Near + Far (12 page)

"You don't look so good," Lewis said. His gaze traveled over her outfit. "It's pretty warm for long sleeves, isn't it? Are you feeling okay?"

She could almost hear the beast's breath.

In the window glass, a flash of copper feathers, the glint of a predatory eye. It struck along her nerves, a sudden intuition, and she smiled.

"Bad dreams, that's all," she said. She turned back to the stove, pretended she was busy ladling out soup. She tossed over her shoulder, "Dreams can't hurt anyone, after all."

Uncertainty flickered in his eyes. "Well," he said, taking a spoonful of soup. "Sure. Dreams."

Years of bluffing him, of not betraying how much a blow had hurt, steadied her. She could act as though she wasn't afraid. And that made her less afraid, somehow.

Still, after he went to bed, she stayed up, saying she wanted to work on a sketch.

Up in her chair, she leaned over the graphic pad. It was very close, so very close.

"Come in," she said, and began to draw.

From The Annals of Everkind:

Mrs. Mountebank:

It comes!

The Tango Gotango Gotengo:

Whose side is it on?

Mrs. Mountebank:

There's no telling. Pray that it's ours.

It was her best work. She didn't know how suitable for children it was, this one, but children liked a touch of darkness, after all—look at
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, the gruesome ends of the children there. Would children like this new character, the Madhawk?

It came in a swirl of feathers and talons; it came as swiftly as pulling the string that dissolves a tangle and lets the lines sweep free. It was graceful and deadly, and it rode the winds high above Everkind, feared but loved at the same time.

It came as suddenly as a battle trumpet shrilling, and its claws were sharp, sharp enough to defeat anything. Sharp enough to defeat fear and despair.

Sharp enough to leave Lewis in a tangle of red in his sheets, the dissipating smell of ash and smoke around him as his creature dissolved beneath the Madhawk's fierce attack.

Afterward.

Ending #1:

When Sam knocked on her door, he didn't say anything about Lewis' death. He had shown up at the funeral with the rest of the Practical Shamanism group. She didn't know whether they had come to express their condolences or to make sure that Lewis was really dead.

Perhaps a mixture of both.

Sam was easy to talk to, though, about things other than Lewis. He loved her books, it turned out, and had dabbled in writing himself, just long enough to appreciate it. They went out to coffee.

Then dinner, then a movie, then other things.

The Madhawk was very popular, it turned out. Everything she touched turned to gold from then on. Sam read each new book with wonder and appreciation. The perfect reader.

Of course he was in love with her.

Of course she fell in love with him.

She kept Lewis's ashes on the mantel. The criminal who had broken into the house, inexplicably killed an already dying man, was never caught.

It was a good life.

Ending #2:

Of course the Madhawk came to her once it was done with Lewis. Roused to blood, it could not relent until its maker was gone, until she had raised her wrists one last time to let its talons slash across the surface and set the crimson floodgates free.

When she had breathed her last, shuddering gasp, wondering what they would make of her stories now, the Madhawk stayed for a few moments, as long as it took for her to leave the world and enter its dimension. It plucked a strand of her hair, and carried it back to begin building its nest.

Its chicks were strong. It was a good life.

Afternotes

I avoid horror movies in the theater because I get far too wrapped up in them and have been known to scream at tense moments. Hence, we watch them at home. After watching the truly dreadful movie "Paranormal Activity," I was thinking about how to make it the movie scarier and ended up coming up with this story as well as making sure I couldn't sleep that night. Some of Lewis and Amber's childhood is the one I shared with my brother Lowell, but he is not a shaman and resembles Lewis in no other way.

The Madhawk also owes a certain amount to the Bird in a Heinlein story, "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag," whose disturbing, reality-isn't-exactly-what-you-think quality always unsettled me (now that I think about it, it's much the same terror as that evoked by the Leiber novel I talked about in another of these notes) and which I ran across as a teenager in the collection by the same name.

But more than anything, the story's origin lies in thinking about both sides of the caretaker role and the fierce resentment that may arise on the part of the person being taken care of. That's what lies at the heart of Lewis' transformation, and I don't know that there's any way Amber could have staved it off.

The story's also got a metafictional side that some readers like and which drives some others nuts. All I can say about that is forgive me. John Barth's influence as a teacher pops out at odd times and this was one.

The piece originally appeared in
Apex Digest
, under editor Lynne M. Thomas.

T
he office's new work-from-home policy had its advantages, but housekeeping service wasn't one of them. Even though he was escaping the smog-laden outside air, Lyle's apartment smelled too-lived in, filled with the odor of ancient take-out, unwashed clothing, and dead house plants.

"I should clean this place up," he said. He thought about hanging up his damp windbreaker, but shrugged it off to toss it over a chair. He dumped his bag on the dining nook table as he edged his way past.

When he thumbed the frame, the metallic square lit with the evening news logo, four stories ribboned and scrolling across it. All showed scrambles of military activity, puffs of bomb smoke, a scattered flash of gun fire, muted and surreal, before they combined into a single burger commercial.

From behind him, the device on the table said, "You seem to use the word 'should' a lot. Do you attribute a particular meaning to that word?"

Lyle scrounged through the refrigerator, pulling out a plastic meal bag to throw in the microwave. Coming back to the coffee table, he said, "I suppose I say 'should' when I really mean 'don't want to do.'"

The Therapy Buddha sat cross-legged, three feet tall and made of soft plastic. It was bright green.

Its calm, big-cheeked face said, "How do you feel about that?" The sound emanated from a speaker that glinted dentally between unmoving lips, like a slanted front tooth.

"Yeah, whatever, toy. TV on." He retrieved his meal and slumped into the couch to flip through channels on the wall screen.

"A broken mirror never reflects again," the Buddha said. "Fallen flowers do not return to their branches."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Zen koans are sayings that challenge habitual thought processes. For another Zen koan, say 'Koan, please.'"

He did not reply. The Buddha sat, silent and immobile. His co-workers had bought it for him on his fortieth birthday, wrapped in sheets of bright pink bubble wrap.

"Gives pop therapy a whole new meaning." Scott laughed and almost patted him on the back. The voice-activated Buddha was a rip-off of a Sony model, but the imitation was very good except for the wrong color.

The party had been a typical office gathering—sheet cake from the corner grocery store with bright red, slightly crooked lettering reading "Happy 40th Lyle!" over white frosting. Everyone stood around and made small talk. He chatted with Scott and the latest intern.

"What do you think of your new surroundings?" Scott asked the intern. He was in full charm mode, relic of his days selling Christian comedy albums.

She was busty and blonde, wearing green-striped overalls that matched the beads in her hair. Her tenure in the office was sixteen hours, as of that afternoon. "I've never worked in a data-selling corporation before," she admitted. "This is my first time working since college."

"You didn't work in high school?" Scott said. "A shame—I think it really builds character. What did you do instead?"

"I was on the swim team," she said. Lyle imagined her briefly in a tank suit, her long hair tied back.

"Sports are good," Scott said. "I worked in my dad's store, making deliveries. What about you, Lyle?"

"I farmed gold in an online game and sold it."

"Every geek's dream job. But how can there be actual money in that?"

"It paid for college," he said. "I didn't really have the grades for a scholarship. Real jobs pay better, though, particularly since they now outsource a lot of gold grinding to Thailand and China."

Scott nodded, looking interested in a way that Lyle knew was forced. The intern didn't bother to conceal her boredom. Beads clicking together as she moved, she went to take another sliver of cake. Scott and Lyle stood staring after her.

"She'll last, what, two weeks?" Scott said. "Someone will want coffee and she'll get huffy and leave."

"If that long."

"How are you liking working from home?"

When the memo had come down from the home office—to decrease costs, remote logins, etc.—Scott had been one of the first proclaiming the glories of the new policy, but every time Lyle made his way into the office to check-in or for functions like this, he found Scott there.

"It's all right," he said. "But a little isolated. How about you?"

"Sometimes it just seems like I can get a lot more done here, you know what I mean?"

Lyle shrugged. "Not really." Most of his work consisted of surfing the trade nets to find places looking for batches of data of the kind he could deliver. Sometimes he looked for new products and then pitched his dataherd to their marketers, pointing out the markets they reflected and the insights they provided, depending on how he grouped them. A data herder needed agility of mind, the ability to see opportunities and seize them quickly.

The coffee shop down the street was wider than his apartment, so he usually took his datapad down there. If he got there early, he could find a spot near the window, overlooking Lake Washington. A latte and a croissant's worth of lunch bought him at least an hour uninterrupted before the servers started cleaning his space too obviously, edging him out. He liked to watch the sailboats on the water, and the little red water scooters, shaped like dragons, that had been rare last year and this year were everywhere.

His fingers danced over the keys as he performed his yearly evaluation of the demographics of his dataherd. As expected, they'd scattered even more geographically, and a few more had married than had divorced. Overall, wages were down. Outside the sky was pinkish and cloudy as dying water, reflected in the metallic sides of the hot dog vendor's cart, steaming as he pushed it along.

Lyle frowned as numbers flowed across his pad in response to his query. The dataherd was trending towards a particularly unprofitable sector—he could no longer mine them for singles data. That had been coming for a while. He'd foreseen it five years ago, but didn't like it nonetheless. He drank the rest of his latte in quick gulps, not tasting it, watching the vendor negotiate with a dragon boat, the rider struggling to pass her credit card across the vendor's beam to be read before it signaled with a green light and the hot dog was passed down. She wore a white face mask, as did the vendor and the others on the street. A bad day for breathing, the morning news had said.

Waving cheerfully, rider and boat made their way back into deeper water, circling the tour boat cruising along the waterfront. Lyle gathered up his pad and put his own mask on to go home.

"The trick is figuring out a way to pitch them," he said to the Buddha. He'd left earlier than he'd meant to, rehearsing this conversation in his mind. It startled him to realize that he had been looking forward to talking to an inanimate object.

"Why is it a trick?"

"Because it's creating something where it didn't exist before. The demographic of people who eat chocolate in the bathtub, or whatever else you can claim them to be representative of, that someone can aim a product at. It's a knack."

"How do you feel about that?"

"I have to go into the office," he said. "It's a bad sign when I'm having conversations with a toy."

The plaza office was much the same as always. Downtown Seattle always struck him as waiting to become the stage setting for a post-apocalyptic film, its workers and visitors white and blue-masked zombies, a few with brighter faces yet, tie-dyed or stamped with bright yellow ducks and green frogs.

Scott poked his head into the cubicle. "Hey buddy, nice to see you for a change."

"We're supposed to be working from home," Lyle said.

"Well, sure," Scott said. "Sitting around doing datasorts in your bathrobe, who wouldn't like that? But I don't think it's a cost-cutting measure. They're seeing what deadwood they can drop." He grinned mirthlessly. "I've been coming in doing alternative training," he said. "It's good to be agile, employment wise. My cousin worked for a mall corp for forty years, then they cut her loose. Now she's a virtual clerk."

"What world?"

"Second Life, tends a music store. Sits there at the computer all day waiting to give shoppers the human touch."

"Ah yeah. Two of my herd did that a couple of weeks ago," he said. "And one's a virtual taxi-driver. Robots control the driving, she just gives clients human interaction and thanks them when the card is billed."

"Sign of downward social mobility!" Scott said, and laughed. "I'm sure you have other opportunities by the binload."

"I'm thinking about recruiting some new people into the herd to up their marketability," he said.

"Almost too late for this graduation."

"Graduation?"

"They do it by year now. For the cost of a few trinkets, you can sign up a thousand or so college kids. They'll fill out any amount of forms for a coffee chip or an mp3 download. Go look on the internal website, there's a list of promotional items you can request."

"That intern quit yet?"

"Last week. Did I call it or what? Mahalia asked her to pick up soda for the office weekender, and she posted a five screen goodbye e-mail to the rest of us, citing a lack of respect for her as a person. You should have gotten it."

"There's so much e-mail that I delete anything that goes to the office at large."

"That may not be the best strategy."

"It's worked well for eight years so far," Lyle said and went home.

"I don't really feel connected to anyone," he said to the Buddha. He'd moved it to the bookshelf so it could see more of the room. He sat on the couch with his back turned to the television, arguing with the Buddha. Behind him, the screen showed troops marching past an indiscriminate jungle backdrop.

"How does that make you feel?"

"Disconnected," he said, then laughed. "Yeah, whatever." He unrolled his datapad and traced his herd's purchases for the evening, managing to assemble a subset into an infochunk on movie-going trends. He shot it off to the studio markets and waited for usage fees.

Checking prices, he noticed a high profile survey on medicinal teas. It was easy to request coupons for free samples to be sent to his dataherd. He could check the results and peddle the infochunk to the company in a week or so.