by Jeff Carlson
"Line-senior, no. This wasn't conveyance. I know when I'm—"
"You don't. When were you ever in a situation like this? The biggest crisis you've dealt with before today was leaving home. Believe me. The feedback can become its own problem."
Joanna nodded slowly. Why am I arguing?
It was Louise who answered the thought. "Your actions prove your heart, cub. Above all you're loyal. And you endured as well as any of us."
"I was selfish."
"Good," Louise said, and when Joanna's gaze lifted suddenly Louise had a new, fierce grin for her. "Yes. Good. We're not just out here to dig up Sealies."
Joanna began to smile back. "I, sometimes I thought..."
"You're quicker than most, cub."
"Sometimes I thought the matriarch must have planned for the ways I'd feel, even wanted it."
"Our line-mother was one of us, a digger, before you and I were born. It's been that way now for three of the past four generations."
Joanna stared. Then she laughed at the idea of herself ever becoming eligible for a senior position. "But they teach us that leadership is internal," she said.
"In the creche, they have to. Ninety-five percent of the line never leaves home, cub." Louise grew quiet again. "We're weaker because of it."
This notion seemed even stranger, and yet Joanna understood. In the colony, life had been well-ordered and predictable. The line itself was equally tame, at least in comparison to the veterans of this site crew.
"We're starting to change," Louise said. Her voice was more forceful now, like a promise, and Joanna felt a bright, rising fire of self-worth.
The hostile lands stretching endlessly from the pole held too many resources to be ignored, too much sheer room, but to recolonize Earth would also demand new skills and capacities, new strength, new destinies.
"Thank you," Joanna said.
END
Afterword
Like a lot of my stories, "Planet of the Sealies" began with the setting. First I had a place. Then I added people and problems.
This bleak future was the offspring of a very simple chore combined with yardwork. We live on a good-sized lot with mature mulberry trees, which I trim myself, partly to save the money, partly because I enjoy the exercise and working with my hands, and mostly because — at least in California — the most prevalent philosophy toward mulberry care is to cut them back every fall. I mean all the way back.
Personally I think this is a scam invented by pruners in order to generate more work for themselves. Yes, mulberries are fast-growing trees, but I see mulberries that have never been trimmed, and they look like trees. That's nice. Alas, the original owners of our home bought into this scam. For decades, they had their trees shaved year after year. By the time we moved in, the mulberries were barely more than thick, six-foot stumps. Of course they grew in a bushy mess! No one ever allowed them to shape into trees, and there was nothing left on top but scar tissue.
Over ten years, I've encouraged the trees to become trees again and reach for the sky, but it's involved some careful work, sort of like bonsai training, except with the judicious application of a chainsaw. Occasionally I've had to clear out large parts of their branches in order to make room for the larger upward growths.
Then I hauled truckloads of biomass to the dump.
The dump was a fascinating place. It was miles wide, like a strange, endless prairie where the bulldozers roam and seldom was heard a living sound except the scavenger birds. Maybe more interesting, there are no prairies on the California coastline. We live near the eastern, inland shores of the San Francisco Bay Area, where the waterline is surrounded by dry, rolling hills, gullies, and watersheds.
So where did this prairie come from? I started to do some research. Back in the 1950s, when the region really began to boom after World War II, guess where the city and state governments realized would be the easiest, cheapest places to use as landfills?
The low spots.
See, what you do is find a good hill where you can bring trucks and throw the garbage down the hill. Keep doing this until the low spot fills in. Bulldoze it to pack it down. Keep filling. Then move on to the next low spot.
And those watersheds that happen to be downstream of the gullies you've just filled? Heck, those birds, fish, frogs, raccoons, and squirrels won't care! Oh, wait, the watersheds flow into the ocean next. And the toxins that leak into the Bay will swirl around and end up on the beach where the people go with their children...
The blind stupidity of the situation bothered me. Yes, a technological civilization will generate refuse. Understood. You can't recycle or burn it all. But you don't shit where you eat, especially not when that old saying can be meant literally.
The dumps aren't only full of inert junk like plastic. They also become the home of everything we throw into our household garbage — cadmium, copper, nano silver, mercury — and the feces of our babies and our elderly. Yes, there's a small, growing movement toward cloth diapers, which have their own problems with increased electrical and water use, not to mention adding to water treatment demands, but do you realize how many disposable diapers a child goes through from birth to two- or three-years-old? Have one. You'll find yourself up to your elbows in poo on an hourly basis, my friend.
All those diapers, thousands of them each year, combined with millions of batteries and old appliances and light bulbs... that kind of mess wasn't something I could leave alone. So I sent Joanna Löw and her clone sisters underground to investigate.
PATTERN MASTERS
Sauber wasn't crazy. He'd planned on never hitting the same place twice. He even kept a check-list — near the toilet, in case it needed to be destroyed in a hurry. But two hundred and nine days crawled past before he'd bagged every store in Berkeley and Oakland, so it seemed impossible that anyone would remember him at Greenwald's, his favorite. His first.
Sauber was at the register before the girl stopped him. "Those are mine," she said, reaching out.
He held the packet against his chest. "What?"
"Look at the label."
Of course he'd already studied it carefully. Thirty-six exposures, regular 35mm film. Jennifer Crisp. The address, written in delicate cursive, was just two blocks from here.
Adrenaline spilled from his veins into his gut.
The girl was half his age, peasant-faced, her nose like a ski jump — yet her breasts were perfect, small and neat, her white bra outlined against her thin white blouse. At five-nine or ten, she had at least an inch on him and maybe ten pounds.
Sauber made a show of examining the packet with a smile. Then he said, "Right, geez, these all look the same."
He'd practiced the words so many times that he managed to sound bored. It still wasn't convincing. The green envelopes were exactly the same except for the personal information each customer jotted down.
The girl's fingers closed on the packet. Sauber knew he should let go — let go and stop grinning like a chimpanzee. But her skin was smooth, wonderful. She wore more rings than he could count in a glance.
She smiled back at him and said, "You sure would've been surprised when you got home."
Sauber's eyes lifted toward the security cameras. What were the odds that he'd pull this packet from the wide drawers just as its owner arrived? One in a thousand? Higher, given the vagaries of timing. Much higher.
He wasn't crazy. He'd been set up.
The photo department at Greenwald's was tiny, crushed in back between two rows of over-priced groceries and the bright, gigantic counters of the pharmacy. He'd shopped here before, scouting the place, and knew that his quickest exit was through the rear. But were the stock room doors unlocked?
"Don't worry about it," the girl said, as the heavy-set photo clerk stepped out from behind the register. The man's eyes were lost under wiry dark brows.
Sauber turned to run.
Her grip was unbelievably strong.
The two of them fumbled the packet and it careened off the
back of Sauber's calf as he spun away. The sharp-cornered impact felt like a knife.
He hit a rack of disposable cameras with his shoulder, kicked through the avalanche of small yellow boxes, fell, got up, slammed into a swinging door. In the dim, confusing maze of the stock room, two men shouted at him. He reached daylight sooner than he'd hoped, scrambling under a giant truck and around a corner before he stopped to look and listen.
#
Four blocks over, he thought he saw the girl again behind the wheel of a dented VW Bug.
#
The sprawling Cal Berkeley campus was Sauber's second favorite place in the world, a sea of loud young voices, firm bodies. Their hairstyles and ridiculous piercings — lips, noses, once he'd seen a forehead ring — always made him smile. It was a safe, colorful environment where anonymity was the rule.
Today it seemed like the kids weren't ignoring him.
Black grease from beneath the truck coated his butt and both knees, and his thoughts felt very loud. He kept his head down and his feet moving but avoided the shortcut behind the clock tower. The thought of that narrow alley made him edgy.
Sauber had always planned on bluffing his way out of a confrontation. Causing a scene would only make him more memorable. All he had to do was apologize and then "realize" that he'd tried the new digital service, the one that Greenwald's sent out for an extra day, and presto-kazam he was just another moron you might joke about with your husband over dinner.
He'd panicked. His streak of bad luck wasn't letting up and he'd gone stupid over a simple coincidence.
If the police did know about him, they wouldn't bother with an elaborate sting operation and sexy decoys — they'd come to his apartment. Now they had his fingerprints. A description.
Outside the science building, three girls and a hairy boy stood in a ring playing hackeysack while another girl circled them, crouching here and there with a pocket camera. "Kick it up, kick it up," she said. Her jeans were very tight.
Sauber felt his anxiety lift for a moment, wishing he was that boy, imagining he had such friends.
He couldn't stop now.
#
A newspaper stood precisely on end against the door of his split-level. Sauber stared. The Montclarion was a free publication that he'd given up on trying to have stopped — yet it had never been left anywhere except in his spotty, muddy strip of grass. He hurried forward and opened all four locks.
The small apartment wasn't anything great — its only real window faced right onto the street — but the entrance was fairly private and he didn't have to share and it had only taken two heavy tarps and a little soundproofing to transform the bedroom into a decent workshop.
Sauber threw the newspaper into the trash and went to the fridge. A blink of red caught his eye. The answering machine. Two blinks. Sauber hesitated, then walked to the counter.
He tried to remember the last time someone had called. A salesman. His ex didn't even have this number.
Then the phone rang and Sauber yanked his hand back.
He took a step toward the front door but turned and strode to the bedroom, propelled entirely by instinct. Guarding that doorway, he stared back at the phone. His heart beat so hard it seemed to squeeze his lungs down against his stomach.
The machine still had Deb's tired voice: "Hi, nobody's here. You know what to do."
Silence poured out of the speaker into his home. He heard a faint scuffing like someone shifting from one foot to another. He didn't move. The caller hung up.
When he ventured forward to hit the 'Play' button, the first two messages were the same expectant quiet — someone listening.
#
The workshop was an awful mess that he'd planned on cleaning this afternoon, but he was restless, nervy. He still needed at least one more score.
He grabbed a different jacket and a Niners cap, tucking his hair up to further change his appearance, remembering clean pants at the last minute.
He had that bad sensation of suffocating again as he stood outside his front door, triple-checking the locks. But nothing happened. No one approached. Nobody is watching you, he thought.
The congestion downtown was comforting: beggars, skate punks, businessmen. He became invisible.
He caught glimpses of different lives through the windows and sliding glass doors of the university dorms — a hideous red leather couch, the smell of grilled cheese. A bare-shouldered woman singing under the turbine roar of a blow drier was his favorite. At the sorority house, zero progress had been made on the steel patio fence that they'd been building since July.
Long's Drugs seemed deserted and his feet clicked loudly against the gleaming tile floor. He fingered through the Ds and Es until a row of flower-heads drawn across the top of a packet caught his eye. Amy Ellison. She had an off-campus address. Roughly one in thirty people got impatient with alphabetical groupings and marked their packets outside the space provided, to make theirs more noticeable. Stars, looping circles, jagged black scribbles. Sauber found these choices very revealing.
He splurged on some candy bars and paid cash. If he got lucky, this one might be the end of it.
In the parking lot, the girl from Greenwald's stood waiting against her dented VW, arms folded, a smile tucked into the corner of her mouth. Sauber was so surprised that he walked straight over, awash in a perverse sense of relief.
Someone has been watching me! he thought.
The only question that occurred to him was so intriguing he almost shouted: "What are you doing?"
"What are you," she countered. "All these pictures."
Her eyes were blue-green, very sharp, and her eyebrows had that same razor quality, thin and perfect. One of her incisors was half-gone, chipped off. A tomboy. How much did she know?
"I'm Nina," the girl said.
"The name on that packet was Jennifer."
"It wasn't mine. I was just trying to start a conversation."
Sauber hoped his smile looked right.
"So what's the secret?" she asked. She had a habit of shaking her head to one side when she finished speaking that he liked. She was rude, confident, crazy.
"I'll show you," he said.
#
He got her inside because she moved the same way that she talked, without hesitation — not getting into her tiny car with him, not parking on the dark street, not at his front door.
She finally wavered in the doorway to his bedroom, the toes of one shoe crackling on the heavy tarp laid over the carpet. Sauber worried that it smelled funny. He worried that he couldn't see her face. He should have cleaned.
"Jesus," she said.
He came up behind her. "Who else knows about me?"
"This is amazing—"
In most ways the sculpture was a departure for him. Deb probably wouldn't have recognized it as his. The work was too busy, too bright, too anthropocentric.
The base structure conformed to a human shape — his own, he imagined telling interviewers — because he hadn't wanted the piece to overwhelm with sheer bulk. It also had to fit through the door. Yet its every surface was flat, aside from a concave dish where the face should be. An oversize dish. None of the proportions were correct, the left biceps squashed into a pyramid, one hip no more than a dangling cube, the fingers of the right hand represented by flat, ten-inch strips.
The man-shape appeared to run or jump or perhaps just swoon, perhaps all three, it depended on where you stood and what was visible of its skin.
The skin, of course, was a mosaic of pictures.
Nina stepped forward in a rush and paced through snippings, cans, power tools. The man-shape danced with her. She said, "This is absolutely amazing! You'll be famous."
Deb had always promised the same. Poor Deb.
Small and large, cropped or whole, color, black-and-white, at first the hundreds of images shotgunned the mind. Then the eye found a place to rest. And then patterns emerged.
Nina paused as a particular grouping caught her. The right shou
lder. Sauber nodded to himself. The skin there consisted of healthy young men, some shirtless, one nude, many playing to the camera. Along the arm were tuxedos and brides, homes, children. Further down the ribcage the young men merged abruptly with a series of infirm seniors, bald, baggy — and still monkeying for the camera, gumming pizza, fencing with canes.
The skin was full of such contrasts, ghettos and pristine deserts, parties and intensive care units. It was illuminating and magical and at the same time utterly horrific.
It drew Sauber’s eyes away from her.
He'd lived with this tapestry of stolen lives for eight months now, longer than any other work, and still it had the ability to make him forget himself.
He moved closer just as Nina brushed one fingertip over the mosaic. She pulled back, eyes wide. "Sorry."
He slapped its jaw. "Indestructible."
The base structure was concrete mixed with epoxy, the sort of thing to use as a shield against a nuclear blast, and he'd triple-laminated the skin and planned to hit it twice more when he finished. Sauber had yet to skin the right calf or the great empty dish of a face — although he'd contemplated leaving that concave blank, hungry, groping. Or maybe that was too obvious.
He'd already thrown in several conspicuous jokes: a life-sized ear precisely where it should be, drunkards mooning the camera on the rump. Such literalism gave idiots something to understand, and in Sauber's experience it was crucial to market to numb-ass television zombies who wouldn't recognize their own existence without having their hands held. There were more of them than anyone else, after all. Therefore they had most of the money, and their choices skewed everything.
He wouldn't be using his own bedroom as a studio and surviving on credit cards if he'd done a better job of commercializing himself when he still had grants and a wife and free warehouse space provided by the university.
"It's almost filled in," Nina said, caressing the back of the right calf. "Will you use a picture of me?"