her way past the table, she saw that they had a portable machine set up, and were staring avidly at its screen. Neither of the women were on-line, and the man didn’t even seem to have a dollie-slot; what good they thought they could do, she didn’t know. There was another familiar shape at a table at the back of the room, a rangy man, bearded and scowling, a flashing pin in the shape of his red-hand icon fastened to the lapel of his neat suit-jacket, and Cerise looked hastily away. Bran-Boru, or whatever his real name was, had a reputation for being chancy, and she had no desire to attract his attention.
Then at last she saw van Liesvelt, skinny and blonde and rumpled, even sitting down taller than the others at the corner table. He lifted his hand in greeting, beckoning her over; Cerise waved back, not trying to hide her relief, and came to join them. The others were there, too: Carlie Held still in working whites under his grubby jacket, Arabesque slowly crumpling the fingers of a VR glove—the old-fashioned virtual-reality interface, not good for anything but games and blunt-instrument science anymore—into an ungainly fist, Max Helling with his partner Jannick Aledort at his back, Aledort listening, not quite part of the group, while Helling talked. Max was always talking, Cerise thought, and took the last chair, next to Dewildah Mason, who looked up at her with a wry smile and a nod of greeting.
“So where’s your other half?”
“Trouble’s gone,” Cerise said, and to her horror heard her voice crack. She took a sip of the wine to cover it, swallowed wrong, and choked. Mason reached over to pound her on the back, brown eyes wide with concern.
“That’s what you said,” van Liesvelt said.
Giving me time to pull myself together, Cerise thought, and nodded her thanks, setting the wine down again.
“Yeah.” Her voice was still strained, and her throat hurt, but at least she didn’t sound as though she were going to cry.
“Evans-Tindale?” Helling asked. He was a thin, feral-looking man, a little older than the rest of them. He’d been on the net for years, had more business connections in the shadows, knew more about buying or selling black-market programs and data than any of the others. Cerise sometimes thought he only stayed friends with them because they were all queer, and the old-style netwalkers still didn’t approve of him, wouldn’t approve of him no matter how good he was because of it. She suspected he’d taken the risk of the brainworm for the same reason: the old-style netwalkers wouldn’t respect his work once he’d gotten it, but then, they hadn’t ever respected him. The brainworm did give you an advantage on the nets, let you use the full range of your senses, not just sight and sound, to interpret the virtual world. The old-style netwalkers claimed to hold it in contempt, said that it was a crutch, something for second-raters, but Cerise suspected, had always suspected, that they were just afraid. The worm entailed risks: implantation and direct-to-brain wiring was always tricky, could leave you a mental cripple if the operation went wrong, and the oldsters had never quite been able to face that possibility. The dollie-slots and the associated implants didn’t touch the brain, ran along existing nerves—less of a risk, and more of a challenge to use, or so the oldsters said.
“Trouble wouldn’t just run away,” Arabesque said. She set the VR glove down on the dented tabletop, curled her own hand over it, matching finger to finger. Her skin was only a little lighter than the black plastic, and both were like shadows in the indirect light.
“She said she would,” Held said. He shook his head, laid his huge hands flat on the tabletop. It was hard, seeing them, to believe that he was as good a cybermedic as he actually was; harder still to believe that he was qualified to install and modify brainworms. Or at least he was qualified in the EC, where he’d trained: the worm was still illegal here, and there wasn’t any chance of legalizing it now that Evans-Tindale had passed. “She said from the beginning she wasn’t going to stick around if Congress overrode the veto.” He shook his head, and pushed himself back from the table. “Anybody else want another drink?”
Van Liesvelt shook his head, and Mason said, “Yeah, thanks, Carlie.” She held out a glittering strip of foil, and Held took it, turned away toward the bar.
“That wasn’t all she was bitching about,” Arabesque said, and gave Cerise a hard look. “Last time I talked to her, she said you two’d had a disagreement over a job.”
Cerise made a face. This was the part she hadn’t wanted to think about, the part she hadn’t wanted to remember: she’d been warned, and she’d miscalculated badly. “There’s a new corporate space, with new IC(E). I didn’t recognize the system, but I thought we could crack it. Trouble doesn’t—didn’t agree. But it’s interesting IC (E).” She could almost see it, taste it, in memory, a massive cylinder of glass, light spiraling slowly up its side, to drift down again in a faint haze, hiding the codes that make up the real security. She had never seen IC(E) that tight before, could hardly wait to try to crack it…
“What was the company?” That was Aledort, leaning forward a little further over the back of his own chair and Helling’s shoulder.
“I don’t know yet,” Cerise answered. “I told you, it’s a new space to me.”
“Better hold off a while,” Helling said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen under Evans-Tindale.”
Van Liesvelt nodded agreement, for once unsmiling. His mustache looked more ragged than ever, as though he’d been chewing on it.
“I can’t believe Trouble just left,” Mason said.
“Neither can I,” Arabesque said, and Cerise glared at her.
“I told you what happened. We’d been talking about the job—”
“You can’t call it a job,” Helling objected. “If you don’t know who made the IC(E) or what’s behind it, it’s not a job.”
Cerise ignored him. “And she said she wasn’t going to do it, it was crazy with the second vote coming up. She said if Evans-Tindale passed, if they overrode the veto, she wasn’t going to stay on the nets. And when I came home this afternoon, she was gone, and all her equipment with her.”
“Jesus,” van Liesvelt said.
“I called about three,” Held said, reappearing with two glasses. He handed one to Mason, along with a couple of plastic slugs, and reseated himself next to van Liesvelt. “So I guess she was gone then. I’d just got out of surgery, heard from a guy in the waiting room.” He shook his head. “Man, I couldn’t believe it. They won’t sign the Conventions, and then they turn around and pass this shit.”
“I was on my way back from campus,” Mason said unexpectedly. She had been a student at a real college, still held an extension card from the university. “I was waiting for the commuter train, there must’ve been twenty of us, and this guy—I hardly know him, his name’s Bill something, or maybe Paul. Anyway, he comes up to me and says, ‘You’re on the nets, right? Did you hear they overrode the veto?’ And I looked at him—I still can’t believe I did this—and I said, ‘You got to be kidding. That can’t be right, you must’ve got it wrong.’ And he says, ‘No, they’ve got the monitors on in the pizza place’—there’s a pizza place right next to the train station—‘and they broke into the soaps to make the announce-merit.’ So I went over there, and sure enough, the monitor’s on, and the screen’s showing the vote count. And I just stood there. I thought for a minute he’d gotten the story backward, that we’d won, because the numbers were so high for Evans-Tindale, but he hadn’t. They’d overridden it, no question. No appeal, no nothing. I damn near didn’t bother getting on the train.”
“I was on the net,” Helling said. “I—” He stopped, glancing over his shoulder at Aledort, who was scowling, and began again. “I’d just drifted back into the BBS, riding the stream, and I thought—I don’t know what I thought. It felt like an earthquake, everybody trying to log on or off or to do something, all at once. I mean, the ground shook.” He waved his hands in the air, miming the motion. “Literally. I couldn’t keep my balance for a minute. And then everybody starting talking, shouting, and I ran for the nearest node and got the hell off the system.” He shook his head. “It’s still crazy out there. I got back on before I came over here. I thought maybe somebody would be talking sense out there, but it’s insane. Half the old spaces are shut down, the BBS is clogged solid with traffic, there’s new IC(E) in half the corporate spots I looked at. It’s just crazy.”
“Miss Kitty shut down the saloon,” Cerise said. “And left some very nasty IC(E) behind her.” She didn’t need to add any more to it: they all knew Miss Kitty, did business with her, and knew Cerise as well.
“Well, she was in a really bad position,” Helling said. “Under the new laws, my God, everything she traded in was felony material.”
“Wonderful,” van Liesvelt said. “I have to admit, Trouble’s got a point. It’s not exactly going to be safe, staying in the shadows.”
“Only if you’re not careful,” Cerise said.
