Robert Bennett - The Company Man

“Yes.”

“Which unions?”

“Any unions. Trade unions. The ones they’re trying to make at McNaughton, for instance.”

“I’m no working man, Princeling.”

“You work very hard, Charlie. You’re always here.”

“I don’t think they’re going to make a guild of denners, then. Why you want to know about unions, Princeling? What patch of ground you got your ear to?”

“All of them. I’m just interested. Just curious.”

Charlie cocked an eyebrow. “You sniffing for Mickey Tazz?”

“What?”

“Mickey Tazz. He’s the union man out of the Shanties, or at least that’s the rumor. He’s the man with the shit-stirring stick.”

“No. No, I never heard of Mickey Tazz,” said Hayes. The pipegirl gently took his head and maneuvered it, her little fingers like ice. She brought the pipe up and Hayes sucked at it again. Numbing tendrils worked their way into his chest and then deep into his spine and up into the base of his brain. The light shuddered and yellowed like the soles of a man’s feet and the girl’s eyes were swallowed by inky blackness, some beautiful nocturnal creature with moth eyes and a pouting mouth waiting on his every word.

“I wouldn’t go sniffing for Tazz, Princeling,” said Charlie’s voice from far away. “Tazz is a hard boy. He’ll fuck you up good and proper. Maybe even more than you fuck yourself up, see?”

Someone began laughing, dry, smoky chuckles that rattled deep down in their chest. It took Hayes a moment to realize it was him.

“I see,” he said. “I see.”

Samantha awoke especially early to take the trolley from Newton down to McNaughton Southern Regional Office in Infield. She had read all she could about the trolley system, not willing to step on until she absolutely trusted it. After she woke she reviewed the stops and the timing, committed the schedule to memory, and then walked down to the station and reluctantly consented to be a passenger. Her planning quickly disintegrated as the malformed lump of machinery trundled up to the platform and released a rush of people that nearly bowled her over. The trolley did not look like a vehicle for transportation as much as it did a decrepit dance hall organ, covered in peeling gilding and bronze pipes. She clapped her hat to her head and squinted through the sea of bobbing heads to see the line number, and dashed aboard at the last moment. Once inside she shrank up against the wall as the vessel shuddered and lurched forward.

She watched as the dark stone walls began to fly by. It was like they were speeding over black waters. The other passengers took this with no reaction, coughing or fingering newspapers in the low light. From time to time a conductor shambled through the aisle, looking scruffily regal in his porter’s uniform, his epaulettes askew and one brass button missing. A dogend was stuck behind his left ear and he groused and hassled passengers for tickets. When he demanded Samantha’s he studied it and then returned it as though it had personally insulted him.

She came to Infield at eight minutes past six, fairly late by the schedule she had made for herself, and then headed off toward Southern Office, keeping to the route she had picked out the night before. She had taken the map with her, but the streets resembled the map in name only. What were straight lines on paper were meandering, dilapidated paths in real life. Shop fronts and home expansions tumbled off the sidewalk to squeeze roads into spaces just a few feet wide. In some places the streets ended entirely, without warning or explanation. And as she walked she began to realize there was something else wrong with the streets of Evesden, something more fundamental. After a while she realized it: there were no paving stones or cobblestones here. No seams, no cracks, no worn-down edges. The streets of Evesden were all smooth cement, almost like they were one huge piece, and the curbs were all sharp-cornered, having never seen the years of traffic common to other cities. She wondered what sort of machine could make a whole city block in one piece, especially when they were as tangled as this, and soon gave up, feeling somehow she had to be wrong.

By the time she arrived at Southern Office she was disoriented and somewhat sweaty, but still forty minutes early for her meeting. She stopped in a small cafe to collect herself, ordered a small cup of coffee that was too hot to sip, and then began to carefully make the proper corrections to her map. She was not sure if it was at all possible to make an accurate map of Evesden, as all those available seemed misinformed to at least some degree, but she was willing to try anyway.

It had been a strange trip here to Infield, but the journey to Evesden had been even stranger and longer. Samantha had never expected to be here, even under these circumstances. When she had been a child following her father from military base to military base in the East she’d heard of this wondrous city out on the edge of the ocean, but it’d never actually been real to her, at least no more real than Heaven or Fairyland. Then when she’d begun serving in the hospitals it had slowly become more present. Officers and engineers she had met in the service began getting bought out by the famous McNaughton Corporation, forever extending its grasp. “Turning company,” they’d called it, and it was always “the company,” never just “McNaughton.” There simply wasn’t another kind. And then when one once-corporal had mentioned in friendly conversation that she seemed to have a solid head on her shoulders and they could use her sort in the company, she’d found herself agreeing to a position and suddenly she was receiving communications from this mysterious jewel on the other side of the world.

When she’d been given her new assignment and transferred to Evesden she hadn’t been sure what to expect. To Samantha, McNaughton was synonymous with order and institution. She’d found her true calling in the arms of the company, trawling through their labyrinthine files and setting their information to rights, and they’d greatly appreciated her work. So she had expected the home city to be something new, a place ruled with intelligence, perception, and efficiency, a paragon of the ideals McNaughton valued and rewarded. Yet she’d found something very different. Evesden was the most confusing city she’d seen yet. You couldn’t walk a block and stay on the same street. Not even the maps made any sense. And how disappointed she’d been to find McNaughton treated rude, shabby little men as if they were the most important employees in the world, for no reason she could see.

Samantha sketched out her latest route but stopped as she questioned one adjustment. Then as she glanced around the cafe she noticed a blond, rumpled figure slouching in a booth by the windows. It was Hayes himself, a mountain of cigarette butts in the ashtray before him and an entire pot of coffee cooling beside it. He wore a curious pair of small blue spectacles that he kept pushing farther and farther up his nose. Stacks of files sat in a heap on the table and in the booth, one open in his lap. She recognized them as the ones she had prepared the day before for their first set of interview subjects.

Sighing inwardly, she stood and walked over to him and said, “Good morning, Mr. Hayes.”

He nodded slowly without taking his eyes off the file. He did not seem at all surprised to see her.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

Still he did nothing. One of his eyebrows may have twitched a bit, she wasn’t sure. Then he reached forward and salvaged one cigarette from the graveyard on the table and took a smoldering drag. He vanished behind a cloud of foul smoke. Samantha turned her head away as it drifted toward her.