400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  "6Pack, meet Nutrimancer. Nutrimancer, 6Pack. I hope you do better than my last fryboy."

  "What happened to him?"

  Tempura-Hashbraun smiled for the first time, showing that he had replaced his teeth with credit registers.

  "Nutrirnancer fired him," he said. "Thirty seconds under the broiler and he was done to perfection." He licked his lips.

  * * *

  6Pack slipped his tongue into the jack, checked the pilot light, and hit the ON switch. For an instant he smelled scallions sizzling in butter, the iron tang of an omlette pan,a nd then he was inside.

  "Wheeee!" cried the Fatline. "You’re back."

  Ahead of him, a ziggurat rose halfway to infinity, looking like a corporate bar chart. But it was not a savings and loan, nor a humongous tax shelter. It was a wedding cake.

  He rushed forward, surpassing the rate of inflation. Tier upon tier leapt into clarity, as an army of menacing custard eclairs streaked past below.

  "Watch out!" the Fatline cried. "It’s covered in ICING![1]"

  In the instant before collision, he found his bearings and soared upward. The tiers dropped below, but not before he had read the message written in ICING upon the topmost layer: "YOU’RE DEAD, FRYBOY!"

  Now he settled into the evasion routines with which the EASA had equipped him. As soon as a cocktail olive drew close enough, he snagged it by the pimento and followed it back to the foodbanks.

  Kaleidoscope of the tongue:

  Mint and parsley, vanilla haggis, pecans and hundred year eggs.

  As the tastes passed through his mind, he peered into the twisted guts of the infokitchen, sorting through spice racks and rifling iceboxes. He ignored the cross-referenced accounting files that tracked the expense of every meal and ordered supplies when they were low. He ignored the brain of the vast system.

  "Go!" sang the Fatline.

  Straight for the stomach.

  * * *

  "What are you doing in my kitchen?"

  His inquisitor was a rotund chef wearing a white suit and a tall white cap; he held a wooden spoon menacingly cocked. They stood on a wild mountain peak; tennis balls whipped past and the sky was full of steel engravings.

  "You’re Nutrimancer," 6Pack said.

  "So what if I am? This kitchen is too small for two. I don’t need a fryboy. I’m self-motivated. What are you?"

  Memories of Earth: hot Florida sand burning his kneecaps, his first smorgasbord, popsicles in Cannes, Judy Dixon sucking his tongue till it hurt like hell.

  "You have a messy mind," Nutrimancer announced. "You can’t cook with all that confusion inside you. Let me clean it out for you. "

  6Pack cried out for the Fatline, but he’d been cut off. He gave a little whistle but it didn’t help. Nutrimancer’s laughter sounded like tricycle tires rushing over a sidewalk covered with worms and roaches.

  "EASA can’t help you now," said the chef. "I know they sent you to stop me, but I control the diet of the most powerful man on or off Earth. Soon I will have replaced every cell in his body with nutrients tailored for world domination. And old Tempura-Hashbraun has developed quite an appetite for human flesh. I’m sure he won’t mind if another fryboy ends up under glass with an apple in his mouth."

  Something was rising over the mountains, unseen by the deranged chef, like a pale and enormous yellow moon lofting up through the clouds. Without letting himself follow the arc of its rise, 6Pack calculated the path of its descent. He took a few steps back, drawing the chef into the point of impact.

  "It’s no use trying to escape. No one knows where you are. And soon the old man will have disposed of the remains."

  The shadow of the falling sphere began to grow around Nutrimancer’s feet. At the last instant, the chef glanced up and cried, "Aiee! Wintermelon! "

  As the titan fruit smashed upon the peak, flattening the chef, 6Pack leapt from the crag. The sky went black and so did he.

  * * *

  He awoke in a soft bed, an extravagant suite, as Lady 3Bean walked through the door with a breakfast tray in her hands.

  "You were wonderful," she said. "Would you like something to eat?"

  6Pack shook his head and regarded the rashers and cantaloupe with distaste.

  "Never again," he said.

  (With thanks and apologies to William Gibson)

  *ICING: Incredibly Complicated Information Never Given.

  * * *

  “Nutrimancer” copyright 1987 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1987.

  THE LIQUOR CABINET OF DR. MALIKUDZU

  Bad news for the janitor; good luck for Dr. Malikudzu. Sometime in the middle of the night-shift, after a fight with Max the supervisor over who was to empty biohazard bins in the animal experimentation labs, young Mr. Coover let go his already slender grip on discretion and began unadvisedly opening random drawers in the offices of the principal investigators. He had seen too many bad things peeking at him emptily from the plastic shrouded hollows of the laboratory bins; he wanted to know what got into the heads of these doctors to make them go after living meat the way they did. Drawer after drawer yielded nothing but paper and paperclips, the occasional stash of change for the vending machines, stale fragments of pastry. But finally, in the office of one Dr. Malikudzu, he came upon a cache of tiny liquor bottles, of the sort distributed by airlines. With a grin he settled back in the squeaky office chair, unscrewed the cap on a vodka bottle, and tipped the contents down his throat, never noticing that the paper seal on the neck of the bottle had already been broken.

  It burned like vodka going down, but the taste was all wrong. And at the bottom young Mr. Coover was unsettled to find that it had dregs—namely a little rubbery bit like a cheese curd, which slipped past his tongue before he could spit it out. Bleh! He held the bottle up to the light, but there was nothing remaining in it to suggest that it had ever held anything but what it claimed.

  Suddenly queasy, he scarcely had time to drop the bottle back into the drawer—knocking over several others as if they were bowling pins—and stagger to his rolling garbage can, therein disgorging all that he had drunk and quite a bit more besides. He hung weakly over the rim of the huge reeking barrel, his mops and brooms clattering to the floor, and waited there in case his stomach might surge again. He felt as if he were breaking out in needles, his stomach seared by acids. His eventual thought was that things would be complicated if he were discovered in this office, where the drawers had obviously been ransacked. To hell with straightening up—he was sick. He had meant to quit anyway, now that he’d saved some money. Let them try to track him down. Doctors weren’t supposed to keep wet bars in their drawers; he probably wouldn’t be reported. But Max, his superior, was another matter.

  He stooped to recover his brooms and mops, and his guts seized the opportunity to stab him without mercy. Then he staggered from the office, pushing his cart and barrel ahead of him through aisles of black acid-proof counter tops lined with glassware and fancy instruments that looked like televisions without screens. His stomach spasmed, forcing a scream from him. The sound echoed through the lab, brittle and cold as the Pyrex. He thought he heard an answering cry from down the hall. Was Max coming to check up on him?

  Get out of here now. Out of here. It sounded like there was a jungle in the walls, apes screaming; but that beating of metal bars would have been out of place in the wild.

  He pushed against another door, this one with a yellow pane set in it. Locked. He fished out his skeleton key, ignoring the warning symbols on the glass. Something more than biohazards here. He pushed the door open and the screech of animals overwhelmed him. Monkeys stared at him from rows of unlit cages: unlit, but their eyes glowed with a sick yellow light, the color of the glass pane. In fact, the pane was clear; this yellow radiance had colored it.

  “Oh God . . .” He put a hand to his belly, rubbed gently, wishing the pain would stop. He had swallowed something, he knew. Something like a tequila worm, bu
t still alive. It was roaming around inside him, not bothering to follow the twists and turns of his guts—no, it was boring a way straight through. The shortest way to a man’s heart . . .

  At that thought, he knew that it had found this most prized muscle. A hot yellow exultance swept through him—alien to his thoughts, but arising alongside them. His heart quivered and there came a soft jabbing. No more pain. The muscle stopped beating, his eyes bulged, and then the organ throbbed and went to work at a far different pace. His blood flooded with yellow light; it spilled from his eyes and lit the dark comers.

  He smiled. A man was calling him, coming down the hall. Max.

  “Coover? What are you doing in there? It’s your ass this time, shithead. We don’t clean these rooms.”

  Young Mr. Coover met him at the door. His heart beat a rapid yellow accompaniment to the stifled gasp, the wet rending of muscle and bone, and the arrhythmic sound of dribbling on the easy-to-clean linoleum tile.

  This done, Mr. Coover found one of the larger cages in a corner of the room and opened the wire mesh door. The occupant gazed at him with soulful yellow eyes, understanding why he must squeeze it by the throat until the vertebrae were mingled in the cooling jellies of the neck. His eyes shone all the more brightly as he climbed into the cage and pulled the door shut after him. Then, until morning, he sulked and howled like all the rest.

  It was a short trip from the simian labs to the psychiatric institute. Dr. Leslie Malikudzu watched from his high office window as the strait-jacketed figure of the young janitor was led around the back of the opposite building by several security men and three white-coated doctors. He could still see the boy’s eyes in his memory: the faint residue of luminescence dying from them in the daylight. He had neglected to mention the empty Vodka bottle to the police. Now he returned to the drawer and examined the other bottles in order to ascertain that they were in fact all quite full of stasis fluid, and that the tiny flesh niblets inside each remained immobile.

  Thank God the janitor had drunk the stuff, he thought; must have held quite a kick, too. He hated to think of what might have happened had the bottle broken on the floor and the flesh-tag escaped. It could have struck from anywhere. Now, however, it was safely lodged in a companionable heart; its presence, he had determined, had struck the boy dumb, driven him utterly mad. It seemed doubtful that he would ever regain speech sufficient to describe how he had been driven to murder his supervisor and the ape whose cage he’d occupied. This was fortunate for Dr. Malikudzu, who was still years away from publishing his tentative findings, and much farther than that from asking permission of the Human Experimentation Committee to pursue his work into animals of a higher order. The Simian Commission did not know exactly what he had done to the apes now in his keeping; or rather, the experiments they had authorized were not the ones he had conducted, although they bore a superficial resemblance. He could thank Mr. Coover that his work had been accelerated by perhaps a decade and its benefits to him might be immediately forthcoming.

  He only required access to the patient himself. If the doctors across the street were close with their unpublished data, they were more so with their high-risk inmates. In cases such as this, Coover might not remain there long at all. The psychologists would argue that he needed mental care, the police that he should be treated as a criminal. Before this argument could get underway there were some tests he would very much like to run on the fellow.

  Poor fellow! He allowed himself a moment of compassion, then reminded himself that the janitor was very likely a drunk, not to mention a pilferer. Well, the tag would have a grand old time with him, wouldn’t it?

  Dr. Malikudzu had his assistant place a few calls, which required interrupting the gossip over the grisly murder and the breakage of several astronomically priced pieces of analytic equipment. Finally he was connected with Dr. Gavin Shiel, financial director of the psychiatric institute. Shiel had a doctorate in economics, and equally important to his status, he had graduated from Cornell with top honors in Hotel Administration.

  “Gavin, how are you? You’ve heard about that ghastly business in my lab I suppose. They’ve brought the young man to your place and I wondered if I could see him.”

  “Good to hear from you, Les. Awful business. I’m not sure who’s handling the case. It’s urgent, you say? Why don’t you run over and ask for a minute with him?”

  “I’d like to, but you know your staff. Quite rigorous on protocol. He did just murder a man, you realize. I wondered if you might oil the water a bit, advise them that I’m coming. Otherwise I’ll have to get into this terrible hassle over privacy, privileges, medical jurisdiction.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll call Therese Dowsie. Should be straightened out by the time you can get over here.”

  “Wonderful. Let’s get together for lunch sometime soon.”

  Dr. Malikudzu whizzed down to the lobby in the elevator, dashed through a light drizzle and crossed the street, threading between two beacon-flashing ambulances that were stalled at the emergency parking entrance while a mailroom messenger gathered up a spill of envelopes. By the time he entered the other building, a nurse named Linda was waiting for him at the elevator. With her key in a coded lock, they were given access to the middle of the crisis ward. The hall was full of wandering patients. An older man with sunken black eyes informed Dr. Malikudzu that he had always loved him. It was impossible to separate staff from patients; there were no alienating white coats in this ward. Dr. Malikudzu was only mildly suprised when Linda began railing at the young man behind the reception desk, telling him that he should be in his room and not answering phones. Before he slipped away, however, she asked him the whereabouts of Dr. Dowsie, and the patient pointed down the end of the hall. They passed out of the ward, checking that the door locked behind them, into an area of much higher security.

  A policeman stood in the hall, talking with the proud Dr. Dowsie, a tall black woman who now began berating the cop for “waving his gun around where it wasn’t wanted.” When she saw Dr. Malikudzu, her only greeting was, “You.”

  “I know you’re expecting me.”

  “Gavin made it clear that I was to let you see the new boy. You know how he reasons—with a checkbook. I don’t see what business it is of yours really.”

  “He was found in my lab.”

  “So what?”

  “I’m investigating a disappearance.”

  “You’re not going to get anything out of him. Besides, his hands were empty when they brought him in. I’m trying to get his evaluation started.”

  “Is he sedated?”

  “We had to sedate him. You heard him howling.”

  “But did the drugs work?”

  A sudden yell answered his question. It sounded like the door might open from the blast. The cop backed away and started walking down the hall shaking his head; he was headed toward the crisis ward.

  “Linda, show him out. I’ll let Dr. Malikudzu in.” She unlocked the door with a deadpan expression.

  “I’d like a few minutes alone if you don’t mind.”

  “Be my guest.”

  Inside, the smell of urine and feces was as strong as the blast of sound. Difficult to imagine such fierce emanations from such a small man. Fortunately, Dr. Malikudzu was quite accustomed to the reek of hominid effluvia. Coover had crawled back into a corner of the couch, and there he lay with his head thrown back, raging at the ceiling, only occasionally glancing down at the man who had come to share his cell. There was no more yellow gleam in the boy’s eyes; they seemed entirely burnt out.

  “I know you’re in there,” Dr. Malikudzu said, not that the flesh-tag implicitly understood human speech. Still, there was a chance that it might have infiltrated the boy’s speech centers and joined forces with him. These were all things he had hoped to ascertain with human subjects.

  He took a bottle of Puerto Rican rum from his pocket and held it up to young Coover’s face. The boy quieted instantly, staring into the
depths of stasis fluid at the floating speck within, a bit of twisted flesh that resembled nothing so much as a kidney bean.

  “Ah, recognition! I could inject you with this fluid, you know—a needle to the heart—and stop your thrashing about in this unfortunate lad. But then there would be an autopsy. There might be one anyway if you’re not careful to live. We must give you time yet to heal. The entry wounds must be painful, yes?” He got close enough to the boy to see blood inside his lips, but it was hard to tell if he’d done that by gnashing his teeth or whether it might have come up from his interior. “Do you know what you’ve got in there? Perhaps I should ask, do you know what you are?”

  He was thrilled by the notion that he might actually be communicating with the flesh-tag for the first time. His simian models had been disappointing in this regard. In fact, in none of them had he seen such extreme reactions. As he’d always suspected, the human organism was the only one that would allow the tags to take their full effect. Which meant . . . the ends of his efforts might be in sight!

  “You are a cancer,” he said. “A bit of self-consuming flesh. Or rather, that’s what you were until I got ahold of you. Now you’re something rather more special than that. In a sense, I am your father.”

  The boy stared deep into his eyes, head jerking rapidly.

  “Yes I am. You should be pleased that your sire is such a genius. It hasn’t been easy to pursue this work. I’ve had four separate rotating groups of graduate students working with me, all of them unaware of the other groups, all convinced—like my patrons—that they were working toward quite different ends. It’s been a jigsaw puzzle, you see, in which only I hold the key piece. I’ve had to invest a bit of unpaid time myself, but I don’t mind. The exposure to radiation, the messing about with chimerae, all part of the job. Do you remember, I tried sending you messages once before? I wrote amusing little codes into chromosomes and let them replicate within your genetic predecessor. I thought you might catch on and reply in kind. Perhaps you’re not that intelligent. Perhaps you’re nothing more than a malignant worm after all.”