by Cat Rambo
"And Ticky has a new friend," Mimsy said, nodding over at the corner where the servo and Daisy were comparing notes on plot twists. "But what did you and I get out of all of this?"
I trailed a finger along the inner curve of one of the Kali's elbows. It didn't seem as tacky as it used to. "Oh, I don't know," I said. "But I'm sure something will emerge."
Afternotes
This story was written for Clarion West, during the week that L. Timmel DuChamp was our instructor, and is my attempt at a screwball comedy, combined with the idea of the Bodys, which was inspired by a long walk in which my foot began to hurt and I was thinking about what it would be like to be able to switch out body parts easily.
The story appeared in the final issue of Crossed Genres, a magazine which I was pleased to support during its existence, and which went away far too quickly (although at the time I'm writing this, a Kickstarter project looks as though it may succeed in reviving the magazine). "Long Enough and Just So Long," which appears in the Near volume of this collection, was originally written for a contest of theirs, but got purchased before I could send it to them.
SPACE ELEVATOR MUSIC
Okay, so it's not really an elevator or even a space elevator in the way anyone originally meant it. But it looks like an elevator, the transo-chrono-ecto-vasi-via. You get on, you punch a button, you go to your destination. Sometimes you stop along the way, people get off, get on. You get the picture. Transportation for the masses. Rich people don't have to stop for other people, they just go straight up to the top. The rest of us stand waiting and listening to the piped in entertainment and the commercial pause every five minutes.
It's always the same music. At first it's just muzak, aural wallpaper, and then a few notes pluck at your consciousness, and then some others, starting to unsettle you, until you realize, finally, it's a Led Zeppelin song, glossed and slicked in a way that should bring Jon Bonham's corpse staggering out of the grave like a zombie dervish, spinning out protest.
Why do we have to turn our cell phones off until we reach the stratopause? What's the point?
Sometimes people leave posters or pamphlets in the elevator, crumpled on the floor or taped to the side with illicit magnetic tape, suggesting alternate transportation or hijacking, TAKE THIS CAR SIDEWAYS or EJECT THE RICH. You have to read them at some point, because you end up looking at every available inch as it is, counting the rivets lining the corner or the number of teeth in a fellow passenger's mouth. You find yourself humming the music, or tapping your foot in time maybe, the fourteenth or fifteenth time it comes up, not realizing that by the end of this trip you'll never be able to listen to that music again.
Every time someone gets on, there's these new configurations, an inch to the left, a step to the right. Everyone's line of sight adjusts, never colliding with anyone else's like laser beams guarding a security vault, never meeting anyone else's eyes as though to do so would be to cross the beams and risk the universe's implosion.
Someone thought glass sides would be a good idea. They were wrong. It's spooky, as though space were reaching into the elevator, the stars fingering at the edge of your consciousness. Unsettling as standing on Alice's mushroom for some unstable souls. You always have to watch for that.
Everyone's there, but you're in an iron tank of solitude if you don't know your fellow travelers. Those people can look each other straight in the face, maybe even lean together, while all you can touch is the chilly glass in front of you, watching their reflections. Maybe you listen to them talking about last year's turkey-plasma or bitching about the music.
At what point did you realize—this trip will never end?
Afternotes
A conversation at Confusion led to this flash piece, which has not previously appeared in print. It has some similarities to "Bus Ride To Mars," a slipstream story produced before this piece.
SURROGATES
Floor 13: Government Offices
They were married on a Monday in the Matrimony office. A poster on the wall said, "Welcome to your new life!" Belinda signed the forms in her careful penmanship, but Bingo simply spit-signed, letting his DNA testify to his presence. There were three rooms processing couples and triads—larger family structures required even more complicated licenses than the one they had secured. This room was painted blue, and one wall was an enormous fish tank.
Three fish spoke to Belinda, but she ignored them. She wished she'd remembered to have the Insanity Chip nullified for the ceremony, but it had been a busy week. The fish pressed their mouths to the plastic separating them from her world. Word pearls rose from their lips, seeped upward, through the barrier, and whispered in the room.
After the computer had pronounced them spouses, Belinda and Bingo stood there grinning at each other while behind them silver fish swam back and forth, back and forth, as though imitating the waves they'd never known. A wall camera took their picture.
In a few moments, a wall slot spat out a plastic bag containing two chipkeys, a silver-colored frame around their wedding picture, and a checklist of Entitlements on a slip of dissolvable paper, already graying around the edges.
The clerk handed over the items. "This is where I tell you that you should treat everything as though it's new," she said. "Studies have shown that the marriages which survive the longest are the ones where the newlyweds begin to build their new life together."
"Thanks!" Bingo said with a bright smile. Belinda could tell how happy he was, like he couldn't stop grinning. He looked at her, and the fish tried even more frantically to say something, battering themselves against the plastic until they were just blood and silver scraps drifting in the water, but she ignored them and focused on Bingo and thoughts of butterflies.
Floor 22: Surrogates
"Preferences haven't changed?" the technician asked as he strapped Belinda into the configuring bed. The straps turned into flowers, tiny lilac-colored bells that smelled like uncertainty.
"No," Belinda said. The question surprised her. They had filled out the forms for marriage only two weeks ago, including the list of preferences for her latest surrogate. It was something she'd thought about for a long time. Her old surrogate had been given to her when she first started having sexual feelings, and she had put it away for good a few years ago, when she'd met Bingo.
"Do people really change their preferences at the last minute?" she asked.
"It's not that their preferences really change, so much," the tech said. "But sometimes after they've spent a little time thinking about it, they realize things that they didn't realize they wanted at first."
He checked his data pad. "Blue eyes, blonde hair, skin pigment pale brown, no scars, no disfigurements, face model Adam?"
"That's it," Belinda said. She'd picked a generic face. She didn't believe in getting attached to surrogates. Her father had chosen to keep the one she'd used all through her teenage years rather than recycle it. The choice was vaguely illegal by virtue of a Statute that was rarely enforced. A person was entitled to one surrogate, which could be replaced whenever you changed status levels, as she and Bingo had done by marrying. But her father was a sentimental sort. She wondered how he would cope now that she was out of the apartment and he was living by himself.
The flower straps tickled her wrists. Perfume netted her, dragged her into sleep, content and dreamy as the machine went about its work, measuring her and calibrating the surrogate to her dimensions.
Afterwards they looked at the visuals of their surrogates. She was surprised by Bingo's choices: he had gone into much more detail than she had, as though designing a flower or piece of jewelry. Her face model was Maria and she wore elaborate blue tattoos like webbing over her arms and spreading across her nipples, half obscured by her long red hair.
Belinda liked the simpler look of her surrogate and she liked knowing that it was specifically designed for her, that it would smell and feel right, that it was hers in a way nothing else would ever be.
"They'll be delivered
tomorrow, after we've done the final calibration," the clerk said. They signed data pads. "Congratulations," she said in a perfunctory tone and checked to make sure their names were spelled correctly.
Floor 77: Mental Services
On Floor 77, Belinda had her Insanity Chip reset so it would factor in her marriage. The Chips were subtle, she knew. They altered your perceptions, they showed the world in the way you wanted to see it. When she'd had a fight with her best friend Angie, she'd had the chip set so she couldn't see Angie for a week, even when the other girl was standing, shouting in her face. When she'd finally relented, missing Angie, though, she'd found the other had gone, moved away.
"I don't want the Chip to change Bingo," she told the doctor. "Let him stay constant."
The doctor fiddled with the machine, her stubby fingers recalibrating the keys. "Do you want hallucinations amped up or down?"
"What I want," Belinda said, "is for everything to seem more significant somehow. Can you do that?"
"Of course," the doctor said. She pressed a few more buttons and turned into a giant jellyfish that hung in the air, glistening greasily. "How is that?" Her voice was muffled, as though coming through water.
"Perfect," Belinda said.
Bingo was in the waiting room. He had worn his best for the wedding: gleaming black pants, a silver hoop in one ear, goatee trimmed to a point. His feet were bare. He was talking to the child beside him but he broke off when Belinda came in. He smiled at her, rising.
"Ready to go home?" he asked.
Behind him the child wavered into a frog, a puddle, a big-eyed kitten.
"Perfect," Belinda said again.
Elevator 17-3
In the elevator between floors 45-75, Belinda said, "You never thought about having an Insanity Chip? Life is more interesting that way."
He kissed her despite the two other women in the elevator. "Life is already interesting."
The younger woman sniffed and stared at the wall; the older woman smiled at them before she got off on floor 82. Belinda saw stars in her eyes, promise in her smile, omens spilling out of the net bag she carried.
In the shop, they bought a new bedspread, dishes, cleaning liquids. They ordered an assortment of food and chose the color of their walls. Belinda liked a yellow and white diamond pattern because it seemed to her when she stared at it long enough, figures danced across it, harlequins in shoes with long pointed toes, kicking them up and down as they capered. She heard it in her head like a complicated marching tune.
Bingo gave her a dubious look. He liked a plain blue. But he let her pick the wall pattern and in return she let him pick a muted gray rug flecked with earth tones, like walking across fabric pebbles, a gentle hum underfoot in the key of C.
Floor 689: Green Leaf Living Quarters
Floors 650-700 were Green Leaf Living Quarters. They would live on 689, in a studio that overlooked one of the four great hollow spaces contained inside the sector.
They kissed as they entered, dropping their bags in a cloud of butterflies beside the door. The curtains matched the walls, which had been prepared in the time they'd spent travelling on the elevator. It was as far in the Building as Belinda had ever travelled in one day. Bingo had been outside it to two other Buildings, but travel like that had never interested her. From what she'd seen on the holovids, every place looked much the same. Belinda kissed the tip of Bingo's nose before she went to the window and looked out.
Portals marked the sides of the living unit walls, and zip lines led from one to another, letting people circumvent the space on hand held lines. Down below was a great green park, filled with grass carpets and plants in pots. Over it stretched the mesh that would catch those who slipped despite the safety straps, or the multitudes of young who delighted in falling, landing on the stretchy softness of the field.
Bingo started supper and she rearranged the pillows on the sofa, then unpacked her clothes into the wall drawers and shelves. Bingo came in smelling of spices and steam and kissed her again.
Bingo worked in advertising and Belinda was an assistant textile designer. That was how they had met. Belinda didn't think it very romantic, but Bingo always told the story as though he was writing an advertisement for it: I Saw her And Then Wham Be Still My Heart. It made Belinda smile when Bingo talked like that.
After dinner they fucked, and fucked again. Bingo nibbled her ears and she tickled his nipples and they gave themselves to each other and murmured sweet things until they fell asleep.
Before breakfast, they uncrated the surrogates and turned them on, flipping the knob on the back of their necks. The surrogates clicked to life, their wide eyes fastening on Bingo and Belinda's faces. After orders, both went to the kitchen and started breakfast, then Bingo's surrogate emerged and began putting their belongings away. While they ate breakfast, the surrogates worked.
An animal came out of the crate that Belinda's had been in, which lay dissolving on the floor with the other one. Belinda didn't know what it was. It had the usual animal shape. It turned cartwheels on the floor and made Belinda laugh.
"What?" Bingo said. He was watching her face, the movement of her eyes tracking the back and forth of the animal, which had purple fur and hair made out of noodles.
"The chip makes me see funny things sometimes," she said.
He reached out and took her hand in his. "Funnier than me?" he said. The animal was behind him, hanging from the ceiling. Its noodles dangled, limp and shiny. The surrogates came in; they were done, so they went into their closet, ignoring Belinda and Bingo.
"I don't think of you as funny," she said.
They fucked on the kitchen table. Flapping plywood tongues, the cupboards talked to Belinda while she jolted back and forth. They sang folksongs, oh my darling Clementine and green hills hop to my Lou and sweet sweet summer enviro-clime.
On Sundays they went to her father's for dinner with his parents, who were still married and her other father, who was not. This father, Father Bob, worked as a restaurant manager, and they ate well on last night's restaurant leftovers, fungus shaped into simulacrums of more expensive creatures, scallops and firm-fleshed shrimp and exquisite orange roe.
Father Anton worked in a news studio and would tell them about the Anchors, what they liked, what they said. He had a fervid adoration for one Morning Host, a perky blonde woman a quarter his age, and when he told stories about her, he did so in hushed tones, like a primitive talking about God.
They drank liters of home-made beer, which his mother distilled in her kitchen and always brought, and afterwards they played cards around the table while the holovision blared news of the Building.
Father Bob kept the surrogates, his and Belinda's, out for company much of the time. She went over a couple of times to pick up belongings she'd left behind and found the three sitting watching holovid. Hers was the size of a fourteen or fifteen year old boy; it was propped in an easy chair while the other surrogate leaned on the sofa beside Bob.
She had decorated this place herself, but since her departure, Bob had been pulling it slowly but inexorably into his own style. Restaurant containers filled the cooler. He had hung up several old pictures scavenged from the last remodel, which Belinda had designed the fabric for. The pictures showed leaves and golden light and flowers like great white cups drowning in blue water. They did not match the pink and orange carpet underfoot; they made it look old and shoddy. She did not like pictures of water. The tank in the Matrimony office had creeped her out.
She realized Father Bob was talking to her.
She said, "What?"
"Are you okay?" He got up from the sofa and peered at her. Behind him on the wall, the pictures undulated and swayed as though they were windows to some vast, tide-drawn lake.
"Sure," she said. "I was just thinking about what it was like, growing up with you and Father Anton." She liked the new place better; she liked the tiny balcony, the view out onto the park. Here was quieter, certainly, a bit more privileged, but there wa
s something to be said for the hubbub that surrounded them, the people swinging past on the zip lines, taking a short cut across the space rather than circle around the living area.
"You had a better childhood than I did," he said. It was a familiar refrain and she tuned out the details of how his family had worked maintenance for years and finally been given the chance to emigrate to this Building, far above the ruined, rotting planet. The food riots. The cold.
She knew Bob had begged on the street and he'd been rather good at it. The same charm and glibness that served him well running the restaurant had allowed him to cajole money, food, a couch to sleep on from people. He had lived a nomadic, room-to-curb existence for several years before becoming more established. He had moved in with Anton two years before they had decided to have Belinda. And life was good now for him. They could afford surrogates to do their daily work, let them concentrate on important things.
Belinda was a Creative type, always had been, and she did appreciate the chance at that which Anton and Bob's bloodlines had bought her, not having had to fight her way out of a less interesting job. She liked what she did and she was good at it.
Buzzing bees, colored violet and licorice and steel, swarmed through the air and she almost flinched.
"Why do you keep that chip?" Bob said. "You're not a child anymore, Belinda. You don't need constant entertainment."
"It makes me think of things differently," she said. "It keeps me on my toes."
She liked her unexpected world, hidden from most. She liked to know that she, and she alone, could see the faces in the wall work, the swords in the grass, the walking trees that paraded across the park every dark, late, when almost everyone was sleeping, the surrogates in the closet unless Bingo had taken his to bed already.