Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  Oh, do I make you sick? A cute little boy like me, engaged in critical unspecified dispopulative behaviors? I may be half glass and four feet high, but I can simulate you better than your own mama, and the better I know you, the deeper my books. I not only know your password now, I can write a word on a paper, seal it up, and then you go home and change your password and then open up what I wrote and there it’ll be, your new password, three times out of ten. I am vertical, and Dogwalker knowed it. Ten percent more supergoo and I wouldn’t even be legally human, but I’m still under the line, which is more than I can say for a lot of people who are a hundred percent zoo inside their head.

  Dogwalker comes to me one day at Carolina Circle, where I’m playing pinball standing on a stool. He didn’t say nothing, just gave me a shove, so naturally he got my elbow in his balls. I get a lot of twelve-year-olds trying to shove me around at the arcades, so I’m used to teaching them lessons. Jack the Giant Killer. Hero of the fourth graders. I usually go for the stomach, only Dogwalker wasn’t a twelve-year-old, so my elbow hit low.

  I knew the second I hit him that this wasn’t no kid. I didn’t know Dogwalker from God, but he gots the look, you know, like he been hungry before, and he don’t care what he eats these days.

  Only he got no ice and he got no slice, just sits there on the floor with his back up against the Eat Shi’ite game, holding his boodle and looking at me like I was a baby he had to diaper. “I hope you’re Goo Boy,” he says, “cause if you ain’t, I’m gonna give you back to your mama in three little tupperware bowls.” He doesn’t sound like he’s making a threat, though. He sounds like he’s chief weeper at his own funeral.

  “You want to do business, use your mouth, not your hands,” I says. Only I say it real apoplectic, which is the same as apologetic except you are still pissed.

  “Come with me,” he says. “I got to go buy me a truss. You pay the tax out of your allowance.”

  So we went to Ivey’s and stood around in children’s wear while he made his pitch. “One P-word,” he says, “only there can’t be no mistake. If there’s a mistake, a guy loses his job and maybe goes to jail.”

  So I told him no. Three chances in ten, that’s the best I can do. No guarantees. My record speaks for itself, but nobody’s perfect, and I ain’t even close.

  “Come on,” he says, “you got to have ways to make sure, right? If you can do three times out of ten, what if you find out more about the guy? What if you meet him?”

  “OK, maybe fifty-fifty.”

  “Look, we can’t go back for seconds. So maybe you can’t get it. But do you know when you ain’t got it?”

  “Maybe half the time when I’m wrong, I know I’m wrong.”

  “So we got three out of four that you’ll know whether you got it?”

  “No,” says I. “Cause half the time when I’m right, I don’t know I’m right.”

  “Shee-it,” he says. “This is like doing business with my baby brother.”

  “You can’t afford me anyway,” I says. “I pull two dimes minimum, and you barely got breakfast on your gold card.”

  “I’m offering a cut.”

  “I don’t want a cut. I want cash.”

  “Sure thing,” he says. He looks around, real careful. As if they wired the sign that said Boys Briefs Sizes 10–12. “I got an inside man at Federal Coding,” he says.

  “That’s nothing,” I says. “I got a bug up the First Lady’s ass, and forty hours on tape of her breaking wind.”

  I got a mouth. I know a got a mouth. I especially know it when he jams my face into a pile of shorts and says, “Suck on this, Goo Boy.”

  I hate it when people push me around. And I know ways to make them stop. This time all I had to do was cry. Real loud, like he was hurting me. Everybody looks when a kid starts crying. “I’ll be good.” I kept saying it. “Don’t hurt me no more! I’ll be good.”

  “Shut up,” he says. “Everybody’s looking.”

  “Don’t you ever shove me around again,” I says. “I’m at least ten years older than you, and a hell of a lot more than ten years smarter. Now I’m leaving this store, and if I see you coming after me, I’ll start screaming about how you zipped down and showed me the pope, and you’ll get yourself a child-molesting tag so they pick you up every time some kid gets jollied within a hundred miles of Greensboro.” I’ve done it before, and it works, and Dogwalker was no dummy. Last thing he needed was extra reasons for the dongs to bring him in for questioning. So I figured he’d tell me to get poked and that’d be the last of it.

  Instead he says, “Goo Boy, I’m sorry, I’m too quick with my hands.”

  Even the goat who shot me never said he was sorry. My first thought was, what kind of sister is he, abjectifying right out like that. Then I reckoned I’d stick around and see what kind of man it is who emulsifies himself in front of a nine-year-old-looking kid. Not that I figured him to be purely sorrowful. He still just wanted me to get the P-word for him, and he knew there wasn’t nobody else to do it. But most street pugs aren’t smart enough to tell the right lie under pressure. Right away I knew he wasn’t your ordinary street hook or low arm, pugging cause they don’t have the sense to stick with any kind of job. He had a deep face, which is to say his head was more than a hairball, by which I mean he had brains enough to put his hands in his pickets without seeking an audience with the pope. Right then was when I decided he was my kind of no-good lying son-of-a-bitch.

  “What are you after at Federal Coding?” I asked him. “A record wipe?”

  “Ten clean greens,” he says. “Coded for unlimited international travel. The whole ID, just like a real person.”

  “The President has a green card,” I says. “The Joint Chiefs have clean greens. But that’s all. The U.S. Vice-President isn’t even cleared for unlimited international travel.”

  “Yes he is,” he says.

  “Oh, yeah, you know everything.”

  “I need a P. My guy could do us reds and blues, but a clean green has to be done by a burr-oak rat two levels up. My guy knows how it’s done.”

  “They won’t just have it with a P-word,” I says. “A guy who can make green cards, they’re going to have his finger on it.”

  “I know how to get the finger,” he says. “It takes the finger and the password.”

  “You take a guy’s finger, he might report it. And even if you persuade him not to, somebody’s gonna notice that it’s gone.”

  “Latex,” he says. “We’ll get a mold. And don’t start telling me how to do my part of the job. You get P-words, I get fingers. You in?”

  “Cash,” I says.

  “Twenty percent,” says he.

  “Twenty percent of pus.”

  “The inside guy gets twenty, the girl who brings me the finger, she gets twenty, and I damn well get forty.”

  “You can’t just sell these things on the street, you know.”

  “They’re worth a meg apiece,” says he, “to certain buyers.” By which he meant Orkish Crime, of course. Sell ten, and my twenty percent grows up to be two megs. Not enough to be rich, but enough to retire from public life and maybe even pay for some high-level medicals to sprout hair on my face. I got to admit that sounded good to me.

  So we went into business. For a few hours he tried to do it without telling me the baroque rat’s name, just giving me data he got from his guy at Federal Coding. But that was real stupid, giving me secondhand face like that, considering he needed me to be a hundred percent sure, and pretty soon he realized that and brought me in all the way. He hated telling me anything, because he couldn’t stand to let go. Once I knew stuff on my own, what was to stop me from trying to go into business for myself? But unless he had another way to get the P-word, he had to get it from me, and for me to do it right, I had to know everything I could. Dogwalker’s got a brain in his head, even it if is all biodegradable, and so he knows there’s times when you got no choice but to trust somebody. When you just got to figure they’ll do their
best even when they’re out of your sight.

  He took me to his cheap condo on the old Guilford College campus, near the worm, which was real congenital for getting to Charlotte or Winston or Raleigh with no fuss. He didn’t have no soft floor, just a bed, but it was a big one, so I didn’t reckon he suffered. Maybe he bought it back in his old pimping days, I figured, back when he got his name, running a string of bitches with names like Spike and Bowser and Prince, real hydrant leg-lifters for the tweeze trade. I could see that he used to have money, and he didn’t anymore. Lots of great clothes, tailor-tight fit, but shabby, out of sync. The really old ones, he tore all the wiring out, but you could still see where the diodes used to light up. We’re talking neanderthal.

  “Vanity, vanity, all is profanity,” says I, while I’m holding out the sleeve of a camisa that used to light up like an airplane coming in for a landing.

  “They’re too comfortable to get rid of,” he says. But there’s a twist in his voice so I know he don’t plan to fool nobody.

  “Let this be a lesson to you,” says I. “This is what happens when a walker don’t walk.”

  “Walkers do steady work,” says he. “But me, when business was good, it felt bad, and when business was bad, it felt good. You walk cats, maybe you can take some pride in it. But you walk dogs, and you know they’re getting hurt every time—”

  “They got a built-in switch, they don’t feel a thing. That’s why the dongs don’t touch you, walking dogs, cause nobody gets hurt.”

  “Yeah, so tell me, which is worse, somebody getting tweezed till they scream so some old honk can pop his pimple, or somebody getting half their brain replaced so when the old honk tweezes her she can’t feel a thing? I had these women’s bodies around me and I knew that they used to be people.”

  “You can be glass,” says I, “and still be people.”

  He saw I was taking it personally. “Oh, hey,” says he, “you’re under the line.”

  “So are dogs.” says I.

  “Yeah well,” says he. “You watch a girl come back and tell about some of the things they done to her, and she’s laughing, you draw your own line.”

  I look around his shabby place. “Your choice,” says I.

  “I wanted to feel clean,” says he. “That don’t mean I got to stay poor.”

  “So you’re setting up this grope so you can return to the old days of peace and prosperity.”

  “Prosperity,” says he. “What the hell kind of word is that? Why do you keep using words like that?”

  “Cause I know them,” says I.

  “Well you don’t know them,” says he, “because half the time you get them wrong.”

  I shows him my best little-boy grin. “I know,” says I. What I don’t tell him is that the fun comes from the fact that almost nobody ever knows I’m using them wrong. Dogwalker’s no ordinary pimp. But then the ordinary pimp doesn’t bench himself halfway through the game because of a sprained moral qualm, by which I mean that Dogwalker had some stray diagonals in his head, and I began to think it might be fun to see where they all hooked up.

  Anyway we got down to business. The target’s name was Jesse H. Hunt, and I did a real job on him. The Crystal Kid really plugged in on this one. Dogwalker had about two pages of stuff—date of birth, place of birth, sex at birth (no changes since), education, employment history. It was like getting an armload of empty boxes. I just laughed at it. “You got a jack to the city library?” I asked him, and he shows me the wall outlet. I plugged right in, visual onto my pocket sony, with my own little crystal head for ee-i-ee-io-h. Not every goo-head can think clear enough to do this, you know, put out clean type just by thinking the right stuff out of my left ear interface port.

  I shows Dogwalker a little bit about research. Took me ten minutes. I know my way right through the Greensboro Public Library. I have P-words for every single librarian and I’m so ept that they don’t even guess I’m stepping upstream through their access channels. From the Public Library you can get all the way into North Carolina Records Division in Raleigh, and from there you can jumble into federal personnel records anywhere in the country. Which meant that by nightfall on that most portentous day we had hardcopy of every document in Jesse H. Hunt’s whole life, from his birth certificate and first grade report card to his medical history and security clearance reports when he first worked for the feds.

  Dogwalker knew enough to be impressed. “If you can do all that,” he says, “you might as well pug his P-word straight out.”

  “No puedo, putz,” says I as cheerful as can be. “Think of the fed as a castle. Personnel files are floating in the moat—there’s a few alligators but I swim real good. Hot data is deep in the dungeon. You can get in there, but you can’t get out clean. And P-words—P-words are kept up the queen’s ass.”

  “No system is unbeatable,” he says.”

  “Where’d you learn that, from graffiti in a toilet stall? If the P-word system was even a little bit breakable, Dogwalker, the gentlemen you plan to sell these cards to would already be inside looking out at us, and they wouldn’t need to spend a meg to get clean greens from a street pug.”

  Trouble was that after impressing Dogwalker with all the stuff I could find out about Jesse H., I didn’t know that much more than before. Oh, I could guess at some P-words, but that was all it was—guessing. I couldn’t even pick a P most likely to succeed. Jesse was one ordinary dull rat. Regulation good grades in school, regulation good evaluations on the job, probably gave his wife regulation lube jobs on a weekly schedule.

  “You don’t really think you girl’s going to get his finger,” says I with sickening scorn.

  “You don’t know the girl,” says he. “If we needed his flipper she’d get molds in five sizes.”

  “You don’t know this guy,” says I. “This is the straightest opie in Mayberry. I don’t see him cheating on his wife.”

  “Trust me,” says Dogwalker. “She’ll get his finger so smooth he won’t even know she took the mold.”

  I didn’t believe him. I got a knack for knowing things about people, and Jesse H. wasn’t faking. Unless he started faking when he was five, which is pretty unpopulated. He wasn’t going to bounce the first pretty girl who made his zipper tight. Besides which he was smart. His career path showed that he was always in the right place. The right people always seemed to know his name. Which is to say he isn’t the kind whose brain can’t run if his jeans get hot. I said so.

  “You’re really a marching band.” says Dogwalker. “You can’t tell me his P-word, but you’re obliquely sure that he’s a limp or a wimp.”

  “Neither one,” says I. “He’s hard and straight. But a girl starts rubbing up to him, he isn’t going to think it’s because she heard that his crotch is cantilevered. He’s going to figure she wants something, and he’ll give her string till he finds out what.”

  He just grinned at me. “I got me the best Password Man in the Triass, didn’t I? I got me a miracle worker named Goo-Boy, didn’t I? The ice-brain they call Crystal Kid, I got him, didn’t I?”

  “Maybe,” says I.

  “I got him or I kill him,” he says, showing more teeth than a primate’s supposed to have.

  “You got me,” says I. “But don’t go thinking you can kill me.”

  He just laughs. “I got you and you’re so good, you can bet I got me a girl who’s at least as good at what she does.”

  “No such,” says I.

  “Tell me his P-word and then I’ll be impressed.”

  “You want quick results? Then go ask him to give you his passwords himself.”

  Dogwalker isn’t one of those guys who can hide it when he’s made. “I want quick results,” he says. “And if I start thinking you can’t deliver, I’ll pull your tongue out of your head. Through your nose.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” says I. “I always do my best thinking when I’m being physically threatened by a client. You really know how to bring out the best in me.”

&n
bsp; “I don’t want to bring out the best.” he says. “I just want to bring out his password.”

  “I got to meet him first,” says I.

  He leans over me as I can smell his musk, which is to say I’m very olfactory and so I can tell you he reeked of testosterone, by which I mean ladies could fill up with babies just from sniffing his sweat. “Meet him?” he asks me. “Why don’t we just ask him to fill out a job application.”

  “I’ve read all his job applications,” says I.

  “How’s a glass-head like you going to meet Mr. Fed?” says he. “I bet you’re always getting invitations to the same parties as guys like him.”

  “I don’t get invited to grown-up parties,” says I. “But on the other hand, grown-ups don’t pay much attention to sweet little kids like me.”

  He sighed. “You really have to meet him?”

  “Unless fifty-fifty on a P-word is good enough odds for you.”

  All of a sudden he goes nova. Slaps a glass off the table and it breaks against the all, and then he kicks the table over, and all the time I’m thinking about ways to get out of there unkilled. But it’s me he’s doing the show for, so there’s no way I’m leaving, and he leans in close to me and screams in my face. “That’s the last of your fifty-fifty and sixty-forty and three times in ten I want to hear about, Goo Boy, you hear me?”

  And I’m talking real meek and sweet, cause this boy’s twice my size and three times my weight and I don’t exactly have no leverage. So I says to him, “I can’t help talking in odds and percentages, Dogwalker, I’m vertical, remember? I’ve got glass channels in here, they spit out percentages as easy as other people sweat.”

  He slapped his hand against his own head. “This ain’t exactly a sausage biscuit, either, but you know and I know that when you give me all them exact numbers it’s all guesswork anyhow. You don’t know the odds on this beakrat anymore than I do.”

  “I don’t know the odds on him, Walker, but I know the odds on me. I’m sorry you don’t like the way I sound so precise, but my crystal memory his every P-word I ever plumbed, which is to say I can give you exact to the third decimal percentages on when I hit it right on the first try after meeting the subject, and how many times I hit it right on the first try just from his curriculum vitae, and right now if I don’t meet him and I go on just what I’ve got here you have a 48.838 percent chance I’ll be right on my P-word first time and a 66.667 chance I’ll be right with one out of three.”