Нил Стивенсон: Diamond Age

Bud rolled his first victim almost by accident. He'd taken a wrong turn into a cul-de-sac and inadvertently trapped a black man and woman and a couple of little kids who'd blundered in there before him. They had a scared look about them, like a lot of the new arrivals did, and Bud noticed the way the man's gaze lingered on his Sights, wondering whether those crosshairs, invisible to him, were centered on him, his lady, or his kid.

Bud didn't get out of their way. He was packing, they weren't, it was up to them to get out of his way. But instead they just froze up. "You got a problem?" Bud said.

"What do you want?" the man said.

It had been a while since anyone had manifested such sincere concern for Bud's desires, and he kind of liked it. He realized that these people were under the impression that they were being mugged. "Oh, same as anyone else. Money and shit," Bud said, and just like that, the man took some hard ucus out of his pocket and handed them over-and then actually thanked him as he backed away.

Bud enjoyed getting that kind of respect from black people— it reminded him of his noble heritage in the trailer parks of North Florida— and he didn't mind the money either. After that day he began looking for black people with that same scared uncertain look about them. These people bought and sold off the record, and so they carried hard money. He did pretty well for himself for a couple of months. Every so often he would stop by the flat where his bitch Tequila lived, give her some lingerie, and maybe give Harv some chocolate.

Harv was presumed by both Bud and Tequila to be Bud's son. He was five, which meant that he had been conceived in a much earlier cycle of Bud and Tequila's break-up-and-make-up relationship. Now the bitch was pregnant again, which meant that Bud would have to bring even more gifts to her place when he came around. The pressures of fatherhood!

One day Bud targeted a particularly well-dressed family because of their fancy clothes. The man was wearing a business suit and the woman a nice clean dress, and they were carrying a baby all dressed up in a white lacy thing, and they had hired a porter to help them haul their luggage away from the Aerodrome. The porter was a white guy who vaguely reminded Bud of himself, and he was incensed to see him acting as a pack animal for blacks. So as soon as these people got away from the bustle of the Aerodrome and into a more secluded neighborhood, Bud approached them, swaggering in the way he'd practiced in the mirror, occasionally pushing his Sights up on his nose with one index finger.

The guy in the suit was different from most of them. He didn't try to act like he hadn't seen Bud, didn't try to skulk away, didn't cringe or slouch, just stood his ground, feet planted squarely, and very pleasantly said, "Yes, sir, can I be of assistance?" He didn't talk like an American black, had almost a British accent, but crisper.

Now that Bud had come closer, he saw that the man had a strip of colored cloth thrown around his neck and over his lapels, dangling down like a scarf. He looked well-housed and well-fed for the most part, except for a little scar high up on one cheekbone.

Bud kept walking until he was a little too close to the guy. He kept his head tilted back until the last minute, like he was kicking back listening to some loud tunes (which he was), and then suddenly snapped his head forward so he was staring the guy right in the face. It was another way to emphasize the fact that he was packing, and it usually did the trick. But this guy did not respond with the little flinch that Bud had come to expect and enjoy. Maybe he was from some booga-booga country where they didn't know about skull guns.

"Sir," the man said, "my family and I are on the way to our hotel. We have had a long journey, and we are tired; my daughter has an ear infection. If you would state your business as expeditiously as possible, I would be obliged."

"You talk like a fucking Vicky," Bud said.

"Sir, I am not what you refer to as a Vicky, or I should have gone directly there. I would be obliged if you could be so kind as to moderate your language in the presence of my wife and child."

It took Bud a while to untangle this sentence, and a while longer to believe that the man really cared about a few dirty words spoken within earshot of his family, and longer yet to believe that he had been so insolent to Bud, a heavily muscled guy who was obviously packing a skull gun.

"I'm gonna fucking say whatever I fucking want to your bitch and your flicking brat," Bud said, very loud. Then he could not keep himself from grinning. Score a few points for Bud!

The man looked impatient rather than scared and heaved a deep sigh. "Is this an armed robbery or something? Are you sure you know what you are getting into?"

Bud answered by whispering "hut" under his breath and firing a Crippler into the man's right bicep. It went off deep in the muscle, like an M-80, blowing a dark hole in the sleeve of the man's jacket and leaving his arm stretched out nice and straight— the trike now pulling without anything to oppose it. The man clenched his teeth, his eyes bulged, and for a few moments he made strangled grunting noises from way down in his chest, making an effort not to cry out.

Bud stared at the wound in fascination. It was just like shooting people in a ractive. Except that the bitch didn't scream and beg for mercy. She just turned her back, using her body to shield the baby, and looked over her shoulder, calmly, at Bud. Bud noticed she had a little scar on her cheek too.

"Next I take your eye," Bud said, "then I go to work on the bitch."

The man held up his good hand palm out, indicating surrender. He emptied his pocket of hard Universal Currency Units and handed them over. And then Bud made himself scarce, because the monitors— almond-size aerostats with eyes, ears, and radios— had probably picked up the sound of the explosion and begun converging on the area. He saw one hiss by him as he rounded the corner, trailing a short whip antenna that caught the light like a hairline crack in the atmosphere.

Three days later, Bud was hanging around the Aerodrome, looking for easy pickings, when a big ship came in from Singapore. Immersed in a stream of thousand arrivals was a tight group of some two dozen solidly built, very dark-skinned black men dressed in business suits, with Strips of colored cloth draped around their necks and little scars on their cheekbone.

It was later that night that Bud, for the first time in his life, heard the word Ashanti . "Another twenty-five Ashanti just came in from L.A.!" said a man in a bar. "The Ashanti had a big meeting in the conference room at the Sheraton!" said a woman on the street. Waiting in a queue for one of the free matter compilers, a bum said, "One of them Ashanti gave me five yuks. They're fine folks." When Bud ran into a guy he knew, a former comrade in the decoy trade, he said, "Hey, the place is crawling with them Ashanti, ain't it?"

"Yup," said the guy, who had seemed unaccountably shocked to see Bud's face on the Street, and who was annoyingly distracted all of a sudden, swiveling his head to look all ways.

"They must be having a convention or something," Bud theorized. "I rolled one of 'em the other night."

"Yeah, I know," his friend said.

"Huh? How'd you know that?"

"They ain't having a convention, Bud. All of those Ashanti— except the first one-came to town hunting for you."

Paralysis struck Bud's vocal cords, and he felt lightheaded, unable to concentrate.

"I gotta go," his friend said, and removed himself from Bud's vicinity.

For the next few hours Bud felt as though everyone on the street was looking at him. Bud was certainly looking at them, looking for those suits, those colored strips of cloth. But he caught sight of a man in shorts and a T-shirt— a black man with very high cheeks, one of which was marked with a tiny scar, and almost Asian-looking eyes in a very high state of alertness. So he couldn't rely on the Ashanti wearing stereotyped clothing.