After the ride there was another station, another shower. The man who ushered the hundreds of rats who’d been collected here into the hangar, under water nozzles along the ceilings and walls, stopped him long enough to say, “Jeeze! You look like you ain’t been washed since you got to the Institute!” (The rat cage in back of the polar station, though it had been disinfected and deodorized once a month, had not had any water for washing rats.) After the shower they were issued more clothes. (The ones he’d been given back at the Institute had, down at the polar station, come apart, bit by bit, first at the places they’d been too tight, then all over, now a sleeve falling off, now a pants leg torn away; for the last year he and the other porters had done their work naked.) He was fed from another trough.
Under girders and wires and behind round windows that distorted things at their edges, he’d worked for three weeks at the industrial yard before he associated the frequently repeated name Muct with the unknown hieroglyph above the doors and on the first cubes of all instruction strings and stenciled in yellow on the brown and green enameled machines. There were seven engines from which he had to clean the soot and soiled lubricant that blackened his hands and stiffened his clothes. Unlike the polar station, here he was fed twice a day, washed every three days, and his work togs changed biweekly. Around him, thousands of rats serviced the great city full of machines, called Muct.
The man in charge, of him and some thirty-two others, told him many things, now about one engine, now about another, told him the things softly, simply, clearly—told him to remember them; and what he was told to do, he did. In six months, he had learned how to drive two of the machines and how to repair four others so well that frequently he did not see the man who was in charge for three and four days at a time.
Sometimes the man came in to where he was working, with another man who himself was being trained to be a rat trainer: “Now who says they can’t learn? Look at this one here, for instance. You just got to know how to teach ’em, is all. They learn better than an ordinary man. I mean, you tell them to do something, they do it. And they remember it—if you tell em to remember. You just got to know what to tell. I always say to you new guys, you tell a rat to take a shit, you gotta remember to tell ’er to pull her pants down first and then pull ’em up afterwards. Or you gonna have a rat with shitty pants.” (Most of the rats back at the polar station and most of the rats at Muct were women.) “But some guys don’t have the patience. You gotta be patient with a rat. Man, I can get these damned rats to do anything a damned man can do. I can even get them to do things you wouldn’t think a damned bitch could do. Once I taught a rat to cook food for me, just as good as a man.”
“Oh, I know women who can cook!”
“Well, yeah. But those were exceptions,” the trainer said. “And I mean, a damned rat …?”
“What else did you teach her?” The interlocutor’s lozenges tinkled.
The man in charge, who didn’t wear a mask (like a rat himself), just grinned as they went out.
Sometimes between work shifts the man would sneak several rats into his own quarters and tell them to do odd things. Several times other trainers came and kidded him about it or, occasionally, yelled at him about it. Sometimes he kidded or yelled back. But he didn’t stop. “I mean,” he said, “they all do it too. Even some of the bitches. It ain’t nothing. It goes along with keeping you rats in line. I mean, what’s a damned rat for, anyway? I ain’t never heard one of you complain about it—hey, rat?” And he wasn’t one of the rats the man took off with him, anyway.
He had a sleeping pad again. During those hours of the afternoon or night when his shift was not working, he sat on a long bench, watching a high screen, on which were projected stories about men and women who wore the dangling masks. Somewhere before the end of each story one man or another would rip a woman’s mask off and the woman would turn her face away and cry. If the wrong man did it, the right man would kill him—or sometimes kill the woman.
A month after he got there, they fixed the sound on the projector; after that the stories made more sense.
He worked and watched stories for three years; then one morning the man in charge came to kick him awake.
He pushed himself up to his elbow.
“They sold you!” The man kicked him again, about as hard as he’d ever been kicked, so that he fell back down and had to push up again. “How you like that! They sold you out from under me! I’ve really worked on you, too, you mindless rat! You don’t treat a damned man like that. You don’t treat a rat like that, either!”
He thought the man was going to kick him again. But he didn’t.
“They said they needed some rats with some kind of experience down in the south. You didn’t have no damned experience when you came here. You didn’t know a thing. Now you got some you can use to do something useful, and they’re gonna take you off, who knows where, and use you for who knows what! It ain’t fair, not after all the words I shoved into your dirty ears! It ain’t fair!”
The man went away. But that evening, after work, he came back. “Come with me, now.”
So he got up off his pad and went.
The man’s quarters were not large. The other male rat and the five females they had picked up on the way almost filled the cluttered cubicle.
“Okay, okay, get your clothes off. Get ’em off, now.” The man was tall (almost as tall as he was), and he put an arm around his shoulder. “This is going to be a going-away party for our friend here. He’s been sold south, you see. He’s going away tomorrow—and it’s a damned shame, too. It ain’t fair. So come on! Get your clothes off, now. Put ’em over there. There’re some masks. Put ’em on—no, on your head, shit-for-brains! Come on, you been here before. You remember now, for next time. Put on the masks; then you can feel like real people for a while.” He scratched his ear. “I don’t think it does a damned rat no harm to feel like a real bitch—excuse me—” (to a rat who’d dropped her splotched tunic to adjust a wire head-frame from which more than half the plastic pieces were missing) “—or a man. Myself, I think it makes ’em work better. And it don’t hurt ’em much, don’t care what they say …”
That night he was told to do some odd things. (“I want you to do just like you’d ’a’ done at this kind of party before you come to the Institute. Exactly like it, you understand? You can use that one, or that one, or that. Only not her—she’s my favorite, right through here, you see? Unless of course she’s got something you really like a lot.”) The man in charge never did put on a mask himself. For much of the evening he made love to one of the masked women while the other masked male struck him on the shoulders and buttocks with a piece of frayed copper wire and called him “a tiny rat” and other things.
There wasn’t much he’d have done at this kind of party except sit, watch, and bite at his cuticles and nails. (As a boy he’d been to a couple like it.) So that’s what he did. After half an hour, the man in charge, who had spatters of blood all over his shoulder blades by now, looked up and noticed. “Okay, then,” he said. “I want you to play with yourself until you come. You too—” which was to a female rat.
So he did.
It felt astonishing and surprising and pleasant—the most powerful thing that had happened to him since the moment he’d said, “Yes,” at Radical Anxiety Termination. When the man in charge sent him outside to go back to his sleeping pad, the female rat had not finished.
The next day some women in plain beige face-covers got him and took him to another station where he was put on another car. Days later he got out at a station with sandstone walls, wire mesh on the ceiling.
Among the men who came to pick up the six rats who’d been delivered, he recognized one: and after a few minutes, while he was checking them for hernias and bad teeth, the man recognized him. “Hey, this one was here six years ago!” he said to his companion. “A real idiot! He couldn’t do nothing right! I think they sent us the wrong rat! The order was for rats with some experience of
what we were doing up here. But I didn’t mean just any rat who’d been here before and couldn’t do anything!”
“What’re you gonna do? Send him back?”
“Naw. We can use him for porter work. That’s what they used him for before.”
He worked at the polar station, which had been reopened, doing pretty much what he’d done—carrying the bag back and forth to the data station—for seven years more. Lots of things were different, at least at first. There was another man in charge. Though he didn’t know exactly what, the station was now studying something other than q-plague. Now there were several large, spidery instruments that sat out in the sand with great arms yearning toward the orange sky. And the wall behind the rat cage had been painted blue.
For a while the rats at the station were given clean clothes each month or so. But they missed the laundry more and more frequently. One morning, when their clothes hadn’t been changed for three months, a man came out to the cage. “Okay, come on. Take ’em off. We’re going to go back to the old way. Naked’s better than walking around in that stuff.” Feeding went back to once a day after that, too.
Coming back across the sand, by the power pylons, he saw the green transport sled and walked by its high, sand-scarred flanks into the station vestibule to lift up the lizard-embossed flap of his canvas bag and empty the elliptical spools of data tape into the receiving slot. About an hour later, someone called him and three female rats into the office of the man in charge.
Years ago, it seemed, he’d been in the room to take out tubs of old message strings and bits of discarded packing foam. Today the walls were blue, like the back wall of the rat cage.
A very tall woman sat on a cushion on the black tiled floor, one sandaled foot on the desk’s lowest shelf. Her heel had overturned a stack of multicolored cubes. Some had fallen to the ground.
“You know that what you’re asking is illegal.”
The woman made a barking sound, becoming a laugh that would have set her lozenges shaking—only for some reason she’d taken off her mask and tossed it on the tile so that the colored bits lay in a tangle. “You think a bitch like me doesn’t know that? Do you think a bitch like me would come in here and ask what I’m asking of you if this station were three thousand kilometers closer to the population belt?” She pulled her foot off the shelf. It dropped to the black, along with three bright cubes. She smiled, as if she knew that behind his plastic bits the man currently in charge smiled back. “What kind of bitch do you think I am?”
“I think—” The man coughed. “Well, really, I don’t know why I’m doing this. It’s irregular—”
“I only said you should bring them in and let me look them over.” She drew her heel back to the cushion and put her arms across her knees.
“And I have.” The man coughed again. “I have. There they are … but I don’t know why I’m doing it. It’s irregular, and it’s illegal, and—”
“I’ll tell you why you’re doing it.” The smile softened on her dark face. “The economy in over a third of the equatorial geosectors is failing. Neither the political swing towards the extreme Yellow, the insurgent Crazy-Grays, nor the Free-Informationist backlash is going to mean a return to the soft-money economy that will benefit any of the polar projects, north or south. I took a look at the shape your rat cage was in before I came inside. Hot stars and cold magma! You men haven’t been properly staffed in three years, and getting rid of another mouth to feed—even a rat’s—is going to be more help than hindrance. You know it. I know it. And that’s why you’ll do it—”
He didn’t know why she paused, but he expected her to pick up her discarded mask and put it back on now: that’s what the women on the projection screen at Muct had always done after they paused meaningfully. But that had been years ago, somewhere else in the world.
This woman still smiled, face still bare.
The masked man behind the desk took a silent breath. White hair moved on his chest under his shirt’s soiled net. “You’re quite a woman.”
“I’m quite a bitch.” She threw back her head, and her hair, which was dark and wiry, did not swing. “That’s how you’ll say it when I’m gone. Say it to me that way now.”
Behind the swinging fragments, the man coughed again. “Well. I guess you are.” He rose, stepping from behind the desk. “A bitch. At any rate. These are the ones I can let you choose from.”
She turned on the cushion, rising to her knees. She had an expression of great concentration now, an expression the women in the projected stories never wore. After seconds she stood. “I told you I was interested in males.” She touched her chin with her fingertips, moving them a little as if scratching some half-felt itch. She was a good head-and-a-half taller than the man in charge.
“Well, we have more females here.” The man shrugged. “These are the ones we can spare.”
“Mmmm,” she said, as though she knew that already. Then she said: “Which more or less limits me to this one. Tell me—” She turned to face him—“are you ready to come away with me to strange climes and stranger lands and be my slave forever, to obey my every command, to fulfill any and every whim and caprice I should articulate, no matter how debased or lascivious?”
He did not know what “articulate” or “lascivious” or some of the other words meant. “Yeah …?”
The man in charge coughed once more.
The woman chuckled over her shoulder. “That was mostly for your benefit. He isn’t exactly what I pictured, I admit.” She turned back, reached forward, touched his naked cheek, grimacing as if she questioned some terribly important point to which he was oblivious. “But you’ll do. You’ll have to, won’t you? It’s cut into your brain now, that you’ll do … do what I say.” Her hand fell from his face, a finger brushing his collar bone in the fall. “How much do you want for him?” She turned to the man in charge and, stepping over fallen cubes in her scuffed sandals, took out a coil of silver string from her leggings pocket and began to unroll it, silent lips counting the evenly spaced black beads along it to which cubes could be clipped.
The man mentioned a price so far above twenty-eight-SI units, he simply decided that they weren’t discussing him after all.
The woman kept wrapping silver around her fist, kept counting. Finally she popped the credit cord, rolled it from her palm with her thumb, and put the SI payment on the desk. “You know you’re overcharging me by even more than some black market slaver might in some mildewed equatorial bazaar.” She still smiled.
“You know,” the man said, “the only reason I’m doing this at all is because—”
“—is because you think you can get away with it.” She put the remaining credit roll back in her pocket and bent to pick up her mask with a swipe of her arm. “That’s why I’m doing it too.” Lozenges clicked and tinkled on tangled wire. “Would you like me to take him out the back? We’ll attract less notice that way.”
“Yes,” the man in charge said. Then he said, “Just a moment.” He reached behind the desk, opened a lower file, and pulled out one of the yellow canvas bags with the embossed lizard. “He can put his things in this.” He handed it across the desk.
“Thanks.” She took it and slipped the strap over her arm. “This way?”
“Yes,” the man repeated. He came around to the front of the desk to pick up the cubes she’d knocked from the desk shelf. He knelt. “The back way. Yes, that would be best.”
In the narrow hall with the badly tacked up roof repairs shredding above them, she asked: “Do you have any things to take with you?”
“No …”
She looked down at the canvas bag hanging at her hip and shook her head. “The condition your cage is in—” She gave a bitter grin—“I’m not surprised.” She put one hand on his peeling shoulder as they walked out the three-layered hangings at the hall’s end that kept in the cool air.
Over hot sand the sky was a hotter orange.
She walked with him through the heat.
&nbs
p; Sand streaked between the evenly spaced bolt heads; the transport’s green metal wall dropped its shadow over them. She opened the door in the side. “Get in.” She followed him up and closed the port.
Tossing the canvas bag into the clutter behind them, she slid under the padded restraining bar and into the seat. She reached forward to rub at a smudge on the transparent sandshield with three fingertips pressed together. “Sit down.”
As he sat beside her, she asked, “Did you know you have to sit down, in these things here, before I start driving?”
“Yeah.”
She sucked her teeth in mock disbelief, pulled some lever sharply down, kicked at some pedal under the instrument board. A motor began to rev, then, at another pedal, to rumble. “Have you any idea why I bought you from the station, there?” She heaved the steering bar around. Outside, the world turned slowly, then began to move back. The transport shook across the sand in a direction he’d never walked before.
“No.” The seat shook against his back and buttocks.
“Oh. Well, you will.” She turned in her plush seat to face him. “I think the first thing is to get you washed down. I read that if I got one of you from any but the big industrial complexes up at the equator, that would probably be the first thing I’d have to contend with.” She frowned. “Tell me, do you know how to use a sonic cleaning plate? That’s what I’ve got in the back.”
“No.”
Outside the plastic windows long dunes shifted. Her look grew puzzled then, oddly, nervous. She gave a little laugh. “You don’t?” The self-assurance from back in the station office had fallen away somewhere, as if in their short walk across the sand, pieces of it had shed onto the desert. “Well, do you at least know how to use a damned squat-john? All I need is to have you pissing and shitting all over this hulk like it was your putrid rat cage—” Suddenly, with the thrust rod in both hands, she leaned forward, her face between her arms, and began to shake. She took great breaths, and he did not know if she were crying or laughing. “What do I think I’m … by the hot stars overhead, by the congealed magma, oh jeeze …! What do I think I’m—it’s crazy, I … I can’t, I—” Possibly steered by its automatic mechanism, possibly not, the transport moved on.