Eastern Standard Tribe

ploughed into him, bounced off of his dented armor, and would have fallen over had Lester not caught his arm and steadied him.

'Art, isn't it? How you doin', mate?'

Art gaped at him. He was thinner than he'd been when he tried to shake Art and Linda down in the doorway of the Boots, grimier and more desperate. His tone was just as bemused as ever, though. 'Jesus Christ, Lester, not now, I'm in a hurry. You'll have to rob me later, all right?'

Lester chuckled wryly. 'Still a clever bastard. You look like you're having some hard times, my old son. Maybe that you're not even worth robbing, eh?'

'Right. I'm skint. Sorry. Nice running into you, now I must be going.' He tried to pull away, but Lester's fingers dug into his biceps, emphatically, painfully.

'Hear you ran into Tom, led him a merry chase. You know, I spent a whole week in the nick on account of you.'

Art jerked his arm again, without effect. 'You tried to rob me, Les. You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, all right? Now let me go-I've got a train to catch.'

'Holidays? How sweet. Thought you were broke, though?'

A motorized scooter pulled up in the kerb lane beside them. It was piloted by a smart young policewoman with a silly foam helmet and outsized pads on her knees and elbows. She looked like the kid with the safety- obsessed mom who inflicts criminally dorky fashions on her daughter, making her the neighborhood laughingstock.

'Everything all right, gentlemen?'

Lester's eyes closed, and he sighed a put-upon sigh that was halfway to a groan.

'Oh, yes, officer,' Art said. 'Peter and I were just making some plans to see our auntie for supper tonight.'

Lester opened his eyes, then the corners of his mouth incremented upwards. 'Yeah,' he said. ''Sright. Cousin Alphonse is here all the way from Canada and Auntie's mad to cook him a proper English meal.'

The policewoman sized them up, then shook her head. 'Sir, begging your pardon, but I must tell you that we have clubs in London where a gentleman such as yourself can find a young companion, legally. We thoroughly discourage making such arrangements on the High Street. Just a word to the wise, all right?'

Art blushed to his eartips. 'Thank you, Officer,' he said with a weak smile. 'I'll keep that in mind.'

The constable gave Lester a hard look, then revved her scooter and pulled into traffic, her arm slicing the air in a sharp turn signal.

'Well,' Lester said, once she was on the roundabout, 'Alphonse, seems like you've got reason to avoid the law, too.'

'Can't we just call it even? I did you a favor with the law, you leave me be?'

'Oh, I don't know. P'raps I should put in a call to our friend PC McGivens. He already thinks you're a dreadful tosser-if you've reason to avoid the law, McGivens'd be bad news indeed. And the police pay very well for the right information. I'm a little financially embarrassed, me, just at this moment.'

'All right,' Art said. 'Fine. How about this: I will pay you 800 Euros, which I will withdraw from an InstaBank once I've got my ticket for the Chunnel train to Calais in hand and am ready to get onto the platform. I've got all of fifteen quid in my pocket right now. Take my wallet and you'll have cabfare home. Accompany me to the train and you'll get a month's rent, which is more than the police'll give you.'

'Oh, you're a villain, you are. What is it that the police will want to talk to you about, then? I wouldn't want to be aiding and abetting a real criminal-could mean trouble.'

'I beat the piss out of my coworker, Lester. Now, can we go? There's a plane in Paris I'm hoping to catch.'

31.

I have a brand-new translucent Sony Veddic, a series 12. I bought it on credit-not mine, mine's sunk; six months of living on plastic and kiting balance-payments with new cards while getting the patents filed on the eight new gizmos that constitute HumanCare's sole asset has blackened my good name with the credit bureaus.

I bought it with the company credit card. The company credit card. Our local Baby Amex rep dropped it off himself after Doc Szandor faxed over the signed contract from the Bureau of Health. Half a million bucks for a proof-of-concept install at the very same Route 128 nuthatch where I'd been 'treated.' If that works, we'll be rolling out a dozen more installs over the next year: smart doors, public drug-prescription stats, locator bracelets that let 'clients'-I've been learning the nuthouse jargon, and have forcibly removed 'patient' from my vocabulary-discover other clients with similar treatment regimens on the ward, bells and whistles galore.

I am cruising the MassPike with HumanCare's first-ever employee, who is, in turn, holding onto HumanCare's first-ever paycheck. Caitlin's husband has been very patient over the past six months as she worked days fixing the ailing machinery at the sanitarium and nights prototyping my designs. He's been likewise patient with my presence on his sagging living-room sofa, where I've had my nightly ten-hour repose faithfully since my release. Caitlin and I have actually seen precious little of each other considering that I've been living under her roof. (Doc Szandor's Cambridge apartment is hardly bigger than my room at the hospital, and between his snoring and the hard floor, I didn't even last a whole night there.) We've communicated mostly by notes commed to her fridge and prototypes left atop my suitcase of day-clothes and sharp-edged toiletries at the foot of my makeshift bed when she staggered in from her workbench while I snored away the nights. Come to think of it, I haven't really seen much of Doc Szandor, either-he's been holed up in his rooms, chatting away on the EST channels.

I am well rested. I am happy. My back is loose and my Chi is flowing. I am driving my few belongings to a lovely two-bedroom-one to sleep in, one to work in-flat overlooking Harvard Square, where the pretty co-eds and their shaggy boyfriends tease one another in the technical argot of a dozen abstruse disciplines. I'm looking forward to picking up a basic physics, law, medicine and business vocabulary just by sitting in my window with my comm, tapping away at new designs.

We drive up to a toll plaza and I crank the yielding, human-centric steering wheel toward the EZPass lane. The dealer installed the transponder and gave me a brochure explaining the Sony Family's approach to maximum driving convenience. But as I approach the toll gate, it stays steadfastly down.

The Veddic's HUD flashes an instruction to pull over to the booth. A bored attendant leans out of the toll booth and squirts his comm at me, and the HUD comes to life with an animated commercial for the new, improved TunePay service, now under direct MassPike management.

The TunePay scandal's been hot news for weeks now. Bribery, corruption, patent disputes-I'd been gratified to discover that my name had been removed from the patent applications, sparing me the nightly hounding Fede and Linda and her fucking ex had been subjected to on my comm as the legal net tightened around them.

I end up laughing so hard that Caitlin gets out of the car and walks around to my side, opens the door, and pulls me bodily to the passenger side. She serenely ignores the blaring of the horns from the aggravated, psychotic Boston drivers stacked up behind us, walks back to the driver's side and takes the wheel.

'Thanks,' I tell her, and lay a hand on her pudgy, freckled arm.

'You belong in a loony bin, you know that?' she says, punching me in the thigh harder than is strictly necessary.

'Oh, I know,' I say, and dial up some music on the car stereo.

Acknowledgements

This novel was workshopped by the Cecil Street Irregulars, the Novelettes and the Gibraltar Point gang, and received excellent feedback from the first readers on the est-preview list (especially Pat York). Likewise, I'm indebted to all the people who read and commented on this book along the way.