Future Crimes Part 76

The addict lifted his weapon and fired. Twice.

The shots sent the man flying back along the corridor, bouncing against the gantry supports before skidding to a halt alongside the rear wall.

The addict crouched and followed.

The place was a maze of metal and smoke.

"How you doing. Reader One?" a tinny voice asked in his headset. It was not the voice he had heard earlier.

"On the ground," the addict shouted into the mouth mike

"See anything?"

Something touched the top of his head, and he fell forward, spinning, bringing his weapon around. On the floor, his knees bent up against the gantry, he saw a sheet of paper flutter, side to side, until it landed, slithering beneath one of the supports.

When he looked up, he saw the rest of them.

The air was filled with sheets of paper, their surfaces covered in the spidery blackness of type. Some of them were burning, leaving tiny trails of smoke as they descended.

He grabbed at a sheet and shook out the flames, glancing at the words between the blackened edges of the page. It wasn't something he recognized, but the simple commitment of thoughts to paper, of the recording of opinions or beliefs or even complete fiction filled him with awe. The way it always did They had always hoped that one day they would find a stash like this one. They had hoped but had never dared believe.

He looked around and saw the black figures swinging down onto the ground level now. As he looked up the tiers, he saw other black figures on the edges of the gantry, their weapons readied but n.o.body to fire at. Several of these figures were already giving the all-clear.

It took them sixteen days to move all of the pages, filling the cavernous interior holds of the stripped down water carriers, delivery modules, and old sky buses before lifting off shakily into the sky to carry the pages to a hundred safe-houses scattered around the city.

Watchers were placed at street corners, upper-story windows and on rooftops for two square miles of the warehouse, each fitted with a mouth mike and a "lights out" implant in a rear tooth to be used in the event of capture. The operation went smoothly thanks to the fact that the warehouse was in a sector that n.o.body ever visited anymore. During the repeated pick ups, the addict realized just how much of the city had fallen into disuse. It was this fact that most depressed him .. .

perhaps even more than the criminalization of reading: the fact that the city was somehow being run down beneath their very eyes .. . turned into something else.

This was why the organization had been necessary.

The People's Literation Society, a middle ground between the authorities which sought to suppress literature and the entrepreneurial pushers who sought to benefit from the suppression. If asked, the addict would have found it difficult to say who he despised the most.

The first drop took place during a busy lunch period, from an old delivery module that skirted the monolithic towers of the business district three times before its load was dispatched. Then the module slipped into and amidst the tiered traffic flows until it was gone. Two Prowlcars arrived minutes later, by which time the module was safely "home" and already being dismantled, its telltale livery being replaced or restructured or redesigned. The addict estimated they "set free"

more than half a million pages of around three hundred to four hundred words a page.

The sheets released on that first drop fell from the air onto the dirty streets and walkways of the city like confetti.

A TAPper propped against a building side outside a recreation brothel stooped to pick a sheet that had brushed his bare legs. As he lifted it for a closer look, another sheet landed to take its place. The sheet contained pages 69 and 70 of The House at Pooh Corner. The TAPper frowned and studied the words, wondering just what, exactly, a "tigger" might be. When he got to the end, he wanted to know more about Piglet and about the blue braces of Christopher Robin (whoever he was). The boy scratched at the rash around his cheek-studs and watched another sheet flutter down toward him. Maybe that one would provide some answers ... or maybe he would have to search around--even ask around--until he found other sheets.. ..

A man wearing a banker's sarong picked up a sheet containing pages 175 and 176 of John Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur, glanced around nervously and then sc rumpled the paper into his waist-pouch. Seconds later he was lost in the crowds watching the pages rain down upon the city, heading home where he could read in safety. He felt gloriously excited. A few steps farther along, he stopped and grabbed a fistful of sheets which he thrust after the first one.. ..

An old woman, bald and bearded, watched a sheet flutter through the gloom of the lower levels, watched it waft to and fro, easing itself finally onto a ledge just a few feet away from her. Maintaining her muttered conversation with herself, she abandoned the metal mall cart containing her entire life's belongings and retrieved the sheet--pages 85 and 86 of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World--and, returning quickly to her possessions, slipped it beneath a makes.h.i.+ft pillow whose stink of urine and sour breath she no longer noticed. The world had come back to her, suddenly, contained on a simple sheet of paper- The streets had been opened.

"What came first?" she asked a pa.s.sing Hostess, reading from the paper and wagging her finger to the heavens.

"The chicken or the 'idea' chicken?" The Hostess pushed her to one side and moved quickly to an elevator platform: she obviously didn't know the answer any more than the old bearded hobo woman.

But as she stepped onto the platform and pulled the gate across, the Hostess went over what the old woman had said.. ..

High above the streets, two men leaned on the protective rails outside a middle-level nicotine store, watching.

"Snow," the addict said.

"It's snowing."

"It's snowing seeds," the man beside him answered, nodding.

"The seeds will find accommodating soil, and they will be nurtured.

They will find warmth and care and they will form roots and grow .. .

grow into knowledge and curiosity and emotion." He pointed to a young man walking determinedly through the fluttering sheets without stopping.

"Some, like him, will ignore what's happening. They will turn a blind eye-but only at first. Eventually even they will want-need--to know more. Those with a two-page sheet from Moby-d.i.c.k will want other sheets, more story .. . the same with those who have read--lived-brief moments from Dracula or Oliver Twist or The Wind in the Willows. They will want to read and to live other moments."

"And what if they can't find them?" the addict asked.

The other man shrugged.

"Then they will construct their own stories inspired by the tastes they have received today. Thus has it ever been, thus will it ever be." He stared out across the city, turning his face to the gently wafting pages.

"There can be no turning back. Not now."

"G.o.d, but I hope you're right," the addict said.

The man beside him smiled and said, in a loud, proud voice:

"Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind.

Be through my lips to un wakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! 0, Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

"Ah, Sh.e.l.ley," the addict said, nodding as he suddenly remembered the old order of the seasons.

"Famous last words?"

His friend shook his head.

"Prophetic first ones."

The sirens, when they began, did not sound frightening.

They sounded afraid.