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by Tina Connolly
Science Fiction, 13 pages.
Originally Published in Son and Foe, 2005
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“Days are very explosive.”
“Were.”
“Were, my unwrinkled ass. Bodies are the only packaging.”
“Merely the most convenient. No longer the only.” Mico rose from his seated position—crosslegged on the carpet—and walked with unfaltering steps to the ancient whiteboard that covered two walls of his office. He had rigged up the five microphones for his communication system himself; had systematically adjusted the soundproofing, the distortion levels, so that those with whom he spoke could have no inkling of his movements around his office—and yet again he reached up to the system controls above the whiteboard, touched it with a finger, and compared the settings with a black-inked schema scribbled on the wall.
The disembodied voice spoke again from the speakers in the ceiling. “Don’t you remember Yuyu?”
As Mico remembered every gamble he lost. “The island.”
“The continent—”
“Whatever.” A pause like a silent wink. “I wasn’t alive then.”
“Please.”
Another pause. Mico briefly imagined his partner and opponent in the blank office a continent away, weighing greed and risk, the only outward sign a thumb and ring finger tugging on an ear. If he strained his ears, he thought he could almost hear the skritch, skritch. Or was he fooling himself? Was it static? Nevertheless, he knew the other’s mind well enough. It was calculating. Desiring.
Temptation thrived in the blank spaces between words, the white lines between paragraphs. Mico would not disturb its growth.
* * *
Yargretta eyed the door open and entered the compact apartment. She kicked off her patent heels, scraped them with a stockinged foot into a pile of other spiked shoes.
Mico emerged from his study, pulling the door shut behind him. Two months a year, the apartment received eight minutes of sunlight just before sunset; one of those segments was starting now, and it lit up the woman in the doorway. He smiled at the glowing vision of his lovely wife de-businessing. “You’re looking particularly young this evening.”
“Yes.” Yargretta unpinned her fashionably large canvas hat and threw it onto the loveseat. Down came her too-tight bun, the hairpins tossed in the chipped pink saucer on the felted table. Her fingers ran along her scalp, loosening her hair from its memorized constraint. “They finally replaced Jarcy at the office. I can go back to doing two people’s work instead of four.”
“So work finally made you happy.”
“It’s all relative.”
* * *
“I know you understand that... I want to finance this,” said the voice. “Would want to. If.”
“If you can be sure.”
The deep voice was stern. “I can’t afford any more negative publicity.”
All publicity is good, Mico said, in lip movements only, subvocalizing even in the empty room. But the conversation was sliding smoothly along the chosen orbit. Criticism would draw it off course.
But for Mico, the pause was a caesura; time enough for his gaze to be drawn from the controls to the whiteboard; irresistably and compulsively. Down, past where the word “Fourier?” had been scribbled, years ago, down past that initial waveform analysis, down to where an “X” marked the start of Mico’s calculations of the past two years.
Even alone in his office he should not give into such a compulsion. The obssession to check and re-check, the urge to pace—the obvious displays of fear must be eliminated. It took all Mico’s self-control to maintain the poker face in public, play the games the way they should be played. But here, in the office—even though he should still thwart his addictions, here—here his long fingers stiffened and twitched with tension. His right calf tensed, strained and expanded—and then as suddenly, relaxed.
Mico began going through the calculations one more time.
* * *
Yargretta picked up a grease-stained deck of cards from their square, felted table. Idly shuffled it with one hand, set it back down. Picked up a celluloid die and rolled it around in her fingers.
Mico watched this old sign of Yargretta’s nervousness and could not decide whether it was unconscious, or intentional. Either possibility quickened his heartbeat. He’d helped her eliminate such obvious displays long ago.
“Do you remember how we met?”
It was always on his mind. The beginning of their passion. The beginning of his double life. A thread, a shock of excitement shivered across the back of his head and another -- [End of Preview.]