by Unknown
Like the walls of some crumbling ruin, a canvasser was standing right before his very eyes.
It bent both its arms—each one by itself resembling some huge crustacean—and grabbed hold of the worker’s midsection from both sides, easily lifting him up into the air. Its featureless, jet-black head unraveled as it pulled him near, its whisper-leaves slowly unfolding like the blossoming of a bowl-shaped flower. It was said that they used this organ to communicate with proprietors and with one another’s departments.
At the center of the head of whisper-leaves was its saucer-shaped mouth, but what unexpectedly came out of it was not a radula but a swarm of insect larvae resembling snowflakes. In no time, a flood of them came crawling out, squirming in the midst of its bowl of whisper-leaves. The worker had no idea what was happening. Could the nymphs that had attacked him last night have been sent from this place? Or could it be that the canvassers too were tormented by eruptions of lice?
The worker let loose a scream from the pit of his stomach and kept twisting and turning as he tried to escape from the writhing things closing in before his eyes. By the time the canvasser had pulled him in so close that he could see the differences in the nymphs’ snowflake patterns, however, he had given up entirely and was sinking into memories of Christmas. He recognized that it was the flashing of the crystals and the bell-like ringing of their wings that had induced such memories, but he couldn’t escape from their hypnotic glamour. And yet these dreams as well were short-lived, ending with the collapse of the whisper-leaves in the background and the scattering of the nymphs.
A rusted metal shaft had been thrust into the throat of the canvasser. It had come from beneath the worker’s armpit and extended all the way to the groundship behind him. It was but one of many coaxers with which the ship was equipped. The president’s corpuscyte was squeezed inside. The coaxer withdrew, and the upper part of the canvasser’s body began to tilt backward, as from the joint between its armor plates spurted slate-blue body fluids, mixed with waybugs.
The worker slid down along the coaxer and landed hard on board the ship.
There was no time for relief, though, as the body of the ship began to tilt. He looked up and saw two more canvassers starting to lift the tail of the ship.
The groundship continued to resist, swinging about three coaxers now; a fourth it pointed toward the crater that lay behind the worker, urging the worker to hurry toward it. On the floor of the crater, three canvassers were already huddled around the client’s meteor carriage, shaking it back and forth ferociously as they tried to break through its outer shell. With each shock, bits of its surface layer were flaking off.
The worker jumped down off of the ship and fought his way through the jellymire as fast as he could. He reached the floor of the crater, and then, in the moment that the canvassers shifted their posture for a concentrated blow, reached out an arm and knocked away shards of broken shell. He slid the hook of the towing cable into the coupling ring that was revealed underneath and, dodging all the while the mantis shrimp-arms that came flying at him, climbed back up out of the crater. At least, that was what he had intended to do. His foot slipped and he fell back on top of the carriage, where he took a blow from one of their fists. Ribs shattered. The worker choked as he vomited blood.
For some reason, though, the assault stopped right away, and he felt the fists grow distant. Clenching his teeth, the worker opened his eyes. The multilayered heads of the three canvassers were all tilted in his direction.
There was nowhere to flee.
Looking out from between the canvassers and up toward the groundship, he could see the coaxers swinging about, feeling around among the innards of canvassers lying flat on their backs.
The worker pulled on the towing cable with a strength born of all the anger he felt toward the president, but the cable was too long and all he could do was haul in some slack. He could see the groundship’s coaxer holding an emerald-hued magatama that it had extracted from the corpse of a canvasser. Almost adoringly, it raised it aloft toward the sunlight. But then the sight of it was hidden by the shadows of the ever-growing numbers of canvassers. Each head of whisper-leaves suddenly inclined downward and blossomed.
Was workman’s comp going to pay out for this? And if so, who was going to be the beneficiary?
The worker was steeling himself for the end when from out of nowhere a wave of jellymire came rolling in and swallowed him up in its swell. With no idea what was happening, he clung to the towing cable. Suddenly, the meteor carriage had tilted and gone under, then it rose back to the surface as though rebounding.
The worker sensed panic from the president inside the ship. He took a look back, and the canvassers were scattering black splashes of mud across the landscape as they worked frantically to dive beneath the mire.
Clouded by rain, a colossal gray something rose up over them like a twisted, warped tower that was continually being built upon. As it slowly bent to the left and the right, it drew nearer, eliciting a sense of unearthly profundity in the worker.
Although its outline closely resembled that of the president, it was closer to the blood of the canvassers in color, and moreover of a gargantuan size that would make either of them look like small children in comparison.
It was a crossing guard. Unaffiliated with any cytan corporation, it was a ”nonprofit entity”—one that brought no profit to anyone—a bringer of death to canvassers, directors, and workers alike.
Against that receding backdrop, the worker could see the armored shells of canvassers tardy in escaping as they were pulled apart by fingers that bristled from the ends of arms swinging down from overhead and internal organs resembling sea hares being sucked up out of them.
Once the groundship was again parked in the company hangar, its hatch sprang open, and from its entryway the president’s corpuscyte overflowed. The worker hurried to get the president’s muscle fiber coat for him.
Each time another mass of the president’s body tissue injected itself into the clothing, a sharp pain ran through the sternum of the worker who bore its weight.
The body and breast of the coat began to swell, a translucent head started rising up out of the collar, and twisted sleeves pulsated as they took shape once more. Face-first, the president laid himself down heavily on the floor, then dragged his naked lower half up out of the ship, crawling forward with arms that had not yet finished regrowing their fingers. Although the bones of both legs were visible, they were all still clumped together like the organs of a conch. Along with bubbles of gas, a large number of Hades Thorns were being ejected through his surface, and a reddish curtain was unfurling inside him.
When the worker brought him his pants, the president’s lower body began to split, and through peristaltic undulations of his surface layer, he steadily drew the fabric onto himself.
Once he had finished dressing and restoring his body to a shape suited to bipedal ambulation, the president, attaching himself to the floor with suction cups formed from the soles of his feet, drew up his knees, lifted his waist, and slowly raised up his arched back until he stood fully erect. Then immediately, he stumbled as though drunk and slammed into a wall.
The worker cried out from behind, “Are you all right, Mr. President?” but the president only put a hand against the wall and set off down the corridor, dragging his feet as he went. Following along behind, the worker was still dragging his feet as well.
Lagging behind, the worker made his way toward the workshop, and when he arrived, the president’s shirt was rolled up, and a long, cardiopulmonary tube meant for synthorgans was buried in his solar plexus. He was giving himself a blood transfusion.
The worker left the room and in anticipation of his next task went into the powder room. When he took off his work clothes, there was an unevenness in his chest resembling a fissure caused by geologic upheavals, and blue-black bruises covered every part of his body. He turned t
he brass handle on the scaly wall and closed his eyes. He could hear the sound of the water in only one of his ears. Carefully avoiding the bruise on his solar plexus—like an overripe fruit, it yielded too easily to his touch—he cleaned away the sticky gum left by the rain. The texture of the jellymire that had clung to his skin remained, though. Even now, it still felt like it was all over him.
The worker changed clothes and headed back to the dock, where he found the front end of the safely recovered meteor carriage covered in a spiderweb pattern of hairline cracks, and a clear substance similar in consistency to a mollusk’s body oozing from the places where they intersected. As he looked on, the substance suddenly overflowed, so after a glance down the hallway in hopes that the president might be coming, he resigned himself and put out both of his arms. Then, remembering that the average client weighed four times as much as he did, the worker hurried frantically back to the wall and rolled a pallet driver up to the underside of the carriage.
The blob of corpuscyte oozing down onto the pallet now poured forth in earnest, and though the worker knew he was looking at a client, there was practically nothing contained inside it, and it resembled nothing so much as a giant, glistening blob of fat. The blob timidly extended a slender antenna, twisted it to the right and the left, and then simply withdrew it. Then the entire mass began to sway as though it were being kneaded by invisible hands, and then presently stopped. In its present condition, it was not even able to move about freely. The worker could not even imagine a time when the president had been this helpless.
The worker pushed the pallet driver with the client loaded aboard, and when they entered the workshop, the president pulled out the cardiopulmonary pipe and dragged himself from the shelf he had been leaning against.
While the president was transferring the client’s body to the workbench, the worker started prep for a series of delivery operations. From a medicine bottle, he pulled out a handful of stupa-toad eggs and swallowed them down to ease the pain in his ribs. He put skingloves on both hands and intertwined his fingers so that there were no gaps, then pulled a number of scrolls from the shelves, lined them up, and lifted up the spine that had been completed only yesterday. It was the first item for delivery.
The president took in hand the forward part of the spinal column, stuck it into the corpuscyte of the client on the workbench, and gradually pushed it in deep. The worker prepared the hips while the president worked in the spine all the way down to the tailbone, arranging it neatly for attachment to the body.
Next came the secondary tibia, and after that the primary tibia. As they repeated this process for each of the major joints, the client’s body—hitherto nothing but a blob of fat—began to take on a shape resembling that of a director.
The worker placed a scroll of peripheral nerves on the client’s head and worked his way down toward the toes applying more of them. When the network of nerves he had laid across the client’s entire form had sunk into his corpuscyte and reached every corner of his body, the president divided out multiple fingertips and continued weaving nerve fibers together at the point of connection between the brain and spinal cord. Compared with the president’s everyday behavior, this degree of manual dexterity was truly extraordinary, and the worker was amazed every time he saw it. However, this kind of work seemed to wear on the president rather heavily, and for some time after a delivery, he would often just sit out on the deck and drown himself in strong drink.
The implantation of the circulatory system was accomplished in a similar manner, by which point the client’s “body”—his corpuscyte—resembled an ocean filled with bobbing and swaying sea anemones. They continued working, fitting each cnidarianlike organ into its place and hooking it up. The worker understood what a vastly different environment the presidents and directors had been living in; without a certain fundamental ruthlessness of character, they could not maintain their existence there.
An upper and lower jaw, each lined with splendid rows of teeth, were submerged into the client next, followed by a windpipe. As for organs of vocalization, those were provided only to middle managers who had charge of multiple assimiants. Wondering to himself whether this client would be willing to listen to complaints about horrible working conditions, the worker pulled a bumpy length of intestine down from the shelf.
It was after he had handed it over to the president, while he was packing the intestine into the client, that the president’s usual roughness of hand started to return. As soon as he finished putting the beating heart in between the lungs, he grabbed a skinbag from the shelf and went out into the hallway.
The worker gasped. He wasn’t just going to quit midway through, was he? And yet there was no sign of the president coming back. The client was still waiting for them to finish. The worker let out an exhausted sigh. With no other choice before him, he set to work alone.
One by one, he pushed the jointed ribs into place, shaped the chest cavity, and by hand drew the cardiopulmonary tube near to the heart and attached it, watching carefully until the veins began to throb and carry blood to the organs. As soon as the lungs began their cycle of expansion and contraction, blood came squirting out of a spot where two blood vessels were joined, spreading out disquietingly like a storm cloud. The metal fitting that the president had put in place to hold them temporarily had come loose. Immediately, the worker pushed his arms into the corpuscyte to try to deal with it, but that didn’t go well: on top of the poor visibility caused by the bleeding, his hands were pushed back by body tissues designed to expel foreign objects. As he was moving his fingertips vainly about, there came a succession of hard noises, like the sound of a typewriter. He looked up and saw that it was the client’s teeth chattering. Perhaps he was experiencing a phantom chill due to the sudden, steep drop in blood pressure.
“Every day, I have to be cold like this too,” the worker muttered, but then he spotted a cloudy redness in the abdomen as well, and there was no time to indulge trite feelings of superiority. If an organ delivery turned out defective and had to be recalled, he might well be called upon to provide replacements from his own body.
The worker pulled off his coat and, naked from the waist up, breathed out a ragged breath to steady his nerves. Focusing all his attention on the clamps, he reset them. While he was doing so, new hemorrhages were breaking out one after another, and the client’s entire body was stained a ruby hue. Suddenly, there came the resounding noise of something being torn asunder, but because it had apparently come from the hallway behind him, he paid it no mind and lost himself in the task at hand.
The worker stood motionless, his arms hanging limp at his sides. Both were dyed red to the elbows. His head was heavy with egg cases. He couldn’t remember what measures he had applied where. The client lay still on the workbench. Too still. Amid the fear that all of his organs had ceased functioning, the client tilted his head lethargically and let his jaw fall slack like some bad actor hamming up a death scene.
“KaKaKa … Kaaaa …”
The client’s thick tongue flicked haltingly in and out and, after making the same sound many times over, uttered in what was clearly its voice, “R’lizided. Dreenkided.”
The worker was relieved that the client was alive, although at the same time he despaired of drawing any meaning from the words. The worker could not tell whether they had been spoken to an assimiant in some linguistic sphere other than his own, or if his voice simply wasn’t working right.
He was glancing toward the hallway, thinking of heading back to his sleepsac, when one of the wall planks blew off and went flying. The upper body of a male lipocorpus—it was unusual to have a chance to see one—stuck out from behind it, then lay down on the floor. From the pair of cardiopulmonary arteries that protruded from its side and disappeared into the hole in the wall, the worker could tell that this male was a CP-type. As it regarded the worker, its eyes were like bullet wounds closed over with abraded skin.
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nbsp; Insensitively, the worker averted his gaze and turned toward the shelf. He suddenly felt very hungry, and without even wiping his bloody hands took a spoiled blood sedge from its sealed container and ate it raw. It didn’t taste much different from when they were served at mealtime. He swallowed it with the intense nausea that accompanied it, and tears ran down from the corners of his eyes. As if in consolation, the client said, “Telidagodabedd, herdares, eh, sodeforriseup.”
The tears didn’t stop.
The client stayed with them for about a week, listening to lectures from the president on how to move like a human being.
The first time he stood up was three days after his organs had been delivered, on the same day that the CP-type—having ceased to function—was removed and a new CP-type was brought in. The client’s joints bent backward when he stood erect, and the center of gravity in his waist was shifted too far to the left, but even so he set out in an awkward walk, stopped at the threshold, and watched as the CP-type was being carried in.
The next day, the client made a slow circuit of the company building, and by the time a few days more had passed, he had mastered the art of bipedal locomotion. His habit of raising his knees too high persisted, but it was a more natural gait than that of the worker, who had still not recovered from the blow he had taken at the crater.
On the last day, the metal fittings were removed from the junctions where blood sedges now adhered. Like a pair of conjoined twins, the client and the president buried their heads in one another, causing a rippling interference pattern to appear along their surfaces, after which the client departed, going down in the lift by himself.
The president came outside and leaned out over the edge of the deck. The worker did likewise.
A flatboat was pulling away from the base of the synthorgan company. On its deck, the client lay on his back, bathing its rippling body in sunlight, reflecting flashes of light just like the oceans once had. Was he saying something? His lower jaw was moving up and down. Matching its movements, the worker gave voice to it: