The Pardoner's Tale Read online

  The Pardoner's Tale

  Robert Silverberg

  The Pardoner’s Tale

  by Robert Silverberg

  “Key Sixteen, Housing Omicron Kappa, aleph sub-one,” I said to the software on duty at the Alhambra gate of the Los Angeles Wall.

  Software isn’t generally suspicious. This wasn’t even very smart software. It was working off some great biochips—I could feel them jigging and pulsing as the electron stream flowed through them—but the software itself was just a kludge. Typical gatekeeper stuff.

  I stood waiting as the picoseconds went ticking away by the millions.

  “Name, please,” the gatekeeper said finally.

  “John Doe. Beta Pi Upsilon 104324x.”

  The gate opened. I walked into Los Angeles.

  As easy as Beta Pi.

  * * *

  The wall that encircles L.A. is a hundred, a hundred fifty feet thick. Its gates are more like tunnels. When you consider that the wall runs completely around the L.A. basin from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley and then over the mountains and down the coast and back the far side past Long Beach, and that it’s at least sixty feet high and all that distance deep, you can begin to appreciate the mass of it. Think of the phenomenal expenditure of human energy that went into building it—muscle and sweat, sweat and muscle. I think about that a lot.

  I suppose the walls around our cities were put there mostly as symbols. They highlight the distinction between city and country-side, between citizen and uncitizen, between control and chaos, just as city walls did five thousand years ago. But mainly they serve to remind us that we are all slaves nowadays. You can’t ignore the walls. You can’t pretend they aren’t there. We made you build them, is what they say, and don’t you ever forget that. All the same, Chicago doesn’t have a wall sixty feet high and a hundred fifty feet deep. Houston doesn’t. Phoenix doesn’t. They make do with less. But L.A. is the main city. I suppose the Los Angeles wall is a statement: I am the Big Cheese. I am the Ham What Am.

  The walls aren’t there because the Entities are afraid of attack. They know how invulnerable they are. We know it too. They just wanted to decorate their capital with something a little special. What the hell, it isn’t their sweat that goes into building the walls. It’s ours. Not mine personally, of course. But ours.

  I saw a few Entities walking around just inside the wall, preoccupied as usual with God knows what and paying no attention to the humans in the vicinity. These were low-caste ones, the kind with the luminous orange spots along their sides. I gave them plenty of room. They have a way sometimes of picking a human up with those long elastic tongues, like a frog snapping up a fly, and letting him dangle in mid-air while they study him with those saucer-sized yellow eyes. I don’t care for that. You don’t get hurt, but it isn’t agreeable to be dangled in mid-air by something that looks like a fifteen-foot-high purple squid standing on the tips of its tentacles. Happened to me once in St. Louis, long ago, and I’m in no hurry to have it happen again.

  The first thing I did when I was inside L.A. was find me a car. On Valley Boulevard about two blocks in from the wall I saw a ’31 Toshiba El Dorado that looked good to me, and I matched frequencies with its lock and slipped inside and took about ninety seconds to reprogram its drive control to my personal metabolic cues. The previous owner must have been fat as a hippo and probably diabetic: her glycogen index was absurd and her phosphines were wild.

  Not a bad car, a little slow in the shift but what can you expect, considering the last time any cars were manufactured on this planet was the year 2034.

  “Pershing Square,” I told it.

  It had nice capacity, maybe 60 megabytes. It turned south right away and found the old freeway and drove off toward downtown. I figured I’d set up shop in the middle of things, work two or three pardons to keep my edge sharp, get myself a hotel room, a meal, maybe hire some companionship. And then think about the next move. It was winter, a nice time to be in L.A. That golden sun, those warm breezes coming down the canyons.

  I hadn’t been out on the Coast in years. Working Florida mainly, Texas, sometimes Arizona. I hate the cold. I hadn’t been in L.A. since ’36. A long time to stay away, but maybe I’d been staying away deliberately. I wasn’t sure. That last L.A. trip had left bad-tasting memories. There had been a woman who wanted a pardon and I sold her a stiff. You have to stiff the customers now and then or else you start looking too good, which can be dangerous; but she was young and pretty and full of hope and I could have stiffed the next one instead of her, only I didn’t. Sometimes I’ve felt bad, thinking back over that. Maybe that’s what had kept me away from L.A. all this time.

  A couple of miles east of the big downtown interchange traffic began backing up. Maybe an accident ahead, maybe a roadblock. I told the Toshiba to get off the freeway.

  Slipping through roadblocks is scary and calls for a lot of hard work. I knew that I probably could fool any kind of software at a roadblock and certainly any human cop, but why bother if you don’t have to?

  I asked the car where I was.

  The screen lit up. Alameda near Banning, it said. A long walk to Pershing Square, looked like. I had the car drop me at Spring Street and went the rest of the way on foot. “Pick me up at 1830 hours,” I told it. “Corner of—umm—Sixth and Hill.” It went away to park itself and I headed for the Square to peddle some pardons.

  * * *

  It isn’t hard for a good pardoner to find buyers. You can see it in their eyes: the tightly controlled anger, the smoldering resentment. And something else, something intangible, a certain sense of having a shred or two of inner integrity left, that tells you right away, Here’s somebody willing to risk a lot to regain some measure of freedom. I was in business within fifteen minutes.

  The first one was an aging surfer sort, barrel chest and that sun-bleached look. The Entities haven’t allowed surfing for ten, fifteen years—they’ve got their plankton seines just off shore from Santa Barbara to San Diego, gulping in the marine nutrients they have to have, and any beach boy who tried to take a whack at the waves out there would be chewed right up. But this guy must have been one hell of a performer in his day. The way he moved through the park, making little balancing moves as if he needed to compensate for the irregularities of the earth’s rotation, you could see how he would have been in the water. Sat down next to me, began working on his lunch. Thick forearms, gnarled hands. A wall-laborer. Muscles knotting in his cheeks: the anger, forever simmering just below boil.

  I got him talking, after a while. A surfer, yes. Lost in the far-away and gone. He began sighing to me about legendary beaches where the waves were tubes and they came pumping end to end. “Trestle Beach,” he murmured. “That’s north of San Onofre. You had to sneak through Camp Pendleton. Sometimes the Marines would open fire, just warning shots. Or Hollister Ranch, up by Santa Barbara.” His blue eyes got misty. “Huntington Beach. Oxnard. I got everywhere, man.” He flexed his huge fingers. “Now these fucking Entity hodads own the shore. Can you believe it? They own it. And I’m pulling wall, my second time around, seven days a week next ten years.”

  “Ten?” I said. “That’s a shitty deal.”

  “You know anyone who doesn’t have a shitty deal?”

  “Some,” I said. “They buy out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It can be done.”

  A careful look. You never know who might be a borgmann. Those stinking collaborators are everywhere.

  “Can it?”

  “All it takes is money,” I said.

  “And a pardoner.”

  “That’s right.”

  “One you can trust.”

  I shrugged. “You’ve got to go on faith, man.�
��

  “Yeah,” he said. Then, after a while: “I heard of a guy, he bought a three-year pardon and wall passage thrown in. Went up north, caught a krill trawler, wound up in Australia, on the Reef. Nobody’s ever going to find him there. He’s out of the system. Right out of the fucking system. What do you think that cost?”

  “About twenty grand,” I said.

  “Hey, that’s a sharp guess!”

  “No guess.”

  “Oh?” Another careful look. “You don’t sound local.”

  “I’m not. Just visiting.”

  “That’s still the price? Twenty grand?”

  “I can’t do anything about supplying krill trawlers. You’d be on your own once you were outside the wall.”

  “Twenty grand just to get through the wall?”

  “And a seven-year labor exemption.”

  “I pulled ten,” he said.

  “I can’t get you ten. It’s not in the configuration, you follow? But seven would work. You could get so far, in seven, that they’d lose you. You could goddamned swim to Australia. Come in low, below Sydney, no seines there.”

  “You know a hell of a lot.”

  “My business to know,” I said. “You want me to run an asset check on you?”

  “I’m worth seventeen five. Fifteen hundred real, the rest collat. What can I get for seventeen five?”

  “Just what I said. Through the wall, and seven years’ exemption.”

  “A bargain rate, hey?”

  “I take what I can get,” I said. “Give me your wrist. And don’t worry. This part is read-only.”

  I keyed his data implant and patched mine in. He had fifteen hundred in the bank and a collateral rating of sixteen thou, exactly as he claimed. We eyed each other very carefully now. As I said, you never know who the borgmanns are.

  “You can do it right here in the park?” he asked.

  “You bet. Lean back, close your eyes, make like you’re snoozing in the sun. The deal is that I take a thousand of the cash now and you transfer five thou of the collateral bucks to me, straight labor-debenture deal. When you get through the wall I get the other five hundred cash and five thou more on sweat security. The rest you pay off at three thou a year plus interest, wherever you are, quarterly key-ins. I’ll program the whole thing, including beep reminders on payment dates. It’s up to you to make your travel arrangements, remember. I can do pardons and wall transits but I’m not a goddamned travel agent. Are we on?”

  He put his head back and closed his eyes.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  It was fingertip stuff, straight circuit emulation, my standard hack. I picked up all his identification codes, carried them into central, found his records. He seemed real, nothing more or less than he had claimed. Sure enough, he had drawn a lulu of a labor tax, ten years on the wall. I wrote him a pardon good for the first seven of that. Had to leave the final three on the books, purely technical reasons, but the computers weren’t going to be able to find him by then. I gave him a wall-transit pass, too, which meant writing in a new skills class for him, programmer third grade. He didn’t think like a programmer and he didn’t look like a programmer but the wall software wasn’t going to figure that out. Now I had made him a member of the human elite, the relative handful of us who are free to go in and out of the walled cities as we wish. In return for these little favors I signed over his entire life savings to various accounts of mine, payable as arranged, part now, part later. He wasn’t worth a nickel any more, but he was a free man. That’s not such a terrible trade-off.

  Oh, and the pardon was a valid one. I had decided not to write any stiffs while I was in Los Angeles. A kind of sentimental atonement, you might say, for the job I had done on that woman all those years back.

  You absolutely have to write stiffs once in a while, you understand. So that you don’t look too good, so that you don’t give the Entities reason to hunt you down. Just as you have to ration the number of pardons you do. I didn’t have to be writing pardons at all, of course. I could have just authorized the system to pay me so much a year, fifty thou, a hundred, and taken it easy forever. But where’s the challenge in that?

  So I write pardons, but no more than I need to cover my expenses, and I deliberately fudge some of them up, making myself look as incompetent as the rest so the Entities don’t have a reason to begin trying to track the identifying marks of my work. My conscience hasn’t been too sore about that. It’s a matter of survival, after all. And most other pardoners are out-and-out frauds, you know. At least with me you stand a better than even chance of getting what you’re paying for.

  * * *

  The next one was a tiny Japanese woman, the classic style, sleek, fragile, doll-like. Crying in big wild gulps that I thought might break her in half, while a gray-haired older man in a shabby business suit—her grandfather, you’d guess—was trying to comfort her. Public crying is a good indicator of Entity trouble. “Maybe I can help,” I said, and they were both so distraught that they didn’t even bother to be suspicious.

  He was her father-in-law, not her grandfather. The husband was dead, killed by burglars the year before. There were two small kids. Now she had received her new labor-tax ticket. She had been afraid they were going to send her out to work on the wall, which of course wasn’t likely to happen: the assignments are pretty random, but they usually aren’t crazy, and what use would a 90-pound girl be in hauling stone blocks around? The father-in-law had some friends who were in the know, and they managed to bring up the hidden encoding on her ticket. The computers hadn’t sent her to the wall, no. They had sent her to Area Five. And they had given her a TTD classification.

  “The wall would have been better,” the old man said. “They’d see, right away, she wasn’t strong enough for heavy work, and they’d find something else, something she could do. But Area Five? Who ever comes back from that?”

  “You know what Area Five is?” I said.

  “The medical experiment place. And this mark here, TTD. I know what that stands for too.”

  She began to moan again. I couldn’t blame her. TTD means Test To Destruction. The Entities want to find out how much work we can really do, and they feel that the only reliable way to discover that is to put us through tests that show where the physical limits are.

  “I will die,” she wailed. “My babies! My babies!”

  “Do you know what a pardoner is?” I asked the father-in-law.

  A quick excited response: sharp intake of breath, eyes going bright, head nodding vehemently. Just as quickly the excitement faded, giving way to bleakness, helplessness, despair.

  “They all cheat you,” he said.

  “Not all.”

  “Who can say? They take your money, they give you nothing.”

  “You know that isn’t true. Everybody can tell you stories of pardons that came through.”

  “Maybe. Maybe,” the old man said. The woman sobbed quietly. “You know of such a person?”

  “For three thousand dollars,” I said, “I can take the TTD off her ticket. For five I can write an exemption from service good until her children are in high school.”

  Sentimental me. A fifty percent discount, and I hadn’t even run an asset check. For all I knew the father-in-law was a millionaire. But no, he’d have been off cutting a pardon for her, then, and not sitting around like this in Pershing Square.

  He gave me a long, deep, appraising look. Peasant shrewdness coming to the surface.

  “How can we be sure of that?” he asked.

  I might have told him that I was the king of my profession, the best of all pardoners, a genius hacker with the truly magic touch, who could slip into any computer ever designed and make it dance to my tune. Which would have been nothing more than the truth. But all I said was that he’d have to make up his own mind, that I couldn’t offer any affidavits or guarantees, that I was available if he wanted me and otherwise it was all the same to me if she preferred to stick with her TTD ticket. They
went off and conferred for a couple of minutes. When they came back, he silently rolled up his sleeve and presented his implant to me. I keyed his credit balance: thirty thou or so, not bad. I transferred eight of it to my accounts, half to Seattle, the rest to Los Angeles. Then I took her wrist, which was about two of my fingers thick, and got into her implant and wrote her the pardon that would save her life. Just to be certain, I ran a double validation check on it. It’s always possible to stiff a customer unintentionally, though I’ve never done it. But I didn’t want this particular one to be my first.

  “Go on,” I said. “Home. Your kids are waiting for their lunch.”

  Her eyes glowed. “If I could only thank you somehow—”

  “I’ve already banked my fee. Go. If you ever see me again, don’t say hello.”

  “This will work?” the old man asked.

  “You say you have friends who know things. Wait seven days, then tell the data bank that she’s lost her ticket. When you get the new one, ask your pals to decode it for you. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

  I don’t think he believed me. I think he was more than half sure I had swindled him out of one fourth of his life’s savings, and I could see the hatred in his eyes. But that was his problem. In a week he’d find out that I really had saved his daughter-in-law’s life, and then he’d rush down to the Square to tell me how sorry he was that he had had such terrible feelings toward me. Only by then I’d be somewhere else, far away.

  They shuffled out the east side of the park, pausing a couple of times to peer over their shoulders at me as if they thought I was going to transform them into pillars of salt the moment their backs were turned. Then they were gone.

  I’d earned enough now to get me through the week I planned to spend in L.A. But I stuck around anyway, hoping for a little more. My mistake.

  This one was Mr. Invisible, the sort of man you’d never notice in a crowd, gray on gray, thinning hair, mild bland apologetic smile. But his eyes had a shine. I forget whether he started talking first to me, or me to him, but pretty soon we were jockeying around trying to find out things about each other. He told me he was from Silver Lake. I gave him a blank look. How in hell am I supposed to know all the zillion L.A. neighborhoods? Said that he had come down here to see someone at the big government HQ on Figueroa Street. All right: probably an appeals case. I sensed a customer.