Authors: Wayne Wightman
“Simple people are simply happy people,” Raff continued grandly. “Simple people know what they know and don't care about the rest. Copy that. Send it to the vid people.” He sipped twice, giving Mr. Strickman time to finish pressing buttons. “You got any unsimple people working for you, Mr. Strickman?”
“Unsimple? No. Well, Bethina is loud, but I don't think she's... unsimple.”
“Loris Clare? She a complicated little woman?” he asked in a thin, rising voice.
“Well, maybe. She doesn't talk much. Might have got a little smart with me the other day — I'm not sure.”
Raff said, “Mm.”
“Any predictions?” Mr. Strickman asked with feigned disinterest. This was always the best part.
Raff said, “Your little woman, the Mrs. Strickman, will soon find out that Fawn is your bang girl.”
In the three-candle light, Mr. Strickman's face went bloodless. Sphincters clenched.
“But the good news is she won't care,” Raff said, following that with a sip. “Who sold you that incense? Smells like the armpit of a dog.”
Mr. Strickman breathed raggedly. Criticism destroyed his thoughts; it made his skin feel like it had knots being pulled through it.
“Mrs. Strickman won't care about Fawn because Mrs. Strickman has her own bang boy. Sixteen-year-old. Real mover.”
It took a moment for the words to register and then transform into imagery. When they did, Mr. Strickman appeared to have died in an upright position. After a minute, Raff finished the drink and upon exiting the office, left his glass on Mr. Strickman's desk, beneath his sightless eyes. Once through the door, across the expansive outer office, Raff observed Bethina, hissing curses and throwing handfuls of tissues at a woman behind a desk that he suspected was Loris Clare.
Mr. Strickman, in his office, slowly unknotted.
What should he do? A sixteen-year-old? A mover? What should he do?
Fawn
.
Fawn would tell him what to do about that. He could depend on her.
....
Fawn didn't exactly tell him what to do. She listened impassively.
“Mover!” he said desperately. “Sixteen!”
She pointed at the vid-end of the room. There Strickland was, full-depth, lifelike, circling mode point of view, working Fawn over — one of her favorite entertainments, watching herself being entertained.
Strickland had no idea his butt looked so pathetic. Could he really look so repellant? Out of his momentary self-pity he startled himself with the thought of anyone else seeing this — Mrs. Strickman seeing this, or — more horrifying — everyone seeing this, on the ninety-meter screen. The last president of Acro E was caught pimping his nieces — so Mr. Strickman might weather this indiscretion: his transgression was, at least, with an adult. It didn't look like he had a single muscle in his butt.
“That,” Fawn said, stopping the vid, “that's what I want. I want it again, I want it now, and I want it whenever else I want it. And I don't care who's plowing your wife. Begin.”
Mr. Strickman agreed. Her demands would undoubtedly become burdensome, but, at the moment, he felt he could force himself.
....
Loris knew someone who wasn't an idiot who knew someone who was at least borderline, and this person worked in surveillance. Word eventually got back to Loris that, yes, the cameras in Lloyd's watch area had been out for months and no paperwork for their repair could be found. Lucky for Lloyd, she thought.
So, two nights after the evening she got this word, she and Quentin Denmore hurried through the area Lloyd should have been looking after, but wasn't. Lloyd wasn't doing his job because JoyLynn Podendall was distracting him in a nearby janitorial closet from which muffled cries emanated. Quentin had a friend who had a friend who knew of JoyLynn and her affection for carnal escapades in non-standard locations.
She and Quentin began working at the complex mechanism. Several gears intermeshed in unexpected ways, designed to be opened only by people who had spent time practicing. It took their four hands five minutes.
Inside the tube, beyond the opening, Quentin and Loris saw what they expected: the transport levitation track running along the base and an overhead line of light just bright enough to see where and where not to step. And, what they also expected, as Lloyd had told Loris, across the tube and down five meters or so, was the vague outline of another hatch that led to the outside. A small plate, meant to be read only by those close enough to open it, said,
Danger Ahead
Acro Security Only
Snakes Spiders Germs
Full BioCon Suit Required
“Shall we?” Loris whispered.
“It says we need suits.”
“And the vid shows tropical plants where there can't be any.”
“But this says suits. We could get sick.”
“I'll do this. Go back out there, wait where you can watch the closet. If JoyLynn lets him loose before I come back, do whatever it takes to keep him busy.” Like a promise, Loris said, “I'm back in five minutes. Five.”
In half a minute, Quentin was gone, and she had turned the simple turn-latch on the side of the tube, and there it was. The outside. She turned on her hand lights. Actual soil covered the ground. Not just dirt on flooring that had to be sterilized once in a while. This was unsterilizeable — authentic germy earth,
everywhere
. Even the air had an unexpected smell, like the air that hovers over a fresh potted plant. Earth perfume.
From picture books and what little she could get through the vid, she knew this foliage was of a temperate zone.
She walked into it a slow dozen steps — a bit of sponginess in the ground, dead leaves there, mostly decayed; tall, tall branchless trees, gray-and-black banded, reaching like tent-poles from the earth up into the dense black canopy. On the ground here and there, clumps of head-high bushes in full leaf. She walked into it far enough that the acro wall was completely hidden by tree trunks and darkness. She breathed. Above the trees, she thought, was the actual sky, but she couldn't see it.
Heading back, she scanned the ground for snakes — none — and the tree sides for lurking vermin — also none. Loris held her breath and listened as hard as she could and heard only the far-away whisper of leaves, so high overhead. As she breathed again, she turned in a circle, leading with the lights, seeing the 180° sweep of the forest and then the plasticine side of the acro providing the other 180°, its immense height hidden above the forest canopy.
She swept her eyes across the wild outside again, trying to fix it in memory. Then she hurried back to the opened exterior hatch, hopped over the translev track, reset the multi-latched door, and strode to the area where Quentin waited. Everything was bright.
“Quentin!” she whisper-hissed.
His head stuck out around a corner, a dozen yards away. “What?” he mouthed without sound.
She ran lightly to him. “Still in there?”
He nodded and looked nervous. A bucket rattled and banged. Right in front of them, her partner was struggling around in a closet with JoyLynn Podendall.
“Good. Poor guy deserves it,” she said.
They hurried away as she whispered of the things she saw.
....
“You know I hate this,” Loris said to Quentin, seated at her left. “The noise alone....”
It was noisy at The Matches, but they were anonymous there, even if they did have trouble hearing each other. Below them, in the shallow arena, two men fought three women; the men were all hooded, without eye holes, wearing fat mitts on their hands. The women, bouncing above them from tall cushion to tall cushion, swung at the men's heads with padded clubs. The audience screamed with impatience as the slow fugue of violence moved slowly toward the inevitable frenzy of beatings and minor injuries.
“Someone was in our condo!” she shouted.
“Lloyd?!”
She shook her head. “Went through my stuff, went through my papers in detail!”
Quentin thought, then shouted, “I'll watch my stuff!”
To this she nodded enthusiastically.
They held hands, but with people jumping up and down, flailing the air, and screaming words without consonants, it was barely affectionate. As they left, Quentin looked back toward the center of the arena. The hooded men had got one of the women off the cushions and were beating her enthusiastically to the cheers of the audience.
Entering the quiet acro hallways, Quentin whispered to her, “They always surprise me.”
“The stupid are unpredictable, not creative.”
“Last week I thought that human windmill thing they did was creative. I was surprised people would do that to themselves. Very creative.”
Directly looking at him, she said, “Neosyphilis type four,” as they walked.
“What?”
“Was saying the first thing that came to my mind creative or impulsive?”
“Neosyph four was the first thing that came into your mind?”
They were still walking. Loris smiled large at him, turned her face forward, and let the back of her hand touch Quentin's.
“I don't understand you,” he said.
....
Loris began arranging for JoyLynn to meet Lloyd three or four times a week. Without Quentin, and with better lights, she could go to the outside and wander among the trees for as long as half an hour. One night, she heard Lloyd, in the closet, singing quietly to JoyLynn. It was an eerie, slowly warbling sound — small, sad, and suggested to her the affection he could never inspire in her. She let it go.
One night early on, in the beam of her light, Loris discovered a leaf with a foamy cluster of tiny eggs on its underside — and then three more leaves with eggs. She smuggled them up to her condo and put them in a transparent box to see what would happen. In a week, they burst into hundreds of tiny flying beetles, blue-black wing covers and perfectly segmented legs, all alike, all beautiful. She fed them till she had to get a bigger box. She told no one of this.
....
Instead of going to The Matches, Quentin and Loris sometimes met in the audience of
What If...?
one of several acro quiz shows broadcast through the vid. The questions were asked, and then while the contestant allegedly thought about a winning answer, the audience presented in increasing decibels its thoughts, arguments, objections, and non-ideational exclamations, giving Quentin and Loris periodic minutes to talk, only having to elevate their voices moderately.
Today, they had longer periods to talk, because there was some problem with the contestant; namely, the host, Mr. Glone (sleek, professorial, impeccably suited) had to educate the contestant on the nature of the hypothetical.
It began with Mr. Glone saying with a big arm-swing, as he did twice a week, “
What if!
Ready, Mr. Cortine? Good! Now, Mr. Cortine,
what if
you were in a place without water, and you —”
“I wouldn't do that.”
(Low key audience participation; grumbling and disbelief; this gave Quentin and Loris twenty-five seconds.)
“But what if you were, Mr. Cortine.
What if you were
in a place without water....”
(Audience commentary, brief; fifteen seconds.)
“I'd take water with me.” He said this without guile, without irony, without understanding.
(Audience shock, outrage, sympathy, confusion and, in limited areas, boredom; some physical expressions; one minute fifteen seconds.)
“Mr. Cortine — Was he screened? Okay. Mr. Cortine, we're not going to put you anyplace without water.”
“Good. I wouldn't go.”
(Twenty seconds.)
Host Glone began, once more, from the top, reciting the same words he'd said before. Big arm swing. “
What if!
Ready Mr. Cortine?” Etc. This time, however, Mr. Cortine appeared confused as well as angry and wanted to know how much he'd have to pay to keep from going through all this twice and why wouldn't they take his money? (Five minutes, twenty-five seconds in six segments; a record.)
During that particular broadcast of
What If...?
, Loris described two not-quite-right conversations with strangers she'd had. One slyly tried to get her to complain about her dissatisfaction with living in the acro. Nosy. Reminded her of an acro official. The other conversation, initiated by an attractive and tastefully dressed woman in her extended youth, chatted her through clothes, through restaurants, and to the quality of her love life. Loris gave her little on any subject and used one of her durable lines, “I never thought about that” more times than made her comfortable.
Quentin said the conversations didn't seem that odd to him, but then he wasn't there. He said nothing of the kind had happened to him and asked her if she had been doing anything illegal that he didn't know about.
“No, you idiot. But sometimes I think I'm being watched. Followed.”
Up on stage, Mr. Cortine had thrown something at the host, Mr. Glone, and the audience rose in united howling. Under the din, Quentin and Loris left, holding hands.
....
The next day, first thing Loris noticed in the office was Bethina's over-frequent head-tossing and her mirthless smirk, both aimed in Loris's direction. If it made Bethina smug and tossy, Loris knew it was something she wasn't going to like.
At 10:00 AM, Mr. Strickman called her into his office. Mr. Raff sat off to the side, dusty and silent. Today he still held his long dusters, and though he sat in a chair, he waved them lazily, idly, over the nearby walls.
Mr. Strickman said, “You're transferred. To Acro B, today, 8 PM. Tube station twenty-three.” It wasn't Lloyd's station.
“Today?” This had to be a mistake. She'd have to leave Quentin and Lloyd behind. And Bethina, Strickman, and more halfwits than she could count. “Transferred today?”
Mr. Strickman shrugged. “What it says. Eight PM. At number twenty-three.” He floated the paper into the trash can.
Mr. Raff sat silent, waving his dusters like long feelers.
Other than that, nothing was revealed. She left.