Pallas

by L. Neil Smith

  If so, she had been misinformed.

  Someone, the little blond again—why couldn’t he remember her name?—shoved a long-stemmed glass under his nose, filled with something fizzy like a pale golden softdrink. Preoccupied with the sight of what seemed to be acres of half-clothed flesh all around him, he gulped it down. It tasted like a softdrink, too, its flavor somewhere between that of green grapes and fresh apples.

  And it only made him thirstier.

  He thought—although the actual memory was only a vague impression—that he drank a lot more of it. All he could hear in the background, above the babble of what seemed like thousands of other people in the room, was Aloysius Brody’s mechanical piano, the one with thumbtacks set in the felt of hammers driven by heavy punched-paper rolls, playing “Old-Fashioned Rock and Roll.” At least the taxidermized animal heads seemed to be enjoying the music..

  They were smiling at him now.

  Emerson’s next memory was of lying on a squeaky white cloud with a golden lining, still slightly sick to his stomach, having just been bathed by someone in a way—and at an anatomical location—that he hadn’t ever been before by anybody but his mother. There was an angel looking over his shoulder—she was deeply tanned and there seemed to be something wrong about her feet—and another perched on his legs. There seemed to be something wrong about her robes. The sky above his head was pink and filled with floating purple orchids. Whenever he made the mistake of closing his eyes, the cloud whirled around and around.

  He strained against the aching in his head and became aware, after a fashion, that the cloud was actually an overstuffed mattress and quilt on a spindly brass bedframe with squeaky springs and that the sky was garishly printed wallpaper. The angel at his shoulder was a small bronze statue of a mermaid, sitting on a night table beside the bed. The someone who’d bathed him—only in one critical spot—and now sat on top of him, straddling his ankles, was the ubiquitous little blond. Somehow—he had no memory of the intervening period—she’d gotten him to her room on one of the upper floors of Galena’s.

  And now she was wearing only long mesh stockings and a bright red, satiny, corsetlike thing which was apparently designed to hold her stockings up but in the process left her round, firm breasts—and almost everything below her navel—exposed.

  “Good morning, Sunshine!” She grinned down at him, nodding toward a window somewhere behind him. “Actually, it’s only about one o’clock, and the night is young.”

  He tried to struggle up to his elbows, but she was too heavy and the bed was too soft. Also, his head hurt too much. He thought it must have been all the perfume. “I don’t have any money.” His voice came in a croak but he was quite sincere about what he said next, especially from the waist down, where—unlike from his neck up—everything still seemed to be working. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “You keep on saying that,” she replied with a momentary frown, then brightened. “If I cared about that, silly, we’d be in one of the cribs downstairs instead of here in my own room. We’re gonna have fun. Pallas is a small world, and we can make the round trip as many times as you’re up to it—and I can be a lotta help in that department, believe me. I liked you the first time I laid eyes on you, and I wanna help you celebrate how your hearing came out. Besides, who knows? You might turn out to be a steady customer someday.”

  “I, er...”

  She frowned again, perplexed. “You know, you may be a grown man legally, Emerson Ngu, but you still smell just like a little boy. You don’t smoke, do you?”

  “Uh, no—” He was relieved. He’d thought she’d been about to ask if he were a virgin, and the only clever comeback he’d ever thought of to that question scarcely applied.

  “Or drink coffee?”

  “A little. Not really. I—”

  “I thought so. Well, it’s nice doing somebody who smells clean for a change.” She grinned, then leaned forward so that he could only see the top of her head.

  To his relief and disappointment—he’d never been aware before that a person could feel both of those emotions at once—everything went black again after that.

  “Jealousy’s a perfectly proper emotion, Emerson, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

  He shook his head, which still hurt, but didn’t disagree with Mrs. Singh, although what she said was the opposite of what he’d been told all his life. In a Utopian community where everybody was supposed to love everybody else—something told him that something may have been wrong with the terminology and that he wasn’t dealing with the same kind of love in this instance—jealousy was at the top of a long list of unforgivably individualistic sins. Nor did it occur to him to question her assumption that jealousy was what he was feeling.

  It was morning again, the day after the hearing at the Nimrod. He’d managed to stagger to the boardinghouse from Galena’s an hour after sunrise, hung over (although he didn’t know it) and aching severely from just below his navel to just above his knees. The worst was that he felt as though someone had punched a huge, hard, hairy fist into his bladder. The little blond—he still didn’t know her name; after their third or fourth ultimate intimacy, he’d been too embarrassed to ask her—had been as good as her word about helping him.

  She’d been a lot of help.

  Probably too much, from the way the insides of his thighs chafed whenever he took a step.

  She’d also been kind enough to let him shower at her place, help him to restore his suit to some semblance of decency, and even feed him a lavish breakfast. She’d have kept him even longer, she’d informed him sometime during the half hour she’d taken to kiss him good-bye, if she hadn’t needed her “beauty sleep” for the long work night ahead. Something deep inside told him that he ought to have skulked back to Mrs. Singh’s much earlier, in the dark, shamefaced and laden down with guilt, but, among other things, he was far too tired for that. And he’d had altogether too good a time—parts of him had, at least.

  And Gretchen wasn’t back yet, herself.

  Mrs. Singh didn’t know where she was.

  In some ways, it was like that first day he’d come to this house. Mrs. Singh, who seemed to be as worried about him as she was about her own daughter—perhaps even more so; he suspected she thought Gretchen better able to take care of herself—had made hot chocolate and they sat together now in her living room. Only the lighting was different. He’d arrived at night, in a rainstorm. Now the only dark clouds and freezing drizzle were inside of him.

  “It’s a species survival trait,” she was going on, “which, among other functions, protects the home, the family, and insures the healthiest offspring possible.”

  He nodded dutifully, suspecting that the woman took some comfort from discussing this matter theoretically, abstractly. So did he, when it came to that. He didn’t enjoy having to think about yesterday, or worrying about where Gretchen might be now. He enjoyed thinking about tomorrow even less.

  Mrs. Singh finished her cup of chocolate and immediately poured herself another from the pot on the coffee table. He’d seen people at the Nimrod go through the same motions with a bottle of liquor. There was an open pack of cigarettes lying on the table beside the pot. Although she wasn’t smoking now, the ashtray was full of burnt and crushed-out ends, many of them only partly consumed, apparently from the night before. Emerson had never had any idea that she smoked.

  “Now you just imagine a bull elk, if you can, having survived an entire season of the kind of antler-bashing that serves his species as natural selection—”

  For once Emerson knew exactly what Mrs. Singh was talking about. As a sort of student hunter, he’d recently watched the ritual from a blind in a deep-woods game preserve, only a few yards away from the animals—with Gretchen.

  “—then catching one of the second-rate males he’s already bested, trying to beat his time with one of his cows.” She snorted, reached out to the pack of cigarettes, evidently thought better of it, and pulled her hand back. “Now can you imagin
e that elk saying to himself that jealousy’s just an immature emotional reaction resulting from his own insecurity and lack of self-confidence?”

  Despite the way he felt, he laughed, spontaneously seeing, in his mind’s eye, the ridiculous image of a gigantic bull elk lying on a psychiatrist’s couch.

  “Emerson.” Mrs. Singh put a hand over his own where it rested on his knee. It was the first time she’d ever touched him that way, and he didn’t know how to react, since neither his mother nor his father had been physically affectionate. He noticed that, exactly like Aloysius Brody, she tended to shed her folksy accent under stress. “Only humans are foolish enough to convince themselves they don’t go through a selection process just as brutal in its own way, or that their homes and families and gene pool don’t need protecting.”

  He nodded, not knowing what to say.

  Mrs. Singh lifted her hand and sighed. “Lookie here, Emerson, I’m real sorry that Gretchen didn’t see fit to tell you she had another suitor. We’ve had quite a number of set-tos about her privacy, me and that girl, which she won fair and square because she was dead right and made me see it. I sure as hell didn’t figure it was my place to let you know which way the wind was blowing.”

  This time he patted her hand. So they’d finally come to it. “I don’t blame you for anything, Mrs. Singh. You took me in when I didn’t have anything, and trusted me when you hadn’t any reason to. But why didn’t she tell me? How long—”

  She took the empty cup from his hand and poured from the pot, carefully not looking at him. “I expect young Altman’s been making visits into town to see her, on an increasingly frequent basis, for about the last year. That’s only a few weeks longer than you’ve been with us, isn’t it? Since his old man kept referring to you as a child—unless that was all lawyer’s horsehockey, intended for the politics of the moment—he was probably sneaking rides with the rollabout drivers under Daddy’s nose. That could account for some of the hostility on Gibson Senior’s part. I never knew what she saw in the boy—maybe he was the only face around here she hadn’t grown up with—nor how far the whole thing went.”

  “But why—” Emerson stopped, realizing he didn’t know what it was he’d meant to ask.

  She shrugged. “And then you came along. But from Gretchen’s viewpoint you were a tough nut to crack. I watched her try. I honestly believe, from something she said to me early on, that she thought you were gay. Pallatians are a pretty direct, outspoken folk, and she’d never seen anybody as bashful and reserved as you are. But it kept her interested, and once she figured it out, well...”

  He kept his eyes on the carpet. “It wasn’t that long ago. Only day before yesterday.”

  “I know,” she nodded. “I thought she was never gonna get through to you, and I was glad to see it happen. But it did mean that, without either of you knowing it, you and young Gibson Ant-farm Junior were courting the same girl. I saw that coming and hoped you’d turn out to be the best man. My bet’s that she made a decision in your favor quite a while before day before yesterday and told him—that’s her idea of fair play—and that’s why he ratted you out to his father.”

  Before Emerson could say anything, the phone began to chirp. Mrs. Singh answered it at the coffee table, where the flat plane of a two-dimensional image formed in the air above the surface. Even at his angle, which foreshortened the image, Emerson could see it was Gretchen—apparently the phone she was calling from was more primitive than those in Curringer—and his heart, possibly encouraged by what her mother had just told him, gave a leap in his chest.

  “Gretchen, baby!” the woman cried, delighted to see her daughter. “Honey, are you all—”

  “This is a recording, Mother, because I don’t want to argue with you—or anybody else. I’m calling from the Residence at the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project.”

  Mrs. Singh gave him an uninterpretable look and somehow turned the image so that he could see, too.

  “Gibson Junior proposed to me day before yesterday when he was in town and I accepted. I came back with him yesterday and we were married last night by his father.”

  Even over his own feelings, which seemed to have deserted him for the moment, Emerson would remember the stricken look in Mrs. Singh’s eyes for as long as he lived.

  Gretchen’s expression appealed for understanding. She appeared to have been doing a great deal of crying. “Mama, I’m trying my best to do what’s right. Please tell Emerson...tell Emerson I hope he can forgive me. He’ll meet other girls. There’s a little blond at Galena’s who’s had her eye on him and really worried me for a while.

  “Anyway, I’ll see you soon. Be well. I love you.”

  The image above the tabletop dissolved.

  Emerson sat where he was on the couch, too stunned at first to move or even think. The first thought that managed to filter into his mind was that even though she was likely be residing with the Chief Administrator’s family, it was a bizarre reversal.

  Gretchen had taken his place at the Project.

  And he would mourn the loss for the rest of his life.

  The Plump Brown Bank

  All that is needed to give rise to a mighty nation, generate a wave of perpetual progress and prosperity within it, even revive a dying civilization, is a simple, irrevocable guarantee that individual members of the productive class be permitted to keep whatever they create. That is what America was supposed to have been about; its preeminence in the world is a direct result. Likewise, each of its failures ultimately stems from the gradual but unrelenting abrogation of that guarantee.

  —Mirelle Stein, The Productive Class

  “What’ve you got there, Emerson?”

  “Nails” Osborn, Emerson’s employer and proprietor of Osborn’s Plumbing & Machine Shop, leaned over the boy’s shoulder to examine a number of oddly shaped metal plates laid out neatly on the bench. He was a big-shouldered, bearded man, closer to seven feet than six, with a clear tenor voice that usually took strangers by surprise. It was an hour after closing, and for the first time that month, Osborn had stayed at the shop after hours to catch up on the accounts.

  Although it still smelled agreeably of heated cutting lubricant and other odors which are like a rare perfume to those who love machinery, the shop was darkened, the heavy equipment on the floor looming as ominous, bulky shadows against a back-lit latticework of skeletal supply shelves, except for a pilot glowing here and there, the glassed-in office cubicle where Osborn had been laboring, and the pool of light spilling onto Emerson’s bench from a floodlamp clamped to its edge.

  “An idea I’ve been working on for a few weeks.” Emerson didn’t look up, but instead applied a fine-surfaced file to an edge of one of the plates until he was satisfied with the way it felt under his work-blackened thumb. Peering critically at a small hole which had been drilled in it—the polished steel threw reflections of the lamplight onto his face—he set it aside and began inspecting the next plate.

  Stainless could be tricky sometimes, and any burred edges on these pieces would spoil everything.

  As an afterthought, he added, “In my spare time.”

  “I see.” Osborn tapped a bent, flattened cigarette from the pack he made a habit of carrying in the left hip pocket of his greasy overalls, applied a lighter he’d constructed at this same bench, and exhaled smoke. “Not during working hours, I trust.”

  “I said in my spare time, didn’t I?” The boy set down the plate he was examining and picked up the next. There were more than a dozen of them lying on the bench before him and he was only halfway finished with them. He’d almost run out of time because Mrs. Singh didn’t like him skipping dinner. Also, although he didn’t say so, he hated it when people watched what he was doing over his shoulder.

  Surprised at the reaction, Osborn raised his eyebrows. “No need to get testy, Emerson. I’m the boss. I’m expected to say things like that. What the hell is it, anyway? It’s kind of large for a surrealist’s notion of a padlock.” The largest
of the plates would have just spanned his outstretched fingertips.

  Emerson grinned, turned on the metal stool he occupied, straightened his back to relieve the ache that came from hunching over the bench, and pushed the magnifying glasses he was wearing back onto his forehead. When he looked up at Osborn, there were dark circles below his eyes where the frames had gathered oily sweat and working grime. “Pretty good guess. I got the idea from one of those laminated padlocks, made up of several layers of steel, riveted together.”

  Osborn nodded understanding. Locks were reasonably rare on the Outside, where people tended to trust one another—possibly because burglars seldom survived their initial foray into the field—but what locks there were had usually been sold, installed, or repaired by his shop. Emerson, of course, had seen plenty of locks in the Project, where, despite the goon patrols—or possibly because of them—almost every door and window required some sort of mechanical security.

  For his curious employer’s benefit, Emerson stacked the finished plates together with the unfinished ones until they began to assume a recognizable form. It was still very difficult for him to think about that terrible Sunday morning, almost a year ago now, when Gretchen Singh had disappeared forever from his life after changing it beyond recognition, but there were some less emotionally painful aspects of it to which he’d given considerable thought. One of them was that Senator Altman and his thugs would have had no trouble dragging him back to the Project against his will if he and the women hadn’t had the means to deter them.

  Sometimes he almost wished they had. He could always have escaped again. Junior wouldn’t have had the opportunity, right after the hearing at the Nimrod, he assumed, to propose to Gretchen. And Gretchen...he shook off the thought, telling himself for perhaps the millionth time that it was pointless.

  By now, he almost believed it.

  “I’ll be damned.” Osborn shook his head, patted Emerson on the shoulder, and grinned down admiringly at the inch-high stack of stainless steel plates. “It’s a pistol!”