Dancing in Dreamtime (14 page)

Lyla quickly extinguished the painting, drew him back into the hallway, and put her arms around as much of him as she could encompass. “I'm sorry, sweetheart, but you wouldn't have believed me if I'd only told you about it.”

“What the devil—” he began, but he was too dazed to formulate a question. He sympathized with the rats, which now lay on their sides, paws outstretched, bellies swollen.

“MEGA programmed into your sky-show a vibration that stimulates the hypothalamus—the hunger center in the brain,” Lyla explained. “You get a more concentrated charge in here than you would in a mall, but this gives you an idea of the effect.”

“They can
do
that?”

“Oh, yes. They've been doing it for nine or ten years, with the government's blessing.”

“To keep everybody hungry?”

She nodded. “Twenty-four hours a day. In every mall, shuttle, stadium, and dome.”

“But not at the base?” he said, thinking of the windowless buildings at Fort Hoosier.

“No, our heads must be clear. Protecting national security, you know.”

He surveyed the engorged rats. After a few weeks of such eating, they would all need slenderizing operations. From trough to needle. Then back to trough. With a stab of insight, he understood—food shops and slenderizing parlors, Cravin' Haven and Sleek of Araby—a closed circuit of gluttony and shame to make the cash registers ring.

“Do you know how it works?” he demanded.

“I'm afraid I do,” said Lyla. “I helped develop the technology.”

“You? For the malls?”

“No, for the military. It was supposed to be used in war. But the Pentagon decided it wouldn't incapacitate enemies. So they licensed hunger to the merchants.”

“What did they come up with instead?”

“Lust, anxiety, paranoia, depression, and hallucination proved to be more disruptive.”

“All of that came from your research?”

“Indirectly. It turns out by modulating the beam you can play the brain like a piano.”

“That's
evil
.” He backed away in disgust and hurried down the hall.

“Thurgood,” she called after him, using his real name, the one she sometimes whispered when they were making love. He did not stop. She caught up with him in the living room. “I could be court-martialed for showing you my little demonstration with the rats,” she said. “But I needed to share this with someone outside Psy-Ops, and you're the only person I can trust.”

Without answering, he slumped onto the couch.

“Maybe I should have left you in the dark,” she said.

He glared at her. “How can you go to the lab every day, knowing what your research is doing to people?”

“I have no say over how my research is used.”

“Then you should have quit.”

“Maybe so. Maybe I will.” She sat beside him on the couch. “But hasn't your art been used to manipulate people?”

“I had no way of knowing,” he objected.

“You didn't know the technical details, but you knew MEGA owns both ends of the food-and-fat cycle, all those franchises with their stupid names. You knew your paintings were helping to lure people into food shops and slenderizing parlors.”

“I never—” he began. Then he faltered into silence, for Lyla was right. He was as much a captive of MEGA as she was of the Pentagon. She had chosen to look the other way when her science was misused, and he had done the same with his art.

“Thurgood?” she said, cuddling against him, sobbing. “Sweetheart?”

He drew her close and spoke quietly. “It's time for both of us to quit what we've been doing and find work we can believe in. Meanwhile, I'd better get out from under those appetite rays and move in here with you.”

For supper there was kale salad, falafel, and yogurt. Though the meal was scrumptious, Thurgood—as he now thought of himself—could not clear his plate. Every bite reminded him of those rats and the munching passengers aboard the shuttle and the chewing faces at the counter in Cravin' Haven. As he toyed with the last of his food, Lyla said, “Keep this up, and you'll melt away to nothing.”

He laughed, relieved that they still loved one another. “Sure, like the Arctic sea ice.”

The image reminded him of the MEGA branding executive, her teeth glistening like tiny icebergs, and he was pitched into gloom once again. He wouldn't do any more Sleek of Araby skies. But what could he paint instead? Where could he get his murals shown?

Sensing this change in mood, Lyla said, “Never fear. We'll find ways to use our talents and brains that don't involve manipulating people.”

“It's scary, though. I wonder if I can still paint anything besides food.”

He rose to clear the table and load the dishwasher. He was handling the last plate when he noticed hairline cracks in the glaze. Immediately he set down the plate, rushed into the living room, grabbed the lightbrush, and began sketching a feathery lacework pattern on the ceiling.

Lyla drew close to him and gazed at the emerging design. “It looks like crystals of frost.”

“Right you are!” he cried. The cracked glaze had reminded him of frost-covered windows in his grandparents' farmhouse.
He could have shouted for joy. There were paintings in him still, preserved by memory and affection. Suddenly he thought of an idea so delicious that he began prancing around the living room, hooting with laughter.

“What is it?” Lyla spun about as he circled her in his lumbering dance.

“I want to broadcast one last sky!” He pointed at the ceiling. “Lovely, innocent frost. Only you'll doctor it up with your voodoo vibrations. Not hunger this time. No, no. This time it's going to be sex. The Sleek of Araby brings you an orgy! Think of it. The dome lights up, ice crystals thread across the screen, and people in malls around the world strip off their clothes, grab the nearest warm body, and tumble onto floors and countertops. Shoppers, gawkers, guards, teenagers, geezers—everybody coupling wildly! What do you say? That would put MEGA and the rest of them out of the brain-tampering business, wouldn't it?”

As he danced, his arms waving and beard wagging, Lyla gaped at him, like a bear-handler whose pet had gone berserk. “That's utterly crazy,” she said, laughing.

“So you'll do it, right? A little subversive science.” He whirled to a stop, bent down, and painted her face with kisses. “We could try it on the rats first, in case you need to work out any kinks. Or work in any kinks. Better yet, we could try it on ourselves. What do you say?”

For a moment her smile was uncertain, and then it brightened into glee.

Orlando Spinks meant no harm. You could have searched that dilapidated organ, his heart, without discovering any murderous hankerings. You could have shone searchlights into the basement of his brain without finding the least cobweb of malice. His intentions were as innocent as shoelaces. He merely wished to inject an element of wildness into the beasts he constructed for the Oregon City Disney.

Wildness, or at least the simulation of wildness, had been the Spinks family business for generations. Orlando had learned the trade of beast-engineering from his father, who had learned zoo-keeping from
his
father, who had stuffed animals for a living back in the days before the Enclosure when there had still been animals to stuff. Once the domes clamped down over the cities, and the travel-tubes bound the cities together in a global web, and extractors began mining the oceans and recyclers began filtering the air, and the Enclosure was sealed tight in all its manufactured perfection, Grandfather Spinks, who was inside, could no longer stuff the cadavers of animals, which were forever shut outside. He therefore abandoned taxidermy as a doomed craft, like blacksmithing, and went to work for the Oregon City Disney restoring moth-eaten bears and crocodiles. Tiring of the jovial owls and congenial tigers
that Grandfather left behind, Father Spinks introduced frankly imaginary beasts, such as unicorns and griffins and mermaids. By the time Orlando became chief engineer, the visitors who ambled through the disney no longer knew or cared which of the animals had once lived on Earth and which were imaginary.

Orlando's initial problem was in deciding what constituted wildness. He brooded on this question while puttering in his workshop, where Grandfather's collection of stuffed animal heads gazed down at him from the walls like a glum and moldering board of trustees. Was it simply filth that distinguished wild creatures from his robots? Shaggy fur swarming with vermin? Or was it stupidity, the inability to reason and talk? Viciousness? Unpredictability? A yen for howling in the night?

He discussed these conjectures with his apprentice, a mop-haired girl of twelve with ingenious fingers and foxy eyes.

“I'd vote for filth as a starter,” the girl suggested.

“But what shall we use for dirt?” said Orlando.

“Don't you worry, I'll find some.”

Before he could object, she was off in search of dirt, pulling a wagon. Today her honey-colored pigtails were coiled into the shape of a beehive, and convincing bees zipped in the air about her head. She had painted her face and arms with raspberry splotches to simulate stings. The pedbelt riders—who would never have seen actual bees, but who could recognize eccentricity from a kilometer away—shouldered aside to give her room.

If anywhere in this immaculate floating city a bucketful of dirt had escaped the cleansers and recyclers, Orlando felt confident she would retrieve it. Her name was Mooch. He had first encountered her one Sunday in the lion's den, her lower half protruding from
the alpha lion's mouth. The jaws were programmed to open and shut in synchrony with recorded roars, but the girl had jammed the mechanism, and the lion's rubber teeth clamped tight about her midriff. Instead of hanging slack or jerking in terror, her legs—clad in baggy purple trousers—stood firmly planted on the cage floor. In place of the lion's voice, there issued from the cavernous throat a child's bemused humming.

When he pried her loose she lambasted him for having stuffed the lion's gut with gears instead of lungs and bowels. “You've even got him saying silly speeches between roars,” she griped. “Don't you know lions couldn't talk? And if they could, they'd have talked about sunlight or the taste of antelope, not about safaris. You need a helper, somebody who knows the beasts. Somebody who's read all the animal books, watched nature feelie films, tromped through hologram jungles. Somebody like me. Make me your apprentice and we'll turn this disney into a place that will stand people's hair on end.”

At this point in their initial interview the girl extended one small hand, greasy from the lion's jaw. Instinctively grasping it, Orlando felt the nimbleness in the fingers, saw the shrewd eyes measuring him as if he were one of the mechanized exhibits.

“Then it's a deal,” she said. “Call me Mooch.”

In fact Orlando had been searching for an apprentice, whom he could teach the art of beast robotics. Since he had scored too low to qualify for breeding, he would never father a child, so he was content when the girl emerged from the lion's jaw and ensnared him in her dizzy speech. Officials at the city orphanage were glad to let him claim her, for Mooch was the slipperiest foundling they had ever tried to corral. She would sneak from the dormitory and ride the belts or creep through engine rooms in the deepest levels
of the city or poke about the disney, as she had been doing on the day when the lion bit her.

Thus Orlando was not surprised when she returned from her dirt search with the wagon full of dust, grit, straw, balls of hair, and sundry obscure items of filth. While Mooch plastered the animals with this grime, Orlando posted messages on the electric signs explaining to visitors that such squalor was typical of beasts in the wild. He also took the occasion to rearrange the exhibits. Father Spinks had displayed the beasts alphabetically, so that dragons stood next to dinosaurs, griffins next to giraffes. However beasts used to array themselves in the wilds, Orlando felt certain they would not have done so alphabetically.

“Why don't we put the forest creatures with other forest creatures,” Mooch proposed, “and all the river beasts together, the snow leopard with the abominable snowman, and so on?”

“You tell me what goes with what, and I'll shuffle them,” agreed Orlando, who was a genius at engineering but rather in the dark in matters of biology.

Since there was no distinction between workday and play-day within the Enclosure, the disney never closed, which meant Orlando had to shuffle the exhibits while patrons watched. The temporary separation of beasts from their labels led to confusion. He might be wheeling a polar bear onto a foam iceberg, say, while Mooch danced alongside smearing the fur with goo, and a tourist would holler, “What did that skunk used to eat?”

Indeed, as the filth began to ripen, many of the beasts were mistaken for skunks. More than one school child yelled out rude variations on the question, “Why do these mechos stink?”