by Jim Stark
Chapter 30
PLUMBING
Wednesday, February 16, 2033—7:00 p.m.
Lilly had her dinner brought up from the E-tery that evening. She'd gone back to bed at 11:00 a.m., after putting away her purchases—just for a nap—and promptly fell asleep for two hours. Her body was still trying to shake off the cold, and perhaps the daytime snooze had helped, but it didn't get her LieDeck-verifying done. When she finally woke just after 1:00 p.m., she feared she'd never nod off when she packed it in for the night.
She had spent the remaining afternoon hours reviewing Netfiles—the bane of every agent's existence—and had actually done a few LieDeck-verifications over the Net. It was not fun being alone in a weird social environment in a quasi-country like Québec, and being sick here had been almost unbearable. Now it was early evening. She sat at the kitchen table and stacked her dishes on the tray as she listened to the soothing strains of Strauss—she was reorganizing the kitchen—the agent she was replacing had neither taste nor talent along those lines.
There was a triple knock on her door. It had to be Lars. Lilly was expecting him, and had unlocked the door for that reason, but he was early, or at least earlier than she had expected. She glanced in the mirror beside the buffet. She was in her blue housecoat, with nothing on underneath, and she had on a pair of the thick woolen socks she'd purchased at the E-Store that morning. “Christ,” she mumbled, “he'll think that I—” She amputated her sentence and used the remote to shut off the stereo. She didn't give a fiddler's fuck what Lars thought of her, and his one-track mind wouldn't think anything different if she were dressed in mediaeval armor. “Come in,” she hollered.
Lars opened the door and stuck his head around the edge, playfully. “Plumber,” he advertised. “You decent?"
"Yes,” said Lilly icily. “You?"
"Zing,” chirped Lars. He threw his head back as if he had been soundly slapped, and then stepped in, carrying a large red tool box, still chuckling at his little joke, or her curt rejoinder—it was hard to tell. “You ... said tonight was convenient,” he reminded Lilly, putting down his equipment and closing the door behind.
"Yes, of course,” she said, rising from the table and using one hand to assure herself that the housecoat stayed together in front. “The bathroom is right through there,” she said, pointing, and then realizing he probably knew that. “The new showerhead is on the side of the tub."
"Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go,” sang Lars as he gathered up his kit and walked into the bathroom. He wanted to explain all about the twelve different settings, but he couldn't really do that without referring to various body parts and likely offending Lilly. He wanted even more to do a show and tell, but that was way out of the question. Images of Lilly and himself experimenting together waltzed through his mind as he turned the long-handled vice-grip wrench. Too bad, he mused. I suppose she figures I want that just for my own tingles.
"I'll take the old one with me, okay?” he hollered. “For when you leave,” he added, not as loudly.
Lilly heard both parts of what Lars had said, but chose not to respond. She decidedly did not want to defend her decision to go un-green with the new fixture, nor did she care at all for the fate of her successor, or the old fixture.
In minutes, the new showerhead was installed, the tools were back in their nests and the tub was wiped. Lars removed the head from its perch, turned on the cold water and tested all the settings. “Works perfect,” he said towards the open door. Lilly was standing just outside the small bathroom, her arms crossed, her face expressionless. “Enjoy,” he said as he grabbed his tools and the rejected showerhead and walked rather briskly past his client. He quite hoped she wouldn't notice that his bulge had grown thicker since his arrival, and then he realized that was the first time in ages that he'd wished for something that perfectly ridiculous. “Bye,” he added without looking back.
Lilly exhaled loudly as the door closed, in wonderment at the sexual spell that Lars seemed to carry around with him. It was like the 20th-century ideology of communism; it permeated his every word, subtly condemning the non-believer for his or her deliberate unenlightenment. Same as religion used to be, she figured. She locked the door quietly.
It was just after seven o'clock, and work beckoned—loudly. A shower will wake me up, she thought as she went into the bathroom and closed the door ... to keep the heat in, she told herself. She took off the heavy socks, let her housecoat drop to the floor, glanced at the showerhead, and looked at her reflection in the mirror above the sink ... and killed a laugh. It's like he left his friggin’ eyes behind, she thought with a crooked smile. And he knows exactly where I am and what I'm about to do, the little bastard.
Chapter 31
THE “L” WORD
Saturday, February 19, 2033—7:30 p.m.
The best part is the head tingle, considered Lilly ... the anticipation phase, the aspect of danger, the whole discovery stage. Then, at the risk of sounding like a dinosaur from the 20th century, she added to her thought: and there's always the “L” word.
The luxurious backseat of Michael Whiteside's limo seemed a strangely isolated bit of real estate. Lilly valued privacy, but for the last while, she'd had perhaps more than was healthy. She even found herself wishing that she'd had the courage to sit up front, if only to see what the chauffeur was made of, but that would have been ... what? she asked herself. Human Three? She searched for the right word. Sophomoric, she finally decided. Maybe even patronizing.
In the five days since she had met Victor Helliwell, her life had been routine at best, plain lonely at times ... most of the time. Victor had sent her an N-mail message saying that he would be too busy to see her for a while. And he had apologized yet again for his obnoxious behavior, but then he'd reminded her that even though he'd been given a free ride for nineteen years, the WDA was still only entitled to demand a meeting once every calendar month, and then only for a brief LieDeck-verification session—four questions and skedaddle. Clearly, Victor was planning to go out in a flash of glory ... or something ... and wasn't in a mood to cramp his preparations for her benefit.
So, Lilly had done other things. She had checked the decibel levels of the big woofers on the roof of the mess hall—no reportable problem there. She had looked into the clinic in the central hub of Victor-E, and discarded her suspicion that some of the patients might be better off in a proper hospital. She had made two reports to Control Upper America, and she had reviewed Victor's theories of human consciousness evolution. She had found the elevator that got the elderly and the disabled down from the rim of the life-base hub to the sunken floor-level. She had accessed InfoBank for Julia Whiteside's archived files and scanned for Netfaces between her and Alex, the taxi driver—they were getting close, and they had even shared some innocent Netsex. She had also tracked Randy Whiteside's movements, studied numerous Netfiles—all of them tedious—and gone about her other monotonous duties as the monitor of an Evolutionary clan. Of no small consequence, she had reached an understanding with Big Wus; he'd give her a wide berth if she'd do the same for him. And of course she'd gone shopping with Julia. Tonight, she was wearing the new winter boots and the gloves she'd bought—the fancy ones.
She hadn't spent any significant time with Annette yet, even though she'd tried. Last Monday, she had asked her to drop by her apartment when she had a moment. Annette had shown up only minutes later. When Lilly's efforts at small talk fell flat, she got to the point. During their LieDeck-verification session one week ago, Annette had not given a straight “no” to the last question, the one about whether she knew anyone who had any intention of committing a crime. “So ask it again,” Annette had barked. Lilly had done so and was surprised to find that Annette's “I-can't-name-a-single-person” ruse hadn't been a ruse at all. Annette gave a straight “no” this time, and her answer had passed muster on the LieDeck. I suppose she was playing with my mind last Saturday; testing me, Lilly had decided.
She had also eavesdr
opped on Victor as he Netfaced with Annette on a daily basis. It was astonishing the way his mood was returning to normal. He seemed very determined to follow through on his plan to help Evolution master Human Three Consciousness—"the whole ball of wax,” he always called it. Lilly couldn't understand why Victor would face Annette on audio, but not on video. He was a strange fellow all around. At least Lilly could see him, and he was getting back into the swing of life almost as if he'd never left. The only time he seemed to regress was when he watched the Netnews, which he did for an hour or two every day. As soon as he started watching it, he would go into some kind of a trance, and he would grip the arms of his chair as if he were sitting on the bridge of the starship Enterprise during a galactic storm. When he stopped his Netnews session, he would shake his head to free himself from its grip, or just lie down and pass out. Lilly had reported all that to Control, and he'd told her to keep a close eye on the situation. “There has to be a reason for that,” he'd said.
The only real difficulty she'd had in the past week was with the young Victor-Een who had apparently been assigned the task of vacuuming and cleaning her apartment every Thursday. Lilly had thrown the skinny remnants of a bar of soap into a trashcan in her bathroom. The “maid” had fished it out, politely chastised her for wanton waste, and given her a free demonstration. “You take the old bar and the new bar, and you wet them both, then you slap them together like this and use tiny circular movements until the two bars start to bind. You can feel it happen. Then you put it aside, and the next time you go to use the soap, they're like glued together like it's one bar. It works perfect."
"Perfectly,” Lilly had corrected her grammar.
"You need a good swiving,” the girl had spit as she stamped out of the apartment. Lilly had to go to her MIU and look up “swiving.” It was a word used in Britain by the underclass of the 19th century. It meant “fucking."
"You want some music on?” asked Michael's chauffeur.
"No thanks,” said Lilly. “I'm really enjoying the quiet."
On Thursday afternoon, she had gone to a general meeting of Regional Command, the several dozen WDA agents who served Pontiac County west. The only part she could remember was that she definitely had not enjoyed meeting Gordon Weatherby, the agent from Callaway #6. Lilly had faced him on the Net a few times, on business matters, and she had actually looked forward to meeting him in person, but his efforts to befriend her on the warm were done in a way that seemed ... too forward, she thought. Sort of the way an Evolutionary might do it—no finesse at all. It was as if he had figured out a formula; if you were nice to a woman, she would happily hop into bed with you. Sheesh!
The rest of the gathering had been a monumental bore. The other agents could not be told about Lilly's assignments to LieDeck-verify Victor Helliwell and to insinuate herself into the private life of Michael Whiteside, which meant that the only interesting aspects of her work were off limits as topics of conversation.
After almost daily interfaces over the Net, she had finally met her local superior on the warm. His name was Major Brian English. He was a tall, sixtyish gentleman, and he somehow reminded Lilly of her ex-boyfriend. He's sort of an older, wiser, whiter Ed, she thought, congenial, but shallow. She didn't know why the Regional Command couldn't just meet on the Net, or why Major English convened these meetings at all. It wasn't like there were any serious problems to solve, procedures to change or mission statements to be hammered out. In fact, when she thought about it, the usual activities of a WDA agent were about as much of a challenge as feeding goldfish.
"Those lights over there across the river, that's Arnprior, Ontario,” said the chauffeur. “Canada,” he added, in case his charge had never seen a map or operated a Sniffer. “And there's a ferry runs to over near Arnprior from Quyon."
This time Lilly didn't respond at all. She wasn't interested in chitchat, and his badly fractured sentence structure had pretty well answered her question as to the kind of stuff the man was made of. Truth be told, she had butterflies in anticipation of the evening that was about to unfold, and she was content to distract herself with a slow review of her past week.
She had taken a decision to do all the LieDeck-verification of her Victor-Eens over the Net. Most agents had a stable of about two hundred civilians to monitor; she had three hundred and twenty. It made no sense to force them to set up appointments and line up at her door, and considering her secret duties regarding Michael and Victor, there was really no way that Control would object to her unorthodox approach. The only part of LVing that bothered her was doing the kids. It was an important part of their conditioning, their participation in grown-up life, but asking six-year-olds if they'd committed any crimes always felt ludicrous.
In any event, one hundred and fifty-eight times so far, she had asked the same four annoying questions to an image on her MIU: “Did you commit a crime? Do you intend to commit a crime? Do you know anyone else who has committed a crime? Do you know anyone else who intends to commit a crime?” That's ... she did some quick math ... six hundred and thirty-two “nos” so far. She knew the critical importance of each “no,” but still, her job was starting to feel robotic. “Boring is good,” she remembered from her days at the Academy. “For you,” the instructors had emphasized, “the opposite of ‘boring’ is not ‘exciting.’ It is ‘chaos,’ or ‘death.’”
Lilly had never gone in for the “sixty-second special,” the ol’ “wham, bam, thank you ma'am” type of LieDeck-verification that was preferred by agents who had “better things to do” with their lives. She tried to turn each and every LV session into a conversation, not so much to pry as to get a “feel” for the person. The capitalist work ethic had suffered a very startling drop in popularity the world over in recent years—except in Evolutionary circles—but she had never forgotten her father's advice when she was a child: “You keep swinging the bat, and sooner or later, you'll get a hit.” She didn't find Evolutionaries very interesting, and she hadn't made any new friends, but she was gradually getting a sense of clan life that would stand her in good stead ... for when the shit hits the fan ... which it usually does, sooner or later.
The only enlightenment she'd had in the past week came as a result of her LV session with Lars, the apprentice plumber who worked part time as a waiter in the clan's E-tery. After answering the mandatory four questions with four “no's,” he had said that he didn't share the clan's resentment of her role. And then he'd talked enthusiastically about being a member of the “Sex-E” virtual community, a Netbased, international group of three million men and women, all of them Evolutionaries. These were people for whom sex had become the point of life—not the only point, but the main point.
Lars had tried to explain how he and his fellow Sex-Eens thought, what they did, how they compared notes on everything from tingle techniques to attitudes. But it wasn't the stuff about sex that Lilly had found enlightening. It was his unexpected comment about how everybody he knew—whether on the Net or on the warm—simply assumed that all WDA agents eavesdropped on them through the mikes and lenses of their MIUs ... even when the machines were off!
"Everyone!?” she'd asked.
"Did you hear a beep when I said that?” he had countered.
"And if this were true ... if we did that ... it would ... bother people?” she had asked, with more than her usual caution.
"It bothers most of them,” Lars had answered—by which he meant the practice, not the theoretical possibility. “But personally, I sort of get a kick out of it, especially when I'm, like, sharing sex. Most Evolutionaries don't give a damn about the WDA any more. It's just the way things are. In fact I would say that most Evolutionaries feel, like, sorry for WDA agents."
Jerk, Lilly thought as the limo smoothly manhandled the snow-covered highway.
The bright spot of her week was the surprise invitation she'd received from Michael, Wednesday evening, over the Net, to go out for dinner on Saturday. After the things she had said to Venice about considerat
ion for others, she had wondered if she should ask Michael if their going out might cause difficulties for his family ... but she didn't do it. Michael had half-solved the problem by arranging for his chauffeur to pick her up at Victor-E and bring her over to the estate—"to meet Becky before we head out.” And then there was the problem of her being a WDA agent and his being ... well, he was Michael Whiteside, the head of Whiteside Technologies! She had found herself thinking about the date often on Thursday, and last night she'd even had trouble sleeping. She had finally nodded off after deciding that dealing with Becky's feelings was his responsibility and after making a commitment to be straight with Michael about the WDA's concerns and plans—or to be as straight as she could be without jeopardizing her career.
A fragile smile crossed her face at the recollection of her brief running of the gauntlet in the E-tery ten minutes ago. There was a steel fire escape out of her apartment, from the small back balcony down to the link fence around the outdoor pool. The deck and those stairs were kept clear of snow, and they were regularly sprinkled with salt and sand, but sneaking out that way would have led to idle gossip, she'd realized. So, when Michael's chauffeur appeared on her MIU screen to say he'd arrived, she had accepted the need to walk from the bottom of the inside stairs, through the E-tery and out the front door.
She looked as if she were dressed for a Broadway opening, with a black satin cocktail dress, pearls, heels (now tucked into her purse), and a thigh-length fake-ermine coat that had finally arrived in her steamer trunk. Her make-up was light, perfect for a narrow face with high cheekbones, and her straight black hair shone against the white faux-fur.