The Best of Michael Swanwick (38 page)

Courtney would’ve been amazed to learn that I was not proud of what I did with her—quite the opposite, in fact. But I was as obsessed with her as she was with whatever it was that obsessed her.

Suddenly Courtney was on her feet, yelling. The hologram showed Koestler on his feet as well. The big guy was on the ropes, being pummeled. Blood and spittle flew from his face with each blow. Then he was down; he’d never even had a chance. He must’ve known early on that it was hopeless, that he wasn’t going to win, but he’d refused to take a fall. He had to be pounded into the ground. He went down raging, proud and uncomplaining. I had to admire that.

But he lost anyway.

That, I realized, was the message I was meant to take away from this. Not just that the product was robust. But that only those who backed it were going to win. I could see, even if the audience couldn’t, that it was the end of an era. A man’s body wasn’t worth a damn anymore. There wasn’t anything it could do that technology couldn’t handle better. The number of losers in the world had just doubled, tripled, reached maximum. What the fools below were cheering for was the death of their futures.

I got up and cheered too.

***

In the stretch afterwards, Koestler said, “You’ve seen the light. You’re a believer now.”

“I haven’t necessarily decided yet.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Koestler said. “I’ve done my homework, Mr. Nichols. Your current position is not exactly secure. Morton-Western is going down the tubes. The entire service sector is going down the tubes. Face it, the old economic order is as good as fucking gone. Of course you’re going to take my offer. You don’t have any other choice.”

The fax outed sets of contracts. “A Certain Product,” it said here and there. Corpses were never mentioned.

But when I opened my jacket to get a pen, Koestler said, “Wait. I’ve got a factory. Three thousand positions under me. I’ve got a motivatedworkforce. They’d walk through fire to keep their jobs. Pilferage is at zero. Sick time practically the same. Give me one advantage your product has over my current workforce. Sell me on it. I’ll give you thirty seconds.”

I wasn’t in sales and the job had been explicitly promised me already. But by reaching for the pen, I had admitted I wanted the position. Andwe all knew whose hand carried the whip.

“They can be catheterized,” I said—”no toilet breaks.”

For a long instant Koestler just stared at me blankly. Then he exploded with laughter. “By God, that’s a new one! You have a great future ahead of you, Donald. Welcome aboard.”

He winked out.

We drove on in silence for a while, aimless, directionless. At last Courtney leaned forward and touched the chauffeur’s shoulder.

“Take me home,” she said.

***

Riding through Manhattan I suffered from a waking hallucination that we were driving through a city of corpses. Grey faces, listless motions. Everyone looked dead in the headlights and sodium vapor streetlamps. Passing by the Children’s Museum I saw a mother with a stroller through the glass doors. Two small children by her side. They all three stood motionless, gazing forward at nothing. We passed by a stop-and-go where zombies stood out on the sidewalk drinking forties in paper bags. Through upper-story windows I could see the sad rainbow trace of virtuals playing to empty eyes. There were zombies in the park, zombies smoking blunts, zombies driving taxies, zombies sitting on stoops and hanging out on street corners, all of them waiting for the years to pass and the flesh to fall from their bones.

I felt like the last man alive.

***

Courtney was still wired and sweaty from the fight. The pheromones came off her in great waves as I followed her down the hall to her apartment. She stank of lust. I found myself thinking of how she got just before orgasm, so desperate, so desirable. It was different after she came, she would fall into a state of calm assurance; the same sort of calm assurance she showed in her business life, the aplomb she sought so wildly during the act itself.

And when that desperation left her, so would I. Because even I could recognize that it was her desperation that drew me to her, that made me do the things she needed me to do. In all the years I’d known her, we’d never once had breakfast together.

I wished there was some way I could deal her out of the equation. I wished that her desperation were a liquid that I could drink down to the dregs. I wished I could drop her in a wine press and squeeze her dry.

At her apartment, Courtney unlocked her door and in one complicated movement twisted through and stood facing me from the inside. “Well,” she said. “All in all, a productive evening. Good night, Donald.”

“Good night? Aren’t you going to invite me inside?”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?” She was beginning to piss me off. A blind man could’ve told she was in heat from across the street. A chimpanzee could’ve talked his way into her pants. “What kind of idiot game are you playing now?”

“You know what no means, Donald. You’re not stupid.”

“No I’m not, and neither are you. We both know the score. Now let me in, goddamnit.”

“Enjoy your present,” she said, and closed the door.

***

I found Courtney’s present back in my suite. I was still seething from her treatment of me and stalked into the room, letting the door slam behind me. So that I was standing in near-total darkness. The only light was what little seeped through the draped windows at the far end of the room. I was just reaching for the light switch when there was a motion in the darkness.

’Jackers!
I thought, and all in a panic lurched for the light switch, hoping to achieve I don’t know what. Credit-jackers always work in trios, one to torture the security codes out of you, one to phone the numbers out of your accounts and into a fiscal trapdoor, a third to stand guard. Was turning the lights on supposed to make them scurry for darkness, like roaches? Nevertheless, I almost tripped over my own feet in my haste to reach the switch. But of course it was nothing like what I’d feared.

It was a woman.

She stood by the window in a white silk dress that could neither compete with nor distract from her ethereal beauty, her porcelain skin. When the lights came on, she turned toward me, eyes widening, lips parting slightly. Her breasts swayed ever so slightly as she gracefully raised a bare arm to offer me a lily. “Hello, Donald,” she said huskily. “I’m yours for the night.” She was absolutely beautiful.

And dead, of course.

***

Not twenty minutes later I was hammering on Courtney’s door. She came to the door in a Pierre Cardin dressing gown and from the way she was still cinching the sash and the disarray of her hair I gathered she hadn’t been expecting me.

“I’m not alone,” she said.

“I didn’t come here for the dubious pleasures of your fair white body.” I pushed my way into the room. But couldn’t help remembering that beautiful body of hers, not so exquisite as the dead whore’s, and now the thoughts were inextricably mingled in my head, death and Courtney, sex and corpses, a Gordian knot I might never be able to untangle.)

“You didn’t like my surprise?” She was smiling openly now, amused.

“No, I fucking did not!”

I took a step toward her. I was shaking. I couldn’t stop fisting and unfisting my hands.

She fell back a step. But that confident, oddly expectant look didn’t leave her face. “Bruno,” she said lightly. “Would you come in here?”

A motion at the periphery of vision. Bruno stepped out of the shadows of her bedroom. He was a muscular brute, pumped, ripped, and as black as the fighter I’d seen go down earlier that night. He stood behind Courtney, totally naked, with slim hips and wide shoulders and the finest skin I’d ever seen.

And dead.

I saw it all in a flash.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Courtney!” I said, disgusted. “I can’t believe you. That you’d actually…That thing’s just an obedient body. There’s nothing there—no passion, no connection, just…physical presence.”

Courtney made a kind of chewing motion through her smile, weighingthe implications of what she was about to say. Nastiness won.

“We have equity now,” she said.

I lost it then. I stepped forward, raising a hand, and I swear to God I intended to bounce the bitch’s head off the back wall. But she didn’t flinch—she didn’t even look afraid. She merely moved aside, saying, “In the body, Bruno. He has to look good in a business suit.”

A dead fist smashed into my ribs so hard I thought for an instant my heart had stopped. Then Bruno punched me in my stomach. I doubled over, gasping. Two, three, four more blows. I was on the ground now,rolling over, helpless and weeping with rage.

“That’s enough, baby. Now put out the trash.”

Bruno dumped me in the hallway.

I glared up at Courtney through my tears. She was not at all beautiful now. Not in the least. You’re getting older, I wanted to tell her. But insteadI heard my voice, angry and astonished, saying, “You…you goddamn, fucking necrophile!”

“Cultivate a taste for it,” Courtney said. Oh, she was purring! I doubted she’d ever find life quite this good again. “Half a million Brunos are about to come on the market. You’re going to find it a lot more difficult to pick up
living
women in not so very long.”

I sent away the dead whore. Then I took a long shower that didn’t really make me feel any better. Naked, I walked into my unlit suite and opened the curtains. For a long time I stared out over the glory and darkness that was Manhattan.

I was afraid, more afraid than I’d ever been in my life.

The slums below me stretched to infinity. They were a vast necropolis, a neverending city of the dead. I thought of the millions out there who were never going to hold down a job again. I thought of how they must hate me—me and my kind—and how helpless they were before us. And yet. There were so many of them and so few of us. If they were to all rise up at once, they’d be like a tsunami, irresistible. And if there was so much as a spark of life left in them, then that was exactly what they would do.

That was one possibility. There was one other, and that was thatnothing would happen. Nothing at all.

God help me, but I didn’t know which one scared me more.

Mother Grasshopper

In the Year One, we came in an armada of a million spacecraft to settle upon, colonize, and claim for our homeland this giant grasshopper on which we now dwell.

We dared not land upon the wings for, though the cube-square rule held true and their most rapid motions would be imperceptible on a historic scale, random nerve firings resulted in pre-movement tremors measured at Richter 11. So we opted to build in the eyes, in the faceted mirrorlands that reflected infinities of flatness, a shimmering Iowa, the architecture of home.

It was an impossible project and one, perhaps, that was doomed from the start. But such things are obvious only in retrospect. We were a young and vigorous race then. Everything seemed possible.

Using shaped temporal fields, we force-grew trees which we cut down to build our cabins. We planted sod and wheat and buffalo. In one vivid and unforgettable night of technology we created a layer of limestone bedrock half a mile deep upon which to build our towns. And when our work was done, we held hoe-downs in a thousand county seats all across the eye-lands.

We created new seasons, including Snow, after the patterns of those we had known in antiquity, but the night sky we left unaltered, for this was to be our home…now and forever. The unfamiliar constellations would grow their own legends over the ages; there would be time. Generations passed, and cities grew with whorls of suburbs like the arms of spiral galaxies around them, for we were lonely, as were the thousands and millions we decanted who grew like the trees of the cisocellar plains that were as thick as the ancient Black Forest.

I was a young man, newly bearded, hardly much more than a shirt-tail child, on that Harvest day when the stranger walked into town.

This was so unusual an event (and for you to whom a town of ten thousand necessarily means that there
will be strangers,
I despair of explaining) that children came out to shout and run at his heels, while we older citizens, conscious of our dignity, stood in the doorways of our shops, factories, and co-ops to gaze ponderously in his general direction. Not quite
at
him, you understand, but over his shoulder, into the flat, mesmeric plains and the infinite white skies beyond.

He claimed to have come all the way from the equatorial abdomen, where gravity is three times eye-normal, and this was easy enough to believe, for he was ungodly strong. With my own eyes I once saw him take a dollar coin between thumb and forefinger and bend it in half—and a steel dollar at that! He also claimed to have walked the entire distance, which nobody believed, not even me.

“If you’d walked even half that far,” I said, “I reckon you’d be the most remarkable man as ever lived.”

He laughed at that and ruffled my hair. “Well, maybe I am,” he said. “Maybe I am.”

I flushed and took a step backwards, hand on the bandersnatch-skin hilt of my fighting knife. I was as feisty as a bantam rooster in those days, and twice as quick to take offense. “Mister, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to step outside.”

The stranger looked at me. Then he reached out and, without the slightest hint of fear or anger or even regret, touched my arm just below the shoulder. He did it with no particular speed and yet somehow I could not react fast enough to stop him. And that touch, light though it was, paralyzed my arm, leaving it withered and useless, even as it is today.

He put his drink down on the bar, and said, “Pick up my knapsack.”

I did.

“Follow me.”

So it was that without a word of farewell to my family or even a backward glance, I left New Auschwitz forever.

***

That night, over a campfire of eel grass and dried buffalo chips, we ate a dinner of refried beans and fatback bacon. It was a new and clumsy experience for me, eating one-handed. For a long time, neither one of us spoke. Finally I said, “Are you a magician?”

The stranger sighed. “Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe I am.”

“You have a name?”

“No.”

“What do we do now?”

“Business.” He pushed his plate toward me. “I cooked. It’s your turn to wash.”

Our business entailed constant travel. We went to Brinkerton with cholera and to Roxborough with typhus. We passed through Denver and Venice and Saint Petersburg and left behind fleas, rats, and plague. In Upper Black Eddy, it was ebola. We never stayed long enough to see the results of our work, but I read the newspapers afterwards, and it was about what you would expect.

Still,
on the whole,
humanity prospered. Where one city was decimated, another was expanding. The overspilling hospitals of one county created a market for the goods of a dozen others. The survivors had babies.

We walked to Tylersburg, Rutledge, and Uniontown and took wagons to Shoemakersville, Confluence, and South Gibson. Booked onto steam trains for Mount Lebanon, Mount Bethel, Mount Aetna, and Mount Nebo and diesel trains to McKeesport, Reinholds Station, and Broomall. Boarded buses to Carbondale, Feasterville, June Bug, and Lincoln Falls. Caught commuter flights to Paradise, Nickel Mines, Niantic, and Zion. The time passed quickly.

Then one shocking day my magician announced that he was going home.

“Home?” I said. “What about your work?”

“
Our
work, Daniel,” he said gently. “I expect you’ll do as good a job as ever I did.” He finished packing his few possessions into a carpet bag.

“You can’t!” I cried.

With a wink and a sad smile, he slipped out the door.

***

For a time—long or short, I don’t know—I sat motionless, unthinking, unseeing. Then I leaped to my feet, threw open the door, and looked up and down the empty street. Blocks away, toward the train station, was a scurrying black speck.

Leaving the door open behind me, I ran after it.

I just missed the afternoon express to Lackawanna. I asked the stationmaster when was the next train after it. He said tomorrow. Had he seen a tall man carrying a carpetbag, looking thus and so? Yes, he had. Where was he? On the train to Lackawanna. Nothing more heading that way today. Did he know where I could rent a car? Yes, he did. Place just down the road.

Maybe I’d’ve caught the magician if I hadn’t gone back to the room to pick up my bags. Most likely not. At Lackawanna station I found he’d taken the bus to Johnstown. In Johnstown, he’d moved on to Erie and there the trail ran cold. It took me three days’ hard questioning to pick it up again.

For a week I pursued him thus, like a man possessed.

Then I awoke one morning and my panic was gone. I knew I wasn’t going to catch my magician anytime soon. I took stock of my resources, counted up what little cash-money I had, and laid out a strategy. Then I went shopping. Finally, I hit the road. I’d have to be patient, dogged, wily, but I knew that, given enough time, I’d find him.

Find him, and kill him too.

The trail led me to Harper’s Ferry, at the very edge of the oculus. Behind was civilization. Ahead was nothing but thousands of miles of empty chitin-lands.

People said he’d gone south, off the lens entirely.

Back at my boarding house, I was approached by one of the lodgers. He was a skinny man with a big mustache and sleeveless white t-shirt that hung from his skinny shoulders like wet laundry on a muggy Sunday.

“What you got in that bag?”

“Black death,” I said, “infectious meningitis, tuberculosis. You name it.”

He thought for a bit. “I got this wife,” he said at last. “I don’t suppose you could…”

“I’ll take a look at her,” I said, and hoisted the bag.

We went upstairs to his room.

She lay in the bed, eyes closed. There was an IV needle in her arm, hooked up to a drip feed. She looked young, but of course that meant nothing. Her hair, neatly brushed and combed, laid across the coverlet almost to her waist, was white—white as snow, as death, as finest bone china.

“How long has she been like this?” I asked.

“Ohhhh…” He blew out his cheeks. “Forty-seven, maybe fifty years?”

“You her father?”

“Husband. Was, anyhow. Not sure how long the vows were meant to hold up under these conditions: can’t say I’ve kept ’em any too well. You got something that bag for her?” He said it as casual as he could, but his eyes were big and spooked-looking.

I made my decision. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll give you forty dollars for her.”

“The sheriff wouldn’t think much of what you just said,” the man said low and quiet.

“No. But then, I suppose I’ll be off of the eye-lands entirely before he knows a word of it.”

I picked up my syringe.

“Well? Is it a deal or not?”

***

Her name was Victoria. We were a good three days march into the chitin before she came out of the trance state characteristic of the interim zombie stage of Recovery. I’d fitted her with a pack, walking shoes, and a good stout stick, and she strode along head up, eyes blank, speaking in the tongues of angels afloat between the stars.

“—cisgalactic phase intercept,” she said. “Do you read? Das Uberraumboot zuruckgegenerinnernte. Verstehen? Anadaemonic mesotechnological conflict strategizing. Drei tausenden Affen mit Laseren! Hello? Is anybody—”

Then she stumbled over a rock, cried out in pain, and said, “Where am I?”

I stopped, spread a map on the ground, and got out my pocket gravitometer. It was a simple thing: a glass cylinder filled with aerogel and a bright orange ceramic bead. The casing was tin, with a compressor screw at the top, a calibrated scale along the side, and the words “Flynn & Co.” at the bottom. I flipped it over, watched the bead slowly fall. I tightened the screw a notch, then two, then three, increasing the aerogel’s density. At five, the bead stopped. I read the gauge, squinted up at the sun, and then jabbed a finger on an isobar to one edge of the map.

“Right here,” I said. “Just off the lens. See?”

“I don’t—” She was trembling with panic. Her dilated eyes shifted wildly from one part of the empty horizon to another. Then suddenly, sourcelessly, she burst into tears.

Embarrassed, I looked away. When she was done crying, I patted the ground. “Sit.” Sniffling, she obeyed. “How old are you, Victoria?”

“How old am…? Sixteen?” she said tentatively. “Seventeen?” Then, “Is that really my name?”

“It was. The woman you were grew tired of life, and injected herself with a drug that destroys the ego and with it all trace of personal history.” I sighed. “So in one sense you’re still Victoria, and in another sense you’re not. What she did was illegal, though; you can never go back to the oculus. You’d be locked into jail for the rest of your life.”

She looked at me through eyes newly young, almost childlike in their experience, and still wet with tears. I was prepared for hysteria, grief, rage. But all she said was, “Are you a magician?”

That rocked me back on my heels. “Well—yes,” I said. “I suppose I am.”

She considered that silently for a moment. “So what happens to me now?”

“Your job is to carry that pack. We also go turn-on-turn with the dishes.” I straightened, folding the map. “Come on. We’ve got a far way yet to go.”

We commenced marching, in silence at first. But then, not many miles down the road and to my complete astonishment, Victoria began to
sing!

***

We followed the faintest of paths—less a trail than the memory of a dream of the idea of one—across the chitin. Alongside it grew an occasional patch of grass. A lot of wind-blown loess had swept across the chitin-lands over the centuries. It caught in cracks in the carapace and gave purchase to fortuitous seeds. Once I even saw a rabbit. But before I could point it out to Victoria, I saw something else. Up ahead, in a place where the shell had powdered and a rare rainstorm had turned the powder briefly to mud, were two overlapping tire prints. A motorbike had been by here, and recently.

I stared at the tracks for a long time, clenching and unclenching my good hand.

The very next day we came upon a settlement.

It was a hardscrabble place. Just a windmill to run the pump that brought up a trickle of ichor from a miles-deep well, a refinery to process the stuff edible, and a handful of unpainted clapboard buildings and Quonset huts. Several battered old pickup trucks sat rusting under the limitless sky.

A gaunt man stood by the gate, waiting for us. His jaw was hard, his backbone straight and his hands empty. But I noted here and there a shiver of movement in a window or from the open door of a shed, and I made no mistake but that there were weapons trained upon us.

“Name’s Rivera,” the man said when we came up to him.

I swept off my bowler hat. “Daniel. This’s Miss Victoria, my ward.”

“Passing through?”

“Yessir, I am, and I see no reason I should ever pass this way again. If you have food for sale, I’ll pay you market rates. But if not, why, with your permission, we’ll just keep on moving on.”

“Fair spoken.” From somewhere Rivera produced a cup of water, and handed it to us. I drank half, handed the rest to Victoria. She shivered as it went down.

“Right good,” I said. “And cold too.”

“We have a heat pump,” Rivera said with grudging pride. “C’mon inside. Let’s see what the women have made us to eat.”

Then the children came running out, whooping and hollering, too many to count, and the adult people behind them, whom I made out to be twenty in number. They made us welcome.

They were good people, if outlaws, and as hungry for news and gossip as anybody can be. I told them about a stump speech I had heard made by Tyler B. Morris, who was running for governor of the Northern Department, and they spent all of dinnertime discussing it. The food was good, too—ham and biscuits with red-eye gravy, sweet yams with butter, and apple cobbler to boot. If I hadn’t seen their chemical complex, I’d’ve never guessed it for synthetic. There were lace curtains in the window, brittle-old but clean, and I noted how carefully the leftovers were stored away for later.

After we’d eaten, Rivera caught my eye and gestured with his chin. We went outside, and he led me to a shed out back. He unpadlocked the door and we stepped within. A line of ten people lay unmoving on plain-built beds. They were each catheterized to a drip-bag of processed ichor. Light from the door caught their hair, ten white haloes in the gloom.