Collected Short Fiction, page 161
The tattoo artist crushed her homemade on the sidewalk as he went into Trader Vic’s. As usual, Vic herself was behind the high counter at the far end of the store, looking regal as she flicked a finger at the flatscreen in front of her. She was dark-skinned and heavily-built, no little slip of a thing but solid and strong in a grey Athletic Club of Overland Park sweatshirt. Trader Vic, as she styled herself, was the real deal because, unlike the restaurateur who had launched a thousand mai tais, she made trades, not drinks. Need something, but suffering from financial embarrassment? Not to worry, Trader Vic liked to say, she had a thousand thousand contacts reachable via a touch on her flatscreen, and millions more reachable by two touches. Somewhere among them was the person who had what you wanted and might be in the mood to make a deal for it, a trade between the two of you. Or it could turn into a three-way dance, or four-way, or you might end up getting plugged into a complex network of give and take, something that would be an impossible tangle for anyone but Trader Vic, who could keep it all straight in her mind no matter which angle she came at it from. You might have thought it was just good software and record-keeping so meticulous as to be anal, but that was just backup for the real trading machine, the one between Vic’s ears.
“Hey yo,” she said with a big smile. “Something new has been added.”
He waved at her with the arm and did bodybuilder poses with it as he approached the counter. Today she had rented some of her unneeded floor space to the tattoo parlor and some to the market on the other side—boxes of animation inks faced crates of olive oil, fish paste, fortified wheat germ, and shell macaroni.
“Like they say on the late show, checkiddout, checkiddout.” He stretched the arm high over his head and made a buzzing noise as he lowered his hand onto the counter next to her monitor for a five-point landing on the fingers. “The Eagle is in da house and things can only get better.”
“Nostalgia sure ain’t what it used to be.” She tried a soul handshake on him, bumped his knuckles with her own, slapped him high and low five, and then got him in an arm wrestling grip.
“No fair, I got no leverage,” he complained grinning as he pushed her arm down on the counter effortlessly, careful not to crush her fingers.
She grinned back at him and then gave him one upside the head; not too hard, though. “Don’t get all misty just because you beat the champ one time.” She flexed her own hand, as if she had a mild cramp. “Feels good, like the real thing. Only realer. How much were you holding back?”
“All of it. Sibelius came by some military stuff, surplus leftovers, she said.”
Vic looked at her screen and tapped a finger on it. “So that’s where that went. Anonymous auction, not that you heard it from me.”
Danny made an elaborate dismissive gesture with his right hand. “You know Sibelius—you don’t ask her questions and she doesn’t have to tell you lies.”
Vic leaned on the counter. “Well, if your arm really did come out of that lot, you may have gotten the deal of the century, my man. It was an experimental batch. The mad scientist behind it got himself cooked in some kind of stupid accident and the military warehoused everything. Sat for six months until the inventory database got scrambled and ceased to officially exist.”
“Gee, I wonder how that happened,” Danny said, admiring his fingers.
“Happens all the time,” Vic said serenely. “With no official existence, there was no official sale and no official income lining any official’s pocket. Not that I told you anything. What would I know anyway? I’m just a humble trader, a go-between, a matchmaker for goods and services.”
Danny looked at her with exaggerated puzzlement. “Huh? Whudja say?”
“I said, I’ll have to thank Sibelius for this.”
He blinked, the puzzlement becoming real. “You will?”
“Oh, yeah.” Vic’s smile was thoughtful. “How’d you like to make that new arm pay for itself?”
“Well, that is kinda what I had in mind,” Danny said. “You know, doing jobs I couldn’t before.”
The trader nodded. “Good. Because it so happens I’ve got a vacancy for tonight. Does that fit in with your busy social schedule?”
“Sure. What do I have to do? Bend some iron bars? Crush beer cans?” He snapped his fingers rhythmically. “Keep the beat?”
“Later. First get down to Jeremy’s and pick up some code for me. It’s special, I don’t want it getting intercepted or scrambled.”
He couldn’t help showing his disappointment. Errand boy again.
“Hey, that’s only the beginning,” Vic said, reading his mind, or at least his expression. “I’m going to need a lot of help from you tonight, and I don’t mean I want you to sit the store while I’m out. I can’t get this done without you.”
Danny laughed a little, feeling both sheepish and relieved. Anyone else might have been patronizing him or setting him up, but not Vic. “Okay. I’m on the case.”
The blowfish, mainly of the tourist persuasion, were lined up for Eye in the Sky, which was just starting to jump. The sumo wrestler on the door was making the usual big show of passing them through after a thorough visual inspection of their clothes, their faces, their jewelry, and, presumably, their coolness quotients. The sumo wrestler’s name was Rakishi, and legend had it he really had been a sumo before bad knees had relegated him to ruling the ingress with guest list and stun-stick.
Danny didn’t look at any of the overdressed would-be clubbers, fearful he’d see some of the people he’d cajoled into buying guidebooks or letting him run errands for them. All he’d need would be for one of them to call out Errand boy! in front of that lard-ass on the door. Rakishi would never let him forget it.
Relax, he told himself as he trotted up the crystal steps to the entrance. The errand boy they knew was a gimp with one arm. They weren’t expecting to see him with two good arms. Nonetheless, he decided, tomorrow he’d get a new haircut, and maybe a dye job just to make sure.
“Say hey.” Rakishi tapped him on the chest with the stun-stick and then left it there. He made a business out of counting Danny’s arms and legs and pretending to think it over. “Sorry, I don’t see your spare parts on the guest list, and even if they were, you couldn’t come in here dressed like that.”
“Save it for the blowfish, Rakishi, you know I’m not here for the dancing. Jeremy’s expecting me. Otherwise I wouldn’t get within a mile of this place.”
Rakishi laughed. “You’re telling me.”
He winced at having inadvertently handed the man a straight line at his own expense and started to push past. Rakishi blocked his way with the stun-stick, resting the point against his new arm, against the shoulder, where the stump and the tiny fingers were now hidden away. The big man started to say something. Danny reached up, closed his new fingers around the chubby wrist, and began slowly applying pressure, letting Rakishi feel it.
The look on the fat man’s face went from surprise to unease and then to outright fear. Danny backed him up several steps toward the entry foyer, still squeezing. He removed the stun-stick from the man’s numbed fingers, and then, just as slowly, released him.
“Don’t worry, nobody saw,” he said in a low voice, giving the stick back to him. “It’ll be our little secret, that a gimp with a spare part took your toy away from you. I mean, we wouldn’t want the blowfish rushing the door and getting you fired, would we?”
Rakishi stared at him, saying nothing. The expression on his face was supposed to be murderous, but Danny could see a hint of the fear underneath.
“But no more, Rakishi, okay? No more gimp, no more spare parts, no more big-man-on-the-door crap. Not to me. Got that?”
Still silent, Rakishi stepped back to let him pass.
“Thanks.” Danny started to go in, then stuck his hand out. “Shake on it?”
Rakishi drew back and jerked his head at the entry foyer.
“Oh, yeah,” Danny said, “we already did that, didn’t we?”
The big man turned away from him and Danny suddenly felt ashamed of himself. He hurried through the dimly-lit foyer, pushing through the double doors marked STAFF ONLY to the left of the ticket-booth and going up the stairs two at a time. Good show, Danny-boy, he thought, you just proved you can be as big a bully as anybody else.
He went halfway down the narrow corridor at the top of the stairs and stopped at a grimy-looking door, plain except for a small card at eye level that said SERVICE MANAGER. Danny knocked and heard the answering come-in grunt.
Jeremy was dressed in his usual multi-pocketed work pants, white T-shirt, and blue fisherman’s jacket with even more pockets. He was as thin as Rakishi was fat, which was some trick considering that Danny had never seen him when he wasn’t eating. Tonight he was having Chinese food, busy chopsticks clicking among an array of classic white takeout cartons on his desk. They competed for space with the old, oversized but very sharp surveillance monitor. On the screen, Rakishi was doing his sorry-not-cool-enough routine with three tourists who were trying to argue with him.
“Saw you throwing the fear of God into my big guy,” Jeremy said, gesturing at the screen with a noodle caught in the chopsticks. “New arm, eh?”
“Works pretty good,” Danny said.
Jeremy made a prawn disappear. “I could see that.”
“Hey, I wasn’t really trying to start anything,” Danny said. “He’s just always pulling that crap on me when he knows the only reason I come here is because Vic sends me to pick something up from you.”
“She told me you were on the way over, and she told me you had a nice new part.” Jeremy put down his chopsticks. “Mind if I have a look?”
Danny extended his arm, pulling his sleeve up. Jeremy ran his hands along the musculature with an expert touch, nodding at the way it connected to his shoulder. He found the software load in Danny’s armpit and palpated it the same way Dr. Sibelius had after she’d put it in.
“Not tickling you, am I?” Jeremy asked.
“I was never ticklish on that side,” Danny told him coolly.
Jeremy stood up to take a closer look at the crook of Danny’s arm. “If I’m not mistaken,” he said after a bit, “this is from the lot that didn’t exist out at the old Roswell Base.”
“Jeez,” Danny said, “does everybody know about this except me?”
“Maybe,” Jeremy said. “I don’t know, I haven’t talked to everybody today.”
Danny smiled, although the truth was that when Jeremy said something like that, you could never be certain he was kidding. “So you can tell just by looking?”
“I know what to look for. You got yourself a lot more arm there than you know.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. The Roswell lot was mad scientist stuff, experimental.”
“Oh, right—Roswell and UFOs and alien technology. You think this came from outer space?”
“Haven’t you been paying attention? The aliens are up in Montana these days. Roswell is a plain old military base now. Even the mad scientists are gone. After what’s-his-name cooked himself, they moved the rest of them elsewhere. The moon, maybe, I don’t know. Those who do know say the guy was working with some kind of quantum crap and that’s what got him.”
“Quantum crap?” Danny grimaced. “You mean, like, you go to the bathroom and it comes out in wavicles?”
Jeremy’s expression never changed. “That’s really very funny, Danny. Quantum stuff is highly weird. You ever hear about Schrödinger’s cat? Things can exist in any number of different states all at the same time, even if they contradict each other.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you might be able to do some interesting magic tricks with that thing. Did you get an operator manual with it?”
“It’s in the software. Check this out.” Danny shifted his shoulder slightly and then extended his arm again, turning it to show Jeremy the underside of his forearm. Words faded in on the pale skinlike surface along a patch five inches long and two inches wide and began to scroll upward.
“Now that takes me back,” Jeremy said, watching the documentation. “Like crib notes in middle school, only fancier. A skin animation of this kind’ll run you, oh, hell, I don’t know, I haven’t priced any lately.” He looked at Danny. “Except this not really being skin, it’s not really a tattoo, is it.”
Danny grinned. “Close enough for government work.”
“You really are a very funny guy,” Jeremy told him solemnly. “I had no idea.”
“Well, besides improving my piano playing, this thing has really put me in a good mood,” Danny said. “Prosthetic limb and antidepressant. Is that like the quantum states you were talking about?”
“Not even close.” Jeremy felt around the pockets in his jacket, then his pants, and then his jacket again before he found what he was looking for, a tiny blue disc in a clear plastic sleeve. “Anyway, this’ll be what you came to get. Vic’s code. She doesn’t make things very easy.”
Danny reached for it with his new hand and Jeremy pulled it back slightly. “Don’t crush it.”
“I’ve got control,” Danny said. “If I didn’t, your big guy’d be on the way to the hospital with a compound fracture.”
Jeremy dropped the disc into his palm and Danny made a show of carefully tucking it into the watch pocket of his jeans. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Hey, I didn’t humiliate him in front of the blowfish, so it’s not like I undermined his authority on the door,” Danny said.
“Bullying is about the only thing Rakishi knows how to do well,” Jeremy said. “And like all bullies, it’s always good he gets a reminder now and then that he’s not the top of the food chain, that there’s always somebody tougher and it might not be who you’d expect. Also, like you said, no harm done. But all the same, here’s a tip for you, Dan-man: what Rakishi does isn’t personal. You shouldn’t take it personally.”
Danny glanced at the screen where some more tourists were arguing with Rakishi.
“Only blowfish take it personally.”
“Oh.” Danny dipped his head, feeling sheepish again. “Got it, Jeremy.”
“Blowfish,” Jeremy continued, almost talking over him, “take everything personally. They don’t understand. They think the world’s out to get them when, actually, the world doesn’t even know they’re there.” Pause. “Sorry. Quantum stuff tends to bring out the philosopher in me. Maybe it has something to do with the butterfly effect. Can I see your arm again?”
Danny obliged, letting him run his fingers all over it again before turning his attention to Danny’s hand, palpating it in a very thorough, pointed way, as if he were looking for something he knew was hidden inside.
“Now, you understand that when the military makes something like this, they always intend it as a weapon,” he said, holding Danny’s hand a little closer to his face as he felt his palm. He suddenly bent Danny’s fingers into an imitation gun shape and aimed it at an antique paper shredder in the far corner of the room. “Try shooting that, see what happens.”
“Try shooting it how?” Danny said.
“It’s your military grey-market arm. Think it, or say ‘bang-bang,’ or something. Didn’t you look at that part of the manual?”
“There was a whole bunch of stuff on how to hurt, torture, or kill someone with one bare hand so I kinda skipped it.”
Jeremy glanced at him. “Pacifist?”
“Actually, it was just grossing me out,” Danny confessed, feeling slightly embarrassed.
“In the future, you should try not to turn down free knowledge, no matter what kind it is,” Jeremy said, aiming his hand at the shredder again and experimentally pressing his knuckles. “Most stuff you want to find out ends up being pretty expensive. Whatever you can get for free could come in handy later, you know?”
Danny disengaged his hand and flexed the fingers. “Don’t you think fooling with a possibly loaded weapon you have no idea about could be a real expensive free shooting lesson?”
Jeremy’s smile was unexpectedly sunny. “You’re learning.” The smile vanished just as suddenly, leaving his bony, wizened face so deadpan that Danny wondered if he had just hallucinated. “Be careful out there tonight. Tell Vic I said be careful.”
“I will,” Danny said. “Anything else?”
Jeremy seemed mildly surprised by the question. “No,” he said and sat down to pick up where he’d left off with the Chinese food.
The street outside Vic’s had gotten busier, more populated with the usual mix of urban survivors, suburban pretenders, and a few tourists who thought they could handle some adventure. Maybe they could. In any case, they could afford it, and there was no shortage of people to sell it to them. The suburban geeks, though, they were all looking a little nervous. It was past time for them to head for the old all-day indoor parking garage, fire up that sport utility vehicle, and hurry back to the ‘burbs before something actually happened, Danny thought, amused. One of them, a tall, plump young guy who looked like a college student, seemed to be trying to get up the nerve to approach the tattoo artist having a smoke in the doorway of Skin Music. Same woman as before. Her gaze met Danny’s and he saw her mouth twitch in a brief, secret display of amusement. She knew Joe College was there and what he was up to and she was having a great time making him even more nervous by being so completely oblivious to him. And now she had Danny to share the joke with her. He pressed his lips together so hard they hurt. What would she think, he wondered, if he told her no one had ever shared the joke with him before, at least, not like this? That instead of meeting his gaze, women always looked away casually but very quickly, so that he might be fooled into thinking they hadn’t looked at him in the first place and so weren’t looking away from his deformity. What would she think if, instead of just smiling secretly back at her, he told her that?
