Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams Read Free Book Online

good gang member. A matter of style, mostly.”
    “Huh.” She reached out for the cigarette and took it from his fingers. “What were you like, back then?”
    “Skinny. Intense.”
    “You’re still skinny and intense. If it weren’t for the muscles, you’d be just a wisp.”
    “Intense maybe. But this body’s been fed. My former body was on the edge of starvation for a lot of years. I was fond of big shades and raw silk jackets and high-topped sneakers with little red balls on the sides. I had a nice home comp with all the latest in stolen software. I chain-smoked Xanadus and traveled on a matte-black fuel-cell scooter. The usual hustler stuff.”
    Odd to think of that as being over twenty years ago. In memory it wasn’t so long. A past that hadn’t even got fuzzy.
    “Hell. Motherfucker.” The Xanadu had burned her fingers. She squashed it in the ashtray, too fast, spilling ashes on the bed. Then she was cursing on her hands and knees, bent over, brushing the ashes off the bed onto the floor. Steward watched the way her spine flexed along her supple back, how her haunches moved as she shifted her weight, the muscles in each thigh tautening alternately, a play of shadow and motion.
    He remembered Natalie, the way she moved, sure of herself, graceful, remembering how she used to slide between the covers as if they were a lover’s arms…. Hell, he thought, if I was as smart as I think I am, I wouldn’t have lost her.
    Stupidity’s something you learn to live with, he thought, just like everything else.
    *
    Morning, next day. Steward sat in the friendl es rest rant, working on his second cup of coffee. It seemed to Steward that he could feel the caffeine moving through his body, switching on first one system, then another. Little bits of his consciousness reawakening, blinking on like a row of little green lights giving a GO signal. A half-eaten sweet roll sat on a plate in front of him. Around him the midmorning coffee-shop crowd lazed over scansheet printouts, read the news, yawned, stretched.
    Steward raised his head to signal the waitress for another cup of coffee, saw a profile moving along the distant aisle between the waitress’s station and his window booth, and suddenly the little row of GO lights in his mind was flashing on and off in hot synchrony, green, yellow, red. His nerves burned. He turned in his seat to watch the man as he walked down the aisle and sat in a corner booth, followed by the waitress with a coffeepot. Steward craned his neck for a view of the man’s face. The waitress was standing in the way, pouring coffee. Steward began to feel foolish. A stranger in an out-of-the-way coffee shop, a chance resemblance, and he was beginning to see ghosts.
    The waitress moved out of the way. Steward looked at the man’s face and felt his mouth go dry. He turned, finished his coffee in a gulp, and stood. He swayed. His balance seemed a little off. He walked down the long aisle, seeing the man’s face foreshortening toward him. Nerves leaped in Steward’s hands, his legs.
    The man looked up as he raised his coffee cup. He was a dark-skinned European with medium-length hair, dressed tidily in a dark short-sleeved suit over a collarless light blue shirt. His arms were gaunt, wiry. His skin was parchment stretched over bone, tied in place with the blue ropes of veins. He wore a graying mustache that was unfamiliar. Steward felt a touch of uncertainty. His memory was of another man, younger, well-muscled, smiling. Then he saw a white splash on a biceps where a tattoo had been removed, and uncertainty was over.
    He felt himself teetering on the edge of something, as if the ground under him was about to spill away, dropping him into a new place, somewhere uncertain, where the rules were different and he would have to learn them as he moved.
    “Griffith,” Steward said.
    The coffee cup stopped halfway to the man’s mouth. His wet eyes glistened, surrounded by dark lines. New eyes. Ghost