traceset contact buried in the arms of the sunglasses he sent a single command to his Image.

  The maglev descended five floors in relative silence, as people got on and off the platform at the various levels. The tower in which the maglev platform was located thrust up like a spear through the center of the Down Plaza; the shops were arrayed in a rough rectangle around the maglev tower. Hanging flat walkways connected the central maglev tower to the shops at each level; skywalks connected the various levels for those who preferred walking to using the maglev.

  At Level Five the maglev did not even slow. The two fat women broke off their conversation in consternation; one of them touched the pressure point for Level Five again. Trent said softly, "Ladies?"

  They turned to look at him.

  "Did you know that on Level One there's one of the finest gyms in the city? And on Level Three there's a biosculptor who vacuums fat cells so you can't get fat." Trent smiled at them. "Really. It's amazing, she just vacuums those fat cells right out. Whoosh!"

  The two fat women gaped at him. The platform had not stopped at Level Five; it did at Level Six, and half a dozen of the maglev platform's occupants got off; a couple more got on.

  The gates closed again, and the platform descended.

  "On Level Four there's three cafes that serve empty food, no calories," Trent continued enthusiastically. "Left handed sugars; you can really pig out." He stared at them with his sunglasses. "It doesn't taste exactly the same, but that's not my fault."

  Everybody left on the maglev platform was looking at them, at Trent and the two fat women. The maglev platform skipped Level Seven, where most of the small businesses were clustered, and opened up finally onto Level Eight, the bottom level of the huge plaza. People filed off slowly, stepping over or walking around the prone, twitching form of the juice junkie who blocked the walkway from the maglev platform, looking back as they did so at Trent and the French women. Trent turned to leave also and then suddenly, just the other side of the maglev gates, turned around to face the French women again.

  "Do you speak English?" he demanded.

  The one nearest him said in English, haughtily, clearly, "I do not speak English."

  "Oh." The maglev gates closed on the women, and the power on the platform suddenly died. The platform went dark. "One hundred and fifteen million people," said Trent in his best French, "died last year because there wasn't enough food for them." Behind the gate, on the maglev platform, the women were pushing frantically at the pressure points. Trent did not think they had even heard him. He looked at them for just a moment, stood watching them without expression from the other side of the gates. The one who was not punching at the pressure points suddenly
became aware of Trent standing and watching them, and pleaded in French, "Young man, will you call someone to let us out?"

  Turning away, Trent shook his head. "I'm already late," he muttered.

  He almost tripped over the juice junkie.

  The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life.

  --The Player's Litany

  Heat rises; it was always notably cool on the bottom level of the Down Plaza.

  Walking out onto Eight, those who were new to the Plaza, even New York natives, tended to gawk like tourists. The upper seven levels of the Down Plaza were illuminated by yellow light with a greenish tinge: a mixture of yellow sunpaint and the omnipresent, wavering flickering light of the blue-green glowfloats in their eternal migration between the first and eighth levels of the Down Plaza.

  Level Eight was a riot of color; glittering adholo, real neon and neonlaser and glowpaint. Eight was the only level with a floor, though those who spent any amount of time down on Eight learned to avoid those areas around the maglev tower where the ceiling opened up; the eight level drop into the crowds was a favorite with jumpers.

  Eight was easily the most popular level in the Plaza. There was a whorehouse behind the furniture shop, and two sensable parlors that catered to those with refined, largely illegal tastes. CalleyTronics was located there as well, and Players from over a hundred kilometers around came in person to buy from Calley, who had been a rather famous Player himself as a young man, in the wistfully remembered days before DataWatch.

  The BloodSilk Boys were mixed among the crowds at the west end of the Plaza. Four gendarmes--cops, New York City Police officers--sat in full goldtone riot armor at Googie's Place on the eastern edge of Eight, watching the Plaza through the coffee shop's glassite walls. Trent did not look at either group as he walked away from the diminishing sound of the swearing French women and went to see Bones.

  On the crowded floor of Down Plaza, well back from the jumper zone, eight floors beneath the surface of Brooklyn, the old black man who was considered by many the world's greatest contortionist gathered up the hard Chinese and SpaceFarer CU in the basket before his platform and prepared to take a break from his routine.