21st Century Science Fiction (100 page)

“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 peoples’ gardens by pointing out the snakes. So, yes, okay, 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 résumé 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 ourselves, 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 cannister, 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 cannister, holding it up to the visor. “Thirty 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 formfitting 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 crash-bar. 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 sorrow 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 heard only 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 metalling 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.”

Buhle laughed, not the chuckle he’d heard before, but an actual, barked
Ha!
that made the tubes heave and the fiber optics writhe. “Fantastic,” he said. “Ria, he’s fantastic.”

The compliment made the tips of Leon’s ears grow warm.

“He’s a good one,” she said. “And he’s come a long way at your request.”

“You hear how she reminds me of my responsibilities? Sit down, both of you.” Ria rolled over two chairs, and Leon settled into one, feeling it noiselessly adjust to take his weight. A small mirror unfolded itself and then two more, angled beneath it, and he found himself looking into Buhle’s eyes, looking at his face, reflected in the mirrors.

“Leon,” Buhle said, “tell me about your final project, the one that got you the top grade in your class.”

Leon’s fragile calm vanished, and he began to sweat. “I don’t like to talk about it,” he said.

“Makes you vulnerable, I know. But vulnerable isn’t so bad. Take me. I thought I was invincible. I thought that I could make and unmake the world to my liking. I thought I understood how the human mind worked—and how it broke.

“And then one day in Madrid, as I was sitting in my suite’s breakfast room, talking with an old friend while I ate my porridge oats, my old friend picked up the heavy silver coffee jug, leaped on my chest, smashed me to the floor, and methodically attempted to beat the brains out of my head with it. It weighed about a kilo and a half, not counting the coffee, which was scalding, and she only got in three licks before they pulled her off of me, took her away. Those three licks though—” He looked intently at them. “I’m an old man,” he said. “Old bones, old tissues. The first blow cracked my skull. The second one broke it. The third one forced fragments into my brain. By the time the medics arrived, I’d been technically dead for about 174 seconds, give or take a second or two.”

Leon wasn’t sure the old thing in the vat had finished speaking, but that seemed to be the whole story. “Why?” he said, picking the word that was uppermost in his mind.

“Why did I tell you this?”

“No,” Leon said. “Why did your old friend try to kill you?”

Buhle grinned. “Oh, I expect I deserved it,” he said.

“Are you going to tell me why?” Leon said.

Buhle’s cozy grin disappeared. “I don’t think I will.”

Leon found he was breathing so hard that he was fogging up his faceplate, despite the air-jets that worked to clear it. “Buhle,” he said, “the point of that story was to tell me how vulnerable you are so that I’d tell you my story, but that story doesn’t make you vulnerable. You were beaten to death and yet you survived, grew stronger, changed into this”—he waved his hands around—“this body, this monstrous, town-size giant. You’re about as vulnerable as fucking Zeus.”