Exceptions to Reality (21 page)

The engineer exhaled slowly. “Do they know about the leak?”

“No.” Cassie stared at him. “That I couldn’t tell them. Nobody else is up to that, either. They’ll find out when the crew goes in. There isn’t much hope, is there?”

“I’m afraid not. The rescue specs are working like maniacs, but even if the leak doesn’t get any worse, the air in there’ll be gone before they can cut the door. Morrie Reuschel was engineer on duty when it happened. We haven’t heard from him. If he’s that badly hurt, then the girl…” His words trailed off into inaudibility, foundering in despair.

“The only communication we have with the module is via its independent Module Lifesystems Monitor. It says it got wanged pretty good, but you know how much redundancy those suckers have built into them. It took stock of its losses and shifted all necessary functions to undamaged components outside the module. That’s the only reason we have some idea of what’s going on inside. One boardline survived the damage, so we’re still getting reports.”

The woman frowned. “But there’s no power to the module.”

“The section there is operating on standard multiple battery backup.”

“I know.” She leaned curiously over the console. “But it shouldn’t be. It’s designed to render a report and then shut itself down to preserve programming and functions if it loses primary power. Something else is wrong. Has it requested repair instructions yet?”

“I would imagine.” Hedrickson checked a readout. “Yeah. Right here. Haven’t been sent out, though.”

“Why not?”

“Central’s dealing with more serious damage elsewhere.”

Chin straightened. “Instead of cycling through shutdown the way it’s supposed to, it keeps requesting repair instructions. There’s got to be a reason.” She thought furiously. “Can you override Central from here?”

Hedrickson frowned at her. “I think so, but you’d better have a damn good reason for messing with prescribed damage-control procedure.”

“As a matter of fact I don’t have any reason at all. But it seems as if the Molimon does. If its internal diagnostics are functioning well enough to tell you what’s wrong, can you send it the necessary instructions on how to fix itself?”

“Why bother? Just so I’ll have something to tell the board of inquiry.”

“I just told you: It’s got to have a reason for not shutting itself down.”

Hedrickson looked dubious. “You’ll take the responsibility?”

“I’ll take the responsibility. See what you can do, Karl.”

The technician bent to work. Cassie stood staring at the wall. Halfway around the station the darkened, leaking module swung precariously on the end of its access tube, to all intents and purposes dead along with everything it contained. Dead except for one semi-independent device, which was disobeying procedure.

Computers do not act on whims, she thought. They respond only according to programming. Something was affecting the priorities of the Molimon unit that supervised the hydroponics module. But it could not proceed without apposite human directives.

Sometimes you just had to have faith in the numbers.

The darkness and gathering chill did not trouble the Molimon. It was immune to all but the most extreme swings of temperature. Reserve power continued to diminish. Still it did not commence shutdown.

Information on how to effect necessary repairs finally began to arrive. Gratefully the incoming instructions were processed. The problem with the critical downed memory was located and a solution devised. Memory reintegration proceeded smoothly, enabling the Molimon to bypass one of the downed molly drives.

The system component that most concerned the Molimon reported borderline functional. It sent out a command, to no response. Clearly the trouble was more serious than anyone, including its programmers, had anticipated.

That did not mean the problem was insoluble. It merely required a period of careful internal debate. The Molimon’s internal voting architecture went to work. One processor opted for procedure as written, even though that had already failed. The second suggested an alternative. Noting the failure of the first, processor three sided with two. Having thus analyzed and debated, it tried anew.

This time the door responded. Like all internal airtights it contained its own backup power cell. Running the instructions exhausted the self-contained cell’s power, but the Molimon was not concerned with that. It wanted the door shut. Opening it again would be a matter for future programs.

Internal alarms began to go off. It had spent entirely too much time operating when it ought to have been shutting down. There was insufficient power to preserve programming. When it shut down now, it would do so with concurrent loss of memory, even though all critical information would be effectively preserved on the surviving mirrored molly drives. The Molimon was not bothered by this knowledge. It had fulfilled another, more important aspect of its programming.

Enough reserve strength remained for it to send a last message to a slave monitor. Composition of the message caused the Molimon some difficulty despite the fact that it had been programmed to accept and respond in plain English.

Then its backup power gave out completely.

Amy was waiting patiently next to the mixing vats when they found her. The jammed lock door gave way with a reluctant groan. Shouts, then laughter, then tears filled the hitherto silent module. She looked very small and vulnerable wrapped up in the dead engineer’s jacket.

Cassie Chin watched the reunion, wiping at her eyes as she listened to the wild exclamations of delight and joy. Mike Macek was tossing his daughter so high into the air, Cassie was afraid that in the limited gravity he was going to bounce her off the ceiling. Her expression turned somber as she watched others kneel beside the body of Morrie Reuschel.

Eventually her attention shifted to the rearmost of the module’s airtight doors. Somehow the Molimon had managed to get it to shut, effectively sealing off the air leak in the section beyond. That action had preserved the remaining atmosphere in the other three-fourths of the module until the rescue team had succeeded in punching its way in. She regarded the lifesaving door awhile longer, then turned to business.

Karl Hedrickson was waiting for her.

“Look at the damn thing. It’s half bashed in.” He pointed at the debris-laden floor. “Looks like that big wrench hit it.”

Cassie sighed. “Let’s get the rear panel off.”

Their first view of the Molimon’s guts had Hedrickson shaking his head. “These mollys must’ve gone down first. Then I don’t know what else.”

“But after it fixed itself it figured out how to seal off the leak and stayed online long enough to get the job done.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Batteries?”

Hedrickson ran a quick check, made a face. “Dead as an imploded mouse.”

Chin pursued her lips. “Then the programming’s gone. I don’t mind that except it means we’ll never learn why it didn’t follow accepted procedure and commence preservation shutoff when the primary power went down.”

Hedrickson turned to the nearest monitor, plugged in a power cell, and brought the Molimon unit online. “Nothing here,” he told her after several minutes of inquiry. “No, wait a sec. There is a shutdown indicator. It knew it was going.” He frowned. “The message is in nonstandard format.”

Chin moved to join him. Lights were coming on all around them as repair crews began to restore station power to the hydroponics module.

“What do you mean, it’s ‘nonstandard’?”

Hedrickson ran a speculative finger along the top of the dead Molimon. His voice was flat. “Read it for yourself.”

Chin looked at the softly glowing monitor he was holding. She expected to see the words
Shutdown procedure completed.

Instead she saw something else. Something that was, after all, only an indication of programming awareness. Nothing more. What it said was this.

LITTLE GIRLS ARE NOT REDUNDANT.

Panhandler

The stories I tell tend not to be controversial. That doesn’t mean I could not write a story about extreme sexual deviancy or serial murder or genocide or based on any one of a dozen other “dangerous” themes. In point of fact, I have written such stories. They are rejected with numbing regularity, like the one about the first humans to land on Mars. The crew is composed of multiple amputees afflicted with a variety of incurable terminal diseases, all of whom are eager volunteers for the one-way mission. Too much logic, I suppose, for the taste of editors charged with buying for the supposedly “daring” genre of science fiction.

Most of us have read about how really grim are the original versions of Grimm’s fairy tales. The bulk of traditional children’s stories, in fact, frequently contain mention of everything from bestiality to mass murder. The trend in retelling seems to favor sanitization over authenticity in order to protect fragile young minds. One exception is the TV show
The Simpsons,
whose writers are intelligent enough to recognize that they, too, were once young and that contrary to the pious protestations of those who see their sacred duty as supervising the maturation of children not their own, children can handle grim fairy stories without being bludgeoned into gibbering insanity by such tales’ perceived excesses. Or as Bart and Milhouse joyfully and innocently chant in one episode, “Car-toon vi-o-lence, car-toon vi-o-lence!”

Itchy and Scratchy are contemporaneously copyrighted, so I could not use them to illustrate my point. The utilization of another older and even more famous children’s trope, however, still unnerved the publishers of the anthology in which this story originally appeared. Names had to be changed to protect, if not the innocent, at least the perceived threat to the almighty corporate balance sheet.

The title of the story, by the way, is a triple pun…

Harbison pulled the
rear flap of the overcoat’s thick, heavy collar up against his neatly trimmed hair-line so that it covered the fuzz and the bare skin on the back of his neck. With the passage of time the morning’s icy rain was turning to sleet as the incoming storm layered the city with a cold, damp mucus. In response to the glooming clouds, lights over storefronts and on billboards were automatically warming to life. Some flickered uncertainly in the murk, as if confused by stalking weather masquerading as night.

The park lay to his right, an oasis of dull green even in winter. Awaiting still-distant spring, trees slept in silence, wooden obelisks scarred by switchbladed hieroglyphs. Bundled up like trolls, old ladies scuttled along the slick sidewalks, heavy woolen mufflers making their necks wrestler-thick. Businessmen preoccupied with affairs of the ledger long-strided between the heated hobbit-holes of favorite luncheon spots and the blandness of dead-end lives they knew no longer had meaning. At this time of midday you could tell which ones were going to lunch and which ones returning to work, Harbison knew. Those who had already eaten were blushing from the effects of having consumed too much rich food and depressed at having to repopulate their myriad cubicles in the tall buildings, while those on their way to indulge their expense accounts at fancy restaurants exuded anticipation like sweat.

He was on lunch hiatus, too, but it wasn’t food he was after. Prowling the clammy streets, he sought satiation of a different sort. Striving to maintain as much anonymity as he could, he tucked his own muffler up over his chin and pulled the brim of his fedora lower on his forehead. That way, little more than his eyes and mouth showed. Both were eager.

The boys hung out on Eighteenth Street, opposite the park. There were not many of them, but there were enough. Practiced at pretending to be waiting for the bus, for friends, for a pickup game of basketball or street hockey, for anything but the tricks who sought them out, they worked hard at avoiding the attentions of the police. As a general rule the local cops did not bother them. In a city plagued by the attentions of genuinely bad people, hookers of any gender tended to be overlooked by the police until and unless some fool of a news reporter decided to guerrilla some video with a shaky, handheld camera so he/she could fill three minutes of the six o’clock report with human interest of the shameful kind. It was a cheap and easy way to sensationalize the news, maybe grab the attention of a few bored channel surfers and push those enervating reports about thousands dead of starvation in Ethiopia to the late-night closing minute.

Following the occasional police roundup, executed to show the powers-that-be that the boys in blue were On Top of the Situation, those boys and girls unlucky enough to be apprehended promptly got out on bail and went back to work. The cops—the ones of good sense and duty, anyway—went back to actually trying to protect the public.

Harbison didn’t need any protection. He knew his vices and how to slake them. He was their prisoner, and the boys on Eighteenth Street were happy to fulfill his needs and take his money. Usually he found someone quickly, terms were agreed upon much faster than in his law office, and it was all over and done with in time for him to still grab a relaxed meal at Carrington’s.

He did not have to approach anyone. All they needed to come flocking was to see the need and the hunger in his eyes. Impatient, he checked them out one by one, like a farmer evaluating prize calves at a country auction. This one too old, that one tweaking, the next too needy, his friend too mired in depression. Harbison ran through them by walking past them, having long since mastered the ability to ignore the filmy haunt that veiled their old-young eyes. They were nothing more than fruit in a market, and he had the time and the money to pick and choose the fresh from the rotting.

He was about to make a deal with a lanky recent immigrant from the heartland, all soulful brown eyes and agile midwestern hands, when he saw the boy in the back.

He was leaning up against the stone wall of the office building, one knee raised, foot propped against an outcropping of early-twentieth-century granite, and openly smoking a joint. He was short, maybe five-five or-six, lean but obviously muscular beneath his jeans and too-light-for-the-winter black leather jacket. The icy slush dribbling down from the sullen sky did not seem to bother him. Atypically, he was gazing off into the distance, ignoring the two or three other johns who were cruising the street offside the park. His eyes were a striking arctic blue. Wavy blond hair peeked out from beneath the brim of the backward cap that covered his head without warming it.

Harbison was drawn to him immediately.

The boy didn’t snuff out the joint, but he did look over as the lawyer approached. His attitude was an intriguing mix of bottled arrogance and heartrending vulnerability. The latter was a quality Harbison was accustomed to encountering in the boys he used, but the former was not. He immediately got down to business. He had to, if he was going to finish and still make lunch.

“How much?” he asked offhandedly. Those eyes. His own eyes strayed elsewhere. The boy didn’t object to the blatant inspection. It was expected, and clearly he was used to it.

“The usual?” The kid’s voice was high, sweet, girlish. Natural, somehow not yet broken, not a put-on. Better and better. Harbison nodded, struggling to contain his eagerness. “Twenty.”

Fair, the lawyer thought. Good. He wouldn’t have to waste time bargaining. “Needs to be quick. I’ve got a lunch appointment.” He indicated his wrist without exposing his watch. This was not a prudent location to flash a Piaget. “You got a place?”

The boy nodded. Flicking the stub of the joint onto the street, where the gathering cold slush instantly extinguished it, he turned his head toward the nearby alley. That made Harbison hesitate.

A grin creased the child-like face. Full of magic, it bordered on the angelic. The boy looked even younger than he doubtless was, Harbison mused. What an enchanting discovery.

“Got a little box in back,” the kid told him. “Propane heater. Mattress, chair. Doorway locks. Nice and private. I’m okay with spending the night there. You don’t have to, but then you don’t want to. It’ll do fine for what you want.”

Harbison was not convinced, but there was no way he was going to pass this up. He had to make a decision fast. Lunch beckoned. And the boy was slim, couldn’t weigh more than 110, 120. An utterly adorable adolescent. Remarkably his skin was as pale and unmarked as a baby’s, devoid of scars and needle marks. Not something one encountered every day on a less-traveled city street. Especially on this street.

“Okay, but no funny stuff.” He put a hand in an empty pocket. “I’ve got a taser.”

The grin lingered, humorless. “You ain’t payin’ enough for funny stuff.”

Smart, too, Harbison decided as he followed the boy into the alley. Not that he was paying for smarts. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Peter.”

Harbison choked back something akin to an amused response.

“No, really,” the boy told him. “Ironic, huh? Or poignant. Depends on your point of view, I guess.”

Something about the reply struck Harbison as out of the ordinary. Natural suspicion being a hallmark of his professional as well as his private life, he slowed his stride. “Just out of curiosity, kid, where’d you learn how to use that word?”

The boy stopped too and turned to face the curious lawyer. “What word?”

“Poignant.”
Turning slightly, Harbison indicated the street behind them. “The kids I meet up with here usually can’t get a handle on anything with more than four letters.”

Blue eyes narrowed slightly and hands rested challengingly on narrow hips. “You want to fucking talk or you want to get it on? I thought you were in a hurry.” The pose reminded Harbison of something, but he could not decide what. Then he saw the green shirt peering out from behind the battered leather jacket. It had a fringed hem. His gaze dropped. The shoes. They hadn’t registered at first. Now they did.

“Your toes must be freezing in those.”

Looking away, the boy muttered something obscene under his breath before his gaze returned to meet the lawyer’s. “What the fuck do you care about my friggin’ toes, Jack? You into feet or something?”

“You’re an actor, right?” Harbison wasn’t sure why he continued with the questions. Maybe because he had always been one to act on hunches, even in court. “When you’re not on the street picking up a few extra bucks for rent, you’re in a play. Or trying out for one.” He smiled reassuringly, confidently. “I think I know which play.”

“Oh, shit,” the boy muttered. His expression twisted. “Yeah, that’s right. Only, you know what, Jack? I’m gonna tell you something. Because every once in a while, for some reason, I just feel like telling somebody. For the hell of it. I’m not an actor, see, and it’s not a play. Not that it means anything, but my last name is one you already know. From the ‘play.’”

Harbison’s guard went up immediately. Either the kid was toying with him, and before time, or else he was going to prove difficult. The latter possibility did not concern Harbison overmuch. He’d had to deal with rants before. They rarely interfered with what he came for. Like all the others, the boy would eventually settle down. Because in the end, no matter how pissed off he got or for what reason, he would still want his money.

“It’s all right,” he said soothingly. “I don’t care what you do once we’ve concluded our business. I just thought, seeing the shirt and the shoes and all…”

“Turns you on, does it?” The boy was watching him steadily.

“A little maybe, yeah.”

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Sure I do. Hey, I think it’s great. Stay in character when you’re off stage. Ought to be good for business, anyway. I know a couple of guys who’d pay double just to have you do them in full costume.”

“I bet you do.” Raising one arm, the boy gestured to take in the alley, the street beyond, the vast, uncaring city. “You know why I’m stuck here, putting up with this shit? Putting up with marauding, predatory assholes like you?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Time’s a-wastin’, Harbison realized. He could still do this and make lunch. Assuming the kid knew his business.

“It’s all the fault of a certain fucking jealous little bitch. Since you’re so confident of what role I’m ‘acting’ in, I’m sure I don’t have to name her. Not the Brit twit, that’s ancient history. But last New Year’s I was in Times Square, and there was this little Puerto Rican chiquita and her friend, and they thought the hat and shirt and shoes were, like, oh so cute, you know? So, like, how about a threesome, to, like, celebrate the Neuva Año,
verdad
? Oh yeah, by the way, I’m bi. That bother you?”

“No,” Harbison admitted honestly.

“So we, like, went back to her place, and I showed them how to fly, in a manner of speaking, and that mini-bitch I can never seem to shake no matter where I go or how hard I try showed up at just the wrong moment. Being kind of preoccupied at the time, I’d forgotten all about her. I thought she’d be out boogeying with the fireworks—that’s one of her little SM things, you know? Man, was she pissed! So, no more fairy dust. I’m grounded until she gets her tiny little panties out of the knot they’re in.” Peering around, he took in his cheerless surroundings. “That was months ago, and I’m starting to wonder if she’s ever coming back, and, like, even an immortal’s got to eat, you know? I’m fucked if I’m gonna sling burgers for minimum. And with this not-growing-old thing, this fucking permanent youth, turns out I’m a boy-magnet to perverts like you.”

Harbison bristled. “Calling clients names is bad for business.”

“No shit?” Bold and completely unafraid, the boy approached until he was standing right up next to the older, bigger man. “You a lawyer or something?”

Harbison nodded. “Right now I need your services, but if you ever need mine…”

The lithe young male body spun around and back, a startlingly agile pirouetting leap that might have sprung straight off the stage at Lincoln Center. “Oh, right! That’s it, that’s the solution! We’ll sue her! Haul her blond little ass right into civil court. Give new meaning to the term
small claims
. With you and her together there, facing each other, there’d be two fairies facing the judge.” His tone darkened, like the weather. “Wouldn’t work, dude. And you ain’t licensed to practice where I come from.” His gaze rose skyward. “Damn but I miss the place. Forest, mermaids. No fucking snow. No pathetic, lonely bastards like you to have to squeeze for enough wampum to get a decent meal. Even that miserable homicidal son-of-a-bitch nemesis of mine at least has his crew to help him out of a jam.”