Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  The train pulls in at Ix Ex Station and they make their transfer, Professor Budshah and the remaining Professor Long sandwiched between the two shield bearers at all times. Arieto holds up her hand, mutely instructing them not to board the train that rolls in to the platform. That one is allowed to pass, and they board the second train which follows it almost at once. Everyone who had been waiting for a train boarded the first one. Their train is old and dingy, with fake wood panelling and shiny turquoise seats. The economists sit half facing each other and the train rolls almost silently out into the oceanic gloom of the tunnels. Arieto looks at her watch after a few minutes—a heavy onion-shaped watch on a chain that she pulls from inside her apron—gets up and goes to the end of the train, knocks on the door of the conductor’s compartment. The door opens slightly; there’s no light behind it. She is talking to someone. The other voice is very low and might be coming over an intercom. Perhaps, the remaining Professor Long thinks, the one who opened the door and the one who is speaking aren’t the same person. A weird-looking grey arm reaches out of the door and opens a metal box high on the partition wall. The black glove it is wearing has white hand bones printed on the back, so it looks like a skeleton hand, even though, as Professor Budshah remarks, there is a skeleton hand already inside the glove. The box opens to reveal a red and blue keypad; Arieto punches a number into it with her stubby finger, then says something through the aperture in the door, which claps shut.

  Another train, going in the same direction on the adjacent track, lifts past them. In one of the windows they can see a man slumped over, obviously dead in his seat, with what looks like a bizarre hairy growth on his face. His hairpiece. It must have come loose and slipped halfway down his face. His horrible black mouth is wide open and his face is already spotted with decomposition. Somebody has put coins on his eyes. Arieto gets up, goes over to the window, and bends down to peer at him

  “Huh. Dead.”

  The accompanying train floats up into the dark, and they travel on in silence. Tony and Rubilyn are alert and on duty. Arieto kneads her hands and watches through the window. The two economists sit looking incredulously at everything. Finally, the remaining Professor Long pulls out some paper napkins and scrapes the few last remnants of shaving foam from Professor Budshah’s face.

  “Please,” he says, taking the napkins from her, and he wipes his jaws himself.

  “Thank you,” he adds, after a very long interval.

  When did they last pass a station? The tunnel has become a brick passage glistening with slime whose walls are so narrow they ooze by only inches from the windows on either side. They pop out into a fresh lake of darkness, with a chaos of silhouetted roof supports, standing in globes of faint lamp light, extending as far as the eye can see in every direction. The lights remain distinct, like stars, so the space between is invisible. It’s like a lamplit forest.

  The remaining Professor Long starts and gasps, looking out into the dark. She thought she saw a figure out there, running. There it is again! A human form with long black hair trailing behind, running through the forest at superhuman speed, keeping up with them. The reflection of Professor Budshah’s face appears beside her own.

  “Someone ...” she says, pointing.

  “I see him. There’s two!”

  There are many, all with black hair streaming out three or four feet behind them, flashing from one bubble of lamplight to the next, their legs whipping them along, only visible for a split second at a time.

  Arieto stomps up to the conductor’s door and raps on it.

  “Coursers on the left, pick it up!” she barks.

  A moment later, a fresh gust of acceleration pushes them implacably back into their seats and the darting forms of the runners begin to drop behind. Professor Budshah fails to suppress a shudder when he catches a good look at one of the faces, haggard features glistening with thick perspiration, staring eyes, gaping mouth sucking thick underground air.

  The remaining Professor Long struggles up to where Arieto stands.

  “Who are ...?”

  “All I know is they’re after this train,” she says. “And if you hadn’t noticed them when you did, they could have caught us.”

  “They won’t now?”

  “Not now,” Arieto says positively.

  Presently, once the runners have disappeared in the distance, Arieto knocks again, the door flies open a few inches with the same galvanic instantaneousness and there’s another brief exchange. The economists feel the momentum of the train diminish, and they glide to a stop. There’s nothing around them.

  “I’ll do it,” Arieto says. The skeleton-gloved hand gives her a bulky ring of keys. She selects the right one and turns it in the lock by the nearest door, one half of which slides open. Dank subterranean air pours into the car, and seems to dim it.

  “This way,” Arieto calls.

  The two shield bearers accompany them. Exactly framed in the open half of the door is a yellow ladder, lit by a small lantern.

  “Up there,” Arieto says, bobbing her pointing finger up and down.

  Rubilyn is the first to go up, with her shield across her back. Then Professor Budshah, then the remaining Professor Long, then Tony, Arieto last. The ladder is only fixed at the top, and sways in gaping emptiness as they climb. Those piles must go up a long way, but, since only their feet are in the light, it’s easy to imagine they’re only as tall as a subway tunnel. The lantern slides up on a vertical rail next to the ladder, somehow following them. A muffled banging tells them that the train has departed beneath them.

  “Keep it up, economists!” Arieto calls from below.

  The next thing Professor Budshah knows, he is being helped by Rubilyn out of a fox hole, its edge ragged with lush grass. Presently they all stand in a woody area at the base of a slope, right beside a boulder like a half-coiled, fossilized turd. The remaining Professor Long stares at the hole they climbed out of, which doesn’t seem large enough for them to have passed through.

  Arieto puts her hands on her hips and looks around, taking deep breaths of sylvan air through her nose. She smiles, without showing her teeth.

  “Well!” she says.

  She takes another deep breath and turns a little in place, to alter her view.

  “Well!” she says again, rubbing her hands on her stomach. “Very satisfactory!”

  While she already seemed lively, a brisk new vitality is animating her now. She looks one way and another, then visors her eyes with her hand and bends a little forward to peer more intently into some promising piece of the distance.

  “Hm!” she says. “That way!”

  Still escorted by the two politely smiling shield bearers, Professor Budshah and the remaining Professor Long follow Arieto through the trees. After a few moments a strip of blacktop road appears.

  “What part of the city is this?” Professor Budshah asks.

  “We’re up north,” Arieto replies over her shoulder.

  “Do you mean Etsimen?”

  Arieto snorts.

  “No!” she says, as if it were a stupid question, and hails the coach that stands waiting for them, square in the middle of the road. It’s actually a weird limousine, designed to look like a horse-drawn carriage. A detailed skeletal horse is painted on the black metal, with a real plume of black feathers set above the painted skull. There’s a cabin for the driver and a much taller box for the passengers. The driver rises mysteriously into view, as if his seat were lifting him up, and he waves a gloved hand in reply to Arieto’s hail. The skinny door of the coach was hanging listlessly open. Now the aperture abruptly widens, and Professor Crest’s white oval face peeks out.

  Professor Budshah and the remaining Professor Long both exclaim with surprise and rush forward, and their shield bearers trot easily beside them. Professor Crest steps significantly from the coach, and behind and above him the head of Professor Aughbui appears, gaping and blinking.

  “All right, all right, back in, back in,” Arieto says
jovially. “We can’t hang around here.”

  Professor Crest’s rehearsed address is cancelled and they are all bundled back through the door, the shield bearers sitting to either side of Professor Budshah and the remaining Professor Long, while Professor Aughbui and Professor Crest face them, with Arieto by one window and Smilebot, holding Boringbot tucked under its arm, sitting beside Professor Aughbui and the other window.

  Arieto raps on the cab partition and cries, “All set!”

  Once again the driver’s head and hands float up from some faintly luminous place below and the limousine slides forward; no engine whoosh, just the clap clap of hooves and the rustle and rattle of the suspension, although the ride is remarkably even. Trees lunge past the narrow windows and everyone seems too embarrassed to speak. Arieto’s glance moves easily from one thing to another, and she goes on smiling contentedly. That isn’t soot on her face after all, but some kind of permanent marking. It looks like a negative galaxy of black stars viewed edge-on, with the center across the bridge of her nose. Arieto tends to attract frail tetchy women who always ended up finding her too rough and loud. Sooner or later there would come the reproachful looks; she walks up to Arieto with something pre-prepared to say. Arieto wants to be understanding, but when she looks into a lover’s eyes, she sees a timorous brittleness in there that she has to admit she finds a bit disgusting. If they were Etruscan pottery shards, they would complain about the roughness of the archaeologists’ brushes and being exposed to the weather, so Arieto is a comfortable heap of safe dirt to lie under, as far as they’re concerned. Phooey. After a few dalliances of this kind, Arieto learned to recognize the type and avoid them.

  She goes on, talking at random, while the economists peer this way and that, trying to make sense of their situation. Typical eggheads, they seem to her. A bunch of mice.

  When she was young, she’d been crazy about a man who worked as a foreman at the mine. He was a shaggy Goliath, but the unusual length of his eyelashes and the brightness of his eyes added a touch of incongruous femininity that put her over the moon. If he wrote poetry, it would have been too much for her to take. He didn’t. And he never looked twice at her, either. He was killed in an accident and the company refused to take responsibility. Those things happened all the time where she grew up.

  Of course, she goes on, not quite aloud but close enough, she knew she was big for a girl, but a full appreciation of her powers didn’t come until she was fourteen and a classmate started giving her a hard time. This other girl had taken one of those mysterious teenage aversions to Arieto and didn’t usually miss an opportunity to adorn her with a few carefully hoarded gems of derision. Finally Arieto got sick of it turned and swatted her face. The girl fell straight to the floor and dislocated her jaw; Arieto refused to apologize and was expelled.

  “She had a bad mouth, and something bad happened to it,” she told the headmistress levelly.

  Arieto’s eyes glitter with pleasure as she remembers.

  “These days,” she says, “naturally, they’d have me before a judge, and I’d be as meek as they wanted. They want to pretend human beings don’t have to hit each other.”

  Eventually the car pulls up in a meadow, and they all get out. A fat man—no, a woman—in a grey sweater and colorless wool hat slouches on a bench with her back against a low stone wall. When she looks up at them, the rims of her eyelids are more conspicuous than her watery eyes. Her hands are in her pockets and she seems too tired to stand. The driver emerges from the car. He’s a giant, dressed in a huge suit of perfect black, gloves, and chauffeur’s cap. He’s leaning in through the door, retrieving what turns out to be a black valise with a thin strap. He’s about fifty, with a neatly cropped white beard and a high, domed forehead like a Taoist immortal. White paint covers his face from the upper lip to the hairline, while his lower jaw is red, and he has Y = C(Y-T) + I(r) + G written on that movie-screen forehead.

  “I’m so glad to see you’ve made it here safely,” the fat woman says in a cultivated, reedy tenor, without altering his posture. The voice is high, but it is a man’s voice. A man, then. With a discernible exertion of his will, he removes his left hand from his pocket and gestures with it to the driver.

  “With your permission, Mr. President?” he asks.

  The driver looks at him. He’s thrown the valise strap over his shoulder and is adjusting it where it crosses his chest.

  “Perhaps you know acting President 70?” the fat man goes on.

  Fleeting warmth crosses the giant’s face. He says, “Lend” with a nod, wishes them all good luck, then places his hands in the air at his sides as though he were resting them on an invisible life preserver and takes off straight up, showing the coffin-shaped soles of his dress shoes.

  “The Surfeit is One,” he intones.

  A moment later, with a gentle whooshing sound, he vanishes over the pines.

  The fat woman sighs, her left hand fallen limp onto his lap. Everyone waits to see what he will do next, but she only sits there, as if she’d forgotten all about them. It’s impossible to say what it is about his face that marks him so clearly as a woman after all. After six or seven minutes she sighs again, then drags a long-fingered, spidery hand down her face, stretching the flesh from his jaws and then releasing it. His lower lip droops, then comes up again with a faint noise. She fills his lungs again.

  “All right!” she says, as if someone has been nagging him, and stands abruptly up, thrusting her gut out. As she lifts his head, the white crescents of his economists’ mark appear, an irregular trail of parentheses lying on their backs, ladders down the right side of the face like a sideburn. Arieto is watching hier (sic) steadily, hands on the belt that wraps around the front of the black apron.

  After the salutation, the fat man or woman departs along a ribbon of white cement that does not touch the ground. Arieto heads in that direction too, although she manages to do this in such a way that she does not seem to be following, but heading along merely by coincidence of orientation.

  Following Arieto, Professor Aughbui, Professor Budshah, Professor Crest, and the remaining Professor Long make their way in silence through the trees and into an empty parking garage nearly completely camouflaged by ivy, yew, cypress, and tall dour pines. Down a resonant, cinderblock chimney, lined with cheese grater stairs, they emerge into a hidden world, a hanging garden that extends as far as even sharp-eyed Professor Crest can see, illuminated by dusty shafts of sun from domed skylights. The light has a congealed, stale appearance, and is so thick that it isn’t transparent. Knots of people can be seen here and there, down below on the broad floor, or on the terraces that rise to either side like ravine walls. Their voices and the sounds of their activities resonate in the enclosed air like the reverberated atmosphere in a cathedral, blending into a constant, soft boom. A group of economists sit facing each other in two seated rows of about a dozen each, practicing for the upcoming quarterly holiday with a rhythmic clapping of hands and syncopated chanting distributed in various parts. Incense trickles like inverted vines up toward the ceiling from braziers scattered about.

  “Oh I almost forgot, for goodness’ sake,” the fat man or woman says startlingly. “Don’t forget to register with human resources. You’ll never hear the end of it if you don’t!”

  He looks like a slob and talks like someone’s maiden aunt, with beleaguered compassion sifting from worrying eyes.

  “Why was acting President 70 driving the car?” Professor Crest asks.

  “He’s a terribly active President,” the fat man or woman says. “Terribly involved. He likes to have a hand in everything. Don’t assume that it means anything. He can be a difficult man to read sometimes. Cryptic. He wants to become full President, obviously.”

  “Do you know what any the specifics?” Professor Budshah asks.

  “I’m not aware of any finding. The verdict respecting your duel has entered a new phase and the question is scheduled to be put to the Occasional Working Group, if that’s wh
at you mean. As far as I know, that’s why you were called.”

  “Questions about ...?” the remaining Professor Long asks.

  “About the duel, yes.”

  “Not about our theory?” Professor Budshah asks.

  “What theory?”

  “This isn’t about the report to the committee?” Professor Aughbui asks.

  “What report?”

  “Professor Aughbui was abducted,” Professor Crest says. “He has been in constant communication with the security committee since.”

  The fat man or woman shakes his or her head, and the glistening flesh jiggles.

  “I don’t know anything at all about it,” he or she says. Then, he or she blinks and looks past them.

  “But,” he or she goes on, pointing. “That’s the regional economics chair right there. Why don’t you ask him?”

  Professor Aughbui, Professor Budshah, Professor Crest, and the remaining Professor Long turn and see a crooked figure vanishing into an archway with an old man’s painstakingly measured, light step. He must have been the size of a professional basketball player once. The russet wool jacket spreads across the broad expanse of the back and the wide, stooped shoulders. But now, the spine is bent so acutely he might be hunchbacked, and the legs are bent, too, cringing him down well below his full height. He walks with hands thrust all the way into the ample pockets of his baggy, almost shapeless tweed slacks.

  The economists approach him as a group, still flanked by their shieldbearers, who haven’t been dismissed, and by Arieto, who seems bored and refractory. Of course, Professor Crest knows the name of this regional economics chair. He knows the names of all the regional economics chairs.