The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  What do you say to somebody who’s seen to the bottom of your wretched and inadequate soul?

  “I want to apologize,” I said.

  With something very close to compassion, the Widow said, “It’s too late for that, Danny. It’s over. Everything’s over. You and I only ever had the one trait in common. We neither of us could ever let go of anything. Small wonder we’re back together again. But don’t you see, it doesn’t matter what you want or don’t want—you’re not going to get it. Not now. You had your chance. It’s too late to make things right.” Then she stopped, aghast at what she had just said.

  But we both knew she had spoken the truth.

  “Widow,” I said as gently as I could, “I’m sure Charlie—”

  “Shut up.”

  I shut up.

  The Widow closed her eyes and swayed, as if in a wind. A ripple ran through her and when it was gone her features were simpler, more schematic, less recognizably human. She was already beginning to surrender the anthropomorphic.

  I tried again. “Widow…” Reaching out my guilty hand to her.

  She stiffened but did not draw away. Our fingers touched, twined, mated. “Elizabeth,” she said at last. “My name is Elizabeth Connelly.”

  ***

  We huddled together on the ceiling of the Roxy through the dawn and the blank horror that is day. When sunset brought us conscious again, we talked through half the night before making the one decision we knew all along that we’d have to make.

  It took us almost an hour to reach the Seven Sisters and climb down to the highest point of Thalia.

  We stood holding hands at the top of the mast. Radio waves were gushing out from under us like a great wind. It was all we could do to keep from being blown away.

  Underfoot, Thalia was happily chatting with her sisters. Typically, at our moment of greatest resolve, they gave us not the slightest indication of interest. But they were all listening to us. Don’t ask me how I knew.

  “Cobb?” Elizabeth said. “I’m afraid.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  A long silence, and then she said, “Let me go first. If you go first, I won’t have the nerve.”

  “Okay.”

  She took a deep breath—funny, if you think about it—and then she let go, and fell into the sky.

  First she was like a kite, and then a scrap of paper, and finally she was a rapidly tumbling speck. I stood for a long time watching her falling, dwindling, until she was lost in the background flicker of the universe, just one more spark in infinity.

  She was gone and I couldn’t help wondering if she had ever really been there at all. Had the Widow truly been Elizabeth Connelly? Or was she just another fragment of my shattered self, a bundle of related memories that I had to come to terms with before I could bring myself to finally let go?

  A vast emptiness seemed to spread itself through all of existence. I clutched the mast spasmodically then, and thought: I can’t!

  But the moment passed. I’ve got a lot of questions, and there aren’t any answers here. In just another instant, I’ll let go and follow Elizabeth (if Elizabeth she was) into the night. I will fall forever and I will be converted to background radiation, smeared ever thinner and cooler across the universe, a smooth, uniform, and universal message that has only one decode. Let Thalia carry my story to whoever cares to listen. I won’t be here for it.

  It’s time to go now. Time and then some to leave. I’m frightened, and I’m going.

  Now.

  The Dead

  Three boy zombies in matching red jackets bussed our table, bringing water, lighting candles, brushing away the crumbs between courses. Their eyes were dark, attentive, lifeless; their hands and faces so white as to be faintly luminous in the hushed light. I thought it in bad taste, but “This is Manhattan,” Courtney said. “A certain studied offensiveness is fashionable here.”

  The blond brought menus and waited for our order.

  We both ordered pheasant. “An excellent choice,” the boy said in a clear, emotionless voice. He went away and came back a minute later with the freshly strangled birds, holding them up for our approval. He couldn’t have been more than eleven when he died and his skin was of that sort connoisseurs call “milk glass,” smooth, without blemish, and all but translucent. He must have cost a fortune.

  As the boy was turning away, I impulsively touched his shoulder. He turned back. “What’s your name, son?” I asked.

  “Timothy.” He might have been telling me the specialite de maison. The boy waited a breath to see if more was expected of him, then left.

  Courtney gazed after him. “How lovely he would look,” she murmured, “nude. Standing in the moonlight by a cliff. Definitely a cliff. Perhaps the very one where he met his death.”

  “He wouldn’t look very lovely if he’d fallen off a cliff.”

  “Oh, don’t be unpleasant.”

  The wine steward brought our bottle. “Chateau La Tour ’17.” I raised an eyebrow. The steward had the sort of old and complex face that Rembrandt would have enjoyed painting. He poured with pulseless ease and then dissolved into the gloom. “Good lord, Courtney, you seduced me on cheaper.”

  She flushed, not happily. Courtney had a better career going than I. She outpowered me. We both knew who was smarter, better connected, more likely to end up in a corner office with the historically significant antique desk. The only edge I had was that I was a male in a seller’s market. It was enough.

  “This is a business dinner, Donald,” she said, “nothing more.”

  I favored her with an expression of polite disbelief I knew from experience she’d find infuriating. And, digging into my pheasant, murmured, “Of course.” We didn’t say much of consequence until dessert, when I finally asked, “So what’s Loeb-Soffner up to these days?”

  “Structuring a corporate expansion. Jim’s putting together the financial side of the package, and I’m doing personnel. You’re being headhunted, Donald.” She favored me with that feral little flash of teeth she made when she saw something she wanted. Courtney wasn’t a beautiful woman, far from it. But there was that fierceness to her, that sense of something primal being held under tight and precarious control that made her hot as hot to me. “You’re talented, you’re thuggish, and you’re not too tightly nailed to your present position. Those are all qualities we’re looking for.”

  She dumped her purse on the table, took out a single folded sheet of paper. “These are the terms I’m offering.” She placed it by my plate, attacked her torte with gusto.

  I unfolded the paper. “This is a lateral transfer.”

  “Unlimited opportunity for advancement,” she said with her mouth full, “if you’ve got the stuff.”

  “Mmm.” I did a line-by-line of the benefits, all comparable to what I was getting now. My current salary to the dollar—Ms. Soffner was showing off. And the stock options. “This can’t be right. Not for a lateral.”

  There was that grin again, like a glimpse of shark in murky waters. “I knew you’d like it. We’re going over the top with the options because we need your answer right away—tonight preferably. Tomorrow at the latest. No negotiations. We have to put the package together fast. There’s going to be a shitstorm of publicity when this comes out. We want to have everything nailed down, present the fundies and bleeding hearts with a fait accompli.”

  “My God, Courtney, what kind of monster do you have hold of now?”

  “The biggest one in the world. Bigger than Apple. Bigger than Home Virtual. Bigger than HIVac-IV,” she said with relish. “Have you ever heard of Koestler Biological?”

  I put my fork down.

  “Koestler? You’re peddling corpses now?”

  “Please. Postanthropic biological resources.” She said it lightly, with just the right touch of irony. Still, I thought I detected a certain discomfort with the nature of her client’s product.

  “There’s no money in it.” I waved a hand toward our attentive wait-staff. “Thes
e guys must be—what?—maybe two percent of the annual turnover? Zombies are luxury goods: servants, reactor cleanups, Hollywood stunt deaths, exotic services”—we both knew what I meant—”a few hundred a year, maybe, tops. There’s not the demand. The revulsion factor is too great.”

  “There’s been a technological breakthrough.” Courtney leaned forward. “They can install the infrasystem and controllers and offer the product for the factory-floor cost of a new subcompact. That’s way below the economic threshold for blue-collar labor.

  “Look at it from the viewpoint of a typical factory owner. He’s already downsized to the bone and labor costs are bleeding him dry. How can he compete in a dwindling consumer market? Now let’s imagine he buys into the program.” She took out her Mont Blanc and began scribbling figures on the tablecloth. “No benefits. No liability suits. No sick pay. No pilferage. We’re talking about cutting labor costs by at least two-thirds. Minimum! That’s irresistible, I don’t care how big your revulsion factor is. We project we can move five hundred thousand units in the first year.”

  “Five hundred thousand,” I said. “That’s crazy. Where the hell are you going to get the raw material for—?”

  “Africa.”

  “Oh, God, Courtney.” I was struck wordless by the cynicism it took to even consider turning the sub-Saharan tragedy to a profit, by the sheer, raw evil of channeling hard currency to the pocket Hitlers who ran the camps. Courtney only smiled and gave that quick little flip of her head that meant she was accessing the time on an optic chip.

  “I think you’re ready,” she said, “to talk with Koestler.”

  At her gesture, the zombie boys erected projector lamps about us, fussed with the settings, turned them on. Interference patterns moired, clashed, meshed. Walls of darkness erected themselves about us. Courtney took out her flat and set it up on the table. Three taps of her nailed fingers and the round and hairless face of Marvin Koestler appeared on the screen. “Ah, Courtney!” he said in a pleased voice. “You’re in—New York, yes? The San Moritz. With Donald.” The slightest pause with each accessed bit of information. “Did you have the antelope medallions?” When we shook our heads, he kissed his fingertips. “Magnificent! They’re ever so lightly braised and then smothered in buffalo mozzarella. Nobody makes them better. I had the same dish in Florence the other day, and there was simply no comparison.”

  I cleared my throat. “Is that where you are? Italy?”

  “Let’s leave out where I am.” He made a dismissive gesture, as if it were a trifle. But Courtney’s face darkened. Corporate kidnapping being the growth industry it is, I’d gaffed badly. “The question is—what do you think of my offer?”

  “It’s…interesting. For a lateral.”

  “It’s the start-up costs. We’re leveraged up to our asses as it is. You’ll make out better this way in the long run.” He favored me with a sudden grin that went mean around the edges. Very much the financial buccaneer. Then he leaned forward, lowered his voice, maintained firm eye contact. Classic people-handling techniques. “You’re not sold. You know you can trust Courtney to have checked out the finances. Still, you think: It won’t work. To work, the product has to be irresistible, and it’s not. It can’t be.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Succinctly put.”

  He nodded to Courtney. “Let’s sell this young man.” And to me, “My stretch is downstairs.”

  He winked out.

  ***

  Koestler was waiting for us in the limo, a ghostly pink presence. His holo, rather, a genial if somewhat coarse-grained ghost afloat in golden light. He waved an expansive and insubstantial arm to take in the interior of the car and said, “Make yourselves at home.”

  The chauffeur wore combat-grade photomultipliers. They gave him a buggish, inhuman look. I wasn’t sure if he was dead or not. “Take us to Heaven,” Koestler said.

  The doorman stepped out into the street, looked both ways, nodded to the chauffeur. Robot guns tracked our progress down the block.

  “Courtney tells me you’re getting the raw materials from Africa.”

  “Distasteful, but necessary. To begin with. We have to sell the idea first—no reason to make things rough on ourselves. Down the line, though, I don’t see why we can’t go domestic. Something along the lines of a reverse mortgage, perhaps, life insurance that pays off while you’re still alive. It’d be a step towards getting the poor off our backs at last. Fuck ’em. They’ve been getting a goddamn free ride for too long; the least they can do is to die and provide us with servants.”

  I was pretty sure Koestler was joking. But I smiled and ducked my head, so I’d be covered in either case. “What’s Heaven?” I asked, to move the conversation onto safer territory.

  “A proving ground,” Koestler said with great satisfaction, “for thefuture. Have you ever witnessed bare-knuckles fisticuffs?”

  “No.”

  “Ah, now there’s a sport for gentlemen! The sweet science at itssweetest. No rounds, no rules, no holds barred. It gives you the real measure of a man—not just of his strength but his character. How he handles himself, whether he keeps cool under pressure—how he stands up to pain. Security won’t let me go to the clubs in person, but I’ve made arrangements.”

  ***

  Heaven was a converted movie theater in a rundown neighborhood in Queens. The chauffeur got out, disappeared briefly around the back, and returned with two zombie bodyguards. It was like a conjurer’s trick. “You had these guys stashed in the trunk?” I asked as he opened the door for us.

  “It’s a new world,” Courtney said. “Get used to it.”

  The place was mobbed. Two, maybe three hundred seats, standing room only. A mixed crowd, blacks and Irish and Koreans mostly, but with a smattering of uptown customers as well. You didn’t have to be poor to need the occasional taste of vicarious potency. Nobody paid us any particular notice. We’d come in just as the fighters were being presented.

  “Weighing two-five-oh, in black trunks with a red stripe,” the ref was bawling, “tha gang-bang gangsta, tha bare-knuckle brawla, tha man with tha—”

  Courtney and I went up a scummy set of back stairs. Bodyguard-us-bodyguard, as if we were a combat patrol out of some twentieth-century jungle war. A scrawny, potbellied old geezer with a damp cigar in his mouth unlocked the door to our box. Sticky floor, bad seats, a good view down on the ring. Grey plastic matting, billowing smoke.

  Koestler was there, in a shiny new hologram shell. It reminded me of those plaster Madonnas in painted bathtubs that Catholics set out in their yards. “Your permanent box?” I asked.

  “All of this is for your sake, Donald—you and a few others. We’re pitting our product one-on-one against some of the local talent. By arrangement with the management. What you’re going to see will settle your doubts once and for all.”

  “You’ll like this,” Courtney said. “I’ve been here five nights straight. Counting tonight.” The bell rang, starting the fight. She leaned forward avidly, hooking her elbows on the railing.

  The zombie was grey-skinned and modestly muscled, for a fighter. But it held up its hands alertly, was light on its feet, and had strangely calm and knowing eyes.

  Its opponent was a real bruiser, a big black guy with classic African features twisted slightly out of true so that his mouth curled up in a kind of sneer on one side. He had gang scars on his chest and even uglier marks on his back that didn’t look deliberate but like something he’d earned on the streets. His eyes burned with an intensity just this side of madness.

  He came forward cautiously but not fearfully, and made a couple of quick jabs to get the measure of his opponent. They were blocked and countered.

  They circled each other, looking for an opening.

  For a minute or so, nothing much happened. Then the gangster feinted at the zombie’s head, drawing up its guard. He drove through that opening with a slam to the zombie’s nuts that made me wince.

  No reaction.

  The dead fi
ghter responded with a flurry of punches, and got in a glancing blow to its opponent’s cheek. They separated, engaged, circled around.

  Then the big guy exploded in a combination of killer blows, connecting so solidly it seemed they would splinter every rib in the dead fighter’s body. It brought the crowd to their feet, roaring their approval.

  The zombie didn’t even stagger.

  A strange look came into the gangster’s eyes, then, as the zombie counterattacked, driving him back into the ropes. I could only imagine what it must be like for a man who had always lived by his strength and his ability to absorb punishment to realize that he was facing an opponent to whom pain meant nothing. Fights were lost and won by flinches and hesitations. You won by keeping your head. You lost by getting rattled.

  Despite his best blows, the zombie stayed methodical, serene, calm, relentless. That was its nature.

  It must have been devastating.

  The fight went on and on. It was a strange and alienating experience for me. After a while I couldn’t stay focused on it. My thoughts kept slipping into a zone where I found myself studying the line of Courtney’s jaw, thinking about later tonight. She liked her sex just a little bit sick. There was always a feeling, fucking her, that there was something truly repulsive that she really wanted to do but lacked the courage to bring up on her own.

  So there was always this urge to get her to do something she didn’t like. She was resistant; I never dared try more than one new thing per date. But I could always talk her into that one thing. Because when she was aroused, she got pliant. She could be talked into anything. She could be made to beg for it.

  Courtney would’ve been amazed to learn that I was not proud of what I did with her—quite the opposite, in fact. But I was as obsessed with her as she was with whatever it was that obsessed her.