Cyberpunk

making him uncomfortable.
    “You’re a union activist, aren’t you,” she said.
    “Yeah,” he laughed nervously. “A cellar unionist.”
    She had been tough and worldly wise to his soft city-boy, a rough diamond. Down at the deep end, in the pallid glow of the drained pool, the balance between them was reversed.
    “You came out here to find us. What can I say? I feel . . . found. Like a toy left out in the rain, that thought the kids would never come back to look for her. I feel rescued.”
    Johnny chewed his lip. Bella wriggled and muttered. One of her knees started butting him in the ribs. She couldn’t get comfortable and she was going to wake. She weighed a ton.
    “D’you ever hear about the phylloxera beetle?” he said. “It’s a similar story. It’s a kind of bug, it spreads like a virus. Once upon a time, all the good wine came from France. They had the vines. The quality, wonderful ancient-lineaged plants. Then someone accidentally shipped in some phylloxera beetles, and the whole of French viticulture was devastated. They had to rip the lot out and start again . . . with vines from North America, where the bug was endemic and the native vines had natural resistance. In a generation nobody could tell the difference. The wine-drinking public forgot it had ever happened.”
    “Phylloxera-proof telephones,” said Cambridge. “Knowing what’s happening in the next state. Bank credit. No more of that fucking censored cable TV. God. I can’t believe it.”
    Johnny registered something moving behind him. The lights were off at the shallow end, but the 360 showed Gustave coming down the steps. Johnny controlled himself with an enormous effort. Among these people you must not show fear.
    “Micane’s guys are here,” he told her softly. Cambridge didn’t make a fuss. She eased past Johnny and walked up between the workbenches, raising more lights with the remote in her hand. The bikers, Samuel and Ernesto, emerged into brilliance. Gustave-Donny stared around him in disbelief.
    “What the fuck is this place?”
    The clerk held up her remote as if it were a weapon, and carefully tossed it down.
    “What’s goin’ on, Cams?”
    “Nothin’. Just a little private interview with the eejay.”
    This God’s rule had some tinge of humanity. In other places, behavior as aberrant as this would have got them their heads blown away, straight off. But Gustave didn’t open fire.
    “You expect me to believe that? You’re crazy.”
    He jerked his shotgun for Johnny and Cambridge to go up the steps ahead. When he registered Bella, he started as if someone had dropped ice down his neck.
    “Fuck!”
    He pulled the headset from Johnny, carefully so’s not to disturb the child. He smashed it, conclusively, against the tiled wall of the stair, and handed it back with a defiant glare.
    That was bad . Out in the wasteland gun waving was endemic, male display behavior, not so dangerous as it looks. But the engineer-journalist was sacred; his tools even more so. He was the only link with the rest of the world. Johnny’s calm left him; fear plummeted through him . . .
    “Fucking weirdos.”
    The tow truck was outside. Johnny got Bella on his knees. She woke up and began to cry. Ernesto crouched on the flatbed, the muzzle of his shotgun through the glassless rear window of the cab. It pressed against Johnny’s neck. Samuel’s bike roared in escort. Young Gustave drove with one hand, the other awkwardly stabbing his gun into Cambridge’s ribs. His eyes were wild with anger and humiliation: he’d been taken in completely. Worse (Johnny read), he feared that his God had been taken in too.
    “Fucking diamond mine!” he wailed. “What the fuck you growing back there, Cams? Illegal drugs?”
    Cambridge kept her eyes front. Through his own blank-brain panic Johnny could feel her arm and side against him, rigid with terror. But for Donny-Gustave she sneered the way she’d sneered when he was six and she was ten.
    “Nah. Mutants, Donny. Cannibal mutant babies. And they’re coming for you. Not tonight, maybe not tomorrow night—”
    “Fucking shut up.” His face in the driver’s mirror was a darkly crumpled rectangle of hurt. “I never would’ve believed an eejay would be into drugs . . .”
    Bella’s loud and violent sobbing—so rare and devastating, this child’s crying—was like a wall around them both. Johnny held her tight and vowed that he was going to get Bella out of this alive. There was no