Slant
Page 8
dataflow center and master bedroom. To th*e right, the kitchen, arbeiter storage,
and then, in its own smaller glassed atrium, a three-level greenhouse.
"It's opulent, all right," Mary says. Behind the dining room, hidden by a
wall, stairs and a lift lead to the upper floors.
"(3," Nussbaum murmurs. He precedes her up the stairs.
/
SLANT 49
"Ops, goddess of wealth. Prurient opulence."
The lights point the way to the back of the house. Another master suite
opens, and it is here the--
Mary halts, her eyes taking it in with human reluctance--
Here the bodies are. She remembers the scattered butchered bodies of Emanuel
Goldsmith's victims in a comb apt in LA, frosted like these, but at least--Nussbaum
takes her suited arm----they
were human, even in disarray.
Closest to her, at the foot of where a bed should have been, where now stand
four surgical tables sided by fixed surgery arbeiters, lies what was once--she
guesses--a woman. Now she is a Boschian collage, wasp-waisted and Diana-breasted,
vaginas on each thigh and some unidentifiable set of genitalia where
the legs meet, her head elongated, the melon baldness shaved but for long
stripes of mink fur, her eyes staring and fogged with death and cold, but clearly
slanted and serpentine.
Mary feels a tug of wretchedness at every eye-drawing detail.
Nussbaum has advanced to the tables, stands between them. On the second
table rests a small body, no larger than a child but fully mature in features,
also sporting custom sexual characteristics. Mary's gaze returns to the body
nearest her, with which she forces herself to become familiar, disengaging all
of her revulsion. She asks, Why is this a victim? and is not even sure what her
question means.
"They can have it all," Nussbaum says. "Whatever they want can be shaped
for them out of electrons or fitted up on prosthetutes. But that's not enough.
They demand more. They suck in the untherapied down-and-outers, fill them
with cheap nano, shape them like lumps of clay..."
Mary bends beside the first body. There are orchid-enfolded bumps on the
corpse's cheeks. Extra clitorises, waiting to be licked. Mary closes her eyes and
steadies herself with an out-thrust hand.
There is something unaesthetic and unintentional about the hands and feet.
The limbs in general seem distorted, if she can separate the deliberate sexual
distortion of a psynthe from what might be pathological. The fingers are swollen.
On closer inspection, she sees that the eyes bulge. A pool of beige fluid
has formed behind the elongated head, now frozen.
The skin appears purplish.
"She's been cooked," Mary says softly.
Nussbaum turns and glances down at the body. "Nano heat?"
She stands and walks to the tables. All of the arbeiter surgeons are slack,
powered off. They could still function in this cold if they had been left with
power and logic on. "They must have abandoned the.., women, and fled. But
first they turned off the surgeons. The women weren't supervised.., something
was going wrong."
"They're just as the first team found them," Nussbaum says. Mary catches
50 GREG BEAR
The clitorises on the cheeks. To give her a cousinly safe kiss.., never have that.
Everything sex forever. Fuck ja'k fuck.
And suddenly, for Mary that aspect fades like a wrong note. She is numb,
but her well-trained defenses go to work, letting the distressed strawboss of
her consciousness have a moment's rest.
She checks the bottles of nano on a nearby shelf. Supplies of nutrients;
delivery tubes, dams and nipples; a new regulator still in its box, not yet
installed, )n the shelf beside the nano it is made to supervise; memory cubes
on a small folding table; scraps of plastic like shavings, blood drops brown as
gravy on the the floor.
Mary picks up a bottle, reverses it to read the label. All the labels have been
turned to the wall. She knows why. The label confirms her suspicions. Somebody
had a small remnant of conscience, or did not want the subjects, the
victims, to know.
"This isn't medical grade," Mary says. "It's for gardens."
"Gardens?" Nussbaum asks, and leans to see the label. "Christ. Distributed
by Ortho."
"Any real expert could reprogram it," Mary says. "Apparently, they didn't
have a real expert."
"Gardener's nano," Nussbaum says. "Sweet Jesus H. Christ. Mary, I'm sorry.
You can't possibly understand this any more than I do."
"No need," Mary says flatly.
"Things started going wrong and the bastards left them here to cook,"
Nussbaum says. "So very, very sorry." Behind the plastic, his face is milky and
drawn.
Mary does not know to whom he is apologizing.
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6 RAZOR DANCE
Jack Giffey thinks about getting some food at the Bullpen in downtown Moscow
just as the republic's office workers decide to end their lunch break and
take a few minutes of sun. The air is still cold and a little snow fell earlier,
but now, at one, the sun is bright and the blind blue of earlier in the morning
is more intense and cheery.
Giffey walks between ranks of folks dressed in loggers--padded vests,
denim pants, plaid or checkered shirts. Nobody is more into the Sour Decades
than Green Idaho, and among the republic's workers, they're practically a
religion. After all, the eighties and nineties bred the root troubles that led to
the Weaverite Insurrection and the Green .Idaho Treaty. And Green Idaho
government workers are among the higtiSt paid and most protected in the
nation.
Giffey blows his nose and takes a turn on C<)nstitution Avenue to find the
Bullpen.
There, in the sunlit corner of a window booth, his butt planted firmly on
an antique pine bench, sitting before a real pine-veneer table, a beer calms
.hi
m, but his face is still red and his thoughts a little jagged.
His father and mother were killed-by Weaverites in the Secession Standoff
of July 2020. Citizens' Repossession Army Brevet General Birchhardt ordered
the execution of thirty Forestry Service employees and the adult members of
their families at Clearwater, in retaliation for a shOot-out with National Guard
troops the week before.
Giffey remembers Birchhardt, square-faced and eagle-nosed, with dead eyes
and a nervous mouth. A regular John Brown and just as sentimental. The
52 GREG BEAR
compound before the massacre. Jack remembers the natural gas pickup trucks,
the single captured helicopter, and the motley soldiers of the general's army,
clad in three different kinds of camouflage--arctic, desert, and lowland jungle,
all handmade or stolen.
Birchhardt and his troops were handed over to the Federals in November
of that year by the newly elected governor of Green Idaho. Birchhardt was
tried and convicted and given forcible therapy. He later worked as a propaganda
chief for Datafree Northwest, which targeted the cut-off communities in the
Idaho panhandle for ten years thereafter, until Raphkind cut the funds and the
Federals gave up.
Later, Birchhardt and his new wife and infant son died in his home in
Montana, all victims of gunshot wounds to the backs of their heads. Some
thought they were murdered by disgruntled Weaverites, too stupid to understand
the implications of really forceful "therapy."
Giffey's father was a tough brave man but his mother had been fragile and
frightened as a deer when the big bearded men had moved into the compound
and separated them.
Giffey never forgives. Giffey hates them all. He hates the Federals for encouraging
the world to change so quickly in the late twentieth, for encouraging
the nano revolution throughout twenty-one, for being insensitive to the pressures
these changes put on the poor inflexible survivalists and orthodox Christians.
Those denominations and parties unable to accept so much change
simply went insane.
Many migrated to the central states, unable to tolerate the ribbons and
corridors and top spin financial hothouses of the coasts and big cities; they
chose Northern Idaho as their sanctuary, and dared Federals to come and get
them. And so the tiny brutal little war began.
Giffey understands them, but he still doesn't like them.
He orders a corned beef sandwich from a cute brunette and looks at the
antique neon beer signs in the window over his booth. Some of those beers he
remembers his father drinking.
Giffey's anger is ramping down now. He grinds his teeth one last time,
then opens his mouth wide and tries to persuade his jaw muscles to give it
up. A little wriggle of the mandible crosswise, a twist of the head, and he is
back where he had been this morning: cool and thoughtful and once again in
charge of himself.
For the first time he really notices the waitress as she comes to his table
with his sandwich. She is about twenty years younger, with wavy brown hair,
a sharply pretty face with a prominent nose, wide hazel eyes, strong hands
with chewed fingernails painted over in dark red polish. Green Idaho is a place
of waitresses, actresses, aviatrixes, authoresses, congressladies, perhaps even
doctresses, if any self-respecting male in the republic will let a woman examine
hN nrivate t>arts. Despite the fact that the republic's president is a woman,
/
SLANT 53
about the sex roles here, and no doubt in Giffey's mind that he can read this
woman's life like an open book.
She is handsome, young, her body is slender and probably very fertile,
her breasts are naturally generous and (he judges from years of experience)
slightly but not grossly pendulous, very womanly. Giffey is not fond of the
prevalence of the nineties cannonshells so many of the women in Green
Idaho affect. Surprising how much plastic surgery the women go for in this
God-fearing, independently governed but non-seceded state republic. Men
strong enough to be afraid of, women eager to keep them happy and calm.
Paradise on Earth.
The waitress gives him a quick look that Giffey instantly categorizes. He
has never been inordinately fond of the chase, regarding women as decent
creatures deserving of more stable and supportive partners than he can ever be.
But there's something in her look--a half-buried homesick yearning--that
Giffey knows and, in all kindness, will not let go without some further exploration.
"Hard week?" he asks.
The waitress smiles thinly.
Giffey lifts his sandwich and smiles back. "I am a connoisseur of fine beef,"
he says. "And very well served."
"Anything else?" she asks blandly.
He knows her now, to a seventy-percent certainty. She's not married but
lives with a fellow gone most of the time looking for work outside of town.
She's no more than twenty-five but looks thirty. Her face has already taken on
a patient dullness. The partner male is vigorous and quick in bed and will not
let her start a family "Until the republic's situation settles." It never will.
Green Idaho is an economic backwater and what flows through here is State
Bank paper money, much grumbled over, or treaty minted specie, not data.
But he is straying from his focus.
"Pretty slow, after lunch," he observes. "I'd love it if you sat down and
talked with me. Tell me about yourself."
The woman gives him a look as har-d as she can make it. But his face is
sympathetic, he is older and probably unlike any man she's known, he looks
solid and wise but a little on the untamed side with his smooth gray hair down
to his neck, and in truth maybe she's thinking of her father: her ideal father,
not the real one, who was likely a disappointment. But she loved him nonetheless...
She knows she is a good girl.
The hard look shifts and she glances around the restaurant. It is indeed
quiet, empty but for Giffey; the government workers have all gone back to
their buildings, and there isn't any other trade at this time of day in Moscow.
"What's to tell?" she asks, as she sits in the booth and folds her hands in
front of her. "And why do you care?"
"I like to talk to women," Giffey says. "I like the way you look. I like the
54
GREG BEAR
"It's hard for Al to get good corned beef," she says, pointing. Giffey will
take a bite soon, but needs his mouth uncluttered for a couple of minutes.
"Don't I know it," he says. "How many times have you thought about
heading south for Boise, or west?"
The woman sniffs. "Our roots are here. People fought and died so we could
live the way we want."
"Indeed," Giffey says. He nods west at the great Outside.
"Where are you from?" she asks.
"You first, then me."
"Billings. My dad brought me here fifteen years ago. He and his girlfriend
home-schooled me, and I got top honors in the Clearwater Scholastic Com
petition when I graduated Now--you?"
"I've done all sorts of things, some of them a little shady," Jack says with
a grin. Not a bold grin, but a shy one, a little out of place in that beard.
"Let me guess," she says. "You worked out of country."
"Bingo," Giffey says. "My name's Jack"
"I'm Yvonne," she says. Jack stretches his hand across the table and she
shakes it. Her grip is warm and dry and her fingers have a utility roughness
that he likes. "Where out of country?" she asks.
"Africa and Hispaniola, after I got out of the federal army"
Yvonne's eyes widen. Federal army folks, if they come to Green Idaho at
all, usually don't admit their history
:;
"I served five years with Colonel Sir John Yardley's boys in Liberia and
Hispaniola. Left when he started getting snake's eyes and took over the coun
try.''
"Oh," she says She's interested, and not just in history.
"Married for five years, no kids, divorced." Something flickers in his mem
ory; the faces of two women. One of them is like a pin-up queen, the other
. . ghostly "Now you."
"I live with a forager. Not married yet, but soon. He's up north working
.
in a pulp mill. Making fine papers for art books, you know. Sometimes they
even pay on time."
Giffey nods. "Must be tough"
"It really is," Yvonne says, looking out the window. "He doesn't want to
get married until we have enough in the state bank to get a little repair business