Yarn

by Jon Armstrong

  I played back what she'd said a moment before because I'd never heard her called Miss Bunné before. "Are Miss Bunné and M-Bunny related?"

  Vada pointed at me as if I had won a prize. "Yes, good customer in the front and back row! Excellent deduction and gastromolecular computation." Her eyes glowed. "They are, in fact, the very same."

  "What does a t'up celeb have to do with the slubs?"

  "Ah, the workings, the mechanisms, and the logic. The key and the rhythm of the history and the chronicle!" Vada put her wrist at her forehead and assumed a woeful pose. "How can it all be revealed and explained?"

  "Tone it down," complained Red Hat. "You're scaring him."

  Vada let her arms drop. "Shut up. We're just having fun."

  I glanced between them and despaired. They were definitely a couple.

  "Anyway," she said, narrowing her eyes at him. "Yes… it's odd. It's strange, but Bunné runs M-Bunny. She has consolidated her authority and her reach. It's high art and low power. It's a vast and vertically integrated business, and it's her psychosexual playground. The city and the slubs are in fact connected at one deadly fulcrum."

  Red Hat peered at his screen and then hurriedly yanked a lever. "I got the master cable!" he crowed. The ship lurched hard. Vada crashed on top of me. I almost tumbled off my chair but managed to stay on and held her up.

  "Thanks." Stepping back, she brushed herself off. "Sorry about that." The theater was gone from her voice. She picked up her fallen chair and sat.

  Out the windows, I could see that we were moving up at three times the normal speed. I whispered to Vada. "You don't weigh anything."

  "My bones are light like a bird's."

  "So you are genetically patented?"

  She smiled as if glad I had remembered the line from her introduction. "I suppose you could say that all the last Toue were."

  "Toes?"

  "Toue!" she said with ire and amusement. "We're an ancient line from the lost tribe of weavers." Her expression darkened. "Now, we are a dying few."

  I figured this was more of her version of warTalk.

  "One hundred stories," said Red Hat.

  "The Toue were as talented and strong as the fabrics we wove, but we were persecuted for our art and our insular ways. We were thrown from our homeland, and for years lived in the depths of Europa10. Despite the conditions, we produced beautiful fabric, but, sadly, we became more militant, more paranoid, and we lost our way." She glanced at Red Hat, who was concentrating on the controls. "Before the treaty that protected us ran out, the elders tried to create a new breed who would carry on the tradition. We are a part of that sorry lot." She paused for a long, thoughtful beat. "At least that's the official storybook version."

  I nodded, but I had gotten lost. "So, you knew my dad?"

  Vada spoke in a serious and thoughtful tone. "Mark Tar Octopus was your dad's nom de fashion."

  The name sounded ludicrous. "Mark Tar Octopus?"

  Vada laughed as if she agreed. Red Hat said, "Two hundred."

  "Textiles, texturizing, and non-wovens were his original focus. That was before we knew him. Later, he became CEO of a fabric company and changed his name again. I never liked that name or persona." Her mouth shrunk thoughtfully. "He traveled all over the world for his business, and I think it was through the travel that he saw how things truly worked and the desperate imbalances. I'm not sure when it was, but he decided to fight and that's about the time we met him."

  Traveled the world? I felt a clenching inside my chest. "I knew him as an M-Bunny rep." Beyond the windows the lights and textures of the buildings sped by.

  "Three hundred stories," said Red Hat.

  Vada glared at me skeptically. "He could do just about anything he wanted."

  This explained why I almost never saw him, but then I remembered when he showed up in the slubs bruised, battered, and covered with Xi rash. "What happened to him?"

  Vada seemed reluctant to speak. "For now, let's just say that he tried to assassinate someone and failed. If you'll be patient, the goal of our journey is to help you understand. So a better question is: How many men are recycled in the slubs?"

  I couldn't think. I stared out a window as the city raced by and wondered why my father hadn't told me anything? He wasn't just an important M-Bunny rep who traveled to different regions. He was a city man who did all sorts of things. The idea-while impossible-didn't actually surprise me. There had always been something different about him.

  "Four hundred stories," announced Red Hat.

  In the end, I hadn't known him at all. Maybe my father hadn't liked me, hadn't loved me. Maybe he hadn't thought me worthy. He had left me out in the corn like an unwanted child, an orphan. "He wanted to be recycled for the bonus. He had a Xi rash-I didn't know that-and he wanted me to switch clans. I didn't know about anything else."

  "Your dad came to think of recycling as a terrible crime."

  "A crime," I repeated. "He wanted it. I wanted to try and cure him, but he fought the whole time. I bought stuff from the COM, but he didn't even want it!"

  Vada pursed her mouth sadly.

  "I was there when he died… or almost there. He wanted to be recycled." I stopped and began to choke. "All he wanted was to help the corn."

  "Maybe yes… maybe no." Vada gestured beyond the ship. "In the slubs, corn is put ahead of human life." She bit her bottom lip. "And maybe that is the way to save the world. Or part of the world… or some concept of the world. Or… maybe it's just a marketing ploy and a way to rationalize cheap labor." She paused for a moment and looked me over as if unsure she should go on. When she did, her voice was softer. "What I'm saying is that your dad didn't believe that was the way to save the world, that a world like that was worth saving. In fact, he thought it was better to fight against it."

  I remembered one of the few days we'd been together, walking through the early summer fields. The corn had been as tall as me. I had looked up and it was as if his eyes had gone gold with the joy of it. He'd seemed more at peace than I had ever seen him. When I spoke, I couldn't stop my voice from vibrating. "He didn't say anything to me."

  Vada swallowed. "I know. I am sorry."

  "Coming up on seven hundred."

  "Shit!" Vada jumped up, and slapped a red-gloved hand on my shoulder. "Give me a boost!" She lifted her chin to the ceiling and I saw a round doorway I hadn't seen before.

  "What for?"

  "Hurry! You'll see."

  I didn't feel like doing anything. I wanted to find some empty corner of the city and unravel. Knitting my fingers together, I bent my legs, and when Vada put one of her red-booted feet in my hands and stepped up, she was like a bird in my arms. Balancing with a hand on top of my head, she stepped up onto my shoulders. For a moment I was inside the hush of her long red dress. The smell was of honey and musk. Her stockinged legs were patterned with the lacy octagons of the city's towers.

  Her hips twisted to the left and she grunted as she worked them. I peeked up at her crotch. There, held in with two small straps, was a gleaming pair of silver scissors with three-inch blades. I felt afraid of and for her.

  She lifted herself through the opening onto the roof and turned to peer at me as the wind tussled her hair and dress. "Stand on a chair. I'll help you up."

  I was still caught in the weave of desire and fear I'd found in the curtain of her dress. Was she going to cut me up there? Was I really safe? I stepped onto my chair. Vada reached down, I, up. Grasping my wrist, she pulled me up onto the roof of the ship with one arm as if I were the one who weighed nothing.

  Outside the plush interior of the entervator, I suddenly felt every inner chill made real on my skin. It was like being thrust from the womb. The ship wasn't moving up anymore, but was gently rocking back and forth.

  "Hold on!" The wind quickly whisked away her words.

  Circling the roof portal and the cable mechanism was a thin metal guardrail. I grabbed at the icy metal, unmoored. From here we could see the rooftops, the po
ints, the spires, and the antennas of the other buildings. Leaning forward, I peered over the edge of the Europa. It was like looking down the lit barrel of a gigantic cannon. All lines focused on the wide atrium a mile below. Beyond the buildings the rest of the word was black. I shivered and imagined myself falling-spinning back down to earth for hours.

  Above us loomed only one tower-Bunné's, which was called The Zea. I could see the edge of the enormous open-air amphitheater atop the high rise.

  I turned to Vada. "It's amazing!"

  She grinned. "Scary, right?"

  "Yes."

  Vada glanced to her right. The air fluttered her hair. "The wind tonight makes this a little more dangerous to navigate, but I think we'll be fine."

  I glanced up at the Zea. I thought I heard sounds coming from the top of the building-the cheering of a crowd and the hammer of a party beat. It suddenly seemed a horrible distortion-the music of my suicide. I wanted desperately to return to Pilla, to the simple chains of her expectations.

  A strange smile passed Vada's face, and she shouted, "We're ready!" down the porthole.

  The lights inside the entervator shut off one by one. It felt like the two of us were floating in space.

  "Go ahead!" came Red Hat's reply. "Release."

  My heart stopped, but I knew he could not mean release the ship. "What are we doing?" As if to answer, Vada pressed her cheek to mine. Her skin was soft and warm. As I pulled her toward me I realized she had extended her right arm behind my head. Turning I saw that her gloved hand gripping a thick brass lever connected to the cable hook.

  "Ready?" Without waiting for an answer, she cranked the lever to the right.

  With a ratcheting sound, the hook opened. The cable seemed to shoot up into the darkness as the ship began to plummet. Vada's dress blew up into our faces, a fluttering tulip. Every corpuscle in my body screamed No!

  IN THE SHADOW

  As I sped forward, across the elevated highway of the plains, far above the simmering fields of corn and soy, over the heads of the millions of dirt-covered men tending those hybridized stalks, the tops of the towers came into view hundreds of miles before I had to start braking. "You're sure?"

  "It's just outside of the old Seattlehama perimeter," said Pheff. "It's called Royal NuSity Estates. He's in Tower 23, forty-first floor. Apartment E." After a beat, he added, "The place looks awful. Knit aluminum towers, doublewide moon balconies, watervators, and every other semi-modern cliché of super-luxury 'rises. Who is this guy?"

  I had not been back to Seattlehama since my days of thread thievery and skivvé knitting. "I'm just following a lead."

  "I thought you were going to see Ryder?"

  "I did. Now I'm checking here."

  "Way out in Seattlehama?"

  "Seattlehama has a burgeoning local textiles industry."

  "Not really. Have you ever been there?"

  "Years ago."

  "That's so knotted! Did you get all dressed and… you know?"

  "I did, but I'll tell you about it another time."

  The city was ten times larger than it had been. Originally the project had been the brainchild of a particle theorist and singer named Zika Emerald. She spent her fortune on building an enormous four-mile-wide foundation around Mt. Rainier and fourteen buildings that made the original core. But she had died a week before the final tower was topped, and by that point, she and the project were bankrupt. A few years later several rim cities joined together to rescue the project and transformed it into a sex and fashion tourism destination. As a slubber boy, gazing up at the structures, I had no idea of the politics, money, and lust that went on in there, not that I would have understood.

  As the Chang sped closer, I saw how Seattlehama had changed in my absence. The city had been towering and thin, an awe-inspiring monolith. Now the original towers were lost in a garden of thistle, monocot, and dandelion buildings.

  As the exit ramp curved hard to the right, I caught a glimpse beyond the guard walls of the slubs surrounding the new city limits. I couldn't help but wonder if some boy were out there, in the cornfields, looking up at the colossal mass of this new Seattlehama, and maybe even at the red and blue lights of my car and wondering who and what was up there.

  The road straightened, as I set a course for the secluded Royal NuSity Estates. I wished I hadn't come back.

  As I passed the city center, glancing through the star roof of the Chang at the cloud-shrouded towers, I could feel the crystalline memories of my youth shattering like glass.

  SEATTLEHAMA: FALLING FOREVER

  The muscles in my hands and arms felt so rigid, I was less afraid that I might let go of the rail than they would snap like plasticott under the strain. Below I could hear Red Hat shouting, but his words whipped away in the wind.

  "We're dead!" I screamed.

  "We're on a voyage," was Vada's reply, her lips against my ear.

  We plummeted straight down. The buildings became elongated blurs as the air whistled past. In one instant, I saw our eventual impact-the sprained metal and shattered wood, the crushed bones and soupy aftermath of my organs. Then I remembered all the wires and cables woven between the buildings. We would be sliced into hundreds of pieces.

  The ship's motion changed, tilting and gliding forward, rather than down. The weightless terror of freefall receded and the metal hull once again sat solidly beneath my feet.

  I felt the cream of Vada's lipstick on my ear as much as I heard her words. "And now, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to the majesty of illegal flight craft!"

  We crossed the empty middle of the city, heading straight for the tops of the buildings on the other side. And just as I thought we were going to crash, the ship turned and darted between the Velour and Foulé. As we rushed past the two intricate spires, I swore I saw the distorted silhouettes of writhing consumers inside. And then, with a whoosh of turbulence, we sailed past the city's edge. Turning, I saw the glowing architecture of the city receding behind us, as I struggled to swallow my fear.

  "We should get inside!" said Vada. "We're going to be landing soon."

  I didn't want to let go of the rail, but she grasped my arm and led me to the portal. A dim glow illuminated the interior. I lowered myself down, trying to land on the chair I had used to climb up, but my left foot missed, and I fell in a heap onto the purple carpet. I was shaken, cold, and furious.

  "What are we doing?" I asked as Vada landed beside me. "Where the rot are we going? I don't want to leave the city!"

  "Close the hatch now!" called Red Hat.

  Vada looked at me. "Another boost."

  I didn't move.

  "We'll be going back to the city tomorrow."

  I knotted my fingers together and she stepped up. Again I was inside the red atmosphere of her dress, her stocking-covered legs framing my face. Above I heard a clank of metal and I glanced up. Of course all I saw was the crotch of her stockings and that small pair of silver shears.

  Vada jumped back down, smoothed her dress, and smiled at me.

  "Why do you have scissors down there?"

  She frowned playfully and whapped my shoulder. "I can't believe you looked!"

  She smiled so invitingly, I knew I hadn't imagined her interest. I stepped toward her, and placed a hand on her waist as I had done on the roof. She raised an eyebrow, amused. I started to move closer.

  "Slow down!" She pushed me back and glanced at Red Hat hunched over the lit screen. "Not here!"

  As if on cue, he said, "Landing in two minutes."

  The touchdown was closer to a crash. The ship hit and then pitched so far forward I tumbled into the wall, and half the chairs came crashing down on me.

  "Muddy shit," muttered our pilot as a curse or an excuse.

  When the main door opened, Vada and I stepped out into squishing mire. Dawn was beginning to temper the eastern sky. The smell of corn, dirt, and a hint of solid recycle felt like a time capsule of memories.

  I shivered. "I don't want to
be here."

  "No one does." Vada glanced around, taking the measure of her surroundings.

  Intricate cloth wings were slowly folding into the sides of the ship. "So that's how it flies."

  "Wings are as illegal as all untethered transportation. But we specialize in illegal." She barked in laughter and waved a gloved hand. "Come."

  "Why are we here?"

  She faced me. "You want to understand a little more about what we're fighting against? I know you were born in the slubs, but that doesn't mean you really know what they're about. We're going to see one of the things your father hated." She pulled up her dress a foot and started walking. Her boots sank into the sucking mud. I followed, not sure I wanted to. Eventually, the mud gave way to firmer ground, and soon we were in rows of corn three feet high.

  A quarter of a mile later, we came up over a hill, and upon a large complex of low buildings, the largest of which was three stories tall and dotted with red and white blinking lights. At a wire fence, which surrounded the place, Vada reached under her dress and used those scissors to cut through the metal like it was cold fat.

  "Stay close to me."

  "What is this?"

  "M-Bunny headquarters."

  I glanced at the structures. This is where men went to have sons and this is where everyone went to be recycled. I backed up a step. "I'm not going."

  "I'm coming with you. We'll be safe; we have a sympathizer here."

  "I know what's here."

  "You haven't been inside, have you?"

  No slubbers I knew worked at headquarters. Some men drove buses to and fro, but they weren't allowed inside. That's just how it had been. We didn't question it. Frankly, unless one was chosen to have a son, most slubbers didn't want anything to do with the place.

  I stared at the facility. I had imagined it consisted of recycled building. All the houses I had lived in were two-hundred-yearold structures stripped of their appliances, plumbing, wiring, and most of their interior. So too, all the factories were housed in former schools, fast-food places, and shopping centers. This building was made of corrugated metal walls and had electric lights. From the top a few slanted puffs of steam or smoke drifted into the morning air. "Is this new?"