The Renegades Page 29

  “You get a lot more from a kind word and a taser than from a kind word alone,” I rephrased a famous saying of an ancient gangster.

  The approaching train interrupted our conversations. Frost popped out to the platform and our evening of reminiscences began with the uncorking of the bottle of cognac. In the meantime, while my friends recalled their school years, I came to grips with the work of a conductor—handing out bedclothes and vintage tea glasses with glass holders (as was traditional in the Russian sector) to the passengers. Frost only bothered to get up when his alarm announced that the train was about to make another stop. I don’t know what he sees in this career, but Frost enjoyed these kind of travels. Over about six years he had managed to travel all over the Russian sector and a lot of it wasn’t even on the clock—he’d simply catch rides with other conductors he knew, following some line that had caught his eye.

  We reached Pyatigorsk early in the morning and, declining the services of cloying taxi drivers (ordinary people who operated classic automobiles with actual internal combustion engines and without a single chip or other trappings of modern technology), entered the city. Walking along an old-fashioned city, a part of which was built in the days of Lermontov and Pushkin was a sheer pleasure, and Beast and I wasted an hour on simply getting lost and exploring. The city had been built on the slope of Mount Mashuk, which meant that we were constantly going uphill or downhill. Locals would pass us at a tranquil pace, an old-fashioned tram would creak through the intersections and dozens of flowerbeds exhaled a pleasant aroma.

  Chip lived in a neighborhood with the funny and memorable name White Daisy in a typical apartment building, not unlike all the others I’d seen in the various cities I’d visited. The building elevator wasn’t in service (as per tradition) and though we didn’t have much trouble climbing to the fourth floor, I considered what Chip would do in the event of an emergency.

  The door swung open, revealing the pirc in his human form. Naturally, Meatspace Chip was no shorter than his virtual avatar. It was clear at a glance that he was over two meters and that his shoulders barely fit through his own doorway. A chiseled face, a square chin, deep-set blue eyes…err…eye. The other eye-socket boasted an implant. A long, hunched nose, a high forehead and dirty blond hair which in places had been cut to a standard-issue buzz cut and in other places was absent due to the fire. Beside this fellow, Beast—who had long since left his adolescent years behind—looked like a feeble toddler.

  Chip was wearing green Bermuda shorts and a baggy orange T-shirt, which formed a lump around where he carried his regenerative device. Other regen devices were attached to the patient’s face and legs, really giving him the resemblance of the evil cyborgs from various space operas. The eye implant, which burned with a sinister dark-green light in the left socket only added to this impression, as did the bio-plasters stuck here and there where the burns had been most severe. I should also add that he looked younger than I had expected. Due to his injuries, I couldn’t be certain, but there was no way he was over forty.

  “Hello!” he boomed in the same metallic timbre I had heard on the phone. Only now did I notice the cause of this distortion: One more tissue regenerator blinked on his throat. Clumsily shuffling his feet, he hobbled closer and offered a shovel-sized hand, which Beast immediately shook.

  “I’m Pavel, but you can go ahead and call me Pasha,” Chip introduced himself. “I didn’t think you’d have the same voluminous mop in real life…just like Kisya Vorobyev’s.”

  My haircut still caused my grandfather to call me ‘Parakeet’ and my grandmother to sigh and lament the extravagant sensibilities of the youth. If you ask me, bright blue hair with several dyed braids was entirely appropriate and even a conservative choice, especially if you compare it to what the majority of my friends tended to sport.

  “Edilberto,” the bassist introduced himself and added, “What’s a Kisya?”

  “A fictional human,” Pasha corrected him. “One of the main characters of a book called The Twelve Chairs. All right, come on in. The food’s getting cold. What did you, take the long way over Mount Mashuk?”

  Beast and I entered the apartment and looked around. It smelled like a hospital. If you ignored the African masks on the walls, mixed with various military gear and a large number of framed photos (I think I even noticed a couple 2D black and white ones), the place was entirely ordinary. Almost. Two of the walls in the living room were taken up with an old-fashioned library consisting of real, paper books.

  “We took a walk,” I plunked my bag on the floor and carefully leaned my guitar synth against the wall. “By the way, I always imagined that you were about fifty. And a good bit shorter.”

  “What gave you that impression?” asked Pasha and slowly, clearly struggling to move his feet, walked to the kitchen. “I’m only 36, so please don’t consign me to the dustbins of history just yet. Okay, let’s not clutter up the hallway either—there’s the table. My robo-sponge already has everything ready. At least we’ll get some use from these digital dimwits…”

  As frequently happens, our friendship grew further at the table and by dessert, the thin ice of our first minutes of meeting each other had shattered. In person, Chip was much the same as in Barliona. The only inconvenience was his eye implant: I kept catching myself staring at it and each time felt very awkward. Pasha’s sad look as he consumed a liquefied mass through a tube also caused me some embarrassment at my own ability to eat normally. Beast, on the other hand, was entirely nonplussed: He gulped down the offered breakfast without a shadow of shame. I suppose the cognac in the train played its part, but Beast wasn’t very perceptive in general, so I couldn’t say for sure.

  Barliona quickly became the topic of conversation, logically enough since that is what all of us had in common.

  “I’m still going to find that radish-head and consume him—without butter,” Pasha shared his dreams of finding the much-hated Otolaryngologist.

  “I’m with you there,” Edilberto nodded in solidarity. “If you act like that, you deserve to have your face plastered to your heels.”

  “Two legendary warriors speak—without having reached Level 10,” I giggled at this conversation.

  “And so what? I have a bro who can crush those PKers without any levels at all. It’s like watching a pastry chef make frosting,” Pasha objected. “He doesn’t even know what to do with all the orders flooding him.”

  “How’s that?” A glint flared to life in Beast’s eye. Despite his brief time in Barliona, he already had a long list of enemies.

  “He simply applies what he learned in real life to the game,” Pasha was happy to explain. “Various traps. He baits them in and wham—the bully’s cooked.”

  “No way!” Edilberto exclaimed. “Can he teach me?”

  “Sure thing,” Pasha assured. “He’s about to drop by with Kiera’s capsule.”

  “Beast,” I intervened, “let’s be honest: You and baited traps are miles apart. You don’t have the patience to hear the punch line to a ‘yo momma’ joke, whereas traps take time and preparation. You’ll just end up in the slammer again.”

  “Maybe so, maybe so,” Beast didn’t bother arguing, “but it’s worth a shot. I had enough patience to learn to play bass; maybe here I’ll have enough too.”

  “You and the bass have a tender love affair,” I objected and instantly cut myself short. “Although…Maybe you have a love affair with the trolls too. It might not be so delicate, maybe it’s a bit singular and even a little violent…”

  “On the topic of my love affairs, I’m really close to letting the back of your head have it,” Beast joked grimly. The idea of mastering the dark art of traps clearly appealed to him.

  “Now now. No violence in the kitchen, please. You two are like a pair of greenhorns…Although, I guess you’re kids after all.”

  “Keep your counsel, old man,” I snorted in reply. “You told me in Barliona that you’ve been flying in the mountains for thirty years, so I had good
reason to figure you over fifty.”

  “Me?” Chip asked, surprised, then thought a bit and began to laugh.

  “That’s a line from a song,” he explained. “Monologue of a chopper. Here,” Pasha snapped his fingers, issuing a command to the imitator. “Play ‘I’ve returned (Mi-8),’” he ordered.

  Judging by its sound, the song was an ancient one, recorded on imperfect equipment. Its narrative, as I understood it, was told from the perspective of a helicopter. And one of the lines really was the one that had confused me about Chip.

  “Whoops, I messed up,” I confessed when the song ended. “The hell with it then, your age. As my granny liked to say, ‘I’m not fixing to make a soup out of you, so who cares how old your bones are.’”

  “Like you know how to make soup,” Edilberto guffawed, missing the point as usual.

  “Why would I need to if I have an autocook?” I protested.

  “Those autocooks are nothing but heaps of junk,” Chip the Luddite immediately got on his soapbox. “Not even the most advanced autocook in the world will ever be able to prepare a dish as well as a human. If these pieces of plastic could match a living cook—why the restaurants wouldn’t employ anyone but. But as you can see, a living mind always triumphs over witless silicon. For this heap of junk simply can’t follow the principle of ‘a pinch of this and a half-dash of that!’”

  “That may be, but for the time being, this witless silicon manages better than I do in the kitchen,” I spoke up in defense of the maligned appliance.

  “No big deal. If you can’t—we’ll teach you. And if you don’t want to—we’ll compel you,” Pasha ‘reassured’ me to Beast’s supportive laughter. These two were certainly getting along…

  The capsule was delivered a few hours later, accompanied by a jovial soldier in green fatigues that were littered with a constellation of strange patches and emblems. The newcomer gingerly embraced Pasha, gave Beast and I a suspicious look and then announced indignantly:

  “Can you believe it, Pasha? The street bums have lost their marbles completely: They tried to start something with me!”

  “And how’d it turn out?” Pasha asked lazily.

  Judging by his reaction, or rather lack thereof, this type of situation was commonplace for this homo militaris. And this would have been entirely understandable, were this new character of the same dimensions as Pasha—but he wasn’t. He looked completely ordinary, neither particularly tall, nor well-built, nor especially fit. He was of average height, a bit thin, long-nosed and he looked more like an actor playing the role of one of the musketeers in the latest film version of Dumas’ novel—if it weren’t for his eyes. Even when the soldier smiled or grimaced, the look in his eyes remained weighty and unkind as if he wasn’t looking at me so much as aiming at me.

  “They ended up helping my imitator clean my place!” shrugged the warrior who’d brought the capsule.

  “You’re always picking on the little guys,” sighed Pasha. “Want some chow?”

  “Sure. I wouldn’t say no to a glass or two of the fire water either!” His buddy didn’t tarry with formalities. “Who are these guys?” he nodded in our direction. “The Junior Helicopter Club?”

  “This is Kiera and Edilberto,” Pasha announced weightily, “so leave your tough guy act at the door. Everyone’s friends here. Don’t be upset with him, guys,” he turned to us. “He’s recon—a ranger. They’re not like other human beings.”

  “Hold your tongue, Iron Angel!” smiled the man. “And be envious in silence. I’m Alex,” the warrior introduced himself at last, “but you can call me Sasha. Together, we’re Sasha and Pasha!”

  Despite this glib introduction, Alex didn’t offer his hand and I could pick up a politely-concealed resentment lurking somewhere in his eyes.

  “Edilberto,” Beast introduced himself without particular need, and I could tell by his squinting eyes that the bassist had entered that dangerous state of mind where he was considering whether there was some slight or insult directed at his person. Beast didn’t know how to forgive a slight and our new acquaintanceship was already verging on a fight, so I quickly changed the topic of conversation.

  “So do you play Barliona as well?”

  “I used to,” Alex explained, heading to the kitchen. “I dicked around and had enough. There’s no point in wasting life in a capsule,” he added, plunging himself into the refrigerator up to his waist. Judging by the way he and Pasha spoke to each other, they had been friends for more than a year or two—in fact, it could have easily been longer than Frost, Beast and I had even lived in this world.

  “Hey look! Salami!” sounded from the depths of the refrigerator and was followed by a contented smacking. “And vodka! Who’ll be my company? Buster’s out—liquor makes him touchy.”

  “I’m about to bust someone’s tongue against his ass!” Pasha barked jokingly.

  The fridge snorted contemptuously.

  “Bring the vodka,” Beast livened up, finding common ground with Alex.

  “Buster?” I asked, looking at Pasha.

  “It’s ‘cause I’m big,” he explained a bit bashfully and followed his buddy with an envious look as the latter proceeded triumphantly to the table bearing a bottle of vodka and a salami in his hands.

  “I don’t get it,” Beast confessed, gingerly taking the bottle and pouring its contents into the glasses that Alex had fished out of the kitchen cupboards.

  “It’s my childhood nickname,” Pasha sat down beside me, still transfixing the bottle with his eyes. “This goof off,” the pilot nodded at the ranger slicing up the salami, “is the one who came up with it. I used to threaten to bust the kids that made fun of me.”

  Noticing the suffering look of our patient, I found several wine glasses, filled them with apple juice, tossed in a straw and completed the arrangement with a slice of lemon.

  “Here,” I slid the glass to Pasha. “Just imagine that you and I are drinking cocktails like refined people, while these two slobs swill their grain alcohol. If you do it right, you’ll even feel a light buzz—just like in Peter Pan.”

  “Really works,” Beast agreed. “I don’t know how but Kiera manages to keep a good conversation going in boozing company even without drinking herself.”

  “Well someone has to be around to tell you what you did last night,” I replied philosophically, sucking the juice through my straw. Pasha followed my example, yet it didn’t seem like the placebo helped him much.

  “Oh we’ve acquired a court scribe!” Alex proclaimed and clinked glasses with us. “Well, let’s drink to your chronicle then!”

  By the end of the first bottle, the danger had passed: Beast and Sasha had become good friends and by the evening, when we finally decided to part ways, they were the best of buddies. During this time, the technicians from the local Barliona branch had come and gone, connected and tested the capsule. No one wanted to go back into the game much, so as it so frequently happens, we ended up chatting late into the night. Or, that is, Pasha and I were chatting, while Beast had already shuffled over to the couch and passed out in his clothes, muttering, “May the blessings of heavy metal be upon you.”

  “Mmm, yeah. Young people don’t know how to drink these days,” Pasha quipped looking at him. “And this one’s one of the better ones I’ve seen…You, uh, don’t be upset with Alex. He’s wary of freaks, even though we were freaks too at one point.”

  “I’m not having children with him,” I shrugged, “so he can be wary of whoever he likes. What’s it to me?”

  “You never know,” winked Pasha. “Who knows how life will turn out? He’s single, so…” He trailed off ambiguously.

  If my grandmother heard him right now, she’d kiss him all over, my still-kicking grandfather notwithstanding. If there’s anyone who likes to start these types of conversations and insist on matching me with ‘good boys,’ it’s her.

  “Why don’t you just admit it already? After you turn thirty, a wedding-industry lobbyist shows up and
instills in you the need to marry anyone around you who’s still single?” I demanded.

  “Has nothing to do with age,” Pasha retorted. “I got married at twenty. Sasha was my best man.”

  “So you suffered from your own mistake and now you feel obliged to visit your experience on others?” I couldn’t help but ask.

  “Yeah, I was impressed into the marriage,” Pasha ‘confessed,’ pressing his hand to his chest.

  “Listen, why doesn’t your buddy like musicians anyway? Well, until he kills a bottle with them, I mean,” I asked, recalling how much better everything went after the vodka had been consumed.

  “I told you, we’re from the same circles,” Pasha said. “It’s just that…Well, freaks don’t frequently like other freaks. Do you understand? You and Edilberto are freaks and Sasha and I were lucky enough to make it out of the freak circles. The ones that are still full of people who are mentally about 16 (the ones that didn’t die from drugs or booze) and who to this day want only to jangle on their guitars for enough change to buy a few bottles of rum and then pontificate on the ‘way of the freak, man.’ I bet you’ve run into plenty of them yourself.”

  “There’s degenerates everywhere you look,” I said.

  “Precisely. But since we clambered out of that bog, Alex’s reflexive reaction to anyone from those circles is to judge them on their appearance. He comes around to their minds a little later,” Pasha drained his weak tea.

  “No wonder he and Beast chummed up so quickly,” I couldn’t help pointing at the couch where Beast was snoring with all his bellows.

  Pasha followed my finger and sighed:

  “Almost. He and I started drinking…later. When we were first sent to Africa. Ever heard of the Great Duchy of Imbanga-Le?”

  “Can you figure it out on your own, or do you want me to flap my eyelids in wonderment?”

  “Well…There were these activists there who were trying to resurrect their, let’s say, cultural traditions. Sasha learned his craft there. And also…we learned to drink vodka there too. By the way, you don’t drink? How come? Not that I have anything against it: It’s simply a little odd for a rocker.”