“Fault! Liability! Just words! Does it matter to our children who is to blame? No. All they want is their lives back. Lives that were ruined because of the van de Oest patenting policy. What would it cost to set right? A few million? Hardly a drop in the company coffers. You should do what you can out of common decency. Who cares about who should have done what? We want to fix it. If guilt at your greed doesn’t motivate you, then humanity, common decency should.”
Carmen seems impervious. “The van de Oest Company sympathizes with your grief in the light of this tragedy. Although the suit for compensation and total grafts for all victims has been dismissed and we have been judged not liable, as a gesture of sympathy to the people of Caracas, the company has authorized me to offer prostheses to all who feel the need-”
The mother of the dead child is having none of that. “We don’t want charity,” she spits. “We want justice. We will not give up. While our children lie in their beds and look at us with their sad eyes we will follow you from country to country, crying ‘Justice! Justice!’ and we will be heard!”
Lore towels her hair dry. It was not Torini’s fault that the locals had tried to cut costs and improve their profit margin by using a generic substitute for the specially tailored van de Oest bacterium around which the whole project had been designed. She thinks about the project in Gdansk and what might happen if, sometime in the next eight months, some greedy or stupid contractor swaps out one bacterium for another. Disaster. She makes a note on her slate to review the continuing supervision of this project and the others in which she has so far been involved, Mistakes happen, but they can be prevented. Then she turns off the screen, dismissing the matter from her mind. It has nothing to do with her and there is a cold drink waiting in the bar.
Chapter 15
Common decency. I pushed my way out of the floor office and began to run. It was difficult to breathe in the hot, humid air by the water, and by the time I reached the readout station, I was gasping. I ran from trough to trough. No Paolo.
I stopped a moment. Think. I had to think. How would he be feeling? What did he know about the plant? Where would he go?
“Sabotage? How could someone sabotage this place?”
“Any number of ways, but the best place would be right at the beginning… ”
The influent. I ran.
There are times when the brain can’t deal with what it sees, so part of it sits back and the rest looks closely at some irrelevant piece of information. I noted that the concrete under my feet was shuddering with the weight of water coursing beneath it; that when the huge trap in the floor was pulled back the air not only hissed and roared with the exposed flow, but that it tasted different.
And why, I wondered, were people who were about to kill themselves so compulsively neat?
Paolo’s skinny was beautifully folded, collar top-and-forward the way shirts are sold in their cellophane packages. I had never been able to fold clothes like that. His limbs were piled just as neatly next to the skinny, all except one arm, which lay on its own to the side. I wondered idly how he had managed to take off that last arm, the right, I think. I supposed the designers had worked out a simple push-and-twist method.
Paolo was belly-down at the corner of the open trap, torso balanced over the chasm, lowering his throat toward the buzz razor jammed into the space between cover and floor.
“Don’t,” I said. Don’t, because it will please Hepple; because it will make a mess and I’ll have to clean it up. Don’t, because you won’t be able to change your mind later; because if you do, oh, I’ll feel guilty, so guilty, and I won’t, ever, be able to make it up to you…
He couldn’t hear me, of course, but he saw me, saw my lips, and his muscles knotted long enough to hold his upper body away from the humming blade, a few inches above the point where he would fall, and I moved gently, not too quickly, and lifted the slippery, ugly razor free. I flicked it off. The muscles over his ribs were tight and absolutely still. He hung in the balance. I didn’t think I could hold him up if he started to fall.
“Don’t move,” I said. “Don’t move.” I put the razor down carefully, not wanting to make a sudden move, a noise that might startle him out of his stasis. His skin gleamed with sweat. I knelt, braced one hand on the floor, and slid the other around his waist. If he wanted to, he could throw us both off, and we’d be sucked away in seconds and drowned, if we weren’t crushed first. He doesn’t know you’re a van de Oest, I told myself. I could feel him trembling.
I heaved him away from the edge.
He lay on his back, limbless, staring at the ceiling. I had the urge to apologize.
I got up and hit the stud that closed up the floor. I could hear his harsh breathing. I picked up the pile of limbs, carried them to his side. “Which one do you want first, right or left?”
“Right.”
We were both very matter-of-fact. There was no other way to be. I reconnected the prosthesis to his right shoulder, then turned away politely while he snapped on the other arm and then the legs. When he had put his skinny back on, I squatted down beside him and handed him the razor. He slipped it under his left cuff with a practiced motion. Carrying a razor was a habit. I wondered how I would have felt, before, if I’d known that.
His eyes were brown, opaque. “You shouldn’t have stopped me.”
“Why?”
For a moment I thought he would not bother to answer. Then he looked at me for a long time, and asked, “Who am I?”
“Paolo Cruz.”
“No. I’m nobody, a nothing.” So bitter. “The only person who cares that I exist is my brother. He brought us, me and my sister, here from Venezuela, to lobby for our rights. But my sister died, and no one will listen to me or my brother. ‘It was all settled long ago,’ the courts say. They’ve given us nothing. Except these plastic arms and legs. And maybe that’s all me and people like me are worth.”
No, I wanted to say. But why should he believe me? Who had there ever been to tell him any different?
“To the courts and the medical industry, to those rich people who caused all this in the first place, I’m one of the disposable masses. Not even wholly human.” He thrust his arm at me. “Feel that.”
“Feel it!”
It was soft and warm and dry. Pleasant.
“Just once, I thought, just once I wanted to be someone to those people, those Hepples and van de Oests. If I killed myself here, if my body fell into the water, they would have to turn everything off. They’d lose money. They would know who I was, me, Paolo Cruz, the man made of plastic.”
I did not know how to tell him that all his death would have accomplished was a minor inconvenience to this shift: his corpse would have been caught on the sieves, easily fished out, and the blood would only have provided more food for the microbes. Unless, of course, he’d thrown in his prostheses, which might have been tough enough to foul the machinery.
We were quiet for a while, then I stood up. “Are you coming back to work? Maybe Magyar will find a way to get your job back.”
“No. I don’t want to be a nobody in this place anymore.”
“But with what I’m teaching you, you could…” I shut up. I could not give him self-esteem. That was something he had to find for himself.
“What will you do?”
“I’ll think of something.” He smiled humorlessly, walked over to the doorway marked Emergency Exit, and opened it. Alarms rang. “I hope Hepple thinks all the pipes have burst.”
He left without a backward glance. After a moment, I closed the door behind him. The alarms shut off abruptly.
When I got back to the troughs, I found it had only been twenty minutes since I had gone with Magyar to Hepple’s office. I went about my work mechanically.
Magyar appeared. She was hushed. “Who used that door?” She looked around. “Cruz?”
“He’s gone.”
She swore. “And I got him his job back, too.”
“I told him you would.” Though
I hadn’t believed it. “How did you manage it?”
“I put myself on the line, just confronting Hepple.” She was trying to explain something. “I took a few risks. I put you on the line, too.”
I suddenly felt very tired. “What have you done?”
“I told him he couldn’t fire Cruz on such shaky grounds, especially since a government employee had witnessed the whole affair.”
“You told him-”
Magyar’s eyes gleamed. “I didn’t actually say anything straight out, just hinted around. And then he said something about you spouting regulations at him, and got thoughtful. Then he said that, yes, maybe he had been hasty, and the downsizing would have to be looked at carefully and systematically. So Paolo is back in. Or would have been. And Hepple thinks we’ve got his balls in a press, so everything’s back to normal.”
It wasn’t. It never would be, not when I kept seeing that slack, empty look in Paolo’s eyes, hearing him say I am nothing.
“What’s the matter? I mean, I didn’t expect handsprings, but thanks wouldn’t be out of order. Or are you just upset that I told Hepple you weren’t quite who you seem to be? Which is something we still haven’t cleared up.”
“I’m not a government employee,” I said wearily. “I’m not after your job. I don’t mean anyone any harm at all. I’m glad you wanted to help Paolo, but as you can see, it’s too late. All I want…” I felt dizzy for a minute. “I want…” I wanted to tell her that all I wanted was to do my job and be left alone, but I found myself crying. “He tried to kill himself. He took off his… and the razor…”
Magyar took my arm tightly. I thought she was worried I would fall into the trough, or run amok, or something, but she just said, “Don’t rub your eyes. You don’t know what’s on your hands.”
Very sensible. And then she was walking me somewhere while I rambled on about Paolo and his limbs and how he had tried to kill himself. I found we were in the breakroom. She made me wash my hands, then gave me a towel. Neither of us spoke. The eerie sense of deja vu hit me, and I laughed.
“I wonder if Paolo felt like this when I was taking away his razor,” I explained. “As though he was about five years old and being humored by a wise, kind person.” And then I felt embarrassed.
She didn’t launch into a denial. Of course she was humoring me. That’s what you did with someone in distress. You patted them on the head, told them everything was fine, and waited for them to get back up to speed with reality.
I sighed. “We should get back.”
Magyar looked at her watch. “Are you up to date in your readings for Hepple? Good. Then you may as well stay here. We break in ten minutes.”
She seemed relieved to get away.
* * *
Lore woke up. It was five in the morning. She pulled a blanket around her shoulders and stumbled out of bed.
Spanner was at the workbench. Lore watched as she picked up a pair of delicate tweezers and opened up a PIDA, touched something inside, then inserted it into her box. She flipped it shut, hummed to herself at the readout, tapped a few keys.
“You’re very good at that,” Lore said.
“I know.” Spanner turned. “What gets you out of bed at this hour?”
“Just wondered what you were up to.” Spanner went back to her screen. “You know, you could get a job doing that.”
Spanner turned again, smiling. “Now, why would I need a job?”
The first few times she had gone to the Polar Bear, Lore had not realized that Spanner was doing business. Spanner would share a drink and a few words, there would be a slap on the back or a nod, and occasionally something would change hands—illegal PIDAs, temporary debit blanks, information. They would go home and Spanner would unload her pockets. The next day she would spend hours at her screens, matching magnetic codes, stripping information; copying the corporate electromagnetic signatures on a stolen debit card, transferring them to a blank; or simply calling people and telling them she had what they wanted. Hyn and Zimmer figured a great deal in the blanks transactions—“They’re more or less untraceable, dear”—but it was Billy who disturbed Lore the most. Every week or so he would cruise by, sometimes with Ann, usually without, and have a quiet word with Spanner, usually when they were at the bar and out of everyone else’s earshot. Lore thought she heard them talking about chickens, but she tried not to listen.
It was around February that Lore noticed a difference in Spanner’s bar dealings. She seemed to be talking more, and more urgently; there was more head shaking and less back-slapping, fewer things changing hands. And then one day Lore realized she had not seen Hyn or Zimmer for a while.
“What’s going on?” she asked Spanner.
“Business is getting tight.”
“Anything to worry about?”
“Not yet. There are always other ways to make money.”
Lore did not want to ask about that. “Where have Hyn and Zimmer been lately?”
“Who?” Spanner laughed. “They’re a couple of cautious old foxes. Whenever the police are cracking down they disappear for a while.”
“Shouldn’t you be more careful?”
“Oh, I’m too smart for the police.”
Nevertheless, Lore noticed that Spanner went out later and for shorter periods, and once she lay low for forty-eight hours straight, wouldn’t let Lore answer the screen at all. But then the next day she went out and came back grinning.
“Close your eyes.” Lore did. “Now open them and look on the bed.”
It was a Hammex 20. Lore picked it up, ran her hands over its familiar black curves. “These aren’t cheap.” She flicked the power switch, peered through the viewfinder. The drive hummed smoothly.
“Do you like it?”
“It seems in good condition.” She put it back on the bed and looked at it for a while, remembering Ratnapida, her first pictures of goldfish swimming slowly through crystal and shadowed water. She turned to face Spanner. “How can we afford it if business is bad?”
Spanner shrugged.
Lore thought of Billy, his mean eyes and fast mouth. “Are we in debt?”
“No.”
“Then how did we afford it?”
“I thought you’d like it.” Spanner sounded irritated.
“I do, I just don’t know how we can afford it.”
“Well, we can.”
Lore thought of Spanner’s disappearances, how tense she had been when she came back. The skin on the back of her neck felt tight. “How?”
“Does it matter?”
It did, but Lore did not have the courage to push any further. She was not sure she really wanted to know how Spanner had come up with the money, who she was blackmailing about what. Or what else she might be doing. Spanner, as though sensing her acquiescence, smiled and slid an arm around Lore’s waist.
“Do you like it? Really?”
Lore forced herself to smile. “You got exactly the right kind. They have the best lenses.” And despite herself, she was touched. The old-fashioned Hammexes were not easy to find these days. She imagined Spanner going from one dealer to another, reading the trade bulletins, bargaining. How she got the money, who had suffered, was none of Lore’s business. “Let’s find a disk and take some pictures.”
It was spring and Lore had the windows open. The soft breeze that blew across her editing desk smelled of new green. There were tiny buds on the branches outside—all the branches except one. She wondered how that had happened, why one branch would die while the others thrived. She supposed it just happened. Parts of things died. Nature. The door banged open. She turned, smiling, expecting Spanner to tell her they had made a lot of money.
Spanner threw a bag on the couch. “They’re not selling.”
“What?” Lore’s smile faded.
“The films aren’t selling.”
“You’ve been making a lot of copies.”
“Oh, I can move the units, but not for enough money. Not as much as we need. People tell me they’
re tired of the same bodies in different situations.”
Lore looked at the frame lit on the screen. She did good work, but her library was so limited. “I need some live action. Or a bigger library.”
Spanner nodded and dropped onto the couch.
“You want me to stop?”
“No,” Spanner said. “Let me think about it awhile.”
Two days later, she disappeared for more than twenty-four hours. When she came back, she looked exhausted, but she was grinning.
“I’ve got something special.” She held up a vial full of some clear, oily liquid.
“What is it?”
“You’ll see. Come here.” Spanner dipped a fingertip into the neck of the bottle, rubbed the finger along Lore’s throat. She did the same for herself. “Just a little. It’s very concentrated.”
“It’s a drug? What kind?”
“You’ll see,” she said again, and her voice was low and multilayered, her eyes dark. Lore wanted to trace Spanner’s cheekbones with her fingertips, run her palm across her shoulders, reach down into her clothes, touch her, feel her moving under her hands. She wanted it urgently. She ached.
An aphrodisiac, then, a pheromone, but more powerful than any she had heard of, legal or illegal. This was unstoppable. Spanner began to unbutton her dress. Lore moaned.
“Anything you like, baby, anything.”
There were about thirty people in the big room, spilling out into the kitchen, onto the steps. Lore introduced people, though most of them knew each other better than she did. Everyone was drinking very steadily. She brought out snacks, made sure the music never faltered. She avoided Billy, who just stood in the corner and watched everything with his small, flat eyes that reminded her of all the things she tried not to think about.
“I don’t like him,” she hissed to Spanner in the kitchen.
“You don’t have to like him,” Spanner said, “just be civil. This is business.”
Lore refilled her glass and went back into the living room. Her wine was cold and aromatic, like sunshine at thirty thousand feet. The music was loud and insistent. Ellen was talking to someone at the other side of the room; they were laughing. Lore sat on the floor and wondered where Ruth was.
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