Don’t get me wrong–I like unspoiled wilderness. I like my sky clear and blue and my city free of the thunder of cars and jackhammers. I’m no technocrat. But goddammit, who wouldn’t want a fully automatic, laser-guided, armor-piercing, self-replenishing personal sidearm?
Nice turn of phrase, huh? I finally memorized it one night, from one of the hoppers, as he stood in my bedroom, pointing his hand-cannon at another hopper, enumerating its many charms: "This is a laser-guided blah blah blah. Throw down your arms and lace your fingers behind your head, blah blah blah." I’d heard the same dialog nearly every day that month, whenever the dimension-hoppers catapulted into my home, shot it up, smashed my window, dived into the street, and chased one another through my poor little shtetl, wreaking havoc, maiming bystanders, and then gating out to another poor dimension to carry on there.
Assholes.
It was all I could do to keep my house well-fed on sand to replace the windows. Much more hopper invasion and I was going to have to extrude its legs and babayaga to the beach. Why the hell was it always my house, anyway?
I wasn’t going to get back to sleep, that much was sure. The autumn wind blowing through the shattered window was fragrant with maple and rich decay and crisp hay, but it was also cold enough to steam my breath and turn me out in all-over gooseflesh. Besides, the racket they were making out in the plaza was deafening, all supersonic thunderclaps and screams from wounded houses. The househusbands would have their work cut out for them come morning.
So I found a robe and slippers and stumbled down to the kitchen, got some coffee from one of the nipples and milk from another, waited for the noise to recede into the bicycle fields and went outside and knocked on Sally’s door.
Her bedroom window flew open and she hung her head out. "Barry?" she called down.
"Yeah," I called back up, clouds of condensed breath obscuring her sleep-gummed face. "Let me in–I’m freezing to death."
The window closed and a moment later the door swung open. Sally had wrapped a heavy duvet around her broad shoulders like a shawl, and underneath, she wore a loose robe that hung to her long, bare toes. Sally and I had a thing, once. It was serious enough that we attached our houses and joined the beds. She curled her toes when I tickled her. We’re still friends–hell, our houses are still next door to one another–but I haven’t curled her toes in a couple of years.
"Jesus, it can’t be three in the morning, can it?" she said as I slipped past her and into the warmth of her house.
"It can and is. Transdimensional crime fighters hew to no human schedule." I collapsed onto her sofa and tucked my feet under my haunches. "I have had more than enough of this shit," I said, massaging my temples.
Sally sank down next to me and threw her comforter over my lap, then gave my shoulder a squeeze. "It’s taking a toll on all of us. The Jeffersons are going to relocate. They’ve been writing to their cousins in Niagara Falls, and they say that there’re hardly any hoppers down there. But how long is that gonna last, I wonder?"
"Oh, I don’t know. The hoppers could go away tomorrow. We don’t know that they’re going to be here forever."
"Of course I know it. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. They’ve got d-hoppers now–they’re not going to just stop using them."
I didn’t say anything, just stared pointedly at the abstract mosaic covering her parlor wall: closely fitted pieces of scrap aluminum, plastics too abstruse to feed to even the crudest house, rare beach-glass and bunched vinyl.
"That’s different," she said. "We ditched the technocracy because we found something that worked better. No one decided it was too dangerous and had to be set aside for our own good. It just got . . . obsolete. Nothing’s going to make d-hoppers obsolete for those guys." Out in the plaza, the booms continued, punctuated by the peristaltic noises of houses hurrying away. Sally’s house gave a shudder in sympathy, and the mosaic rippled.
I held my cup away from the comforter as coffee sloshed over the edge and to the floor, where the house drank it greedily.
"No caffeine!" Sally said as she sopped up the coffee with her stockinged foot. "The house gets all jumpy."
I opened my mouth to say something about Sally’s crackpot house-husbandry theories, and then the door was blown off its hinges. A hopper in outlandish technocrat armor rolled into the parlor, sat up, snapped off three rounds in the general direction of the door (one passed through it, the other two left curdled houseflesh and scorch marks on the wall around it).
Sally and I levitated out of our seats and dived behind the sofa as another hopper rolled through the door and returned fire, missing his opponent but blowing away the mosaic. My heart hammered in my chest, and all my other clichés hackneyed in my chestnuts.
"You okay?" I hollered over the din.
"I think so," Sally said. A piece of jagged plastic was embedded in the wall inches over her head, and the house was keening.
A stray blast of electric thunder set the sofa ablaze, and we scrambled away. The second gunman was retreating under a volley of fire from the first, who was performing machine-assisted gymnastics around the parlor, avoiding the shots aimed at him. The second man made good his escape, and the first holstered his weapon and turned to face us.
"Sorry about the mess, folks," he said, through his faceplate.
I was speechless. Sally, though, cupped her ear and hollered "What?"
"Sorry," the gunman said.
"What?" Sally said again. She turned and said, "Can you make out what he’s saying?" She winked at me with the eye that faced away from him.
"No," I said, slowly. "Can’t make out a word."
"Sorry," he said again, more loudly.
"We! Can’t! Understand! You!" Sally said.
The man raised his visor with an air of exasperation and said, "I’m sorry, all right?"
"Not as sorry as you’re gonna be," Sally said, and jammed her thumb into his eye. He hollered and his gauntlets went to his face just as Sally snatched away his gun. She rapped the butt against his helmet to get his attention, then scampered back, keeping the muzzle aimed at him. The gunman looked at her with dawning comprehension, raising his arms, lacing his fingers behind his head and blah blah blah.
"Asshole," she said.
?
His name was Larry Roman, which explained the word "ROMAN" stenciled onto each piece of his armor. Getting it off of him was trickier than shelling a lobster, and he cursed us blue the whole way. Sally kept the gun trained on him, impassive, as I peeled off the sweaty carapace and bound his wrists and ankles.
Her house was badly injured, and I didn’t think it would make it. Certainly, the walls’ fading to a brittle, unhealthy white boded ill. The d-hopper itself was a curious and complex device, a forearm-sized lozenge seemingly cast of a single piece of metal–titanium?–and covered with a welter of confusing imprinted controls. I set it down carefully, not wanting to find myself inadvertently whisked away to a parallel universe.
Roman watched me from his good eye–the one that Sally poked was swollen shut–with a mixture of resentment and concern. "Don’t worry," I said. "I’m not going to play with it."
"Why are you doing this?" he said.
I cocked my head at Sally. "It’s her show," I said.
Sally kicked her smoldering sofa. "You killed my house," she said. "You assholes keep coming here and shooting up the place, without a single thought to the people who live here –"
"What do you mean, ‘keep coming here?’ This is the first time anyone’s ever used the trans-d device."
Sally snorted. "Sure, in your dimension. You’re a little behind schedule, pal. We’ve had hoppers blasting through here for months now."
"You’re lying," he said. Sally looked coolly at him. I could have told him that that was no way to win an argument with Sally. I’d never found any way of winning an argument with her, but blank refusal didn’t work for sure. "Look, I’m a police officer. The man I’m chasing is a dangerous criminal. If I don’t catch him, you’re all in danger."
"Really?" she drawled. "Greater danger than you assholes put us in when you shoot us?"
He swallowed. Stripped of his armor, wearing nothing but high-tech underwear, and he was finally getting scared. "I’m just doing my duty. Upholding the law. You two are going to end up in a lot of trouble. I want to speak to someone in charge."
I cleared my throat. "That would be me, this year. I’m the mayor."
"You’re kidding."
"It’s an administrative position," I apologized. I’d read up on civics of old, and I knew that mayoring wasn’t what it once was. Still, I’m a fine negotiator, and that’s what it takes nowadays.
"So what are you going to do with me?"
"Oh, I’m sure we’ll think of something," Sally said.
?
Sally’s house was dead by sunrise. It heaved a terrible sigh, and the nipples started running with black gore. The stink was overpowering, so we led our prisoner shivering next door to my place.
My place wasn’t much better. The cold wind had been blowing through my bedroom window all night, leaving a rime of frost over the house’s delicate, thin-barked internal walls. But I’ve got a southern exposure, and as the sun rose, buttery light pierced the remaining windows and warmed the interior, and I heard the house’s sap sluicing up inside the walls. We got ourselves coffees and resumed the argument.
"I tell you, Osborne’s out there, and he’s got the morals of a jackal. If I don’t get to him, we’re all in trouble." Roman was still trying to convince us to give him back his gear and let him get after his perp.
"What did he do, anyway?" I asked. Some sense of civic responsibility was nagging at me–what if the guy really was dangerous?
"Does it matter?" Sally asked. She was playing with Roman’s gear, crushing my ornamental pebbles to powder with the power-assisted gauntlets. "They’re all bastards. Technocrats." She spat out the word and powdered another pebble.
"He’s a monopolist," Roman said, as though that explained everything. We must have looked confused, because he continued. "He’s the Senior Strategist for a company that makes networked relevance filters. They’ve been planting malware online that breaks any standards-defined competing products. If he isn’t brought to justice, he’ll own the whole goddamn media ecology. He must be stopped!" His eyes flashed.
Sally and I traded looks, then Sally burst out laughing. "He did what?"
"He’s engaged in unfair business practices!"
"Well, I think we’ll be able to survive, then," she said. She hefted the pistol again. "So, Roman, you say that you folks just invented the d-hopper, huh?"
He looked puzzled. "The trans-d device," I said, remembering what he’d called it.
"Yes," he said. "It was developed by a researcher at the University of Waterloo and stolen by Osborne so he could flee justice. We had that one fabbed up just so we could chase him."
Aha. The whole shtetl was built over the bones of the University of Waterloo–my house must be right where the physics labs once stood; still stood, in the technocratic dimensions. That explained my popularity with the transdimensional set.
"How do you work it?" Sally asked, casually.
I wasn’t fooled and neither was Roman. Sally’s version of casual put my most intense vibe to shame.
"I can’t disclose that," Roman said, setting his face in an expression of grim dutifulness.
"Aw, c’mon," Sally said, fondling the d-hopper. "What’s the harm?"
Roman stared silently at the floor.
"Trial and error it is, then," Sally said, and poised a finger over one of the many inset controls.
Roman groaned.
"Don’t do that. Please," he said. "I’m in enough trouble as it is."
Sally pretended she hadn’t heard him. "How hard can it be, after all? Barry, we’ve both studied technocracy–let’s figure it out together. Does this look like the on-switch to you?"
"No, no," I said, catching on. "You can’t just go pushing buttons at random–you could end up whisked away to another dimension!" Roman appeared relieved. "We have to take it apart to see how it works first. I’ve got some tools out in the shed." Roman groaned.
"And if those don’t work," Sally continued, "I’m sure these gloves would peel it open real quick. After all, if we break this one, there’s always the other guy–Osborne? He’s got one, too."
"I’ll show you," Roman said. "I’ll show you."
?
Roman escaped as we were finishing breakfast. It was my fault. I figured that once he’d taken us through the d-hopper’s workings, he was cowed. Sally and I had a mini-spat over untying him, but that left me feeling all nostalgic and fuzzy for our romantic past, and maybe that’s why I wasn’t on my guard. It also felt less antisocial once my houseguest was untied and spooning up mueseli at my homey old kitchen table.
He was more cunning than I’d guessed. Square-jawed, blue-eyed (well, black-and-blue-eyed, thanks to Sally), and exhausted, he’d lulled me into a false sense of security. When I turned to squeeze another cup of coffee from the kitchen wall, he kicked the table over and scrambled away. Sally fired a bolt after him, which hit my already overwrought house and caused my toilet to flush and all my tchtotchkes to rain down from my shelves as it jerked. In an instant, Roman was scurrying away down the street.
"Sally!" I shouted, exasperated. "You could’ve killed him!"
She was ashen, staring at the pistol. "I didn’t mean to! It was a reflex."
We both struggled into our shoes and took off after him. By the time I caught sight of him, he was off in the bicycle fields, uprooting a ripe mountain bike and pedaling away toward Guelph.
A group of rubberneckers congregated around us, most of the town, dressed in woolens and mitts against the frosty air. Sally and I were still in our pajamas, and I saw the town gossips taking mental notes. By supper, the housenet would be burning up with news of our reconciliation.
"Who was that?" Lemuel asked me. He’d been mayor before me, and still liked to take a proprietary interest in the comings and goings around town.
"D-hopper," Sally said. "Technocrat. He killed my house."
Lemuel clucked his tongue and scrunched up his round, ruddy face. "That’s bad. The Beckers’ house, too. Barry, you’d better send someone off to Toronto to parley for some more seed."
"Thank you, Lemuel," I said, straining to keep the irritation out of my voice. "I’ll do that."
He held his hands up. "I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job," he said. "Just trying to help you out. Times like this, we all need to pull together."
"I just want to catch that son-of-a-bitch," Sally said.
"Oh, I expect he’ll be off to his home dimension shortly," Lemuel said.
"Nuh-uh," I said. "We got–oomph." Sally trod on my foot.
"Yeah, I expect so," she said. "How about the other one–did anyone see where he went?"
"Oh, he took off east," Hezekiah said. He was Lemuel’s son, and you could’ve nested them like Russian dolls: ruddy, paunchy, round-faced, and earnest. Hezekiah had a fine touch with the cigarette trees, and his grove was a local tourist stop. "Headed for Toronto, maybe."
"All right, then," Sally said. "I’ll send word ahead. He won’t get far. We’ll head out and meet him."
"What about your house?" Lemuel asked.
"What about it?"
"Well, you’ve got to get your stuff moved out soon–the househusbands will be wanting to take it away for mulch."
"Tell them they can put my stuff in Barry’s place," she said. I watched the gossipy looks flying.
?
Sally worked the housenet furiously as the househusbands trekked in and out of my place with armloads of her stuff. They kept giving me hey-big-fella looks, but I knew that any congratulations were premature. Sally wasn’t moving in to get romantic–she was doing it out of expedience, her primary motivation in nearly every circumstance. She scribed with the housenet stylus, back rigid, waiting impatiently for her distant correspondents to work their own styli, until every wall in my house was covered in temporary pigment. No one had seen Osborne.
"Maybe he went back to his dimension," I said.
"No, he’s here. I saw his d-hopper before he ran out last night–it was a wreck."
"Maybe he fixed it," I said.
"And maybe he hasn’t. This has got to stop, Barry. If you don’t want to help, just say so. But stop trying to dissuade me." She slammed the stylus down. "Are you in or out?"
"I’m in," I said. "I’m in."
"Then get dressed," she said.
I was already dressed. I said so.
"Put on Roman’s armor. We need to be on even footing with Osborne if we’re going to catch him, and that stuff won’t fit me."
"What about Roman?"
"He’ll be back," she said. "We have his d-hopper."
?
What did I call it? "Outlandish technocrat armor?" Maybe from the outside. But once I was inside, man, I was a god. I walked on seven-league boots, boots that would let me jump as high as the treetops. My vision extended down to the infrared and up into the ultraviolet and further up into the electromagnetic, so that I could see the chemically encoded housenet signals traversing the root-systems that the houses all tied into, the fingers of polarized light lengthening as the sun dipped to the west. My hearing was acute as a rabbit’s, the wind’s soughing and the crackle of forest-creatures and the whoosh-whoosh of sap all clearly delineated and perfectly triangulated. We set out after Roman, and I quickly evolved a search-strategy: I would leap as high as I could, then spin around quickly as I fell back to earth, surveying the countryside in infrared for anything human-shaped. Once back on terra firma, I scooped up Sally and took a great leap forward–no waiting for her slow, unassisted legs to keep up with my gigantic strides–set her down, and repeated the process.
We kept after it for an hour or two, falling into a kind of pleasant reverie, lulled by the fiery crazy quilt of the autumn leaves viewed from great height. I’d seen color plates in old technocrat books, the earth shown from such heights, even from space, and of all the things we’d given up with technocracy, I think that flight was the thing that I wished for most fervently.
It was growing chilly by the time we reached Hamilton. Hamilton! In two hours! I was used to thinking of Hamilton as being a hard day’s bike-ride from home, but here I was, not even out of breath, and there already. I gathered Sally into my arms and leapt toward the city-limits, enchanted by the sunset’s torchy light over the hills, and something fast and hard smashed into me from the side. Instinctively, I tightened my grip on Sally, but she wasn’t there–good thing, since with the armor’s power-assist, squeezing Sally that hard might’ve broken her spine.
I slammed into the dirt, the armor’s suspension whining. I righted myself and heard Sally hollering. I looked up and there she was, squirming in Osborne’s arms as he leapt away with her.
