Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [164]
“Just enough for a soft cot, horse,” said Jenny. “All of us we’ll sleep well after this hard day.”
Then she saw that little flutter. One of the fronds had a bit of feather caught between some leaves, and yes, it was coal black, midnight blue, reeking of the north. Jenny sighed, because her citizenship was less faultless than Soma’s, and policemen disturbed her. But she opened her head and stared at the feather.
A telephone leapt off a tulip poplar a little ways down the road to Nashville. It squawked through its brief flight and landed with inelegant weight in front of Jenny. It turned its beady eyes on her.
“Ring,” said the telephone.
“Hello,” said Jenny.
Jenny’s Operator sounded just like Jenny, something else that secretly disturbed her. Other people’s Operators sounded like television stars or famous Legislators or like happy cartoon characters, but Jenny was in that minority of people whose Operators and Teachers always sounded like themselves. Jenny remembered a slogan from Campaign, “My voice is yours.”
“The Tennessee Highway Patrol has plucked one already, Jenny Healer.” The voice from the telephone thickened around Jenny and began pouring through her ears like cold syrup. “But we want a sample of this one as well. Hold that feather, Jenny, and open your head a little wider.”
Now, here’s the secret of those feathers. The one Jenny gave to the police and the one the cluenets had caught already. The secret of those feathers, and the feathers strung like look-here flags along the trails down from the Girding Wall, and even of the Owl feathers that had pushed through that fence and let the outside in. All of them were oily with intrigue. Each had been dipped in potent math, the autonomous software developed by the Owls of the Bluegrass.
Those feathers were hacks. They were lures and false attacks. Those feathers marked the way the Kentuckians didn’t go.
The math kept quiet and still as it floated through Jenny’s head, through the ignorable defenses of the telephone and the more considerable, but still avoidable, rings of barbed wire around Jenny’s Operator. The math went looking for a Detective or even a Legislator if one were to be found not braying in a pack of its brethren, an unlikely event.
The math stayed well clear of the Commodores in the Great Salt Lick ringing the Parthenon. It was sly math. Its goals were limited, realizable. It marked the way they didn’t go.
The Crows made Soma carry things. “You’re stronger than you think,” one said, and loaded him up with a sloshing keg made from white oak staves. A lot of the Crows carried such, Soma saw, and others carried damp, muddy burlap bags flecked with old root matter and smelling of poor people’s meals.
Japheth Sapp carried only a piece of paper. He referred to it as he huddled with the Owl and the blue-eyed boy, crouched in a dry stream bed a few yards from where the rest of the crew were hauling out their goods.
Soma had no idea where they were at this point, though he had a vague idea that they’d described an arc above the northern suburbs and the conversations indicated that they were now heading toward the capital, unlikely as that sounded. His head was still numb and soft inside, not an unpleasant situation, but not one that helped his already shaky geographical sense.
He knew what time it was, though, when the green fall of light speckling the hollow they rested in shifted toward pink. Dull as his mind was, he recognized that and smiled.
The clouds sounded the pitch note, then suddenly a great deal was happening around him. For the first time that day, the Crows’ reaction to what they perceived to be a crisis didn’t involve Soma being poked somewhere or shoved under something. So he was free to sing the anthem while the Crows went mad with activity.
The instant the rising bell tone fell