Analog SFF, May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Actually, they probably had. A couple of years ago, when they'd registered me for the lottery, I'd been sent about five megabytes of rules, regulations, “backgrounders,” and the like. But who pays attention to that type of junk?

  Fortunately, back in Cantril, the Exchange agent had given me a whole podful of docs that probably contained the same information. I had about a million questions, so I plugged the pod into my vidbook (or I guess I should say Anthony's vidbook) and between bounces, tried to find at least a few answers. Could I use Anthony's money to buy groceries? Could he use mine to rent a bulldozer and go wreck the planet? Would I be liable if I mashed his thumb with a hammer? Would he, if he smashed up my body, driving drunk?

  Answers: no, no, probably not, and yes. On the money thing, the key was that we would each be spending our own, except for ongoing commitments like rent and loans.

  The eighty-three dollars appeared to be mine to do with as I wanted. But if I used Anthony's credit card, the payment would be logged to my account. And vice versa, I presumed. I also learned that Kurt was being reimbursed for whatever “inefficiencies” I might introduce into his business, but that he had a legal right of indemnification against me for anything deliberate or reckless. Bottom line: I could bankrupt myself very easily. Not that I had all that much to lose. Maybe that was another reason they limited the Exchange to folks under thirty. The ones who voted it in weren't about to risk their retirements.

  Then we hit a particularly nasty stretch of gravel, and I decided to save the rest for later. Working vehicle or not, I didn't think Kurt would like it if I barfed Anthony's cholesterol-fest breakfast all over the inside of his truck.

  The house we were building wasn't much more than a hole in the ground, enclosing concrete walls that would someday be a basement.

  “Here,” Kurt said, handing me an oversized paintbrush and a three-ton bucket of something black and sticky-looking. “Have fun.”

  My job, he explained, was “tarring” the outside of the walls to keep water from seeping into the basement. “It's not the Mona Lisa. Just slop it on.”

  I was about to complain—wasn't there some kind of automated equipment to do such things?—but Anthony's subconscious sort of sighed, and I realized I wasn't being picked on for being Blue. Apparently, Anthony was both cheap labor and low man on this crew's totem pole. If a job was hot, miserable, and messy, it would be his, and therefore mine. Hell, compared to this, he might actually like the espresso machine.

  * * * *

  I'm sure there's a way to tar a foundation without getting the stuff in your hair, but there's a limit to the amount of information you can drag from an Exchange host's subconscious. When it came to job skills, I was pretty much learning from scratch.

  Kurt wasn't a mean boss. In fact, he was a lot better than some I'd encountered in my real life.

  “Good enough,” he said after making me touch up a few places where he thought I'd gone a bit light with the tar. “Go ahead and call it a day. Do you know how to get home?”

  Most likely, that was in the information the Exchange agent had given me, but Kurt's subconscious seemed to have that one down cold. The mere thought brought an image of the car: an aging Hyundai Micro with holes in the fenders. Not much of a car, actually.

  The reality was even worse when I spied it in all its rusting glory. “It's nothing but a jalopy!” I almost blurted, only realizing at the last moment that remarks like that would give me away and open me to a whole month's persecution from all of these Reds.

  Still, it was rather amazing that the thing ran at all.

  * * * *

  Anthony's home turned out to be a bungalow in a town called Troy.

  The lit major in me instantly coughed up an image of giant wooden horses, but in this case, what was being smuggled in was me, pretending to be Anthony. And besides, there was nothing to conquer except three rooms and a big gray cat the subconscious hadn't bothered to warn me about.

  A cat? I mean, what kind of Red male owns a cat? What kind of male of any kind, for that matter? I thought cats were for old ladies.

  Other than that, though, I was impressed that he had a whole house to himself. It wasn't huge, but there was no way I could have afforded anything like it back home. Though I could definitely do without the cat, which kept bumping up against my leg and yowling with what I presumed to be feed me demands.

  Anthony's car had been even worse than it looked. To begin with, it was so old that the GreenPwr charger was a clunky-looking affair that took up half the back seat and had obviously been installed as an afterthought. Not that there'd been any use for it out at the construction site, because there was nothing to plug it into. A couple of nearby farms had windmills, but not our site. Apparently you don't build those until sometime after you're done with foundation tarring. Not that it mattered. There hadn't been a puff of breeze all afternoon.

  Just try combining a windless day with a million degrees and 99.9 percent humidity. No wonder these people are weird. Extreme heat equals extreme politics? Too bad I'd not thought of that one back at ol’ Redwood Coast U. There, it never gets hot, and everyone's sane. It's the same back home. Here, in Red Central, it was freakin’ hot as Hell. Not to mention Gramps down in Texas, where the weather's got to be even worse. A nice, consistent pattern. No way anyone could call that oversimplified.

  Of course, it might just be crappy cars that made everyone crazy. Leaving the construction site, I got a weird whiff of dust, but it wasn't until miles later that I glanced down and saw gravel speeding by beneath, through an honest-to-hell hole in the floorboards. I damn near panicked and ran off the road before Anthony's subconscious assured me that this wasn't anything new. Something to do with years of winter road salt, tracked in on his boots. Freakin’ hell. He apparently had this idea that someday he'd deal with it by welding a steel plate over the hole, but as best I could tell, “someday” was an exceedingly vague term.

  Now, with the cat again bumping against my leg, congratulating me for having found the can opener and about ten times too much food, I couldn't decide which was weirder: having your own home on a barely above minimum-wage job, or taking it for granted that winter would rust holes in your car. And why the hell hadn't he fixed it? It was big enough that a rock could bounce right up through it and hit you, hard. Big enough that if I dropped something on the floor, like the damn Exchange pod, I might lose it entirely.

  * * * *

  I spent a far more studious evening than I ever did in college, pleased to discover that Anthony's refrigerator ("fridge,” his subconscious quaintly called it) was stocked with a large array of what turned out to be quite decent microbrews. That was nearly as big a surprise as the cat; I'd not have expected Anthony to know the difference between piss and pilsner.

  By the time I turned in, I pretty much knew where I stood, though I'm afraid it didn't help much. I was still stuck in Iowa, with thirty more days to go. And Anthony's subconscious hadn't been hiding any great secrets from me, such as a BMW electric in Mr. Fix-It's Garage in whatever the hell passed for a city around here. The depressing fact was that despite his taste in beer and homeowner status, Anthony didn't amount to much.

  * * * *

  The next morning, Kurt called at dawn and told me I was on the roofing crew. Though when I got there, it seemed to be the same “crew” as before. But now we were in a burg called Milton, where he'd managed to line up something like six roofing jobs and was doing them all at once while waiting for something or other regarding yesterday's house. Whatever it was, we weren't just waiting for the tar to dry because I knew from experience the damn stuff didn't take that long. I'd had to cut big clots of it out of Anthony's hair when I woke up in the morning. Afterward, I'd found a bottle of nail-polish remover in the medicine cabinet. It gave me pause for a sec—believe me, I'm as liberal as the next guy, but for one panicked moment I wondered what the hell kind of private life I was supposed to be leading. Then it clicked. What do you bet it dissolves the gunk? Too
bad his subconscious hadn't let me know before I massacred his ‘do. Not that the hair had been any great shakes to begin with, though who knows about these Bubba styles.

  The freakin’ subconscious did tell me that Anthony calls his barber “Pete,” and that they shoot the breeze endlessly about baseball. No surprise on that: there was a whole file on baseball in the pod. But I'd be damned if I'd memorize it. Not my sport. Not that I have a sport, actually. I wasn't exactly into that kind of stuff as a kid, which was okay, because in my group, not being into things was way cool.

  Kurt must have offered the folks in Milton a quantity discount on roofs. Or maybe he'd been saving them up to do all at once.

  Last night's research had informed me that all of these small towns had been slowly dying for decades, until suburban flight began sending people back from the cities. Now, they were growing again, though there were still a lot of empty buildings, which was why someone like Anthony could afford a house. And probably why Kurt could mass-produce roofing jobs: a lot of these houses probably hadn't been cared for in ages.

  What the pod info hadn't told me was that shingles were heavy. And for some reason, Anthony's subconscious hadn't told me, either. I'd been noticing, in fact, that the more familiar I became with his life, the harder it was to get in touch with his subconscious. Except about baseball. The guy must have lived and breathed the stuff. The mere thought brought up the most asinine trivia. Who was the last pinch hitter to hit for the cycle in the World Series? Who gives a rip? For that matter, what's the cycle? Subconscious memory must be like Swiss cheese. Want anything specific, like why the hell Anthony didn't know shingles were heavy, and it disappears in one of the holes. But the damn pinch hitter was Tyree Domingo, and he did it in 2017. Good for Tyree.

  The shingles came in thirty-five-kilo bags. Kurt had a hoist that could lift them to the roof, but getting the hoist to Milton required hauling it over on a flatbed from somewhere else, and part of roofing on the cheap was not doing things like that.

  “Each time you go up the ladder,” he said as we were drinking coffee at 7:55 and psyching up for work, just like normal folks, “bring a bag up with you. That'll save some time.”

  In the mirror that morning, I'd noticed that Anthony was big, but not brawny. All beer, no gym. Back home, I'm leaner, but I don't like gyms either.

  Now I discovered that I was the only one who couldn't get a bag up the damn ladder. I got about halfway, then Anthony's arm cramped and I dropped it. The bag burst, scattering shingles on the ground.

  I won't bother to repeat what I said; when it comes to swearing, nobody beats a truly pissed-off Blue.

  Everyone had seen it happen, so I went back down and picked up as many shingles as I could, thinking about the “inefficiencies” I was introducing into Kurt's crew. I learned another lesson along the way: loose shingles are hard to carry. I only got about a quarter of them in the first attempt, so I went up and down a total of four times. Four and a half, if you count the one where I dropped the bag.

  All the while, everyone was still watching me but not saying anything. It was uncanny, and I didn't have a clue how to react. And of course, Anthony's subconscious was deeply in Swiss-cheese mode, because it wasn't giving me anything at all. Obviously, I'd done something wrong, but it was Anthony's arm that had cramped. What was I supposed to have done about it?

  * * * *

  Three days later, I finally got a bag of shingles up the ladder.

  By that time, Kurt had divided his crew among the roofs, two to each. I was teamed with Joe, an evening-shift highway patrolman who moonlighted—or should I say “daylighted"?—for Kurt. I suppose that goes with small town life: a lot of people here seemed to have multiple jobs. In fact, the customer was a farmer who also taught (are you ready for this?) American lit and composition part time at the local high school. He didn't seem all that dumb, either. Luckily, Anthony had gone to school in Troy because if this guy had been one of his teachers, I might have had some trouble pulling off my Anthony impression. Especially because the Swiss-cheese holes were continuing to grow. For example, even though Anthony had clearly worked with Joe before, the subconscious wouldn't tell me whether he was a good guy (whatever that might mean for a Red) or a jerk. It was almost as though Anthony viewed him as a non-entity. In fact, the only folks the subconscious seemed all that interested in were Anthony's sports-bar buddies, who called every evening to tell me where to meet for the game of the night. The subconscious wanted me to go, but I told ‘em the cat was sick.

  I figured out quickly enough on my own, though, that Joe was a lot better than me at roofing. There's an art to laying out the shingles in straight lines so they not only look good but all the little wires connect up. Partly, I was dealing with the problem I'd had before: not much job skill info in the subconscious, even when you can summon anything up at all. But Anthony didn't even seem to know that Joe was good at this.

  Once I got the knack, it actually wasn't all that tough, though you had to pay attention. You also had to check for bad connections or defective shingles. Otherwise, the roof wouldn't operate at full power, and what use is a solar roof that doesn't make electricity?

  The first day, I'd wrecked about half the shingles in the bag I'd dropped. After that, when I started to cramp, I'd managed to get back down to ground level before letting go. And I got a couple of steps higher each day.

  Now, as I plopped the bag onto the roof, Joe gave a minute nod. “I always knew you could do it,” he said.

  For some reason, that prompted the subconscious into serving up its first true memory of him. It was startlingly vivid, standing on a similar roof, not far from a freeway, watching the cars zip by.

  “All that crime going on out there,” he'd said, “and I'm not there to do anything about it.”

  Anthony had thought it weird, but it made sense to me. A cop, enforcing the speed limit by night. Building solar roofs by day. Joe might be a law-and-order Red, but he was doing more for energy conservation than all of my Redwood Coast bull sessions combined. Gotta give him points for that.

  * * * *

  The following Tuesday, Xavier fell off the roof. Not the roof I was working on, thank goodness, or any of Kurt's initial half dozen. With the tax rebates, a solar roof will pay for itself in five to seven years (I'd lost count of the number of times I'd heard Kurt give that spiel), and as long as we were in town, he was lining up jobs faster than we could get to them.

  I don't do well with blood, but this was worse. No wonder ol’ Vlad the Impaler lives on in horror myth, even if the stories have nothing to do with his real crimes. When we studied mythology in college, I'd never understood what vampires and spikes had in common, but there's nothing like looking at something sticking right through a guy to make you realize that puncture wounds really are one of the worst horrors imaginable. Now that I think of it, I'd had the same gut-wrenching sensation during my brief fling with Catholicism, rebelling against my atheist parents. It wasn't the fact that Jesus died that got to me: it was the damn nails.

  I'm an agnostic now, but Xavier apparently wasn't, because he wore a big silver cross, plain to see. The crew was split at the time, with Joe and me working one roof, and Xavier and two others on a larger one across the street. I didn't see him slip, but I heard the yell and looked up in time to see him crash into a bush in the front yard. Then Joe was swarming down the ladder and dashing off, already shouting into his satphone.

  I never quite figured out what it was that Xavier landed on. It was metal and spiky and about three feet long, and it shish-kabobbed his hamstring like a shrimp on a toothpick. Okay, that's a mixed metaphor, but it'll be a long time before I eat either shrimp or shish-kabob again. Whatever it was, it must have been something Xavier's crew had thrown off the roof when they were prepping it for the new shingles. There was always a bunch of such stuff, ranging from metal combing to pieces of heaven knows what, and ripping them up with a claw hammer and flipping them over the edge was the most fun part of the job
.

  It's the only time I ever saw Kurt get mad. His glare fell first on me, then swiveled to the others, though he didn't say anything until the ambulance finally got there and the medic backed up Joe's assessment that Xavier would not only live, but walk again, “soon enough.” Then Kurt let loose. “How many times have I got to tell you?” he growled. “Keep a clean site. It was only twelve feet, and he hit a goddamn bush. He should have walked away.” Then he spun on his heel and headed for his truck and, presumably, the hospital. “Joe, you're in charge,” he called over his shoulder.

  * * * *

  That noon, nobody said much. Nobody ate much, either: Xavier was well liked. I took the opportunity to consult Anthony's subconscious. What I found was a surprising amount of guilt. Apparently site cleanup was one of his jobs, though not one he was particularly good at remembering. I'd not been responsible for Xavier's site, but I'd not done anything at mine, either. Thinking back, I remembered that whenever we took a break, Joe walked the perimeter of whatever house we were working on, tossing junk into a tidy pile, well away from the building. I'd thought it was just another aspect of his law-and-order personality. Cop and neat-freak; I figured they went together. Shows what I knew. While the others were finishing lunch, I carefully checked both sites, looking for anything more dangerous than a dandelion. It was odd: back home, I'd never have taken on someone else's job without being asked to do so—and even then I'd have found some creative ways to complain. But I'd never seen anyone hurt like that before, either. Red, Blue, nobody deserves that.

  * * * *

  By the time we finished, I'd swear we'd reroofed every house in Milton, though it was probably only one or two percent. It's amazing how many buildings can hide in a town you can walk all the way across in ten minutes.

  Xavier was now out of the hospital, on crutches and expected to make a full recovery. Kurt was in a generous mood. “Take Monday off,” he said. “You've earned it.”