Caine Black Knife

deal. It’s all of you. All you fuckers. Everybody wins.”

My mouth was full of blood and acid bile. “Everybody except the ordinary grills, living in slave ghettoes, trading their balls for a chance at a better life.

Everybody except the regular fucking folk getting ripped limb from fucking limb by the fucking Smoke Hunt. Christ, I hate you people. If you only knew how I hate you.”

I spat the blood on the floor. I was panting. My breath felt hot enough to ignite the room. “And now I’ve fucked you, because there actually are a couple decent fucking people in this artesian shitspring of a town, and they’re on their way here, and there’s no way you’re gonna talk your way out of this. Hell, you can’t even want to. The truth’s your only fucking hope.”

“Perhaps,” Markham murmured. “And perhaps not. Do you believe Khryl’s Champion is likely to defy the expressed Will of the Lord of Battles?”

“Just bet my life on it, didn’t I?”

Soapy One snorted. “What life?” he said, and his shock baton came up on my own blind side and blasted starshells across my brain.

On Home, the physics are wrong for the capacitors in the shock baton. So he had to hit me a couple more times. I remember saying, as I went down, “Tell her-tell her she owes me. Tell her I want to get paid. .”

Then the event horizon surged out from inside my head and swallowed me whole.

EXTRODUCTION A DEAL WITH GOD

Once I woke up, it didn’t take long to figure out where I was. I’d been there before.

Too many times.

The plain cream-colored walls, blank, windowless, featureless except for the touchpad beside the door. The flat cream-colored door itself, also without window. Or handle. The simple desk and chair, injection-molded of a single piece with the floor. Nothing on them. No books. No screen and stylus, and certainly no pen or paper. The lo- flo crapper in the corner. The bed, with the padded wire-and-plastic straps to secure my arms to the cold round rails of brushed stainless steel. No straps for my legs, because they didn’t need any, and they knew it.

This was Earth.

The computerized spinal bypass that let my legs work in this universe hadn’t been reinitialized since I left three years ago; the mental trick that lets me walk on Home is magick. From the waist down I was just dead fucking meat. Like-as Deliann once wrote-having a couple dead dogs strapped to my ass. Except I can’t eat ’em.

I had a tube coming out of my dick, and a big diaper, and I didn’t have any self-consciousness about crapping all over myself. If they didn’t feel like cleaning up my shit, they could fucking well unstrap an arm so I could use the bedpan-the one success of my literally half-assed spinal regeneration therapy had been bowel and bladder control. But nobody minded cleaning up my shit. They weren’t capable of minding.

If I’d had any doubt about where I was being held, it would have vanished the first time my attendants came in to empty my urine bag, replace my IVs, and change my diaper. I could see the lobotomized vacancy in their eyes before I saw the neural yokes on their necks.

Workers.

I didn’t bother to try to talk to them. With their higher cognitive function overridden by the yokes, Workers can’t do anything beyond give simple answers to direct questions. These couldn’t even do that. They were deaf. Stone fucking deaf.

Surgically deafened.

To make sure that an inmate here had no one to communicate with. That the inmate has absolutely no unapproved contact whatsoever with anyone beyond his cell. Which I knew because for about ten years, I used to regularly bribe my way into this place, to talk to my father.

I was in the Buke.

The Buchanan Social Camp is one of the places Geneva puts people who need to have their antisocial attitudes rectified, or at least interdicted from healthy society. Usually permanently.

It’s hard to say how long I was there; time has little meaning in the Buke. Workers came and went. My relief bag and diaper got changed, as did my sheets and my IV. My headaches went away. I got stronger.

I had time to think.

Thinking-real thinking-is not something I do often, nor particularly well. I was never trained for it, and I sure as hell don’t have any natural inclination.

Thinking gets in my way. In a fight it’s fatal.

In the real world, instinct and experience are superior to thought; Tolstoy wrote that in a contest of cunning, the peasant consistently defeats the intellectual, and he was right. Not because the peasant is smarter but because he doesn’t have the self-doubt and the second thoughts and all the other mind tricks that make the intellectual out- think himself.

I was born to be an intellectual. Before his illness and multiple breakdowns, my father was arguably the most famous anthropologist of the century; his book Tales of the First Folk is still the standard text on Primal oral culture. My mother, before her death, had been his brightest student. Even after the Social Police arrested him and busted us down to Labor, he was still trying to make me think like a Professional, teaching me out of books on the net. Even after my mother died. Even after the madness had him wholly in its grip; on his semilucid days, he would make me read and talk and read some more. But I did that only to keep him from beating me into bloody unconsciousness. Any real chance of growing up an intellectual was over for me by the time I was six. My real education was street school.

I might have been born an intellectual, but I was raised a peasant.

Which-along with what a number of people have described as lunatic self-confidence and a truly staggering degree of self-absorption-might explain why I wasn’t really worried.

It was clear why they put me in the Buke. This was tactical. Because of all those years of visiting Dad here. They were expecting my presumed future to smother me in wet-wool layers of claustrophobia.

Dickheads.

I spent days hanging from a fucking cross. I spent fuck knows how long chained to the wall of the Shaft in Ankhana’s Donjon, dying of gangrene in a river of other people’s shit. Spending the rest of my life in a nice clean quiet cell is gonna scare me?

Oh, yeah. Sure.

One of the books that Dad made me read-one that I’ve read again a few times on my own, in fact-was The Art of War. Because, like a lot of those old-timey Chinese guys, Sun Tzu had a gift for metaphor. The book isn’t just about war, it’s about handling conflict. You could even say it’s about how to live well in a dangerous world.

One of the things Master Sun wrote is that a general who knows his enemy and knows himself need not fear the outcomes of a thousand battles.

I knew my enemy. That was my edge.

When I finally got a visitor, he seemed a little surprised to find me smiling.

His Professional’s suit and tie didn’t really fit-looked like it was cut for a guy with twenty extra pounds on him-and he scuffed the soles of his brown wingtips along the floor when he came through the door, but maybe it wasn’t the suit so much as it was my eyes.

My eyes kept wanting to see his hair in a brown comb-over instead of grey strings waxed flat across bare scalp, and a dirt-colored stubble on thicker jowls instead of the stiff salty beard neatly trimmed. Age suited him, really: he’d lost weight and gained gravity.

And he could walk straight in and just sit down and let me stare at him and get my mind around his existence, and he didn’t even have to do his goddamn coin tricks with nervous hands. He just kept them folded in