Complete Short Fiction, page 106
Despite my mini rainforest, she doesn’t pay any attention to my stand. She’s been in training for months, so surely she recognizes the virtuoso technique involved. It’s a clear signal, directly to her. She’s not usually so obtuse.
The riot of rainforest life under my umbrella is hard to put together and even harder to maintain, right above a great selection of bratwurst and all-beef hotdogs. You could spend an hour looking at moths get nectar from orchids, ants crawl up stems, tree frogs count for crickets. I’m doing good business, good enough that I can’t pay as much attention to her as I want. It’s a point of pride that I get the orders right.
Even though it’s right in their face, everyone misses the three-toed sloth at first. It hangs amid the leaves, its fur green with algae, its yellow claws hooked around an umbrella rib, and chews on the same leaf it’s been working on for the past half an hour.
Berenika kneels and peers into the animal waste recycler just past a set of stairs. But it’s clean. She can’t tell how recently the cougar who owns this territory has been here.
She turns, and for a moment, I think she’s going to walk over and get a hot dog. I do have to wear this ridiculous purple and orange jacket that clashes with the orchids. I’ve sweated through the pits. Still, I want her to.
Finally, our cougar slinks into the plaza. It glances toward the Cafe Kulfi. It still remembers the unexpected nose bum and won’t go up there unless it has a good reason.
It has other things to worry about. It is well into the other male’s range, and this time is completely aware of it. Its ears flick back and forth. A cougar has thirty separate muscles in its ear and it’s using every one to swivel them, trying to extract all the information the environment has to offer.
Each step forward is a serious consideration. Since it’s here, it believes that it is here to challenge the other cougar. Like anything above a certain level of consciousness, it believes it acts because of decisions it has made. And, like anything above a certain level of consciousness, it is wrong.
As soon as it appears, Berenika is aware of it. She doesn’t turn toward it, but I can see the way her back stretches out, fine shoulder blades against the fabric of her jacket. She stands very still: irrelevant, since the cougar can’t see her. It’s almost a courtesy. Her hands float without weight.
I didn’t understand her before, and now I’m kind of sorry about that raccoon. She’s not just fooling around. She’s as serious about life as I am. She could be the rare Trainer that could be seen, and still do her job.
The cougar whose territory we’re in comes out of the Cafe Kulfi and stands at the top of the stairs. It is significantly larger and stronger than our cougar, full-sized at 170 pounds, eight feet long. Everyone in the plaza falls silent and watches as it swishes its tail impatiently. Since this is its territory, it is the local favorite. They wait to see what it will do to the interloper.
Somewhere around here, Mark appears and comes back into her life. That’s the story. And the cougar, no longer needed, goes. Sure, there’s always a chance it will defeat its larger and stronger opponent. Nothing is certain.
But the smart money’s on the muscle.
The territory owner crouches down to charge. It is ready. Our cougar is going to find out that it is no longer the center of attention.
Berenika strolls toward the cafe, not giving any sign that she sees the other cougar. I should be watching the cougars, but, instead, I watch her. She looks like she’s just window-shopping, but I know she’s not seeing anything in the vitrines. Her consciousness is focused forward.
She steps right into the other cougar’s path. It is ready to leap . . . and suddenly its opponent has vanished. All it can really sense is the absence that is Berenika, because it can’t detect a human being. A shadow has dropped over its world, and it is confounded.
Suddenly coming to itself, realizing the perilous situation it is in, our cougar turns and bounds out of the plaza.
There is a stir among everyone else in the plaza. They resume whatever they were doing. But they feel vaguely cheated, unfulfilled. A crucial plot point was muffed.
That’s because they’re paying attention to the wrong story.
“Excuse me.”
Berenika came up silently as I watched the cougar vanish. She catches me off guard.
Our eyes meet through the mist that comes from my umbrella. As a gesture, the sloth even turns its head, jaws still working on its leaf, to look at her.
She realizes the complexity of what I have achieved here. And, seeing that, she’s scoped out who is responsible for the events around her. She has an instinctive feel for the behavior of living creatures. Seeing the effects, she’s tracked down the cause: me.
“I’d like two hot dogs, please.”
Two? She really doesn’t need to get one for me. It’s my stand, after all. “Um, sure. That’s what I’m here for.”
“One with mustard and relish.”
“Okay.”
“And one with lots of hot peppers, sauerkraut, and epizote, if you have any.”
It’s not something I’d usually know about an employer, but Mark had me make him his favorite dog when we were setting this scene up, the day before. Peppers, sauerkraut, and—
“No epizote.” I still have some, but he’s not getting it. “Out today.”
“Well.” She sighs. “We can’t always get what we want, can we?”
“No,” I say. “I guess not.”
I watch her, graceful and slim, as she crosses the plaza and heads right for the copse of trees where Mark stands, seemingly invisible from the world, waiting to emerge into the midst of a battle to the death between cougars for a single territory.
Last Encounter
Anhinga
The water just beyond the table is still and black. The cypress trees in the hammock stretch above, forming a thick canopy, screening the bright sun. The air is hot, heavy, motionless. Spanish moss, vines, flowers dangle down, dripping water. The only detectable motion is that of an occasional insect flying slowly, almost walking on the thick air. Tiny beams with motion detectors pick them out and highlight their lacy wings against the dimness, subtly enough that the patrons take it for granted that they can see things here, despite having evolved on the sunny, dry veldt.
There’s no reason why nature shouldn’t always look her best.
Paolo, Mria, Berenika, and Mark have fallen silent as they wait for their food. Mark is never chatty, and Paolo and Mria have been trying to fill in the spaces, showing, by their eagerness to entertain, their gratitude that things are back the way they should be, but they’ve run out of things to talk about.
Mark paid their way out here. That’s their notion of the way things should be.
Berenika hasn’t been talking much. Is she already regretting her decision to get back with him?
“Look, there’s one.” Paolo points as an alligator slides by, careful not to thrust his finger over the railing.
No one else looks.
“What’s wrong?” Mark finally says. “I knew this was a mistake. Too wet, right? We should get back to the house. The desert. That’s best.”
“No,” Berenika says. “That’s not it. This is extremely impressive. I might like to work here, actually.”
Our wetland, lush with water coming from the north, is sandwiched between an office building, all pink stucco and plate glass, and a housing development. Carefully generated mist makes the office building look like a mistake of vision, and the houses hide behind a vine-covered wall. Water is pumped into this patch of jungle, runs through, and then gets recovered on the other side of the restaurant.
Water once sheeted down from the lakes to the north, covered the sawgrass prairies less than an inch deep, all the way down to the south. Development and overuse of water had threatened these environments.
Not much of the sawgrass prairie was left, but the wetland is something people want to see. Water flows have been reestablished, exactly to the necessary degree. Nothing that lives here, in the deep waters or any of the other environments around, senses that it all came via subtle paths completely different than the original ones.
But there’s still a lot of work to do. Berenika could make a real contribution.
“But something’s bothering you about it.”
“Yeah: Paolo,” Mria says. “Stop pointing out that stupid alligator every time it swims by. We see it.”
Paolo’s mouth droops.
“No,” Berenika says. “It’s the cat.”
Our cougar rests on a bough above the black water, barely awake.
“Wrong species of panther?” Paolo flicks through the restaurant’s environmental information, eager to make good. “The Florida one’s extinct, this one is pretty close, they say. . . .”
“Not the species. The environment. The place. Cougars live in the slash pine woods. In decent-sized limestone uplands. They need some dry land. Not down in the water here. They don’t fish.”
“Maybe they eat birds.” Paolo, on a roll, is pleased to spot the anhinga, the restaurant’s signature bird, as it pops out of the water, a dead fish speared on its beak. He starts to point, thinks better of it, and changes his gesture to a wave at the waiter.
He’s just going to have to wait. I’m no longer on duty.
The anhinga climbs out on a cypress knee and spends a moment getting the fish off its beak. It’s dark, with a long white neck. It swallows the fish, then spreads its wings. Unlike most water birds, anhingas have no oils on their feathers. This permits them to dive deeply, but means they have to dry their wings before attempting flight.
This catches the cougar’s attention. There’s really no way it can get that anhinga, but, still, it’s kind of an interesting intellectual problem, with the tricky approach, the bird’s speed, and all. For a sated cat, thinking about ways to catch unpromising prey is like doing crossword puzzles.
“You’re right.” Mark frowns. “It shouldn’t be here.”
Neither should I. My job is done. I should be back to my regular work. There’re some oak stands to redo in Illinois, and ponds for migratory birds. Those things are hard. The birds have to maintain their ability to navigate thousands of miles, yet not realize they are landing amid observation platforms whenever they come down.
Aside from some species of parrot, birds are never easy to train.
Berenika has slipped away, probably to the bathroom. I didn’t notice her go.
In her absence, Mark is checking and sending messages. He’s probably finding out where I am, what I’m up to, figuring out that someone who owed me a favor let me set up here in the Everglades, checking water pH and drainage.
Mark isn’t the only one with deep resources.
A couple of heavy drops fall on the raft, and it tilts, just slightly, with added weight.
“Do you really think no one can see you?” Berenika says, almost in my ear.
I jerk, but don’t knock anything over, and look up. She stands over me, water sheeting down her body, her hair gleaming black.
“How much was real?” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.” She moves around the raft, barefoot and silent, and examines the equipment. “Is this what a nature god is? A little man squatting in the underbrush with some display screens?”
“I’ve never claimed divine status—”
She’s in my face. She’s disturbing close up, eyes too big, cheekbones too high, skin too velvet. She’s meant to be observed from a safe distance.
“How much, Mr. . . . you do have a name, don’t you? Mark must allow you a name.”
“Tyrell Fredrickson.”
“Come on.” She glances back at the restaurant. Mria is complaining that there is too much saffron in the flan. There isn’t supposed to be any saffron in the flan. No one has missed Berenika yet. “You’ve been on me, you and your kitty. What did Mark hire you to do?”
“Just to keep you safe. What appears to be the natural world is more dangerous than you—”
She knocks me down and pins me to the raft. The cougar stands up on its bough and looks over at us, exactly as if it can see us both.
I enjoy feeling her weight on me.
“It wasn’t all my doing, was it?” she says. “Everything around me. You have the power to control it. Tell me!”
So I do. It’s not that I think she’s going to kill me, though she’s mad enough to try. It’s because she sees that which she would like least to see. My assignment was to make her feel like . . . Mark said, “like a nature goddess.”
It had been a dream ever since she was a little girl, to have the natural world perceive and respond to her. She’d always had pets, found wounded birds and animals and nursed them back to health, had the ability to sit still for hours and let things come to her. She was perfect for the career I had.
Mark’s analysis had shown him that she had left because she felt like she didn’t have equal standing with him. She didn’t have a valid role. So he decided to give her one.
That’s my job, really. To make things seem like they just happen. Of course, if you left the natural world to “just happen,” most of it would be dead and decaying in a couple of seasons. Too much of it is gone for the rest of it to live on its own.
“That’s pretty much what I thought,” she says, and sits back on her heels.
I look at her. I never expected her to go back with Mark, no matter what power she felt. I expected . . . I don’t know what I expected. None of it makes sense. Mark wanted her to come back to him, so he made her feel more powerful, more in control. And now she questions the one illusion that makes her feel best about herself.
“I’m going away,” I say. “I’m taking a rough job. A weed patch in an old city. No one really likes those mundane restoration jobs. It takes forever, and even when you’re done, it doesn’t look like much.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“In case . . . if you wonder where I am. What I’m doing.”
She shakes her head, smiles at me. “You really don’t understand anything, do you?”
“Look—no matter what, you’re good at this. Better, probably, than I am. You can—”
“I know what I can do. But what can you do? Are you just going to hide in the leaves and fake it all up for people?”
“It’s what I do. I’m a Trainer.”
“So am I, now. You think Mark wanted to give me the illusion of power over nature to get me to come back to him. But it’s not an illusion, is it? I’m not some kind of nature goddess. That’s just dumb. But I do have power over nature. And I love it all. Every bit of it. Do you love it, Tyrell?”
“I do.” The answer comes before I think about it.
This time she really looks at me. I’m pale, a little soft, but I think I have some shape to me. A good jaw, and people say my eyes are thoughtful.
Well, my mother said it. She was otherwise pretty honest. She never told me I was strikingly handsome or anything.
“You might still make something of yourself, Tyrell. Then we’ll see.” Her dive into the water is totally silent.
Berenika. I write these reports for Mark, but he never reads them. Maybe someday you will.
How I Became a Trainer
by Tyrell Fredrickson
You don’t really want the whole story, but perhaps this part will help you make sense of it.
Before I became a Trainer, I worked on a farm, at Sty #14, on the thirtieth floor. Sometimes, when my work was done, I’d go out to the plant areas to watch the sunset. The circulating breeze kept condensation off the glass and made the leaves whisper behind me. From that height I didn’t really see people, just buildings copper to the horizon. After a few minutes, something would start beeping. I wasn’t really supposed to be in that area. My job was the pork.
I’d go back to the dark. The glow strip across the vat room’s arched ceiling was about as bright as a full moon. After all, the pork tubes—pigs, if you insist—couldn’t see.
The sterilizing lights came on once a day. Then it was my job to put on goggles and turn the tubes in their vats of liquid, making sure the UV hit all their surfaces. The fluid was full of antibiotics and all that, but there were fungi, there were molds . . . anywhere there was that much cell shedding and organic material something would find a way to live.
The main problem was the skin. The bones were vestigial, floating free from each other like an exploded skeletal diagram, but the things still had skin. They floated in the blue-green support fluid, but they were so huge that there were always folds, or points of pressure against the tank sides, where infection could collect. My job was detecting these areas and taking care of them.
It might seem that you should just get rid of the skin and just have meat, but that would cause more problems than it solved. Skin is a sophisticated interface, keeping in the things that should be in, and keeping almost all of the universe out. Creating some new interface would have been more trouble that it was worth. It might not have seemed that way, but they’d changed only those things that needed changing. For example, collagen had been added, to make the skin easier to remove, when that time came.
The back of pork still looked like a pig. The spine had separated like the boosters of a rocket heading for space, but I could still see a trace of the original shoat, with its bristly hair. If I left them in some other orientation, they would slowly turn to have their backs up.
No one ever visited me there. The meat side of the farm just wasn’t that popular. There was an occasional maintenance team, in to adjust the recirculators that turned pork waste into usable fertilizer for the plants on the south side. Otherwise, I was alone with my pigs.
Once a month was slaughtering time.
I’d pull each tube out of the liquid in a support harness. The sterilizing fluid would cascade off its sides. I’d dry the skin, first with a roller and then with an infrared light, and then I would open it up. There was supposed to be a seam, kind of a biological zipper, along where the edge of the belly had once been, but it often got jammed up with squamous cells and other undifferentiated growth.
