Connie Willis - Fire Watch

“Boy, you’re sure wadgetty,” Brad said. “And you know why? Because you don’t have a gal of your own. Tell you what, you pick out one of mine, and I’ll give her to you. How about Sue?”

Ulric walked over to the window. “I don’t want her,” he said.

“I bet you don’t even know which one she is,” Brad said.

I don’t, Ulric thought. They all sound exactly alike. They use interface as a verb and support as an adjective. One of them had called for Brad and when Ulric told her he was over at Research, she had said, “Sorry. My wetware’s nonfunctional this morning.” Ulric felt as if he were living in a foreign country.

“What difference does it make?” Ulric said angrily. “Not one of them speaks English, which is probably why they’re all dumb enough to think they’re engaged to you.”

“How about if I get you a gal who speaks English and you honeyfuggle Sally Mowen for me?” Brad said. He turned to the terminal and began typing furiously “What exactly do you want?”

Ulric clenched his fists and looked out the window. The dead cottonwood under the window had a kite or something caught in its branches. He debated climbing down the tree and walking over to Mr. Mowen’s office to demand an apartment.

“Makes no never mind,” Brad said when he didn’t answer. “I’ve heard you oratin’ often enough on the subject.” He typed a minute more and hit the print button. “There,” he said.

Ulric turned around.

Brad read from the monitor, “‘Wanted: Young woman who can generate enthusiasm for the Queen’s English, needs to use correct grammar and syntax, no gobbledy-gook, no slang, respect for the language. Signed, Ulric Henry.’ What do you think of that? It’s the spittin’ image of the way you talk.”

“I can find my own ‘gals,’” Ulric said. He yanked the sheet of paper as it was still coming out of the printer, ripping over half the sheet in a long ragged diagonal. Now it read, Wanted: Young woman who can generate language. Ulric H.”

“I’ll swop you horses,” Brad said. “If this don’t rope you in a nice little filly, I’ll give you Lynn when she gets back. It’ll cheer her up, after getting her name taken off the project and all. What do you think of that?”

Ulric put the scrap of paper down carefully on the table, trying to resist the impulse to wad it up and cram it down Brad’s throat. He slammed the window up. There was a sudden burst of chilly wind, and the paper on the table balanced uneasily and then drifted onto the windowsill.

“What if Lynn misses her plane in Cheyenne?” Ulric said. “What if she comes back here and runs into one of your other fiancees?”

“No chance on the map,” Brad said cheerfully “I got me a program for that, too.” He tore the rest of the paper out of the printer and wadded it up. “Two of my fiancees come callin’ at the same time, they have to come up in the elevators, and there’s only two of them. They work on the same signals, so I made me up a program that stops the elevators between floors if my security code gets read in more than once in an hour. It makes an override beep go off on my terminal, too, so’s I can soft-shoe the first gal down the back stairs.” He stood up. “I gotta go over to Research and check on the waste emissions project again. You better find yourself a gal right quick. You’re givin’ me the flit-flats with all this unfriendly talk.”

He grabbed his coat off the back of the chair and went out. He slammed the door, perhaps because he had the flit-flats, and the resultant breeze hit the scrap of paper on the windowsill and sailed it neatly out the window.

“Flit-flats,” Ulric mumbled to himself, and tried to call Mowen’s office. The line was busy.

Sally Mowen called her father as soon as she got home. “Hi, Janice,” she said. “Is Dad there?”

“He just left,” Janice said. “But I have a feeling he might stop by Research. He’s worried about the new stratospheric waste emissions project.”

“I’ll walk over and meet him.”

“Your father said to tell you there’s a press conference tomorrow at eleven. Are you at your terminal?”

“Yes,” Sally said, and flicked the power on.

“I’ll send the press releases for you so you’ll know what’s going on.”

Sally was going to say that she had already received an invitation to the press conference and the accompanying PR material from someone named Gail, but changed her mind when she saw what was being printed out on the printer. “You didn’t send me the press releases,” she said. “You sent me a bio on somebody named Ulric Henry. Who’s he?”

“I did?” Janice said, sounding flustered. “I’ll try it again.”

Sally held up the tail of the printout sheet as it came rolling out of the computer. “Now I’ve got a picture of him.” The picture showed a dark-haired young man with an expression somewhere between dismay and displeasure. I’ll bet someone just told him she thought they could have a viable relationship, Sally thought. “Who is he?”

Janice sighed, a quick, flustered kind of sigh. “I didn’t mean to send that to you. He’s the company linguist. I think your father invited him to the press conference to write press releases.”

I thought the press releases were already done and you were sending them to me, Sally thought, but she said, “When did my father hire a linguist?”

“Last summer,” Janice said, sounding even more flustered. “How’s school?”

“Fine,” Sally said. “And no, I’m not getting married. I’m not even having a viable relationship, whatever that is.”

“Your mother called today. She’s in Cheyenne at a NOW rally,” Janice said, which sounded like a non sequitur, but wasn’t. With a mother like Sally’s, it was no wonder her father worried himself sick over who Sally might marry. Sometimes Sally worried, too. Viable relationship.

“How did Charlotte sound?” Sally said. “No, wait. I already know. Look, don’t worry about the press conference stuff. I already know all about it. Gail somebody in publicity sent me an invitation. That’s why I came home for Thanksgiving a day early.”

“She did?” Janice said. “Your father didn’t mention it. He probably forgot. He’s been a little worried about this project,” she said, which must be the understatement of the year, Sally thought, if he’d managed to rattle Janice. “So you haven’t met anyone nice?”

“No,” Sally said. “Yes. I’ll tell you tomorrow.” She hung up. They’re all nice, she thought. That isn’t the problem. They’re nice, but they’re incoherent. A viable relationship. What on earth was that? And what was “respecting your personal space"? Or “fulfilling each other’s socioeconomic needs"? I have no idea what they are talking about, Sally thought. I have been going out with a bunch of foreigners.

She put her coat and her hat back on and started down in the elevator to find her father. Poor man. He knew what it was like to be married to someone who didn’t speak English. She could imagine what the conversation with her mother had been like. All sisters and sexist pigs. She hadn’t been speaking ERA very long. The last time she called, she had been speaking est and the time before that California. It was no wonder Sally’s father had hired a secretary that communicated almost entirely through sighs, and that Sally had majored in English.

Tomorrow at the press conference would be dreadful. She would be surrounded by nice young men who spoke Big Business or Computer or Bachelor on the Make, and she would not understand a word they said.

It suddenly occurred to her that the company linguist, Ulric Something, might speak English, and she punched in her security code all over again and went back up in the elevator to get the printout with his address on it. She decided to go through the oriental gardens to get to Research instead of taking the car. She told herself it was shorter, which was true, but she was really thinking that if she went through them, she would go past the housing unit where Ulric Henry lived.