by Susan Juby
Grassly’s lungs strained, and he realized he’d been holding his breath.
He was responsible for this.
“I’m just going to get a new releaser,” he muttered, backing out of the room.
No one followed him out. The chip he’d implanted in his neck streamed rotating sets of false data, so if anyone came looking, they wouldn’t be able to locate him. He had to find the favour with the light helmet. Things were not at all optimal from a success perspective.
07.00
Bright hurried toward the nearest privator, which would take her to the seventh floor. As she neared it, her footsteps slowed.
What if there was nothing wrong with her client except doofishness? He’d paid good credits and she’d given him to a barely trained lure. He’d end up watching the girl do double dream hands for fifteen minutes! Or worse, maybe there was something wrong with him and she’d left the curly-haired lure to deal with it. That wasn’t nice to contemplate, either.
As a highly trained party favour, it was her duty to figure out what was wrong with the client. If he was sick, she’d report him. No matter how it looked on her record.
Bright was tempted to take the helmet off and throw it down a long hallway, but she didn’t. She had only one first-release product in her arsenal and she couldn’t afford to waste it, not if she was going to get herself promoted to the House of It.
She turned a corner and saw a PS officer rushing away down another hallway. It was a good thing she hadn’t thrown her helmet. PS staff tended to notice things like that.
She sparked up a big smile. No problem. Nothing was a problem. She swayed and strutted back to the Stimu Room. She stood in the hallway and peered tentatively through the open door into the room. She saw three PS officers standing around her slump-shouldered client. One held a releaser to the man’s hunched back. Over the bass thump of the music, she could hear his words: “By order of the Deciders, you have been released from your contract. We thank you for your service and congratulate you in advance on coming back better than ever at some point in the future.”
The officer must have pressed the button, because the client’s body leapt into the air and then slumped to the floor. The other two officers stepped back quickly, as though afraid to be contaminated by the man’s body.
Bright couldn’t see the lure. With any luck, the girl had gotten lost on her way to the Stimu Room. Then Bright spotted a pair of small feet clad in adorable yellow work boots lying just inside the door frame. The feet within the boots were a bad kind of still.
Bright backed away, hoping the PS staff hadn’t noticed her lurking at the doorway, and began to walk quickly back the way she’d come. When thoughts about the client and the little yellow boots rose in Bright’s head, she pushed them away, as she’d been trained to do with all negative thoughts. She searched through various rooms until she found Fon and her client partying in the Bounceteria.
Fon looked up at Bright’s head through the glow of her halo, and Bright knew her dressing-mate was coveting the helmet.
“Here,” said Bright, taking it off. “I’ve had an amazing time with it. You can borrow it now.”
“Awesome!” cried Fon. She struggled to remove her halo with one hand and jam the helmet on with the other.
“Let me help,” said Bright.
08.00
Grassly looked around the Bounceteria for clients, those sad figures who spent all their hard-earned credits just so they could dance and mingle with more beautiful people. If the 51s weren’t opposed to prejudice of all kinds, he’d have thought them pathetic. The Bounceteria had slides that culminated in bounce landings so that the people who went down them pinged from platform to platform. Bouncing balls lay in small groups like round huddled creatures. One purple wall billowed, waiting for people to be flung against it by a slingshot attached to a TeeterBouncer. He saw only one client. The tall woman was inside an IndieBounce tube and she was, predictably, bouncing. When she landed on the floor of the tube, it propelled her at least ten feet into the air. The stretchy see-through plastic sides kept her on a more or less straight trajectory up and down. An elasticized plastic top stopped her, just barely, from bumping the ceiling with her head.
The expression on the woman’s face was somewhere between exultation and worry.
Grassly knew from long observation that favours used the IndieBouncer when they needed a moment to themselves and wanted to keep a client busy. Clients couldn’t get themselves out of the device or even stop bouncing. A favour needed to change the tension on the tube to dampen the bounce.
How long had this particular client had been ricocheting between the ceiling and the floor? The woman was still making happy noises, but with some effort.
In another corner of the room, one of the favours sat on a spongy padded stool. She wore the pink helmet shoved down low on her head, and was doubled over so the brim of the helmet nearly touched her bare knees. The other favour was trying, without success, to force a wire semicircle covered with little light bulbs over top of the helmet.
“It’s not going to fit, Fon. If you want to wear it, you’re going to have to leave the halo off.”
“But Bright, the halo is totally my trademark!” said the one called Fon.
“Only for like three months.”
“It’ll fit!” said Fon. “Just push harder.”
Bright was slightly rounder than the one called Fon, and her skin wasn’t as glowy. She had on a bikini top with a pair of baggy suspender pants that managed to be both revealing and capacious. She also wore a heavy pair of work gloves, sturdy boots, and a belt that sagged with the weight of many tools.
Grassly knocked on the doorway.
Bright looked up. She froze, as though caught in the act of doing something wrong.
He wanted to tell her to relax, but that would make her even more concerned. PS staff didn’t say things like “relax.”
They stood around making people feel secure and special. Until the day they didn’t.
“Lot of options for bouncing in here,” he said, finally.
Both favours were looking at him now, glossed lips slightly open.
The one called Fon had twisted her head at an uncomfortable angle so that she could see him. Bright’s expression was still one of polite alarm.
Grassly nodded, as though in answer to a comment. He hadn’t been socially gifted on H51, where the influence of the Mothers made the population one of the kindest, friendliest, and most overpoweringly helpful in existence. He was even less skilled at being social in the Store. PS staff weren’t big talkers. Nor, he realized, were they big on knocking. That knock had been a mistake. His lack of ease wasn’t helping the mission. No, he thought. Don’t be too hard on yourself. A Sending was a learning process. He wasn’t expected to be perfect.
He realized they were staring at him and forced himself to continue. From behind him came the repetitive wheeze-thump of the client surging up and down in the IndieBouncer.
“You changed the wearer of the light,” he said.
“I, uh …” said Bright.
“She said I could …” said Fon.
“It’s fine,” Grassly assured them.
He saw their shoulders relax infinitesimally. Their breathing became more regular. He’d succeeded in calming them. How satisfying.
“And the light,” he said. “You have turned it on?”
This time, only the one called Bright stiffened.
“No,” she said. With his highly attuned senses, common to all 51s, Grassly could hear her heart hammering in her chest. Was she … lying? He had observed favours lying to clients and sometimes to each other when they were throwing around false compliments, but they didn’t lie about substantive issues.
He knew she’d turned on the light. He’d seen the effects on the client. He’d also seen her accidentally use it on the male favour who’d come to her dressing room, though in that instance she might not have realized what she’d done.
“Have
you looked at the light?”
The two favours exchanged a glance. Though he was supremely confident in his interpretive abilities, he found it difficult to decipher the favours’ reactions under all the makeup and surgical alterations.
Bright nodded. Her face was somewhat less regular than Fon’s. He could see why she was forty-second in the credit standings rather than first. But there was something compelling about her small anomalies, such as the way her hair wasn’t quite perfect and her right eyebrow was slightly and permanently higher than the left. It made her look as though she was listening intently to a good joke.
“What happened when you turned the light on?”
“Nothing,” said Bright, quickly.
“Well, not nothing,” said Fon.
“Mostly nothing.” Bright stared at Fon. If favours weren’t so obviously limited in the areas of empathy and community, he would have thought all this glancing and staring was a means of communicating telepathically. Instead, it was plain to Grassly that Bright was simply trying to tell her dressing-mate to be quiet. And Fon wasn’t getting the message.
Ancestors. So sad.
“We pretty much passed out. After it flickered,” Fon said. Flickered. As he’d suspected, the flicker was the significant variable.
Grassly remembered that, when the previous version had been in the flickering phase, nothing had happened when he passed his hand through the uncertain beam. When the beam became steady, it had burned him.
“Have you looked at the beam since?”
“Only like ten times, practically,” said Fon. “It’s so pretty!”
To demonstrate, she turned the light on. She pulled the helmet off and stared into the light. She shone it into Bright’s face. Then she pointed it abruptly at Grassly.
The beam slid over his black uniform, and he jerked away as it moved up his body.
“Enough!” he shouted before she could burn the exposed part of his face.
She turned it off.
Grassly exhaled. Collected himself. Told himself to remember what Sally Lancaster had said about enlightenment in her book: “Light is the key to bringing all beings into harmony with nature.” She better be right about that. He reminded himself, in a supportive way, of what he was doing here and why. All creatures were worth saving, and any species that could dance like the ancestors deserved a second chance in a new, more hospitable environment. Once Earth had had time to recover, perhaps in five hundred or a thousand years, it too would be rehabbed and some new, deserving species would find a home here.
But in the meantime, the light required more testing before anything else went wrong.
There was another long pause as he considered what to say.
“Have you shone it on anyone else? Besides yourselves?” At this, Bright cleared her throat.
“No,” she lied. Again.
She was definitely afraid. She knew the light was doing something to people. That’s why she was trying to give the helmet to her dressing-mate. That was most decidedly not enlightened behaviour.
“Please give me the helmet,” he said, reaching out a hand to take it.
Fon gasped and clutched the pink hard hat to her chest.
“No!” she said. “It’s Bright’s. No one can touch her stuff, which she bought with her own credits, unless she says it’s okay!”
Bright looked down at her feet.
Grassly had violated yet another prime directive inside the Store. No one was allowed to confiscate anyone else’s goods for any reason—or even handle them without permission. It simply wasn’t done.
Still, he had to try. There were lives on the line.
“I must insist,” he said.
“What’s with you?” breathed Fon, aghast.
Grassly puffed out a breath. He thought Bright would have given him the helmet if she’d been alone; after all, she’d seen what it could do. But she wouldn’t give it to him in front of Fon.
The client in the IndieBouncer had begun to make noises that didn’t sound like enjoyment. Ooof, wheeze. Ooof, wheeze.
“Fine,” he said. “Just don’t turn it on until you receive further instructions from me.”
“He can’t tell you what to do with your gear,” Fon whispered to Bright.
But Bright nodded at him. “Okay,” she said.
He began to improvise, feeling pleased with his intellectual agility. “If you turn on the light, you may draw the attention of … less exclusive people.”
“Oh! So that’s the secret,” breathed Fon.
Grassly felt himself start. Which secret did she know?
“The helmet. It’s from the House of It. Right?”
Fon spoke to Bright, as though Grassly had no ears with which to hear. “The House of It uses performance tests to decide who gets promoted there.”
It does? thought Grassly.
“The helmet is a test,” continued Fon. “The House of It is testing us.”
Then she fixed Grassly with an unnervingly direct gaze. “The House of It wants us to protect the light helmet, right? And the first part of the test was whether we’d let you take it.”
“Yes,” he said, because he couldn’t think of a suitable response to her bizarre conclusions.
They could hold on to the helmet, to which they’d become strangely attached, and believe whatever they wanted about some promotional test. His concern right now was figuring out how to get people to the Natural Experience and from there onto his ship.
“Does it matter which one of us wears it?” Fon asked.
“No,” he said.
Fon smiled triumphantly and pointed a finger from herself to Bright. “Working together. Sharing the helmet,” she said.
“That’s right,” he said. “You will work together. Just remember. Don’t turn the light on again until you receive further instructions from me.”
Bright put up her hand, as though she were in a classroom. “Are there going to be any more tests this shift?” she asked. She gave a sidelong glance at the tall, thin client, who was wobbling unsteadily inside the IndieBouncer, hitting the sides and sliding back down. The woman’s legs appeared to be buckling more each time she landed.
“We have a leisure unit meeting after shift, and I’m better at doing tests when I’m rested,” continued Bright. “So maybe we should get off early?”
Grassly took in the client’s grey face, a smear inside the IndieBouncer. “That’s fine,” he said. “Just go about your business and wait to hear from me. You’re doing a fine job, Bright. And Fon.”
Bright smiled at him, and for the first time since he’d come into the room, there was nothing but happiness in her face.
He hurried out of the Bounceteria and headed toward his workshop, thinking hard about what to do next.
As he cleared the doorway, he heard one of them say, “He’s kind of nice for a PS officer.”
He stopped in case they said more.
“Well, he’s boring like a PS officer.”
“PS officers are supposed to be boring. He’s probably especially good at being boring because he’s from the House of It.”
He was far too busy to be eavesdropping, Grassly decided.
09.00
For reasons that made her head hurt to consider, the rules about avoiding unproductive attachments seemed less important when Bright looked at Slater, a favour from the House of Boards. He was nineteen and three-quarters, but he looked seventeen. A young seventeen. And he acted sixteen. A person would never know he was staring release in the mirrored shades. Bright always tried to sit next to him during leisure unit meetings. Not that he was a good conversationalist or anything. He’d been bred for hard muscle and soft skin.
During leisure unit meetings, favours got to behave in ways they couldn’t any other time. They scratched, picked, prodded, and poked themselves. They burped, sighed, and looked bored. Even light complaining was tolerated. It was glorious. Almost as glorious as watching Slater shake out his bleached hair.
He
had this habit of looking deep into her eyes and saying, “Oh, Bright, dude, I love your style.” Just like that. He had never, to her knowledge, said those words to Fon. For that reason, Bright liked him more than anyone else she could think of, save Pinkie.
Bright and Fon had been assigned to leisure unit 7 as soon as they arrived at the House of Gear after graduating from the Party Favour Training Centre, where they’d been in separate classes. The unit met at different houses in the Partytainment District. Favours were supposed to use the time to discuss their purpose and ways to improve their productivity, but meetings were really an opportunity to gossip about clients and new surgeries and Mistresses. Favours were on display at work, in public, and any time they weren’t alone in their rooms. Some of them even slept in glass bedrooms so that sleep lookers could watch. Party favour was one of the most 24/7-365 jobs there was, and they needed their down-but-still-fun-time.
The meeting was being held at the House of Gear this month, in an unoccupied lure dressing room on the second floor. Bright waited for Slater to say that he dug her style. She wanted to tell him about the helmet and the light, about the client who went bizarre after she shone the light on him, about the PS officer who was so strange but also kind of nice, and about the extremely important test she was being given by the House of It. But having too many unusual things happen to you was unattractive.
Slater shook out his blond hair again, closed his eyes, and scratched his abdomen, which, she couldn’t help noticing, wasn’t quite as washboardy as it used to be. His six-pack had turned into more of a four-pack.
A wave of tenderness swept over her and she tamped it down. She snuck a nervous glance at the parachute pack she’d brought to the meeting. Inside it was the pink helmet, which, test device or no, made her uneasy. The pack slouched against the far wall of the silvery room. The mirrors and makeup chairs of a standard dressing room had been removed and replaced with comfy ergochairs and semi-beds for lounging.