Descending Road - CORTEVAIL by Dana W. Paxson

CORTEVAIL

1563 4D

“M44K, you were due up at Square Green five hours back. M44K, respond. M44K, we are initiating search for your echo comm. Please report.”

The sun climbed from red toward yellow. Rennie drove the fastcar at a crawl; Rion followed in the reactivated autocart. Ezzar fingered the fastcar‘s comm unit, listening to the corp security message traffic. Her gut clenched and unclenched. She kept talking, driving the face-image from her mind. “That’s probably us. If I’d known the codes, I’d have confirmed and they wouldn’t be hunting.”

Rennie, looking haggard, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “We’re coming into Drevill now. Don’t bother, EZ. Why don’t you just pull the echo comm when we junk this thing?”

“We’re not junking it. I’m turning it over to Rion for the group. They’ll rename it and use it. The echo comm‘s disabled.” In the raw morning light, she scanned the large loading station just ahead: a quarry in the guts of a mountain, gnawed out with titanium teeth by a vast blind greedy creature.

She took a last deep breath before entering the haze of dust in the station’s staging area. The less exposure to this she got, the better.

Coming in filled with orange-yellow powder from the mine loaders, huge ore carts lumbered through this vast mountain-fenced yard. Andro-operated vacuum feeders sucked the carts empty, building arrays of conical heaps of ore. Later the feeders loaded the heaps into trains bound for the City‘s refiners and reactors. Long low-hanging cylinders of pale-gray rail cars, lined up side by side, pointed toward a joining of the many yard tracks into a pair of lines that ran off through a narrow gorge, taking a twisting route through gradually-diminishing mountains north toward the City. Engines complained in ozone baritone voices, shuttled back and forth, sorted the cars by ore type. Crashes and thuds rippled continually through the yard. Haze, gray and yellowish in the morning light, billowed slightly in a soft breeze.

Ezzar scanned the yard. “We’ve got to find Cortevail. She knows what car to put our stuff on. Let’s see. There.” She pointed to a long metal shed, stained green by rain, standing alone near the base of the marbled and machine-chewed mountain wall. A door at the left end of the shed bore deep dents and scratches in its peeling white surface.

Ezzar pulled the door open and looked in. To her right, two sunny windows on the shed’s long southern wall lit the haze in pale creamy swirls. Racked and stacked on the opposite wall was a miscellany of battered and worn heavy-machinery robotools. At the other end of the shed, a tall andro woman as pale as Rennie teetered back in a spidery chair at a big steel table.

“Cortevail,” Ezzar called out over the noise.

The woman smoothed her coverall and shook yellow dust from her head of frizzy blond hair. “Hanni, Rion. Hana, Ezzar, Rennie. Have a seat.”

Rion kicked and dragged metal-frame chairs up to the heavy, grease-stained table.

“You’re not going on a plute car,” Cortevail said. “I’ll put you up front with the engineer. She’s with us.” Cortevail sat her chair upright with a thock on the stone floor, and grabbed a datasheet from a stack in front of her.

Ezzar studied Rennie and Cortevail, comparing the dark and varicolored maculations on the skin of their arms and necks, the andros' jailer: melanoma. Many times Ezzar had worked Rennie‘s body over with a medkit, snatching away the deadly little tumors that seemed to breed in his pale skin like lice. It was time once again for that, time Rennie didn’t want to take any more, time too precious. Who took care of Cortevail‘s mottlings? Rion touched Cortevail‘s neck with one finger, nudging a ripe, dark-brown spot. Aha.

Cortevail fingered the datasheet and said over the background roar, “Just be sure you contact Elvin when you get in. The shipment has to be off the car before it leaves on the return trip. That gives you five days.” She threw the datasheet on the table.

A team of andros outside the shed began taking away the gun crates. Ezzar waved some dust away from her face. Ten days to do it all, and now this. “Elvin? He’s a— I don’t trust him.”

“He’s all we have right now.”

Rion nodded. “I agree with Ezzar. Elvin isn’t safe. He could blow us all, the pig — Novander hacked him off their tree, you know.”

“We’re stuck with him,” Cortevail said, her mouth turning down. “If Allashani‘s people don’t get the medicine, they’ll die. The weapons go down to Blinker Zone, then out, fast. He’s the only one who knows the safe routes.”

“Who’s Allashani?” Rennie asked, flipping his chair back-to-front and straddling it. “And what’s the medical problem?” He pulled a blue-labeled beamer cartridge from a pocket of his coverall and nibbled gently at the edge of the soft-metal end. Ezzar glared at him. Someday one of these damn things would blow his jaw off.

“If you go in, you’ll get to meet Allashani,” Rion said. “I don’t think you’re going in, are you?”

“Not a chance. Into the ore station and back out, that’s all,” Ezzar said, still glaring at Rennie. He shook his head at her, grinned, and kept nibbling.

Rion shrugged. “She’s got a real following down in Sobi and the lowest areas. They’re getting sick with a virus loose in the lower City.”

Viruses hadn’t been a problem for fifteen hundred years, after the Inside-Out Plague. Ezzar said, “So? What’s this one?”

“It isn’t just a virus,” Rion said. “It’s an enhancement genebuilder gone rogue, an andro headsmith upgrade. Some andro stole viral brew in the gene farms and they never wiped him. It went sour. Supposed to cause high fevers and death. The City put out a public notice and warning, and they’re monitoring travelers. There’s rumors of a new relocation. I got stopped on the way out here this trip, just as I was leaving the City.”

Ezzar said, “The corps can usually neutralize those things in hours, when they decide to. Why haven’t they?” Rion shrugged.

“I don’t know,” Cortevail said. She tilted her chair back again and extended her long legs, planting her boots on the table. “The biotrackers traced it back to ArCorp. I think Arlen‘s covering it all up. Maybe his teams can’t solve this one, and he doesn’t want to take the fines and sanctions for it. He’s got way too much invested in his andro farms; he can’t afford a per-unit charge for this. He keeps them all backing off from him, though, all the corps, all the agencies; there’s no one he can’t fuck sideways if he wants to. Look at the relocs.”

Rennie broke in, examining the cartridge closely and stuffing it back in a pocket. “Before I… got free, I used to get those viral upgrades — just a good hard sniff, with a kick of coshine. The high was good, but the headache nearly killed me.” He massaged one temple. “Maybe this part about death is just an info plant, like the rumors about cropkilling mold last year.”

Rion said, “One of my ArCorp buddies said this one can cross over to humans, jump back and forth, swap human genes for andro, in living people. Give us the andro upgrades, maybe more; maybe give the andros what we have, fertility, good skin, who knows? Maybe we’ll get a free innerspace ride.”

Ezzar stared at Rion; he hadn’t been this relaxed since they had started their raid for the weapons. Not if he joked about innerspace. But then he wasn’t taking the guns any further — she and Rennie were.

Cortevail shook her head. “It’s killing people, or something is. The bio stuff we’re sending in is from the labs at Durrisbro, and I don’t even know what it does. They wouldn’t tell us. I hope we’re not being used just for testing it.” She clenched one hand in the other.

Ezzar‘s impatience grew. “That crossover thing’s got to be somebody’s drug dream. Look, couldn’t we just miss seeing Elvin, maybe take the shipment on in ourselves?”

“Sorry, he’s got the only City contacts and there’s nothing any of us can do about it, not unless you want to get tangled in City shit. And you don’t want that, trust me. It was hard enough finding someone even as good as him. Here.” Cortevail passed Ezzar a hard biscuit with a complex symbol on it. “If he’s not there, scratch this mark at the usual entry, calf level, when you get there, and go back the next day. If no one comes then, just get out, whatever way you can.”

“What’s the rush?” Ezzar asked.

“Things are warming up at the City ore terminal down there. We nearly had a firefight nine days back. The regional militia are watching the area.”

Ezzar looked at the biscuit for a moment, registering the pattern, then slipped it into a pocket.

Cortevail continued. “The shipment’ll be in the car numbered 107964. It’ll be just a few cars behind the engine. There’ll be a crew at that end, and they’ll know what to look for. Remember to clean all the dust off yourselves afterwards, and I mean ALL the dust.” She looked directly at Ezzar. “What’s your spit with Elvin?”

Ezzar shuddered and stood up. “It’s personal. Like Rion says, he’s a pig.” In a flash of old memory, rapid hot breath curled damp against her neck. Her stomach tightened. Then Rennie‘s hand, firm and warm, gripped her shoulder, and she turned to him. His arm went around her. “Are you all right, EZ? This time, I’ll be there.” His deep voice vibrated against her body.

Ezzar relaxed slightly; then, seeing Rion and Cortevail looking at her, she straightened and pulled away to stand free again. It wouldn’t work to have them think she was weak, especially not now. “Yeah. When we get this loaded, I want to get back to Engrammatic with you.” And some surgery on those moles of yours. She turned to Cortevail. “All I can say is I hope Elvin doesn’t turn this shipment and take the cash. We’ve worked too hard for that. How long do we have?”

“The train leaves for the City in six days. Just be here on time.” Cortevail tapped her finger on the wall.

Ezzar liked Cortevail. She worked like Rennie, active and forceful, not like all the other andros Ezzar had met. More human than most humans. No wonder Rion stayed with her.

“We’ll be here on the sixth morning after today. We’ll see you then.”

“Perfect. Maybe you can help us load, if you get here early.”

“We’ll try. Come on, Rennie.” Ezzar took Rennie‘s hand. She turned to Rion. “We’re hiking up to Engrammatic. The car is yours. Will you be here when we get back?”

“No, got to get back to ArCorp for a few months. I’ve got appearances to keep up. They think I’m in the City having fun in Poly Town. Thanks for the car — I thought you’d want it, and I was going to ask you for a ride. We’ll dress it up for another job playing corpo.”

“I don’t know how you can work for Arlen,” Ezzar said. “Don’t they suspect you?”

Rion grinned, and swung his head, bouncing the knot in his long hair against his back. “They suspect everybody, even corpos. Don’t I make a good cop, with the hair? Their latest sess, straight out of downcity.”

He smiled, then let it fade. “Just in case you need it, my corpo name there is Artir Surendar, and my trigger-name is Weian Shai. I learn a lot in there, but it gets scary sometimes. Have a good trip.” He waved at Rennie. “See you, GoJo.”

As Ezzar moved with Rennie toward the door of the shed, her back itched, and she stopped. “Help me with this strap, it’s off-center again.”

Rennie loosened the strap and started making adjustments. Ezzar froze. Rion‘s voice, muttering to Cortevail through the grumbling of the yard machinery, carried to just the spot where Ezzar stood. “Don’t know how she does that, either, going to war beside him. He’s got a bad leg, too, he told me. Can’t be Leg Number Three that’s bad, judging from her.”

“Shut up, asshole,” Cortevail said softly to him, “You crank me every chance you get. Besides, he’ll hear you.”

Ezzar nudged Rennie with her elbow; he gave a soft bass chuckle. The roar and dust enveloped them as he opened the door. About half a day’s walk toward Engrammatic Inn, a broadneedle grove, its air fresh and scented, stood over a leaf-cushioned bed just out of sight of the road. Warmth spread through her chest.

Story List	SURPRISE ME	Author Page
USER SURVEY	PUZZLE ME	MAKE ELM MARK

HOVER Lucida Bright BARE	HOVER Lucida Bright FULL	HOVER Palatino Linotype BARE
HOVER Palatino Linotype FULL	HOVER Times New Roman BARE	HOVER Times New Roman FULL
PAD Arial BARE	PAD Arial FULL	PAD Lucida Bright BARE
PAD Lucida Bright FULL	PAD Times New Roman BARE	PAD Times New Roman FULL


	CORTEVAIL 1563 4D “M44K, you were due up at Square Green five hours back. M44K, respond. M44K, we are initiating search for your echo comm. Please report.” The sun climbed from red toward yellow. Rennie drove the fastcar at a crawl; Rion followed in the reactivated autocart. Ezzar fingered the fastcar‘s comm unit, listening to the corp security message traffic. Her gut clenched and unclenched. She kept talking, driving the face-image from her mind. “That’s probably us. If I’d known the codes, I’d have confirmed and they wouldn’t be hunting.” Rennie, looking haggard, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “We’re coming into Drevill now. Don’t bother, EZ. Why don’t you just pull the echo comm when we junk this thing?” “We’re not junking it. I’m turning it over to Rion for the group. They’ll rename it and use it. The echo comm‘s disabled.” In the raw morning light, she scanned the large loading station just ahead: a quarry in the guts of a mountain, gnawed out with titanium teeth by a vast blind greedy creature. She took a last deep breath before entering the haze of dust in the station’s staging area. The less exposure to this she got, the better. Coming in filled with orange-yellow powder from the mine loaders, huge ore carts lumbered through this vast mountain-fenced yard. Andro-operated vacuum feeders sucked the carts empty, building arrays of conical heaps of ore. Later the feeders loaded the heaps into trains bound for the City‘s refiners and reactors. Long low-hanging cylinders of pale-gray rail cars, lined up side by side, pointed toward a joining of the many yard tracks into a pair of lines that ran off through a narrow gorge, taking a twisting route through gradually-diminishing mountains north toward the City. Engines complained in ozone baritone voices, shuttled back and forth, sorted the cars by ore type. Crashes and thuds rippled continually through the yard. Haze, gray and yellowish in the morning light, billowed slightly in a soft breeze. Ezzar scanned the yard. “We’ve got to find Cortevail. She knows what car to put our stuff on. Let’s see. There.” She pointed to a long metal shed, stained green by rain, standing alone near the base of the marbled and machine-chewed mountain wall. A door at the left end of the shed bore deep dents and scratches in its peeling white surface. Ezzar pulled the door open and looked in. To her right, two sunny windows on the shed’s long southern wall lit the haze in pale creamy swirls. Racked and stacked on the opposite wall was a miscellany of battered and worn heavy-machinery robotools. At the other end of the shed, a tall andro woman as pale as Rennie teetered back in a spidery chair at a big steel table. “Cortevail,” Ezzar called out over the noise. The woman smoothed her coverall and shook yellow dust from her head of frizzy blond hair. “Hanni, Rion. Hana, Ezzar, Rennie. Have a seat.” Rion kicked and dragged metal-frame chairs up to the heavy, grease-stained table. “You’re not going on a plute car,” Cortevail said. “I’ll put you up front with the engineer. She’s with us.” Cortevail sat her chair upright with a thock on the stone floor, and grabbed a datasheet from a stack in front of her. Ezzar studied Rennie and Cortevail, comparing the dark and varicolored maculations on the skin of their arms and necks, the andros' jailer: melanoma. Many times Ezzar had worked Rennie‘s body over with a medkit, snatching away the deadly little tumors that seemed to breed in his pale skin like lice. It was time once again for that, time Rennie didn’t want to take any more, time too precious. Who took care of Cortevail‘s mottlings? Rion touched Cortevail‘s neck with one finger, nudging a ripe, dark-brown spot. Aha. Cortevail fingered the datasheet and said over the background roar, “Just be sure you contact Elvin when you get in. The shipment has to be off the car before it leaves on the return trip. That gives you five days.” She threw the datasheet on the table. A team of andros outside the shed began taking away the gun crates. Ezzar waved some dust away from her face. Ten days to do it all, and now this. “Elvin? He’s a— I don’t trust him.” “He’s all we have right now.” Rion nodded. “I agree with Ezzar. Elvin isn’t safe. He could blow us all, the pig — Novander hacked him off their tree, you know.” “We’re stuck with him,” Cortevail said, her mouth turning down. “If Allashani‘s people don’t get the medicine, they’ll die. The weapons go down to Blinker Zone, then out, fast. He’s the only one who knows the safe routes.” “Who’s Allashani?” Rennie asked, flipping his chair back-to-front and straddling it. “And what’s the medical problem?” He pulled a blue-labeled beamer cartridge from a pocket of his coverall and nibbled gently at the edge of the soft-metal end. Ezzar glared at him. Someday one of these damn things would blow his jaw off. “If you go in, you’ll get to meet Allashani,” Rion said. “I don’t think you’re going in, are you?” “Not a chance. Into the ore station and back out, that’s all,” Ezzar said, still glaring at Rennie. He shook his head at her, grinned, and kept nibbling. Rion shrugged. “She’s got a real following down in Sobi and the lowest areas. They’re getting sick with a virus loose in the lower City.” Viruses hadn’t been a problem for fifteen hundred years, after the Inside-Out Plague. Ezzar said, “So? What’s this one?” “It isn’t just a virus,” Rion said. “It’s an enhancement genebuilder gone rogue, an andro headsmith upgrade. Some andro stole viral brew in the gene farms and they never wiped him. It went sour. Supposed to cause high fevers and death. The City put out a public notice and warning, and they’re monitoring travelers. There’s rumors of a new relocation. I got stopped on the way out here this trip, just as I was leaving the City.” Ezzar said, “The corps can usually neutralize those things in hours, when they decide to. Why haven’t they?” Rion shrugged. “I don’t know,” Cortevail said. She tilted her chair back again and extended her long legs, planting her boots on the table. “The biotrackers traced it back to ArCorp. I think Arlen‘s covering it all up. Maybe his teams can’t solve this one, and he doesn’t want to take the fines and sanctions for it. He’s got way too much invested in his andro farms; he can’t afford a per-unit charge for this. He keeps them all backing off from him, though, all the corps, all the agencies; there’s no one he can’t fuck sideways if he wants to. Look at the relocs.” Rennie broke in, examining the cartridge closely and stuffing it back in a pocket. “Before I… got free, I used to get those viral upgrades — just a good hard sniff, with a kick of coshine. The high was good, but the headache nearly killed me.” He massaged one temple. “Maybe this part about death is just an info plant, like the rumors about cropkilling mold last year.” Rion said, “One of my ArCorp buddies said this one can cross over to humans, jump back and forth, swap human genes for andro, in living people. Give us the andro upgrades, maybe more; maybe give the andros what we have, fertility, good skin, who knows? Maybe we’ll get a free innerspace ride.” Ezzar stared at Rion; he hadn’t been this relaxed since they had started their raid for the weapons. Not if he joked about innerspace. But then he wasn’t taking the guns any further — she and Rennie were. Cortevail shook her head. “It’s killing people, or something is. The bio stuff we’re sending in is from the labs at Durrisbro, and I don’t even know what it does. They wouldn’t tell us. I hope we’re not being used just for testing it.” She clenched one hand in the other. Ezzar‘s impatience grew. “That crossover thing’s got to be somebody’s drug dream. Look, couldn’t we just miss seeing Elvin, maybe take the shipment on in ourselves?” “Sorry, he’s got the only City contacts and there’s nothing any of us can do about it, not unless you want to get tangled in City shit. And you don’t want that, trust me. It was hard enough finding someone even as good as him. Here.” Cortevail passed Ezzar a hard biscuit with a complex symbol on it. “If he’s not there, scratch this mark at the usual entry, calf level, when you get there, and go back the next day. If no one comes then, just get out, whatever way you can.” “What’s the rush?” Ezzar asked. “Things are warming up at the City ore terminal down there. We nearly had a firefight nine days back. The regional militia are watching the area.” Ezzar looked at the biscuit for a moment, registering the pattern, then slipped it into a pocket. Cortevail continued. “The shipment’ll be in the car numbered 107964. It’ll be just a few cars behind the engine. There’ll be a crew at that end, and they’ll know what to look for. Remember to clean all the dust off yourselves afterwards, and I mean ALL the dust.” She looked directly at Ezzar. “What’s your spit with Elvin?” Ezzar shuddered and stood up. “It’s personal. Like Rion says, he’s a pig.” In a flash of old memory, rapid hot breath curled damp against her neck. Her stomach tightened. Then Rennie‘s hand, firm and warm, gripped her shoulder, and she turned to him. His arm went around her. “Are you all right, EZ? This time, I’ll be there.” His deep voice vibrated against her body. Ezzar relaxed slightly; then, seeing Rion and Cortevail looking at her, she straightened and pulled away to stand free again. It wouldn’t work to have them think she was weak, especially not now. “Yeah. When we get this loaded, I want to get back to Engrammatic with you.” And some surgery on those moles of yours. She turned to Cortevail. “All I can say is I hope Elvin doesn’t turn this shipment and take the cash. We’ve worked too hard for that. How long do we have?” “The train leaves for the City in six days. Just be here on time.” Cortevail tapped her finger on the wall. Ezzar liked Cortevail. She worked like Rennie, active and forceful, not like all the other andros Ezzar had met. More human than most humans. No wonder Rion stayed with her. “We’ll be here on the sixth morning after today. We’ll see you then.” “Perfect. Maybe you can help us load, if you get here early.” “We’ll try. Come on, Rennie.” Ezzar took Rennie‘s hand. She turned to Rion. “We’re hiking up to Engrammatic. The car is yours. Will you be here when we get back?” “No, got to get back to ArCorp for a few months. I’ve got appearances to keep up. They think I’m in the City having fun in Poly Town. Thanks for the car — I thought you’d want it, and I was going to ask you for a ride. We’ll dress it up for another job playing corpo.” “I don’t know how you can work for Arlen,” Ezzar said. “Don’t they suspect you?” Rion grinned, and swung his head, bouncing the knot in his long hair against his back. “They suspect everybody, even corpos. Don’t I make a good cop, with the hair? Their latest sess, straight out of downcity.” He smiled, then let it fade. “Just in case you need it, my corpo name there is Artir Surendar, and my trigger-name is Weian Shai. I learn a lot in there, but it gets scary sometimes. Have a good trip.” He waved at Rennie. “See you, GoJo.” As Ezzar moved with Rennie toward the door of the shed, her back itched, and she stopped. “Help me with this strap, it’s off-center again.” Rennie loosened the strap and started making adjustments. Ezzar froze. Rion‘s voice, muttering to Cortevail through the grumbling of the yard machinery, carried to just the spot where Ezzar stood. “Don’t know how she does that, either, going to war beside him. He’s got a bad leg, too, he told me. Can’t be Leg Number Three that’s bad, judging from her.” “Shut up, asshole,” Cortevail said softly to him, “You crank me every chance you get. Besides, he’ll hear you.” Ezzar nudged Rennie with her elbow; he gave a soft bass chuckle. The roar and dust enveloped them as he opened the door. About half a day’s walk toward Engrammatic Inn, a broadneedle grove, its air fresh and scented, stood over a leaf-cushioned bed just out of sight of the road. Warmth spread through her chest.