“Don’t you find that monkey lover stuff kind of.. . well... revolting, Bernie?”
“Frankly, I find it sort of refreshingly piquant,” he said in a sincere tone of voice.
This time I put the receiver down gently. I’d probably want to use it again sometime, I realized.
Outside the booth it was a bright shiny day. Beautiful weather. Wonder what Liz does on days like this, I thought to myself. I’m kind of getting interested, I realized, with a start. Maybe I’m front page potential after all.
STABLE STRATEGIES FOR MIDDLE MANAGEMENT
Eileen Gunn
“Stable Strategies for Middle Management” was purchased by Gardner Dozois, and appeared in the June 1988 issue ofAsimov’s, with an illustration by Marc Davis. It went on to be one of our most popular stories that year, and Gunn has subsequently sold several other popular stories to the magazine. She is not a prolific writer, but, like her friend Howard Waldrop, her stories are well worth waiting for—she has a twisted perspective on life unlike anyone else's, and a strange and pungent sense of humor all her own. She has been a Nebula and Hugo finalist several times, has also sold stories to markets such as Amazing, Proteus, Tales by Moonlight, and Alternate Presidents, an d is currently at work on her first novel. She lives in Seattle, Washington, where she is involved in the administration of the Clarion West workshop.
In the strange and funny story that follows, she outlines for us one of the most bizarre career-advancement ploys that anyone is ever likely to see. . . .
* * *
Our cousin the insect has an external skeleton made of shiny brown chitin, a material that is particularly responsive to the demands of evolution. Just as bioengineering has sculpted our bodies into new forms, so evolution has shaped the early insect’s chewing mouthparts into her descendants’ chisels, siphons, and stilettos, and has molded from the chitin special tools—pockets to carry pollen, combs to clean her compound eyes, notches on which she can fiddle a song.
— From the popular science program Insect People!
***
I awoke this morning to discover that bioengineering had made demands upon me during the night. My tongue had turned into a stiletto, and my left hand now contained a small chitinous comb, as if for cleaning a compound eye. Since I didn’t have compound eyes, I thought that perhaps this presaged some change to come.
I dragged myself out of bed, wondering how I was going to drink my coffee through a stiletto. Was I now expected to kill my breakfast, and dispense with coffee entirely? I hoped I was not evolving into a creature whose survival depended on early-morning alertness. My circadian rhythms would no doubt keep pace with any physical changes, but my unevolved soul was repulsed at the thought of my waking cheerfully at dawn, ravenous for some wriggly little creature that had arisen even earlier.
I looked down at Greg, still asleep, the edge of our red and white quilt pulled up under his chin. His mouth had changed during the night too, and seemed to contain some sort of a long probe. Were we growing apart?
I reached down with my unchanged hand and touched his hair. It was still shiny brown, soft and thick, luxurious. But along his cheek, under his beard, I could feel patches of sclerotin, as the flexible chitin in his skin was slowly hardening to an impermeable armor.
He opened his eyes, staring blearily forward without moving his head. I could see him move his mouth cautiously, examining its internal changes. He turned his head and looked up at me, rubbing his hair slightly into my hand.
“Time to get up?” he asked. I nodded. “Oh, God,” he said. He said this every morning. It was like a prayer.
“I’ll make coffee,” I said. “Do you want some?”
He shook his head slowly. “Just a glass of apricot nectar,” he said. He unrolled his long, rough tongue and looked at it, slightly cross-eyed. “This is real interesting, but it wasn’t in the catalog. I’ll be sipping lunch from flowers pretty soon. That ought to draw a second glance at Duke’s.”
“I thought account execs were expected to sip their lunches,” I said.
“Not from the flower arrangements. ..” he said, still exploring the odd shape of his mouth. Then he looked up at me and reached up from under the covers. “Come here.”
It had been a while, I thought, and I had to get to work. But he did smell terribly attractive. Perhaps he was developing aphrodisiac scent glands. I climbed back under the covers and stretched my body against his. We were both developing chitinous knobs and odd lumps that made this less than comfortable. “How am I supposed to kiss you with a stiletto in my mouth?” I asked.
“There are other things to do. New equipment presents new possibilities.” He pushed the covers back and ran his unchanged hands down my body from shoulder to thigh. “Let me know if my tongue is too rough.”
It was not.
Fuzzy-minded, I got out of bed for the second time and drifted into the kitchen.
Measuring the coffee into the grinder, I realized that I was no longer interested in drinking it, although it was diverting for a moment to spear the beans with my stiletto. What was the damn thing for, anyhow? I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.
Putting the grinder aside, I poured a can of apricot nectar into a tulip glass. Shallow glasses were going to be a problem for Greg in the future, I thought. Not to mention solid food.
My particular problem, however, if I could figure out what I was supposed to eat for breakfast, was getting to the office in time for my ten am meeting. Maybe I’d just skip breakfast. I dressed quickly and dashed out the door before Greg was even out of bed.
Thirty minutes later, I was more or less awake and sitting in the small conference room with the new marketing manager, listening to him lay out his plan for the Model 2000 launch.
In signing up for his bioengineering program, Harry had chosen specialized primate adaptation, B-E Option No. 4. He had evolved into a text-book example: small and long-limbed, with forward-facing eyes for judging distances and long, grasping fingers to keep him from falling out of his tree.
He was dressed for success in a pin-striped three-piece suit that fit his simian proportions perfectly. I wondered what premium he paid for custom-made. Or did he patronize a ready-to-wear shop that catered especially to primates?
I listened as he leaped agilely from one ridiculous marketing premise to the next. Trying to borrow credibility from mathematics and engineering, he used wildly metaphoric bizspeak, ‘‘factoring in the need for pipeline throughout,” ‘‘fine-tuning the media mix,” without even cracking a smile.
Harry had been with the company only a few months, straight from business school. He saw himself as a much-needed infusion of talent. I didn’t like him, but I envied his ability to root through his subconscious and toss out one half-formed idea after another. I know he felt it reflected badly on me that I didn't join in and spew forth a random selection of promotional suggestions.
I didn’t think much of his marketing plan. The advertising section was a textbook application of theory with no practical basis. I had two options: I could force him to accept a solution that would work, or I could yes him to death, making sure everybody understood it was his idea. I knew which path I'd take.
“Yeah, we can do that for you,” I told him. “No problem." We'd see which of us would survive and which was hurtling to an evolutionary dead end.
Although Harry had won his point, he continued to belabor it. My attention wandered—I’d heard it all before. His voice was the hum of an air conditioner, a familiar, easily ignored background noise. I drowsed and new emotions stirred in me, yearnings to float through moist air currents, to land on bright surfaces, to engorge myself with warm, wet food.
Adrift in insect dreams, I became sharply aware of the bare skin of Harry’s arm, between his gold-plated watchband and his rolled-up sleeve, as he manipulated papers on the conference room table. He smelled greasily delicious, like a pepperoni pizza or a charcoal-broiled hamburger. I realized he probably wouldn’t taste as good
as he smelled, but I was hungry. My stiletto-like tongue was there for a purpose, and it wasn’t to skewer cubes of tofu. I leaned over his arm and braced myself against the back of his hand, probing with my stylets to find a capillary.
Harry noticed what I was doing and swatted me sharply on the side of the head. I pulled away before he could hit me again.
“We were discussing the Model 2000 launch. Or have you forgotten?” he said, rubbing his arm.
“Sorry. I skipped breakfast this morning.” I was embarrassed.
“Well, get your hormones adjusted, for chrissake.” He was annoyed, and I couldn’t really blame him. “Let's get back to the media allocation issue, if you can keep your mind on it. I've got another meeting at eleven in Building Two.”
Inappropriate feeding behavior was not unusual in the company, and corporate etiquette sometimes allowed minor lapses to pass without pursuit. Of course. I could no longer hope that he would support me on moving some money out of the direct-mail budget. . . .
During the remainder of the meeting, my glance kept drifting through the open door of the conference room, toward a large decorative plant in the hall, one of those oases of generic greenery that dot the corporate landscape. It didn’t look succulent exactly—it obviously wasn’t what I would have preferred to eat if I hadn't been so hungry—but I wondered if I swung both ways?
I grabbed a handful of the broad leaves as I left the room and carried them back to my office. With my tongue. I probed a vein in the thickest part of a leaf. It wasn’t so bad. Tasted green. I sucked them dry and tossed the husks in the wastebasket.
I was still omnivorous, at least—female mosquitoes don’t eat plants. So the process wasn’t complete. . . .
I got a cup of coffee, for company, from the kitchenette and sat in my office with the door closed and wondered what was happening. The incident with Harry disturbed me. Was I turning into a mosquito? If so, what the hell kind of good was that supposed to do me? The company didn’t have any use for a whining loner.
There was a knock at the door, and my boss stuck his head in. I nodded and gestured him into my office. He sat down in the visitor’s chair on the other side of my desk. From the look on his face. I could tell Harry had talked to him already.
Tom Samson was an older guy. pre-bioengineering. He was well versed in stimulus-response techniques, but had somehow never made it to the top job. I liked him, but then that was what he intended. Without sacrificing authority, he had pitched his appearance, his gestures, the tone of his voice, to the warm end of the spectrum. Even though I knew what he was doing, it worked.
He looked at me with what appeared to be sympathy, but was actually a practiced sign stimulus, intended to defuse any fight-or-Hight response. “Is there something bothering you, Margaret?”
“Bothering me? I’m hungry, that’s all. I get short-tempered when I'm hungry.”
Watch it, I thought. He hasn't referred to the incident; leave it for him to bring up. I made my mind go blank and forced myself to meet his eyes. A shifty gaze is a guilty gaze.
Tom just looked at me, biding his time, waiting for me to put myself on the spot. My coffee smelt burnt, but I stuck my tongue in it and pretended to drink. “I'm just not human until I've had my coffee in the morning.” Sounded phony. Shut up, I thought.
This was the opening that Tom was waiting for. “That’s what I wanted to speak to you about, Margaret.” He sat there, hunched over in a relaxed way, like a mountain gorilla, unthreatened by natural enemies. “I just talked to Harry Winthrop, and he said you were trying to suck his blood during a meeting on marketing strategy.” He paused for a moment to check my reaction, but the neutral expression was fixed on my face and I said nothing. His face changed to project disappointment. “You know, when we noticed you were developing three distinct body segments, we had great hopes for you. But your actions just don’t reflect the social and organizational development we expected.”
He paused, and it was my turn to say something in my defense. “Most insects are solitary, you know. Perhaps the company erred in hoping for a termite or an ant. I’m not responsible for that.”
“Now, Margaret,” he said, his voice simulating genial reprimand. “This isn’t the jungle, you know. When you signed those consent forms, you agreed to let the B-E staff mold you into a more useful corporate organism. But this isn’t nature, this is man reshaping nature. It doesn’t follow the old rules. You can truly be anything you want to be. But you have to cooperate.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” I said, cooperatively. “I’m putting in eighty hours a week.”
“Margaret, the quality of your work is not an issue. It’s your interactions with others that you have to work on. You have to learn to work as part of the group. I just cannot permit such backbiting to continue. I’ll have Arthur get you an appointment this afternoon with the B-E counselor.” Arthur was his secretary. He knew everything that happened in the department and mostly kept his mouth shut.
“I’d be a social insect if I could manage it,” I muttered as Tom left my office. “But I’ve never known what to say to people in bars.”
For lunch I met Greg and our friend David Detlor at a health-food restaurant that advertises fifty different kinds of fruit nectar. We’d never eaten there before, but Greg knew he’d love the place. It was already a favorite of David’s, and he still has all his teeth, so I figured it would be okay with me.
David was there when I arrived, but not Greg. David works for the company too, in a different department. He, however, has proved remarkably resistant to corporate blandishment. Not only has he never undertaken B-E, he hasn’t even bought a three-piece suit. Today he was wearing chewed-up blue jeans and a flashy Hawaiian shirt, of a type that was cool about ten years ago.
“Your boss lets you dress like that?” I asked.
“We have this agreement. I don’t tell her she has to give me a job, and she doesn’t tell me what to wear.”
David’s perspective on life is very different from mine. And I don’t think it’s just that he’s in R&D and I’m in Advertising— it’s more basic than that. Where he sees the world as a bunch of really neat but optional puzzles put there for his enjoyment, I see it as . . . well, as a series of SATs.
“So what’s new with you guys?” he asked, while we stood around waiting for a table.
“Greg’s turning into a goddamn butterfly. He went out last week and bought a dozen Italian silk sweaters. It's not a corporate look.”
“He’s not a corporate guy, Margaret.”
“Then why is he having all this B-E done if he's not even going to use it?”
“He’s dressing up a little. He just wants to look nice. Like Michael Jackson, you know?”
I couldn’t tell whether David was kidding me or not. Then he started telling me about his music, this barbershop quartet that he sings in. They were going to dress in black leather for the next competition and sing She! Silverstein’s “Come to Me, My Masochistic Baby.”
“It’ll knock them on their tails,” he said gleefully. “We’ve already got a great arrangement.”
“Do you think it will win. David?” It seemed too weird to please the judges in that sort of a show.
“Who cares?” said David. He didn’t look worried.
Just then Greg showed up. He was wearing a cobalt blue silk sweater with a copper green design on it. Italian. He was also wearing a pair of dangly earrings shaped like bright blue airplanes. We were shown to a table near a display of carved vegetables.
“This is great,” said David. “Everybody wants to sit near the vegetables. It’s where you sit to be seen in this place.” He nodded to Greg. “I think it’s your sweater.”
“It’s the butterfly in my personality,” said Greg. “Headwaiters never used to do stuff like this for me. I always got the table next to the espresso machine.”
If Greg was going to go on about the perks that come with being a butterfly, I was going to change the subject.
“David, how come you still haven’t signed up for B-E?” I asked. “The company pays half the cost, and they don’t ask questions.”
David screwed up his mouth, raised his hands to his face, and made small, twitching, insect gestures, as if grooming his nose and eyes. “I’m doing okay the way I am.”
Greg chuckled at this, but I was serious. “You’ll get ahead faster with a little adjustment. Plus you’re showing a good attitude, you know, if you do it.”
“I’m getting ahead faster than I want to right now—it looks like I won’t be able to take the three months off that I wanted this summer.”
“Three months?” I was astonished. “Aren't you afraid you won’t have a job to come back to?”
“I could live with that,” said David calmly, opening his menu.
The waiter took our orders. We sat for a moment in a companionable silence, the self-congratulation that follows ordering high-fiber foodstuffs. Then I told them the story of my encounter with Harry Winthrop.
“There’s something wrong with me,” I said. “Why suck his blood? What good is that supposed to do me?”
“Well,” said David, “you chose this schedule of treatments. Where did you want it to go?”
“According to the catalog,” I said, “the No. 2 Insect Option is supposed to make me into a successful competitor for a middle-management niche, with triggerable responses that can be useful in gaining entry to upper hierarchical levels. Unquote.” Of course, that was just ad talk—I didn’t really expect it to do all that. “That’s what I want. I want to be in charge. I want to be the boss.”
“Maybe you should go back to BioEngineering and try again,” said Greg. “Sometimes the hormones don’t do what you expect. Look at my tongue, for instance.” He unfurled it gently and rolled it back into his mouth. “Though I’m sort of getting to like it.” He sucked at his drink, making disgusting slurping sounds. He didn’t need a straw.
“Don’t bother with it, Margaret,” said David firmly, taking a cup of rosehip tea from the waiter. “Bioengineering is a waste of time and money and millions of years of evolution. If human beings were intended to be managers, we’d have evolved pin-striped body covering.”
Isaac Asimov's SF-Lite Page 10