Bud kept walking until he was a little too close to the guy. He kept his head tilted back until the last minute, like he was kicking back listening to some loud tunes (which he was), and then suddenly snapped his head forward so he was staring the guy right in the face. It was another way to emphasize the fact that he was packing, and it usually did the trick. But this guy did not respond with the little flinch that Bud had come to expect and enjoy. Maybe he was from some booga-booga country where they didn't know about skull guns.
"Sir," the man said, "my family and I are on the way to our hotel. We have had a long journey, and we are tired; my daughter has an ear infection. If you would state your business as expeditiously as possible, I would be obliged."
"You talk like a fucking Vicky," Bud said.
"Sir, I am not what you refer to as a Vicky, or I should have gone directly there. I would be obliged if you could be so kind as to moderate your language in the presence of my wife and child."
It took Bud a while to untangle this sentence, and a while longer to believe that the man really cared about a few dirty words spoken within earshot of his family, and longer yet to believe that he had been so insolent to Bud, a heavily muscled guy who was obviously packing a skull gun.
"I'm gonna fucking say whatever I fucking want to your bitch and your flicking brat," Bud said, very loud. Then he could not keep himself from grinning. Score a few points for Bud!
The man looked impatient rather than scared and heaved a deep sigh. "Is this an armed robbery or something? Are you sure you know what you are getting into?"
Bud answered by whispering "hut" under his breath and firing a Crippler into the man's right bicep. It went off deep in the muscle, like an M-80, blowing a dark hole in the sleeve of the man's jacket and leaving his arm stretched out nice and straight— the trike now pulling without anything to oppose it. The man clenched his teeth, his eyes bulged, and for a few moments he made strangled grunting noises from way down in his chest, making an effort not to cry out.
Bud stared at the wound in fascination. It was just like shooting people in a ractive. Except that the bitch didn't scream and beg for mercy. She just turned her back, using her body to shield the baby, and looked over her shoulder, calmly, at Bud. Bud noticed she had a little scar on her cheek too.
"Next I take your eye," Bud said, "then I go to work on the bitch."
The man held up his good hand palm out, indicating surrender. He emptied his pocket of hard Universal Currency Units and handed them over. And then Bud made himself scarce, because the monitors— almond-size aerostats with eyes, ears, and radios— had probably picked up the sound of the explosion and begun converging on the area. He saw one hiss by him as he rounded the corner, trailing a short whip antenna that caught the light like a hairline crack in the atmosphere.
Three days later, Bud was hanging around the Aerodrome, looking for easy pickings, when a big ship came in from Singapore. Immersed in a stream of thousand arrivals was a tight group of some two dozen solidly built, very dark-skinned black men dressed in business suits, with Strips of colored cloth draped around their necks and little scars on their cheekbone.
It was later that night that Bud, for the first time in his life, heard the word Ashanti. "Another twenty-five Ashanti just came in from L.A.!" said a man in a bar. "The Ashanti had a big meeting in the conference room at the Sheraton!" said a woman on the street. Waiting in a queue for one of the free matter compilers, a bum said, "One of them Ashanti gave me five yuks. They're fine folks." When Bud ran into a guy he knew, a former comrade in the decoy trade, he said, "Hey, the place is crawling with them Ashanti, ain't it?"
"Yup," said the guy, who had seemed unaccountably shocked to see Bud's face on the Street, and who was annoyingly distracted all of a sudden, swiveling his head to look all ways.
"They must be having a convention or something," Bud theorized. "I rolled one of 'em the other night."
"Yeah, I know," his friend said.
"Huh? How'd you know that?"
"They ain't having a convention, Bud. All of those Ashanti— except the first one-came to town hunting for you."
Paralysis struck Bud's vocal cords, and he felt lightheaded, unable to concentrate.
"I gotta go," his friend said, and removed himself from Bud's vicinity.
For the next few hours Bud felt as though everyone on the street was looking at him. Bud was certainly looking at them, looking for those suits, those colored strips of cloth. But he caught sight of a man in shorts and a T-shirt— a black man with very high cheeks, one of which was marked with a tiny scar, and almost Asian-looking eyes in a very high state of alertness. So he couldn't rely on the Ashanti wearing stereotyped clothing.
Very soon after that, Bud swapped clothes with an indigent down on the beach, giving up all his black leather and coming away with a T-shirt and shorts of his own. The T-shirt was much too small; it bound him under the armpits and pressed against his muscles so that he felt the eternal twitching even more than usual. He wished he could turn the stimulators off now, relax his muscles even for one night, but that would require a trip to the mod parlor, and he had to figure that the Ashanti had the mod parlors all staked out. He could have gone to any of several brothels, but he didn't know what kind of connections these Ashanti might have— or even what the hell an Ashanti was, exactly-and he wasn't sure he could get a boner under these circumstances anyway.
As he wandered the streets of the Leased Territories, primed to level his Sights at any black person who blundered into his path, he reflected on the unfairness of his fate. How was he to know that guy belonged to a tribe? Actually, he should have known, just from the fact that he wore nice clothes and didn't look like all the other people. The very apartness of those people should have been a dead giveaway. And his lack of fear should have told him something. Like he couldn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to mug him.
Well, Bud had been that stupid, and Bud didn't have a phyle of his own, so Bud was screwed. Bud would have to go get himself one real quick, now.
He'd already tried to join the Boers a few years back. The Boers were to Bud's kind of white trash what these Ashanti were to most of the blacks. Stocky blonds in suits or the most conservative sorts of dresses, usually with half a dozen kids in tow, and my god did they ever stick together. Bud had paid a few visits to the local laager, studied some of their training ractives on his home mediatron, put in some extra hours at the gym trying to meet their physical standards, even gone to a couple of horrific bible-study sessions. But in the end, Bud and the Boers weren't much of a match. The amount of church you had to attend was staggering-it was like living in church. And he'd studied their history, but there were only so many Boer/Zulu skirmishes he could stand to read about or keep straight in his head. So that was out; he wasn't getting into any laager tonight.
The Vickys wouldn't take him in a million years, of course. Almost all the other tribes were racially oriented, like those Parsis or whatever. The Jews wouldn't take him unless he cut a piece of his dick off and learned to read a whole nother language, which was a bit of a tall order since he hadn't gotten round to learning how to read English yet. There were a bunch of coenobitical phyles— religious tribes— that took people of all races, but most of them weren't very powerful and didn't have turf in the Leased Territories. The Mormons had turf and were very powerful, but he wasn't sure if they'd take him as quickly and readily as he needed to be taken.
Then there were the tribes that people just made up out of thin air— the synthetic phyles— but most of them were based on some shared skill or weird idea or ritual that he wouldn't be able to pick up in half an hour.
Finally, sometime around midnight, he wandered past a man in a funny gray jacket and cap with a red star on it, trying to give away little red books, and it hit him: Sendero. Most Senderistas were either Incan or Korean, but they'd take anyone. They had a nice clave here in the Leased Territories, a clave with good security, and every one of them, down to the last man or woman, was batshit. They'd be more than a match for a few dozen Ashantis. And you could join anytime just by walking in the gates. They would take anyone, no questions asked.
He'd heard it was not such a good thing to be a Communist, but under the circumstances he figured he could hold his nose and quote from the little red book as necessary. As soon as those Ashantis left town, he'd bolt.
Once he made up his mind, he couldn't wait to get there. He had to restrain himself from breaking into a jog, which would be sure to draw the attention of any Ashantis on the street. He couldn't bear the idea of being so close to safety and then blowing it.
He rounded a corner and saw the wall of the Sendero Clave; four stories high and two blocks long, one solid giant mediatron with a tiny gate in the middle. Mao was on one end, waving to an unseen multitude, backed up by his horsetoothed wife and his beetle-browed sidekick Lin Biao, and Chairman Gonzalo was on the other, teaching some small children, and in the middle was a slogan in ten-meter-high letters: STRIVE TO UPHOLD THE PRINCIPLES OF MAO-GONZALO-THOUGHT!
The gate was guarded, as always, by a couple of twelve-year-old kids in red neckerchiefs and armbands, ancient bolt-action rifles with real bayonets leaning against their collarbones. A blond white girl and a pudgy Asian boy. Bud and his son Harv had whiled away many an idle hour trying to get these kids to laugh: making silly faces, mooning them, telling jokes. Nothing ever worked. But he'd seen the rituaclass="underline" They'd bar his path with crossed rifles and not let him in until he swore his undying allegiance to Mao-Gonzalo-thought, and then-
A horse, or something built around the same general plan, was coming down the street at a hand-gallop. Its hooves did not make the pocking noise of iron horseshoes. Bud realized it was a chevaline— a four-legged robot thingy.