TWO
He woke up on the outskirts of L.A. His eyes were gummy and he had a bad taste in his mouth. He was slightly hung over from the modest amount he had drunk at the party. He'd never had a strong tolerance for alcohol. He stopped at a charging station and found a restroom where he could wash his face and brush his teeth. The attendant behind his bulletproof barrier looked askance at his classic car and formal clothes. He pulled the razor out of the dashboard, then put it away. If he was going to be moving among the hoi polloi, an unshaven face might be good protective coloration.
There was a lot of L.A. to choose from. The Greater Los Angeles area stretched from Chula Vista to San Luis Obispo. Huge stretches of the megalopolis were Hispanic, and large areas were Ukrainian or Asiatic. In this immense, polyglot community was to be found everything that was happening in America.
He drove to Eagle Rock, an area that was still predominantly Old Establishment middle-class and found a motor inn that looked acceptable. In the lobby he punched the attention plate and the screen lit up. The clerk looked like a college girl working part-time out of her student apartment. "May I help you, sir?" She looked Hispanic and had a nice smile.
"I need a single room for a few days. Do your rooms have holo service and infonet screens?"
"Yes, sir, all our units are fully equipped. Please place your card in the slot and I'll key it for your room." Thor put his card in the slot and the girl's eyes widened when she read the credit rating.
"Is there a car rental nearby?" Thor asked.
"That information should be on the infonet, sir. All the nearby restaurants and entertainment centers will be listed, too. Just key in the name of your hotel: Omega Inns, Eagle Rock location number two."
"Thank you," Thor said. The girl's image winked out and the number of his unit appeared on the screen along with a disembodied voice for the visually impaired or the illiterate: "Your unit is five six six. Your unit is five six six. Enjoy your stay."
He parked the Porsche and took his bag up to the room. He chose some anonymous sports clothes from his small selection and found a nearby coffee shop for breakfast. Today he would institute his casual study of changes in holographic programming. He stopped in a convenience store and picked up several self-heating meals and appropriate beverages. This was going to call for a few inert days as a cushion veg, so he reminded himself to find a nearby dojo and make reservations for a daily workout.
With his bag of supplies in one arm, he stuck his card into the slot beside the door. The door slid open and he set the bag on a table. The room wasn't what he was used to these days, but it was at least as good as his first-year college digs had been. It was a small cubicle about five paces on a side, with a fungusbed large enough for two, a small table with two chairs, and a tiny bathroom. One wall was a picture window looking toward the old downtown section of L.A., where several small smoke plumes probably denoted modest riots. Best of all, another wall was covered by a holoscreen. He studied its controls and found a fairly complete listing of channels and services. It had a mask for retinal projection, but he disliked the gadgets. They gave him headaches and made it difficult to focus his eyes for an hour after he removed them.
He dragged a floor cushion before the screen, stuck his card in the screen slot, and keyed into the infonet He punched the keyboard for Media; Visual; History: –10 years; Daily program guide. An instant later the Greater Los Angeles guide for that date ten years previously began rolling slowly up the screen. He modified his request to the programming of the five major networks. He was instantly transported into a major nostalgia-wallow. There were all the programs he had grown up with. Many of them had been long-running series even at that date. At least one show in five had featured spacers in some way or other. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, space opera had become the premier format for action-adventure programming, and had stayed in that place for the next several decades. Only police and war series were even in competition.
There was Pioneers, set in the asteroid belt at the time of the earliest mining operations; Tarkovskygrad, about the terrible first years of Martian settlement; L-5, a semi-comedy in which the builders of the wholly artificial orbiting environments found themselves in a new, insane predicament every week. There was Space Marine!, which had been his favorite program while growing up, because Sam Taggart occasionally showed up as the senior commandant of the Corps. Makeup and computer enhancement had transformed the actor into a virtual duplicate of his grandfather.
Besides these historical and contemporary programs, there were many set in the fictional future of exploration. The science in those series had usually been so bad that even the fifteen-year-old Thor Taggart had winced, but they had abounded with energy, excitement and optimism. The series Aliens had featured a new first-contact story every week, many of them based on classic tales.
Documentaries about the progress of exploration and exploitation had been common as well, although they had never been nearly as popular as the pure entertainment programs. Thor keyed in a few minutes of each program to refresh his memory. He remembered many of the episodes. The dialogue and plotting were hopelessly simple-minded and naive to his adult sensibilities, but he could still feel a faint tingle of the excitement that had so stirred his adolescent imagination.
He spent the first half of the day going over the old shows, sometimes going back as far as forty years, long before he had been born. Always, a significant part of the programming had been space-oriented, expanding or shrinking as fads had made or dropped other genres. Virtually all of it had been sympathetic toward the adventure of space exploration. There was the occasional exception. Space Pirates, for instance, or the utterly bizarre Star Tarts, which had run for two seasons before the Islamic bloc had forced a worldwide crackdown on media porn. In all, it was much as he had remembered.
He opened one of the trays he had bought and poured water over it from the bathroom tap. The meal began to heat and reconstitute and he ate it with the plastic fork provided. He washed it down with genuine milk and felt fortified to face the next part. It was time to look in on contemporary programming.
After four excruciating hours he sat back in his cushion, appalled. His first selection had been titled Asteroid. It had sounded something like the old Pioneers. What he had watched instead had been the "family saga" of an incredibly rich and corrupt clan of psychopathic degenerates who mined gold (gold?!) from space rock, working slave-gangs of transported convicts. When they weren't chuckling over the death-agonies of the miners, they were usually indulging in a lot of kinky (off-screen) sex or crooked political wrangling, all of it amid surroundings of free-fall opulence fit to set any Earth slum-dweller frothing with rage and envy.
Then there had been Space Cop, an actioner about a team of handsome, incorruptible customs agents dedicated to keeping Earth free of goods smuggled in from space. In the space of a single hour they had dealt with a gang smuggling drugs made in secret, free-fall labs, another smuggling low-priced high-tech equipment, sure to put millions of Earthmen out of jobs, a third gang bringing back dangerous criminals exiled to Lunar colonies and a fourth bringing in a sinister political rabble-rouser. All four gangs were bloodily annihilated by the end of the hour. In this epic, "space scum" was one of the milder references to offworlders. Thor had a suspicion that, had media blue laws not been so strict, the references would have been considerably more graphic.
Frantically, he had switched around looking for something more hopeful. Every time he found any appearance by space settlers or explorers, they were invariably depicted as sociopaths, criminals, exploiters, sinister political schemers or, at best, deluded fools. How had he missed all this? The answer, of course, was that Bob was right: he had been hopelessly out of touch. He had spent too much of his life in colleges and with his rich friends and relatives. College establishments and the rich were always the last to accept change, or even notice it.
He needed to find out when this change had taken place. Had it been sudden or gradual? Had all networks changed at once or had one instituted it and the others followed? What was behind it? The sponsors? The Writer's Guild? It was a complex problem and he had no time to tackle it himself. All right, then, if he had spent too much time in the college network, at least he knew how to use it to get things done.
He keyed in the Greater L.A. University complex. When it appeared he keyed the Media Studies department and examined the sub-department headings. He selected Popular Holovision first and eliminated all the technical fields. He cross-referenced History of Programming and Media Propaganda. A list of courses and professors appeared. He eliminated them and keyed Independent Study Assistants For Hire. A long list of names appeared. All of them were grad students needing food, rent and beer money. His less fortunate friends in grad school had all worked the independent study network.
There were hundreds of names, but one attracted his notice instantly: Chih' Chin Fu. It used the old transliteration, before the adoption of Pinyin. The modern equivalent would probably be something like Jeijing Vung. It suggested a California family of more than a century s residence. There was no creature on Earth the equal of an old-time Californio for feeling out popular trends. It was imprinted on the nervous system.
He keyed the address code. The screen showed a blond young man with squarish features. "May I help you?" he asked in a heavy Ukrainian accent.
"I'm trying to find Chih' Chin Fu. I have a study to commission," Thor said.
"I'm Panas Chubar. Fu is my roommate. Just a moment." The screen panned to another part of the same room, where a thin young man sat amid a clutter of computer and infonet equipment. He wore a sleeveless coverall of silver fabric and his hair hung in a shoulder-length tangle. He looked sixteen but had to be older.
"Fu here," he said with a toothy smile.
"I'm Thor Taggart. I see in the U. infonet listing that you're qualified for independent study in trends and propaganda uses of holovision."
"Not only am I qualified," Fu said, "but I'm probably the best in the net."
"I'll give you a chance to prove it," Thor said. He outlined his problem. Throughout the recitation, the young grad student kept in continual motion. At first, Thor suspected some drug at work, but the boy moved very precisely, picking things up and putting them down, tapping out rhythms on the console before him, sipping periodically from a teacup. Thor decided that it was just an abundance of nervous energy. The kid spent too much of his time in front of a console.
"Let's see if I have it straight," Fu said. "You need to know the when, where, why, how and, most of all, who of the switchover from pro- to anti-spaceploitation in the pop holo medium?"
"That's it."
"Well, a study like that could take a while, and I have a heavy class load to cope with, plus a teaching assistantship."
"I don't have much time. How much would a rush job cost me?"
Fu scratched his bushy scalp. "Well, taking all the time and inconvenience into account, say, forty gee?"
Forty thousand dollars was a bit steep for a hungry grad student. Undoubtedly he could bargain the price down, but he didn't want to waste time and the money meant little to him, anyway. "Agreed. How soon can I have it? I'm only going to be in L.A. for a few days."
"Well, you're not too far from here. Will an hour from now do?"
"I said a rush job," Thor said, "but even the best in the net can't be that fast!"
"No, I got it right here." Fu rummaged through a file drawer and came up with a messy stack of printout sheets. "I did this a couple of months ago for a holoprop class. I was thinking of doing my thesis on it. You want me to transfer it to micro? That'll take a couple of hours, but I'll throw it in for free."
He had been neatly snookered. You had to admire that kind of gall. There was something in the way Fu moved—"Tomiki System?" he said on a hunch.
Fu gave him the toothy grin again. "Among others. You're aikidoka?"
"Among others," said Thor, smiling back, this time. "I'm looking for a good dojo. Could you recommend one?"
"I use the Honin Hall. It's about thirty minutes from where you are. I'll be heading over there this evening for a late workout You want to meet me there? It's jodo tonight, but you can probably find an instructor for some aikido."
"What time?"
"I go there at twenty-thirty. I'll flash you the address." He punched the location, then looked back up. "If you don't mind my asking, your name's Taggart, and your facial features resemble a certain gentleman of that name prominent in the early days of spaceploitation. Any connection?"
"If you're talking about Sam Taggart, I'm his grandson." This kid was quick.
"No kidding," said Fu, grinning. "And I only took you for forty gee! I'm going to be looking forward to meeting you in the flesh."
"Just bring the study. And yes, reduce it to micro. See you in a few hours." Fu broke the connection and Thor stretched. It was late afternoon and he'd accomplished a lot already. There was still a lot to get done today.
Leaving the Porsche in the subterranean parking garage of the hotel, he walked a few blocks to a rental agency and rented a battered electrical runabout. When he put in his deposit, his card got the raised-eyebrows treatment once again. That was another thing he had to change. His first stop was a bank, where he arranged for a more unobtrusive card, one which showed a modest credit balance. The teller showed no surprise at the request. Apparently, it was common for slumming rich types to adopt such protective coloration.
At a second-hand store he bought a workingman's outfit of trousers, tunic, vest and boots. He studied the array of cheap jewelry in the case at the purchase counter, but decided to pass it up. He knew vaguely that body decorations served as insignia of sorts, and he didn't want to send out the wrong signal through ignorance. He returned to the hotel to don his new apparel and by then it was time to make his way to the dojo.
Ronin Hall was located in the shabby, rundown Beverly Hills section, an area of thronged streets, shops selling cheap goods and old mansions cut up into slum housing for immigrants. Signs glared and flashed in multilingual profusion, projecting holographic images of goods or entertainments to be had. The dojo was located in a wing of a building which had once been the palatial home of a series of briefly famous flat-screen stars.
He saw no sign of Fu outside, so he went in. The place was arranged on several levels and from somewhere he could hear the clatter of a kendo class. In a side room, he caught the glitter of real swords, wielded by iaido practioners. A short Japanese with a slightly pockmarked face walked to Thor and bowed slightly. He wore a lightweight gi of the karate practitioner. "May I help you, sir?"
"I was to meet Chih' Chin Fu here," Thor said.
"He should be here in a few minutes for the jodo class. Are you a jodoka?"
"Aikido. I'm here from out of town and Fu said I might find an instructor for an aikido workout here."
"We might be able to accommodate you," the man said. "Dr. Kobayashi will be finishing his iaido class in five minutes. He's always looking for someone new to practice Tomiki system with. If you'll let me have your card, I'll put you down for an hour and get you an outfit." The man walked away with his card just as Fu walked in the door.
Fu was a bit taller than he had appeared on the screen. He still wore the silver coverall, with the addition of a beefeater hat and a brass-tipped walking stick. He grinned toothily as they shook hands. "You find somebody to practice with?"
"A Dr. Kobayashi," Thor affirmed.
"That old guy will work you to death. He just loves it. Look, I have to go change. We'll get together when the class breaks up and we'll go someplace where we can talk, okay?"
"Fine," Thor said. The manager came back with Thor's card and sparring clothes. In a dressing room, he changed into the long, black hakama trousers and white jacket. An elderly man with a white goatee introduced himself as Kobayashi and conducted him to a side room floored with straw mats. On the way, they passed the jodo class, which Fu was teaching. The students were sparring vigorously with fifty-one inch sticks and, by ancient custom, they wore no protective gear. Many of them already sported red marks and swellings where they had not defended quickly enough.
Kobayashi proved to be far stronger and fitter than he looked and was every bit as fierce as Fu had predicted. It was a long, hot, sweaty hour and Thor finished it sore and bruised, but he was feeling much better. He showered and resumed his street clothes.
Fu met him at the entrance. "You had dinner yet?"
"No. I'm starved." He realized that he was truly ravenous.
"I know a good place a few blocks from here. We can walk if you like."
"That sounds good. I need to work out some of these bruises. I'll leave my car here."
On the street, Fu studied him. "First thing, though, we have to find something for your head."
"My head?" Thor said, mystified.
"No question about it. You're trying to pass as a prole, aren't you? The clothes are okay, but the haircut's all wrong. Come on." A few doors down, Fu led him into a clothing shop where he selected a black silk bandanna and tied it around Thor's head buccaneer-fashion. "That's better." He turned to the girl at the sales counter. "You got any lipstick, my sweet?" he asked.
"What color?" she said, flashing iridescent eyelids.
"Yellow?"
She reached into her beltbag and came up with a stick of the requisite color. He drew a horizontal stripe beneath Thor's eyes and across his nose. "This is an Apache stripe. Face paint is very subdued this year."
"You aren't wearing any at all," Thor said.
"California students aren't wearing it this semester. Come on, let's go get something to eat."
On the way, they stopped in front of a bank and put their cards into the row of slots set into the facade. Thor keyed the instrument to transfer the forty thousand dollars from his account to Fu's. Fu handed over a plastic carrier with a tiny crystal imbedded in its face. Thor stuck the carrier into his pocket.
"That's the cheapest piece of first-rate scholarship you'll ever buy," Fu assured him.
Thor noted a glowing graffito on a stained brick wall, painted over the faded graffiti of years past. "What's that?" he asked. "I've been seeing that symbol everyplace since I got to L.A." The symbol consisted of two figures: ©1.
"You haven't run across that one before? It's been the top graffito for months!"
"I've been out of touch," Thor said, defensively.
"You must've been on the bottom of the Marianas Trench. The cross in the circle is one of the old astronomical symbols for Earth. The other figure, as you've no doubt already figured out, is a one. What's that make?"
"Earth First," Thor said.
"There you go," Fu said. "And here we are." They went into a small restaurant where robot carts wheeled among the tables, bearing trays of dimsum. The place was crowded and noisy. Most L.A. establishments were open twenty-four hours. They found an unoccupied table. A cart came by and Fu reached for his card but Thor made restraining motions. Fu wasted no time in returning his card to his pocket. Thor thrust his card into the cart's slot. "Help yourself," he said. They took bottles of beer from the refrigerated basket on the cart's bottom level and loaded their table with plates of pork buns, shu-mai, spring rolls and stuffed duck's feet.
"It's none of my business," Fu said, "but this study you've commissioned and got with such commendable speed is not what I'd expect from a scion of the illustrious founding families of our expansion into space. It's what I'd expect from a media consulting firm, or a programming survey analyst."
"You're right," Thor said. "It's none of your business." He dunked a pork bun into a sweet dipping sauce. "But, what the hell. I'll tell you anyway." He took the folded Earth First manifesto from his pocket and handed it to Fu. "This is what the Earth Firsters are going to put before the U.N. and the Space Council in a few days. They asked that we refrain from showing this around before they go public, but screw 'em. I don't owe them any favors." He found himself telling Fu the whole story; about his plans, the party, his talk with Bob and his revelatory viewing of holo programs that day. There was no real reason for saying all this, except that he had to talk to somebody, and he sensed a kindred spirit in Fu.
Fu handed the paper back. "I've been wondering when it'd come to this. It's been in the air a long time. It's only the first move, you know."
"I got that impression. Carstairs referred to it as an 'opening campaign.' What I can't figure is why the McNaughtons are backing it."
"I can't help you there. Big-business practice isn't my field. My field is media history and trend, and I know that the fastest way for a government to bring any medium to heel is to threaten to yank its broadcast license. That's the history of control, my friend. Once you control licensing, everything else falls right into your hands." He surveyed the litter of empty plates and bottles atop the table. "I think we've done all the damage we're going to do here. Do you feel up to some slumming or are you too tired?"
"I'm up to it," Thor said. "Are you offering to be my guide?"
"I can save you a lot of time. I'll steer you to just the kind of place your friend Robert Ciano would consider to be most educational. And all of it free, gratis."
"Then lead on." They walked back to his rented vehicle and Fu twirled his walking stick like a baton. The streets were as crowded as ever. Thor looked up and could not see a single star. The air of Los Angeles was clean these days, but it was so ablaze with light around the clock that on the clearest night it was difficult to see a full moon.
Fu examined the battered little electrocar with a critical eye, poking it here and there with his stick. "Good choice," he pronounced at last. "Very inconspicuous. What do you usually drive?"
"'A 2045 Porsche."
"I might've known. Manual drive?"
"The works. I even brake it manually. Or should I say pedally?"
Fu climbed into the vehicle and propped his stick between his knees. He leaned forward and keyed a destination into the dash control. '"Our first stop will be the Watts development. Ever been there?" Thor shook his head. "Well, it can be a rough place. If we should run into trouble, just remember: take no prisoners, call no cops and just walk away from it if you're in any condition to walk. That is, unless you feel like spending the next few months in the never-never-land of the L.A. court system."
"It's that bad?" Thor asked.
"My, my," Fu shook his head in wonderment, "you have been out of touch!"
Thor leaned back in his seat and watched the cityscape go by. All of the most splendid buildings were old ones. With their nighttime illumination, they gave the skyline a fairyland look. But Thor knew that, close up, most of them would be shabby and dilapidated.
"How about you?" Thor asked. "How did you come to do a study on changing attitudes toward the push into space?"
"Changing popular attitudes," Fu corrected. "The attitudes of people who think seriously about it have changed little if at all, for or against. People who take the trouble to study, to read and keep track of developments, usually form their own opinions. Popular opinion, mass culture, that's something completely different and that's where holovision comes in. The vast majority of people in the First World and much of the Third get virtually all of their information about the world around them from the holos. It's the most effective propaganda tool ever invented." He was gesticulating enthusiastically, clearly onto his pet subject.
"It's replaced virtually all other media. Radio is gone except for intervehicular communication. Television is obsolete because holo is so much more effective. Less than twenty percent of the population is literate because it's too difficult a skill to acquire and who'd read anyway, with their heads plugged into the holo every non-working hour? Those that have work to do, anyway."
He took a deep breath. "Well, you'll get most of this when you go over my study. I chose that subject first of all because it's the most notable trend in holo programming these days, but also because I've wanted for years to emigrate and I keep an eye on developments like that." He began tapping out a snare-drum rhythm on the dashboard.
"Where were you planning to head out to?"
"The Moon. I have relatives in Armstrong and some other places. My clan's a big one."
"You may have to move sooner than you thought, if you don't want to go out as a licensed contract employee. Of course, your field may not be one of the ones they put under government control."
"Don't you believe it, man. Anything having to do with media handling is going to be under their thumb. That's why I plan to get out as soon as I can."
"And what would you do out there? I know there's always a demand for people with technical skills. Is there a lot of media work to be had?"
"Sure. Miners and settlers and convicts need entertainment and information, too. They have their own networks and info services and there are always teaching positions to be had in the schools. But that's not what I expect to be doing."
"What, then?"
"Politics." He seemed reluctant to expand on it, perhaps thinking he had already said too much. Thor knew it wouldn't take much to get him talking again.
"I wasn't aware that there were any politics to practice offworld."
"There will be. Agitation for some degree of independence is already starting. Where there's political agitation, parties are going to form. And what's the first thing a political party needs?"
Thor thought a moment. "Publicity, media exposure."
"In a word," Fu said triumphantly, "propaganda. That's where I come in." He glanced sideways at Thor. "Look, you don't impress me as a professor or a business exec. The way I read it, you're a grad student like me. Am I right?"
"That's right. Space-habitation engineering."
"So you've spent, what, six or seven straight years in university?"
"Closer to eight," Thor admitted.
"Then how come you're so far out of touch with what's going on? Universities are medieval institutions, I grant you, but students are the trendiest people on Earth. Undergrads, especially."
"I got my degree at Yale," Thor said, self-consciously. "I've been doing thesis work at Cambridge and Bern."
"That explains a lot. Where were you hoping to work? But, hell, you're a Taggart. I guess you can just take your pick."
"It's not that easy," said Thor, shaking his head. "I'm headed for the Belt. They won't take any deadwood out there, and family connections don't count for much if you don't have the needed skills. Besides, there isn't much love lost between the Earthbound and offworld branches of my family. There are more Taggarts and Cianos out there than they know what to do with anyway."
"You figure on going to Luna first?"
"That's the way it's looking," Thor said. "This is in strictest confidence, but I may just be going out unofficially and incognito. I want to finish my grad work. By that time, I won't be able to emigrate except as a licensed public servant under contract. But I'll have no trouble getting a temporary visa to go to the Moon for study or tourism. From there, maybe I'll be able to buy a passage out to the Belt. Business is conducted on a pretty freewheeling basis out there."
Fu was silent for a moment. "I may be able to put you onto something. Let me think about it for a while."
The Watts complex was coming into view. It blocked out an unbelievable section of sky. Parts of it blazed with light but large sections were dark. Inaugurated on January 1, 2001, the Watts development was to have been the showpiece answer to the ugliness of urban sprawl and the decay of the inner cities. Touted as "the housing of the Twenty-First Century," the Watts development had called for the razing of an immense slum and replacing it with a forty-story structure of near self-sufficiency. The upper levels were mostly for housing, the lower levels being devoted to shopping malls, entertainment arcades, schools, public services, even light manufacturing. It was to lead the way in solving the urban problems of a century.
Now it was a run-down, outdated slum area. It had been outdated before its completion. Such structures were too laborious to construct and could not keep up with the tide of immigration. In its early years, there had been fierce competition for housing in the Watts development. Now even the L.A. Police were reluctant to enter it.
As they slid from the freeway into the web of streets surrounding the development, Thor took manual control of the little vehicle. Fu pointed to a flashing sign which shifted to several languages in turn. The English part read: "Safe Parking." There was also an image of a car inside a stylized cage: the universal illit symbol for a guarded parking facility. They drove into the small lot and were stopped by a boy who stood in the center of the drive approach, holding a fire ax at port arms. As they climbed from the car, another boy, perhaps fourteen years old, emerged from a shack next to the drive. Inside the shack, they could see a group of younger boys and girls, most of them with holo masks on their faces.
"You going into the Big W?" the boy asked. He wore a coverall of red imitation leather and had a chromed ball-peen hammer thonged to his chain-belt. His shaven scalp was covered by a tattooed spider and contact film transformed his eyes to scarlet orbs.
"For a couple of hours," Fu said. "How much?"
"Two C," the boy said, rubbing the thumb and fingers of his raised right hand in the gesture which had appeared coincidentally with the invention of paper money.
"Capitalist pig!" Fu protested. "Quarter-C, tops."
The boy grinned, displaying teeth enameled the color of blood. "One C, exploiter of the masses. Less buys less protection."
"Three-quarter C, enemy of the people," Fu said.
"Done," the boy said. "Three-quarter C for two hours. For every hour or partial hour after that, one half C. After ten hours, we declare you dead and ransom the car back to the rental company."
"Agreed," Fu said.
"Three-quarter C in advance. " The boy took a slotted credit box from his belt and Thor thrust his card into it, transferring seventy-five dollars. The boy in red turned and said something to the ax-bearer, speaking fast in a dialect Thor couldn't follow, although it seemed to have some English words in it. The other boy tossed his ax into the back of the car, climbed in and drove the little vehicle into a caged area. There were several other conveyances there, some of them expensive models. Thor and Fu began to walk the two blocks to the Watts development.
"What was that language that little bandit was speaking?" Thor asked.
"Yankrainian. It's a youthspeak like Burmex, used by the twelve-to-sixteen crowd. There's two L.A. holo stations that use nothing else. On your toes, now. We're in Injun country."
A sour smell hung over the whole district, as if the sanitation systems had been failing for years. There were few people on the streets at this hour, and they displayed little curiosity toward Thor and his companion. The general attitude was one of dejected apathy,
"Stop looking around like you were expecting these poor losers to jump us," Fu said. "Relax. Nobody's going to bother us except groups of three or more. The gangs mostly hang out inside the complex."
"And that's where we're going," Thor said uneasily.
"You want to see what's happening, you have to take the risks." The hulking building was getting closer, looking more like a cliff than an artifact.
"Do you come down here often?" Thor asked.
"Maybe once a month. Down here is where the politics of despair are generated. To get the other end of the spectrum, I hire out part-time to a catering firm that supplies waiters for rich people's parties in the silicon-and-wine territory. They like the feeling of having humans act as servants for them. I can pick up a lot by listening to them talk."
"I'm surprised the McNaughtons haven't picked that up yet. They're still high-tech, only robot servants."
Now they were at the base of the structure. The walls were covered with luminescent graffiti to a height of twenty feet. Splintered glass crunched under their feet as they walked through a wide entranceway from which the doors had long since disappeared. The entrance opened onto a huge atrium twenty stories in height. Lining the atrium were twenty elevator tubes. Four or five of the elevators seemed to be in working order. The other tubes were filled with several stories of trash cast in by upper-level dwellers.
On the lowest levels, lurid neon and holographic signs enticed passersby into establishments catering to every possible taste. Bizarrely-costumed groups wandered about aimlessly. In the center of the atrium, a group of perhaps fifty persons in all-enveloping sackcloth robes and masked hoods constantly blew the same two notes on battered trumpets.
"Slaves of the New Apocalypse," Fu said, nodding toward the horn-blowers. "They've been blowing those two notes in shifts for more than a year now. They figure if they keep it up long enough, God will notice and destroy the world and take them up to heaven."
They mounted a stair to the second level, where entertainment was the order of the day or night. Everywhere, huddled against the walls or sprawled in the walkways, were the inert forms of drunks and druggies. Colored smokes emerged from dim doorways and the sound of music was raucous and unending. Holographic shills appeared outside entranceways and clamored for attention, promising untold delights to be had within.
Most of the dense crowds wore the shabby clothing of the proles or the idiosyncratic uniforms of youth gangs. Some were in the native dress of whatever part of the world they had fled to come to this place. Dozens of languages were to be heard. Here and there were individuals or small groups in expensive, fashionable clothes; the bored rich out for low amusements among their inferiors. They were invariably accompanied by hulking bodyguards.
Thor found it a disturbingly stimulating place. It was far livelier than the dismal streets outside, but its grotesque combination of gaiety and misery was disorienting. He leaned on a railing overlooking the atrium floor and nodded to a crowd of Francophone Asians filing into a restaurant. "What do they come here for?" he asked. "I mean, not just here, but L.A. Hell, all of the U.S. is headed down the tubes. That's no surprise, of course, what with the insane redistribution of productive middle-class income to dole-hungry lower classes, while upper classes are immune to serious taxation. Not to mention the socially self-destructive educational policies and the legislations catering only to the special interest groups. What draws all these immigrants here?"
"Because, compared to whatever Third World hellhole they come from, this is still heaven."
"It's appalling," Thor said. "What is there for them to do when they get here?"
"Very little," Fu said, pushing back his hat, his eyes following a richly-dressed woman trailed by a security robot. "This country was always the immigrant's dream, but it was built by taking land away from Indians and giving it to the immigrants. When most of the Indian land was gone, there was industry opening up and needing lots of labor. Now that's gone, too.
"The frontier's in space now, and space unfortunately isn't a frontier for the masses. If all the resources of the planet were devoted to building ships and sending out as many people as possible, it wouldn't put a dent in the annual birth rate." He shifted his grip on his stick slightly as four youths in leather masks walked by, studying the two truculently through slanted goggles. The four wore metal-plated gloves. They passed on and Fu relaxed slightly.
"What's left," Fu went on, "is despair and envy."
"Despair I can understand," Thor commented, "but why envy?"
"That brings us back to holo programming. You saw some of this in your sampling today, but it pervades all of popular programming, not just the space-oriented series like Asteroids. Everywhere, the emphasis is on the doings and possessions of the absurdly rich. These people we see all around us here spend most of their day, vicariously, amid the surroundings of the filthy rich and they know that they'll never have access to a life like that. Worse, they can't even have the illusion that the rich and powerful are somehow superior to themselves. They see that those people are just jerks like everybody else."
"So what can they do?" Thor asked.
"They can vote," Fu said. "With any degree of solidarity, the unemployed or semi-employed underclass forms the most powerful voting bloc in any nation that has a popular vote at all. That's too much potential political power to just leave lying around unexploited. Earth First has figured a way to make use of them." He nodded to a group of men who had just entered the complex. They looked like factory workers just coming off shift from some light industry facility nearby. They wore coveralls with a company logo on the breast that Thor couldn't make out, but each wore another device on his back that was large enough to read from the second level; it was the symbol ©1.
"Now they're being told that it's the offworlders that're bleeding them," Fu said. "Precious tax money is going into expensive projects in space from which they derive no benefit. It's a stroke of genius, really."
"Why do you say that?" Opposite them on the same level, he saw a sign advertising a drug service which tailored its product to the body chemistry of the buyer.
"Well, because you can have great big demonstrations and mass rallies without ugly pogroms. After all, the people they're learning to hate are millions of klicks away."
Suddenly, Thor was profoundly depressed. The sheer immensity of the problem paralyzed the mind. "Come on," he said, "let's go."
"But there's lots more to see," Fu protested. "You haven't even gone inside one of the pain palaces yet."
"Not tonight," Thor said. "I'll come back later. I've had enough for now."
"It's a little too much to take in all at once," Fu agreed, leading the way back down to the entrance. "Rest up tomorrow and I'll take you to some other places. There's a religious revival over on Cahuenga that's been going on for three months. You have to see it to understand what despair is all about."
They walked back out through the littered entrance and found the four leather-masked men waiting outside. "You belong to the Baron," intoned one in a hieratic voice.
Fu smiled. "We're just sightseers, friends. We don't even have anything valuable on us." He held his stick lightly by the middle, balanced casually over one shoulder.
"We don't steal," said one. "We've vowed two goats to Baron Samedi. You're it." With no more warning than that, they attacked.
If Thor had had to think about it, he would have died in the next second. The attack was so sudden, so unprovoked, so unbelievable, that the conscious part of his mind still had no idea what was happening. The unconscious part, though, had been conditioned by thousands of hours in the dojo, so that thought was unnecessary. He sidestepped the knife before his senses even registered its presence and his right hand shot out into the bump in the center of the mask, between the slanting eyepieces of the goggles. The deadly shomen-ate crushed the man's nose to a pulp, jerking his head backward. A second man was already swinging a chain overhand toward his head and Thor stepped inside its arc, blocking overhead with his left forearm as the stiffened fingers of his right hand lanced upward beneath the man's sternum. The attacker doubled up, gasping. The vicious blow to the solar plexus could easily render a man unconscious, and this one did.
Thor looked about wildly and saw the other two masked men lying peacefully on the sidewalk. Fu leaned with both hands on the top of his cane, his hat at a jaunty angle, looking fresh and elegant and absurdly resembling a soft-shoe dancer. Thor hadn't heard the impacts of the stick, but they had been effective. A number of people went into or out of the building, sparing no more than a glance for the aftermath of the little battle.
"It worked," Thor said, wonderingly. "It really worked!" He began to notice a burning pain across his back, where the chain had connected after his block.
"Worked just fine," Fu said. "You've never done it for real?"
Thor shook his head and knelt by his first attacker. "I might have killed this one," he said, tugging at the mask. The mask came off, revealing a blotchy, pale face. The man was around thirty and had a scraggly red beard. He was breathing stertorously and was bleeding from the nose, but seemed otherwise undamaged.
"He's fine," Fu said. "A skull that thick would be hard to damage. They'll all live. As I advised earlier, we won't bother the police. These vacuum-heads would just sue us. Come on."
Thor got up and walked with Fu back toward the parking lot. He began to tremble slightly with delayed reaction and thrust his hands into his pockets to hide it. "Would they have killed us?"
"Deader'n hell," Fu assured him. "The courts won't touch them, but don't despair. Baron Samedi is going to be very pissed off at them. Probably turn them into zombies." He thought for a moment. "Not that it'd be much of a change. "
Something struck Thor. "That one I unmasked was white. I thought voudon followers were all black. Haitians, mostly."
"Not any more," Fu said.
They retrieved the car and set out for Fu's apartment. For once, Thor was glad to have an autopilot. The sudden, shocking outburst of violence had shaken him badly. When they were out on the freeway, Fu broke the silence.
"Thor, there's someone you need to contact when you get to Luna. Man by the name of Martin Shaw. He's a cousin, sort of. The name Shaw is Chinese, by the way, not English, like George Bernard Shaw. He doesn't look very Chinese, though. He's a Eurasian from Singapore. Kind of like Lenin, he looks slightly Asiatic to Westerners and slightly European to Asians. Anyway, he's a smuggler these days, strictly respectable, though. And he's a revolutionary, which is what got him kicked off Earth in the first place. He was sent out from Singapore after some indiscretions involving explosives and government buildings. Of course they would've shot him for that, so he let them pick him up for publishing his unlicensed newspaper before the other things could be pinned on him.
"They sent him up to the Tranquillitatis relocation Center and he was running the place in a month. He busted or bribed his way out, I don't know which, and now he's big in the underground economy. The important thing is, he has his own ship and he can probably get you out to the Belt."
"He sounds like a man of many talents," Thor said. "How would I get in contact with him?"
"He's sometimes to be found in the Earthview Room of the Armstrong Hilton. Ask around and use my name. If he doesn't remember me, remind him that I belong to the L.A. laundry-restaurant-and-computer Fus."
At his apartment building, Fu got out of the car, then leaned in the driver's window. "You handled yourself really well tonight, for a Yale man. Keep in touch." He sauntered toward the building, twirling the cane and then breaking into a quick Maurice Chevalier dance step. Thor smiled and set the car for his inn. He hadn't looked forward to a good night's sleep like this in a long time.