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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 has 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."
Well that took him down, which was fine I must say because he loosened up my
sphincters with that glass-smashing table-tossing hot-breath-in-my-face routine he
did. He stepped back and put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall.
"Well I chose the right P-man, then, didn't I," he says, but he doesn't smile, no,
he says the back-down words but his eyes don't back down, his eyes say don't try to
flash my face because I see through you, I got most excellent inward shades all
polarized to keep out your glitz and see you straight and clear. I never saw eyes
like that before. Like he knew me. Nobody ever knew me, and I didn't think he really
knew me either, but I didn't like him looking at me as if he thought he knew me
cause the fact is I didn't know me all that well and it worried me to think he might
know me better than I did, if you catch my drift.
"All I have to do is be a little lost boy in a store," I says.
"What if he isn't the kind who helps little lost boys?"
"Is he the kind who lets them cry?"
"I don't know. What if he is? What then? Think you can get away with meeting him a
second time? "
"So the lost boy in the store won't work. I can crash my bicycle on his front
lawn. I can try to sell him cable magazines."
But he was ahead of me already. "For the cable magazines he slams the door in your
face, if he even comes to the door at all. For the bicycle crash, you're out of your
little glass brain. I got my inside girl working on him right now, very complicated,
because he's not the playing around kind, so she has to make this a real emotional
come-on, like she's breaking up with a boyfriend and he's the only shoulder she can
cry on, and his wife is so lucky to have a man like him. This much he can believe.
But then suddenly he has this little boy crashing in his yard, and because he's
paranoid, he begins to wonder if some weird rain isn't falling, right? I know he's
paranoid because you don't get to his level in the fed without you know how to watch
behind you and kill the enemy even before they know they're out to get you. So he
even suspects, for one instant, that somebody's setting him up for something and
what does he do?"
I knew what Dogwalker was getting at now, and he was right, and so I let him have
his victory and I let the words he wanted march out all in a row. "He changes all
his passwords, all his habits, and watches over his shoulder all the time."
"And my little project turns into compost. No clean greens."
So I saw for the first time why this street boy, this ex-pimp, why he was the one
to do this job. He wasn't vertical like me, and he didn't have the inside hook like
his fed boy, and he didn't have bumps in his sweater so he couldn't do the girl
part, but he had eyes in his elbows, ears in his knees, by which I mean he noticed
everything there was to notice and then he thought of a few things that weren't even
noticeable yet and noticed them. He earned his forty percent. And he earned part of
my twenty, too.
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Now while we waited around for the girl to fill Jesse's empty aching arms and get
a finger off him, and while we were still working on how to get me to meet him slow
and easy and sure, I spent a lot of time with Dogwalker. Not that he ever asked me,
but I found myself looping his bus route every morning till he picked me up, or I'd
be eating at Bojangle's when he came in to throw cajun chicken down into his
ulcerated organs. I watched to make sure he didn't mind, cause I didn't want to piss
this boy, having once beheld the majesty of his wrath, but if he wanted to shiver me
he gave me no shiv.
Even after a few days, when the ghosts of the cold hard street started haunting
us, he didn't shake me, and that includes when Bellbottom says to him, "Looks like
you stopped walking dogs. Now you pimping little boys, right? Little catamites, we
call you Catwalker now, that so? Or maybe you just keep him for private use, is that
it? You be Boypoker now?" Well like I always said, someday somebody's going to kill
Bellbottom just to flay him and use his skin for a convertible roof, but Dogwalker
just waved and walked on by while I made little pissy bumps at Bell. Most people
shake me right off when they start getting splashed on about liking little boys, but
Doggy, he didn't say we were friends or nothing, but he didn't give me no Miami
howdy, neither, which is to say I didn't find myself floating in the Bermuda
Triangle with my ass pulled down around my ankles, by which I mean he wasn't ashamed
to be seen with me on the street, which don't sound like a six-minute orgasm to you
but to me it was like a breeze in August, I didn't ask for it and I don't trust it
to last but as long as it's there I'm going to like it.
How I finally got to meet Jesse H. was dervish, the best I ever thought of. Which
made me wonder why I never thought of it before, except that I never before had
Dogwalker like a parrot saying "Stupid idea" every time I thought of something. By
the time I finally got a plan that he didn't say "stupid idea," I was almost drowned
in the deepest lightholes of my lucidity. I mean I was going at a hundred watts by
the time I satisfied him.
First we found out who did babysitting for them when Jesse H. and Mrs. Jesse went
out on the town (which for Nice People in G-boro means walking around the mall
wishing there was something to do and then taking a piss in the public john). They
had two regular teenage girls who usually came over and ignored their children for a
fee, but when these darlettes were other-wise engaged, which meant they had a
contract to get squeezed and poked by some half-zipped boy in exchange for a
hambuger and a vid, they called upon Mother Hubbard's Homecare Hotline. So I most
carefully assinuated myself into Mother Hubbard's estimable organization by passing
myself off as a lamentably prepubic fourteen-year-old, specializing in the northwest
section of town and on into the county. All this took a week, but Walker was in no
hurry. Take the time to do it right, he said, if we hurry somebody's going to notice
the blur of motion and look our way and just by looking at us they'll undo us. A
horizontal mind that boy had.
Came a most delicious night when the Hunts went out to play, and both their
diddle-girls were busy being squeezed most delectably (and didn't we have a lovely
time persuading two toddle-boys to do the squeezing that very night). This news came
to Mr. and Mrs. Jesse at the very last minute, and they had no choice but to call
Mother Hubbard's, and isn't it lovely that just a half hour before, sweet little
Stevie Queen, being moi, called in and said that he was available for baby-stomping
after all. Ein and ein made zwei, and there I was being dropped off by a Mother
Hubbard driver at the door of the Jesse Hunt house, whereupon I not only got to look
upon the beatific face of Mr. Fed himself, I also got to have my dear head patted by
Mrs. Fed, and then had the privilege of preparing little snacks for fussy Fed Jr.
and foul-mouthed Fedene, the five-year-old and the three-year-old, while Microfed,
the one-year-old (not yet human and, if I am any judge of character, not likely to
live long enough to become such) sprayed uric acid in my face while I was diapering
him. A good time was had by all.
Because of my heroic efforts, the small creatures were in their truckle beds quite
early, and being a most fastidious baby-tucker, I browsed the house looking for
burglars and stumbling, quite by chance, upon the most useful information about the
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beakrat whose secret self-chosen name I was trying to learn. For one thing, he had
set a watchful hair upon each of his bureau drawers, so that if I had been inclined
to steal, he would know that unlawful access of his drawers had been attempted. I
learned that he and his wife had separate containers of everything in the bathroom,
even when they used the same brand of toothpaste, and it was he, not she, who took
care of all their prophylactic activities (and not a moment too soon, thought I, for
I had come to know their children). He was not the sort to use lubrificants or
little pleasure-giving ribs, either. Only the regulation govemment-issue
hard-as-concrete rubber rafts for him, which suggested to my most pernicious mind
that he had almost as much fun between the sheets as me.
I learned all kinds of joyful information, all of it trivial, all of it vital. I
never know which of the threads I grasp are going to make connections deep within
the lumens of my brightest caves. But I never before had the chance to wander
unmolested through a person's own house when searching for his P-word. I saw the
notes his children brought home from school, the magazines his family received, and
more and more I began to see that Jesse H. Hunt barely touched his family at any
point. He stood like a waterbug on the surface of life, without ever getting his
feet wet. He could die, and if nobody tripped over the corpse it would be weeks
before they noticed. And yet this was not because he did not care. It was because he
was so very very careful. He examined everything but through the wrong end of the
microscope, so that it all became very small and far away. I was a sad little boy by
the end of that night, and I whispered to Microfed that he should practice pissing
in male faces, because that's the only way he would ever sink a hook into his
daddy's face.
"What if he wants to take you home?" Dogwalker asked me, and I said, "No way he
would, nobody does that," but Dogwalker made sure I had a place to go'all the same,
and sure enough, it was Doggy who got voltage and me who went limp. I ended up
riding in a beak-rat buggy, a genuine made-in-America rattletrap station wagon, and
he took me to the for-sale house where Mama Pimple was waiting crossly for me and
made Mr. Hunt go away because he kept me out too late. Then when the door was closed
Mama Pimple giggled her gig and chuckled her chuck, and Walker himself wandered out
of the back room and said, "That's one less favor you owe me, Mama Pimple," and she
said, "No, my dear boy-oh, that's one more favor you owe me" and then they kissed a
deep passionate kiss if you can believe it. Did you imagine anybody ever kissed Mama
Pimple that way? Dogwalker is a boyful of shocks.
"Did you get all you needed?" he asks me.
"I have P-words dancing upward," says I, "and I'll have a name for you tomorrow in
my sleep."
"Hold onto it and don't tell me," says Dogwalker. "I don't want to hear a name
until after we have his finger."
That magical day was only hours away, because the girl-- whose name I never knew
and whose face I never saw-- was to cast her spell over Mr. Fed the very next day.
As Dogwalker said, this was no job for lingeree. The girl did not dress pretty and
pretended to be lacking in the social graces, but she was a good little clerical who
was going through a most distressing period in her private life, because she had
undergone a premature hysterectomy, poor lass, or so she told Mr. Fed, and here she
was losing her womanhood and she had never really felt like a woman at all. But he
was so kind to her, for weeks he had been so kind, and Dogwalker told me afterward
how he locked the door of his office for just a few minutes, and held her and kissed
her to make her feel womanly, and once his fingers had all made their little
impressions on the thin electrified plastic microcoating all over her lovely naked
back and breasts, she began to cry and most gratefully informed him that she did not
want him to be unfaithful to his wife for her sake, that he had already given her
such a much of a lovely gift by being so kind and understanding, and she felt better
thinking that a man like him could bear to touch her knowing she was defemmed
inside, and now she thought she had the confidence to go on. A very convincing act,
and one calculated to get his hot naked handprints with out giving him a crisis of
conscience that might change his face and give him a whole new set of possible Ps.
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The microsheet got all his fingers from several angles, and so Walker was able to
dummy out a finger mask for our inside man within a single night. Right index. I
looked at it most skeptically, I fear, because I had my doubts already dancing in
the little lightpoints of my inmost mind. "Just one finger?"
"All we get is one shot," said Dogwalker. "One single try."
"But if he makes a mistake, if my first password isn't right, then he could use
the middle finger on the second try."
"Tell me, my vertical pricket, whether you think Jesse H. Hunt is the sort of burr
oak rat who makes mistakes?"
To which I had to answer that he was not, and yet I had my misgivings and my
misgivings all had to do with needing a second finger, and yet I am vertical, not
horizontal, which means that I can see the present as deep as you please but the
future's not mine to see, que sera, sera.
From what Doggy told me, I tried to imagine Mr. Fed's reaction to this nubile
flesh that he had pressed. If he had poked as well as peeked, I think it would have
changed his P-word, but when she told him that she would not want to compromise his
uncompromising virtue, it reinforced him as a most regular or even regulation fellow
and his na
me remained pronouncedly the same, and his P-word also did not change.
"InvictusXYZrwr," quoth I, to Dogwalker, for that was his veritable password, I
knew it with more certainty than I had ever had before.
"Where in hell did you come up with that?" says he.
"If I knew how I did it, Walker, I'd never miss at all," says I. "I don't even
know if it's in the goo or in the zoo. All the facts go down, and it all gets mixed
around, and up come all these dancing P-words, little pieces of P."
"Yeah, but you don't just make it up, what does it mean?"
"Invictus is an old poem in a frame stuck in his bureau drawer, which his mama
gave him when he was still a little fed-to-be. XYZ is his idea of randomizing, and
rwr is the first U.S. President that he admired. I don't know why he chose these
words now. Six weeks ago he was using a different P-word with a lot of numbers in
it, and six weeks from now he'll change again, but right now--"
"Sixty percent sure?" asked Doggy.
"I give no percents this time," says I. "I've never roamed through the bathroom of
my subject before. But this or give me an assectomy, I've never been more sure."
Now that he had the P-word, the inside guy began to wear his magic finger every
day, looking for chance to be alone in Mr. Fed's office. He had already created the
preliminary files, like any routine green card requests, and buried them within his
work area.
All he needed was to go in, sign on as Mr. Fed, and then if the system accepted
his name and P-word and finger, he could call up the files, approve them, and be
gone within a minute. But he had to have that minute.
And on that wonderful magical day he had it. Mr. Fed had a meeting and his
secretary sprung a leak a day early, and in went Inside Man with a perfectly
legitimate note to leave for Hunt. He sat before the terminal, typed name and P-word
and laid down his phony finger, and the machine spread wide its lovely legs and bid
him enter. He had the files processed in forty seconds, laying down his finger for
each green, then signed off and went on out. No sign, no sound that anything was
wrong. As sweet as summertime, as smooth as ice, and all we had to do was sit and
wait for green cards to come in the mail.
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