Yarn (10 page)

I grabbed a silken towel to dry my hands and dabbed my face. This job was exactly the thing I had been preparing for my whole professional life. What greater goal could there be for clothes than to ease one into the next phase? From what I knew of her life, Vada had rebirthed herself with her costumes- how fitting that another costume would end it.

Throwing the towel into the receptacle, I stared at my face again. The momentary triumph I had just felt in ordering, defining, and congratulating myself on my journey, my payback, my grand quest, faded. There was something else going on. I didn't know what it was, but I was starting to feel its weight, its temperature, and hand.

Returning to the hall, I started toward Ryder's door. When I got within ten feet, the green-haired ad-woman came to life.

"Destiny of design," she said, batting her green-encrusted eyelids, "is the buried treasure of your dreams and Ryder Textile Jobber is the submarine, powered with the relentless velocity of love that is ready to take you to new depths of creativity and material freedom. Won't you come with me, take a dive into the wetness that is pure and clean?"

Turning the knob, I stepped inside.

SLUBS: CORNFIELD

"Dad," I whispered, "Dad… I'm sorry to wake you." In the moonlight, I could just see his eyelids and the wrinkles around his eyes twitch a few times. "It's me, Tane," I said, afraid he might not even remember me. "I have go to the corn mill. The bus will be here soon." Finally he opened his eyes. He didn't turn to me, but stared straight up into the black sky.

"That music you hear… that's the early fry." Two hundred yards away on the paved road I could see the lights of a food truck. Several times a day, they circled the fields, delivering fried BurritoPops, EcoDogs, and KobNockers announced by the tinny chimes of the M-Bunny jingle.

"You'll be okay," I told him. We had slept in the field. I had covered him with my blanket. "Just stay here. I told my friend Rik to look after you. You can trust him. He's very loyal. Just don't go in the house. The rep doesn't want you there… yet." Although his eyes were open, I worried that he wasn't really awake, and that he wouldn't remember.

Jamming a hand in my shorts pocket, I continued. "I'm leaving you with two M-pennies so you can get something later if you want. You should drink some Golden. It's good for you."

"Right." His flat voice lay somewhere between acceptance and sarcasm. Then I heard him swallow, and his eyes finally met mine. In that instant, I saw the man I once knew. The strong, capable man I had always looked up to.

"Dad, I missed you." I barely got the words out before my throat constricted. Before I started to cry or he replied, I quickly said, "Anyway, here are some coins." I held out the thin silvery things, hoping he would take them. Instead, his eyelids began to droop. "Dad?"

He was falling back asleep. Instead of waking him, I inched forward, gingerly felt for the pocket at the side of his shorts, and tried to slide the coins in. I got them just inside the flap of the stiff non-woven, but worried that they would easily slide out into the dust. Trying not to make a sound, I attempted to push the coins farther in. And that's when I saw-or I thought I saw-a tiny white light, no larger than a grain of sand inside his pocket.

Sitting back, I told myself I had to go. I hadn't seen anything. It was just some blip in my vision, like the way my eyes seemed to make patterns and meshes in the dark. But then I saw it again.

The only lights in the slubs were corn oil lamps or the pale blue florescent bulbs powered by the truck and bus engines. I couldn't imagine what he might have. Worse, he wasn't supposed to have anything like that. If one found a rusted cluster of gears, a hard green wafer traced with lines of gold, or coils of colored wires, it was all to be immediately turned over to M-Bunny for proper recycling. Besides, it was said a lot of that stuff could kill you.

In the darkness of his pocket, the light flashed again. Dad had something that wasn't M-Bunny. He had something illegal,
unloyal,
and dangerous. I panicked and rose, making my way toward the fry truck.

I stopped after twenty feet. I couldn't leave that thing with the lights-whatever it was-with my barely conscious father. If the rep discovered it, Dad was doomed. I returned to his side. Gingerly poking into his pocket, I grasped the thing between two fingertips and pulled.

It was a thread seven inches long. It blinked and sparkled like it was encrusted with a dozen microscopic stars. And even when I shielded it from the moonlight, the specks didn't disappear. They actually grew brighter and blinked on and off.

In the distance, there was a brief pause as the fry melody reached the end of its loop and began again, and in that blip of silence, where the space around me expanded to include the vast hush of corn and wind, I floated far from the world I knew. The sparkling thread in my hand was like nothing I had ever seen or dreamed of.

Maybe I should have tucked it back into Dad's pocket, or dug a hole and buried it, or grasped his shoulders, shaken him, and demanded to know what it was and where it had come from. Instead I tucked it into my own pocket and started toward the fry truck.

I didn't get a chance to really examine the yarn until I was at the back of the M-Bunny bus heading to the corn mill. I only had a bit of scratched glass as a magnifier and wasn't sure what I was looking at, but that yarn told me things. It told me that there was a place of reason and artistry. It told me that there was a place where I might fit in.

"Bunny?" I asked Kira, confused that she thought it was from the slubs. "You mean M-Bunny."

She pointed at the screen. "This signature is Bunné."

I stepped closer. It would be a while before I had the vocabulary, but I later learned my hidden thread was what's called a "novelty" or "compound" yarn-one made of several components-five in this case. Two were thicker matrix-fibril, one was angora wool with a loose z-twist that looped and spun around the two main mono-fibers like an extended spring- thick and fuzzy here, narrow and smooth there. A micro-mono wrapped around the wool connected it to the others. And threaded loosely among all of these was another very high-twist yarn that resembled a miniature string of lights-in this case light-emitting polymers.

I asked, "What's Bunné?"

"The beating heart of my enemy… and the tap root of my inspiration." Kira faced me. "I was part of Bunné at one time. I dreamed with her and was a proud saleswarrior at her fantasy knitting subsidiary, Casper Union." Her expression darkened. "But I saw what they were doing to the brand. They were replacing craft with rage, silver with tin, and heart with spleen." For several moments she seemed lost in thought. "If you were a Bunné spy, that would explain your handsome knitting, but not your presence before me. And hearing your past… about this yarn from your father… I am moved. Both moved and baffled by what you are."

I was glad that she wasn't threatening me anymore, but she hadn't answered my question so I asked it again.

"Bunné!" she cried. "Miss Bunné is the ruling celeb of this sex and shopping country of Seattlehama. Around her rumors of terror swirl, but she is the tower and she is the light. Truly she is grand, and I haven't stopped loving her even as my heart is filled with the tar of hate." Kira paused as if to gather her warTalk. "I worshiped her and her dreams. But I could not stay with Casper Union. I can't fathom how she has been duped by those who pervert her vision and her love. To my death I will battle back to her feet and clear a wide and bloody swatch of truth!"

She spun back to the magnified yarn. "So, I believe you, Tane Cedar. I believe and hold dear as I have not before that you truly are a former man of the prison crop… but how did your father acquire it?"

"I don't know."

"You did not inquire?"

I shook my head. "He died the next day."

She bowed her head slowly as if offering her condolences. "Remon, you are a cloudy mystery. Someday we will knit that haze into meaning, but for today, your past binds and unites us… it powers our fight together!" She took it from the magnitron and held it in her palm as one might a jewel. "It is quite a yarn."

Tucking it into my pocket, I found myself deeply relieved to have it back. No less a relief was to have gained Kira's trust, even if it took a bloody nose and a scratched neck.

"I sense a deep furrow of talent in you." She stepped beside the Stanton-Bell Tex-knitter. "Demonstrate the rhythm of your knitting for me. Audition for possibilities."

Without a hesitation, I stepped up and grasped the handles.

SEATTLEHAMA: INFINITE LAYERS

Kira had me knit twenty skivvé in a row. She reloaded the cartridges three times, urging me on. "Knot and start again! Yes… Brilliant! … It's sheer intensity. Spectacular! Excellent!"

I worked faster and faster. Skivvé piled up around us. Another cartridge went dry, I stopped moving the handles and we locked eyes. Hers glowed with intensity. I thought she was going to get more yarn, but she grabbed her thick coat, but did not button it. Stepping from the Stanton, I undid the front of my slacks, and we fashioned each other on the pile of my knit skivvé.

"I have found my Remon," she whispered as we lay there cooling off. "Truly a Remon of worth and terror."

"The man in the worm jacket told me that Remon was from the slubs."

It seemed to take a moment for her to figure out whom I was talking about. "That's a Mulberry Jacket! He is dressed as brave Commander Sheppard. But as for Warrior Remon, he is not
from
. He fights wars. He slays ferocious beasts, and he is championed by the city. But then… in a mysterious moment… he is injured. Some songs describe a battle in which a gang of corn prisoners slashed him. Another ballad describes a threat from Bunné who curses his manhood. What ever is the cause, Remon is cut across his groin. While his exact injury is never known, he never again wears a fashion panty. And yet, ravaged by war and the heat of love, he and Bunné find that their love for one another blooms like a glamorous cancer."

She was so adamant I couldn't laugh. "Is this real or not?"

She gazed into my eyes. "What is truth is that Warrior Remon was a man of fashion and talent and so are you." She shook her head and smiled. "If you walked into the knitting conservatory where I schooled and danced with a Stanton-Bell as you have today you would be crowned dark emperor of the loops!" Her face was aglow and excitement flowed from her. "You have all the belongings of knowledge, the twisted fibers, and the precision knotting, but you need lessons of design."

"In the corn all we had were B-shirts and shorts and they weren't even real cloth. I want to learn everything."

"First," said Kira as she flexed her hand before me. "The study is skin. We learn its stretch and wear. We learn its ease and comfort. That is the heart of fashion. All the layers we stack on top must not sacrifice its pleasure and beauty. Our customer is skin. And as the foundation, skivvé are the rhythm of dress."

For a minute we sat there staring at our hands as we flexed our fingers and watched the skin wrinkle and stretch. My eyes wandered to her skivvé, the tube of which rested on her thigh. "Why you wear
men's
skivvé? You don't have a root."

She laughed at me. "They are men's
fantasy
skivvé. Several years ago, in Bunné's
Sweet Way Surgery Duo
, she wore the first pair. From then on it is fashion. The market has doubled every year. The fantasy skivvé has become the badge of honor of the true knit saleswarrior." She pushed herself up, took down a yarn cartridge, and inserted it into the slot on the back of the Stanton. "We will first knit the woman's
reality
skivvé," she announced. I wasn't sure what she wanted, but began knitting and when the knit heads came to the crotch, and I was about to add something, she held my right hand still. We produced a simple, smooth skivvé.

"The female sculpture," she announced as she pulled it from mannequin hips. "The stage is empty, the actor, hidden. There can be no drama. It delights some, but not the saleswarrior of purls. For us, we find dignity, power, and ferocity in
the ghost
." She pulled her dress above her belly. "The man is positive… an appendage of expression… a wand of will… a needle of knitting!"

I still didn't really understand, but felt I could pretend I did. Kira stared at me intently. I didn't know what to expect.

"I promote you, Warrior Remon."

I remembered how Withor had hated me, dismissed my yarn snatching, and used me. "I'm so glad I found you." I hoped her promotion meant I could continue to knit.

She paced back and forth. After a minute, she stopped and spoke softly. "You shall know the inner mechanisms of the corporation and the dire clock mechanism in which we run." Her expression was almost sad as she gazed at me. "Today… the creditwarrior I lunched with had charts covered in the blood of loss. The balance is that Python Duck is in its last minutes. We must profit. We must chart now!"

"I had no idea." Even as I spoke, I recalled my first impression of the empty Python shop compared to the crowded and shiny Casper Union. "What can I do?"

"Exactly! You… Warrior Remon… you will be our sensation! You will be our scandal. No man knits fantasy skivvé and no former prisoner ever did!"

She didn't mean
I
was going to knit Python Duck's skivvé, did she?

"Yes," she replied as if reading my mind. "And it is a smoky and desperate map. But without sensation… without spectacle and risk, the creditwarriors will take our Stanton, our yarn, our needles, and our hope." She took my hands and cradled them in hers. "These are the artistry and honor I have searched for. These hands are the labor and the might. You Remon of Loin…" Her eyes focused on mine. "You are the craft that I do not possess. From now on you are Python Duck's Chief Executive Knitter!"

"Kira," I asked, "are you sure?"

"Time is desperation and we have arrived at the endgame. Tell me now: Can you grace the loops?"

"Yes!" I squeezed her hands in mine. "I will knit for you."