Alan Foster - Exceptions to Reality

“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 therear 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.