by Neil Clarke
The people he was talking to were just the fronts. Back in the city there were offices and labs where the babus who really counted made the real choices. Somewhere in one of those offices, somebody was looking at him through one of the cameras mounted in the corners of the room. Right now, when he looked up at the camera in the front left hand corner, he was looking right into the eyes of someone who was sitting in front of a screen sixty kilometers away.
If they would take away the cameras, he could just ask her. Just tell me what they want, lady. We’re both crawling around at the bottom of the food chain. Tell me what I should do. Will they let me out of here if I cooperate first? Will I get a better deal if I tough it out right to the last minute? Are all of you really working for Mr. Tan?
And what would he have done with her answers when he got them? Did any of the people in this place understand the situation any better than he did? In the city, he hobbled around in a permanent psychological haze, surrounded by people who made incomprehensible mouth noises and hurried from one place to another on incomprehensible missions. In the ecosystem, the canaries puttered with their odd jobs and created their picture of the world from the information that trickled onto their screens.
“I understand there’s a visitor’s lounge attached to the outside of the ecosystem,” George said.
“And?” the woman said.
“I’ll be glad to tell you anything I know. I just want to get out of here—out of the system itself. There’s no way I can get away if you let me get that far—just to the lounge. I’ll still need transportation back to the city, right?”
The woman stood up. She stopped in front of the syrup bottle and picked it up. She turned it around in her hand as if she was reading the label. She put it back on the shelf. She glanced at the dog. She slipped out the door.
The time strip read 0:54 the next time the woman came back. The dog turned her way and she shook her head when she saw the soulful look in its eyes.
“You’re putting a strain on his toilet training,” the woman said.
“Suppose I do give you a statement? Is there any guarantee you’ll let me go?”
“Are you trying to bargain with us?”
“Would you expect me to do anything else?”
“You think you’re better than us? You think you deserve all that opportunity you thought they were going to give you when you left Earth?”
George shrugged. “I couldn’t get a job on Earth. Any kind of job. I just came here to survive.”
“They wouldn’t even pay you to play that music you like?”
“On Earth? There would have been twenty thousand people lined up ahead of me.”
“There’s no way you can bargain with us, George. You answer the questions. We relay the answers. They decide what to do. There’s only one thing I can guarantee.”
“In fifty-four minutes, I’ll have to open the suit and stay here.”
“Right.”
They didn’t let him out when they had his statement. Instead the woman poured syrup into the flask that fueled his life support system. Then she walked out and left him sitting there.
The urine collection system on his leg was a brand name piece of equipment but he couldn’t empty the receptacle without opening the suit. He had already used the system once, about an hour after they had captured him. He didn’t know what would happen the next time he used it. No one had thought about the possibility he might wear the suit more than five hours.
The woman smiled when she re-entered the room and caught him fidgeting. The first dog had been replaced a few minutes after it had communicated his message but no one even mentioned his problem.
The woman had him stand up in the middle of the room and face the left hand camera. He repeated all his statements. He told them, once again, that the guy with the scarred fingers had mentioned Mr. Tan by name.
The timestrip said 3:27 when they left him alone this time. They had given him a full five hour refill when they had poured in the syrup.
The timestrip read 0:33 when they put him in the security portal. Big-belly and the woman and three other people stared through the little square windows. A no-nonsense voice talked him through the procedure in Hong Kong British.
He was reminded that a lapse in the procedure could result in long-term isolation. He stood in an indentation in the floor. He stuck his hands into a pair of holes above his head. Robot arms stripped the suit. Heat and radiation poured into the portal.
George had never been a reader, but he had played in orchestras that accompanied two operatic versions of the Orpheus legend. He kept his eyes half shut and tried not to look at the door that would take him back to the ecosystem. When he did glance back, after the other door had swung open, the woman and big-belly looked, it seemed to him, like disappointed gargoyles. He started to wave at them and decided that would still be too risky. He walked through the door with his shoulders hunched. And started looking for the two things he needed most: clothes and a bathroom.
The lounge was just a place where drivers and visitors could stretch their legs. There was a bathroom. There was a water fountain. There was a kitchen which checked his credit when he stuck his thumb in the ID unit. And offered him a menu that listed the kind of stuff he had been eating since he arrived on the Moon.
He queried taxi services on the phone screen and discovered a trip back to the city would cost him a week’s wages. He had never been naked in a public place before and he didn’t know how to act. Were the canaries watching him on the single camera mounted in the ceiling?
“I didn’t do this because I wanted to,” he told the cameras. “I don’t even know what’s going on. I just want to get out of here. Is that too much to ask?”
A truck entered the garage space under the lounge. A woman who was old enough to be his mother appeared in one of the doors and handed him a wad of cloth. The shirt was too long for him but it was the only thing she had. He stood around for an hour while she ate a meal and talked to people on the phone. He couldn’t shake off the feeling he was wearing a dress.
He had missed a full shift at the Twelve Sages Cafe but the first violinist had left him a message assuring him they had only hired a temporary replacement. They could all see he was jumpy and preoccupied when he joined them at the start of the next shift but no one said anything. He had always been popular with the people he played with. He had the right temperament for a viola player. He took his part seriously but he understood the give-and-take that is one of the primary requirements of good chamber playing.
The big guy lumbered into the Twelve Sages Cafe a month later. He smiled at the musicians playing in the corner. He threw George a big wave as he sat down.
They were playing the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s A Major quintet. George actually stumbled out of the room with his hands clutching his stomach. He managed to come back before the next movement started but he lost his place three times.
The second violinist took him aside after the last movement and told him he was putting all their jobs in danger. She came back to his apartment after the shift ended.
Six months later a woman came up to George during a break and asked him if he gave lessons in style, interpretation, and the other subjects you could still teach. Eight months after that he had seven students. The second violinist moved in with him.
Then the first violinist discovered one of the most famous restaurants in the city was looking for a new quartet. And George did something that surprised him just as much as it surprised everyone else. He told the first violinist they should abandon the other viola player, develop their interpretation of two of the most famous quarters in the repertoire, and audition for the other job. They would have to spend all their leisure, non-sleeping hours studying Chi-Li’s Opus 12 and Beethoven’s Opus 59, No. 2, but the second violinist backed him up. The other two were dubious but they caught fire as George guided them through the recordings and interpretative commentaries he selected from the databanks. The restaurant own
er and her husband actually stood up and applauded when they finished the last note of the Chi-Li.
The restaurant paid unskilled labor real money. It was also a place, George discovered, where some of the customers actually listened to the music. They were busy people—men and women who were making fortunes. Someday they might buy performance systems themselves and enjoy the pleasure of experiencing music from the inside. For now, they sat at their tables like barons and duchesses and let the commoners do the work. Once every three or four days somebody dropped the musicians a tip that was bigger than all the money their old quintet had received in a week.
The other members of the quartet all knew they owed it all to George. Anyone could buy a performance system and play the notes. George was the guy who understood the shadings and the instrumental interactions that turned sounds into real music. He had created a foursome that worked well together—a unit that accepted his ideas without a lot of argument.
George had occasionally exercised that kind of leadership when he had been playing for pleasure on Earth. Now he did it with all the intensity of someone who knew his livelihood depended on it.
George searched the databanks twice. He didn’t like to spend money on things he didn’t need, even after he began to feel more secure. As far as he could tell, Ms. Chao was still the chief designer in her company. Mr. Tan resigned from the board four months after George’s visit to the canary cage. Then he rejoined the board six months later. It occurred to George that Ms. Chao had somehow tricked Mr. Tan into doing something that looked stupid. But why did she let him rejoin the board later?
The second violinist thought it might have something to do with family ties.
“Everybody says the Overseas Chinese have always been big on family ties,” the second violinist pointed out. “Why should the off-Earth Chinese be any different?”
The whole business became even more puzzling when one of George’s students told him she really was glad “Tan Zem” had recommended him. Three of his first four students, George discovered, had looked him up because Mr. Tan had steered them his way. Had Mr. Tan felt guilty? Had he been motivated by some kind of criminal code of honor? Finally George stopped trying to figure it out. He had a bigger apartment. He had a better job. He had the second violinist. He had become—who would have believed it?—the kind of immigrant the other immigrants talked about when they wanted to convince themselves a determined North American could create a place for himself in the new society humanity was building on the Moon.
He had become—by immigrant standards—a success.
First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January, 1997.
About the Author
Tom Purdom lives in downtown Philadelphia where he spends his days writing science fiction, reviewing classical music for an online publication called The Broad Street Review, and pursuing the pleasures of urban life. Tom started reading science fiction in 1950, when it was just emerging from the pulp ghetto, and sold his first story in 1957, just before he turned twenty-one. In the last twenty-five years, he has produced a string of novelettes and short stories that have mostly appeared in Asimov’s. Fantastic Books recently published two collections of his Asimov’s stories, Lovers and Fighters, Starships and Dragons and Romance on Four Worlds, A Casanova Quartet.
Sea Change
Una McCormack
We went back to Callie’s bedroom after evening classes pretending we were going to force-feed ourselves Chinese verbs. Really we were talking about what we’d do with the tutor if we could get our hands on him. You’ve seen the Level 12 ’casts, you know the guy I mean. When I realized all our witty lust had turned into monologue, I glanced over at Callie. She was sitting back in the sofa with her feet up on the table, her tongue sticking out, and a piece of glass pressed up against her forearm.
“You’ll ruin the carpet,” I said.
“Fuck the carpet.”
“Mm, you know, I think I’ll pass.”
I watched with interest, wondering how far she’d get. God only knows how she’d found something sharp—everything round here is so smooth, no rough edges. Nothing to mark you, no way to leave your mark. Callie cut into the flesh, and blood surged out, a shock of bright color. She went paler beneath her skin bleach and her hand started to shake. “Shit,” she muttered, as blood dripped onto the table. Her mother had told me at least twice how expensive that had been, so I dread to think how often she must have said it to Callie.
I took the piece of glass from her. “I’ll do it.” One quick surgical strike from me, and her tracker was out. It’s been bugging her ever since it went in. Ho ho. By now Callie was starting to get a thin, papery look—sort of see-through—so I wrapped a towel tight around her arm and made her hold it above her head like they’d shown me in the public hospital when I was getting my social credits. Then, to show moral support, I nicked my finger tip. A ruby red bead welled up, and I waved my hand at Callie. “Hey, we can be blood sisters!”
She pulled a face. “That’s disgusting!” Maybe, but it made her forget to feel sick, and she jumped up and went over to the door that led out onto the balcony. “Let’s go out.”
“Out? It’ll be hot, Cal, you won’t like it.”
“I mean really out. Leave your key on the table.”
I knew then what she had planned for us. I glanced over at the tutorial that was still playing through, and bit my lip. Callie hissed with impatience. “Come on! We’ve got to be there in ten minutes!”
Well, it’s Callie’s home, and I’m the guest, so I unclipped my key from my belt, and put it on the table next to her tracker. Off we went, leaving the tutor talking to the empty room, and all the while our accounts were racking up the study points for the modules he labored through.
We walked down the main lane that runs through the estate. All the houses are on one side and the school stuff on the other. We went past the arts block and then along by the tennis courts where the teams were out practicing. We were heading roughly towards the cinema, but before we got there, Callie led me down a side path. We cut through some bushes, and soon we came to the wall, smooth and tall and impregnable. Except for a gap where it ended and the railings began, where the bushes hadn’t grown thick. Someone very slim could slip through. So we did.
We started down the road into town. There was still pavement most of the way, although in some places it had gone completely and there was only dust. Callie was already complaining about her shoes. The road was walled on either side of its entire length, the back of our estate and another one, and I think some government agency has houses round here. I’d been down this road in the car hundreds of times, but it’s a lot different up close with those walls looming over you. The not-so-homely home counties. After about five minutes, Callie stopped by an old bus shelter and said, “Okay, now we wait.”
“Are we getting the bus, Cal?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I don’t have any actual money, that’s all—”
“Don’t be stupid.”
A couple of cars sped past, and each time my heart jumped—I look young for fifteen and you don’t tend to see people hanging around much on the main roads. But soon enough a car pulled up, and this guy—nineteen, maybe twenty—leaned out. “Hi, Cal,” he said. “Hop in.” He looked at me, hanging back, and laughed. “And your little friend too, if she’s coming.” I went red and scrambled into the back while Callie graced the passenger seat.
If we’re speaking geographically, I’ve no idea where we went, but it was a party, of course, and it was up in a second-floor flat. Music was thumping out of the open windows and inside it was all sweat and noise and bodies. How Callie finds out about this kind of thing I don’t know, but somehow she manages. She was in the thick of it straight away, but I stayed back near the drinks table and tried not to look conspicuous.
It wasn’t long before some guy started talking to me—well, yelling, really; he had to, over the music. “You from that estate up the road? The one
with the school?”
“Yeah.”
“Very nice.” He was tanned, and when he smiled I noticed his bottom teeth were slightly crooked.
I shrugged. “It’s all right.” Usually I can do more than monosyllables, but it was really noisy and his smile had made me feel self-conscious. “Bit dull.”
“I bet.” He nodded at Callie. “That your friend?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s something else, isn’t she?”
That’s me—gateway to Callie. I did what I was there for and introduced them, although he didn’t get very far with her, because about five minutes after that the police kicked the door in and started yanking us all out. They’d put an emergency dispersal order on the place. I suppose one of the neighbors had got fed up with the noise.
The police pulled me and Callie out of the crowd right away. It’s not that they profile, but . . . look, I know it sounds bad, but a lot’s been spent on the two of us, from before we were conceived, and our skin looks good and our hair looks good and our teeth look good, and . . . you can just tell, all right? That there’s money around. As we were taken off to a car everyone else was being piled into vans. I saw the guy we’d been talking to, and he shrugged at me and gave me his crooked smile, as if to say, “What can you do?” When we got to the station, a policewoman made us tea while Callie’s mother drove out to get us. She was laughing and apologizing as she paid the fine, but once we were in the car it came out about the tracker and that was the cue for tears and shouting.
“I’m particularly disappointed in you, Miranda.” Mrs. Banville glared back at me in the rear-view mirror. She’s monstrous; done far too much to her face. “I would have expected you to have shown more sense. For gratitude’s sake, if nothing else.”
I stared out of the window at the walls speeding past. Of course. I’m supposed to be glad to have a home. But what could she expect, from someone with my background?