The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (76 page)

Nor will I.

IT TAKES TWO

Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith has won the Nebula Award, the James Tiptree, Jr., Memorial Award, and five Lambda awards. Her SF novels include
Ammonite
and
Slow River
(her Nebula Award winner), and she also writes the popular “Aud Torvingen” series of mystery novels, which includes
Stay, Always
, and
The Blue Place.
She’s co-editor, with Stephen Pagel, of
Bending the Landscape: Horror, Bending the Landscape: Fantasy
, and
Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction.
Born in Leeds, United Kingdom, she now lives in Seattle.

Here she takes us to a strip club for an evening of lap-dancing, one in which there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface than immediately meets the eye, and not just the surface of the clothes.

I
T BEGAN, AS
these things often do, at a bar – a long dark piece of mahogany along one wall of Seattle’s Queen City Grill polished by age and more than a few chins. The music was winding down. Richard and Cody (whose real name was Candice, though no one she had met since high school knew it) lived on different coasts, but tonight was the third time this year they had been drinking together. Cody was staring at the shadows gathering in the corners of the bar and trying not to think about her impersonal hotel room. She thought instead about the fact that in the last six months she had seen Richard more often than some of her friends in San Francisco, and that she would probably see him yet again in a few weeks when their respective companies bid on the Atlanta contract.

She said, “You ever wonder what it would be like to have, you know, a normal type job, where you get up on Monday and drive to work, and do the same thing Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, every week, except when you take a vacation?”

“You forgot Friday.”

“What?” They had started on mojitos, escalated through James Bonds, and were now on a tequila-shooter-with-draft-chaser glide path.

“I said, you forgot Friday. Monday, Tuesday—”

“Right,” Cody said. “Right. Too many fucking details. But did you ever wonder? About a normal life?” An actual life, in one city, with actual friends.

Richard was silent long enough for Cody to lever herself around on the bar stool and look at him. He was playing with his empty glass. “I just took a job,” he said. “A no-travel job.”

“Ah, shit.” She remembered how they met, just after the first dotcom crash, at a graduate conference on synergies of bio-mechanics and expert decision-making software architecture or some such crap, which was wild because he started out in cognitive psychology and she in applied mathematics. But computers were the alien glue that made all kinds of odd limbs stick together and work in ways never intended by nature. Like Frankenstein’s monster, he had said when she mentioned it, and she had bought him a drink, because he got it. They ran into each other at a similar conference two months later, then again at some industry junket not long after they’d both joined social media startups. The pattern repeated itself, until, by the time they were both pitching venture capitalists at trade shows, they managed to get past the required cool, the distancing irony, and began to email each other beforehand to arrange dinners, drinks, tickets to the game. They were young, good-looking, and very, very smart. Even better, they had absolutely no romantic interest in each other.

Now when they met it was while traveling as representatives of their credit-starved companies to make increasingly desperate pitches to industry-leading Goliaths on why they needed the nimble expertise of hungry Davids.

Cody hadn’t told Richard that lately her pitches had been more about why the Goliaths might find it cost-effective to absorb the getting-desperate David she worked for, along with all its innovative, motivated, boot-strapping employees whose stock options and 401(k)s were now worthless. But going back to the groves of academe was really admitting failure.

She sighed. “Where?”

“Chapel Hill. And it’s not . . . Well, okay, it is sort of an academic job, but not really.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No, really. It’s with a new company, a joint venture between WishtleNet and the University of North—”

“See.”

“Just let me finish.” Richard could get very didactic when he’d been drinking. “Think Google Labs, or Xerox PARC, but wackier. Lots of money to play with, lots of smart grad students to do what I tell them, lots of blue sky research, not just irritating Vice Presidents saying I’ve got six months to get the software on the market, even if it is garbage.”

“I hear you on that.” Except that Vince, Cody’s COO, had told her that if she landed the Atlanta contract she would be made a VP herself.

“It’s cool stuff, Cody. All those things we’ve talked about in the last six, seven years? The cognitive patterning and behavior mod, the modulated resonance imaging software, the intuitive learning algorithms—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“ – they want me to work on that. They want me to define new areas of interest. Very cool stuff.”

Cody just shook her head. Cool. Cool didn’t remember to feed the fish when you were out of town, again.

“Starts next month,” he said.

Cody felt very tired. “You won’t be in Atlanta.”

“Nope.”

“Atlanta in August. On my own. Jesus.”

“On your own? What about all those pretty girls in skimpy summer clothes?”

The muscles in Cody’s eyebrows felt tight. She rubbed them. “It’s Boone I’m not looking forward to. Boone and his sleazy strip club games.”

“He’s the customer.”

“Your sympathy’s killing me.”

He shrugged. “I thought that lap-dancing hooker thing was your wet dream.”

Her head ached. Now he was going to bring up Dallas.

“That’s what you told us in – now where the hell was that?”

“Dallas.” Might as well get it over with.

“You were really into it. Are you blushing?”

“No.” Three years ago she had been twenty-eight with four million dollars in stock options and the belief that coding cowboy colleagues were her friends. Ha. And now probably half the geeks in the South had heard about her most intimate fantasy. Including Boone.

She swallowed the last of her tequila. Ugly stuff once it got tepid. She picked up her jacket.

“I’m out of here. Unless you have any handy hints about landing that contract without playing Boone’s slimeball games? Didn’t think so.” She pushed her shot glass away and stood.

“That Atlanta meeting’s when? Eight, nine weeks?”

“About that.” She dropped two twenties on the bar.

“I maybe could help.”

“With Boone? Right.” But Richard’s usually cherubic face was quite stern.

He fished his phone from his pocket and put it on the bar. He said, “Just trust me for a minute,” and tapped the memo icon. The icon winked red. “Whatever happens, I promise no one will ever hear what goes on this recording except you.”

Cody slung on her jacket. “Cue ominous music.”

“It’s more an, um, an ethics thing.”

“Jesus, Richard. You’re such a drama queen.” But she caught the bartender’s eye, pointed to their glasses, and sat.

“I did my Atlanta research too,” he said. “Like you, I’m pretty sure what will happen after you’ve made your presentations to Boone.”

“The Golden Key,” she said, nodding. Everyone said so. The sun rises, the government taxes, Boone listens to bids and takes everyone to the Golden Key.

“– but what I need to know from you is whether or not, to win this contract, you can authorize out-of-pocket expenses in the high five figures.”

She snorted. “Five figures against a possible eight? What do you think?”

He pointed at the phone.

“Fine. Yes. I can approve that kind of expense.”

He smiled, a very un-Richardlike sliding of muscle and bone, like a python disarticulating its jaw to swallow a pig. Cody nearly stood up, but the moment passed.

“You’ll also have to authorize me to access your medical records,” he said.

So here they were in Marietta, home of the kind of Georgians who wouldn’t fuck a stranger in the woods only because they didn’t know who his people were: seven men and one woman stepping from Boone’s white concrete and green glass tower into an August sun hot enough to make the blacktop bubble. Boone’s shades flashed as he turned to face the group.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And Jill,” with a nod at Cody, who nodded back and tried not to squint. Squinting made her look like a moron: not good when all around you were wearing sleek East Coast summer business clothes and gilded with Southern tans. At least the guy from Portland had forgotten his shades too.

They moved in a small herd across the soft, sticky parking lot: the guy from Boston would have to throw away his fawn loafers.

Boone said to the guy from Austin, “Dave, you take these three. I know you know where we’re going.”

“Sure do,” Dave said, and the seven boys shared that we’re-all-men-of-the-world-yes-indeedy laugh. Cody missed Richard. And she was still pissed at the way he’d dropped the news on her only last week. Why hadn’t he told her earlier about not coming to Atlanta? Why hadn’t he told her in Seattle? And a university job: what was up with that? Loser. But she wished he was here.

Boone’s car was a flashy Mercedes hybrid in silver. He opened the passenger door with a Yeah-I-know-men-and-women-are-equal-but-I-was-born-in-the-South-so-what-can-you-do? smile to which Cody responded with a perfect, ironic lift of both eyebrows. Hey, couldn’t have managed that in shades. The New York guy and Boston loafers got in the back. The others were climbing into Dave’s dark green rental SUV. A full-sized SUV. Very uncool. He’d lose points for that. She jammed her seatbelt home with a satisfying click.

As they drove to the club, she let the two in the back jostle for conversational space with Boone. She stared out of the window. The meeting had gone very well. It was clear that she and Dave and the guy from Denver were the only ones representing companies with the chops for this contract, and she was pretty sure she had the edge over the Denver people when it came to program rollout. Between her and Dave, then. If only they weren’t going to the Golden Key. God. The thought of all those men watching her watch those women and think they knew what she was thinking made her scalp prickle with sweat. In the flow of conditioned air, her face turned cold.

*  *  *

Two days before she left for Atlanta she’d emailed Vince to explain that it wasn’t her who would be uncomfortable at the strip club, but the men, and that he should at least consider giving Boone a call and setting her presentation up for either the day before or the day after the others. She’d got a reply half an hour later, short and to the point: You’re going, kid, end of story. She’d taken a deep breath and walked over to his office.

He was on the phone, pacing up and down, but waved her in before she could knock. He covered the receiver with one hand, “Gotta take this, won’t be long,” and went back to pacing, shouting, “Damn it, Rick, I want it done. When we had that meeting last week you assured me – Yeah. No problem, you said. No fucking problem. So just do it, just find a way.” He slammed the phone down, shook his head, turned his attention to her. “Cody, what can I do for you? If it’s about this Atlanta thing I don’t want to hear it.”

“Vince – ”

“Boone’s not stupid. He takes people to that titty club because he likes to watch how they behave under pressure. You’re the best we’ve got, you know that. Just be yourself and you won’t fuck up. Give him good presentation and don’t act like a girl scout when the nipples start to show. Can you handle that?”

“I just resent—”

“Jesus Christ, Cody. It’s not like you’ve never seen bare naked ladies before. You want to be a VP? Tell me now: yes or no.”

Cody took a breath. “Yes.”

“Glad to hear it. Now get out of here.”

The Golden Key was another world: cool, and scented with the fruity overtones of beer; loud, with enough bass to make the walls of her abdomen vibrate; dark at the edges, though lushly lit at the central stage with its three chrome poles and laser strobes. Only one woman was dancing. It was just after six, but the place was already half full. Somewhere, someone was smoking expensive cigars. Cody wondered who the club paid off to make that possible.

Boone ordered staff to put two tables together right by the stage, near the center pole. The guy from New York sat on Boone’s left, Dave on his right. Cody took a place at the end, out of Boone’s peripheral vision. She wouldn’t say or do anything that wasn’t detached and ironic. She would be seamless.

A new dancer: shoulder-length red hair that fell over her face as she writhed around the right hand pole. She wore a skirt the size of a belt, and six-inch heels of translucent plastic embedded with suggestive pink flowers. Without the pole she probably couldn’t even stand. Did interesting things to her butt, though, Cody thought, then patted surreptitiously at her upper lip. Dry, thank god. Score one for air conditioning.