his bitch Tequila lived, give her some lingerie, and maybe give Harv some chocolate.
Harv was presumed by both Bud and Tequila to be Bud's son. He was five, which meant that he had been conceived in a much earlier cycle of Bud and Tequila's break-up-and-make-up relationship. Now the bitch was pregnant again, which meant that Bud would have to bring even more gifts to her place when he came around. The pressures of fatherhood!
One day Bud targeted a particularly well-dressed family because of their fancy clothes. The man was wearing a business suit and the woman a nice clean dress, and they were carrying a baby all dressed up in a white lacy thing, and they had hired a porter to help them haul their luggage away from the Aerodrome. The porter was a white guy who vaguely reminded Bud of himself, and he was incensed to see him acting as a pack animal for blacks. So as soon as these people got away from the bustle of the Aerodrome and into a more secluded neighborhood, Bud approached them, swaggering in the way he'd practiced in the mirror, occasionally pushing his Sights up on his nose with one index finger.
The guy in the suit was different from most of them. He didn't try to act like he hadn't seen Bud, didn't try to skulk away, didn't cringe or slouch, just stood his ground, feet planted squarely, and very pleasantly said, 'Yes, sir, can I be of assistance?' He didn't talk like an American black, had almost a British accent, but crisper.
Now that Bud had come closer, he saw that the man had a strip of colored cloth thrown around his neck and over his lapels, dangling down like a scarf. He looked well-housed and well-fed for the most part, except for a little scar high up on one cheekbone.
Bud kept walking until he was a little too close to the guy. He kept his head tilted back until the last minute, like he was kicking back listening to some loud tunes (which he was), and then suddenly snapped his head forward so he was staring the guy right in the face. It was another way to emphasize the fact that he was packing, and it usually did the trick. But this guy did not respond with the little flinch that Bud had come to expect and enjoy. Maybe he was from some booga-booga country where they didn't know about skull guns.
'Sir,' the man said, 'my family and I are on the way to our hotel. We have had a long journey, and we are tired; my daughter has an ear infection. If you would state your business as expeditiously as possible, I would be obliged.'
'You talk like a fucking Vicky,' Bud said.
'Sir, I am not what you refer to as a Vicky, or I should have gone directly there. I would be obliged if you could be so kind as to moderate your language in the presence of my wife and child.'
It took Bud a while to untangle this sentence, and a while longer to believe that the man really cared about a few dirty words spoken within earshot of his family, and longer yet to believe that he had been so insolent to Bud, a heavily muscled guy who was obviously packing a skull gun.
'I'm gonna fucking say whatever I fucking want to your bitch and your flicking brat,' Bud said, very loud. Then he could not keep himself from grinning. Score a few points for Bud!
The man looked impatient rather than scared and heaved a deep sigh. 'Is this an armed robbery or something? Are you sure you know what you are getting into?'
Bud answered by whispering 'hut' under his breath and firing a Crippler into the man's right bicep. It went off deep in the muscle, like an M-80, blowing a dark hole in the sleeve of the man's jacket and leaving his arm stretched out nice and straight— the trike now pulling without anything to oppose it. The man clenched his teeth, his eyes bulged, and for a few moments he made strangled grunting noises from way down in his chest, making an effort not to cry out.
Bud stared at the wound in fascination. It was just like shooting people in a ractive. Except that the bitch didn't scream and beg for mercy. She just turned her back, using her body to shield the baby, and looked over her shoulder, calmly, at Bud. Bud noticed she had a little scar on her cheek too.
'Next I take your eye,' Bud said, 'then I go to work on the bitch.'
The man held up his good hand palm out, indicating surrender. He emptied his pocket of hard Universal Currency Units and handed them over. And then Bud made himself scarce, because the monitors— almond-size aerostats with eyes, ears, and radios— had probably picked up the sound of the explosion and begun converging on the area. He saw one hiss by him as he rounded the corner, trailing a short whip antenna that caught the light like a hairline crack in the atmosphere.
Three days later, Bud was hanging around the Aerodrome, looking for easy pickings, when a big ship came in from Singapore. Immersed in a stream of thousand arrivals was a tight group of some two dozen solidly built, very dark-skinned black men dressed in business suits, with Strips of colored cloth draped around their necks and little scars on their cheekbone.
It was later that night that Bud, for the first time in his life, heard the word
'Yup,' said the guy, who had seemed unaccountably shocked to see Bud's face on the Street, and who was annoyingly distracted all of a sudden, swiveling his head to look all ways.
'They must be having a convention or something,' Bud theorized. 'I rolled one of 'em the other night.'
'Yeah, I know,' his friend said.
'Huh? How'd you know that?'
'They ain't having a convention, Bud. All of those Ashanti— except the first one-came to town hunting for you.'
Paralysis struck Bud's vocal cords, and he felt lightheaded, unable to concentrate.
'I gotta go,' his friend said, and removed himself from Bud's vicinity.
For the next few hours Bud felt as though everyone on the street was looking at him. Bud was certainly looking at them, looking for those suits, those colored strips of cloth. But he caught sight of a man in shorts and a T-shirt— a black man with very high cheeks, one of which was marked with a tiny scar, and almost Asian-looking eyes in a very high state of alertness. So he couldn't rely on the Ashanti wearing stereotyped clothing.
Very soon after that, Bud swapped clothes with an indigent down on the beach, giving up all his black leather and coming away with a T-shirt and shorts of his own. The T-shirt was much too small; it bound him under the armpits and pressed against his muscles so that he felt the eternal twitching even more than usual. He wished he could turn the stimulators off now, relax his muscles even for one night, but that would require a trip to the mod parlor, and he had to figure that the Ashanti had the mod parlors all staked out. He could have gone to any of several brothels, but he didn't know what kind of connections these Ashanti might have— or even what the hell an Ashanti was, exactly-and he wasn't sure he could get a boner under these circumstances anyway.
As he wandered the streets of the Leased Territories, primed to level his Sights at any black person who blundered into his path, he reflected on the unfairness of his fate. How was he to know that guy belonged to a tribe? Actually, he should have known, just from the fact that he wore nice clothes and didn't look like all the other people. The very apartness of those people should have been a dead giveaway. And his lack of fear should have told him something. Like he couldn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to mug him.
Well, Bud had been that stupid, and Bud didn't have a phyle of his own, so Bud was screwed. Bud would have to go get himself one real quick, now.
He'd already tried to join the Boers a few years back. The Boers were to Bud's kind of white trash what these Ashanti were to most of the blacks. Stocky blonds in suits or the most conservative sorts of dresses, usually with half a dozen kids in tow, and my god did they ever stick together. Bud had paid a few visits to the local laager, studied some of their training ractives on his home mediatron, put in some extra hours at the gym trying to meet their physical standards, even gone to a couple of horrific bible-study sessions. But in the end, Bud and the Boers weren't much of a match. The amount of church you had to attend was staggering-it was like
The Vickys wouldn't take him in a million years, of course. Almost all the other tribes were racially oriented, like those Parsis or whatever. The Jews wouldn't take him unless he cut a piece of his dick off and learned
