Slant

  ONE OF MANY: Are you in their pay, too?

  MOD: I wish, no such. But wait, I’m not done yet. I’m at the helm today; you can apply for the post tomorrow. You have no skills off the fibes, or on, that anybody really wants to pay for, so your last refuge is the dole. You’re one of the disAffected, my friend. Join the crowd. I really sympathize.

  ONE OF MANY: Wait, this is

  MOD: If you don’t post your stats and address, how can we check my psi? You’re drawing a blank, and you expect rational discourse? Let us know whether I’m right and post your stats.

  ONE OF MANY: Fuck you.

  MOD: Ah, more reasoned discourse. Fucking is an act of friendship and love and trust, Mr. Blank. You must come from the old school that believes it’s penetrative domination and reducing the other to chattel slavery, hence a term of opprobrium. But maybe I shouldn’t use such big words. I bet you haven’t used your sensemaker on an unfamiliar word in ever so long. Ah, Mr. Blank has logged off. Okay. It’s open, gang. Does anybody have anything interesting to talk about?

  5

  The Sea Foam 2 sits on the ocean waters of the sound, not far from the ancient and revered Pike Place Market. The cab drops Martin and he pays his ninety dollars and steps out on the concrete and asphalt of the old Alaskan Way, lovingly reconstructed from the mammoth quake of ‘14, with antique turtle-shaped Ford Tauruses and a few Japanese-cars parked here and there for effect. Short green trolleys clang along their brick-encased rails below the rise to the market. Westward spreads the sound, blue-gray under scattered clouds and dazzling curtains of sun.

  The tourist crowd is light today but the line before the Sea Foam 2 is already long. Sun glints from the clusters of huge liquid-filled bubbles rising above the slurping waterfront. Within the bubbles, grotesque horrors of the sea live their suspended lives, most real, a few, wonderful robots perhaps even smarter than the creatures they are meant to depict.

  “My name is Burke. I’m supposed to meet Miz Dana Carrilund,” he tells the live, real maitre d’ at the front. The maitre d’ knows well enough to recognize these names from the list, and guides him under the sparkling shimmers of the piled, sea-filled bubbles to a table by the broad side window looking out, unobstructed, over the sound. Carrilund is waiting. Shadows pass over her as they shake hands. Unable to restrain himself, Martin flinches and looks up—a shark turns in its bubble, dappled like a fawn. It is swimming upside down, he realizes. Is it supposed to do that?

  “How nice to finally meet you,” Carrilund says. She is severe at first appearance, hair almost white and cut short, square-faced and solid but pleasingly shaped. Her arms resting on the paper menu appear strong, and she asks him if he drinks this early.

  “Not often,” Martin says.

  “Nor I. But they have a grand cocktail here—they call it a Sea Daisy. Shall we—just to loosen up?”

  She smiles pleasantly, so he nods and murmurs, “Sure. What the hell.”

  Martin knows people—he prides himself on understanding their smallest behaviors, and being able to fit those behaviors into overall impressions of surpassing accuracy. Dana Carrilund knows humans perhaps as well as he does, but in a different way and to different ends—not to improve their mental health, as such, but to fit them better into larger schemes. She betrays very few of her own needs in the process, and her behaviors are as studied as those of an actor, though not necessarily false. Not necessarily.

  Right now, Carrilund wishes Martin to believe she is impressed by him. And not so oddly, Martin is himself impressed. Carrilund appears to be very integrated, mentally robust, and a specimen of physical health.

  The drinks are served. Flower-like tangles of half-frozen, half-gelatinized fruit juice seep into a surround of vodka. The rim of the globular glass is caked with microcapsules of salt, sugar, and vinegar, which dissolve unpredictably against the tongue—and it is all served very cold.

  Martin sips and finds it delicious. “I hope you don’t need all my mental faculties this morning,” he says.

  “If we keep ourselves to one drink, we’ll do fine,” Carrilund says. “What I need now is to get a more accurate picture of Martin Burke, the man.”

  Martin raises his eyebrow, pictures his face with a bushy brow elevated rather pompously, and lowers it quickly. “I don’t have much to hide,” he says.

  “You’ve been through some rough times,” Carrilund observes. “Quite a few shifts in your career track.”

  “Open history,” Martin says.

  “Yes, and no,” Carrilund says. “You’ve never been very open about your involvement in the Goldsmith case.”

  “Ah.” Martin smiles grimly. “How thorough are we going to be this morning?”

  “Tolerably friendly and only tolerably thorough. I’m more concerned about your part in developing the tools of effective deep therapy. You were a brilliant pioneer. You caused upsets that derailed your career. And now—you’re a quiet, respectable professional with a narrow focus.”

  “So far, so true,” Martin says.

  “You have no intention of ever getting involved in anything that could bring more trouble.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  Carrilund orders her breakfast, and the waiter takes Martin’s order next. Later, he does not remember what he ordered; he feels an unease he has become all too familiar with in his career, contemplating another stroll through a lion’s cage—a stroll he can never seem to convince himself is not worth the risk.

  “You consulted on a research project three years ago for a group working out of Washington, the New Federalist Market Alliance. They’re associated with another group, called the Aristos.”

  “Yes,” Martin says. “It was a small contract. Lasted only two weeks.”

  “I presume what you told them is confidential.”

  “Not really. They wanted my thoughts on the future of a society without effective deep-tissue mental therapy. They’re a very conservative organization.”

  Carrilund precisely reveals her distaste. “What did you think of them?”

  “Polite and well-dressed,” Martin says, smiling.

  “Fascists?”

  “No. Class elitists. They take their Federalism seriously.”

  “They also believe in the genetic superiority of a moneyed class… am I right?” Carrilund asks.

  Martin nods. “So I’ve heard.”

  Carrilund shows her distaste. “Their Jesus wears a longsuit and has a perfect long-term investment plan.”

  “I provided them what they asked for, and that was that,” Martin says.

  Carrilund seems to steel herself for some unpleasantness. “What did you tell them, in outline?”

  “I told them our society had reached a point where effective therapy is a necessity. Remove the effects of therapy in today’s culture, and you’ll begin a long decline into anarchy.”

  “Why?”

  “The stresses put on the best and brightest members of the world’s social systems are as precisely tuned as the stresses on the fragile parts in a high-speed engine. Well, about a century and a half ago, the stresses became too great, overall, resulting in increasing populations of thymically unbalanced individuals. Not crazy people, necessarily—just deeply unhappy people.”

  “The work loads became too great?”

  “Not exactly. This is more difficult to convey—the stresses, perhaps not coincidentally, seemed perfectly designed to cause nagging, even debilitating thymic problems. The mental equivalents of baseball elbow or housework knee—on a huge scale. Without effective therapy, widely available and used, we wouldn’t be able to support the dataflow economy we have today.”

  Carrilund seems interested in clarifying this point. “By therapy, you mean specifically deep tissue therapy—thymic balancing, pathic correction, neuronal supplement and repair. Chemicotropic adjustment and psychosocial microsurgery on the neural level. Implanted monitors for continuing adjustment.”

  “Better minds for a better world,” Mart
in says. “I’ve never been ashamed of my part in all this.”

  “You have no reason to be ashamed,” Carrilund says hastily. “You’ve played an integral role in a magnificent accomplishment. And you’ve done quite well recently with implant monitor designs. You’re a major player in a big industry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And, as you say, a necessary one. What did this organization do with what you told them?”

  “I presume they went home and kept quiet about it,” Martin says. “They’ve long been opposed to therapy on ethical and religious grounds. The necessity of error and sin in God’s plan, I suppose. Free will. I didn’t give them much they would find useful. No political wedge, so to speak.” Martin looks down at his fingers, twisted on the tabletop. He untwists them. “I got the impression they were hoping I’d tell them it could all be dispensed with.”

  “I see,” Carrilund says. She puts her finger to her lips—not an affectation, Martin judges, but a genuine sign of deep thought. The breakfast arrives and he eats without paying any attention to the food. He cannot help feeling that the lion’s cage is just down the road.

  “Mr. Burke, you know I’m in charge of the health care of fourteen million employees in the Corridor and along Southcoast.”

  “Yes.”

  “Something statistically impossible is happening,” she says. She continues to eat; relaxed and polite, as if they are having a purely social breakfast. “A mental meltdown. The wave is just beginning to build, but from what we’re seeing so far, I think you’re right about the consequences.”

  Martin stops eating and squints at the ocean, then up at the masses of water suspended over them.

  “Are you free this afternoon?” Carrilund asks.

  “I can make some time available,” Martin says. And disappoint some patients.

  “We need some advice, obviously, and we have something you probably need to see.” Her smile is assuring, positive. Why, then, does Martin feel a familiar sensation of loss, of sinking and drowning?

  “For once,” Martin muses, “I’d like to be on the side of the angels.”

  Carrilund does not immediately know what to make of this.

  “Never mind,” he adds, waving that off.

  “No, I understand,” she says. “That’s the side we’re on, Mr. Burke.”

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  6

  Jack Giffey is working his way through a case of the shakes.

  He lies in bed in the small room he took in the early hours of the morning in a motel at the corner of Elk and Copper, across town; the covers are pulled up over his chest and tucked under his chin, and he feels like small boy caught doing something really stupid.

  A good family man would not do that.

  That inside voice comes out of nowhere. It means nothing; but its cold surprise brings on a sudden, almost leaden calm, and his thoughts become as shiny and smooth as doped silicon. That voice is a bit of dream, he hears a more familiar voice, his own voice, say. Ignore that man behind the curtain.

  “What the hell,” Giffey says in the room’s quiet.

  But the sensation passes. Giffey closes his eyes, now that the shaking has stopped and the voices are no longer dueling, to savor a bit of undifferentiated muzz, scattered passing of memory and dream. Then, with a few deep breaths, he is past recriminations and on to making today’s schedule.

  There is little time to waste. He will meet with the rest of the team, and with the team’s leader, at one in the afternoon. And by six tomorrow evening, they should be inside…

  There is of course so much that could go wrong. But Giffey thinks the builders of Omphalos, like most pharaohs, have an inherent arrogance. The appearance of power is power, to them, especially in a world which they regard with so much contempt. Arrogance swells within the armor until many chinks appear.

  He dresses, eats in the small, quiet, rundown hotel cafe, keeping his eyes to himself, and gathers his stuff from the room before checking out.

  Today is cold and clear. Tomorrow, a weather front is moving in. Snow is predicted by seventeen tomorrow evening. They might be able to take advantage of that, as well.

  The warehouse on the east end of town is at least seventy years old, a steel-beam and corrugated sheet-steel relic that’s probably cold as a freezer inside.

  Giffey approaches the office entrance on foot, bag in hand. He comes from nowhere, as if bearing no identity, his past forgotten; everything begins here. His mind is clear and his thoughts focused. He rings the ancient electric buzzer.

  Thirty seconds later, the door opens, and he looks into the face of a woman he has never met before. She is pale-skinned, brown hair cut in a medium frizz, brown eyes suspicious. She wears a checked shirt and army green pants and a thick bronze bracelet hangs loose around one wrist.

  “Who are you?” she asks from behind the door.

  “Giffey,” he says. “Jack Giffey.”

  She stands back and pulls the door open. It creaks. Inside, the office is small and dusty. An ancient space heater cracks and snaps against one wall; the air feels blastingly hot and dry compared to the chill outside. A battered metal desk hunkers in one corner and a putty-colored filing cabinet leans next to the desk. A sink with naked pipes has been scrubbed spotlessly clean in the opposite corner, and an antique electric Mr. Espresso sits on a wooden shelf above it. Beside the sink is a white refrigerator and a microwave oven on a portable workbench.

  “I’m Hally Preston,” the woman says. “I’m a friend of Mr. Hale.”

  Giffey does not know that name, probably false. He wonders if the reference is to Nathan Hale.

  With tight slacks and a jacket and her hair cut close and combed to one side, Preston is more than a little mannish. Her face is lean and neutral, her lips prim. “Let’s meet the others,” she says, and opens the next door. Giffey passes through into the warehouse proper.

  The warehouse is filled with scraps of old airplanes, like the broken husks of giant dragonflies. A few disconsolate salvage arbeiters stand beside the heaps of scrap, but none of them seem to be in working order.

  Preston takes him on a short walk between walls of scrap. In the center of the pile, a small space has been cleared, just enough for a couch, four battered chairs, and a free-standing repeater whiteboard. Five men are here, three sitting and two standing: one of them is Jenner, the young ex-Army man.

  He looks up and waves. “The stuff’s here,” he announces proudly to Giffey. “It’s all delivered. I checked it out and it seems fine.” His scalp ripples like a tired caterpillar. Otherwise he seems at ease and pleased with himself.

  Giffey’s breath clouds in front of him. He knows two of the others from photos.

  Preston introduces him. “Jack Giffey,” she says to the five.

  One of the sitters, a blocky, black-haired man with a short neatly sculpted beard, stands and steps forward. He offers his hand. “I’m Hale,” he says. Giffey knows him as Terkes. He looks British somehow, maybe Irish, but Hale/Terkes is a weapons expert from Ukraine, a naturalized citizen for twenty
years, whose accent is pure middle American, New Received Broadcast. He has been involved in wire and fibe fraud, running industrial nano and pre-build slurry to Hispaniola, selling hell-crowns to Selectors in Southcoast. In short, Hale is an occasional bad’un but chubbily innocent, clean and scrubbed, cheerful.

  “I’m Kim Lou Park,” says an Oriental man, whom Giffey knows as Evan Chung. Park/Chung has no past; he is as blank in all records as a newborn babe. What little Giffey knows about him is contradictory. He wears a long mustache and his hair is cut in a short bowl with a fringe down his neck.

  Park believes that he recruited Giffey in St. Louis last spring. In fact, Park is way down the chain of origination. They met only twice there. Still, Park is savvy; he undoubtedly knows more about the rest of them than they do themselves, but he knows very little about Giffey… Very little that is true.

  “Mr. Giffey and Mr. Jenner are our materials procurement people,” Park says. “Mr. Giffey is also our main source for knowledge about the target.”

  Giffey looks at the two men he does not know, and Preston walks around him. “Mr. Pent and Mr. Pickwenn,” she says. “Architectural experts, specializing in breaking in or, if necessary, breaking out.” She produces the faintest of smiles. Pent and Pickwenn are in their late thirties, with experienced, almost bored expressions. Pent is dark brown, Polynesian blood, and has almost no hair. Pickwenn is ghostly pale, with large lemur eyes and thin, elegant fingers.

  “We’ve worked together for ten years,” Pickwenn says softly. Pent nods agreement. They do not offer to shake hands; Giffey is just as glad. Pickwenn’s grip looks to be cold and damp.