“Yes … yes, you’re right,” said the Master. Its body was big and male, strong and healthy, but effort and fear had sapped the strength from its voice; it sounded distracted and anxious. “Yes. All right. Thank you.” It headed out to the receiving room.
That was when Sadie threw herself against the transfer room door and locked it, with herself still inside.
“Sadie?” Olivia, knocking on the door’s other side. But transfer chambers were designed for the Masters’ comfort; they could lock themselves in if they felt uncomfortable showing vulnerability around the anthro facility’s caregivers. Olivia would not be able to get through. Neither would the other Master—not until it was too late.
Trembling, Sadie turned to face the transfer tables and pulled the letter opener from the waistband of her pants.
It took several tries to kill the Eighteen Female. The girl screamed and struggled as Sadie stabbed and stabbed. Finally, though, she stopped moving.
By this time, the Master had extracted itself from its old flesh. It stood on the body’s bloody shoulders, head-tendrils waving and curling uncertainly toward the now-useless Eighteen. “You have no choice,” Sadie told it. Such a shameful thrill, to speak to a Master this way! Such madness, this freedom. “I’m all there is.”
But she wasn’t alone. She could feel them now somewhere in her mind, Enri and the others. A thousand, million memories of terrible death, coiled and ready to be flung forth like a weapon. Through Enri, through Sadie, through the Master that took her, through every Master in every body … they would all dream of death, and die in waking, too.
No revolution without blood. No freedom without the willingness to die.
Then she pulled off her shirt, staring into her own eyes in the mirrored wall as she did so, and lay down on the floor, ready.
The Elevator Dancer
Shift change, changeshift, humdrum and ho hum, and on the little screen a woman dances. She is in the elevator. She is alone in the elevator and she is dancing because there is no one to see her but the security camera, and the security guard who watches its output on the little screen.
She is dancing the Mashed Potatoes. He knows the name of the dance because he remembers his mother doing it in a silly moment of his childhood. It’s a silly dance at the best of times, even for a good dancer, which this woman is not. Yet the guard does not press the button beside his workstation. He does not alert the police, who these days concern themselves with other things besides crime. He simply stares as she twists her feet and hips over and over, bopping her head, too, in time to her own internal rhythm.
Then the automated elevator voice says, You have reached your floor, and the woman stops. She is not breathing hard. Not a hair is out of place. No drop of sweat mars her modest gray skirtsuit to suggest that here is a woman who cares only for her own pleasure, here is a woman who has a life alone and worst of all enjoys it. The doors open and she walks out; several people walk in. And the guard sits back in his chair, his every nerve and hair follicle a-tingle.
He wonders when they will come for him, but they do not. At the end of his shift he goes home to his modest house and the modest wife that the government assigned to him, and as he eats the dinner she has prepared, he thinks about the woman in the elevator. After dinner he helps his wife clean up, that much is not proscribed as women’s work, his hands are slick with grease and suds and he thinks about the liquid movement of the elevator woman’s hips. Later that evening he and his wife watch TV together, and during the prayer-and-commercial break, he wonders what the elevator woman prays for. That night his wife sighs as usual while she does her wifely duty, and he sighs as usual and climbs on top of her, and as an otherwise lackluster orgasm passes through his flesh, his soul is consumed with the memory of the woman in the elevator.
Changeshift, shift change, and he watches the screens in the little dark room. His supervisors would think him very diligent but he is watching just for her. He leans forward, his palms damp, when she gets into the elevator. The doors begin to close. Just before they do, a hand inserts itself; another employee of the corporation, just in time to catch the elevator down to the lobby. The woman politely nods to him. They do not exchange small talk. She does not dance.
She never dances when anyone is in the elevator with her. Does she know about the camera in the control panel? She must. Surveillance is everywhere. But every day he sees her, sometimes alone and sometimes amid her fellow office drones, and it is only alone that she suddenly begins pirouetting, over and over and over, until the elevator stops and she is not dizzy because she used the door seam to spot herself. Or swaying in a circle, her hips gyrating in a way that would make the Concerned Women for America much more concerned, but as the guard watches her, he thinks maybe this is how Salome made John the Baptist lose his head. This is why dancing is illegal. This will send me to Hell, he tells himself, Hell in a handbasket and a government detention camp.
She cannot be married, or she wouldn’t be employed. No one, then, has been assigned her as a wife. Does that mean …? No. Divorce is illegal. And she would be bored with him, he feels, if he were hers.
She does not do it for him. Still, he cannot tear his eyes away.
Shift change, changeshift, day in and day out, and finally he can no longer bear the torment. He looks for her in the lunchroom cafeteria. She is not there. He contrives to take his breaks standing near her favorite elevator, but she does not come. He skims the employee directory, hoping, hoping. But he does not see her.
He wonders why they have not yet come for him.
But they do not come, maybe they are busy, and as the shifts change, he begins to believe that God has sent her to teach him. The pastor’s words, from Wednesday night Bible study and Sunday afternoon service, suddenly make sense. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, it makes a sound if God wills. The elevator woman is that sound. She exalts Him and inspires him. She fills him with a fervor he believes is holy. To dance with her is to embody prayer. He weeps as he tries to find her and fails.
Finally he loses control; he is overwhelmed by the fundamental emptiness of his life; he needs. On the little monitor screen she dances, this time something most definitely proscribed because it is foreign and heathen, he thinks maybe it is Thai, she weaves her head from side to side like a snake and maybe she means to evoke Eve or even Lilith-most-evil; or maybe it just feels good. Either way he is bewitched.
He leaps up from his chair and tears through the hallways and does not care that he is frightening everyone, that the cameras will catch his strange behavior and some more diligent security guard will report him. He tears through the halls—fluorescent change, corridor shift—and suddenly he is at the elevator. He has beaten the elevator there. He will meet her at last.
The doors open. She is not there.
He is helped. He has been a good American all his life, obedient and steadfast, and this is a minor setback. In the camp he learns that it was all a hallucination, caused not by lack of faith but misplaced faith. The elevator woman may well have been there, but if so, she was sent to tempt him. How foolish was he to fall prey! Now he sits again in the dark little room with the monitors and resolutely tells himself that he does not see the woman dancing. She is not there. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, it makes a sound if God wills. But that is a tree, not a woman, and God does not will a woman to dance.
It is shameful and sinful to question the will of God. Still, the guard cannot help wondering. He does not want to think this thought, but sly, like temptation, it comes anyhow. And, well …
if …
if a tree falls …
if a tree falls and there’s no one around to hear it (but God) …
would it really bother with anything so mundane as making a sound?
or would it
dance
Cuisine des Mémoires
The name of the first entrée made me groan. “La Mort du Marie Ant
oinette,” the menu proclaimed, followed by a list of dishes. “Coq au vin, hearth bread, Château du Briand Chardonnay of 1789 (final pressing before Messrs. Briand themselves met the guillotine).”
I looked up at my friend and dining companion, Yvette, who smiled. “Now don’t be ornery, Harold,” she said. Her St. Charles accent stretched “now” into two distinct syllables and slurred my name into one. “I told you to keep an open mind.”
“Oh, my mind is open,” I said. “Though I’m wondering whether you’ve lost yours. The final meal of Marie Antoinette? This is a joke, right?”
“I’m planning to get that,” she said, pointing to another item on my menu. I followed her finger and saw:
On the occasion of King Edward VIII of England’s announcement to the royal family of his intent to marry Wallis Simpson even if it meant abdication of the throne
Clear turtle soup
Lobster mousse with piquant sauce
Roast pheasant
Potatoes soufflé
Mixed greens
Fresh pineapple and toasted cheese savory
Coffee and liqueurs
“Well, at least they don’t just do executions,” I said.
“Course not. That would be morbid, and besides—can you imagine what sort of tasteless slop some half-educated trailer trash would ask for? Hot dogs and red beans.”
“You mean authentic red beans?” I did my best imitation of an Upper West Side yuppie. “Trailer trash, Yvette. Really?”
She rolled her eyes and tapped the menu again. “The point is importance. Meaning. The chance to share in an historic moment, or a moment historic only to you. Use some damned imagination, Harold; if you don’t like what’s on the menu, then order a custom meal.”
I flipped to the menu’s third page, reading the instructions regarding custom meals. “Any meal from any occasion,” the caption read. In fine print: “Restaurant patron must be able to provide the exact date.”
I set the menu down and rubbed my eyes. “All right. I’ll admit, this is original as jokes go. But it’s not very funny.”
Yvette smiled in that knowing, Mona Lisa way that had entranced and infuriated three husbands. “Just try it, Harold,” she said. “It’s my treat, after all. If you’re disappointed, there’s no loss. But I doubt you’ll be disappointed.”
I shook my head. “There’s nothing special about this food, Yvette. This is someone’s idea of a bizarre theme restaurant. Who could possibly know for certain what someone had for dinner three hundred years ago? They could make up the menu out of whole cloth and there’s nobody to contradict them.”
“A few armchair historians, maybe, but you’re right.” Her smile never faded.
“Then what—” I broke off as the restaurant’s hostess came over. Even if she hadn’t been wearing an old-fashioned satin gown which pushed up her cleavage to a scandalous degree, I would have stared at her, for she was one of the most striking women I’d ever seen. Blond and freckled, she nevertheless had that distinctive cast to her features that revealed the dollop of African somewhere in her recent ancestry, maybe along with a splash of Native American and a pinch of Spaniard.
“Bienvenue,” she said, with that perfect back-of-the-throat pronunciation which most Americans mangled. “Welcome to Maison Laveau. Your server will be with you shortly. In the interim—” She carried a clipboard in one hand, which she set down in front of me.
NONDISCLOSURE, NONCOMPETE, AND TRADEMARK PROTECTION AGREEMENT
The Recipient (restaurant patron) will not, without prior written approval of the Maison Laveau or an authorized representative thereof, disclose or in any other way make known, reveal, report, publish or transfer to any person, firm, corporation or utilize for competitive or any other purpose any secret information
That was as far as my eyes got before my mind snapped back into place. I looked up at the woman in pure disbelief.
“If you please,” she said with a gracious smile. “We prefer to grow our clientele gradually and selectively.”
“Do you honestly mean to say”—I could barely keep myself from spluttering—“you mean to say I can’t tell anyone about this place?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “The agreement merely specifies how others can be told. Ms. Coraseau has demonstrated our policy perfectly by bringing you here in person so that you may see and judge the experience for yourself.” She gave me a smile, the very picture of courtesy. “We’ve found over the years that our uniqueness loses something when described secondhand.”
I looked down at the contract, trying to scan its clauses for pitfalls. “And what happens if I sign this and then break the contract? You sue me?”
She looked momentarily affronted. “Sir, this is an establishment of the highest caliber and civilité. Consider it a gentleman’s agreement—we assume that you will behave honorably, and you may trust that we will do the same.”
Which told me absolutely nothing. I opened my mouth to demand a more detailed explanation, but then Yvette sighed in impatience.
“Sign it, Harold. Be impulsive for once in your life.”
“What is that supposed to—”
“It means whatever you think it means. But remember that this is your birthday gift.”
Meaning that I was being rude. Since Yvette came from the oldest of old Southern blueblood—the kind that didn’t tolerate discourtesy—it meant that I’d damned well better shut up and sign the contract. Which I finally did.
The hostess gave me a bright smile and whipped the clipboard out of sight. “You’ll be given a countersigned copy along with the check. In the meantime, did you have any questions about our establishment?”
I had plenty, but I decided to play along. “Your menu says you can produce any meal from any occasion.”
“Indeed, sir.”
“Anything. Not just famous events?”
“Provided you give us some details about the event, yes.”
I sat back, grinning in triumph. “Like the menu, you mean.”
“Oh, no, sir.” Her smile never flagged. “We don’t need to know the menu. Just the location, the date and approximate time, and the significance of the occasion. Then we produce dishes which are precise replicas of the ones served on that occasion.”
“Replicas.”
“Down to the least spice, sir. Our process even reproduces the exact techniques used to prepare the meal on its original occasion.”
How much skill did it take to mimic the cooking style of a British royal chef? I couldn’t decide whether the notion sounded impressive or ludicrous.
“As I said before, sir—the process loses something in description. It’s best if you try it for yourself.” She smiled and inclined her head to us. “Enjoy your evening.”
She strode gracefully away. Yvette leaned forward, folding her hands on the table. “You still think this is some sort of trick.”
“Of course I do. It is.”
“Then give them a challenge,” she said. “Some meal that was special to you. Maybe something Angelina made. Try it, and see how they do.”
I shook my head, though her mention of Angelina’s cooking had intrigued me; in spite of myself I was already thinking of ideas. “And ruin a perfectly good memory? I don’t think so.”
“Do it,” she said. “I don’t want to hear you whining later about smoke and mirrors. You won’t believe anything until you’ve seen it, tasted it, for yourself.” She smiled. “I can’t say I blame you. I didn’t believe it either the first time I came here. But I do now. In the end, everyone who comes here believes.”
I looked around the restaurant. The dining room was small despite its elegance; there were only a handful of tables in the place. It was obvious which of the other patrons were newcomers like myself, because the repeat customers had the same air of calm anticipation as Yvette. I met the eyes of a young woman who was in the middle of gesticulating at her companion; she gave me a “can you believe this?” smile before resuming her argument.
> An older gentleman—as much a racial mishmash as the hostess, I guessed by his look, though less attractively so—came overdressed in an old-fashioned doublet with frilled sleeves peeking out of the cuffs. I hadn’t given up on the idea that this was some sort of theme restaurant, but Yvette had already told me that the staff’s uniforms were unchanged since the early 1800s, when apparently the restaurant had been founded.
“Good evening, monsieur et madame. Would you care for an apéritif? We have a replica of the 1900 Lafite Rothschild available tonight, perfectly chilled. The last bottle of this was sold to a collector some eighty years ago.”
This was too much. “I’ll bite,” I said. “Let’s have the Lafite. I can at least hope you’ll give us a decent cheap wine that way, though I’m sure you’ll slap on some outrageous price for verisimilitude.”
“Harold!” Yvette glowered at me.
The server smiled. “It’s all right, madame. We see this all the time. A bottle of the Lafite, then. And are you ready to order your meal?”
“I’ll have the King Edward,” Yvette said.
I sat back, feeling very full of myself. “And I will have a custom order,” I said. “A good friend of mine—ex-wife, actually—was a chef, and she prepared a marvelous meal for her certification exam. This would have been exactly ten years ago December the eighteenth. I remember because it was the night I proposed to her, and the night she served me with divorce papers eight years later.”
The waiter took note of all this without batting an eyelash. “And the location, sir?”
“Right here in this city, over on Royale at the American National Culinary Institute.”
“Ah, yes, I know the place. Excellent choice, sir. Anything else?”
I shook my head, amused at how far he was taking it. “You’re a marvelous actor, my friend.”
How Long 'Til Black Future Month? Page 22
