Crystal Express by Bruce Sterling

Author:Bruce Sterling [Sterling, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf

SPOOK

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1983.

For Rudy Rucker

The spook was peeling off from orbit, headed for Washington, D.C., and it felt just great. The spook twisted convulsively in his seat, grinning out the Plexiglas at the cheery red-hot glow of the shuttle's wind edges.

Far below, the unnatural green of genetically altered forests showed the faint scars of old-time roads and fence lines The spook ran long, narrow, agile fingers through the roots of his short- cropped blue hair. He hadn't made groundfall in ten months. Already the cooped-up feeling of the orbiting zaibatseries was peeling off cold and crisp like a snake's skin.

The shuttle decelerated through Mach 4 with a faint, delicious shiver. The spook twisted in his seat and turned a long slanted green glance past the sleeping plutocrat in the seat beside him and at a woman across the aisle. She had that cool starved zaibatsery look and those hollow veinwebby eyes.... Looked like the gravity was giving her trouble already, she'd spent too much time floating alone those low-grav zaibatsery axes of rotation. She'd pay for it when they made groundfall, when she'd have to shuffle all cute from waterbed to waterbed, like helpless prey.... The spook looked down his hands were making unconscious twitchy clawing motions in his lap. He picked them up and shook the tension out of them. Silly little hands....

The forests of the Maryland Piedmont skinned by like green video. Washington and the DNA recombo labs of Rockville, Maryland, were 1,080 clean ticking seconds away. He couldn't remember when he'd ever had so much fun. Inside his right ear the computer whispered, whispered....

The shuttle albatrossed down on the reinforced runway, and airport groundcraft foamed it cool. The spook decamped, clutching his valise.

A chopper was waiting for him from the private security apparat of the Replicon corporation. While it flew him to Replicon's Rockville HQ, he had a drink, shuddering a little at the intuitive impact of the unspoken paradigms of the chopper's interior. The techniques he had learned in the zaibatsery espionage camp oozed up his hind-brain like psychotic flashbacks. Under the impact of gravity, fresh air, and plush upholstery, whole sections of his personality were decaying at once.

He was as sweet and fluid as the heart of a rotting melon. This was fluidity, slick as grease, all right... Acting on intuition, he opened his valise, took a mechanical comb from a grooming case, and flicked it on with the iridescent nail of his right thumb. Black dye from the comb's vibrating teeth soothed and darkened his blue zaibatsery coif.

He unplugged the tiny jack that was coupled to the auditory nerve of his right ear and unclipped his computer earring. Humming to himself to cover the gaps in its whispering, he opened a flat case clipped inside the valise and restored the minicomp earring to its own padded socket. Inside the case were seven others, little jeweled globes packed with microminiature circuitry, soaked tight with advanced software. He plugged in a new one and hung it from his pale pierced lobe.

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