Futureland. Part 40

Harold rode his adult-size tricycle down Lower Broadway, headed for the Brooklyn Bridge. There had been no motorized traffic allowed on Broadway for over thirty years. A quarter of the streets in Lower and Upper Manhattan were closed to motor-driven vehicles because no cycler could afford the leasing fees and insurance rates on an automobile. Cycler was a term meant for those who rode the unemployment cycles, but it also fit those same individuals' mode of transportation.

Harold rode down the crowded avenue looking at the crumbling old brick that showed here and there between holo-ads. Lower Manhattan was falling apart. Every now and then a building was refaced. But the only real improvements came when big business could find a profit niche. Lately that niche had been leased window holo-ads. All you had to do was put a holo-screen across your outside wall s.p.a.ce and allow whatever advertiser to display his wares on it. At a dollar per square foot per day--for prime s.p.a.ce, at prime time--you could make pocket money for the kids. And now with the new screens you could look out of your windows as if there were nothing there at all.

All down Broadway there were animated signs for leasing IT curves, household utilities, even furniture and some finer clothes. Almost everything by 2055 was leased. That stabilized the profit factor and created a built-in insurance policy. No one owned anything except the manufacturers.

Harold knew a lot about leasing because L&L Leasing was the company he worked for. L&L acted as a middleman for various industries. They advertised and brokered the deals while the major manufacturers supplied the goods.

"The people live on the installment plan," XX Y, the revolutionary, said on the poster circulated over ghostnet, "while corpse-barons buy up the sky."

The slogan played its way through Harold's mind while he rolled over the Brooklyn Bridge. He knew that every word of what the militant chromosome of RadCons 6 and 7 said was true. But he also remembered what his professor, Len Gorzki, had said in Political Science 101 at City College.

"Product is everywhere and everything," the slender, AIDS-ridden educator exclaimed. "From the bricks in the wall to the chair under your b.u.t.ts to your b.u.t.t itself. It's all product, either product or waste."

Harold understood the threat posed to him. He believed in XX's ideal but lived according to the cycles.

Blanklands was a moveable feast. A bar, restaurant, Eros-Haus, DJ joint hotbed of perversions and alternative lifestyles.

Yasmine M--onetime executive secretary for L&L Leasing--was now an Eros-girl working illegally for the drifting Blanklands boutique.

Harold had never met anyone like her. Her Persian family had become fabulously wealthy by developing one of the first labor corps in the Middle East.

A labor corps was a large group of men and women who did a specific kind of labor, usually manual, either at a home base or on location. From apple picking in Vermont to disaster relief in Peru, the labor corps provided sweat and sinew for an annual wage.

Yasmine's parents owned a palace in southern Persia. They also owned two hundred thousand hands. Yasmine was their only child. Everything would one day belong to her. But she left it all for the prod's life in New York City.

"My mum and da," she said in her tutored English accent, "don't see that it's slavery. If you got married you were fired and fined. Salaries are paid in advance and so if you quit you're arrested. Then the government confiscates your labor account and you're forced to work out your term without pay. Everybody says that it's good for the people. Da says that some people are made to work and others are made to rule. So I left and came here to live as a worker."

She confided in Harold, called him a friend. But she never returned his ardent pa.s.sions. Harold had loved her from the first moment he saw the grim longing in her eyes.

Jamey was waiting in the alley when Harold got there.

"Hey, man," Harold said. "I thought you said the place was here."

"It is."

"Then how come we're the only people here?"

"It's early. When I saw Yas she said she could get us in if we came early. You got your chip?"

Harold pulled out a clear plastic card in which his ident.i.ty chip was embedded. The ID-chip was a cycler's most important piece of property. It was everything. His PBC (personal bar code), his work history, his current rsum, and his DNA voter's registration data. The loss of an ID-chip was an immediate fifty-one points against your labor record--a consecutive nine months of unemployment cycles, almost a year of beans and rice, living in an octangular hive cubicle; three of the eight steps before becoming a Muzak Jack.

The ID-chip meant everything, and so when they demanded to hold Harold's before he could go into Blanklands he balked.

"Com'on, man," the nervous white doorman said. He had brown scars on his throat and arms from a recent bout with the striped flu. "I ain't got time."

"Just let it go," Jamey said from behind. He put his hand on Harold's shoulder, and Harold released his grip on the card.

While walking down the long, brick-lined corridor Harold felt panic in his chest and across his brow. He hadn't let go of his ID-chip in twelve years, since the day of his labor adulthood at fifteen. The eerie glow from the light decals slapped on the wall at irregular intervals only served to make him more apprehensive. He had never spent a day in Common Ground, the underground public homestead that provided compartments barely large enough to hold a fiberplas mattress. But Harold knew from his uncle that it was no free ride like the holo-ads claimed. It was dangerous and it smelled. You couldn't lock your s.p.a.ce and you couldn't own anything. The place was full of gangs of Backgrounders who raped and robbed men and women alike.

The way most cyclers survived an unemployment cycle was by finding illegal labor or a relative or friend who knew the drill. He could become a prettyboy or maybe sell a body part--but, no, it wouldn't have to come to that. His brother, Rand, in Oklahoma City would take him in. He'd make Harold work in the communal gardens but that was bearable. He wouldn't have to get involved with the black market, or worse, the weapons market--or worse still, to become a thief. To be caught stealing would mean a thirty-year minimum sentence in one of the corporate prisons. There was no early release, parole, or life after prison. The few ex-cons that Harold had seen were hollow-eyed, slack-jawed men and women. Maybe black people didn't get the striped flu, but they sure got bit by prison--they sure did.

"Prison sucks the soul out of our men and women through a pinhole in the heart," XX Y had proclaimed more than fifteen years before. "And we just look the other way . . ."

Harold's heart was racing. What was he doing thinking about Common Ground and Angel's Island prison? He decided to go back, pay the hundred dollars, and leave.

"Here you go," the nervous doorman said as he opened a door. Jamey pushed Harold through into a room filled with light.

Harold went through the door thinking that he would turn around and go back out again. Yasmine meant a lot to him, but not enough to live in h.e.l.l.

He looked around to get his bearings. He was standing in a cavernous room full of large raised platforms that held fiberplas beds. There was a ledge around the mattresses and chairs, too. Going by the size of the room Harold figured that it held over forty tablebeds. At a table a few feet away Harold saw something that slowed his exit.

An elderly man, bald and gray, with parchmentlike skin, was sitting on the ledge of a table while a young woman, no more than twenty, stroked his huge p.e.n.i.s. The white man had well-defined muscles to complement his twenty-inch boy-hard erection. The slender Asian girl rocked back and forth holding on with both hands. The look of reverence on her face seemed studied but that didn't detract from Harold's fascination. He had heard about the s.e.x therapies that the uppers could afford. The process of cell rejuvenation could make parts of the body young again, at least for a while. Drugs could make you virile. An every-other-day visit to sensory-dep tanks could exercise your body until it had what was advertised as peak physique.

This man had it all.

"Yeah, yeah," the man grunted. Then he looked up at Harold and winked just before he came.

"Yeah, baby," the Asian prettygirl said.

The man's emission went on and on. He looked at Harold and Jamey, winking again, as if to say, "Who's the man?"

"d.a.m.n," Jamey said. "You see that?"

Two tables over a woman who was near the man's age sat naked at a table. Her face, thighs, and belly were pudgy and somewhat wrinkled, but her b.r.e.a.s.t.s put the prettygirl's to shame. Harold felt nauseated and aroused at the same time. The man was strutting around now with his erection tilting up, still dripping s.e.m.e.n.

"Somethin', huh?" Yasmine M said. She was standing next to them. "I know an even older guy who's got one-half again as long. He has to hold his up when he walks around 'cause it hurts his muscles.

"Hey, Yas," Jamey said.

He hugged the young brown-skinned woman. She was wearing a clear plastic full-length jacket and a G-string.

Harold had forgotten all about leaving. He was looking at Yasmine, unable to speak.

"Hi, Harold," the Iranian emigr said.

"Hey."

"I wondered if you guys'd come," Yasmine said in her newly acquired American accent.

"We wanted to see you, Yas," Jamey was saying. His attention was distracted by the older man's approach to the elderly, young breasted woman.

"See me like that?" she asked.

"Uh," Harold said. He wanted to say yes before Jamey could, but the word was stuck in his throat.

"As long as you don't see us like him," Jamey said. Yasmine laughed.

"Harold wants you to be his prettygirl," Jamey said. "He wants to juggle bra.s.s pots with you. That's what he said."

Harold had said it, three years earlier when he and Jamey first signed on with L&L Leasing. But he didn't expect Jamey to remember or to speak for him. They had both l.u.s.ted after Yasmine while she was busy b.u.mping with uppers in storage rooms and doored cubicles. Back then Yas wasn't interested in cyclers s.e.xually.

But now she smiled and took Harold by the hand. They walked across the mostly empty room of tablebeds toward the far exit. This led to another dank hallway lined with brick and bright light decals. They pa.s.sed several doors and various men and women along the way. They had to step over three lovers who had fallen to the floor between decals, rutting wild.

Finally they came to a door that sprang open at a word from Yasmine. It was a small room containing only a fiberplas mattress and a hotplate altar with three bra.s.s pots on it. Weak candle decals flickered when they entered. There were no decorations on the wall, no carpeting on the floor.

"They move all of this stuff every week?" Harold asked.

"Take off your clothes," Yasmine answered.

Harold's andro-alls were off with a quick gesture. He looked down seeing how small his erection was compared to the man in the main room.

"I guess I won't need the hot pot on you, Harry," Yasmine said.

She was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in person. Tall--his height--and dark-skinned in that Middle Eastern way. She had large eyes that slanted upwards, black as liquid s.p.a.ce, and a mouth that was meant to eat only sensuous fruits and honey cakes. Harold had dreamt of Yasmine at least once a week for the past three years.

She moved close to him and took the erection gently in her hand.

"Your card will be decremented by the minute, two dollars a minute. Do you understand?"

"Yuh."

"I have to say that, Harold. It's the rules."

"I know."

"How long do you want me?"

"As long as I can get."

"How much money do you have?"

"Three thousand, I think."

"How much to spend?"

"All of it," he whispered.

She began stroking his erection in a loose grip. The rest of Harold's body stiffened.

Yasmine was looking him in the eye.

"Tell me before you come," she said. She seemed to be studying something that was going on in his head.

He felt his legs buckle. Yasmine supported his b.u.t.tocks with her free hand.

"Don't fall. Put all your mind into your c.o.c.k. Try to come but tell me before you do."

"I . . . I . . . now . . . now," Harold rasped.

Yasmine reached down to the altar in a deft motion and brought a bra.s.s bowl under his nose. Instantly his diaphragm went into spasm and the feeling of o.r.g.a.s.m subsided.

"How's your heart?" she asked.

"Okay, I think."

"Because I'm going to do things to you that would kill that old man in the grand hall. Bust his heart open like a rotten peach."

Harold blinked and almost lost consciousness.

"No sleeping, no sitting," she said. She held another bowl under his nose and started the gentle stroking again. "I will bring you up to the edge twenty times or more if I want. And every time you have to tell me and every time I'll pull you back. Okay?"

"What if I said no?"

Yasmine wagged her head slowly from side to side. She smiled and he wondered if his heart was strong enough to last the night.

4.

". . . three men--captured after apparently trying to contaminate a children's immunization center in Rockland, Oregon--have all committed suicide while in custody of the Rockland police." The newsman, Letter Phillips, wore a lavender T-s.h.i.+rt. His hair was brown and thick. He sat forward on his tall stool and spoke seriously, without personal appeal. This switch from his usual wisecracking manner was effected to tell the audience that this was real news. "Our correspondent in Oregon, Couchy Malone, has more."

A beautiful waif with surgically enhanced eyes appeared in the curve. Her skirt was short and her thin legs seemed unsteady.

"Thank you, New York," said the freckled child, striped flu marks on her arms. "Police sources have informed this reporter that a map of some sort was found among the possessions of one of the prisoners. This map identifies immunization centers around the Midwest, Oregon, Was.h.i.+ngton, and Alaska. Each center's location has been circled in red and some of these had been marked with a black check sign." Couchy disappeared and a red circle marked with a black check, floating in s.p.a.ce, replaced her.

"Was the Rockland site checked, Couchy?" Letter's voice inquired.

"That's the problem, New York," the child said as she reappeared. "It was not checked. The police and the FBI fear that the checked centers may have already been contaminated. These centers work all through the school year. Thousands of children are immunized each day." The strain of fear, real fear, came into Couchy Malone's voice.

Harold put down his shrimp and noodle cup to concentrate on the news report.

"This could be the tip of the iceberg, New York," the young ITL freelancer said. "It could be a very real act of monstrous terrorism."

"Can you tell us which immunization sites, centers, have been marked with the black check?" Letter asked quickly, as if he were trying to drown out her fears.

"No. No, New York. My sources wouldn't or couldn't identify the marked centers."

"Thank you very much, Couchy," Letter Phillips said.

Couchy Malone looked as if she wanted to say something else, but her image faded as Letter Phillips returned to the curve. Harold wondered if she wanted to call out some kind of warning to her family or loved ones.

"In another disease-related story, seven cases of Jeffers's Disease have been reported in and around the Denver area. Named after the doctor who identified it, this new syndrome speeds up the body's metabolism, depleting certain essential elements for blood and skin maintenance. We have Dr. Jeffers on satellite hookup to talk to us about this new disturbing disease."