“All it takes is money,” I said.
“And a pardoner.”
“That’s right.”
“One you can trust.”
I shrugged. “You’ve got to go on faith, man.”
“Yeah,” he said. Then, after a while: “I heard of a guy, he bought a three-year pardon and wall passage thrown in. Went up north, caught a krill trawler, wound up in Australia, on the Reef. Nobody’s ever going to find him there. He’s out of the system. Right out of the fucking system. What do you think that cost?”
“About twenty grand,” I said.
“Hey, that’s a sharp guess!”
“No guess.”
“Oh?” Another careful look. “You don’t sound local.”
“I’m not. Just visiting.”
“That’s still the price? Twenty grand?”
“I can’t do anything about supplying krill trawlers. You’d be on your own once you were outside the wall.”
“Twenty grand just to get through the wall?”
“And a seven-year labor exemption.”
“I pulled ten,” he said.
“I can’t get you ten. It’s not in the configuration, you follow? But seven would work. You could get so far, in seven, that they’d lose you. You could goddamned
“You know a hell of a lot.”
“My business to know,” I said. “You want me to run an asset check on you?”
“I’m worth seventeen five. Fifteen hundred real, the rest collat. What can I get for seventeen five?”
“Just what I said. Through the wall, and seven years’ exemption.”
“A bargain rate, hey?”
“I take what I can get,” I said. “Give me your wrist. And don’t worry. This part is read-only.”
I keyed his data implant and patched mine in. He had fifteen hundred in the bank and a collateral rating of sixteen thou, exactly as he claimed. We eyed each other very carefully now. As I said, you never know who the borgmanns are.
“You can do it right here in the park?” he asked.
“You bet. Lean back, close your eyes, make like you’re snoozing in the sun. The deal is that I take a thousand of the cash now and you transfer five thou of the collateral bucks to me, straight labor-debenture deal. When you get through the wall I get the other five hundred cash and five thou more on sweat security. The rest you pay off at three thou a year plus interest, wherever you are, quarterly key-ins. I’ll program the whole thing, including beep reminders on payment dates. It’s up to you to make your travel arrangements, remember. I can do pardons and wall transits but I’m not a goddamned travel agent. Are we on?”
He put his head back and closed his eyes.
“Go ahead,” he said.
It was fingertip stuff, straight circuit emulation, my standard hack. I picked up all his identification codes, carried them into central, found his records. He seemed real, nothing more or less than he had claimed. Sure enough, he had drawn a lulu of a labor tax, ten years on the wall. I wrote him a pardon good for the first seven of that. Had to leave the final three on the books, purely technical reasons, but the computers weren’t going to be able to find him by then. I gave him a wall-transit pass, too, which meant writing in a new skills class for him, programmer third grade. He didn’t think like a programmer and he didn’t look like a programmer but the wall software wasn’t going to figure that out. Now I had made him a member of the human elite, the relative handful of us who are free to go in and out of the walled cities as we wish. In return for these little favors I signed over his entire life savings to various accounts of mine, payable as arranged, part now, part later. He wasn’t worth a nickel any more, but he was a free man. That’s not such a terrible trade-off.
Oh, and the pardon was a valid one. I had decided not to write any stiffs while I was in Los Angeles. A kind of sentimental atonement, you might say, for the job I had done on that woman all those years back.
You absolutely have to write stiffs once in a while, you understand. So that you don’t look too good, so that you don’t give the Entities reason to hunt you down. Just as you have to ration the number of pardons you do. I didn’t have to be writing pardons at all, of course. I could have just authorized the system to pay me so much a year, fifty thou, a hundred, and taken it easy forever. But where’s the challenge in that?
So I write pardons, but no more than I need to cover my expenses, and I deliberately fudge some of them up, making myself look as incompetent as the rest so the Entities don’t have a reason to begin trying to track the identifying marks of my work. My conscience hasn’t been too sore about that. It’s a matter of survival, after all. And most other pardoners are out-and-out frauds, you know. At least with me you stand a better than even chance of getting what you’re paying for.
The next one was a tiny Japanese woman, the classic style, sleek, fragile, doll-like. Crying in big wild gulps that I thought might break her in half, while a gray-haired older man in a shabby business suit—her grandfather, you’d guess—was trying to comfort her. Public crying is a good indicator of Entity trouble. “Maybe I can help,” I said, and they were both so distraught that they didn’t even bother to be suspicious.
He was her father-in-law, not her grandfather. The husband was dead, killed by burglars the year before. There were two small kids. Now she had received her new labor-tax ticket. She had been afraid they were going to send her out to work on the wall, which of course wasn’t likely to happen: the assignments are pretty random, but they usually aren’t crazy, and what use would a 90-pound girl be in hauling stone blocks around? The father- in-law had some friends who were in the know, and they managed to bring up the hidden encoding on her ticket. The computers hadn’t sent her to the wall, no. They had sent her to Area Five. And they had given her a TTD classification.
“The wall would have been better,” the old man said. “They’d see, right away, she wasn’t strong enough for heavy work, and they’d find something else, something she could do. But Area Five? Who ever comes back from that?”
“You know what Area Five is?” I said.
“The medical experiment place. And this mark here, TTD. I know what that stands for too.”
She began to moan again. I couldn’t blame her. TTD means Test To Destruction. The Entities want to find out how much work we can really do, and they feel that the only reliable way to discover that is to put us through tests that show where the physical limits are.
“I will die,” she wailed. “My babies! My babies!”
“Do you know what a pardoner is?” I asked the father-in-law.
A quick excited response: sharp intake of breath, eyes going bright, head nodding vehemently. Just as quickly the excitement faded, giving way to bleakness, helplessness, despair.
“They all cheat you,” he said.
“Not all.”
“Who can say? They take your money, they give you nothing.”
“You know that isn’t true. Everybody can tell you stories of pardons that came through.”
“Maybe. Maybe,” the old man said. The woman sobbed quietly. “You know of such a person?”
“For three thousand dollars,” I said, “I can take the TTD off her ticket. For five I can write an exemption from service good until her children are in high school.”
Sentimental me. A fifty percent discount, and I hadn’t even run an asset check. For all I knew the father-in- law was a millionaire. But no, he’d have been off cutting a pardon for her, then, and not sitting around like this in Pershing Square.
He gave me a long, deep, appraising look. Peasant shrewdness coming to the surface.
“How can we be sure of that?” he asked.
