Rule 34 hs-2

by Charles Stross

  On the other hand, that was before you hit your teens—and ran into crushes and BFFs and all the weirdly incomprehensible playground politics that never really made sense to you. Because your crushes were all wrong, and you were afraid to talk about them: Is she a lesbo? was about the second worst thing they could say about anyone, and you knew that if you gave them even a hint about what you dreamed about, about what made you wake flushed and sweating in the small hours, it’d be the absolute end, utter humiliation for the rest of your life.

  So you giggled along with them, and learned to lie, didn’t admit to watching and rewatching Xena on video until the tapes chewed themselves up, and made a point of going to church so that when you said you believed in no-sex-before-marriage, they believed you and forgot to ask the obvious follow-on question: So who’s the lucky boy, then? You even did the Alpha course when you were eighteen, and lied enthusiastically right up until the speaking in tongues bit (which caught in your throat).

  But then it was time for university. Where you met your inner Dorothy and got to know her . . . quite well.

  Learning who you are is something every teenager goes through: But if your identity isn’t an identikit match for any of the role models on offer, it can take quite a while and take you up some strange paths on the way. You figured out you wanted to be a cop quite early—maybe it was Uncle Bert’s fault (even though he never bothered taking the sergeant’s exam), and maybe it was connected to the hard-shell uniformed image: self-sufficient, justified, not taking shit from ignorant assholes. You wanted that, you wanted it badly, and you believed in rules and telling the truth and punishing bullies. But maybe there was something else going on as well, something you didn’t understand at the time.

  When you got your A-level grades and that place at university and broke away from the home-town claustrophobia for the first time, you didn’t bother joining any wishy-washy clubs and societies: You signed up for Archery and SCUBA Diving rather than the Feminists Society or LGBT Soc. You did your drinking in a pub on the wrong side of the tracks, where you unconsciously felt safe, not realizing that you were missing out on all the torrid flesh-pots of academia; and it was from the local bears that you learned about gay culture at second hand. Learned their jokes, learned their slang, learned “friends of Dorothy” as archaic code for the love that dared not speak its name (once upon a time).

  You never realized that the Feminists Society was the bed-hopping club of your dreams; or that if you’d hung out in the Student’s Union on campus, you could have had your pick from the conveyor-belt sushi buffet of dungaree-wearing baby dykes in LGBT Soc.

  (At least, until they learned you were studying to be a cop.)

  Mary was the turning point. Portsmouth, Pompey: a naval town, going back hundreds of years—and where you get warships, you get sailors. Some of whom—you can imagine Kylie in Lower Sixth hissing it in disbelief—were lesbians. Who did not hang out around the university campus but were certainly willing to take a gawky post-teen with aspirations towards a uniformed service under their wings and teach her stuff about herself that would be a source of nostalgia many years later. Mary was blonde and friendly and brisk, and for a while you’d been her girl in port: which was good while it lasted (Twelve months? Eighteen?) and left you on a tide of tears, clutching a much better understanding of who you were going to be when you grew up.

  All of which is fifteen years and more in your past, but goes some way towards explaining how you got a bona grip on Polari before anybody told you that you were the wrong kind of feminist; why you sigh whenever you see a navy ship in the waters of the Firth; and how come you think it’s hilarious that your on-again off-again will-she-orwon’t-she nuisance lover is called Dorothy Straight.

  ANWAR: Office Worker

  You smell hot oil and cardamom as you walk through the front door: “Hi, Bibi, I’m home!”

  She’s in the kitchen. “Yes, dear,” she calls distractedly. “Have you seen Naseem? I sent him round to Uncle Lal’s for a bunch of methi, and he’s not come back. I think he’s playing with his English friends again”—in Bibi’s world English is a wild-card ethnicity: It could equally mean Scottish or Lithuanian—“and he’s forgotten, the little scamp . . .”

  “No, haven’t seen him.” You suppress the urge to grump at her (What am I, his nursemaid?) as you close the front door and hang your jacket up. The boy will be fine; you can locate him on GPS just as soon as you take the sock off your phone . . . “I’ve been looking for an office. I think I’ve found one.”

  “Oh, good! Hey, come and be a dear and help peel these onions? You know they make me . . .” cry, you mentally autocomplete, suppressing a snort and heading into the kitchen. It’s one of Bibi’s stranger foibles: Despite the day job, she insists on cooking, but she can’t, absolutely can’t, peel and chop onions. (You said “no” and watched her try, just the once, years ago: The memory of what it did to her eyes is still enough to make you wince. Now she’s got a German gadget to chop them up, but getting the outer skin off first is a man’s job . . . where is that boy?)

  You join Bibi in the kitchen, where she’s frying up spices, and take a knife to the offending onions. (It’s probably her contact lenses. Why can’t she just wear spectacles while she’s cooking?) “Your auntie Sameena called round earlier, you know? She was wanting to know all about this mystery job of yours, but I told her it was none of her business until you are good and ready to tell everyone. Trade secrets. That hushed her up, I can tell you. She watches too many trashy spy soaps from Karachi; she thinks you’re still secretly a black-hat hacker . . .”

  You wordlessly pass her the bowl of onions. She stuffs them into the German gadget, closes the lid, and stares at you significantly as she puts some serious arm action into the handle. It’s a sign that she expects you to read her mind—she’s a firm believer in male telepathy, and you’ve never quite had the nuts to break it to her that she’d do much better at silent communication if she simply stuck to jerking your dick in Morse code. You waggle your eyebrows at her. “What is it?”

  She pauses, then looks up at you. “What is this mysterious job that you need to rent an office for, oh my husband?” She’s using this oddly stilted excuse for a private language she picked up from fuck-knows-where—some Bollywood musical version of domestic married bliss perhaps—she’s even batting her eyelashes. You may be telepathically deaf, but even you can figure out that this is the feminine equivalent of boldface and double-underlined capitals.

  You lean close, put an arm around her shoulder, and ask her: “Can you keep a secret, oh my wife?”

  She leans against you, seeking contact, which is nice (for once, there are no kids present). “If you ask me to, nicely . . .”

  You kiss the top of her head. “Alright. But please don’t tell your mother; she’ll get too excited.

  “It’s all to do with that job interview I had last week. The one the Gnome sent my way—”

  “I knew it!” She tenses angrily. “That rat!” She doesn’t pull away, but you can feel her quiver with indignation, and something inside you locks up tight.

  Bibi doesn’t know your exact relationship with Adam, but he’s been around occasionally, and she doesn’t like or trust him: She knows he’s a business associate, and that’s bad enough for her—the kind of business associate whose company landed you in Saughton, she thinks. Nonsense: It was just a spot of bad luck. But needs must, and ruffled feathers need smoothing: “No, love, it’s not something I’m doing for him; it’s just something he was able to point my way. It’s not big, but it’s useful, and there’s money in it, and more importantly, it’ll convince the social workers that I’m getting my life straightened out.”

  “Is it legal?” she asks, pointedly.

  “It’s more than legal: It’s for a government.”

  “Well then.” That shuts her up for a moment, but not for two: She’s not stupid. “What government? The Scottish—”

  “Hsst, no.” The current administr
ation is a hive of snake-fondling Christians, in league with the Wee Frees; luckily it looks as if they’re going to go down hard at the next election. “You see, the job interview wasn’t in London, and I didn’t get the sleeper train: I had to fly all the way to Przewalsk! And I got the job. I’m going to be”—you savour the moment as you prepare to tell her—“the honorary consul in Edinburgh for the Independent Republic of Issyk-ouch!”

  You were about to say Kulistan when your loving, obedient wife dropped the German gadget on your foot. “Oh!” She ignores your injury and scrabbles around on the floor in pursuit of the onion compartment, which has taken on a life of its own and is rolling enthusiastically towards the table. You stifle a rude word—being German, the gadget is over-engineered and surprisingly heavy—and instead bend over and pick up the detachable handle. The plastic collar where it fits onto the onion eviscerator (or whatever it is called) has broken, and there is a smell of burning—worse, of hot metal—from the frying pan.

  Bibi stands up, snorting deeply like an angry heifer as she clutches a clear plastic tub of finely chopped onions: Her chest rises and falls fetchingly under her blouse as she stares at you in disbelief. “Honorary what? You’re making shit up again, you worthless sack of—” Then she blinks and lunges past you in the direction of the cooker: “Oh, my pan! Oh no! This is a disaster!”

  Right at that moment the front door opens with a fanfare of brassy pre-teen boys’ voices, and everything gets a little vague. You are not sure how the plastic-collared German onion-destroying gadget’s handle ends up in the frying pan, or why the turmeric ends up in the bowl of gram flour and the whole mess ends up on the floor, or where the smell of burning plastic is coming from, because the smoke detector has gone off its little electronic trolley and is screeching loud enough to wake the dead: But you beat a hasty retreat from the self-deconstructing kitchen.

  “Go and help your mother,” you sternly tell your son, who is clutching a paper bag and chattering excitedly about something football-related that he and his friend Mo have done. Then you tiptoe away with a sinking heart. Bibi will blame you for setting the kitchen on fire, and she’ll make you go chase after a template for the broken part of the German gadget and repair the thing. Why do your attempts to do good for her always seem to end up this way?

  Your hard work has paid off. In the process of examining commercial properties you stumbled upon some most remarkably posh digs at a knock-down price for your consular mission. It’s in one corner of a modernist glass cube that is embedded like a gestating alien larva within the bowels of the former post office headquarters on North Bridge. The Gothic architraves of Scottish Baronial limestone pulse with an eerie green radiance after dusk; passers-by who peer between the sandstone window casements can see the cleaning robots casting long shadows across the cube’s windows as they skitter hither and yon. It’s supposedly haunted by the ghost of a Microsoft sales rep who hanged herself in the central atrium a couple of decades ago. Some of the Ghost Tours from the Royal Mile have taken to stopping by late at night.

  Admittedly, your stipend does not stretch to anything particularly plush: Your wee niche in the former Microsoft HQ is a three-metre-by-four room in a shared office suite. It’s half-filled by a scratched-up pine desk and a pre-owned Aeron chair the management threw in as a sweetener. The rest of the suite is overrun by programmers from a local gaming corporation who rent two entire floors above you. They’re working on some kind of Artificial Reality project—you made the fatal mistake of asking one of them, and your eyes glazed over before he reached the fourth paragraph of nerdspeak without stopping to draw breath. But at least you’re not hot-desking, or hanging out your shingle above Rafi’s phone-unlocking and discount-print shop on Easter Road. No, indeed. You’ve come up in the world, you have an office of your own, you wear a suit and tie to work, and people respect you.

  (Well, we’ll soon see about that.)

  Mr. Webber was certainly taken aback at your last interview. “Representing a consortium of central Asian commercial interests in the Midlothian region?” He doodled a note on his tablet. “Well, Anwar, you never cease to surprise me. A family connection, I assume?” You grinned and refrained from blabbing, but produced the documentation when he asked to see it. The smug bastard really raised an eyebrow when you showed him the letterhead. He’s going to check it out, but the beauty is that it will check out. Which means your future sessions with him will be reduced to thirty-second ticky-boxes rather than real probation interviews. Going straight doesn’t get much straighter than wearing a suit and working for a foreign government.

  Actually, there’s fuck-all work in it. You’ve set up your office and your desk just so, and you’ve skimmed the helpful handbook they’ve prepared for honorary consuls. The first IBAN draft hits your bank account with a thud, and now you’re sitting pretty. Cousin Shani’s handling your tax—she’s an accountant—and you’re in credit and in employment. But after the first few days of scurrying around filling out online forms, it’s a bit boring. As the Gnome surmised, few natives of Issyk-Kulistan pass through Scotland. In fact, it’s a lot boring. There isn’t even any email to answer.

  Alas, you’ve got to be behind the desk during core hours, all twenty of them a week. After a bit, you ask Tariq if you can borrow a pad so you can work on his dating website while you’re holding the fort: Nobody who walks in will know it from what you’re supposed to be doing, and you can do with the cash.

  So you’re there one midafternoon, grinding your teeth over a broken style sheet, when the doorbell chimes. At first you mistake it for your IDE complaining about a syntax error, but then it rings again, and you see the desk set blinking its light at you. You’ve got company.

  “Hello? Uh, consulate of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan?”

  The desk set clears its throat. “Hello, the consulate? Please to be letting us in?”

  You stare for a couple of seconds, then figure out which button to push on the antique console. You hear the front door open and hide Tariq’s pad before you stand up and go to see who it is.

  Two men are peering twitchily around the lobby area of the shared offices. One’s in his late twenties, and the other is considerably older. They’ve both got close-cropped hair, bushy moustaches, and an indefinable air of perplexity that screams foreigner at you. The younger one is clutching the handle of a gigantic rolling case. “Hello? Can I help you?” you ask, politely enough, and the young guy nearly jumps out of his skin.

  “Er, hello, this is consulate of . . . Przewalsk?” The younger guy’s English is clearly a second language—or third. “Hussein Anwar?”

  “That’s me,” you say, nodding. “Can I ask what your business is, sir?” You really want to get back to fixing Tariq’s botched style sheet, and you haven’t snapped into the right head space, but it comes out sounding patronizing and officious.

  The old guy turns to his young companion and rattles something off. The young guy replies, then turns to you. “He says we need to speak in your office. We are visiting trade delegation. Felix Datka sends us to you.”

  Oh. Well that puts a different face on things! “Certainly, if you’d like to follow me?”

  Your office is equipped with two plastic visitors chairs and a regrettably non-plastic rubber plant, which has hideous yellow-rimmed holes in its leaves but refuses to die despite your daily libation of coffee grounds. You usher the trade delegation past the plant and wave them into the seats. “What brings you to Edinburgh?” you ask.

  “Emails are you has read, the?” begins the old guy before his young companion takes over: “My friend here, he is being lead trade mission to sell produce of our factories to foreign markets. There should an email be. We bring here for you a consignment of trade samples, to be distributed to visitors.”

  The old guy nods emphatically. “You give we.” He waves at the huge and villainous suitcase, which is already settling into the carpet. “Samples.”

  “Uh, yes. I see. What kind
of samples?”

  You watch, fascinated, as the young guy fiddles with the substantial locks on the case. He opens the lid with a flourish, not unlike a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. “Look!” he announces.

  The suitcase is full of white paper bags. He pulls one out and hands it to you. The label reads: INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE. “For Western home bread-maker machine,” says the young guy, as the old guy grins broadly and nods. “Is produced by People’s Number Four Grain Products Factory of Issyk-Kulistan! Taste very good, no grit, batteries included, just add water.”

  “Batteries?” You shake your head.

  “Yeast,” he says hastily. “You give. Visitors.”

  You eye up the enormous suitcase. “You want me to give visitors bags of bread mix?” you ask him. “But I don’t have room here—”

  The old guy nods again. “Give he you visitors bread.” He looks at you, and suddenly you recognize his expression and you just about shit yourself. “Is visitors, yes? Email, is.”

  “The instructions are for you in the email,” the young guy adds helpfully. He stands up. “We go, now. Other consuls, more trade!” He grins alarmingly widely and reaches out to shake your hand. His skin is dry and hot, his grip tight as a handcuff. “Am thanking you. You are good man, says Colonel Datka.”

  After the “trade delegation” leaves, you sit behind your desk breathing heavily for a couple of minutes. The suitcase crouches behind the dying rubber plant, like a snooping secret policeman intent on exposing your guilt. Who do they think I am? Does Datka think I’m stupid, or something? You glare at the case. It’s obviously drugs. That’s what this is all about. They’ve figured out how to use diplomatic bags and “trade delegations” to smuggle heroin out of Abkhazia or Ruritania or somewhere, and now you’re expected to play host to an endless revolving-door parade of dealers. Well, it won’t do! You weren’t born yesterday. If they think you’re going to tamely take the fall, for a mere thousand euros a month—