Instead of gasps from everyone now, and perhaps applause, followed by fear, which they should be feeling, four of the nine people listening to Dex turn away, to the stage, to the song coming together.
No need to embarrass poor Charlotte any more than she already is. Dex knows that’s what they’re thinking.
“No!” he yells, his hands fists by his pockets. “Brown, Molly Brown, the unsinkable, get it? Jock Law, violinist, Teddy Ronald, pianist, Percy Cornelius, freaking cello! Don’t you see it? What this means?”
“What this means?” Dex’s mom says, her voice all about talking him down, not really a question at all.
Dex pushes his hands into his forehead, pulls his hair, closes his eyes, and is about to launch into his trademark hysterics—“It’s happening again, can’t you see?”—when Officer Dampier, who knows Dex from the old days, takes him by the hand and upper arm, guides him forcibly away from the night’s entertainment, so that, when the Winston Family Orchestra eases into what should be their trademark song, if anybody knew anything, all Dex can do from the backseat of the town’s only police car is bang his head against the unbreakable glass, scream and beg for them not to play that song, any song but that one, please.
Don’t they understand what they’re doing, the fire they’re playing with?
But it’s not fire at all.
It’s ice.
As the orchestra swells with song, a series of unlikely collisions out in what Dex would know is the Kupier belt begins. Just a gentle tap at first, a nudge, but the end result of those tumbling collisions will be the disruption of a comet—one of the true icebergs of space—the disruption of its elliptical path through the solar system, redirecting it for a fateful intersection with Earth, a date with history that only unsinkable Millicent Brown will be able to record, if only she can find a pen. If only there are any pens.
Dex shakes his head no, no, his eyes finally settling on one old man near the stage, arranging and rearranging his lawn chair, as if that makes all the difference here.
Popular sayings, two thousand, please.
This is how it begins.
JUMPERS
Case in point: Ron’s clothes started coming off about a quarter of an hour before lunch. At first it was just the cuffs of his shirt snapping open, one side of his tie getting longer and longer, but by the time he got back from the sandwich shop on the first floor, pants were becoming an issue his belt couldn’t deal with. On the way to his desk Myrna smirked at him and his unkemptness; they were currently having a contest about who could pretend they had the most money, and this wasn’t helping him. Behind him she threw away a tray of expensive chocolates after picking out the one she liked.
At his desk Ron went though the formalities: giving the clients he called free advice, and doing so loudly and clearly, as if he didn’t need ten percent off them. But then his watchband came loose in the middle of an over-generous hand-flourish and landed deep in the mayonnaise of his sandwich. He held his breath, listening for the telescoping of Myrna’s pupils, but she was in stealth mode, suddenly standing over his inbox.
“Too bad . . . ” she said, eyebrows up in a fake arch.
Ron licked his lips, curled his toes to keep his loafers on, and told her not really, he’d been needing a new watch for months. One without all those extra, expensive features. And he hadn’t really been hungry in the first place, just didn’t want everyone thinking he was an android or something.
Myrna nodded, told him that she appreciated that, his efforts to maintain social decorum. It was the small things that would count, in the end. “But really,” she added confidentially, leaning close, looking from side to side of his face, “you don’t need to worry, doll. You’re not quite symmetrical enough to be machine-made.”
In response, Ron’s hair caught whatever his clothes had, and mussed all over to one side.
It wasn’t a good day.
He spent the next two hours dialing his own number so Myrna wouldn’t know he was giving advice to the dial tone. One time he thought he caught her leaning a little too far over in his chair, eyeing the chocolate in her trashcan, but as it turned out there was a pencil on the floor she was after.
“You got the ti—?” she asked him when their eyes met, then made a show of looking to his desk, the sandwich and the watch now balled together in the same paper. She smiled an apology, turned instead to the huge clock set into the wall: 3:10. Ron’s custom-ordered watch had been in the mayonnaise now for longer than any manufacturer would recommend. He would finish paying for it in four months.
He nodded to Myrna that it was no problem, it was an easy mistake to make. And he was forgiving—could afford to be forgiving. Even if his pants were at his ankles, now his knees.
Ron pulled them back up while sitting down—no small feat—then snaked his emergency suspenders out of his top drawer, shouldered into them under cover of his wingback chair.
He had to get out of here, out of the office, just for a bit. Hit one of the vendors on the street, salvage something like lunch from the day. It owed him that. He wasn’t an android, after all. He said this to himself over and over as he walked mechanically across the office, Myrna asking if everything was all right, he looked pale, pekid. Moreso than usual, she meant with a smirk.
Ron opened his mouth to lie to her, try to match her excess for excess, but nothing came out. He was empty, or too full. His mouth no longer worked. He looked hard and imploring to Myrna—trying to surrender, beg for mercy—and Myrna stepped out of character for a moment, asked it again, this time with feeling: “You all right?”
Ron shook his head no, and then the elevator doors were embracing him, isolating him.
In the chrome reflection his fists were buried deep in his pockets, clutching fabric, his elbows held close to his side, feet and knees touching, resisting.
A woman on the third floor tried to get on but Ron shook his head no. Somewhere above him a pencil was falling into a trashcan, returning to its owner with a chocolate treat proudly speared.
It didn’t matter.
Ron put his watch back on and it didn’t smell good.
On the street the delicate among the masses allowed him room to smear past, and he took it. He didn’t need their approval. All he needed was a vendor, please. As if in answer, at the end of the passageway the crowd afforded him, there appeared a vendor, leaning back to counterbalance his tray. He nodded yes to Ron, once, and Ron stumbled to him, leaving his shoes behind like footprints.
Something wasn’t right, though: the holes in the vendor’s tray which should be holding peanuts or popcorn or something salty were all hollow and black. Ron tracked up the stripes of the vendor’s apron to his face.
“Two dollars,” the vendor’s mouth enunciated, and then he arched his eyebrows to Ron, waiting for a response. It was a challenge.
Ron grubbed a five from his wallet, didn’t understand.
The man clipped it onto one of the tray’s straps and then folded out twin aluminum shoulder supports, eased into them. The kind you wear at an amusement park ride. Next he smiled, and his teeth were filmed in rich chocolate, sick chocolate. He handed Ron a club sheathed in dirty sheepskin; the handle-end was strung to the tray, and Ron nodded his head to the vendor that he got it, yes, he was getting it, and by now a hesitant crowd had gathered. The vendor leaned back further yet, in anticipation, and started cranking a handle with his right hand, and when the first mole popped up out of his hole Ron clubbed its rodent grin back down where it belonged, and then another shot up near the back corner of the tray, smirking, and Ron clubbed it down as well, and then they were coming up two at a time, in impossible combinations, and the crowd was smiling behind their hands.
When his five dollars was spent, Ron offered twenty-two more, all he had on him. If only Myrna could see this, the way the tendons in the vendor’s neck were standing out, the capillaries bursting in his eyes, the chocolate welling up in the back of his throat. Ron was a machine. Twenty-two dollars
later he wouldn’t surrender his club, either, but stood there, pants at ankle-level, shirt flapping, the crowd holding its breath for him, and that was approximately when I first came into contact with him, intuited the day that must have gotten him here.
After a series of long, mole-less minutes, Ron trying to will the vendor to turn that handle just one more time, he finally sheathed the club, looked left, right, and down, at his bare feet, and became small again. We’ve all been there. As he walked away, the crowd both giving him generous room and pretending he didn’t exist, I followed at a discreet distance, as the manual instructs, until—on the third time around his building—Ron looked to his watch for the time, only the time wasn’t there. Under the beveled glass face there was just oil and vinegar suspended in egg yolk. He swallowed loud, stomaching some feeling, some realization, and then overcorrected for his mistake, his forgetfulness, and looked up the side of the building. All the way to the top, to the fire door on the roof the smokers had rigged. And he stared. And he had ideas that brought an easy grin to the corner of his mouth, and that was when I stepped forward, put my right hand on his left shoulder, locked eyes with him, and simply shook my head no. Not that. Not today.
He stared back at me, and, gradually—as they all do—the muscles in his face untensed, and he agreed with me for no other reason than that I had been trained to affect a caring look, been taught about the way the lips are and aren’t held, the proper distance between eye and brow, how the tilt of the head can make all the difference.
Not today.
I stood there for a moment longer and then backed into the suits flowing by, became part of them again, my part of Ron’s life over before it really even began. And this was only a Tuesday. Sometimes on a Friday I’ll save six of them before lunch.
THE SEA OF INTRANQUILITY
This was back when we still hadn’t figured out the key to living forever, back when all the dumb schmucks about to check out down on Earth would pay to have their minds warehoused in the chitinous skin of those giant low-grav shrimp and lobsters they’d let loose on the moon, in all the new oceans that happened when the craters filled up with industrial rain.
Back in the stupid days, I mean.
I was right in the thick of it.
See this scar, right here?
It’s from then. Not from a giant claw or some antennae whipping back and forth like you’d think, either.
It’s from a dame.
And before you jump on my case for calling her that, dial back to then if you can. Everybody was financing family crests, becoming instantly royalty. Dukes, princesses, counts, a few kings, an emperor or two, and ‘dame,’ that shuffles in there somewhere, I’m not just real sure where. Maybe it’s like a knight?
Guys who’ve been reduced to p.i. work late in life, well. There weren’t a lot of princes among us, I guess you could say. Mostly mongrels, if you want the truth, and even in that pack, I wasn’t top dog.
My office was the storage room above a bar. When I could make it upstairs at closing time, it was also my bedroom. When I couldn’t make it down, it was my cell. You get the picture. These weren’t exactly my gravy days.
But then your mom walked in.
She carried her breasts before her like a platter of cookies, I swear. Just looking up and seeing her, I was ten years old again. But growing fast.
As for how she found me, your guess is as good as mine. I’d guess she lucked onto me in the Directory. For all I know, one of those gadgets she had lacquered into her fingernails could find a midpoint between Discretion and Gullibility, then associate a name with it.
Rock Turner, p.i.
At your service, ma’am.
I’d say your mom was all legs, except for her breasts.
It’s been a clean two years since that day, but I’m guessing that if she walked through this door, I’d forget what I was saying all over again.
Just like then.
I was on the phone with a former client, trying to leverage another payment, even considering taking payments toward that payment, but when your mom sat down on the other side of my desk, I hung up as gently as I could.
“What can I do you for?” I asked.
She settled into this tall chair I had back then, crossed her legs like she’d just flunked out of leg-crossing school. At least the one for ladies.
I would have lit her cigarette for her, except for the bans. Everybody was afraid of lighting the atmosphere on fire again. What they were really afraid of was that smokers would be the only ones able to breathe fire, the only ones to come out the other side, but still, you could get fined, and, since they’d taxed smokes to hell and back, I’d quit carrying my lighter.
Until now, though, until I needed a good reason to lean forward, change my point of view, I hadn’t much regretted it.
“My husband,” she said. Because it had been highlighted in her script, probably. Because she’d seen all the old watchies, knew what was expected of her here.
I didn’t care. Not that she was lying to me, and not that she was married. Really, the first, the deceit and how easy it seemed to come to her, it was what was making the marriage not so important at the moment.
Anyway, I won’t bore you with the rest of what she’d made up to bait me in. It was the usual sob-story of being cheated on, a prisoner in her own house, victim of the fairy tale, all that. She even worked her own mom in somewhere, but then, towards the end, we got to the important part: her husband had checked out.
She didn’t want to find him because she loved him, but because the house detectives were closing in on her, she was pretty sure.
You might not remember that, though, right? ‘Check out?’ It wasn’t the technical term, was just what you said about somebody when they’d called the Service. Had one of their bots come out, attach that thing to your head. The SoulSucker.
Everybody remembers them.
Ten minutes with a SoulSucker and the most important parts of you were in storage thee hundred K away, had become a kind of transparent amoeba or bacteria in a giant lobster’s shell. You were part of its armor, now. You were in storage.
As for the tech on that, I’m probably the wrong detective to ask. Far as I could follow, with crustaceans, we’d always thought they were native to Earth. Cockroaches of the sea, all that. Good for dinner and date, just creepy the rest of the time. But, turned out, they were creepier than we’d ever thought. They weren’t from Earth at all, had just drifted down some millions of years ago. And, the only reason they were all small and puny, it was our sludgy gravity, shaping them. Keeping them down.
I mean, yeah, on the moon they still had that buggy look, don’t get me wrong. But they were monster-huge, and their proportions were just different enough to make you nervous, and, lo and behold, get enough of them in the same heavy-water tank like you’ve got on the moon, and bam, them suckers can lock together like puzzles. Not to make some even bigger lobster or shrimp, but . . . nobody really knew. Some natural part of their life cycle, or were they huddling up to plot against us?
You could take a sub, pry them apart, but they’d just fall away dead, and those ones that fell away, none of the other lobsters or crabs would eat them. It was like they were poisoned, or fallen soldiers.
Like I said: creepy as hell.
Still, we’re pretty smart monkeys down here on Earth sometimes. We tested the water and, surprise, when they all locked arms like that, got their mental space orgy on, it released something into the water that changed the other lobsters that were still solo, waiting their turn.
It changed them so we could use them like storage devices.
And that’s where your dad was, evidently.
In one of a hundred and twenty-two giant lobsters in uncharted lakes on the moon.
The rub, though, it was that somebody had put him there.
He hadn’t made the call himself.
Somebody’d dropped a serious dime on him. My job was to roll it off.
The blast to get
me lunarside was the usual thing.
I softened it with four hours at the bar—two on Earth, two on the moon, all the drinks there swirling with calcium so that you’d have grit in your mouth after tying one on proper.
Like I care about a little chalkmouth.
I wiped my lips and found myself a captain. Not the one your mom had hired, because I do have a few self-preservation instincts, mind.
The guy I found was a girl. She carried a laser bullwhip on each hip. I didn’t ask what for.
Hand in hand like she’d claimed me for the night, we made our way out to her ship and she took us across to the Sea of Tranquility.
All the seas kept the same names they’d had when they were just craters. Like I say, these were the stupid times.
As for why we knew to go there and not to any of the others, it was that the investigation into your mom, it was only three days old, meaning your dad couldn’t have checked out more than four days ago. So—I didn’t get my license for nothing—of course he’d still be in the Sea of Tranquility. It was the staging area, was where the sensors monitored whether your personality was going to synch up with your shrimp or not.
If not, no big deal, they could move you to a crab, and if that wasn’t love at first insertion, then they’d just load you onto one of the krill. On Earth, they were a joke, were nothing, but in low-grav, they were zeppelins, floating through the new seas. They were gods, dwarfing any of the lobsters or crabs. Who knew, right?
Anyway, the first week out of your body, they liked to keep tabs, just to report back to the family on Earth: “Papa Walter’s loving it up here! He’s in the third right-side leg of a snow crab forty feet tall! He’ll be ready for whenever you decide to download him!”
You know the racket.
Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth Page 5