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作  家: xian (去日留痕) on board 'SFworld'
题  目: dogwalker (4/4)
来  源: 哈尔滨紫丁香站
日  期: Thu Sep 25 11:29:56 1997
出  处: byh.bbs@bbs.net.tsinghua.edu.cn

发信人: dogwalker (沉苇), 信区: SFworld
标  题: dogwalker (4/4)
发信站: BBS 水木清华站 (Thu Jul 17 02:16:31 1997)

  And that was it, right then I knew. Not a week
before, not when it would do any good. Right then
I finally knew it all, knew what Hunt had done.
Jesse Hunt never made mistakes. But he was also so
paranoid that he haired his bureau to see if the
babysitter stole from him. So even though he would
never accidentally enter the wrong P-word, he was
just the kind who would do it on purpose. "He
doublefingered every time," I says to Dog. "He's so
damn careful he does his password wrong the first
time every time, and then comes in on his second
finger."
  "So one time he comes in on the first try, so
what?" He says this because he doesn't know com-
puters like I do, being half-glass myself.
  "The system knew the pattern, that's what. Jesse
H. is so precise he never changed a bit, so when we
came in on the first try, that set off alarms. It's my
fault, Dog, I knew how crazy paranoidical he is, I
knew that something was wrong, but not till this
minute I didn't know what it was. I should have
nown, I'm sorry, you never should have gotten me
into this, I'm sorry, you should have listened to me
when I told you something was wrong, I shouid have
known, I'm sorry."
  What I done to Doggy that I never meant to do.
What I done to him! Anytime, I could have thought
of it, it was all there inside my glassy little head, but
no, I didn't think of it till after it was way too late.
And maybe it's because I didn't want to think of it
maybe it's because I really wanted to be wrong about
the green cards, but however it flew, I did what I
do, which is to say I'm not the pontiff in his fancy
chair, by which I mean I can't be smarter than
myself.
  Right away he called the gentlebens of Ossified
Crime to warn them, but I was already plugged into
the library sucking news as fast as I could and so I
knew it wouldn't do no good, cause they got all
seven of the big boys and their nitwit taster, too,
locked up good and tight for card fraud.
  And what they said on the phone to Dogwalker
made things real clear. "We're dead," says Doggy.
  "Give them time to cool," says I.
  "They'll never cool," says he. "There's no chance,
they'll never forgive this even if they know the whole
truth, because look at the names they gave the cards
to, it's like they got them for their biggest boys on
the borderline, the habibs who bribe presidents of
little countries and rake off cash from octopods like
Shell and ITT and every now and then kill somebody
and walk away clean. Now they're sitting there in
jail with the whole life story of the organization in
their brains, so they don't care if we meant to do it
or not. They're hurting, and the only way they k
to make the hurt go away is to pass it on to somebodp
else. And that's us. They want to make us hurt, and
hurt real bad, and for a long long time."
  I never saw Dog so scared. That's the only reason
we went to the.feds ourselves. We didn't ever want
to stool, but we needed their protection plan, it was
our only hope. So we offered to testify how we did
it, not even for immunity, just so they'd change our
faces and put us in a safe jail somewhere to work
off the sentence and come out alive, you know?
That's all we wanted.
  But the feds, they laughed at us. They had the
inside guy, see, and he was going to get immunity
for testifying. "We don't need you," they says to us;
"and we don't care if you go to jail or not. It was
the big guys we wanted."
  "If you let us walk," says Doggy, "then they'll
think we set them up."
  "Make us laugh," says the feds. "Us work with
street poots like you? They know that we don't stoop
so low."
  "They bought from us," says Doggy. "If we're big
enough for them, we're big enough for the dongs."
  "Do you believe this?" says one fed to his identi-
cal junior officer. "These jollies are begging us to
take them into jail. Well listen tight, my jolly boys,
maybe we don't want to add you to the taxpayers'
expense account, did you think of that? Besides, all
we'd give you is time, but on the street, those boys
will give you time and a half, and it won't cost us a
dime."
  So what could we do? Doggy just looks like some-
body sucked out six pints, he's so white. On the way
out of the fedhouse, he says, "Now we're going to
find out what it's like to die."
  And I says to him, "Walker, they stuck no gun in
your mouth yet, they shove no shiv in your eye. We
still breathing, we got legs, so let s walk out of here.
  "Walk!" he says. "You walk out of G-boro, glass-
head, and you bump into trees."
  "So what?" says I. "I can plug in and pull out all
the data we want about how to live in the woods.
Lots of empty land out there. Where do you think
the marijuana rows "
  "I'm a city boy," he says. "I'm a city boy. Now
we're standing out in front, and he's looking around.
"In the city I got a chance, I know the city."
  "Maybe in New York or Dallas," says I, "but G�
boro's just too small not even half a million people
you can't lose yourself deep enough here.
  "Yeah well," he says, still looking around. "It's
none of your business now anyway, Goo Boy. They
aren't blaming you, they're blaming me."
  "But it's my fault," says I, "and I'm staying with
you to tell them so."
  "You think they're going to stop and listen?" says
he.
  "I'll let them shoot me up with speakeasy so the
know I'm telling the truth."
  "It's nobody's fault," says he. "And I don't give
a twelve-inch poker whose fault it is anyway. You're
clean, but if you stay with me you'll get all muddy
too. I don't need you around, and you sure as hell
don't need me. Job's over. Done. Get lost."
  But I couldn't do that. The same way he couldn't
go on walking dogs, I couldn't just run off and leave
him to eat my mistake. "They know I was your P-
word man," says I. "'They'll be after me too."
  "Maybe for a while, Goo Boy. But you tr
your twenty percent into Bobby Joe's Face Shop, so
they aren't looking for you to get a refund, and then
stay quiet for a week and they'll forget all about
you."
  He's right but I don't care. "I was in for twenty
percent of rich," says I. "So I'm in for fifty percert
of trouble."
  All of a sudden he sees what he's looking for.
"There they are, Goo Boy, the dorks they sent to
hit me. In that Mercedes." I look but all I see are
electrics. Then his hand is on my back and he gives
me a shove that takes me right off the portico and
into the bushes, and by the time I crawl out, Doggy's
nowhere in sight. For about a minute I'm pissed
about getting scratched up in the plants, until I
realize he was getting me out of the way, so I
wouldn't get shot down or hacked up or lased out,
whatever it is they planned to do to him to get even.
  I was safe enough, right? I should've walked away,
I should've ducked right out of the city. I didn't even
have to refund the money. I had enough to go clear
out of the country and live the rest of my life where
even Occipital Crime couldn't find me.
  And I thought about it. I stayed the night in Mama
Pimple's flophouse because I knew somebody would
be watching my own place. All that night I thought
about places I could go. Australia. New Zealand.
Or even a foreign place; I could afford a good
vocabulary crystal so picking up a new language
would be easy.
  But in the morning I couldn't do it. Mama Pimple
didn't exactly ask me but she looked so worried and
all I could say was, "He pushed me into the bushes
and I don't know where he is."
  And she just nods at me and goes back to fixing
breakfast. Her hands are shaking she's so upset.
Because she knows that Dogwalker doesn't stand a
chance against Orphan Crime.
  "I'm sorry," says I.
  "What can you do?" she says. When they want
you, they get you. If the feds don't give you a new
face, you can't hide."
  "What if they didn't want him?" says I.
  She laughs at me. "The story's all over the street.
The arrests were in the news, and now everybody
knows the big boys are looking for Walker. The
want him so bad the whole street can smell it.
  "What if they knew it wasn't his fault?" says I.
What if they knew it was an accident? A mistake?"
  Then Mama Pimple squints at me-not many
people can tell when she's squinting, but I can-and
she says, "Only one boy can tell them that so they 11
believe it."
  "Sure, I know," says I.
  "And if that boy walks in and says, Let me tell you
why you don't want to hurt my friend Dogwalker-"
  "Nobody said life was safe, I says. "Besides,
what could they do to me that s worsehan what
already happened to me when I was nine.
  She comes over and just puts her hand on my
head, just lets her hand lie there for a few minutes,
and I know what I've got to do.
  So I did it. Went to Fat Jack's and told him I
wanted to talk to Junior Mint about Dogwalker, and
it wasn't thirty seconds before I was hustled on out
into the alley and driven somewhere with my face
mashed into the floor of the car so I couldn't tell
where it was. Idiots didn't know that somebody as
vertical as me can tell the number of wheel revo-
lutions and the exact trajectory of every curve. I
could've drawn a freehand map of where they
me. But if I let them know that, I'd never come
home, and since there was a good chance I'd end up
dosed with speakeasy, I went ahead and erased tbe
memory. Good thing I did-that was the first thing,
they asked me as soon as they had the drug in me.
  Gave me a grown-up dose, they did, so I practi-
cally told them my whole life story and my opinion
of them and everybody and everything else; so the
whole session took hours, felt like forever, but at
the end they knew, they absolutely knew that Dog-
walker was straight with them, and when it was over
and I was coming up so I had some control over
what I said, I asked them, I begged them, Let Dog-
walker live. Just let him go. He'll give back the
money, and I'll give back mine, just let him go.
  "OK," says the guy.
  I didn't believe it.
  "No, you can believe me, we'll let him go."
  "You got him?"
  "Picked him up before you even came in. It wasn't
hard."
  "And you didn't kill him?"
  "Kill him? We had to get the money back first,
didn't we, so we needed him alive till morning, and
then you came in, and your little story changed our
minds, it really did, you made us feel all sloppy and
sorry for that poor old pimp."
  For a few seconds there I actually believed that it
was going to be all right. But then I knew from the
way they looked, from the way they acted, I knew
the same way I know about passwords.
  They brought in Dogwalker and handed me a
book. Dogwalker was very quiet and stiff and he
didn't look like he recognized me at all. I didn't
even have to look at the book to know what it was.
They scooped out his brain and replaced it with
glass, like me only way over the line, way way over,
there was nothing of Dogwalker left inside his head,
just glass pipe and goo. The book was a User's
Manual, with all the instructions about how to pro-
gram him and control him.
  I looked at him and he was Dogwalker, the same
face, the same hair, everything. Then he moved or
talked and he was dead, he was somebody else living
in Dogwalker's body. And I says to them, "Why?
Why didn't you just kill him, if you were going to
do this?"
  "This one was too big;" says the guy. "Everybody
in G-boro knew what happened, everybody in the
whole country, everybody in the world. Even if it
was a mistake, we couldn't let it go. No hard feel-
ings, Goo Boy. He is alive. And so are you. And
you both stay that way, as long as you follow a few
simple rules. Since he's over the line, he has to have
an owner, and you're it. You can use him however
you want-rent out data storage, pimp him as a jig
or a jaw-but he stays with you always. Every day,
he's on the street here in G-boro, so we can bring
people here and show them what happens to boys
who make mistakes. You can even keep your cut
from the job, so you don't have to scramble at all if
you don't want to. That's how much we like you,
Goo Boy. But if he leaves this town or doesn't come
out, even one single solitary day, you'll be very
sorry for the last six hours of your life. Do you
understand?"
  I understood. I took him with me. I bought this
place, these clothes, and that's how it's been ever
since. That's why we go out on the street every d;:
I read the whole manual, and I figure there's maybe
ten percent of Dogwalker left inside. The part that's
Dogwalker can't ever get to the surface, can't ev
talk or move or anything like that, can't ever remem-
ber or even csciously think. But maybe he can
still wander around inside what used to be his head;
maybe he can sample the data stored in all that goo.
Maybe someday he'll even run across this story and
he'll know what happened to him, and he'll know
that I tried to save him.
  In the meantime this is my last will and testament.
See, I have us doing all kinds of research on
Orgasmic Crime, so that someday I'll know enough
to reach inside the system and unplug it. Unplug it
all, and make those bastards lose everything, the
way they took everything away from Dogwalker.
Trouble is, some places there ain't no way to look
without leaving tracks. Goo is as goo do, I always
say. I'll find out I'm not as good as I think I am
when somebody comes along and puts a hot steel
putz in my face. Knock my brains out when it comes.
But there's this, lying in a few hundred places in the
system. Three days after I don't lay down my code
in a certain program in a certain place, this story
pops into view. The fact you're reading this means
I'm dead.
  Or it means I paid them back, and so I quit sup-
pressing this because I don't care anymore. So
maybe this is my swan song, and maybe this is my
victory song. You'll never know, will you, mate?
  But you'll wonder. I like that. You wondering
about us, whoever you are, you thinking about old
Goo Boy and Dogwalker, you guessing whether the
fangs who scooped Doggy's skull and turned him
into self-propelled property paid for it down to the
very last delicious little drop.
  And in the meantime, I've got this goo machine
to take care of. Only ten percent a man, he is, but
then I'm only forty percent myself. All added up
together we make only half a human. But that's the
half that counts. That's the half that still wants
things. The goo in me and the goo in him is all
just light pipes and electricity. Data without desire.
Lightspeed trash. But I have some desires left, just
a few, and maybe so does Dogwalker, even fewer.
And we'll get what we want. Every speck. Every
sparkle. Believe it.

[The End]

First appeared in "Isaac Asimov's SF magazine" 11.1989.
Scanned from "Maps in a Mirror" - short fiction collection
of Orson Scott Card.
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                情深不寿      剑钢易折

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