by Bright,R. F.
24
Representatives Thomka and Murthy had a private box at The RunAway RunWay. There were dozens of fashion-bars in Manhattan, but they’d set themselves up at The RunAway years ago. Overnight, every night, The RunAway transformed into whatever a certain gaggle of designers and celebrity stylists thought might trump yesterday’s show.
Fashion filled the biological imperative to display and expressed the nation’s insatiable material longing, on behalf of their sponsors. Manhattan’s flawless females were an inbred tribe who’d flocked here for over three hundred years. But as the island built up its defenses, fewer and fewer genes were added to their pool. The number of healthy men dropped precipitously. Some blamed war, others lawlessness, but many believed estrogen from birth control pills inadvertently pissed into the water supply caused fewer male births. The disparity in gender, and the male predilection for pretty girls, had quickly culled the plain women from Manhattan’s breeding stock. Only the most beautiful women could attract a mate, and their children grew ever more beautiful. An age-old dance, with modern choreography.
“What are you tormenting yourself about today?” mused Murthy as he checked the stage in anticipation.
“Not one blessed thing. I’m no longer worried about anything,” said Thomka. “Not one blessed thing.”
“Really,” said Murthy, raising a manly pair of opera glasses to his eyes.
Thomka stared at him as though he’d never seen him before. “I’ve found something. A tiny shred of personal decency. I don’t care about anything else.”
“Really?” Murthy oozed indifference. “I don’t know how they do it. Yesterday this place was a Swiss Chalet, today it’s the Serengeti. But it still smells of lavender. Or is it edelweiss? I love that about this place. Permanent newness.”
Thomka stared, and said flatly, “Five thousand satellite antennas and twelve thousand wireless routers disappeared last night.”
“Really?” Murthy was swept away as snake-charming music faded up, a techno rendition of Caravan. “Here they come!”
Thomka had no interest in the show, and never really had. The answers he was looking for would not to be found in a fashion show. “Tuke’s declared war on us, and he’s going to win.”
“Really?” said Murthy. “Where is that one, she’s . . .”
“I’ve read some of his articles. Watched several interviews. All nine TEDs. The Nobel thing. And he’s right. We, you and me, we’re parasites who’ve just about devoured our host.”
“Really? Oh! There she is! The fourth one. Curly blonde hair, large purposeless features, Scandinavian pale — gotta be six-two.”
“Mahesh, you do realize they all look the same?”
Murthy’s nostrils flared. “You need a psychiatrist. They do not all look ‘the same’. That’s impossible. Irrational!”
Thomka had been waiting to say that for a long time. “They all look uncomfortable. Skinny. Bored. Unavailable. Overworked. Unhappy. And as unappealing as a plastic-wrapped birthday cake.”
Murthy’s outrage soared. “How can they all look the same?! Every outfit is new, brand new. It’s impossible for them to look all the same, if they’re all wearing something new!”
“You’re right, Mahesh. It’s all new. That’s another thing that’s the same!”
“Really?” said Murthy, grinning wanly at a few patrons who’d caught him making a scene. He calmed himself. “I talked to Petey this morning. He likes what my guys did in Pittsburgh. And anyway, what’s wrong with this? We are animals, ya know. We show off for obvious reasons. We can’t help it.”
“Everything we’ve ever done is for display, Mahesh. We’ve converted three centuries of wealth into pure vanity. This is what we have to show for it . . . this, whatever . . . whatever the fuck it is we’re doing here. A very nice-looking reality show with an easily digestible plot but no meaning.”
“What a mood.”
Thomka slipped his coat from the back of his chair and put it on. “Tuke’s got it right, Mahesh. What little remains of the world will be needed to build the next society. That’s what Tuke is telling us. That’s what’s happening right now.” He started to leave, but turned to discover that his friend hadn’t even noticed. That was the final disappointment, the one that ended their friendship.
25
MacIan and Max awoke in adjoining rooms, formerly used for drying hops and yeast. The cavernous brew room beyond held four gigantic, hammered copper brew-kettles that faced a bank of industrial size windows. The Duquesne Brewery predated electric light by several decades. The room was forty feet wide and a hundred and fifty long with a short “L” at the other end. The floor was made from whole oak trees, as precisely hewn as the pyramids, using only the heartwood from a nearby forest. It was worn smooth, severely gouged, stained, burnt in places, and scattered with makeshift devices.
This two-block-long brewery was built in the heyday of elaborate brickwork, 1889. Every door and window was trimmed in multicolored brick, in geometric patterns contoured to whatever form was needed. A simply lovely building. The architectural envy of the industrial revolution. A glimpse of the modern industrial design that would follow.
The winter sky beyond the towering windows filled the space with a soft glow as MacIan dozed under a fluffy comforter beneath the decorative ironwork. Max eagerly pulled his clothes on and draped his precious down parka over his shoulders. He looked for his fur hat, then remembered he’d traded it and owed two more. He felt a little vulnerable. He’d never been away from home, overnight, in someone else’s house. And what a house. He drifted into MacIan's room and motioned out into the cavernous space.
MacIan aimed one eye at him. “Don’t touch anything.”
Max strolled through the brew-room sizing things up with an occasional pirouette. He loved the immensity of this space, but it felt wrong. Too big. Out of scale. The ceiling was so high he could scarcely see the decorative girders. What was the point? He looked down the row of giant brew kettles lined up like so many copper teardrops. They were a bit dented, but appeared to be working even now. The smell of fresh-brewed beer was pungent, but topped with a flowery bouquet. He liked the smell, but knew it would get old quick.
Standing out a few feet from the window wall, he saw a maze of white plastic pipe with freshly sprouted greens popping out from a thousand holes. He followed the plumbing to a series of large tanks filled with trout, river bass and tilapia. He thought of Jon Replogle’s ‘engineered habitat.’
His dad would love this, he was certain of that. Fred must be worried. He’d call as soon as he could figure out how.
Max came to the end of the room where the L-shape went around the bend about thirty feet and discovered a large bedroom. The short leg of the L was lit by one massive window, and blessed with as much privacy as one could expect in such a vast space.
Oh my god . . . he was suddenly overcome by the smell of something magical. In the crook of the L stood a small cluster of trees growing out of large wooden boxes. An orange tree with tiny buds. A clump of small but healthy banana trees. A scattering of lemon and lime trees, all pruned to perfection.
Max looked to MacIan, who was still perched on the edge of his bed way up at the other end. “Trooper Mac!” he shouted.
MacIan slowly stood, lifted a fuzzy blanket from the bed, wrapped it around himself and trudged toward Max, barefooted.
“Look. Like back in Lily. But way more productive.”
Jon Replogle entered through a side door. “Good morning, gentlemen.”
MacIan grinned, but his feet were getting cold. Max smiled quietly.
Jon looked back and forth, laughed, then spun round a wheeled cart. “Most important meal of the day,” said Jon.
MacIan’s voice was groggy. “Which meal’s that?”
Jon raised a large ceramic mug. “The one with coffee.”
Efryn Boyne’s troop was sound asleep and they, too, were in a renovated factory building. The old Clark Candy Bar factory, less than a
mile from the Lady Name Towers. Chocolate Clark Bars, Zagnut Bars and Necco Wafers had been movie theater favorites for decades, all made here in another beautiful brick building. One of Boyne’s risk reduction strategies involved living on the fly. Every move unscheduled, with random destinations, and most importantly — paid for by his betters. He lived as large as he could, in the unconventional manner he fancied, on their dime. What could be better? And The Clark Bar was one of his favorite places.
Built in 1847, the Clark Candy Bar factory had been renovated, in 2041, into The Clark Bar & Grill — the most expensive restaurant and dance hall in the region. The high-priced dancers kept the riff-raff away, the place was ringed with bodyguards, and an ample supply of birth-control products and antibiotics settled most other issues.
Boyne had a permanent suite at The Clark Bar, in the former CEO’s mahogany-paneled offices. He like the bawdy atmosphere here, but had only once, in a drunken stupor, ordered up a dancer. It made him feel like a loser and that was the end of that; the thought of it still embarrassed him.
He’d gotten up early this morning and gone for a walk by the river in the bracing chill. He’d been reading a large hardbound book that he hoped to finish on a park bench overlooking the river, but it was too cold. For a split second he thought he saw some debris from the Tessyier explosion floating by, but this was the Allegheny – wrong river. He tucked the huge book under his arm and strolled back just slowly enough to defy the biting wind and distract himself from the uneasy feelings he was having. Much of what the Bloviator had said was obviously truth. But what did mean?
He stopped in the lobby to remove his hat and put his hand inside it to feel the warmth caught there. He checked the mini-machine pistol in its perfectly tailored holster. Good hat. A real head-furnace. He dropped it back on his head, tipped it to the gorgeous concierge, and turned down a marbled hallway. At its end, he paused before a huge, whimsically painted doorway sculpted to look like stacks of giant Necco Wafers. This was the entrance to the fanciest party room here at The Clark Bar & Grill — The Necco Chamber.
Boyne pushed the door open and gazed blindly into the darkness, but there was no escaping the smell of debauchery. Tiny shafts of sunlight slithered through a long row of curtains. As his eyes adjusted, he began to see arms and legs in the half-light. The room stank of stale beer and cigarette butts at low tide. He drew back the curtains, winked at the skyscrapers across the river, then turned to the room now filling with grunts and groans.
His troop slowly crawled out from heaps of naked bodies strewn about on beds and couches, some on the floor. He did a quick head count. Three, four — it was difficult. He set his book down, yanked a window open, and watched as the frosty air cut the fetid damp. A mischievous smile crept over his face as the angry girls started yelling for him to close the window. The action, however unwanted, stirred the room. But as he watched he felt more and more detached, as though he were on an anthropological expedition. These were his men, his kin, but he was not one of them.
The men wobbled around trying to pull on their socks, stumbling playfully back into stacks of smoothly contoured asses and breasts.
The Driver stepped forward, buck-naked, an entirely unaffected state for a man of no shame, bathing himself in the cold air. “Morning, Captain.”
“Round ’em up. Clean ’em up. I’m not getting in the transporter with this lot stinking of jizz.”
The other men were lining up to hear today’s itinerary.
“Forty-five minutes. In the parking lot. Ready to go,” said Boyne, sternly. “It’s late in the day already.”
The Driver noted Boyne’s foul mood, and nodded. “Forty-five. Parking lot. Got it, Captain.”
Boyne made for the door. This scene was a bit dodgy, but it kept the men in a state of arousal he could use to his advantage. None of them could ever hope to afford such fantasies as these without him.
He opened the door and looked back. The men were staring, as though waiting for him to be gone. Then a small voice came from the middle of a pile, “Driver. Where you goin’?”
The Driver turned to Boyne, his face waffling with indecision.
“Driver!” the sultry voice came again.
Boyne craned his neck to see who was calling. A voluptuous young woman rolled onto her naked back, spread her legs, and reached between them, wagging all ten fingers at the Driver.
The Driver’s cheeks puffed all the way up, eyes squinting. “Forty-five minutes? Parking lot? Right, Captain?”
Boyne capitulated.
“See you then, Captain. Wit’ bells on.”
The whole crew tossed off whatever clothes they’d put on, and ran for a slithering pile.
At the concierge desk, a young woman busied herself with the newly computerized administration of the oldest profession. “Can I help you, Captain?” she said with happy familiarity.
“Have someone fill my transporter with diesel.”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Put it on the Harbinger account, this time.”
She pulled out a ledger, opened it to a page tabbed for Harbinger, and slid it onto the desk facing Boyne. He put his book down and took the plastic pen she held out to him. Her head twisted as she tried to read his book’s title, upside down.
He turned it toward her, and said, “Gibbon.”
Her eyebrows arched in two ponderous curves. “Gibbon?”
“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” he said, quizzically.
“I love to read,” she mused. “I have the whole James Patterson collection, all thirteen hundred and eighty-six of ’em.”
“Prolific,” said Boyne.
“No,” she said, somewhat defensively. “He just writes a lot.”
Boyne tried to hide an amused grin.
“Old-fashioned page burners,” she said, jabbing a finger at his lonely tome. “What’s that one about?”
Boyne set down the pen, slid the ledger back to her, and picked up his book. He stared at her, wondering what to say, then smiled and declared, “Insatiable appetites.”
26
Jon Replogle and his two new friends ate a hearty breakfast at a table beneath the fragrant citrus trees. Jon really liked Max and assumed he’d been raised by good people. MacIan he could easily see was the product of war. A wild card. But he saw in these two a similar spirit, and they even seemed a bit brotherly. A good pair. Balanced. In the end, he considered Max an innocent, and believed he could rely on MacIan. Reliance was everything for Jon Replogle.
“This place is amazing,” said Max. “We built stuff like this back home, but jeez.”
“We’ve been tweaking these systems for years,” said Jon. “For the engineers, there’s no end to fixing stuff. They change things, and as soon as they like what happens, they change it again. They’re always on to the next argument. Especially Mendelssohn.”
“Who lives here?” asked MacIan.
“It changes day-to-day. We have several buildings like this all over the South Side. Old factories, warehouses, a couple small office towers. People come and go, move to where they’re needed, or just feel like being for a while, but an awful lot gets done.”
“Real engineers?” asked Max, assuming all new engineers were self-taught amateurs, like himself.
“Yeah. Real college professor type engineers. This Brewery was our first repurposed factory, sorry — engineered habitat. That’s the only term they use. Their families, their children, all live here. And, of course, the school. They built this place around the school.”
“Whole families live here?” asked Max.
“Oh yeah. Including mine. The engineers joined us because they needed security. That’s all I had to trade at the time. They needed some hoodlums, we needed adult supervision. You can’t do engineering if you don’t survive. But, for them, surviving isn’t enough. They’re all about marginal productivity and that kinda stuff.”
A young girl pushed a noisy metal cart through the side door and into the brew-roo
m. She waved to Jon across the expansive floor.
He dipped his chin.
She pushed the cart halfway down the floor, then abandoned it and its rattling, swirled from the cart, big canvas apron flowing in a wide spiral, and skipped toward them.
“Haven’t seen you in days,” she said, to Jon.
“This is Molly,” Jon said flatly. “Max and MacIan.”
Max guessed her age at fourteen, maybe more.
Molly obliged with two confident nods.
“Molly designed this aquaponics system,” said Jon.
“I monitor the monitors,” she said, hoping for a laugh. “I’m doing a couple of experiments.” She tilted her head at the boxed citrus trees. “Grafting for cold tolerance . . .”
“Citrus trees?” said Max. “Unbelievable.”
“I got buds in the dead of winter.” She pointed at them proudly, then swirled away. “Bye-bye.”
It took a moment for them to reset, and MacIan asked, “Is it safe here?”
“It’s dangerous everywhere. Even here. People who live on the edge, for whatever reason, are doing exactly what you’d expect. If it’s a matter of watching their child starve or putting a gun to your head . . . which one would you pick?”
MacIan didn’t answer; instead, he asked, “Where’d you get all these engineers?”
“Oh, back when it was really bad. When the local government started to crumble. I was one of the young idiots who made things worse. We didn’t know who to blame, but somebody caused this mess. What little promise we once had for a future was gone. We didn’t know what’d ruined our lives, so we lashed out at everything.
“I had my little band of vandals roaming the South Side. We’d rage all over the place smashing things up. We took over this building, that was a helluva fight, and soon found ourselves out of food, water and — rage. We had busted up all the irrelevant shit we thought worth busting up, and now we had to survive. But then something happened, you know how it does — some unexpected thing that changes everything.”
