Now if that ain’t a silly weapon, I don’t know what is.
So it doesn’t matter if you were cautious enough not to make your home near any strategic military targets. If you live anywhere near a commercial airport, you stand a chance of being attacked by an Icy B.M.
NOBODY LIKES TO BE LONELY
The room looked quite comfortable when they brought McGinny in and left him alone. He had seen pictures, and knew what it was. But in his guts he could not believe that it was a cell.
It didn’t look like a cell. It didn’t taste like a cell, or feel like one, but most of all it didn’t look like one. McGinny had been in jail once before, in this same county, and the cell then had borne all the classic hallmarks: bars, mildewed concrete walls, barred windows, an absurdly large lock, and miserably inadequate sanitary provisions consisting of a seatless toilet which stubbornly refused to flush and a badly cracked sink which exuded brown, rusty water.
But then, that had been so long ago that the charge for which McGinny had done time was possession of marijuana. That statute, while it still existed, had not been enforced in over ten years.
And in the meantime, prisons had changed. They had had to, of course. The Attica Uprising and the Tombs Rebellion, the Joliet Massacre and the Battle of New Alcatrz had been unmistakable signs that the traditional approach to penology was obsolete. A criminal population approaching thirty percent of the total simply could not be herded together and kept safely subjugated without the very sort of brutalization which an informed public would no longer tolerate.
But what if they were not herded together?
So it was that the room which met McGinny’s eyes now was in appearance a pleasant, modestly appointed studio apartment—with a few anomalies. The convict seated himself in a remarkably comfortable, high-backed pseudo-leather armchair, padded with God alone knew what, and surveyed the unit which would be his universe until the time-lock on the room’s only door ran out, ten years from now. Lookit all the cubic, he told himself wonderingly. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
The time-lock itself, not unnaturally, was the first thing that held his eye. It was set just below the apparently open window which was cut into the door of his cell. All that faced on his side of the door was an inverted triangular plate with rounded corners, small horizontal grooved slots in each corner. The overall effect was damnably like a skull.
“Pleased to meet ya,” McGinny told it, returning its sour grin.
The window above the plate measured about three by three, and appeared empty of glass. So did the window on the opposite wall behind McGinny, but both were in fact enclosed with a synthetic material (trade-named “Nothing”) which was so transparent as to appear invisible. It could not break, crack or get dirty. The second window looked out on a small courtyard, pleasantly landscaped with ferns and lush grasses, bordered by three fifteen-story wings just like the one which held McGinny’s cell. The seven hundred and fifty windows of each were opaque from the outside. He sighed.
To his left was a bed, consisting of a mattress on top of a sealed box-spring which was clamped to the floor. Although the room’s climate-control system made bedclothes superfluous, the penologists had been thoughtful enough to realize that a man (or woman) felt better with something over him as he slept. Hence they provided a sheet—made of paper. Above the bed were two horizontal slits, each about a half-meter wide. The upper one would dispense either paper sheets or paper clothes. It was activated by placing a used sheet or garment in the lower slot, which led to an incinerator somewhere in the bowels of the prison. Two pillows lay on the bed, each a featureless sponge.
Filling the space between the head of the bed and the corner of the room was a closet without a door. It had no transversing pole from which to suspend hangers, nor did it have hangers. Instead, suits of paper clothing—there were four of them—hung from small extrusions of plasteel high on the rear wall of the closet.
In the opposite corner, behind McGinny and to the right, was a spacious desk with voicewriter and drawing pencils. Above the desk was a reader which would display any book requested, page by page, so long as it was stored in the prison’s central computer. Much of the fiction available was speculative, the authorities having decided that it would be all right to allow prisoners some form of escape. (McGinny knew that lately, the majority of science-fiction writers were ex-criminals, some of whose output was quite disturbing. Or perhaps that was not a new development.)
To the left of the desk was a quadio console, also computer-supplied, its four speakers represented by darker areas at four corners of the ceiling. Available tapes ranged from classical through rock to flash, with side trips into gregorian and neojazz. The console was nearly featureless: one spoke one’s choice and selected tone and volume with simple slide switches. In appearance, therefore, the console resembled a washing machine with two small horns.
Directly adjacent to the quadio was the Automat: an equally large cube, with a serving platform let into its front and small slots on either side which dispensed rubber cutlery. It too was voice-activated, and was fed through the floor from a master unit which supplied the Automat with raw materials. Save for the absence of a slot into which to deposit one’s quarters, it was identical to the Automats to be found on the average street corner—from McGinny’s angle of vision at least. From the other end of the room one could have seen the unmistakable, time-honored shape of a toilet bowl, let into the Automat’s left side. It drained to the prison’s basement where paper and waste were filtered out and the remainder routed to the master food unit. This saved the taxpayers millions of dollars annually.
McGinny snorted, ceased his inventory of the room and rose from his chair. He went to the small sink on the right of the cell door and regarded himself in its “mirror,” a glassless reflective surface. As McGinny was one of many who had elected to inhibit their beards, there was no shaving unit next to the mirror; his hair would simply have to grow for the next ten years, or until he became sick enough to warrant the cutting open of the time-lock to permit a doctor to attend him. The doctor played a lot of golf.
Familiar, coarse features stared back at McGinny, restoring his confidence. His head was large, with a cap of wiry brown curls resting on elongated ears. His eyes were set close against a blunt nose, and his over-full lower lip gave him a pouting, petulant expression. As he saw again the room whose reflection surrounded his own, the pout became almost a sneer. These were the most spacious and luxurious quarters he had ever inhabited—few in the overcrowded world of 2007 had it so good.
Ten years? he thought, cheerfully. I’ll do it standing on my head. Elbow room, privacy, food cooked for me…He frowned. Sure will miss beer, though. And the fems. His contentment beginning to fade, he returned to the armchair and dropped heavily into it. He found his gaze fixed on the window set in the cell door. It was strange—the window on the opposite wall looked out on open space, this one onto a plasteel corridor. And yet the exterior window gave a view of a false freedom, sculpted to make McGinny and other thousands feel better. In the corridor, men walked. Somehow, freedom was that way.
He shifted, scratched his crotch and considered the quadio. It seemed to him that his first choice in this cell was a significant event, demanding contemplation. He imagined himself ten years hence, narrating his prison saga to an enraptured fem with eyes like saucers, saying, “And do you know what the first thing I played in that taken place was?” This’d better be good; he’d hate to have to lie to her.
After a time he addressed the quadio. The room filled with the sound of a frenzied 4/4 piano solo from Leon Russell’s legendary last album, Live at Luna City. Bass and moog came in together as the Master of Space and Time hurled his anthem:
“I’m just tryin’ to stay ’live—and keep mah sideburns too.”
Legs trembling, vaguely enjoying the play of cool air across his sweat-sheened, slender body, Solomon Orechal lay in the utter relaxation called afterglow and surveyed his bedroo
m. In so doing, he also surveyed his dining room, his living room, his kitchen, and his car—all at the same time.
He sighed, for perhaps the dozenth time that day; just as, in fact, he had sighed with an almost rhythmic regularity on every day since he had first moved into his own Mome, from the comparative spaciousness of his parents’ fish-and-see apartment. As the popular name indicated, a good efficiency was hard to find these days, but the Orechal ancestral apt (the building dated all the way back to 1957) had been in the family possession since before the Housing Riots—as the axe-scar and single bullet-hole in the door attested. Solomon had told himself often in the last two years that he had been a fool to strike out on his own. But the lure of adventure and the challenge of living wherever he could find a parking space had been enough to pry him from the four-and-a-half-room home of his youth.
Besides, it was awkward, bringing your girlfriends into the bathroom to be alone.
Apropos of which:
It’s very strange, thought Solomon. I know just what she’s going to say now…
“Sol, why can’t we do the Truth dope?”
…and yet there’s nothing déjà vu about it.
Beside him on the narrow bed, Barbara raised on one elbow, half-leaned across him. Sleepily, earnestly, she brushed the hair out of his eyes and repeated, “Why won’t you do Truth with me, lover?”
…even down to the soft but oh so insistent tone of voice, the way she lets her left breast brush me; and it’s just nothing at all like déjà vu…
She was still talking, and there was that in her voice which acts directly on the glands, but he was miles ahead of her, his attention two levels removed, contemplating the frustration of Moebius’s Band with what seemed a poignant bitterness. Vaguely, he monitored the persuasions and importunities, dropping a grunt here and there and looking impassive, until he heard the line he had been patiently waiting for.
“…how,” she was saying, timidly and inevitably, “can I help but think you’re afraid of the Truth?”
His timing was magnificent.
“Afraid of the truth?” he asked quietly, paused. “What we just did…wasn’t that the truth?” He brushed his fingertips along the underside of her belly, and she shivered. “Are you suggesting that that wasn’t real? That we were just fucking? Because it sure seemed to me that we were making love. Maybe I was wrong.”
He had her now, he knew it from the look on her face, but somehow he couldn’t summon up the old elation, the sense of triumph. Mechanically, he moved for the coup-de-grace: now that you’ve stirred up the emotions, throw in a pseudologic and you’re home free.
“You know why I don’t do Truth Dope, man. I’ve told you a dozen times. I’m not afraid of the truth, I’m afraid of the dope.”
She made one last try. “But Sol…”
“Now don’t start, Barb. We’ve been through this, kark it. There’s a mountain of evidence for each side, just like there always is when a new drug comes out. The law says it plays hob with your motivations, and the heads say it clears your vision. The law says it rots your body, and heads say it’s a lie. You know what happened with pot.” (It hadn’t been until 1986 that it was proven that marijuana could cause tuberculosis. No real problem, as they had TB licked by that time—one shot at twelve and you couldn’t get it if you tried—but it was too late for an awful lot of smokers who had thought that all the evidence was in by 1975.) “I lost my mother to TB, and I plan for the rest of my life to take the conservative opinion wherever possible. No thanks, Barb. I’ll take my Truth the sloppy, human way, through inference and deduction. Maybe I’ll be wrong a lot more often…but maybe I’ll have a lot more often to be wrong in.
“Besides, I don’t need any proof that you love me—even through you’re trying to get me to do something I don’t think is safe, to reassure you. Things like what just happened here a couple of minutes ago are all the ‘proof’ I need.”
There was, of course, nothing she could say to that, and she even apologized, but somehow even as he mounted her to prove again the depth of his love by the strength of his hips he knew that the subject was not closed, and that someday she would back him into a corner he couldn’t talk his way out of, and on that day they would share the drug that made dissembly impossible, and she would leave him, just like all the others.
He moaned, but she misunderstood and held him tighter.
McGinny tried for the fifth time to cut the leathery soyburger with his rubber fork. This time the disposable plate danced on the serving platform and he nearly lost the meal entirely. He swore a hideous oath and flung the fork angrily from him, but with the blind malignance that inanimate objects display when a man is in a towering rage, it bounced from the plasteel wall and dropped with an absurdly loud, high splash into the toilet.
He rose quickly, cursing with a steady, monotonous rhythm. Taken stuff tastes enough like rubber already, he thought savagely, plunging his thick hand into the bowl. He was just too late to save the fork; the cell’s designers had reasoned that a flushing mechanism could fail—a serious calamity in a time-locked room—and so that bowl simply emptied itself constantly, at a gentle speed which McGinny had not quite beaten.
Swearing louder now, he straightened and walked to the sink to wash his hands. He could not for the life of him understand why he felt that the water there would be any cleaner than that which laved the bowl, and it irritated him immensely.
Of course he burned his hands. But by that time the anger had reached the point from which one either tremblingly descends, or begins throwing things. He had few things to throw, and none he could spare. He counted to ten, then chanted Om Mani Padme Hum, and gradually the black rage subsided, at least to the point where he could see through the red haze.
Make the karkin’ silverware rubber so we can’t snuff ourselves, he thought, and look how much good it does. I’m really filled with the joy of livin’ now.
Finally he walked back to the automat, sat down in the desk chair which stood before it, and picked the soyburger from the plate on the serving platform.
It was cold.
“GodDAMNit,” he exploded. “Sunnabitchin’ machine s’posta keep the taken stuff hot, just my fuckin’ luck to get the one don’t work for TEN TAKEN YEARS!”
There was nothing for it; the soyburger was all he would get until tomorrow morning. Growling, he raised it to his mouth and ripped off a piece with his teeth.
“Hi, there.”
He whirled, his hand absurdly cocking the soyburger like a weapon. There in the window of the cell door, above the skull-like time-lock, was a face. A person!
McGinny ran to the door, flinging the soyburger into a corner. “Hello!” he shouted, and then pulled to a halt before the door, suddenly embarrassed. They looked at each other for a while, McGinny seeing the young kid, maybe twenty, with long blond hair and a Fu Manchu mustache, looks like one o’ them Trippies, oh, Jesus, I hope he likes to talk.
“What are you in for?”
“Embezzlement,” McGinny said automatically, a million questions that he could not form coherently enough to ask buzzing in his brain.
“Oh,” said the youth, adjusting a uniform cap on his shaggy head. He seemed somehow just slightly disappointed. “I guess that must be pretty interesting stuff, embezzlement. I get to talk to all kinds of interesting people on this job. Once…once I talked to a rapist.”
He almost seemed to be licking his lips, but McGinny was beyond noticing. He managed to stammer, “Hey, look, buddy…what…I mean, who are you? What are you doing here? How often do you come around? What…hey, how come I can even hear you in here?”
The kid chuckled. “They’ve got a two-way sound system on the door, man. Didn’t you know? Listen, don’t freak, I’m like, the guard. You didn’t think they’d leave you alone with nobody to check on you, did you? Suppose you conked?”
“But,” McGinny said, “I mean, do you come around a lot? Can you stay awhile and talk?”
“Oh, sure,�
�� the kid assured him. “That’s why I took this job, man. I’m into people, where they’re at, like. All I have to do is walk around and talk to interesting people, and I only gotta cover fifteen guys a day. See, if you want to know the truth, the job’s welfare.”
McGinny understood. The work-and-wage system as a means of distributing wealth was on its last legs—there simply wasn’t enough work to go around, and the population continued to climb. As a last-ditch stopgap, the government had taken to making up idiot work so that there would be sufficient jobs available to keep the traditional economic system staggering on, but the farce was becoming more obvious every year. What more obvious example than this young Trippie, “guarding” men in sealed plasteel cells to earn his living.
But at this particular moment McGinny was overwhelmingly grateful for the continued sham. It was accidentally providing him with the means of maintaining his sanity.
“Listen,” he said urgently, “listen, kid, if you’ll come around and talk to me a lot, I’ll…” He paused, baffled. He had nothing to offer. “I’ll be grateful,” he finished lamely, desperate with fear that he would be rejected.
“Sure, man,” the kid grinned. “I like to talk. Mostly I like to listen. I’m interested in the criminal mind and all. I’ll bet you’ve got some interesting stories to tell.”
By Any Other Name Page 16
