A Place so Foreign by Cory Doctorow (best ebook reader under 100 .TXT) 📖

landed on my feet. The thought made me smile. Another kid, say Oly, wouldn't have coped nearly as well.

I still hadn't spied a public phone. I figured that the taprooms would have a phone, otherwise, how could a drunk call his wife and tell her he was going to be late coming home? I picked a bar, whose airlock was painted to look like a brick tunnel, and walked in.

The airlock irised shut behind me and I blinked in the gloom. My nose was assaulted with sickly sweet incense, and stale liquor, and cigar smoke.

The place was tiny, and crowded with dented metal tables and chairs that were bolted to the floorplates. A woman stood behind the bar, looking hard and brassy and cheap, watching a soap opera on her vid. A spacer sat in one corner, staring at his bulb of beer.

The bartender looked up. "Get lost, kid," she said. "No minors allowed."

"Sorry, ma'am," I said. "I just wanted to use your telephone. I was packjacked, and I need to call the police."

The bartender turned back to her soap opera. "Go peddle it somewhere else, sonny. The phone's for customers only."

"Please," I said. "My father's an ambassador, from 1898? I don't have any money, and I'm stuck here. I won't be a minute."

The spacer looked up from his drink. "Get lost, the lady said," he slurred at me.

"I'll buy something," I said.

"You just said you don't have any money," the bartender said.

"I'll pay for it when the police get here. The Embassy will cover it."

"No credit," she said.

"You're not going to let me use your phone?" I said.

"That's right," she said, still staring at her vid.

"I'm a stranger, an ambassador's son, who's been robbed. A kid. Stuck here, broke and alone, and you won't let me use your phone to call the police?"

"That's about the size of things," she said.

"Well, I guess my Pa was right. The whole world went to hell after 1914. No manners, no human decency."

"You're breaking my heart," she said.

"Fine. Be that way. Send me back out on the street, deny me a favour that won't cost you one red cent, just because I'm a stranger."

"Shut up, kid, for chrissakes," the spacer said. "I'll stand him to a Coke, if that's what it takes. Just let him use the phone and get out of here. He's giving me a headache."

"Thank you, sir," I said, politely.

The bartender switched her vid over to phone mode, poured me a Coke, and handed me the vid.

#

The policeman who showed up a few minutes later stuck me in the back of his cruiser, listened to my story, scanned my retinas, confirmed my identity, and retracted the armour between the back and front seats.

"I'll take you to the station house," he said. "We'll contact your Embassy, let them handle it from there."

"What about the kids who 'jacked me?" I asked.

The cop turned the jetcar's conn over to wire-fly mode and turned around. "You got any description?"

"Well, they had really nice packs on, with the traffic beacons snapped off. One was red, and I think the other was green. And they were young. Ten or eleven."

The cop punched at his screen. "Kid," he said, "I got over three million minors eight to eleven, flying packs less than a year old. The most popular colour is red. Second choice, green. Where would you like me to start? Alphabetically?"

"Sorry, sir, I didn't realise."

"Sure," he said. "Whatever."

"I guess I'm not thinking very clearly. It's been a long day."

The cop looked over to me and smiled. "I guess it has, at that. Don't worry, kid, we'll get you home all right."

#

They gave me a fresh jumpsuit, sat me on a bench, called the embassy, and forgot about me. A long, boring time later, a fat man with walrus moustaches and ruddy skin showed up.

"On your feet, lad," he said. "I'm Pondicherry, your father's successor. You've made quite a mess of things, haven't you?" He had a clipped, British accent, with a hint of something else. I remembered Mr Johnstone saying he'd been in India. He wore a standard unisex jumpsuit, with his ambassadorial sash overtop of it. He looked ridiculous.

"Sorry to have disturbed you, sir," I said.

"I'm sure you are," he said. "Come along, we'll see about fixing this mess."

He used the station's teleporter to bring me to his apartment. It was as ridiculous as his uniform, and in the same way. He'd taken the basic elegant simplicity of a standard 1975 unit and draped all kinds of silly trophies and models overtop of it: lions' heads and sabers and model ships and framed medals and savage masks and dolls.

"You may look, but not touch, do you understand me?" he said, as we stepped out of the teleporter.

"Yes, sir," I said. If anyone else had said it, I would have been offended, but coming from this puffed-up pigeon, it didn't sting much.

He went to a vid and punched impatiently at the screen while I prowled the apartment. The bookcase was full of old friends, books by the Frenchman, of course, and more, with strange names like Wells and Burroughs and Shelley. I looked over a long, stone-headed spear, and the curve of an elephant's tusk, and a collection of campaign ribbons and medals under glass. I returned to the bookcase: something had been bothering me. There, there it was: "War of the Worlds," the book that Mr Adelson had given me for Christmas. But there was something wrong with the spine of this one: instead of Jules Verne, the author name was H.G. Wells. I snuck a look over my shoulder; Pondicherry was still stabbing at the screen. I snuck the book off the shelf and turned to the title page: "War of the Worlds, by Herbert George Wells." I turned to the first chapter:

The Eve of the War

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

It was just as I remembered it, every word, just as it was in the Verne. I couldn't begin to explain it.

A robutler swung out of its niche with a sheaf of papers. I startled at the noise, then reflexively stuck the book in my jumpsuit. The roboutler delivered them to Pondicherry, who stuffed them in a briefcase.

"The embassy will be able to return you home by courier route in three hours. Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of waiting around here until then. I have an important meeting to attend — you'll have to come along."

"Yes, sir," I said, trying to sound eager and helpful.

"Don't say anything, don't touch anything. This is very sensitive."

"No, sir, I won't. Thank you, sir."

#

The meeting was in a private room in a fancy restaurant, one that I'd been to before for an embassy Christmas party. Mama had drunk two glasses of sherry, and had flushed right to the neck of her dress. We'd had roast beef, and a goose wrapped inside a huge squash, the size of a barrel, like they grew on the Moon.

Pondicherry whisked through the lobby, and the main dining room, and then up a narrow set of stairs, without checking to see if I was following. I dawdled a little, remembering Pa laughing and raising his glass in toast after toast.

I caught up with Pondicherry just as he was ordering, speaking brusquely into the table. Another man sat opposite him. Pondicherry looked up at me and said, "Have you dined, boy?"

"No, sir."

He ordered me a plate of calf livers in cream sauce, which is about the worst thing you can feed a boy, if you ask me, which he didn't. "Sit down," he said. "Mr Nussbaum, Master James Nicholson. I am temporarily in loco parentis, until he can be sent home."

Nussbaum smiled and extended his hand. He was wearing a grey suit, with a strange cut, and a black tie. His fingers dripped with heavy gold rings, and his hair, while short, still managed to look fancy and a little sissy-fied. "Good to meetcha, son. You Lester's boy?"

"Yes, sir, he was my Pa."

"Good man. A damned shame. What are you doing here? Playing hooky?"

"I guess I just got lost. I'm going home, soon as they can get me there."

"Is that so? Well, I'll be sad to see you go. You look like a smart kid. You like chocolate cake, I bet."

"Sometimes," I said.

"Like when?"

"When my mama makes it, with a glass of milk, after school," I said.

He laughed, a strangled har-har-har. "You guys kill me. Your mama, huh? Well, they make some fine chocolate cake here, though it may not be as good as the stuff from home." He thumbed the table. "Sweetie, send up the biggest piece of chocolate cake you got down there, and a glass a milk, willya?"

The table acknowledged his request with a soft green light.

"Thank you, sir," I said.

"That's quite enough, I think," Pondicherry said. "I didn't come here to watch you rot young James's teeth. Can we get to business?"

Pondicherry started talking, in rapid, clipped sentences, punctuated by vicious bites of his food. I tried to follow what it was about — trading buffalo steaks for rare metals, I got that much, but not much more. The calves' livers were worse than I imagined, and I hid as much of them as I could under the potatoes, then pushed the plate away and dug into the cake.

I sneaked a look up and saw that Nussbaum was grinning slyly at me. He hadn't said much, just ate calmly and waited for Pondicherry to run out of steam. He caught my eye and slipped a wink at me. I looked over at Pondicherry, who was noisily cudding a piece of steak, oblivious, and winked back at Nussbaum.

Pondicherry daubbed at his mouth with his napkin. "Excuse me," he said, "I'll be right back." He stood and walked towards the WC.

Nussbaum suddenly jingled. Distractledly, he patted his pockets until he located a tiny phone. He flipped it open and grunted "Nussbaum," into it.

"Jules!" he said a moment later. "How're things?"

He scowled as he listened to the answer. "Now, you and I know that there's a difference between smart and greedy. I think it's a bad idea."

He listened some more and drummed his fingers on the table.

"Because it's not credible, dammit! Even the title is anachronistic: no one in 1902 is going to understand what Neuromancer means. Think about it, wouldya? Why don't you do some of Twain's stuff? Those books've got legs."

My jaw dropped. Nussbaum was talking to the Frenchman — and he was helping him to cheat! To steal from Mark Twain! I was suddenly conscious of "War of the Worlds," down the front of my jumpsuit. I thought back to Mr Adelson's assignment, and it all made sudden sense. Verne was a plagiarist.

Nussbaum hung up just as Pondicherry re-seated himself. He took a sip of his drink, then held up a hand. Pondicherry eyed him coldly.

"Look," Nussbaum said. "We've gone over this a few times, OK? I know where you stand. You know where I stand. We're not standing in the same place. Much as I enjoy your company, I don't really wanna spend the whole day listening to you repeating yourself. All right?"

"Really, I don't think —" Pondicherry started, but Nussbaum held up his hand again.

"That's all right, I'm a rude son-of-a-bitch, and I know it. Let's just take it as read that you and me spent the whole afternoon letting the other fella know how sincere our positions are. Then we can move onto cocktails, and compromise, and maybe have some of the day left over." Pondicherry started to talk again, but Nussbaum plowed over him. "I'll go to six troy ounces per steer. You won't get a better offer. 98% pure ores. Better than anything you'd ever refine back home. It's as