Chimera (27 page)

I talked to a woman who was alone in the camp's tiny library, and the man behind the counter at the store, and a few humans stretching their legs before lights-out. Asking them about Zoe got me next to nada: There were several young catwomen among the chimera indentures. Some of them had multicolored hair. No one knew their names. No one could say whether any of them were jaguars.

Chapter Sixteen

The next couple of days were intermittently dull and disgusting. My feeling that I was back in kindergarten increased when I got my very own bully. An archangel named Finn gave me a blink test at the end of each day to make sure I hadn't found a diamond ring or a bazooka and stashed it in the Pocket. When he asked how I'd gotten the Pocket, I said I'd been paid to test it, which was true enough to pass the blink.

But Finn knew something about UNSEC. The fact that the Pocket was by my gun hand made him conclude I'd worked for them. I didn't compliment his powers of deduction, because he had family killed in the Jackson Rebellion. He took to calling me "UNSEC-man" and made sure I got the least pleasant jobs. When the fan in the fertilizer room burned out, guess who spent the afternoon in a hot, stagnant ventilation shaft taking out the old motor and putting in a new one?

Finn couldn't find an especially disgusting job for me every day, but he found enough that I didn't work with Betty again until the second week of January. At the Baby Puke break, she said, "Duggan got the rights to work a landfill near Phoenix. A jag called Zoe was in the crew sent to work it. I don't know how long she's stationed there. I couldn't get word to her that you're looking for her. I'm taking this on myself to tell you, so if you have a notion to do her wrong, you best know I'll see you suffer if anything happens to that cat."

"I appreciate it."

"I dunno how knowing that'll do you any good, but you're welcome."

At dinner the next day, I saw the answer to the only question I had about the company's liberal credit policy. The bald man, Monty, screamed at the archangel behind the credit counter, "I'm strong, damn it! Look at me! All I want is a goddamn cheeseburger!" The archangel calmly shook his head through several of Monty's protests, then gave him a 'centive that dropped him on the floor. When Monty could pick himself up, he got into the camp food line.

I asked Cho and Ginger what had happened. Ginger gave her spaghetti and meatballs a worried look. Cho said, "He get no more credit. They say he work for them until he sixty-five, no more credit. Then he finish without a penny. He fool." Though Cho spat in disgust, after dinner, he went to Monty and they played chess together.

Monty hung himself that night. An oldtimer should've known better. His Little Angel registered his lack of oxygen and began to wail. The medical staff fixed him up. Since his injury was self-inflected, the costs were added to his period of indenture.

One afternoon during break when Finn was near, I stretched, inhaled loudly, and told Cho, "Smell that Montana air."

"I try to not smell that air."

"The trucks are out. Go ahead."

Cho sniffed. "So?"

"We're lucky."

"This lucky?"

"Hell, yeah. We could be digging through shit in some desert somewhere. Damn, but I hate the heat."

Cho shook his head. "You crazy, UNSEC-man."

"Count your blessings, Cho. We're in a winter wonderland. Rich folk pay to vacation in country like this. Only way to improve on this would be if we could go cross-country skiing."

Three days later, I was on a truck to Phoenix. The driver, a decent archangel called Medium-sized Ben, saw me grin out the window. He said, "Better look miserable when we get there. If they decide this isn't enough of a lesson to you, I don't know where they'll transfer you next."

The reason for Medium-sized Ben's trip was to haul a steam shovel to the Arizona dig. Since he would get it there faster with a second driver and since Finn had suggested I get a taste of work in the field to improve my attitude, I rode shotgun. The Little Angel was set to put me to sleep if I got within striking distance of Medium-sized Ben or more than thirty feet away from him, so no one was worried about me taking off.

Medium-sized Ben didn't talk much. He liked country-western music, and I thought it was amusing, so I was comfortable in the cab. The scenery might've been prettier in another season, but I admired snow-covered plains so white and level that they might've been geometric abstractions and mountains that pierced them like dark intruders from the third dimension.

At truck stops, Medium-sized Ben told me to order off the menu, even though the company had sent enough Nutrigruel to get me to Phoenix. I ate vegetable soup, a grilled cheese sandwich, french fries, and apple pie in Idaho Falls, Greek salad and vegetarian moussaka in Gunnison, and carrot cake at a midnight stop in Fredonia.

I'd never seen the city that polygamy built; Medium-sized Ben stopped so we could both smell the Great Salt Lake. At the Arizona border, we were searched for anti-Christian literature. I refrained from asking the guards where it said in the Bible to censor ideas that offended you.

Just after sunrise, we rolled through the Phoenix wasteland. Though he could've waited until we got to the camp, Medium-sized Ben stopped for breakfast. I ate huevos rancheros, rice, borracho beans, and hot corn tortillas, then sipped hot, strong coffee until Medium-sized Ben said, "Best be going." The trip had gone too slowly and too quickly. I wanted it to end, because I wanted Zoe free, and I wanted it to last forever, because I might be eating Nutrigruel for eleven months and three days after this.

Journey's end was a city of army green tents and mobile homes arranged in perfect rows near a land fill. A sign said, "Welcome to Phoenix Camp, a subsidiary of Duggan Enterprises. We build bright tomorrows from dim yesterdays! Please, for your safety, don't pick up hitchhikers." There were no fences—the Little Angels had made Duggan's walls redundant. Someone had built a golf course beside the land fill, after it was sealed and before Phoenix had been weaned from its dependence on imported water. The golf course had mostly been reclaimed by the desert. A large manmade lake remained, though it had shrunk to half its former size, and would someday disappear, too.

The smell grew worse as we drove closer. I had thought Duggan was bad, but Phoenix set new standards of stench. I saw indentures milling in the main yard and realized we had arrived in time for morning line-up. Human and chimera faces turned our way, and I scanned them, hoping to see one among them. When I spotted a tangle of black, brown, and gold hair on someone looking away from us, my heart leaped. Then I reminded myself that someone else might have jaguar hair, so I shouldn't get my hopes up. Still, as the truck came to a stop, I wrenched open the passenger door and jumped outside.

The head of jaguar hair disappeared, then reappeared as its owner walked away. The indentures had begun to form lines. Seven-thirty must've been only a minute or two away. The jaguar hair belonged to a small and shapely woman who strode with a dancer's grace. My heart said this was Zoe; my mind said I couldn't know that. She glanced toward the truck. Zoe. My Little Angel should've screamed an alarm when my heart stopped.

Our eyes met. Hers opened wide, then narrowed as she took in my clothes and collar. I grinned and started toward her, but halted when my Little Angel beeped.

She ran through the crowd to me. I smiled and said, "Zoe." Maybe I moved my hands forward for a hug.

She stopped two steps from me. The Little Angel kept beeping at my throat. She knew I could come no closer. I realized in that instant that she might have found a lover in the camp, that our night together might have meant much less to her than to me.

The camp was watching. I said, "I was in the area, so I thought I'd stop by."

She didn't smile. "I didn't think you'd get time."

"I signed up."

She gaped at me. "That's the stupidest—"

Our Little Angels shrieked and dropped us in the dust. When I could move again, I stood. Zoe looked past my shoulder, whispered, "Later," and ran to join a work line.

I turned. Carol O'Grady, the company's God with a datapad, walked toward me. She said, "Finn said you didn't understand the way we do things, UNSEC-man. Don't you know that time is money?"

I said, "Why's that only said by people who think money's more important than time?"

"You clearly agreed. You sold us a year." She pointed toward a line of humans and chimeras in stained grays. "Join the diggers."

Medium-sized Ben, by the truck, said, "He drove twelve hours yesterday and last night."

"Good," said O'Grady. "He owes us another twelve today."

The diggers were the reclamation center's front line. Wearing construction helmets, heavy leather gloves, steel-soled boots, and safety-lines, we waded into the open pit to dig out or pull out everything in it. Objects that were too heavy for us to move, we chained for a tractor to drag free. The big equipment couldn't enter the pits because the surface was unstable. I heard the trash went down for a quarter of a mile, and that might well have been true.

The diggers moved trash to solid ground without considering its nature. In most cases, you didn't want to consider its nature. The sorters divided it between blatantly useless, which went off to a new dump. That was less than a twentieth of what we pulled. The rest, the probably useful, was loaded onto trucks to go back to the main facilities, where the process continued as it had at Duggan.

Zoe was a sorter. I caught her glance a few times, when I happened to be hauling things from the pit and she was coming to decide if a heavy chunk of encrusted muck might have something useful within it. Neither of us knew whether to smile or snarl. Since we'd already given the camp's inhabitants enough fuel for speculation, we merely looked away from each other as though we were strangers. Which I suppose we were. We'd shared more in a day than most people share in a life, but I can't say I knew her or she knew me.

I spent much of the morning cursing my safety-line. It snagged constantly, making me walk back to free it from one protrusion so it could catch on another. The oldtimers had developed a second sense about what would snag the line and what wouldn't. When their lines caught, they flicked them with the experience of years, and the lines danced free.

Sometime after a lunch of all-too-familiar Nutrigruel, on what I was told was an unusually warm Arizona winter day, I began to feel drowsy. My work slowed until an archangel drawled, "Don't make me give you no 'centives, UNSEC-boy."

I wanted them to pay as little attention to me as possible, so I worked faster. You put your mind in automatic, and you barely notice that life has become an unending routine. Dig. Carry. Dump. Return. What thoughts I had were for the heat, and what to do about Zoe, and whether I was a fool to come here. I could've been sitting in a cool casino, watching my money ebb and flow with the cards—

Cans rolled below my feet. Before I knew it, I was sliding deep into the landfill, sucked down as if it wanted something back for all we were taking from it. I heard someone else scream. I didn't have time to. My thoughts went roughly from "Way to go, Clumsy Joe," to "Why haven't I stopped sinking?" to "I'm dead." No revivification this time. The cryo circuits will lose energy, and I'll thaw and rot like frozen meatloaf. The diggers will avoid this part of the pit, knowing my corpse waits for its unfortunate finder. And Zoe will go on, year after year, slowly dying as she works in garbage.

That sounds as if I calmly sank into some gentle oblivion. I sank through loose trash into the muck, thrashing for all I was worth. As I fell through the surface, I began yelling too late for help. Only when the oozing waste of Old Phoenix rolled over my head did I realize I was a dead man. Even then I tried to flail, hoping to catch something to climb or to swim somehow, but the weight of the muck was too great. Though there were hard things all around me like boulders in the sea, they merely helped pin my arms together over my head.

I stopped sinking when my feet settled on something solid and flat, a refrigerator or an oven or a car roof. I had time to think of childhood fears, of monstrous things swimming through the slime to grab me and pull me deeper. You would've thought the choice was between panicking and staying calm, but I did both: I watched myself panic, and knew I would die, and knew I would fight to live as long as I could, though that fight only consisted of squirming desperately while praying for God to yank me out.

Then the safety line drew tight, drawing me up as a bird draws a worm from the mud. I gasped fetid air the instant I rose from the stinking sea into the crust of loose garbage, and gasped again when I burst from the crust into the open air.

Strong hands dragged me from the landfill to solid ground. Warm water flooded over me, washing slime from my mouth and nose and eyes, making my skin scream from the cuts along my side where I must've been dragged against something jagged. My left arm was bruised, and I stank as badly as the vilest thing plucked from the pit, but life looked just fine then.

A crowd of people surrounded me. The archangel who saved me, a Hispanic woman whose name I never caught, said, "Okay, okay, we landed our fish. Now, back to work!"

The faces moved away. One indenture, a ratman, said, "You be okay now, man. You'll learn to walk it, just like us."

A face lingered beside the archangel's. I said, "Hey, Zoe."

She grinned. All I had gone through was worth it, for that moment. "Hey, Max."

The archangel said, "Didn't you hear—"

"I know him," Zoe said.

The archangel shrugged, letting Zoe stay while she turned her attention back to me. "Your record says you got all your shots."

"Yeah. First day at Duggan."

"Okay." She looked at Zoe. "Cat. Get the medkit and clean him up."

Zoe nodded and ran away. I stood and stretched myself.

The archangel repeated, "You're all right?"

"Fine, thanks."

"You hurt yourself, the company wonders if I screwed up. I've been fair to you, haven't I?"