Chicken Little

  Leon's earmuffs made all the sound -- the sea, the chopper -- into a uniform hiss, and in that hiss, his thoughts and fears seemed to recede for a moment, as though they couldn't make themselves heard over the white noise. For the first time since he'd walked out of Ate, the nagging, doubtful voices fell still and Leon was alone in his head. It was as though he'd had a great pin stuck through his chest that had been finally removed. There was a feeling of lightness, and tears pricking at his eyes, and a feeling of wonderful obliteration, as he stopped, just for a moment, stopped trying to figure out where he fit in the world.

  The chopper touched down on a helipad at Newport State Airport, to one side of the huge X slashed into the heavy woods -- new forest, fast-growing carbon sinkers garlanded with extravagances of moss and vine. From the moment the doors opened, the heavy earthy smell filled his nose and he thought of the Living Room, which led him to think of Ria. He thanked the pilot and zapped her a tip and looked up and there was Ria, as though his thoughts had summoned her.

  She had a little half-smile on her face, uncertain and somehow childlike, a little girl waiting to find out if he'd be her friend still. He smiled at her, grateful for the clatter of the chopper so that they couldn't speak. She shook his hand, hers warm and dry, and then, on impulse, he gave her a hug. She was soft and firm too, a middle-aged woman who kept fit but didn't obsess about the pounds. It was the first time he'd touched another human since he left Ate. And, as with the chopper's din, this revelation didn't open him to fresh miseries -- rather, it put the miseries away, so that he felt better.

  "Are you ready?" she said, once the chopper had lifted off.

  "One thing," he said. "Is there a town here? I thought I saw one while we were landing."

  "A little one," she said. "Used to be bigger, but we like them small."

  "Does it have a hardware store?"

  She gave him a significant look. "What for? An axe? A nailgun? Going to do some improvements?"

  "Thought I'd bring along a door-knob," he said.

  She dissolved into giggles. "Oh, he'll like that. Yes, we can find a hardware store."

  ***

  Buhle's security people subjected the doorknob to millimeter radar and a gas chromatograph before letting it past. He was shown into an anteroom by Ria, who talked to him through the whole procedure, just light chatter about the weather and his real-estate problems, but she gently steered him around the room, changing their angle several times, and then he said, "Am I being scanned?"

  "Millimeter radar in here too," she said. "Whole body imaging. Don't worry, I get it every time I come in. Par for the course."

  He shrugged. "This is the least offensive security scan I've ever been through," he said.

  "It's the room," she said. "The dimensions, the color. Mostly the semiotics of a security scan are either you are a germ on a slide or you are not worth trifling with, but if we must, we must. We went for something a little... sweeter." And it was, a sweet little room, like the private study of a single mom who's stolen a corner in which to work on her secret novel.

  Beyond the room -- a wonderful place.

  "It's like a college campus," he said.

  "Oh, I think we use a better class of materials than most colleges," Ria said, airily, but he could tell he'd pleased her. "But yes, there's about 15,000 of us here. A little city. Nice cafes, gyms, cinemas. A couple artists in residence, a nice little Waldorf school..." The pathways were tidy and wended their way through buildings ranging from cottages to large, institutional buildings, but all with the feel of endowed research institutes rather than finance towers. The people were young and old, casually dressed, walking in pairs and groups, mostly, deep in conversation.

  "15,000?"

  "That's the head office. Most of them doing medical stuff here. We've got lots of other holdings, all around the world, in places that are different from this. But we're bringing them all in line with HQ, fast as we can. It's a good way to work. Churn is incredibly low. We actually have to put people back out into the world for a year every decade, just so they can see what it's like."

  "Is that what you're doing?"

  She socked him in the arm. "You think I could be happy here? No, I've always lived off campus. I commute. I'm not a team person. It's OK, this is the kind of place where even lone guns can find their way to glory."

  They were walking on the grass now, and he saw that the trees, strangely oversized red maples without any of the whippy slenderness he associated with the species, had a walkway suspended from their branches, a real Swiss Family Robinson job with rope-railings and little platforms with baskets on pulleys for ascending and descending. The people who scurried by overhead greeted each other volubly and laughed at the awkwardness of squeezing past each other in opposite directions.

  "Does that ever get old?" he said, lifting his eyebrows to the walkways.

  "Not for a certain kind of person," she said. "For a certain kind of person, the delightfulness of those walkways never wears off." The way she said "certain kind of person" made him remember her saying, "bears shouldn't be that happy."

  He pointed to a bench, a long twig-chair, really, made from birch branches and rope and wire all twined together. "Can we sit for a moment? I mean, will Buhle mind?"

  She flicked her fingers. "Buhle's schedule is his own. If we're five minutes late, someone will put five minutes' worth of interesting and useful injecta into his in-box. Don't you worry." She sat on the bench, which looked too fragile and fey to take a grown person's weight, but then she patted the seat next to him, and when he sat, he felt almost no give. The bench had been very well built, by someone who knew what she or he was doing.

  "OK, so what's going on, Ria? First you went along with Brautigan scooping my job and exiling me to Siberia --" he held up a hand to stop her from speaking and discovered that the hand was shaking and so was his chest, shaking with a bottled-up anger he hadn't dared admit. "You could have stopped it at a word. You envoys from the vat-gods, you are the absolute monarchs at Ate. You could have told them to have Brautigan skinned, tanned and made into a pair of boots, and he'd have measured your foot-size himself. But you let them do it.

  "And now, here I am, a minister without portfolio, about to do something that would make Brautigan explode with delight, about to meet one of the Great Old Ones, in his very vat, in person. A man who might live to be a thousand, if all goes according to plan, a man who is a country, sovereign and inviolate. And I just want to ask you, why? Why all the secrecy and obliqueness and funny gaps? Why?"

  Ria waited while a pack of grad students scampered by overhead, deep in discussion of teleomeres, the racket of their talk and their bare feet slapping on the walkway loud enough to serve as a pretence for silence. Leon's pulse thudded and his armpits slicked themselves as he realized that he might have just popped the bubble of unreality between them, the consensual illusion that all was normal, whatever normal was.

  "Oh, Leon," she said. "I'm sorry. Habit here -- there's some things that can't be readily said in utopia. Eventually, you just get in the habit of speaking out of the back of your head. It's, you know, rude to ruin people's gardens by pointing out the snakes. So, yes, OK, I'll say something right out. I like you, Leon. The average employee at a place like Ate is a bottomless well of desires, trying to figure out what others might desire. We've been hearing from them for decades now, the resourceful ones, the important ones, the ones who could get past the filters and the filters behind the filters. We know what they're like.

  "Your work was different. As soon as you were hired by Ate, we generated a dossier on you. Saw your grad work."

  Leon swallowed. His resume emphasized his grades, not his final projects. He didn't speak of them at all.

  "So we thought, well, here's something different, it's possible he may have a house to go with our doorknob. But we knew what would happen if you were left to your own devices at a place like Ate: they'd bend you and shape you and make you over or ruin you. We do it our
selves, all too often. Bring in a promising young thing, subject him to the dreaded Buhle Culture, a culture he's totally unsuited to, and he either runs screaming or... fits in. It's worse when the latter happens. So we made sure that you had a good fairy perched on your right shoulder to counterbalance the devil on your left shoulder." She stopped, made a face, mock slapped herself upside the head. "Talking in euphemism again. Bad habit. You see what I mean."

  "And you let me get pushed aside..."

  She looked solemn. "We figured you wouldn't last long as a button-polisher. Figured you'd want out."

  "And that you'd be able to hire me."

  "Oh, we could have hired you any time. We could have bought Ate. Ate would have given you to us -- remember all that business about making Brautigan into a pair of boots? It applies all around."

  "So you wanted me to... what? Walk in the wilderness first?"

  "Now you're talking in euphemisms. It's catching! Let's walk."

  ***

  They gave him a bunny-suit to wear into the heart of Buhle. First he passed through a pair of double-doors, faintly positively pressurized, sterile air that ruffled his hair on the way in. The building was low-slung, nondescript brown brick, no windows. It could have been a water sterilization plant or a dry-goods warehouse. The inside was good tile, warm colors with lots of reds and browns down low, making the walls look like they were the inside of a kiln. The building's interior was hushed, and a pair of alert-looking plainclothes security men watched them very closely as they changed into the bunny suits, loose micropore coveralls with plastic visors. Each one had a small, self-contained air-circ system powered by a wrist canister, and when a security man helpfully twisted the valve open, Leon noted that there were clever jets that managed to defog the visor without drying out his eyeballs.

  "That be enough for you, Ria?" the taller of the two security men said. He was dressed like a college kid who'd been invited to his girlfriend's place for dinner: smart slacks a little frayed at the cuffs, a short-sleeved, pressed cotton shirt that showed the bulge of his substantial chest and biceps and neck.

  She looked at her canister, holding it up to the visor. "30 minutes is fine," she said. "I doubt he'll have any more time than that for us!" Turning to Leon, she said, "I think that the whole air-supply thing is way overblown. But it does keep meetings from going long."

  "Where does the exhaust go?" Leon said, twisting in his suit. "I mean, surely the point is to keep my cooties away from," he swallowed, "Buhle." It was the first time he'd really used the word to describe a person, rather than a concept, and he was filled with the knowledge that the person it described was somewhere very close.

  "Here," she said, and pointed to a small bubble growing out of the back of her neck. "You swell up, one little bladder at a time, until you look like the Michelin man. Some joke." She made a face. "You can get a permanent suit if you come here often. Much less awkward. But Buhle likes it awkward."

  She led him down a corridor with still more people, these ones in bunny-suits or more permanent-looking suits that were form-fitting and iridescent and flattering. "Really?" he said, keeping pace with her. "Elegant is a word that comes to mind, not awkward."

  "Well, sure, elegant on the other side of that airlock door. But we're inside Buhle's body now." She saw the look on his face and smiled. "No, no, it's not a riddle. Everything on this side of the airlock is Buhle. It's his lungs and circulatory and limbic system. The vat may be where the meat sits, but all this is what makes the vat work. You're like a gigantic foreign organism that's burrowing into his tissues. It's intimate." They passed through another set of doors and now they were almost alone in a hall the size of his university's basketball court, the only others a long way off. She lowered her voice so that he had to lean in to hear her. "When you're outside, speaking to Buhle through his many tendrils, like me, or even on the phone, he has all the power in the world. He's a giant. But here, inside his body, he's very, very weak. The suits, they're there to level out the playing field. It's all head-games and symbolism. And this is just Mark I, the system we jury-rigged after Buhle's... accident. They're building the Mark II about five miles from here, and half a mile underground. When it's ready, they'll blast a tunnel and take him all the way down into it without ever compromising the skin of Buhle's extended body."

  "You never told me what the accident was, how he ended up here. I assumed it was a stroke or --"

  Ria shook her head, the micropore fabric rustling softly. "Nothing like that," she said.

  They were on the other side of the great room now, headed for the doors. "What is this giant room for?"

  "Left over from the original floor-plan, when this place was just biotech R&D. Used for all-hands meetings then, sometimes a little symposium. Too big now. Security protocol dictates no more than ten people in any one space."

  "Was it assassination?" He said it without thinking, quick as ripping off a band-aid.

  Again, the rustle of fabric. "No."

  She put her hand on the door's crashbar, made ready to pass into the next chamber.

  "I'm starting to freak out a little here, Ria," he said. "He doesn't hunt humans or something?"

  "No," and he didn't need to see her face, he could see the smile.

  "Or need an organ? I don't think I have a rare blood-type, and I should tell you that mine have been indifferently cared for --"

  "Leon," she said, "if Buhle needed an organ, we'd make one right here. Print it out in about forty hours, pristine and virgin."

  "So you're saying I'm not going to be harvested or hunted, then?"

  "It's a very low probability outcome," she said, and pushed the crashbar.

  It was darker in this room, a mellow, candlelit sort of light, and there was a rhythmic vibration coming up through the floor, a whoosh whoosh.

  Ria said, "It's his breath. The filtration systems are down there." She pointed a toe at the outline of a service hatch set into the floor. "Circulatory system overhead," she said, and he craned his neck up at the grate covering the ceiling, the troughs filled with neatly bundled tubes.

  One more set of doors, another cool, dark room, this one nearly silent, and one more door at the end, an airlock door, and another plainclothes security person in front of it; a side-room with a glass door bustling with people staring intently at screens. The security person -- a woman, Leon saw -- had a frank and square pistol with a bulbous butt velcroed to the side of her suit.

  "He's through there, isn't he?" Leon said, pointing at the airlock door.

  "No," Ria said. "No. He's here. We are inside him. Remember that, Leon. He isn't the stuff in the vat there. In some sense you've been in Buhle's body since you got off the chopper. His sensor array network stretches out as far as the heliport, like the tips of the hairs on your neck, they feel the breezes that blow in his vicinity. Now you've tunneled inside him, and you're right here, in his heart or his liver."

  "Or his brain."

  A voice, then, from everywhere, warm and good-humored. "The brain is overrated." Leon looked at Ria and she rolled her eyes eloquently behind her faceplate.

  "Tuned sound," she said. "A party trick. Buhle --"

  "Wait," Buhle said. "Wait. The brain, this is important, the brain is so overrated. The ancient Egyptians thought it was used to cool the blood, you know that?" He chortled, a sound that felt to Leon as though it began just above his groin and rose up through his torso, a very pleasant and very invasive sensation. "The heart, they thought, the heart was the place where the me lived. I used to wonder about that. Wouldn't they think that the thing between the organs of hearing, the thing behind the organs of seeing, that must be the me? But that's just the brain doing one of its little stupid games, backfilling the explanation. We think the brain is the obvious seat of the me because the brain already knows that it is the seat, and can't conceive of anything else. When the brain thought it lived in your chest, it was perfectly happy to rationalize that too -- Of course it's in the chest, you feel your sor
row and your joy there, your satiety and your hunger... The brain, pffft, the brain!"

  "Buhle," she said. "We're coming in now."

  The nurse/guard by the door had apparently only heard their part of the conversation, but also hadn't let it bother her. She stood to one side, and offered Leon a tiny, incremental nod as he passed. He returned it, and then hurried to catch up with Ria, who was waiting inside the airlock. The outer door closed and for a moment, they were pressed up against one another and he felt a wild, horny thought streak through him, all the excitement discharging itself from yet another place that the me might reside.

  Then the outer door hissed open and he met Buhle -- he tried to remember what Ria had said, that Buhle wasn't this, Buhle was everywhere, but he couldn't help himself from feeling that this was him.

  Buhle's vat was surprisingly small, no bigger than the sarcophagus that an ancient Egyptian might have gone to in his burial chamber. He tried not to stare inside it, but he couldn't stop himself. The withered, wrinkled man floating in the vat was intertwined with a thousand fiber optics that disappeared into pinprick holes in his naked skin. There were tubes: in the big highways in the groin, in the gut through a small valve set into a pucker of scar, in the nose and ear. The hairless head was pushed in on one side, like a pumpkin that hasn't been turned as it grew in the patch, and there was no skin on the flat piece, only white bone and a fine metallic mesh and more ragged, curdled scar tissue.

  The eyes were hidden behind a slim set of goggles that irised open when they neared him, and beneath the goggles they were preternaturally bright, bright as marbles, set deep in bruised-looking sockets. The mouth beneath the nostril-tubes parted in a smile, revealing teeth as neat and white as a toothpaste advertisement, and Buhle spoke.

  "Welcome to the liver. Or the heart."

  Leon choked on whatever words he'd prepared. The voice was the same one he'd heard in the outer room, warm and friendly, the voice of a man whom you could trust, who would take care of you. He fumbled around his suit, patting it. "I brought you a doorknob," he said, "but I can't reach it just now."