Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  The car went over a bump, and Shenda knocked her head.

  All this time. All this time she had had help waiting, but had been too proud to heed the numerous offers.

  If any flaw of hers deserved punishment, this was it. Trying always to go it alone.

  And now she finally was. All alone.

  Or was she?

  15.

  The Lady Is the Tiger

  It was very convenient for Marmaduke Twigg that his bedroom was wired, boasting all the electronic conveniences that allowed him to run the Isoterm empire remotely.

  For he had found in the days after the massacre underground that, having attained a safe refuge, he could not summon the will to leave his room.

  Oh, of course the phobia was quite understandable and certainly only of temporary duration. After all, what survivor of such carnage wouldn’t jump at every sharp report or look with suspicion at formerly trusted faces? He just needed a little time to regather his wits and confidence, his sense of the rest of humanity as easily manipulated cattle.

  But: dangerous cattle, who could gore.

  That had been his mistake. Not to realize that even witless subhumans could inflict pain.

  But not as intently and ingeniously as he, Twigg himself, could.

  Therein lay his superiority.

  Twigg had not delayed in pursuing what would strengthen him.

  Immediately upon receiving the requisite medical attention, he had begun to sweep up the crumbling empires of his erstwhile PGL peers. Kalpagni, Ltd.; Stonecipher Industries; Burnes Sloan Hardin Hades; Crumbee Products; Harrow & Wither; Somnifax et Cie; Asura Refineries; Preta-Loka Entertainments; Culex, SA; Brasher Investments, Pic.; Rudrakonig, GmbH; LD-100 Pharmaceuticals. All these firms, unlike more democratic ones, had been particularly susceptible to disintegration upon the lopping off of their heads. Now Isoterm, the insect god of homogeneity, was engulfing them.

  With every glorious business absorption, Twigg felt power flow into him.

  And yet, something was missing. These conquests were all ethereal affairs of bytes and EFTs, votes and bribes. Too impersonal.

  What Twigg needed to fully reinvigorate himself was much more elemental.

  Blood. The blood of the cow that had set off the stampede that had nearly trampled him.

  And this was the day, now the hour.

  A knock came at Twigg’s door. He took his feet off his new hassock, pausing to pat the frozen kneeler appreciatively before he stood.

  Alas, poor Paternoster. Decades of loyal service undone by one incautious aged stumble while bearing the breakfast tray. Now enjoying his retirement.

  Without pension.

  “Enter,” called out Twigg imperiously.

  The unconscious woman carried into the room by the two thugs was not in immaculate condition. Contusions mottled her naked form, and her features were smeared. An arm dangled crookedly. Experts had inflicted a certain high degree of damage on her prior to her delivery here. Twigg had not fully recovered his strength yet, was used to dealing with drugged victims, and had heard that this one was a fiery bitch. Best to have her vitality taken down a notch or three beforehand.

  Twigg was not greedy. There was plenty of play left in her still.

  The men dumped her on the rug and left. Twigg picked up his favorite knife, a slim Medici stiletto, and kneeled beside her. With expert prickings and a final slap across the face he managed to raise her eyelids.

  “Ah, my dear, so pleased to meet you. I’m Marmaduke Twigg, your new best friend. Here is my calling card.”

  Twigg sliced shallowly across the bridge of her nose. Blood flowed, crimson on brown like lava down a hillside.

  “We’re going to get along famously, I can tell. What do you think?”

  The woman was murmuring something. Twigg had to lean over to listen, since her bruised lips and lacerated tongue had trouble forming words.

  “Dog. Your… name. A dog.”

  Twigg straightened. “Oh, dear. How gauche. I’m afraid I must register my dismay.”

  Twigg began to carve.

  Delightful hours passed. Despite all his experience at prolonging agony, matters seemed to be reaching a terminal point. So Twigg paused for refreshment.

  A deep swallow of Zingo.

  Lowering the bottle from his avaricious mouth, Twigg was inspired. He bent over the shattered woman lying curled up on her side.

  Her lips were twitching. Twigg thought to hear her mutter, “Lou—Louie…”

  “He’s not here, dear. Would you care for a drink? I know you’re famously not partial to this beverage though. Too much like vinegar, I take it? Oh, well, if you insist—”

  Twigg emptied the cobalt liquid onto her grimly painted face.

  It seemed to revive her a bit. With infinite exertion she rolled fully onto her stomach and began to crawl. Twigg watched indulgently.

  She reached the table supported by the two male statues. Using their organic irregularities as handholds, she dragged herself upward until she managed to catch the gilt edge of the glass top.

  The active workstation across the room chimed, signalling its need for a share-selling authorization. Twigg moved quickly to attend it, so that he could resume his pleasures.

  When he looked again, the woman held the control for the tiger.

  “No!”

  Too late.

  Death roared.

  The neuronal dam crumbled.

  Twigg dashed insanely for the door.

  Impossibly, the woman stood like an iron wall between him and safety.

  Something supernaturally strong dwelled now within her.

  She clasped Twigg in an iron embrace.

  “Come with me,” rasped a voice not hers.

  And then the tiger was upon them both, claws, jaws and tropical volcano breath.

  But tigers are not cruel.

  16.

  Long May You Run

  A key turned in the repaired door to Shenda Moore’s apartment. The door swung inward.

  First entered Titi Yaya.

  Behind her, Thurman, cane thumping.

  After him hopped a three-legged Bullfinch with bandaged front stump.

  Titi Yaya stopped.

  “I know this won’t be pleasant. But we need to go through all her papers if we are to salvage what she built. You know that’s what she wanted.”

  “Yes,” said Thurman. The word came out of him easier and more evenly than he would have expected, given the surroundings. Apparently, he was, for the moment anyway, all cried out.

  He had been dreading returning here, had delayed the necessity till a week after the funeral. (Shenda’s savaged corpse had come home to them only through Titi Yaya’s string-pulling on both supernatural and earthly powers.) But now, with the future of Karuna, Inc., at stake, they could delay no longer.

  “You take the desk here,” ordered Titi Yaya. “I will look in the bedroom.”

  Thurman was not inclined to argue. The bedroom was not a place he cared to revisit. “Feeb—” He sat at the desk chair; Bullfinch dropped down beside him. He began to leaf through papers. Shenda’s handwriting was everywhere.

  After a time Titi Yaya emerged, bearing various folders, Shenda’s big satchel—and a small glass vial.

  “What is this doing unopened?” she demanded. “How do you expect to accomplish anything if you stay sick? Here, drink this now!”

  Thurman did as he was told. The potion was not exactly pleasant, but not vile either. Musty, loamy, musky, powerful.

  “I have to go now, child. Meet me at my apartment when you are finished.”

  Alone, Thurman sorted through a few more sheets and ledgers. Then an irresistible drowsiness started to creep along his limbs from his feet on up, until it crested over his head and swallowed him entirely. His hand dropped down to graze Bullfinch’s back.

  He was on a flat city rooftop. Bullfinch was with him, smiling and rollicking, lolloping about on his remaining three legs.

  “Throw t
he ball! Throw the ball! Quick!” said the bulldog.

  Thurman realized he held a tennis ball.

  “I don’t know how! Get Shenda to do it. Where is she?”

  “She’s everywhere! Just look! She’s always here! Now let’s play!”

  Thurman looked around. The sun, the sky, the commonplace urban fixtures. Was that Shenda? It seemed a poor substitute, a deceitful trade for the living woman.

  “Don’t you see her? Wake up so we can play! Wake up!”

  Bullfinch’s last words seemed to echo and reverberate. The rooftop scene wavered and dissolved.

  Thurman opened his eyes and saw Shenda.

  It was only a picture of her as a child, an old snapshot lying atop the papers on the desk.

  But it hadn’t been there when he fell asleep.

  Thurman stood to go. He reached for his cane, then hesitated. Somehow his legs seemed stronger.

  Cane left behind, he moved with increasing confidence toward the door.

  Behind him gamely trotted Bullfinch.

  Thurman guessed that now he had a dog.

  * * *

  [Compassion or karuna] does not seem to die. Shantideva says that every uncompassionate action is like planting a dead tree, but anything related to compassion is like planting a living tree. It grows and grows endlessly and never dies. Even if it seems to die, it always leaves behind a seed from which another grows. Compassion is organic; it continues on and on and on.

  —Chogyam Trungpa,

  Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

  In a collection of stories devoted to various modes of employment— the classic “working for a living” theme, if you will—the author’s attitude toward the workplace and the marketplace are bound to emerge fairly strongly—if he’s done his job right. Contradictory and shifting, my take on earning one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow has undergone a number of metamorphoses. But at the core has remained a distaste for rigid, authoritarian environments, big corporate cube farms and their ilk. Some twenty years ago, when I was still a COBOL programmer for an insurance company, one of the goads to leaping blindly into the freelance writer’s life was a newly instituted office clothing policy that required us formerly unrestrained coders to don a tie. I gave my notice shortly thereafter.

  As Thoreau famously advised, “Beware of all enterprises requiring new clothes.”

  Suits

  I’ll never forget the first time I saw a suit. The sight took five years off my life.

  I was hunched over my CAD-CAM station, trying to finish up the specs for a new waste-burning facility (thankfully to be situated in a state far away from mine). The smokestack scrubbers were giving me a hell of a time. I couldn’t come up with a configuration that would match both the money allotted and the cleansing capabilities needed. The simulations kept showing we’d either have to spend twice as much as we had in the budget, or end up spewing dioxin over half the Midwest. I could guess which option we’d choose. With EPA pollution credits available comparatively cheap, it would definitely be the latter.

  As I agonized over my mouse and keyboard, trying to squeeze out the last possible ounce of utility from the scrubber models available in my price range, I could sense someone hovering behind me, looking over my shoulder. At first, I figured it was just Carl, checking on my progress, and I didn’t bother turning around. But as minutes passed and no caustic comment was forthcoming, I gradually realized that it couldn’t be Carl. Anne would’ve laid a hand on my back. Jerry would’ve been slurping his omnipresent coffee. Marcie would’ve been popping gum. But behind me was only an eerie silence, and the subliminal sense of someone—or something— watching me.

  I swivelled my chair around.

  And that’s when I saw the SUIT.

  The empty cuffs of its perfect wool trousers floated several inches off the carpet. The legs of its pants were bulked out as if they contained living flesh, but I knew instantly and unerringly that they were empty. The suit jacket—one button buttoned, lapels neatly creased—showed the vacant cuffs of a white shirt out its sleeves, and a swath of the same shirt across the nonexistent but shapely chest. The hollow neck of the shirt was ringed with a red tie that hung down neatly.

  It was like coming face to face with the Headless Horseman. Only this apparition lacked limbs or torso of any kind.

  “Jesus Christ!’’ I yelled, and scrambled backward in my wheeled chair.

  Laughter broke out from the doorway, and I looked.

  Carl led a pack consisting of the whole office staff. They had been waiting patiently for my reaction to this bizarre thing, and I had been gratifyingly dramatic.

  Now Carl stepped into my office. “What’s the matter, Mark? That’s no way to greet your new coworker.”

  I got up and hastily placed the desk between me and the floating clothing. Even with the first shock fading, I found the thing too uncanny. It simply gave me the creeps.

  Now that the show I had put on was over, the others were dispersing back to their desks. Soon, I was left alone with Carl and the strange mechanism.

  “What the hell is it?” I asked.

  “It’s a SUIT. Sensor Unit for Interior Telemonitoring. Not only does it keep track of the building’s microclimate—dust levels, heat, drafts, things like that—but it also functions as mobile security.”

  I started to relax just a little, my engineer’s fascination with clever gadgetry taking over.

  I thought I knew, but I still asked, “How’s it float like that?”

  “Superconducting wires woven into the fabric. Just like the mag-lev train you hopped to work this morning. It rides the steel frame of the building on magnetic lift. The wires give it its shape, too. Combination of stiffness and interactive fields. And all its sensing circuits, cameras, probes and chips are incorporated right in the material too. Oh, and its power pack as well.”

  “Well, all right, why can’t it look like a normal robot?”

  “Why should it? It doesn’t need a body because it doesn’t have to lift or move anything. But it’s got to be roughly humanoid so that it can efficiently monitor the same body space that the average worker occupies. The building management might have decided to let loose another horde of MICE, but the building’s crawling with MICE already. So they went with this. And wrapping it in clothing makes it familiar. It’s an elegant design. Whimsical, too.”

  “It’s terrifying. It reminds me of a ghost.”

  Carl laughed. “C’mon, Mark, don’t be superstitious! Here, poke it. Go ahead, it doesn’t mind.”

  Suiting his actions to his words, Carl jabbed a finger into the thing. It bobbled backwards on its magnetic fields, then righted itself.

  I came up tentatively to the SUIT and tried the same thing.

  My finger encountered the sensation of yielding flesh beneath the fabric. Although I knew it was just an electromagnetic simulation of skin and blood, it was almost indistinguishable from poking a living body, save for its lack of warmth.

  I shivered, and stepped back. Had I seen the SUIT start to raise its arms, as if against me…?

  Shaking my head, I said, “No, I’m sorry, Carl, I really don’t like it.…”

  “You’re just jealous because it’s wearing—or made of—better clothing than you own.”

  This was true. The manufacturer had chosen a beautiful designer outfit to modify.

  “How many of these things are there?”

  “Oh, a dozen or so. There’re even female ones.”

  “No!”

  “Sure. Skirt, frilly blouse, jacket, floppy bow tie. Equal employment opportunities for sensing devices too, you know.”

  Suddenly, the SUIT began to drift away. Its legs, of course, didn’t bend in walking movements—and thank God for that! It simply floated silently away like a specter, its empty arms slightly bent at the elbow.

  “How did you get it in here?”

  “I phoned Sys-Ops and told them to send it to your office, to check a funny smell with its chemosensors
. It must’ve finished just now.”

  “Someone down in Sys-Ops is guiding these all the time?”

  “Not at all. The SUITs run off the server without human intervention most of the time. It’s only if something turns up that the heuristics can’t deal with that a live operator is called. Doesn’t happen that often either. At least not yet.”

  I paused to consider everything Carl had told me. In the end, I supposed, the SUITs were just one more thing I didn’t like about my job.

  “Well, please don’t ever send one of those things in again when I’m in the middle of concentrating. It’s very disturbing.”

  Once again Carl laughed. “Oh, now that you know what they are, you’ll get used to them.”

  But he was wrong.

  The next few months were among the most hectic and enervating of my life. I was burdened and overburdened with work on a dozen projects, each one of them more reprehensible than the last.

  Our firm wasn’t the biggest contractor in our particular job arena, and it wasn’t the smartest. There were competitors out there who could both outspend and outthink us. Practically the only way we could get work was to underbid. And that resulted in cutting some pretty sharp corners.

  In the weeks after I first saw the SUIT, I had to make the following compromises:

  Switch to a lower grade of concrete for the foundations of a new airline terminal.

  Cut back as far as I dared on the number of structural beams in a hotel walkway.

  Substitute a thousand two-pane windows for the requested three-pane ones.

  Use PVC piping in place of copper.

  Find a source of used bricks when new ones had been promised.

  Every such morally dubious action I was forced to take left me feeling more and more hollow. I lay awake nights, wondering how I had ended up in such a position. I wanted to quit, but just couldn’t convince myself to do it. The paycheck was too regular, my lifestyle too secure. I tried to tell myself that everyone made such compromises, no matter where they worked. That no one was getting hurt with this second-class material even though they had expected to receive first-class goods. That the difference was minimal, undetectable, would never be noticed by the occupants of the shoddy structures.