The Long Run Read online

  Trent came to a stop just off the walkway, beside the low platform on which Bones worked. Pulling on his shirt, Bones had to raise his voice to be heard above the loud music and the babble of the crowd.

  "Evening, Trent. Take dinner with me?"

  "Hi, Bones. Not tonight."

  "Something goin', Trent?"

  Trent did not even turn his head as Bones spoke to him. "What do you mean?"

  "'Bout an hour ago I seen Jimmy Ramirez; and Tammy the Rat been hanging around, and not fifteen minutes ago I seen your midget. And there was six Peaceforcers, they was here when I got here this morning. I ain't seen the Left Hand of the Devil in the Plaza that early in, oh, five years."

  Trent heard barely audible popping noises as Bones' joints slowly realigned themselves. Still he did not look at the old man. "Six Peaceforcers?"

  "I don't trust that midget, Trent." Peering through the crowds and flickering adholos, Bones tried to see what it was that Trent was looking at, but could not.

  "You don't trust who?"

  "That midget working for you."

  "Which midget?"

  "The pretty one."

  "Oh, Bird. Bird's a doll, Bones."

  "He's the right size," Bones agreed.

  "He's only fourteen, Bones. He hasn't started growing yet. When were the Peaceforcers here?"

  Bones sighed audibly. "You got something going today, don't you? You ever going to get a job, Trent?"

  "Bones."

  "What?"

  "Don't start on me today. I'm not in the mood for it."

  "Just wonderin'. You so good with the Net, I knows you could get work."

  "Bones, this is starting to look like a very bad day. I don't want to hear about it." At the other end of the plaza, seventy-five meters distant, Trent caught sight of Tammy, a too-skinny girl with platinum-white hair, deep in conversation with a tall black man wearing BloodSilks colors, waving her arms as she spoke.

  "Why ain't you going to get a job?"

  "I already have one and I don't need two. What time were the Peaceforcers here?"

  Near Trent, clustered around a small bench just the other side of the walkway, three teenaged girls were conducting a loud argument about where they would eat dinner. Two of them faced Trent and Bones; the third stood facing her companions, and Trent could see only her back. She wore a tight green leather dress that came down to mid-thigh, black ankle boots and pale green silk stockings. Her hair was jet black, straight and long.

  "Everybody gots to work, Trent. Everybody needs something to make it worth gettin' up in the morning." The old contortionist chewed on the thought for a bit. "That's the fact. 'Sides," he said suddenly, "you keep up boosting, eventually the Peaceforcers going to catch you."

  The girl in the green dress, immediately in front of Trent, stood clutching a handbag by its closed top. She had an exquisite bottom. A glowing scarlet zipper began at the dress's hem, just over her right thigh, and spiraled up around her buttocks, waist, and breasts; taking her out of it would be like peeling the skin off an orange. "What time, Bones?"

  Bones sighed. "Seven-thirty, I guess. I was having breakfast upstairs on the second floor, at the cantina. I don't know the names of any of them, but I seen them in the crowds before sometimes when I performs. They're assigned regular to this stretch, us being so close to the Fringe and all. Cheap bastards," he added thoughtfully. "Don't never throw nothing into the kitty when I'm done."

  "They recognize you?"

  Bones shrugged. It was a curiously fluid motion; most of the major bones in his body had extra joints surgically inserted. "Who knows? I was dressed; I don't look much the same when all the ceramic joints are locked up and I'm wearin' clothes."

  "Oh." From across the crowded length of the plaza, Tammy reached up and casually scratched her left shoulder.

  Bones looked at Trent with a perturbed expression on his seamed black face. "I'm really serious, Trent. You're still young enough to get out of here."

  "Out of the Patrol Sectors?" Trent grinned at Bones suddenly, a quick flash which brought unnaturally still features alive for just a moment. "I took six years just getting out of the Fringe, Bones. I love the Patrol Sectors."

  "That's not what I meant. Geography got nothing to do with gettin' out of here." Bones pulled on a long-sleeved shirt and buttoned it up as he spoke. "I gots me a whole lot of contacts; been tying myself up in knots here in the Plaza for a long time, and I met a lot of folks. I could probably get you a job with"

  Seventy-five meters away, Tammy tugged gently at the lobe of her left ear; Trent cut Bones off. "I have a job, Bones."

  The old contortionist snorted. "Boosting," he said with gentle derision.

  It was Tuesday, April the thirtieth, 2069.

  Trent said softly, "Not exactly." He closed his eyes and went Inside.

  "Trent said to me once, 'A theft is an act of communication. So is a blow. Unlike words, neither one can be ignored. A properly executed boost consists of three elements: what you steal, how you steal it, and from whom you steal.

  'You cannot catch a thief who knows this and employs the knowledge properly. If the thief is a very good thief, you may learn, in time, why he stole what he stole.'"

  --The Peaceforcer Elite Melissa du Bois, as quoted in The Exodus Bible.

  "I never ever talk like that."

  --Trent the Uncatchable, according to the historian Corazon de Nostri.

  The sunglasses had cost Trent more than the rest of what he was wearing put together. The lenses filtered ultraviolet from bright sunlight; in dim surroundings they stepped infrared up into the visible spectrum. The arms of the glasses, where they crossed his temples, held the contacts for the traceset in the handheld InfoNet link in the right hand pocket of his coat.

  The Down Plaza was run by Frazier Enforcement, the firm which ran many of the shopping districts located either in the Fringe proper or at its edge; Frazier got along acceptably well with the Peaceforcers, and they were experts in the unique problems of Fringe-area security.

  They also had the worst software in the state of New York. Trent's Image, a program named Johnny Johnny, said softly, Boss, somebody's messed with Plaza security.

  I know, Johnny. Standing with his eyes closed behind the concealing lenses, Trent merged with his Image, and ceased to be Trent.

  Johnny Johnny roused himself into full wakefulness.

  He could never remember, between times when Trent was not with him, how it was to be truly alive in the InfoNet. Unlike most Image programs--unlike Johnny Johnny's predecessor, Ralf the Wise and Powerful--Johnny Johnny had never been turned off, and only rarely reprogrammed. His memories stretched back over six years to his first nanoseconds of awareness; in those days he had been little more than a filter program, a collection of routines to enable Trent to quickly sort and discard the network's vast crush of irrelevant detail, to select communication routes through the millions of Boards which had, at any given moment, surplus available logic that Johnny Johnny's master might hijack.

  That was Johnny Johnny's function: to act as a front end for Trent, as an interface to the InfoNet, as Trent's Image to the world.

  But the flow was not one way. The relationship between Johnny Johnny and Trent was a partnership, a symbiosis.

  Trent's touch brought Johnny Johnny to life.

  Johnny Johnny blasted out into the Crystal Wind of Data.

  Trent heard Jimmy Ramirez's voice, far away, talking with Bones. A voice rumbled something slow and distant, and Trent relinquished all touch with Realtime and fell away into the glowing Crystal Wind.

  Johnny Johnny went into the Board that ran Down Plaza's security through a line of lasercable that was putatively a failsafe backup for tracking of Personal Protection Systems inside the Plaza. Though expected to be so in the near future, the PPSs were not yet illegal, and therefore could not be banned from the Plaza. Still they were potentially so dangerous that any good security program had to keep an eye on them.

  That
particular strand of lasercable did not track PPSs. It was one of several third-layer backup systems Johnny Johnny had corrupted for his own use. There was no time to trace through every line of lasercable in the Plaza; Johnny Johnny did not seriously consider trying. He loaded Frazier Enforcement's Security Diagnostics and ran it. The program took forever to run, most of six seconds. Johnny Johnny waited patiently, and then swore in surprise when the results came back to him.

  There was something excessively strange in the Security Board with him.

  Player, web angel, a DataWatch webdancer--Johnny Johnny had no time to find out. In approximately two thousand nanoseconds Johnny Johnny copied himself into eighty functional ghosts, sent them out into the Net in all directions, disengaged from the Security Board, and fled.

  Trent's eyes snapped open. Tammy the Rat was on her way across the length of the Plaza, striding angrily toward him through the crowd. Trent was peripherally aware of the gendarmes over at Googie's, watching Tammy walk across the Plaza. Wearing a conservative businessperson's suit, briefcase dangling loosely from his left hand, Jimmy Ramirez stood next to Bones; a tall, handsome, ex-semi-pro boxer with muscles on his muscles, slightly taller than Trent, simply watching Trent with that cool, reserved look he saved for those instances when he was genuinely pissed.

  "Hello, Jimmy."

  "Hello, my man," said Jimmy Ramirez softly. "You're late again."

  "People keep saying. I had to stop and talk to a man--"

  "About?"

  "--and then the baby carriage blew up--"

  Trent never had a chance to finish; Tammy pushed her way through the last few meters of crowd, radiating anger so palpably that those who saw her coming got out of the way without further encouragement. "What the slithy goddam hell is going on? I've been stalling the BloodSilk Boys but--"

  Trent said clearly, "It's a drop."

  Tammy the Rat was a professional; she froze in mid-word, turned away from Trent almost instantly and without hurrying merged back into the flow of the crowd around them.

  "Walk away." Trent did even look in Jimmy Ramirez's direction. "Have dinner with Bones, talk about Hemingway or something. A man named Jerry Jackson just tried to hire me to boost CalleyTronics--"

  "But we're already boosting Calley!"

  "--and, the Peaceforcers have some kind of dancer in the Plaza's Security Board. It's a drop."

  Bones was looking back and forth between them, and Trent said softly to Jimmy, "Go." One of the gendarmes was pointing out the scene to the others; still Trent did not see anyone in the Plaza who might reasonably have been a Peaceforcer. The girl in the green dress was walking away with her friends, and Trent started after her, Jimmy falling in beside him for just a second. Out of the corner of his eye Trent saw a pair of the gendarmes coming out onto the Plaza floor.

  "What are you doing?" Jimmy demanded, glancing over at the gendarmes watching them.

  "Creating a diversion. Go, damn it." Trent never so much as looked around; he was simply aware that Jimmy had faded back into the crowd. He threaded his way smoothly through the surging crowds on Eight's walkways, gaining on the three girls; the girl in the green leather dress still held her purse by its clasped top. An adholo flared and he swerved slightly to pass through it; under the cover of scarlet laser light he pulled the emblade from its waterproofed hiding place behind his belt buckle and turned it on. The emblade was only three molecules wide at its edge; it would cut through ferrocrete as though it were paper, and with some muscle behind it would cut even sheet monocrystal. It was completely safe; the blade itself dissolved instantly into a fine dust at the first touch of liquid--say, blood.

  The cops were only thirty meters or so away; Trent increased his pace slightly, came alongside the three girls and did the thing in one movement, with the ease of long years of practice: jostled the girl roughly enough to make sure the gendarmes saw it, muttered a brief apology and smiled at the girl in what might be taken for slight embarrassment, flicked the emblade up to touch the side of the purse, cut, reached through the open flap and with two fingers pulled the wallet free, switched the emblade off, dropped the haft to the ground and gave it a good kick and was turning away with the stolen wallet, the exercise done flawlessly, back toward the gendarmes, when a delicate feminine hand closed around his forearm with amazing strength.

  The girl said softly, in a voice pitched to go no further than Trent's ears, "I'd like my wallet returned."

  Trent turned back to her and for the first time actually looked at the girl's face. The crowd was clearing away around them, a small open space with Trent and the girl at the center. She was fifteen or so, with clean simple features framed by long, straight black hair, with green eyes that were even brighter than the dyed leather dress she wore. Trent said, "Sure," and gave the wallet back. The girl looked at him curiously, head tilted slightly to one side, a puzzled look taking hold upon her features.

  Trent said softly, "How did you know I took it?"

  A deep baritone voice ten meters behind Trent, off to his left, said "Ma'am, stand away, please."

  "Really," said Trent. "I did that perfectly."

  The baritone voice boomed, "Stand away!"

  The girl had not answered Trent. Trent said, as the seconds ticked by, "If you're not going to answer me, you'd better do what he says. He'll stun you too if you don't, and it's not pleasant. Believe me."

  The girl nodded slowly, and took a single step backward, wallet in her hand. Her eyes never left Trent, and the puzzled look did not waver.

  Her eyes.

  "Oh," said Trent. The girl took another step backward, and another.

  Bright green eyes, like Carl Castanaveras', or Jany McConnell's--

  Emerald eyes.

  Trent said, "Denice?"

  Her eyes widened in shock.

  The cops shot him.

  * * *

  3.

  "I don't understand," she said to Trent, that February day in 2062, "why you work so hard at it."

  The three of them lay in the grass in the center of the park across the street from the Chandler Complex: the dark-haired green-eyed twins, and one blonde boy with pale blue eyes. David lay beneath one of the trees, hiding from the hazy noontime sun with a book; Denice and Trent sat beneath the tree next to David's, dancing in the InfoNet.

  "Because I'm a Player," Trent replied.

  Denice Castanaveras sighed in frustration. It frustrated her to know that most of the telepaths in the Complex could have touched Trent's thoughts easily, to know that two years from now, when the Change came for her, she would be able to do the same; and that today she was limited by the clumsiness of words in her attempt to understand something that was very important to the closest friend she had in the world.

  "Not a webdancer, Denice, a Player."

  She peered down at the portaterm Trent worked on. Seven years later, after the perfection of tracesets that required neither hypnosis nor biofeedback nor drugs for normal users to operate, the device would be a quarter the size, lack a keyboard, incorporate the functions of infocards, and be called a handheld--but the primary function was the same, a device to interface humans with the global Information Network.

  Jacked into the MPU slot at the side of the portaterm was an optical computer about the size of a makeup key; the coprocessor that held Trent's Image, Ralf the Wise and Powerful. "Life can be described," said Ralf in a completely human voice, "and described surprisingly well, in terms of the growth of information content. Correct me if I'm wrong, Boss, but that's what the Player's Litany means: from the Crystal Wind came data, and from data came life."

  Trent nodded. "That's why I want an inskin."

  "What's why?"

  ... to expand your sensory bandwidth by an order of magnitude, to do the things an AI could do, control inanimate equipment with a thought, find in instants the answer to any question to which there was an answer….

  Trent said, "It makes things faster."

  "So what's the point?" she
asked. "So you can find data faster than anybody else in the world except an AI or another Player. Really, I just don't get it."

  Trent turned his head slightly, found the serious green eyes looking directly into his own from five centimeters away. Waiting.

  "The Crystal Wind is the greatest source of data the world has ever seen. Truth and data," he said quietly, "are not the same thing. Data lies in the Crystal Wind; Truth is a function of Realtime. And yet Truth arises from data. From data you can--extract--Truth."

  With a grave countenance, the nine-year-old girl studied him for just a moment longer.

  Trent stared back.

  Finally the corners of her mouth twitched, and she fought it, then gave up and broke up giggling. She leaned back against the bole of the tree they were under, rested her head on Trent's shoulder. Finally the giggles stopped, and she said in a quiet, detached voice, "Honestly, you're the craziest thing I ever saw."

  "Really?"

  "It's okay," she said quickly. "I like you anyhow."

  The gendarmes took the sunglasses containing his traceset contacts. They took the handheld that contained the traceset itself. They took his watch and the ruby stud from his left ear, his belt and his wallet and his shoes as well. They did not remove his socks and even though they ran a slowscan over him the slowscan started just above his ankles.

  They missed the magpick taped to the sole of his right foot.

  Lying on his back, Trent stared up at the ceiling of the holding cell. The glowpaint was old and cracked; he suspected it had originally been intended to glow the color of sunlight. Now it was closer to orange than yellow. In one corner of the cell the webbed cracks in the paint had actually cut off a ragged, meter-wide section of the paint from the current; that section of the paint was dead gray, the color of mushrooms in shade.

  His hands were tingling; he tried moving them again. Better this time--he actually got his fingers to curl up to touch his palms. There are drugs that will buffer the human nervous system from the effects of sonics, and others that will aid in recovering more quickly.