The Inner City (3 page)

Bossephalus beams and pats her shoulder. “Parking department, downtown unit. Look,” he says, pointing as a red light moves closer to a blue light. “Got him!” The blue light disappears and the red moves on. “He thought he had that spot!” Bossephalus claps his hands. “I love that. Drives them crazy upstairs. Parking to kill for! That’s what the motto is. I bet that red was driving around for an hour. Those are the ones that are very dear to us.”

Lena’s mind is racing. The maps on the wall are street maps? They must be street maps. Then the reds are cars looking for parking spots and, if she understands Bossephalus, the blues are parking spots. They disappear in one street and appear in another. There are green lights as well, and the greens always get the spots.

“You’re controlling the parking spaces?” she asks. “You’re moving your own cars around?”

“That’s it! We take the spaces ourselves or sometimes we give them to the luckies. The unluckies
almost
get it, but at the last minute they get stopped by someone crossing the street or a light changes, or a bus blocks the way, and then they can actually see someone else getting the spot they were heading for. Or we put cones up and it suddenly becomes illegal.”

“Nice,” she says neutrally. “Smooth.” She doesn’t have a car, doesn’t like cars—why would anyone have a car in New York?—but it’s not nice, not a bit. What kind of place is this?

Bossephalus taps her on the elbow and they go back into the corridor.

“So you’re seeing Biskabit,” he says. “Didn’t know he was hiring. I could use some help myself. What do you do?”

“Programmer,” she tells him. “Strong in html and design.”

“Very useful,” he says. “We’re always looking for web designers. We put a lot of them in startup companies, but now we’re branching into corporate.”

“The startups didn’t do so well,” she says cautiously.

“No? We thought it went splendidly.”

Splendid? Who could think that all those bankruptcies were a good thing? He must be terribly uninformed. “Where do you work?” Lena asks politely.

He looks at her and smiles. “I’m in Information,” he says.

There’s something about his smile that’s nasty, though she tries to talk herself out of it. Maybe he’s just a friendly man showing a newcomer around, she thinks. Maybe.

They come to a wider corridor. She can hear drilling and hammering.

“We’re expanding,” Bossephalus says, sweeping his hand along the corridor. “Our job keeps getting bigger, and there’s a limit to how much we can squeeze into our limited space. So—up we go.” He’s very cheerful about it.

She squints at the corridor. “Up?”

“They can’t have it all,” he says easily. “We’re willing to put up with a lot, since we like what we do. But as they grow we grow, so we’re forced to have some additional entries and vents and a window here and there. Very modest when you consider.”

She’s trying to piece this together and stupidly repeats, “Up?” Could her downstairs neighbour be on to something? Could they really be taking some of his apartment? It seems incredible, but Bossephalus raises his eyes up to follow his pointing finger. He lifts his chin and the look on his face is satisfied and confident.

“We’re really just shifting them around a little. When you think about it, nobody uses all the space they have. Tops of closets, under the sink, behind the tub—add it all together and it’s substantial real estate. We have the science to do some adjusting. We’re careful not to give them anything concrete to go on.”

“I see.” She struggles to make her voice noncommittal. “You just make them a little more cramped? When they’re already complaining about being cramped?”

He beams. “Nicely put.”

They start to pass men on ladders drilling upwards and men with expanders—wide metal brackets with a wheel in the middle—widening the drilled areas. Bossephalus motions for Lena to follow him into a long room with calculators and screens with groups of numbers. “This is one of my favourites,” he whispers, and nods towards a lottery machine. “It was my idea to get involved in this. Every third lottery winner will have a problem—we give it to someone who has a warrant out on him, or a guy who’ll say it was his own purchase but his buddies at work say it was a group ticket, or a mugger finds the winning ticket in the purse he just stole—that’s tricky! What will he do?”

She decides she has to go along with him, cheer along with him. “I like that,” she says in an appreciative sort of way. “It’s a moral dilemma that’s really a legal dilemma. I mean, a criminal dilemma. What to do, what to do.” She’s trying not to think about implications, any implications. Her mind is snapping around like cut wires.

“You see the fun. Now, I’m getting forgetful. Where am I taking you?” He turns up his smile, it’s now bright and gleaming. There’s a little edge of intimacy in it, as if he has something up his sleeve.

“Biskabit.”

“Oh yes, that’s right. And what department is he in?”

“Personnel. Human Resources. Whatever it’s called, I forget. They keep changing the name, don’t they?”

“Do they?” he says smoothly, as if it doesn’t matter to him. “Here’s Billings.” He waves his arm. “We’re sending out cut-off notices to people who have no idea why; we’re sending out $10,000 electric bills to small studios; $10,000 phone bills to poor people. The interns make up collection notices with unreadable phone numbers!” He laughs. “We scramble the records at the source, of course.”

She thinks of people getting those bills, trying to cope with them. She had a notice from a collection agency once; it drove her crazy. She blurts out, “Why?” She regrets it immediately. Wherever she is—whatever this place is—it’s obviously not an ordinary job, these aren’t ordinary people. She should keep her head down and shut up.

“Why?” he murmurs, repeating her question in a sad little voice. “When did you hear from Biskabit?”

“I didn’t actually hear from him,” she says. “I heard about the job. From a memo. A job description.”

“In the papers?” he suggests.

She’s blinking too much, she knows she’s blinking too much, but she can’t stop no matter how much she wants to. “In some papers,” she says. “I found some papers.”

He sighs. “Come along with me. We’re almost there.”

They pass more open rooms. Some rooms have signs on them: “Obstruction. Illegal Towing. Merchandise Warranties.” One of the biggest rooms says, simply, “Chemicals.” She hears people yelling, “Skin reactions! Fumes! No noticeable odour!”

Her feet are getting leaden, she’s becoming heavy with dread. If I can just get rid of Bossephalus, she thinks, maybe I can make my way back and out. How many times have we turned? I can’t remember how many times we’ve turned.

“It’s a great job,” he explains. “You have to love it.” He clasps his hands together in delight. “
Love.
It’s a chemical, you know. A little bit of a drug in the right place. Sneak it into their coffee or their potato chips—voila! Take it away and forty years of marriage goes down the drain. Of course, sometimes all you have to do is get someone a little sexier, a little more spangled, and put them in the right place. Take someone with the name of Denise, for instance. Smart and sexy and just a little bit dangerous. But you know all about Denise,” he says.

Her heart does a little thud. Is this just some wild coincidence, or is Bossephalus talking about the woman who clicked her heels and took her love to Oz?

She passes a screen that shows a massive backup on the bridge. She doesn’t look directly; her eyes roll out to the side. The bridge camera swings from the long view to the short view. It’s a jackknifed tractor-trailer, as usual. “Why is it always a tractor-trailer?” she asks, trying to make it a joke. “Shouldn’t they be outlawed?”

“The Bridge and Tunnel Authority!” he shouts. “We
own
the Bridge and Tunnel Authority! Between that and the construction jobs, we hardly have enough staff. Well, construction doesn’t actually need staff once they put up the orange cones, do they?” He’s pleased with himself.

Then he puts his hand on her shoulder. At first it’s just a slight touch, but he adds weight to it. They turn a corner and there are four people standing there, as if they’re waiting.

“The membership committee,” Bossephalus says easily. “Come to greet us. You, actually.”

There are two men and two women, all in white lab coats. They stand in front of a door marked “Accidents.” The women smile at her politely, the men move behind her and she can’t see their faces, but she can feel them.

“What’s this?” she asks, her mouth dry.

“We’ve been thinking about what job would be best for you,” Bossephalus says. He’s very happy.

“Who’s ‘we’?” She tries to sound tough, but it comes out faintly.

“Think of us as a service organization,” he says. “Only we serve ourselves.” He points to his ear, which has a small device, like a hearing aid. “I’ve been getting reports on you all along. Let’s go this way.” They take a left down another corridor, which has stacks of filing cabinets pushed to one side. “We’re digital now, of course,” Bossephalus murmurs. “Computers, chips, cameras everywhere. Look it up, nail it down. We keep track of millions of people above us, we visit them, we live among them. And we play a little.” He laughs. “We play a lot. We’re scientists.” His eyes roll toward a sign. “Medical Records.” She doesn’t like the sign.

“Is this where you work?” Lena asks.

“Me?” He laughs. “No, no, no. You haven’t figured it out yet? You can’t guess what my job is?” He stops to watch her think.

She looks at the four people who surround them. Each one is looking in a different direction—at the walls, down the corridor, into the rooms that flash with computer screens. “Sometimes I feel that there’s a plan,” she says finally. “When things go wrong again and again. I keep telling myself it’s just bad luck.” This isn’t the kind of thing she admits. Not normally.

He smiles. “The plan keeps changing,” he says agreeably. “Something we do seems good, and we do it; and then someone comes along with a better plan. For the little people,” he whispered. “For the pawns. Isn’t that how it feels?”

She nods. But she resents it.

“You see, you were never called here. You simply don’t belong here. Another accident? Do you think so?” He pats her on the shoulder. She thinks, for a moment, that it’s a friendly pat, avuncular.

She can hear names being called out in one of the rooms. Just names, no emotion, then a list of diseases. “Heart attack. Lung cancer. Malaria. Stroke.” She steps into the doorway and looks inside. People are standing at whiteboards, where they write and then erase diseases, as if to keep track of trends.

“Food poisoning!” a worker cries. “How about a funeral?”

There’s an instant crescendo of agreement. She turns back to Bossephalus. “You’re with security, aren’t you?”

“Head of,” he says cheerily. “Specializing in break-ins. We don’t see them too often, we’ve got a good system of checks and counterchecks. The guards don’t look too intelligent, but that’s deliberate. If someone is interested, they’re going to get in, and it’s best if we get them at our own convenience.”

“So.” She takes a deep breath. “So what happens now?”

He grips her shoulder again and leads her to another room. “It’s not so bad,” he says in a reassuring tone. “We’re going to put you back where you belong. But you won’t be in any danger, and neither will we.” He waves her forward, over to the main desk in the room. “Shayton,” he says. “Lena Shayton.”

“Ah,” the woman at the desk says. “Got her right here.” She turns to the computer screen and starts clicking away.

Lena’s hands began to perspire and she feels a lump at the back of her mouth. It’s so big she has trouble swallowing. Bossephalus’ hand moves up from her shoulder and he spreads his fingers hard around her ear. “Right about here, maybe,” he says. “Though I’m not a doctor. But right where the speech centers are, the communication centers.”

“Got it!” the desk person calls out. “Here we go!”

“Stop,” Lena says. “Fot are ye doon?”

“Not just the sounds,” he advises. “Make it the meaning, too.”

“Croon wizzes, who saw that blucksbin. Terrible blucksbin!” I try, I try, she thinks.

“That’s it!” Bossephalus cries. “That’s exactly what I mean. Give her lots of words without meaning, make it almost make sense.”

She can eel her tongue twisting, he says, “Goo.” She can’t find things, sharp or thin. Is it in her turn? Maybe she can write, with a spit on the knee, so they’ll wonder highways and believe then, get a gooseberry rhythm.

Lena Shayton, boom boom, ready now? Upsy upsy.

Whirlybanging all over bingo next Tuesday too. Please please bing she think. Words, she say words.

One of those pigs with the ears all down its back walked by, snorting.

“Little piggy,” Tercepia called, bending over and holding her hand out. “Here, here, here.”

The pig ignored her.

She was standing next to a crib of grain. She reached in and took a handful and threw it in an arc towards the pig. Some of the ears on its back were moving.

The pig did a little jump and trotted away. Tercepia straightened up and ran after it. The pig went faster and so did Tercepia and all at once she was racing really swiftly, wind in her face and the pig rounded the corner of the barn and she lost sight of it for a moment and that made her run even faster so it wouldn’t disappear altogether and she put on a burst.

“No!” Dr. Sandam yelled. He was right there around the corner of the barn. The pig was slowing down, looking back at her, and the doctor’s face looked really annoyed. At once she stopped and felt ashamed. She wasn’t supposed to chase the pigs. She was never supposed to chase the pigs.

“Pig ran,” she said faintly.

“What did I tell you?”

“No chasing pigs,” she whispered.

“Only the pigs?”

“No chasing anything.”

“And if you do?”

She hung her head. Her hands dangled, her shoulders sank and curved her back. “Sit forever,” she said sadly.

“For one hour,” he amended. His voice was cheerier, and Tercepia looked up. There was someone else standing next to him and the doctor was looking at this person now, smiling. “An hour seems forever at that age,” he was saying. “But the pigs can’t be disturbed, of course. Too much agitation and we might damage the implants. Not to mention that the pigs get stressed, and that wouldn’t be right.”

“Woulda be right,” Tercepia agreed, eager to please him.

The doctor’s friend looked at her and put a smile on his face, but she didn’t trust it. She stepped closer to the doctor, keeping her eyes on the smile.

“This is Portafack,” the doctor said. “He wants to look around. Do you want to show him around?”

She hung her head and hid behind the doctor. “Please no. Feed pigs now.”

“They’re all shy?” Portafack asked. “Or just this one?”

“They like routines,” the doctor said and shrugged. “They get nervous when anything changes, and we’ve had a few changes lately. But yes, the females are a little shyer than the males. Would you prefer a male?”

Portafack’s smile went away. “I was interested in the females. Thought they would be . . . well, more docile, I guess. No aggression issues. That kind of thing.”

The doctor stepped aside and pulled Tercepia forward. “Yes, there’s been a lot of interest in the females. They’re smart and submissive, by and large. Here, let me show you what she can do. Tercepia, bring water.”

Tercepia looked alert and said “Yes!” eagerly. She was allowed to run to bring water, so she flung herself away. She went back the way she had come, around the corner, and then across the yard to the office, where there was cold water and glasses. She knew how to do that.

That pig was there again, twitching its tail and all its ears, and Tercepia tried very hard not to see it, but when it noticed Tercepia, it did a little pig turnaround and trotted off to the next yard. Tercepia was still in control, but then she saw the dog, which she hadn’t seen in hours, and she gave a gleeful little call and ran to the dog, then sat down next to it, and hugged it over and over again.

The dog’s mouth moved but there was no sound, so Tercepia kept saying, “Good, good, good Cerbo! Good, good, good dog!” and Cerbo licked her face and then, still silent, looked at her earnestly. He lifted a paw and placed it gently on her knee.

“Food? Water?” Tercepia asked him. She hugged him fiercely and stood up. “Come.”

The dog followed her to the office, where she got a bowl of water and put it down for him, and then took sandwiches out of the refrigerator and put them down on the floor.

She sat down and leaned against him for comfort but the dog inched away from her; he was hungry and pulled the sandwiches apart, eating them piece by piece. When he was done he drank the water, which reminded Tercepia of her task. She leaped up and said, “Bring water!” Then she filled two glasses, put them on a tray, and walked out the door, her eyes devoted to the glasses, trying not to walk so fast she would slop them. The dog watched her from the doorway, licking his muzzle fastidiously. When she disappeared, he went over to Portafack’s car, lifted his leg, and then walked away in satisfaction.

Tercepia went in search of Sandam and the stranger. They weren’t at the first barn, which held more of the pigs with ears. When she was younger she would run in there to pull their ears and the pig would squeal a little and jump and the ears would wiggle. Sandam made her sit still in the middle of all the pigs, sit forever, and she had never done it again, but the ears always made her chin rise up with excitement, and her mouth would open. Even as she passed, she panted a little, longingly, but held the glasses steady and went on to the pens behind the second barn, where the pigs had rows of eyes like polyps growing around their necks like garlands. The eyes rippled as the pigs moved.

“Sometimes they roll over,” the doctor was saying, pointing things out to Portafack. “Which the ears can take, but not the eyes. So we made the eyes into a sort of necklace, they suffer less damage that way.”

Portafack leaned over to look at a bunch of pigs grunting in a group by the railing. One had brown eyes, about half grown, around its head. It kept twitching.

“Those flies,” Portafack said. “Don’t they bother the eyes?”

“The eyes are rudimentary at this point,” the doctor assured him. “They don’t feel a thing. Ah, here she is. You see? Good girl, Tercepia.”

She held out the tray, looking around uneasily. She didn’t like these pigs. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of eyes peering at her from every direction. Her neck prickled; she kept feeling that the eyes were following her. The doctor looked at her steadily as she held the tray.

Portafack was also watching her. “How old is she?”

“Four. The hybrids learn very quickly, though there’s a limit. Her vocabulary is about a hundred spoken words, but she understands much more than that. You can teach her. It takes some repetition and reward, but she learns quickly. Her motor skills aren’t as good. She can carry things, but nothing too fine. We teach them to pour drinks and to make sandwiches, but we don’t allow knives, and no cooking. They can do assembly lines if it’s blunt work—nothing like turning screws, for instance. Were you thinking household or assembly lines? They’re very good at both, though you have to allow them rest breaks—or exercise breaks, really—after an hour. They make mistakes when they get bored.”

“It’s incredible. She looks grown up.” Portafack’s eyes scanned her body. “A little woman,” he said.

“Well, for the most part, she is.” There was a pause as the men stared at her.

“How long do they live?”

“Our guess is somewhere around 30. They may live longer—after all, they’re visibly human; they have human bodies. The dog gene will affect their longevity, of course.”

Portafack shook his head. “Dogs,” he said. “I had a dog when I was a kid. Broke my heart when I had to destroy him. Those mournful, loving eyes. Hard to think of a world without dogs.”

“There’s no reason to,” Sandam said quickly.

“Does she act like a human girl? Domestic urges, that kind of thing?”

The doctor glanced at Portafack. “You want a household servant, then?”

Portafack’s lips twitched slightly. “Yes. I live alone, you see. My life needs a woman’s touch.” His smile inched across his face again.

“Would you like to see some of the others? You have a choice, you know. After all, if you’re going to be seeing her every day, you’d want the one that appeals to your eyes the most, no? I think Tercepia is exceptionally intelligent, but that may be because she was one of the first and I spent a lot of time with her. But there are differences in appearance, too. She does have a slightly more noticeable ridge along the nose; some of the others have less. It’s up to you.” He turned to lead the way and Portafack glanced at his back for a moment, appraisingly.

Tercepia followed them, away from the eye pigs and past the outside pen with the nose pigs. They headed for a red brick building called The House, which had a front door and windows with curtains.

A pair of young girls answered the doorbell. To Portafack, they looked like they could be twins—or almost twins. There was only a slight difference between them. They wore similar loose dresses and one had a somewhat bigger nose and one had thinner lips

The girls jostled each other and one fell back against a lamp. They lunged together and rolled around the floor.

“Stop!” Sandam shouted, and the girls rolled away from each other, looking slightly shamefaced. “Up!” They got up reluctantly, grabbing each other and bumping in a playful manner.

“Sit,” Sandam said, and they began to sit on the floor. “On the sofa,” Sandam said, and when they appeared confused, he whispered to Portafack, “They’re still in training.” Then he walked over to the sofa, called them, and made them sit properly. He saw a certain air of expectation on Portafack’s part, so he said, “We never hit them.”

“Really? That’s remarkable. How do you get them to learn?”

“Repetition and rewards. If they don’t do a task right, they don’t get a treat. But they want praise, of course. Rewards just tell them they’ve succeeded.”

Portafack raised his eyebrows. ”But surely there must be times when they do something wrong? Or when they disobey?”

“We never hit them,” Sandam repeated, and Portafack shrugged his shoulders lightly.

They went to the next room, where the larger girls were ironing and washing dishes. One of them was holding a tray with plastic glasses on it. The tray kept sliding forward and the glasses kept dropping.

Tercepia ran up to the girls one by one and just touched them on the arm, and then ran over to another girl. Portafack felt that he could trace the origins of some of the girls quite easily. One had hair that was coarse and slightly mottled. Another had eyes that seemed, to him, to be too close together. Tercepia on the other hand had even features and good hair.

They walked to the porch. The youngest girls were buttoning and unbuttoning their shirts, heads were lowered, their faces frowning in concentration. One girl was biting her lip. “Grooming,” Sandam said. “We teach them proper appearance. They don’t all reach the same abilities, but we do have some ground rules. They have to bathe and do buttons and zippers. They have to return when they’re called. They can’t bite.” He shrugged. “General rules.”

“Biters?” Portafack asked, his eyes traveling slowly over the girls.

“We haven’t really had any biters yet. We just try to come up with rules that guarantee hybrids with reliable temperaments.”

Sandam followed Portafack’s gaze to a girl who was having the most trouble, and whose bare skin was visible. “Perhaps you could give me a little information about yourself?” Sandam asked. “What you’re looking for exactly, what kind of household you have. Just in general some background. You mentioned a dog when you were a child. Have you had more pets, children, a wife?”

Portafack drew his eyes away from the girl. “I was married once but divorced. We didn’t have children. That was a while ago. I’m very busy and, I’m afraid, rather set in my ways. I like the house to be kept clean and I like simple foods well prepared. I had a housekeeper for many years but she left to get married. That was surprising, she was far too old, I would have thought, to interest anybody. I wouldn’t like to lose another one to marriage.” He turned back to the girls in front of him. “They don’t—well, marry, do they?”

Sandam smiled. “No. Though their sexuality is intact. They might find someone to sleep with occasionally.”

“But not get pregnant?” Portafack moistened his lips.

“No. They’re sterile. We own the copyright, after all.”

“So they don’t mind sex,” Portafack murmured.

Sandam let the statement rest for a second. “No. We didn’t see any reason to take that away. It can enhance their quality of life. You have to remember that they are dominantly human. You have to have some sensitivity, because they do.”

“Oh, I’m kind,” Portafack said. “No one has ever said I wasn’t. They do prepare food, I see?” He was watching as the girls made sandwiches.

“Meals are really pretty simple. They don’t have much of an attention span so we’ve given up on using a stove. They forget about it and walk away. You might as well tell me exactly what your requirements are. Cleaning, simple meals?”

“Laundry, ironing. Can they do shopping?”

“Simple things only, I’m afraid. They don’t read.”

“Oh?” Portafack considered this. “I’m surprised. Is that deliberate?”

“No, we’ve tried teaching them. Their intellectual capacity varies from one to the other, but the best comprehends about as much as a 6 year old. They can be extremely sensitive, and unable to express it well.”

“She looks . . .” Portafack began. “Her name is Tercepia, right? She looks like a normal girl. A normal young girl.” His voice was soothing. He was looking at Tercepia more and more as she helped a friend make sandwiches. She wrapped two and put them in her pocket.

“We spent a lot of time with her. Of course she was one of the first group.”

“Oh? And what happened to the others?”

Sandam hesitated briefly. “It was just her and two males. We had trouble with one of them and he’s not for release. We keep him separated from the others, since he’s not really trainable. We can generally tell from their appearance how well they’ll do.”

“I suppose the ones who look too much like a dog get sent to the pound?” Portafack joked.

Sandam’s face froze and eyes shifted to the window. Then he produced a short laugh and said, “Nothing that drastic, I assure you. It’s very rare. Most of the hybrids are running the way we want now.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Portafack said. “They’re born in a group, aren’t they? Multiple births. I suppose you don’t call them a litter, do you?” He laughed and Sandam dutifully laughed with him. “Are the mothers the humans? How does that work?”