Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

The data was there, for them to notice and fear, or ignore and pay the price. She would give them that much warning. The normals might find a way to clean-gene people after they were grown; they might even set Fellows to work on the problem and let them share the benefits. Lais wondered at her own naïveté, that after everything a small part of her still hoped her people might finally be forgiven.

She left it all behind, even the data cubes, and went back out onto the mall.

A hovercar whirred a few streets back; sharp beams from its searchlights touched the edges and corners of buildings. She walked faster, then ran painfully, past firmly-shut doors to a piece of sculpture that doubled as a sitting park. She crawled into the deepest and most enclosed alcove she could reach. Outside she could hear the security car intruding on the pedestrian mall. The sucks passed without suspecting her presence, not recognizing the sculpture as a children’s toy, a place to hide and climb and play, a place for transients to sleep in good weather, a place that, tonight, was Lais’ alone.

There was a tiny window by her shoulder that cut through a meter of stone to the outside. Moonlight polished a square of the wall that narrowed, crept upward, and vanished as the moon set.

Lais put her head on her knees and focused all her attention on herself, tracing lines of fatigue through her muscles to extrapolate her reserves of stamina, probing at the wells of pain in her body and in her bones. She had become almost accustomed to betrayal by the physical part of herself; but she was still used to relying on her mind. The slight tilt from a fine edge of alertness was too recent for her to accept. Now, forcing herself to be aware of everything she was, she was frightened by the changes to the edge of panic. She closed her eyes and fought it down, wrestling with a feeling like a great grey slug in her stomach and a small brown millipede in her throat. Both of them retreated, temporarily. Tears tickled her cheeks, touched her lips with salt; she scrubbed them away on her rough sleeve.

She felt marginally better. It had occurred to her that she felt light-headed and removed and hallucinatory because of hunger, not because of advancing pathological changes in her brain; that helped. It was another matter of relying on feedback from a faulty instrument. The thought of food was still nauseating. It would be harder to eat the longer she put it off, but, then, perhaps it was too late to matter anymore.

The sitting park restored her, as it was meant to; for her it was the silence and isolation, the slight respite from cold and the clean twisting lines of it, whatever reasons others had for responding. She would have liked to stay.

She walked a long way toward the edge of the bazaar. Her knees still hurt—it took her a few minutes to remember when she had fallen, and why; it seemed a very long time before—and her legs began to ache. Resting again, she sat on a wall at the edge of the bazaar, at the edge of the mountaintop, looking down over a city of pinpoint lights (holes in the ground to hell? but the lights were gold and silver, not crimson). The lights led in lines down the flanks of the mountain, dendrites from the cell of the city and its nucleus of landing field. She knew she could get out of Highport. She believed she could run so far that they would not catch her until too late; she hoped they would never find her, and she hoped her body would fail her before her mind did, or that she would have courage and presence enough to kill herself if it did not or if the pain grew great enough to break her. All she really had to do was get to the bottom of the mountain, and past the foothills, until she reached lush jungle and great heat and a climate like an incubator, where life processes are faster and scavengers prowl, and the destruction of decomposition is rapid and complete. The jungle would conspire with her to deny the Institute what she considered most precious, knowledge. She slipped off the wall and started down the hill. Before her the sky was changing from midnight blue to grey and scarlet with the dawn.

FIRST I should tell you about our manager. He weighed about 300, composed of equal parts of grease and fat, like our burgers, except that our burgers weigh nothing. I would say that his most annoying habit (aside from chain smoking and making us counter girls pick up his butts, so he could look up our uniforms, or down them, or through them) was to put an inch of orange drink in a cardboard cup every morning, fill it up with vodka, and call it a screwdriver. “Screwdriver,” he would say, wiping his greasy chin. After two of these, he was ready to face the day, lying on his back in the storeroom. “Never skip breakfast,” he’d say, popping a french fry into his greasy mouth.

One day he delayed his breakfast to introduce me to a new girl. The last one had quit because of heat exhaustion aggravated by a growing fear of food. It had been pitiful to watch her. When fishburgers were introduced, she’d been robbed of the last form of protein she could still stomach. She’d show up for work with her eyeliner smeared across her bloodshot lids. She’d unwrap patties in her little hands and sweep a limp strand of blond hair out of her face, biting at her lip frost to get the smell out of her mouth. Some of us got it, and she got it bad. Finally, one noon rush, she threw her cage of fries down into the boiling grease and staggered out the service door, muttering, “The pickles are dyed green. The Coke is dyed brown. My hair is dyed blond. I’m turning into a cheeseburger.” She never even picked up her last paycheck. We did smell like cheeseburgers. Our uniforms are the same white as the paper bags. I don’t want to think about it.

“This is Trudy,” says the manager with a greasy hand on her shoulder. “She’s going to be a novice here for a while, so we’ll have to show her around.”

Your hair is greasy , I thought at the manager. Even your pimples are greasier than my pimples.

The manager ran his hand down his tie. “Trudy, this is Maureen. She calls herself Girl Burger.”

Even your eyes are greasy , I thought.

Trudy walks on over to me, looking the place up and down. I don’t mind admitting she did things for that starchy white shift I never conceived of. The weight I have in my rump and thighs, she has elsewhere. Her hair was short and black. Her eyeshadow was green and premeditated. “I worked at a burger place before,” she said, pretending to chew gum. “You can call me Burger Queen.”

I could see right then we were going to get along.

Burger Queen turned out to be excellent with shakes and male customers. We spent our lunch hours at the chicken place across the highway, conspiring to perfect a code for insulting the manager and yelling orders at the same time.

It was late one night shift. Everyone else had deserted. I was mopping the linoleum when I heard a scraping and whimpering at the service door. I opened the door and swung the mop into the thing’s face.

With a sort of liquid snort, it eeled under my arm and fell in a heap against the grill. It looked like a tall, stringy man made of gritty, burnt hamburger meat in jeans, track sneakers, and a dirty undershirt. Its hair was a tangle of french fries. Its mouth, a wedge of onion smeared around the edges with ketchup. Its eyes were pickle slices, and it had no nose.

Since it wasn’t making any moves, but only gibbering with its little head cocked sideways on the end of its neck, I beat it with my mop into the walk-in freezer and slammed the door. I figured the guy on the morning shift would attend to it the next day. I was on overtime already.