Chicken Little (3 page)

"Good point. Let's turn this around. Why should Buhle meet with you?"

He was ready for this one. "We have a track-record of designing products that suit people in his..." Talking about the vat-born lent itself to elliptical statements. Maybe that's why Brautigan had developed that annoying telegraph-talk.

"You've designed one such product," she said.

"That's one more than almost anyone else can claim." There were two other firms like Ate. He thought of them in his head as Sefen and Nein, as though invoking their real names might cause them to appear. "I'm new here, but I'm not alone. We're tied in with some of the finest designers, engineers, research scientists..." Again with the ellipsis. "You wanted to get to the good part. This isn't the good part, Ria. You've got smart people. We've got smart people. What we have, what you don't have, is smart people who are impedance-mismatched to your organization. Every organization has quirks that make it unsuited to working with some good people and good ideas. You've got your no-go areas, just like anyone else. We're good at mining that space, the no-go space, the mote in your eye, for things that you need."

She nodded and slapped her hands together like someone about to start a carpentry project. "That's a great spiel," she said.

He felt a little blush creep into his cheeks. "I think about this a lot, rehearse it in my head."

"That's good," she said. "Shows you're in the right line of business. Are you a Daffy Duck man?"

He cocked his head. "More of a Bugs man," he said, finally, wondering where this was going.

"Go download a cartoon called 'The Stupor Salesman,' and get back to me, OK?"

She stood up, wriggling her toes on the mossy surface and then stepping back into her shoes. He scrambled to his feet, wiping his palms on his legs. She must have seen the expression on his face because she made all those dimples and wrinkles and crowsfeet appear again and took his hand warmly. "You did very well," she said. "We'll talk again soon." She let go of his hand and knelt down to rub her hands over the floor. "In the meantime, you've got a pretty sweet gig, don't you?"

***

The Stupor Salesman turned out to feature Daffy Duck as a traveling salesman bent on selling something to a bank robber who is holed up in a suburban bungalow. Daffy produces a stream of ever-more-improbable wares, and is violently rebuffed with each attempt. Finally, one of his attempts manages to blow up the robber's hideout, just as Daffy is once again jiggling the doorknob. As the robber and Daffy fly through the air, Daffy brandishes the doorknob at him and shouts, "Hey, bub, I know just what you need! You need a house to go with this doorknob!"

The first time he watched it, Leon snorted at the punchline, but on subsequent viewings, he found himself less and less amused. Yes, he was indeed trying to come up with a need that this Buhle didn't know he had -- he was assuming Buhle was a he, but no one was sure -- and then fill it. From Buhle's perspective, life would be just fine if Leon gave up and never bothered him again.

And yet Ria had been so
nice
-- so understanding and gentle, he thought there must be something else to this. And she had made a point of telling him that he had a "sweet gig" and he had to admit that it was true. He was contracted for five years with Ate, and would get a hefty bonus if they canned him before then. If he managed to score a sale to Buhle or one of the others, he'd be indescribably wealthy. In the meantime, Ate took care of his every need.

But it was so
empty
there -- that's what got him. There were a hundred people on Ate's production team, bright sorts like him, and most of them only used the office to park a few knick-knacks and impress out-of-town relatives. Ate hired the best, charged them with the impossible and turned them loose. They got lost.

Carmela knew them all, of course. She was Ate's den-mother.

"We should all get together," he said. "Maybe a weekly staff meeting?"

"Oh, they tried that," she said, sipping from the triple-filtered water that was always at her elbow. "No one had much to say. The collaboration spaces update themselves with all the interesting leads from everyone's research, and the suggestion engine is pretty good at making sure you get an overview of anything relevant to your work going on." She shrugged. "This place is a show-room, more than anything else. I always figured you had to give creative people room to be creative."

He mulled this over. "How long do you figure they'll keep this place open if it doesn't sell anything to one of the vat people?"

"I try not to think about that too much," she said lightly. "I figure either we don't find something, run out of time and shut -- and there's nothing I can do about it; or we find something in time and stay open -- and there's nothing I can do about it."

"That's depressing."

"I think of it as liberating. It's like that lady said, Leon, you've got a sweet gig. You can make anything you can imagine, and if you hit one out of the park, you'll attain orbit and never reenter the atmosphere."

"Do the other account execs come around for pep talks?"

"Everyone needs a little help now and then," she said.

***

Ria met him for lunch at a supper-club in the living room of an 11th floor apartment in a slightly run-down ex-doorman building in midtown. The cooks were a middle-aged couple, he was Thai, she was Hungarian, the food was eclectic, light, and spicy, blending paprika and chilis in a nose-watering cocktail.

There were only two other diners in the tiny room for the early seating. They were another couple, two young gay men, tourists from the Netherlands, wearing crease-proof sportsjackets and barely-there barefoot hiking shoes. They spoke excellent English, and chatted politely about the sights they'd seen so far in New York, before falling into Dutch and leaving Ria and Leon to concentrate on each other and the food, which emerged from the kitchen in a series of ever-more-wonderful courses.

Over fluffy, caramelized fried bananas and Thai iced coffee, Ria effusively praised the food to their hosts, then waited politely while Leon did the same. The hosts were genuinely delighted to have fed them so successfully, and were only too happy to talk about their recipes, their grown children, the other diners they'd entertained over the years.

Outside, standing on 34th street between Lex and Third, a cool summer evening breeze and purple summer twilight skies, Leon patted his stomach and closed his eyes and groaned.

"Ate too much, didn't you?" she said.

"It was like eating my mother's cooking -- she just kept putting more on the plate. I couldn't help it."

"Did you enjoy it?"

He opened his eyes. "You're kidding, right? That was probably the most incredible meal I've eaten in my entire life. It was like a parallel dimension of good food."

She nodded vigorously and took his arm in a friendly, intimate gesture, led him toward Lexington. "You notice how time sort of stops when you're there? How the part of your brain that's going 'what next? what next?' goes quiet?"

"That's it! That's
exactly
it!" The buzz of the jetpacks on Lex grew louder as they neared the corner, like a thousand crickets in the sky.

"Hate those things," she said, glaring up at the joyriders zipping past, scarves and capes streaming out behind them. "A thousand crashes upon your souls." She spat, theatrically.

"You make them, though, don't you?"

She laughed. "You've been reading up on Buhle then?"

"Everything I can find." He'd bought small blocks of shares in all the public companies in which Buhle was a substantial owner, charging them to Ate's brokerage account, and then devoured their annual reports. There was lots more he could feel in the shadows: blind trusts holding more shares in still more companies. It was the standard corporate structure, a Flying Spaghetti Monster of interlocking directorships, offshore holdings, debt parking lots, and exotic matrioshke companies that seemed on the verge of devouring themselves.

"Oy," she said. "Poor boy. Those aren't meant to be parsed. They're like the bramble patch around the sleeping princess, there to ensnare foolhardy knights who wish to court the virgin in the tower. Yes, Buhle's the largest jetpack manufacturer in the world, through a layer or two of misdirection." She inspected the uptownbound horde, sculling the air with their fins and gloves, making course corrections and wibbles and wobbles that were sheer, joyful exhibitionism.

"He did it for me," she said. "Have you noticed that they've gotten better in the past couple years? Quieter? That was us. We put a lot of thought into the campaign; the chop-shops have been selling 'loud pipes save lives' since the motorcycle days, and every tiny-dick flyboy wanted to have a pack that was as loud as a bulldozer. It took a lot of market smarts to turn it around; we had a low-end model we were selling way below cost that was close to those loud-pipe machines in decibel count; it was ugly and junky and fell apart. Naturally, we sold it through a different arm of the company that had totally different livery, identity and everything. Then we started to cut into our margins on the high-end rides, and at the same time, we engineered them for a quieter and quieter run. We actually did some preproduction on a jetpack that was so quiet it actually
absorbed
noise, don't ask me to explain it, unless you've got a day or two to waste on the psycho-acoustics.

"Every swish bourgeois was competing to see whose jetpack could run quieter, while the low-end was busily switching loyalty to our loud junkmobiles. The competition went out of business in a year, and then we dummied-up a bunch of consumer-protection lawsuits that 'forced'" -- she drew air-quotes -- "us to recall the loud ones, rebuild them with pipes so engineered and tuned you could use them for the woodwinds section. And here we are." She gestured at the buzzing, whooshing fliers overhead.

Leon tried to figure out if she was kidding, but she looked and sounded serious. "You're telling me that Buhle dropped, what, a billion?"

"About eight billion, in the end."

"Eight billion rupiah on a project to make the skies quieter?"

"All told," she said. "We could have done it other ways, some of them cheaper. We could have bought some laws, or bought out the competition and changed their product line, but that's very, you know,
blunt
. This was sweet. Everyone got what they wanted in the end: fast rides, quiet skies, safe, cheap vehicles. Win win win."

An old school flyer with a jetpack as loud as the inside of an ice-blender roared past, leaving thousands scowling in his wake.

"That guy is plenty dedicated," she said. "He'll be machining his own replacement parts for that thing. No one's making them anymore."

He tried a joke: "You're not going to send the Buhle ninjas to off him before he hits Union Square?"

She didn't smile. "We don't use assassination," she said. "That's what I'm trying to convey to you, Leon."

He crumbled. He'd blown it somehow, shown himself to be the boor he'd always feared he was.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I guess -- look, it's all kind of hard to take in. The sums are staggering."

"They're meaningless," she said. "That's the point. The sums are just a convenient way of directing power. Power is what matters."

"I don't mean to offend you," he said carefully, "but that's a scary sounding thing to say."

"Now you're getting it," she said, and took his arm again. "Drinks?"

***

The limes for the daiquiris came from the trees around them on the rooftop conservatory. The trees were healthy working beasts, and the barman expertly inspected several limes before deftly twisting off a basket's worth and retreating to his workbench to juice them over his blender.

"You have to be a member to drink here," Ria said, as they sat on the roof, watching the jetpacks scud past.

"I'm not surprised," he said. "It must be expensive."

"You can't buy your way in," she said. "You have to work it off. It's a co-op. I planted this whole row of trees." She waved her arm, sloshing a little daquiri on the odd turf their loungers rested on. "I planted the mint garden over there." It was a beautiful little patch, decorated with rocks and favored with a small stream that wended its way through them.

"Forgive me for saying this," he said, "but you must earn a lot of money. A
lot
, I'm thinking." She nodded, unembarrassed, even waggled her eyebrows a bit. "So you could, I don't know, you could probably build one of these on any of the buildings that Buhle owns in Manhattan. Just like this. Even keep a little staff on board. Give out memberships as perks for your senior management team."

"That's right," she said. "I could."

He drank his daquiri. "I'm supposed to figure out why you don't, right?"

She nodded. "Indeed." She drank. Her face suffused with pleasure. He took a moment to pay attention to the signals his tongue was transmitting to him. The drink was
incredible
. Even the glass was beautiful, thick, handblown, irregular. "Listen, Leon, I'll let you in on a secret.
I want you to succeed
. There's not much that surprises Buhle and even less that pleasantly surprises him. If you were to manage it..." She took another sip and looked intensely at him. He squirmed. Had he thought her matronly and sweet? She looked like she could lead a guerilla force. Like she could wrestle a mugger to the ground and kick the shit out of him.