Trouble and Her Friends

Jesse started to leer, then thought better of it. Trouble said it for him, “No, not even his own hot body. Not my type.”

“Agreed. I’ll need a deposit—earnest money.”

“I’ll give you three hundred now,” Trouble said, “and another two hundred over the commission if you can make the deal before I leave.”

Jesse nodded, and typed something into his desktop. A chime sounded faintly. Trouble reached into her pocket, pulled out a second folder of bearer cards. She found one that rated two hundred and fifty, then paged through a half-empty book of foils until she came up with the remaining fifty, and passed them together across the desktop.

“I’m trying to contact him now,” Jesse said, and made the money vanish into a pocket without looking up from his screens. “You said there was more?”

“Second thing,” Trouble said. “I need to go to Seahaven, Jesse. Can I walk out through your nodes?”

There was a little silence, Jesse busying himself with the desktop. “Seahaven’s changed some,” he said at last.

When he didn’t say anything more, Trouble lifted an eyebrow at him. “What do you mean?”

“It’s changed.” Jesse grimaced, looked annoyed with himself for having betrayed anything like uncertainty. “The Mayor—he’s gotten a little more autocratic these days, and the interface is a lot slicker, a lot more IC(E) in it, nasty IC(E). There was an incident last year that caused a lot of talk. The Mayor turned in somebody who was working out of Seahaven—he said the guy was cracking without good sense, screwing around where he couldn’t possibly make a profit, but a lot of people thought it was personal.”

“I heard some of that,” Trouble said. There had been a rumor last year that someone, not a cracker, had been shopped to the cops for screwing around with someone else’s pillow-friend. If that was from Seahaven— well, it had to have been a nasty quarrel, and wide-ranging, for its echoes to have reached her in the bright lights.

“So a lot of people are off Seahaven these days,” Jesse went on, “or at least they’re watching their step.”

Trouble shrugged, only partly out of bravado. Whatever truth was behind the rumors, Seahaven was still the only place left that you could do certain kinds of business, the only place that had successfully defended itself against the various agencies whose job it had become to police the nets. “I need to get a message out,” she said, and Jesse sighed.

“Then you want to go to Seahaven,” he agreed. “Try through Eleven’s Moon. You’re welcome to use a node, any room you want. But—be careful, Trouble.”

“Thanks,” Trouble said. “Is there someplace I can be private? Not just for me,” she added, seeing Jesse’s mouth curl into a grin, “but to keep you people out of it.”

Jesse sobered instantly. “Yeah.” He touched more controls, and Trouble heard a chime sound in some distant part of the building. “You can have the little room upstairs.”

That brought back memories, all right—she had worked there before, done some of her best work in that little, blue-walled space, both when she was starting out and then later, when she and Cerise had needed to do a job on the fly—but she said nothing.

“Ah,” Jesse said, and looked down at his screens. “I found the kid.”

“Offer him two-thirds,” Trouble said.

“Don’t you trust me?” Jesse asked, rhetorically, and his fingers danced over the keyboard. There was a little pause, and then he smiled. “Done deal. That’s another fifteen hundred, Trouble.”

“Rounded up?” Trouble asked, but reached for her money.

“Rounded down. I’m wounded.”

Trouble slid a short stack of bearer cards across the table, added a booklet of citiscrip. “Where is the trike?”

“Out back,” Jesse answered. “You can have it whenever you want it—” He broke off as the curtain slid back and Elhibri appeared in the doorway.

“Annie. Trouble’s going to be working upstairs.”

Elhibri nodded, and Trouble followed the other woman out of the room and up the narrow back stairway to the blue-painted room. It was empty except for the node, its box mounted in the center of the floor like an inside- out drain, and a patched foam-core armchair.

“You want coffee?” Elhibri said, grudgingly, and Trouble nodded.

“Yeah, I’d appreciate it.”

“I’ll bring you a pot,” Elhibri answered, and disappeared, closing the door behind her. Left to herself, Trouble began setting up her system, main box, data drives, the specialized add-ons that interpreted the net, then plugged the cord into her dollie-slot, careful to keep the power low for now. She loaded the new programs, ran the installation routines, and sat back to run a quick diagnostic scan. Elhibri reappeared halfway through, a small, two-cup thermos and a mug on a tray, and Trouble thanked her abstractedly, barely aware of her presence or her departure. The scan showed green, a multibranched tree of indicators; more than that, she could feel the system in tune, a gentle harmony, and she shut down the scan.

The gateway icon returned to the center of the screen, a multibranched, ever-changing shape that seemed always on the verge of falling into a regular polygon but could never quite be defined. Trouble evoked the control program, touched the virtual levers, bringing the brainworm fully online, and heard the seashell rush, the traffic rumble of the net. The realworld hazed and faded, overwritten by the images transmitted directly to her brain.

She rides the fast datastream toward the BBS and the delta, slides away from it as the data slows around her, using her own separate momentum to carry her a little further into the swirling light, the bright icons of the advertisers and the punters and the users blending into a single shifting layer like the flow of a visible wind. She passes familiar stations, nodes and virtual spaces that are shops and meeting grounds and informal brokers of one thing or another, but no one seems to notice. No one sends her more than the usual glittering chaff, and she smiles at her conceit that made her expect more. It is probably just as well, this virtual anonymity, or discretion, but she doesn’t have to like it. She finds a mail drop, a red-and-blue glittering box, and, after only the slightest hesitation, steps within. Inside is the illusion of a post office, and the illusion of privacy; she invokes a routine that makes the latter real, and quickly shapes her message. BUTCH—I NEED YOUR HELP TO CONTACT DR HUU, AND A PLACE TO STAY. MEET ME AT MICKEY’S WILD GOOSE AT—she glances sideways, checking realtime, and makes the calculation—5 A.M. TOMORROW. THANKS. She adds the mailcode and dispatches it, through a tried-and-true cutout node. Smoke flares briefly, a stink and a flash of heat across her face, and she knows the system has erased the local copy. She smiles, and dismisses the program that gave her the moment’s protection from prying eyes.

She moves on through the shifting pattern of the virtual streets, spirals eddying within a greater spiral, following their shape rather than the outward image, and finds herself at last in front of a symbol she recognizes, an icon man-tall, X and I barring a shape like a full moon. She lifts her hand, knocks, and, a fraction late, feels wood beneath her knuckle. A heartbeat later, the icon fades a little, becomes pliable to the touch. She drifts through it, and feels the local interface seize her, drawing shadowy shapes around her. The walls of a store tower to either side, dark shelves crammed with dark and unimaginable objects that slink away from view when you try to see them clearly; a shapeless figure, a demon carved of light so white that she can’t see any detail, sits behind a high counter, waiting.

You rang? it says, deep voice stolen from an actor famous for horror films, and Trouble smiles to herself. She gestures, overriding the local system, and calls into being her old icon, harlequin dancing, the one everyone remembers.

*I’m on the road for Seahaven* she says, and ignores the faint intake of breath that betrays the human hand behind the demon.

There is a little pause. She feels the faint pulse of a probe, pressure, a tickle, against her skin, and then the stronger surge of her own kit repelling its interest, so that she appears to the other as an icon without a source, without the faint silver cord that ties most icons to their point of origin and makes the skies above the BBS a cat’s-cradle of glittering lines. The demon shape nods and gestures, creating a doorway out of nothing.