Page 1


I had to laugh when I noticed that. Sappho. Shit. I nudged Olric. "Hey, spud." I pointed toward the wall across the street, the purple and red wildstyle scrawl over crumbling mortar and faded stone bricks. "Check it."
Olric snickered."Think the Uptown boys know how to read that?"
- "Fuck, no. Skagheads don't have a fuckin clue."
The high-speed escalator over to the left spat out an
off-balance figure into the cool white cone of the streetlight's halogen.
Kurt. "Yo, my brother!" I called out. "Eyes slideways."
Kurt turned and walked toward us under the dead neon Metro sign.
"Cool runnings, spuds. What's happening in the Downside lines tonight?"
We dapped, hands flowing through the jive, exchanging the ritual All Clear signs.
Olric answered him.
- "JCH, Ctulhu, and the others are already at the Beach. We're having a
war at the FFI around midnight."
- "Rammin." Kurt grinned. "Got ammo for sale?"
- "Ctulhu does. Five Euros a ten-pack, 200 Old if you're using paper.
M-80s and Clusters, too."
- "Slicin. Let's step."
- "Solid, spud. We're still waiting for Toxic." Olric waved at the concrete. "Squat."
- "Check."
Kurt dropped his pack on a parked skimmer and slumped against the wall of the
station, next to me. He was wearing the obligatory Downside mud-crusted
nylonand-leather jungle boots, and a surplus United European
States flightsuit.



Pages 2 / 3



My flightsuit was Chzecosov-I'd scored it in Berlin-and had
STALIN stenciled in Cyrillic on the back, above a red star. Really ticks off
the fuckin Mirrorfaces. Those boys don't like the Chzecosovs, UES party line
and "ideological reconciliation" be fucked.
Kurt pulled out a crumpled pack of Gauloises and offered me one. I took two
and passed one to Olric. We each lit our own.
We smoked for a while without talking. 1 watched some bloods as they walked by,
jet-black exchange students from the West African Tribes' Federation studying
at the old Cité Universitaire, the international campus that sprawled along Paris's
southern rim. One of them looked straight at me for a beat, deadfish Dust stare.
Motherfucker'll be on the Streer within the year. When the junk line sucks up his
gov funds ... Hope he knows the slice&dice, knows it but good.
Olric and I were still pretty red from the bowl of Turkish we'd smoked.
My unshaven chin itched. I keyed my armdeck and turned up the dub that was beating
through my implants. It echoed through my skull, hardbeat bass and madness.
Iron Bar Dub. check it.
I stared at the stone buildings of Cité U. The American House squatted in darkness,
gutted by a terrorist bombing three weeks ago. Eighty-nine students had died.
The Little Big Horn, a splinter group off the Alliance of the Nations, had claimed
responsibility. The next day U.S. President Eastwood ordered a Cheyenne reservation
village evacuated and razed in retaliation. I'd caught a lost shard of memory for
an instant watching rhe newscast, my Cheyenne mother's thin smile, and I'd thought,
cowboy motherfucker...
I looked up. All I could see of Paris was the dull orange glow of the night sky,
the bulging dome of dancing photons, bright as a cloudy day.
We sat.

Kurt was the first to break the trance. He waved toward Cité U, the glowing tip
of his cigarette leaving trails in the air.
- "I hear the Belt is going to build a House here," he said.
The Belt... Kirishto, if only I could score the credit for a one-way! To climb
the well... Out of the shit, the mud, the sisterfuckin Street...
I turned down the dub before I spoke, letting it fade into the backbrain.
Subliminal riddim pulsing down the reggae wire deep into the blood and bone; bad music
(LKJ had once called it), bad music soundcheckin down your spinal column, bad music
tearin up your flesh. I rarely shut it down entirely. It's part of me, just like my
blood, my bones, my silicon implants.
- "Who? Cérès?"
- "No, not Cérès, blankbrain." He grinned again, his angelic grin. "The Free Islands."
- "Raas claat ... Can they?"
- "Unconfirmed. I got it from a gadjo jockey, oldman name of Case. He pulled a
hardcore zap job, intercepted a data squirt on the Net. The detail's on the market, if
you're interested."
- "They got a treaty," said Olric. He ran his hands through his wirespiked black shag,
scratching. "With Brussels."
- "What?" Kurt, clueless.
- "The Free Islands. A treaty. Signed it three years ago, in '30, with the UES politicos.
Cultural exchanges, diplomatic recognition, the works. Uptown, the Zaibatsus,
they can't do jackshit about it, and Ogoun knows the Suits tried. Same for the
Americans and the Chzecosovs. The Chinese love it, of course."
- "I remember that," I said. "Why did the fuckin UES sign it?"
- "Usual Babylon reasons. To piss off Uptown, and the Powers. Political maneuvering,
strategies."
- "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." I smiled.
- "Read that, my brother."
- "Politricks," said Kurt. "It's all bullshit anyways." Kurt hates politics as much
as Olric loves them. l'm apathetic, as long as they don't affect my drug supplies,
like the Wipe did.
- "Take a reality check, wildboy," Olric sneered. "Babylon is the real world, dig?
You think the Street is outside Control? You think that what goes on in the Islands,
or Stateside, doesn't affect your blackbiz? You think the shitstem just squats there
like a poisoned toad and exists, that nothing really changes? Bullshit!"


Pages 4 / 5



- "Chill, my brother." Kurt raised his hands, defensive. "I just don't give a fuck, is all."
- "Maybe you sh-"
- "Eyes slideways, spuds," I said softly. "Mirrorfaces, ten o'clock."
We sat in silence while the three Mirrorfaces strutted by, encased in black Kelvar
body armor and insectile helmets, MAS flechette SMGs at port. I stared at the
distorted renection of the three of us sitting in their mirrored visors. Just
like in a funhouse... CRS, Companies Republicaines de Sécurité. They were probably
nice kids back when they lived in the province, but being in the Big City with a badge,
a gun, and no restraints does strange things to people. Like turn them into sociopathic
beasts. The Faces greased more streetdrek than the streetdrek themselves these days.
All it cost them was a week suspension, with the salary covered by their squad buddies.
Picture it: Honey, moans the bored copwife, I wanna vacation ... Not to wony, dear,
next shift I'll bag me a few of those little punk shits and we're off to Normandy.
These three must have been in a real good mood cause they totally ignored us.
We watched them enter the Metro station, a slow pan; Kurt spat viciously as the clear
acrylic door hissed shut behind them.
His tone matched the sound of the hydraulics as he spoke:
- "There is your precious reality, Olric. The Beasts, and us." Bitter. "That's all."
The spitting escalator saved us from further argument as it expelled Toxic from the
depths of the station. Salutations and dapping, Toxic constantly pushing his antique
wireframe prescriptions up his thin nose. We shouldered our packs and started walking
up the street. Looking very casual-I hoped. Eyes flicking leftside-rightside.
SOP, no problem.
We reached the grate and stopped. I ran a thorough scan and Jived the All Clear.
We dropped our packs. Olric bent down, pulled the grate up and over, and wordlessly
slithered down into the darkness. Kurt and Toxic followed him.
I said, "One," and dropped the first pack into the hole; then Two, Three, Four.
A final scope, then down. I stopped five rungs from the bottom and pulled the grate
shut, the familiar scraping followed by the final clang of rusted iron on concrere.
This was an old maintenance entrance, long disused.
I could still see the orange glow of the sky through the grate as I jumped down
the rest of the way. The others were already gearing up at the end of the small
landing. I walked over and opened my pack, extracting the mess of plastic and tubes
and metal as Olric held up a penlight. The harsh light from the argon bulb threw
stark, cutout shadows on the wall, making me squint.
Our equipment was antique, some of it going all the way back to the early '90s.
Affectation, the mark of the true cataphile. Only tourists wore modern spelunking
equipment: polystyrene plastic and halogen lights running off lithium batteries.
Our helmets, now ... Old construction helmets, spraypainted and graffitied.
We mounted a beam electrical lamp and a small gas nozzle on the front of each one.
The nozzle is connected by a long tube to a belt gas generator, a fifty-year-old
miner's contraption which drips water onto carbide to create acetylene.
A Piezo lighter over the nozzie produces the sparks which ignite the gas.
Chemical reaction, just check it, man.
We fiddled with faucets and whacked the generators against rhe walls until the
acetylene lamps grudgingly Bared into life. A whiff of acetylene filled the air, sharp
characteristic tang, omnipresent Downside smell. The gas lamps behaved like buibs,
area lighting; walking the lines is a bitch if you can't see the ground and the sky
simultaneously. We only use the electric beams for distance work, or for blinding
people walking toward us.
We stood in the pool of dull yellow light while Olric went through his fiddling and
whacking routine. I took point for the march, and Toxic took the rear. We went down a
short flight of stairs, past where the mass of lead-wrapped vidphone cables grew out
of the wall, to the pit at the bottom. The cables flowed over the edge.


Pages 6 / 7



I followed them.
The climb lasted a familiar eternity. Muddy rungs, packs catching against the cables,
a thirty-meter chute mainlining us into the underside of the city, runnels laid out
like silvered circuitry under the streets.
I dropped the last meter and moved away a bit, out of the way. I wiped my hands on my
flightsuit, scraping crusted mud off it as I pasted on a new layer. When my fingers were
dry enough, I Bicked the dull, burnished cover of my armdeck back, carballoy plates
curvemolded iike the chitinous armor of a beetle. My fingers flew over the keypad, cutting
the dub and routing the audio to the miniature Sony speakers on my web belt. I keyed in
the music, and the first operatic voices echoed through the tunnels as Olric thudded
to the ground.
- "Razor, spud," said Kurt. I'd picked some '90s German industrial music, the kinda
heavybeat that paints silver-purple metal on your brain. Very German, very Berlin.
I'd picked up a lot of music during the year I spent there.
Heute die welt
Heute die welt
Heute die welt
We headed west, down the concrete line, racks of vidphone cables stacked against
the right wall. A PTT maintenance tunnel, boring, not yet the actual catacombs. We walked
in silence to the beat of clanging steel pipes and single bass notes.
Four hundred meters later, we turned north, up a real line. Dug two thousand years ago
and reconsolidated by the Inspection Générale des Carrières in the early 1800s; walls
of limestone blocks, hand-carved for fuck's sake; muddy ground. The sky is low, so we
walked with a perpetual, agonizing stoop. The smell, the catacomb smell that always
Pavlovianly triggers memories and emotions, is duil, dank, moist; a clean earth smell,
old and dead as the city itself.
The music echoed, muted auditory illusion of high volume. I sounded like I was
wandering in a vast cathedral lined with felt.
A carved plaque on the wall, RUE NANSOUTY. The main lines Downside are named after
the street they more or less run under; a Downside map reads like a flawed copy of
a street map.
Morgenn das sonnensystem
Morgenn das sonnensystem
Half a klik north. Nansouty becomes Avenue du Park Montsouris. Lots of graffiti,
political or obscene, some small wildstyle murals. I noticed only one MADAME EURYDICE
REVIENDRA DES ENFER, the slogan of the Artistes Terroristes, friends of mine.
The acronym spelled MERDE. They'd lifted it from Cocteau, their patron saint. An old
joke, a century old.
I ignored a few sidelines till we reached a particular west-running one. I stopped.
So did the others, not that they had a choice.
- "What says, spuds?" I asked. "Westways, short and dirty, or north?"
- "I say north," said Toxic. "That vein into the Beach is a bitch."
- "Fuck that." said Olric. "It's electric, man."
- "Throw for it," I said.
- Olric's scissors beat Toxic's paper; we turned west. A few minutes later, we reached
the grid under the Réservoir de la Vanne. Concrete lines, series of right angles, the
hard gray walls glistening with pearly secretions, tainted waters filtering down from
the reservoir above. We went straight through, back into sandstone and mud. Then north,
up the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire. Another halfklik, stooped in Bickering light, and we
reached the vein.
The veins, once called chatière, are the intestines of the Downside system.
Some are very low, some a bit higher; some are short, some are long; some are sand,
some are mud, some are stone. All of them, though, have this in common: you have
to crawl through them.
Olric went first, pushing his pack in front of him. Toxic went next, muttering, cursing;
then Kurt. I took the rear.
This vein is low, long, and sandy. I had zipped my flightsuit up and sealed the neck
tabs, but it was useless: the sand still penetrared, itching, irritating. I dragged
myself forward by my elbows, pushing my pack, whack ing my helmet against the sky every
half-meter. The music resonated louder than ever, echoing in my ears.


Pages 8 / 9



Heavybeat, heavy like stone and steel. Sound of machines, of work, presilicone, music
for concrete barbarians.
Ewige schlangekraft
Ewige schlangekraft
I rolled out of the vein into one of the back rooms of the Beach, vast, labyrinthian
complex of vaulted rooms with a thick layer of sand on the ground. Four breeds were
sitting there, smoking a spliff around a sand table with a candle on it. Kurt had
already disappeared into the Beach proper.
I dapped with the breeds. One of them, a sharp, skinny Eurasian woman, flashed the
signal for black-market tech, on sale. I nodded, interested, and keyed down tbe music.
- "DeVeres wetware logicals, commerical, IBM and Matsui-Mikoyan compatible. Sealed case
of twenty, fifteen hundred Euros. What says?"
- "Too much. One thou."
- "Negative. Fourteen, min."
- "Twelve and a customized Krytech trojan."
- "Customized by who?"
- "Billy Name."
She grinned. "I can run wirh that. Two of them. RAM, on needle."
- "ROM, on CD." "Three then. The money on crystal."
- "On card."
- "Acceptable."
- "Done. Wherewhen?"
- "Mamoun's, at the Forum. Tomorrow, 22:30?"
- "Not Mamoun. They're kinked."
- "No say?"
- "Truth. i2:30 OK, though."
- "McDonald's clear?"
- "Yeah, far as 1 know. Some skins dusted their vidsystem last week."
- "Isn't it fixed?"
I snorted. "Why bother? They know it'd get dusted again within the night."
- "Check. I'll see you there, then."
- "Salaam, chica."
- "Salaam to you, breed. See you tomorrow." I went on through to the main area, running
the deal on playback. It looked good. I could check the wetware on the spot, and I could
download it for sure on Name for at least fifteen hundred, if I could ever find the fucker.
The trojans would only cost me the price of the CD, cause they were a gift from Viper.
Looks like I'll score for three hundred Euros. Good biz, if it works out.
The main room was on, like berserk, all the main spuds there. Flickering candlelight,
pungent hashish smell, Rob and Dan's maddening conga polyrhythms. Primitive tribal
scene, voodoo ritual or Niyabinghi feast. I cut the Industrial noise and started dapping.
Vulcain, JCH, Shadow the mapmaker, Richard, Brother John with his huge, knotted oak
club, Pado, Maldoror, Sida on crutches, Coolbeat and five of his bloods from the
Zone, Scalpel, paint-spattered and wired tight, MZ, Cochise ... Like I said, all the main
spuds. A couple of tourists huddled in the corner, nervous. Tourists, Uptown kids checking
out the mythic Downside for slum kicks, maybe they got a map from a friend who has a
friend. No one bothered them, no one talked to them. Tourists don't exist.
I dropped my pack, hung my helmet and generator from one of the rusted spikes that
protruded out of the sky-relic of an older age, when the Beach was a mad scientist's
lab-and sat down next to Olric. He handed me a brew, generic white can with the word
BEER printed on it. I cracked it and drank.
I looked around. On the wall across from me, Scalpel's mural, a reproduction of
Hokusai's "The Wave," two weeks old, already soiled. Toxic and Pado were heating a can
of ravioli on a heatpad. Kurt was dragging Whizz off into a corner for yet another
argument. Everything was hazy from the smoke, a foul, polluted compound of ganja and
oily candles and cigarettes and acetylene. A rat scuttled out of a pile of garbage
in the corner and ran across the room, dodged a tossed knife, and disappeared into the
darkness. I laughed. If you're squeamish, don't kick the Beach rubble.
The flame on my helmet hissed and painted a black carbon spot on the sky right above it.
Saxo wandered in, chipped, silver-plated tenor slung over his shoulder. He
didn't even dap, just pulled up his horn, licked the reed, and joined the madjam.
I finished the brew and pulled out my butterfly knife, making faces at Scalpel.
She winked while I flicked it open, teasing. Three chrome wings danced and glinted
as I played with the knife, snickt snickt. Balisong game, flashy and deadly.
I didn't get cut once.

End of the first part.

Jonathan Littell on Urban-Resources.net