Flux Tales Of Human Futures

by Card, Orson Scott

  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 also still pissed.

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  "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 aroxind, 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 I 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

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  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 pockets 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 if it 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

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  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

  propensity."

  "Propensity," 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 showed 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

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  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-i-oh. Not every goo-head can think clear enough to do this,

  you know, put out clean type just by thinking the right stuff out my left ear

  interface port.

  I showed 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 your 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

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  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 password himself."

  Dogwalker isn't one of those guys who can hide it when he's mad. "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."

  "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 so 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 wall, 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."