Cory Doctorow - Eastern Standard Tribe

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The security guard finally asked him if he needed a doctor.

"No," Art said. "That's fine. I'm just upset. A friend of mine died suddenly and
I'm flying to London for the funeral." The guard seemed satisfied with this
explanation and let him pass, finally.

He fought the urge to get plastered on the flight and vibrated in his seat
instead, jiggling his leg until his seatmate -- an elderly businessman who'd
spent the flight thus far wrinkling his brow at a series of spreadsheets on his
comm -- actually put a hand on Art's knee and said, "Switch off the motor, son.
You're gonna burn it out if you idle it that high all the way to Gatwick."

Art nearly leapt out of his seat when the flight attendant wheeled up the
duty-free cart, bristling with novelty beakers of fantastically old whiskey
shaped like jigging Scotchmen and drunken leprechauns swinging from lampposts.

By the time he hit UK customs he was supersonic, ready to hammer an entire
packet of Player's filterless into his face and light them with a blowtorch. It
wasn't even 0600h GMT, and the Sikh working the booth looked three-quarters
asleep under his turban, but he woke right up when Art stepped past the red line
and slapped both palms on the counter and used them as a lever to support him as
he pogoed in place.

"Your business in England, sir?"

"I work for Virgin/Deutsche Telekom. Let me beam you my visa." His hands were
shaking so badly he dropped his comm to the hard floor with an ominous clatter.
He snatched it up and rubbed at the fresh dent in the cover, then flipped it
open and stabbed at it with a filthy fingernail.

"Thank you, sir. Door number two, please."

Art took one step towards the baggage carousel when the words registered.
Customs search! Godfuckingdammit! He jittered in the private interview room
until another Customs officer showed up, overrode his comm and read in his ID
and credentials, then stared at them for a long moment.

"Are you quite all right, sir?"

"Just a little wound up," Art said, trying desperately to sound normal. He
thought about telling the dead friend story again, but unlike a lowly airport
security drone, the Customs man had the ability and inclination to actually
verify it. "Too much coffee on the plane. Need to have a slash like you wouldn't
believe."

The Customs man grimaced slightly, then chewed a corner of his little moustache.
"Everything else is all right, though?"

"Everything's fine. Back from a business trip to the States and Canada, all
jetlagged. You know. Can you believe the bastards actually expect me at the
office today?" This might work. Piss and moan about the office until he gets
bored and lets him go. "I mean, you work your guts out, fly halfway around the
world and do it some more, get strapped into a torture seat -- you think Virgin
springs for business-class tickets for its employees? Hell no! -- for six hours,
then they want you at the goddamned office."

"Virgin?" the Customs man said, eyebrows going up. "But you flew in on BA, sir."

Shit. Of course he hadn't booked a Virgin flight. That's what Fede'd be
expecting him to do, he'd be watching for Art to use his employee discount and
hop a flight back. "Yes, can you believe it?" Art thought furiously. "They
called me back suddenly, wouldn't even let me wait around for one of their own
damned planes. One minute I'm eating breakfast, the next I'm in a taxi heading
for the airport. I forgot half of my damned underwear in the hotel room! You'd
think they could cope with *one little problem* without crawling up my cock,
wouldn't you?"

"Sir, please, calm down." The Customs man looked alarmed and Art realized that
he'd begun to pace.

"Sorry, sorry. It just sucks. Bad job. Time to quit, I think."

"I should think so," the Customs man said. "Welcome to England."

Traffic was early-morning light and the cabbie drove like a madman. Art kept
flinching away from the oncoming traffic, already unaccustomed to driving on the
wrong side of the road. England seemed filthy and gray and shabby to him now,
tiny little cars with tiny, anal-retentive drivers filled with self-loathing,
vegetarian meat-substitutes and bad dentistry. In his rooms in Camden Town, Art
took a hasty and vengeful census of his stupid belongings, sagging rental
furniture and bad art prints hanging askew (not any more, not after he smashed
them to the floor). Bad English clothes (toss 'em onto the floor, looking for
one thing he'd be caught dead wearing in NYC, and guess what, not a single
thing). Stupid keepsakes from the Camden market, funny novelty lighters, retro
rave flyers preserved in glassine envelopes.

He was about to overturn his ugly little pressboard coffee table when he
realized that there was something on it.

A small, leather-worked box with a simple brass catch. Inside, the axe-head. Two
hundred thousand years old. Heavy with the weight of the ages. He hefted it in
his hand. It felt ancient and lethal. He dropped it into his jacket pocket,
instantly deforming the jacket into a stroke-y left-hanging slant. He kicked the
coffee table over.

Time to go see Fede.

27.

I have wished for a comm a hundred thousand times an hour since they stuck me in
this shithole, and now that I have one, I don't know who to call. Not smart. Not
happy.

I run my fingers over the keypad, think about all the stupid, terrible decisions
that I made on the way to this place in my life. I feel like I could burst into
tears, like I could tear the hair out of my head, like I could pound my fists
bloody on the floor. My fingers, splayed over the keypad, tap out the old
nervous rhythms of the phone numbers I've know all my life, my first house, my
Mom's comm, Gran's place.

Gran. I tap out her number and hit the commit button. I put the phone to my
head.

"Gran?"

"Arthur?"

"Oh, Gran!"

"Arthur, I'm so worried about you. I spoke to your cousins yesterday, they tell
me you're not doing so good there."

"No, no I'm not." The stitches in my jaw throb in counterpoint with my back.

"I tried to explain it all to Father Ferlenghetti, but I didn't have the details
right. He said it didn't make any sense."

"It doesn't. They don't care. They've just put me here."

"He said that they should have let you put your own experts up when you had your
hearing."

"Well, of *course* they should have."

"No, he said that they *had* to, that it was the law in Massachusetts. He used
to live there, you know."

"I didn't know."

"Oh yes, he had a congregation in Newton. That was before he moved to Toronto.
He seemed very sure of it."

"Why was he living in Newton?"

"Oh, he moved there after university. He's a Harvard man, you know."

"I think you've got that wrong. Harvard doesn't have a divinity school."

"No, this was *after* divinity school. He was doing a psychiatry degree at
Harvard."

Oh, my.

"Oh, my."

"What is it, Arthur?"

"Do you have Father Ferlenghetti's number, Gran?"

28.

Tonaishah's Kubrick-figure facepaint distorted into wild grimaces when Art
banged into O'Malley House, raccoon-eyed with sleepdep, airline crud crusted at
the corners of his lips, whole person quivering with righteous smitefulness. He
commed the door savagely and yanked it so hard that the gas-lift snapped with a
popping sound like a metal ruler being whacked on a desk. The door caromed back
into his heel and nearly sent him sprawling, but he converted its momentum into
a jog through the halls to his miniature office -- the last three times he'd
spoken to Fede, the bastard had been working out of his office -- stealing his
papers, no doubt, though that hadn't occurred to Art until his plane was
somewhere over Ireland.

Fede was halfway out of Art's chair when Art bounded into the office. Fede's
face was gratifyingly pale, his eyes thoroughly wide and scared. Art didn't
bother to slow down, just slammed into Fede, bashing foreheads with him. Art
smelled a puff of his own travel sweat and Fede's spicy Lilac Vegetal, saw blood
welling from Fede's eyebrow.

"Hi, pal!" he said, kicking the door shut with a crash that resounded through
the paper-thin walls.

"Art! Jesus fucking Christ, what the hell is wrong with you?" Fede backed away
to the far corner of the office, sending Art's chair over backwards, wheels
spinning, ergonomic adjustment knobs and rods sticking up in the air like the
legs of an overturned beetle.

"TunePay, Inc.?" Art said, booting the chair into Fede's shins. "Is that the
best fucking name you could come up with? Or did Toby and Linda cook it up?"

Fede held his hands out, palms first. "What are you talking about, buddy? What's
wrong with you?"

Art shook his head slowly. "Come on, Fede, it's time to stop blowing smoke up my
cock."

"I honestly have no idea --"

"*Bullshit!*" Art bellowed, closing up with Fede, getting close enough to see
the flecks of spittle flying off his lips spatter Fede's face. "I've had enough
bullshit, Fede!"

Abruptly, Fede lurched forward, sweeping Art's feet out from underneath him and
landing on Art's chest seconds after Art slammed to the scratched and splintered
hardwood floor. He pinned Art's arms under his knees, then leaned forward and
crushed Art's windpipe with his forearm, bearing down.

"You dumb sack of shit," he hissed. "We were going to cut you in, after it was
done. We knew you wouldn't go for it, but we were still going to cut you in --
you think that was your little whore's idea? No, it was mine! I stuck up for
you! But not anymore, you hear? Not anymore. You're through. Jesus, I gave you
this fucking job! I set up the deal in Cali. Fuck-off heaps of money! I'm
through with you, now. You're done. I'm ratting you out to V/DT, and I'm flying
to California tonight. Enjoy your deportation hearing, you dumb Canuck
boy-scout."

Art's vision had contracted to a fuzzy black vignette with Fede's florid face in
the center of it. He gasped convulsively, fighting for air. He felt his bladder
go, and hot urine stream down his groin and over his thighs.

An instant later, Fede sprang back from him, face twisted in disgust, hands
brushing at his urine-stained pants. "Damn it," he said, as Art rolled onto his
side and retched. Art got up on all fours, then lurched erect. As he did, the
axe head in his pocket swung wildly and knocked against the glass pane beside
his office's door, spiderwebbing it with cracks.

Moving with dreamlike slowness, Art reached into his pocket, clasped the axe
head, turned it in his hand so that the edge was pointing outwards. He lifted it
out of his pocket and held his hand behind his back. He staggered to Fede, who
was glaring at him, daring him to do something, his chest heaving.

Art windmilled his arm over his head and brought the axe head down solidly on
Fede's head. It hit with an impact that jarred his arm to the shoulder, and he
dropped the axe head to the floor, where it fell with a thud, crusted with blood
and hair for the first time in 200,000 years.

Fede crumpled back into the office's wall, slid down it into a sitting position.
His eyes were open and staring. Blood streamed over his face.

Art looked at Fede in horrified fascination. He noticed that Fede was breathing
shallowly, almost panting, and realized dimly that this meant he wasn't a
murderer. He turned and fled the office, nearly bowling Tonaishah over in the
corridor.

"Call an ambulance," he said, then shoved her aside and fled O'Malley House and
disappeared into the Piccadilly lunchtime crowd.

29.

I am: sprung.

Father Ferlenghetti hasn't been licensed to practice psychiatry in Massachusetts
for forty years, but the court gave him standing. The judge actually winked at
me when he took the stand, and stopped scritching on her comm as the priest said
a lot of fantastically embarrassing things about my general fitness for human
consumption.

The sanitarium sent a single junior doc to my hearing, a kid so young I'd
mistaken him for a hospital driver when he climbed into the van with me and
gunned the engine. But no, he was a doctor who'd apparently been briefed on my
case, though not very well. When the judge asked him if he had any opinions on
Father Ferlenghetti's testimony, he fumbled with his comm while the Father
stared at him through eyebrows thick enough to hide a hamster in, then finally
stammered a few verbatim notes from my intake interview, blushed, and sat down.

"Thank you," the judge said, shaking her head as she said it. Gran, seated
beside me, put one hand on my knee and one hand on the knee of Doc Szandor's
brother-in-law, a hotshot Harvard Law post-doc whom we'd retained as corporate
counsel for a new Limited Liability Corporation. We'd signed the articles of
incorporation the day before, after Group. It was the last thing Doc Szandor did
before resigning his post at the sanitarium to take up the position of Chief
Medical Officer at HumanCare, LLC, a corporation with no assets, no employees,
and a sheaf of shitkicking ideas for redesigning mental hospitals using
off-the-shelf tech and a little bit of UE mojo.

30.

Art was most of the way to the Tube when he ran into Lester. Literally.

Lester must have seen him coming, because he stepped right into Art's path from
out of the crowd. Art ploughed into him, bounced off of his dented armor, and
would have fallen over had Lester not caught his arm and steadied him.

"Art, isn't it? How you doin', mate?"

Art gaped at him. He was thinner than he'd been when he tried to shake Art and
Linda down in the doorway of the Boots, grimier and more desperate. His tone was
just as bemused as ever, though. "Jesus Christ, Lester, not now, I'm in a hurry.
You'll have to rob me later, all right?"

Lester chuckled wryly. "Still a clever bastard. You look like you're having some
hard times, my old son. Maybe that you're not even worth robbing, eh?"

"Right. I'm skint. Sorry. Nice running into you, now I must be going." He tried
to pull away, but Lester's fingers dug into his biceps, emphatically, painfully.

"Hear you ran into Tom, led him a merry chase. You know, I spent a whole week in
the nick on account of you."

Art jerked his arm again, without effect. "You tried to rob me, Les. You knew
the job was dangerous when you took it, all right? Now let me go -- I've got a
train to catch."

"Holidays? How sweet. Thought you were broke, though?"

A motorized scooter pulled up in the kerb lane beside them. It was piloted by a
smart young policewoman with a silly foam helmet and outsized pads on her knees
and elbows. She looked like the kid with the safety-obsessed mom who inflicts
criminally dorky fashions on her daughter, making her the neighborhood
laughingstock.

"Everything all right, gentlemen?"

Lester's eyes closed, and he sighed a put-upon sigh that was halfway to a groan.

"Oh, yes, officer," Art said. "Peter and I were just making some plans to see
our auntie for supper tonight."

Lester opened his eyes, then the corners of his mouth incremented upwards.
"Yeah," he said. "'Sright. Cousin Alphonse is here all the way from Canada and
Auntie's mad to cook him a proper English meal."

The policewoman sized them up, then shook her head. "Sir, begging your pardon,
but I must tell you that we have clubs in London where a gentleman such as
yourself can find a young companion, legally. We thoroughly discourage making
such arrangements on the High Street. Just a word to the wise, all right?"

Art blushed to his eartips. "Thank you, Officer," he said with a weak smile.
"I'll keep that in mind."

The constable gave Lester a hard look, then revved her scooter and pulled into
traffic, her arm slicing the air in a sharp turn signal.

"Well," Lester said, once she was on the roundabout, "*Alphonse*, seems like
you've got reason to avoid the law, too."

"Can't we just call it even? I did you a favor with the law, you leave me be?"

"Oh, I don't know. P'raps I should put in a call to our friend PC McGivens. He
already thinks you're a dreadful tosser -- if you've reason to avoid the law,
McGivens'd be bad news indeed. And the police pay very well for the right
information. I'm a little financially embarrassed, me, just at this moment."

"All right," Art said. "Fine. How about this: I will pay you 800 Euros, which I
will withdraw from an InstaBank once I've got my ticket for the Chunnel train to
Calais in hand and am ready to get onto the platform. I've got all of fifteen
quid in my pocket right now. Take my wallet and you'll have cabfare home.
Accompany me to the train and you'll get a month's rent, which is more than the
police'll give you."

"Oh, you're a villain, you are. What is it that the police will want to talk to
you about, then? I wouldn't want to be aiding and abetting a real criminal --
could mean trouble."

"I beat the piss out of my coworker, Lester. Now, can we go? There's a plane in
Paris I'm hoping to catch."

31.

I have a brand-new translucent Sony Veddic, a series 12. I bought it on credit
-- not mine, mine's sunk; six months of living on plastic and kiting
balance-payments with new cards while getting the patents filed on the eight new
gizmos that constitute HumanCare's sole asset has blackened my good name with
the credit bureaus.

I bought it with the company credit card. The *company credit card*. Our local
Baby Amex rep dropped it off himself after Doc Szandor faxed over the signed
contract from the Bureau of Health. Half a million bucks for a proof-of-concept
install at the very same Route 128 nuthatch where I'd been "treated." If that
works, we'll be rolling out a dozen more installs over the next year: smart
doors, public drug-prescription stats, locator bracelets that let "clients" --
I've been learning the nuthouse jargon, and have forcibly removed "patient" from
my vocabulary -- discover other clients with similar treatment regimens on the
ward, bells and whistles galore.

I am cruising the MassPike with HumanCare's first-ever employee, who is, in
turn, holding onto HumanCare's first-ever paycheck. Caitlin's husband has been
very patient over the past six months as she worked days fixing the ailing
machinery at the sanitarium and nights prototyping my designs. He's been
likewise patient with my presence on his sagging living-room sofa, where I've
had my nightly ten-hour repose faithfully since my release. Caitlin and I have
actually seen precious little of each other considering that I've been living
under her roof. (Doc Szandor's Cambridge apartment is hardly bigger than my room
at the hospital, and between his snoring and the hard floor, I didn't even last
a whole night there.) We've communicated mostly by notes commed to her fridge
and prototypes left atop my suitcase of day-clothes and sharp-edged toiletries
at the foot of my makeshift bed when she staggered in from her workbench while I
snored away the nights. Come to think of it, I haven't really seen much of Doc
Szandor, either -- he's been holed up in his rooms, chatting away on the EST
channels.

I am well rested. I am happy. My back is loose and my Chi is flowing. I am
driving my few belongings to a lovely two-bedroom -- one to sleep in, one to
work in -- flat overlooking Harvard Square, where the pretty co-eds and their
shaggy boyfriends tease one another in the technical argot of a dozen abstruse
disciplines. I'm looking forward to picking up a basic physics, law, medicine
and business vocabulary just by sitting in my window with my comm, tapping away
at new designs.

We drive up to a toll plaza and I crank the yielding, human-centric steering
wheel toward the EZPass lane. The dealer installed the transponder and gave me a
brochure explaining the Sony Family's approach to maximum driving convenience.
But as I approach the toll gate, it stays steadfastly down.

The Veddic's HUD flashes an instruction to pull over to the booth. A bored
attendant leans out of the toll booth and squirts his comm at me, and the HUD
comes to life with an animated commercial for the new, improved TunePay service,
now under direct MassPike management.

The TunePay scandal's been hot news for weeks now. Bribery, corruption, patent
disputes -- I'd been gratified to discover that my name had been removed from
the patent applications, sparing me the nightly hounding Fede and Linda and her
fucking ex had been subjected to on my comm as the legal net tightened around
them.

I end up laughing so hard that Caitlin gets out of the car and walks around to
my side, opens the door, and pulls me bodily to the passenger side. She serenely
ignores the blaring of the horns from the aggravated, psychotic Boston drivers
stacked up behind us, walks back to the driver's side and takes the wheel.

"Thanks," I tell her, and lay a hand on her pudgy, freckled arm.

"You belong in a loony bin, you know that?" she says, punching me in the thigh
harder than is strictly necessary.

"Oh, I know," I say, and dial up some music on the car stereo.

--

Acknowledgements

This novel was workshopped by the Cecil Street Irregulars, the Novelettes and
the Gibraltar Point gang, and received excellent feedback from the first readers
on the est-preview list (especially Pat York). Likewise, I'm indebted to all the
people who read and commented on this book along the way.

Thanks go to my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, for reading this so quickly --
minutes after I finished it! Likewise to my agent, Don Maass, thank you.

Thanks to Irene Gallo and Shelley Eshkar for knocking *two* out of the park with
their cover-designs for my books.

Thanks to my co-editors at Boing Boing and all the collaborators I've written
with, who've made me a better writer.

Thanks, I suppose, to the villains in my life, who inspired me to write this
book rather than do something ugly that I'd regret.

Thanks to Paul Boutin for commissioning the *Wired* article of the same name.

Thanks to the readers and bloggers and Tribespeople who cared enough to check
out my first book and liked it enough to check out this one.

Thanks to Creative Commons for the licenses that give me the freedom to say
"Some Rights Reserved."

--

Bio

Cory Doctorow (www.craphound.com) is the author of Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, and The Complete Idiot's Guide to
Publishing Science Fiction (with Karl Schroeder). He was raised in Toronto and
lives in San Francisco, where he works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(www.eff.org), a civil liberties group. He's a journalist, editorialist and
blogger. Boing Boing (boingboing.net), the weblog he co-edits, is the most
linked-to blog on the Net, according to Technorati. He won the John W. Campbell
Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 Hugos. You can download this book for free
from craphound.com/est.

--

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Eastern Standard Tribe
2004-2-9
A novel by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow

eof

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