chapter ELEVEN
“I think we’ve got a balance,” said the blonde technician. Her voice whispered out to every human on Elysium except for Don Slade. “We’re going to begin coupling in.” Her fingers played over the banks of rocker switches before her.
“A little up in the thirties, I think,” said her bald companion. The blonde’s fingers replaced a nod. They touched controls and sharpened the color of the images forming in her mind, her companion’s mind, and in those of the other thirteen thousand Elysians with right-brain implants.
The bald technician rubbed his temples. “Blessed Lord,” he grumbled. “That spike almost took the top off my skull. And just the mural, not something he’d been through himself.”
“How’s this?” asked the blonde as the images firmed.
“Perfect,” said her companion. He touched one of his own controls, minusculely changing the attitude of the hidden probe aimed at the back of Slade’s head.
“I had the controls set down, just cracked enough to get a reading, I thought. Really.”
“I’m not blaming you,” the bald technician said. He had closed his eyes. “I never knew an affect to peak like that either. I just hope the shunts catch the next spike the way they’re supposed to. Or—” he smiled, covering a wince of remembered pain— “our guest is going to be very surprised when his audience starts to scream just as he gets to the good part.”
Then the two of them relaxed behind their instruments. With the ease of long experience, they let Don Slade’s words and the thoughts like sharks beneath those words hiss simultaneously through their own minds.
“The ship on which I hired passage,” the speaker was saying, “had a lot of military types aboard. There’d been a lot of fighting on Friesland in the recent past. Hard-cases had signed on with one side or another. Now that things had settled down, they were leaving; and sometimes one step ahead of the White Mice, the authorities. Passes weren’t being checked very carefully. The Colonel—ah, President Hammer, the new executive, seemed to figure that it was as cheap to ship the trash out as it was to cull them and shoot them.
“Or just shoot them, I guess—” A vivid image of bound figures collapsing against a shot-burned wall; a smile on the speaker’s face that matched the image much better than it did his merchant persona. “I hear that might’ve been discussed before a fellow named Pritchard, close to the President, put his foot down.”
Elysium watched the men with the uniforms and bearing of military men who filled a small, tense room. Young men in battle-dress stood beside the door. The seated men had the age and rank. They were scowling, several of them ready to jump to their feet. Danny Pritchard in civilian clothes was clicking off, coldly as an abacus, the long-term effects of a present resort to terror.
Don Slade was not a figure in his own vision. The scene was tinged red with suppressed violence. Beneath the physical details ran an awareness of the weight of Slade’s pistol holster and the smooth hardness of the mini-grenade concealed in his left hand. The big man was poised to clear the room if Hammer ordered his friend’s arrest.
“I wasn’t too worried about the other passengers,” Slade was saying. His voice was a pleasant tenor, sharply at variance with the jagged images in his mind. It was always the striking memories that remained, of course. But what the subject found striking depended on the life that had brought him to them.
“I’d turned all my, ah, wares to cash, and I figured to arrange a bank transfer when I got home to Tethys. The others aboard the ship, a tramp with just the registry number GAC 59, weren’t the sort of folks I’d have wanted to go to sleep with if I’d had anything worth stealing. But I didn’t, and they knew it, and I figured I could handle minor annoyances about as well as the next guy.” The smile again, and the great, scarred fingers of one hand caressing the knuckles of the other.
“Thing is,” Don Slade continued, “there was one thing I had that the others turned out to want: my—trading experience, for the venture they were planning. . . .”