Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  “So what are you going to do when you get out of here?” Lexa asked. She folded the printout sheet and fed it into a pocket document shredder in her purse. “For work, I mean.”

  “Don’t know. After this morning I’ll be off May Team duty for sure—”

  “You are. Fatima Sigorski logged your suspension at 1:12 P.M.”

  “—right, and a desk job with the Department of Sewers would be a new low, so it looks like I’m unemployed. You have a suggestion?”

  “It doesn’t involve hunting sharks . . .”

  “Carcharodons.” Joan smiled. “It’s funny, after all those years of picket signs and petitions, and then pimping for Harry . . . there’s something refreshing about carrying a loaded twelve-gauge.” Even as she said this she flashed on Prohaska, dragged under screaming, and was suddenly nauseous.

  “Guns.” Lexa shook her head, while Joan hurriedly took a long drag of nicotine. “What I want to know is, whatever happened to the ideal of heroic endurance? Slow, steady, hard work, that’s still how most social change gets done. And you get to grow old.”

  “I plan on growing old, thank you. And you know damn well I hate bloodshed, but . . .”

  “You love a good fight.” Lexa smiled; this was an old exchange between them. “A rough-and-tumble showdown, a moment of truth, and no casualties, except for the odd fish. You never were much for animal rights.”

  “Right. And I mean I’ve got the Sanctuary too, and that’s a comfort, knowing there’s twenty less people sleeping on the street at night, but it’s not satisfying. I need a brick wall to smash through. Why do you think I married Harry?”

  “Joan of Arc.”

  Joan shrugged. “So sue me. What do you expect, with my mother? Not to mention Gordo Gambino.”

  “Well I don’t need a liberal mafiosa and I don’t need the Maid of Orleans,” said Lexa. “I need a smart researcher, one who’s got an in at Gant Industries. And who can defend herself.” She laid the manila folder on the bed. “I can’t promise, but it could be dangerous.”

  “What is it?”

  “A murder. Amberson Teaneck. He ran the Corporate Raiding Office at Drexel Burnham Salomon. Rumor has it he was trying to organize a takeover of Gant Industries, but he had a sudden attack of unnatural causes.”

  “You think Harry killed him? Smokey the Bear would be a more likely suspect.”

  “Well that’s the interesting part,” Lexa said. “There’s evidence suggesting that he wasn’t killed by a person at all, not directly. What would you say if I told you a Gant Automatic Servant might be the murder weapon?”

  Joan shook her head. “Highly doubtful.”

  “But not impossible?”

  Joan shrugged. “It’s been tried plenty of times, always unsuccessfully as far as I know. A lot of would-be murderers have thought of the idea. Bank robbers, too. But you can’t just reprogram a Servant the way you can a computer. They have open data storage for remembering instructions, but their behavioral inhibitors are all hardwired, and the list of things they won’t do is pretty comprehensive. Has to be, for the sake of product liability.”

  “And not even a genius could bypass the hardwiring?”

  “It’s supposedly tamperproof,” Joan said. “Which means yeah, it could probably be done, but not by just any yahoo with a soldering iron. You’d need to yank the Central Processing Unit—by itself a major chore, since it’s sealed up tighter than the engine block in a Rolls Royce—deengineer, redesign, and replace it, do the same thing with a bunch of other silicon, and find and remove a number of hidden mechanical fail-safes as well. Which even if you have the resources and know-how to pull it off is a lot of trouble to go to just to kill somebody. Simpler to just fix the brakes on the guy’s car.

  “And would this sort of tampering—replacing the CPU, removing the fail-safes—would it be easy to spot?”

  “You mean if a trained technician examined the Servant after the fact?” Joan nodded. “Yeah. Sure. And once you knew that tampering had gone on—and that it worked—the list of suspects would narrow down considerably. Which is another reason why it’s really not such a hot modus operandi for a murder.”

  “Under ordinary circumstances,” Lexa said, “probably not.”

  “But the circumstances here aren’t ordinary?”

  Lexa nudged the folder. “You should look this through, tell me what you think.”

  “You’re going out of your way to make this sound intriguing, aren’t you?”

  “I want you to take the assignment.”

  “All right, I will. But I’ll tell you again,” Joan said, “if this was really a premeditated murder, and not just some freak accident caused by a design flaw—”

  “Oh, it was no accident,” Lexa said. “That much seems pretty certain.”

  “Then there’s no way in hell Harry could have had anything to do with it, no matter how much of a threat to Gant Industries Teaneck might have been. It’s not even a question of ethics so much as that the idea of murder would never occur to him. He doesn’t think that way.”

  “Well then,” said Lexa, “your new job will be to find out who did think that way. Just one thing . . .”

  “What?”

  “You have to promise not to blow up any more basements. Hospital bills I can deal with, but my insurance doesn’t cover acts of war.”

  4

  The Declaration of Independence, which gave birth to the United States in 1776, stated that “all men are created equal.” Yet the United States continued to be the largest slaveholding nation in the world until the Civil War. Americans tried to make equality a reality soon after the war by ratifying (approving) the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which officially abolished slavery throughout the United States. The place of blacks in American society, however, remained unsettled.

  —World Book Encyclopedia

  Maxwell’s Electric Leg

  These days he was just a maladjusted middle-ager who screwed with the public library system, but in his youth Maxwell had been a tank commander.

  His war was the ’07 War for Free Trade in Sub-Saharan Africa, fought to settle a dispute over the stewardship of fuel and mineral deposits in those areas depopulated by the ’04 Pandemic. An allied coalition of American, Afrikaner, and European armed forces joined in defense of a democratic resource management system, while the terrorist-led North Africa League attempted to impose an unfair monopoly on the region. Russia, busy arbitrating human rights issues with its few remaining republics, agreed to stay out of the conflict in return for a seat at the armistice talks.

  Maxwell was sent to the Western Front, which ran along the mountainous border between Cameroon and Nigeria. The allied battle plan called for an amphibious assault on the Niger Delta and the liberation of Nigeria’s oil and coal fields. Projected casualty rates for the invasion were high, but an act of God intervened at the last moment. The unexpected eruption of Mt. Cameroon was mistaken for a League nuclear strike; the allies retaliated by dropping FRED (a Friendly Radiation Enhancement Device) on the Nigerian port city of Lagos. This all but wiped out the North Africa League’s western field command and panicked the defending troops (who did not, in fact, have nuclear weapons) into a rout. Allied Marines landed unopposed and in less than a week had occupied the entire country, along with neighboring Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Burkina Faso.

  Maxwell and his tank crew were sent to guard an oil refinery in Port Harcourt while the terms of the North African surrender were worked out. Winning such a bloodless victory didn’t bother him—like most soldiers, he was just as happy to avoid combat—but in one sense the war was a big disappointment: Maxwell missed the thankful cheers of a liberated citizenry. Post-Pandemic Nigeria didn’t have many citizens to speak of, and the handful of native Caucasians weren’t in a cheering mood after the radiation enhancement of Lagos. Maxwell’s hopes of taping some nature video on leave were likewise dashed when word came from Uganda that the world’s last white rhinoceros had been collaterally damag
ed by an errant smart bomb.

  Despondent, Maxwell sat atop his tank at the refinery gates daydreaming of the grand safaris of the nineteenth century, when Africa had still been a fun place to invade. Perhaps this sort of nostalgia was bad luck, for one evening at dusk a black man appeared to Maxwell: appeared suddenly, gliding like a wraith from among the stacked and rusted barrels that lined the shoulder of the refinery’s access road. The black man was tall and thin as a stick, and his eyes were green razors stropped to a keen edge by the sunset. Maxwell could not have been more stunned if a white rhinoceros had strolled up for a chat. But the black man had not come to talk. Too late, Maxwell realized that the long tube the stranger cradled in his arms was not a ceremonial native gift but rather an armor-piercing rocket launcher.

  “Hey, don’t,” Maxwell said, grabbing for his rifle.

  The rocket shredded the main body of the tank, including two of Maxwell’s crew who were playing poker in the air-conditioned interior; a lopsided portion of the turret and a lopsided portion of Maxwell were blown clear. He woke up a week later at the Red Cross hospital in Pretoria, where a ruddy-faced Afrikaner lieutenant told him that the entire refinery had been torched by unidentified saboteurs.

  He lost all of his right leg to the hip and most of his crotch, but his left leg remained intact except for the big toe. “Very asymmetrical, Max,” chided his surgeon, “we’ll have to do something about that.” The surgeon replaced his lost limb with a Chrysler prosthetic, an Electric Leg that was clunky but came with a refrigerated compartment in the thigh that could hold peanuts and a beer. Maxwell’s left foot got a Steel Toe; his ruined crotch got an Automatic Scrotum, a temperature-sensitive carbon-fiber sac that scrunched up and expanded just like the real article. And was crushproof.

  No Electric Wanger, though. “Sorry,” Maxwell’s surgeon said. A subclause of the Third Helms Statute on Art and Obscenity prohibited the use of federal funds for any medical or scientific device that might double as a sex toy; the United States Supreme Court had determined in State of Florida vs. Silver ’05 that artificial testicles were kosher under this law, but prosthetic penii clearly were not. Maxwell could still get a Swedish-made penis for $100,000 plus the cost of round-trip airfare, but the Veteran’s Administration would be unable to help him foot the bill. “Hey, Max,” his surgeon said, “at least you got one hell of a set of balls, right? So buck up!”

  Psychological damage was a harder fix. A Marine psychiatrist diagnosed Maxwell as chronically battle fatigued and “unpredictable of temperament.” Back home in New York, interviewing for his first civilian job, Maxwell went berserk and tried to strangle the employment office mascot, a green-eyed black cat. As the cat squeezed behind a Xerox machine cabinet to save itself, the interviewer shut her notebook and said: “Well, I guess we can skip the reference check.”

  Finding a place to live was similarly problematic. The ’04 Pandemic had created a renter’s paradise, but Maxwell refused to enter any building made vacant by plague. Better to be homeless, he believed, than to further risk the wrath of the dead: staying well south of 125th Street, he slept in parks, train yards, subway stations, steam pipe conduits, and once in a sewer tunnel (which cost him another three toes before the night was over). Whenever V.A. case workers did manage to find him “ghost-free” lodgings, his chronically battle fatigued behavior soon got him booted back onto the street.

  Somehow he survived; sixteen years after the war, Maxwell lived. And just lately his circumstances had been improving. He finally had a real roof over his head, a bed that he could keep. Last winter the director of a welfare home in the Bowery had watched impassively while Maxwell emptied his Automatic Bladder onto the floor in front of her. “If that’s supposed to disgust me,” she said, tapping ash from a cigarette, “you’re going to have to try harder. I paddle around in piss all day, and my mother had lepers over for dinner when I was a kid. Your room’s upstairs, turn left off the second landing. I’ll send up a mop and an extra change of sheets.” While no one in a hiring and firing position had yet been this tolerant of him, Maxwell had also found a vocation of sorts, unpaid but satisfying, even addicting.

  He moved library books.

  “You ever notice how you can’t find any naked pictures in a library?” Maxwell would sometimes say to strangers on the subway, by way of explanation. “What I mean is, you’re a kid, your voice changes, and one day you start and wonder if you could find a book with naked pictures at the public library. Like, could they have bought one by mistake, and put it on the shelf where even a kid could get at it. So you look up subjects like ‘Erotica’ and ‘Nude Photography’ in the catalog, and it turns out they have some hot-sounding titles, like An Illustrated History of Pornographic Films. But when you check for the call number on the shelf, those kind of books are never in. Hell, you might find one that’s all text, in French, but if it’s a book with actual naked pictures, it won’t be there. Even if the catalog computer says it’s on the shelf, it won’t be there. Even if you come back and check every day for a month—when your voice changes, you do that kind of thing—it’ll never be there. Like it’s been removed. Surgically.

  “Well you know, I figured out why that is, not just at one library but at any library you go to. I’m lying in this pile of mucus one night, wondering what the hell got my toes, and it just hit me: there’s a conspiracy. Guys all over the country, a secret brotherhood. They come into every library first thing in the morning, and they grab all the books with naked pictures before anybody else can get to them. They don’t take them out, and they don’t steal them or burn them, they just refile them. They put the books with naked pictures in boring parts of the library, stick ’em in between the books that nobody ever reads. Then later, when the kids whose voices are changing come in, the members of the brotherhood just stand back and laugh up their sleeves. It’s a very important job.”

  There was little love lost between Maxwell and Electric Negroes. The main branch of the New York Public Library owned two Servants, Eldridge 162 and Bartholomew 75. Eldridge was used for “entropy containment,” which meant that twenty-three hours a day (stopping only to recharge) he walked past bookstack after bookstack, scanning every item on every shelf, verifying that each of some nine million volumes was in its proper place. Including the ones with naked pictures. No human being would have had the patience or persistence for such a mind-numbing task, but Eldridge was so efficient that Maxwell had to scramble whole rows of books just to slow him down.

  Today there was a new Negro in the stacks.

  A posted notice to library patrons said “our happy helpers Bart and Eldridge” had been sent to the shop for cleaning and a tune-up, and Maxwell thought at first he’d have an easy time of it, operating uncontested. Morning and lunchtime passed smoothly enough, with Maxwell relocating over thirty books. Then at half past three he walked over to the African History section, seeking a suitable burial spot for a National Geographic nude pygmy retrospective. He stepped around a shelf and there it—she—was, hunkered down in what should have been a deserted corner of the library.

  She was all wrong. He could see that at once. Black skin, many shades darker than Eldridge’s coffee-with-artificial-creamer tint; medium length wooly hair, not plaited or braided or fixed in any other standard factory style, but disheveled, as if she normally combed it and had forgotten to do so today. Her clothes were wrong, too. Not that people didn’t accouter their Negroes in outlandish costumes from time to time, but surely the library staff would have chosen something conservative and homey, like a flower-print dress, or a blouse and skirt. Not: red Velcro sneakers, bulky black workpants, equally bulky sleeveless vest—yes, sleeveless, her bare shoulders round and soft like real flesh, a gold circlet curled around her upper arm—and, just brushing her collar, bright parrot-feather earrings.

  Wrong. Wrong.

  Her lips were moving. One fingertip stroked the spines of several books—slowly—and her lips moved as though she were mumbling to herself, which
Automatic Servants didn’t do. Then Maxwell noticed the furry shape perched on her far shoulder and realized she was conversing with it in whispers. A pet rat? A talking pet rat?

  He moved closer. She stretched to reach a book and Maxwell saw that the front of her vest was untagged. That did it.

  “Where’s your I.D. badge?” Maxwell demanded. She turned towards him; the furry shape on her shoulder wasn’t a rat after all, it was a small beaver wearing spectacles and a hard hat, and it did talk. “Yellow alert, Seraphina,” it said. Maxwell didn’t hear it, though, because by then he’d seen her eyes.

  Green. Green eyes in a black face.

  “Red alert!” the beaver warned, slapping its tail against the Negro’s back. She stood, unzipping a nearly invisible pocket in her vest as Maxwell tried to grab her. Something silvery and quick bit Maxwell on the wrist. The sharp pricking seemed to travel up the length of his arm, turning it all to pins and needles. It fell limp against his side.

  Her forehead was shiny with sweat, another wrongness. “You didn’t see me,” she told him. “You never saw me.”

  “Fuck I didn’t,” Maxwell said, and lunged for her again, leading with his other arm. She’d already turned her back and started walking away, and it took three thumping strides of his Electric Leg to catch up to her. This time the beaver bit him. It wasn’t a pinprick of anesthetic; it was like sticking his hand into a vise. Maxwell screamed and fell down.

  Descending, his shoulder knocked books from the shelf. An Illustrated History of Pornographic Films that he’d hidden back here an hour ago struck the floor beside him and flapped open. Maxwell found himself lying on his side, staring fish-eyed across the nubile form of adult movie star Marilyn Chambers (now in her seventies and living the life of a retired social worker in San Luis Obispo, California). The un-Electric Negro with the beaver on her shoulder paused at a safe distance and gave him a parting green glance.