The Age of Sinatra, page 9
part #2 of Motorman Series
Dr. Burnheart lifted a buttock and gave a push. Hearing the flop of his stool in the pan, he wiped, then knelt to examine it. To his dismay he saw a white worm, hair-thin, wound in a knot and struggling to untie itself. “Oh, bugger, I’ve got them. Sergeant? Over here!”
“Just a moment. Can’t you see I’ve got my hands full?”
“Sorry, Sergeant.”
When it came time to inspect Dr. Burnheart’s specimen, the sergeant plucked the worm away from the stool with a small forceps, then held it up for all to see. “Attention, everyone! Attention! Regardez! This is the species you should all be looking for—tubularia Vinkii. It has two sides, as you can see, but only one surface. As yet, Valdosta is tubularia free. For the Ratt administration, it’s a shining example of what stringent sanitary measures can do for a people.”
“My vote is in his pocket,” Burnheart said. “Fight worms for a worm-free world,” Burnheart said. “I can believe in that.”
“Top notch,” said the Sergeant. “As soon as we land, you’ll get a strong dose of vermifuge.”
The sergeant examined Mrs. Moldenke’s stool, then Ophelia’s. “These look clean.” He sniffed them. “Oh, yes. Very nice. No worms here.” He moved along the line, sniffing pans.
A neutrodyne prisoner seated behind Mrs. Moldenke grunted, “My flocculus, it’s fruiting. Why don’t you Americans have a taste of green. It’s harvest time.”
“Suits me,” said Dr. Burnheart. “That fungu wasn’t exactly the cat’s meow, not even with a lot of powder on it.”
“I’d love some gland,” said Mrs. Moldenke.
Ophelia blew a bit of froth from the corner of her mouth. “I’m drooling for some,” she said
Using his fingernails, the neut tore open the rindlike outer skin of the flocculus, exposing a bite-sized, steaming green globe of meat. He held the flocculus out for Ophelia’s convenience. When she bit into the gland, the neut swooned. “Ahhh … the relief. The calming. …”
The process was repeated for Mrs. Moldenke, who remarked, “Divine,” and swallowed a mouthful of gland without chewing.
And again for Dr. Burnheart. “Ah, the best,” he said, savoring it, letting it remain in his mouth until it melted away. “Even at the Pisstown Glandfest, there is nothing to compare to this. Nonpareil in every way. Prime stuff. Good green, sir.”
The flocculus expelled a jet of air and retracted. “All gone for now,” the neut said. “Americans, there’s another lesson for you. Regardless of the law, you either eat the green when it ripens, or watch it shrivel and rot.”
“It could be canned in quantity and sold,” said Mrs. Moldenke. “Perhaps I should look into the possibility. There may be a profit in it. For you, for me. Edible paper was certainly a moneymaker for everybody.”
“A heavy purse in a neut’s pocket fast becomes a heavy curse,” the neut said. “During the Chaos, remember, a kernel of wheat was more valuable to us than all the diamonds in Indistan.”
“Suit yourself, I only thought—”
“Scheifs?!” A German banged his fist on the table. “I vanted zum green!”
“Swearing is a superfluity of naughtiness,” the sergeant said. “Don’t let me hear it again. If I do, I’ll bite off that tongue and nail it to your kraut head.”
“Vat if I half a vaiffer?”
“In that event, I’ll nail it to the head of a bystander. Either way you lose a tongue. So I’d curb it now and save that waiver for later.”
“Danke.”
“More than that. I trust you’ll promise to heed the Arvian teachings from this day forward. Night and day you’ll say, ‘We’ll watch and we’ll wait … our lamps trimmed and burning. We know not the hour, we know not the day. We know only this: the next Great Forgetting is well on its way.’”
“Yez, nacht und tag. Nacht und tag.”
PRESIDENT RATT WAS enjoying a buffet luncheon at the Squat ’n’ Gobble in Tesla Town when, across the street, an explosion at a guida factory left fifty neutrodynes with severe burns. Clouds of singed root-flour and hot poudrette fell to the sidewalk below. Neutrodyne workers and pedestrians, knowing no better, gawked at the spectacle and were blistered in the face. Some were blinded. One died of fright.
The President toured the ruins of the facility as soon as the fires were out. Gerald Hilter dogged him, firing questions. “Sir, fifty neuts burned. There were blindings, blisters, a death. What sort of action do you plan to take? This is the third ‘accidental’ explosion just in the month of Fruiting.”
“What’s actually more newsworthy, Hilter, is this. An energy-free cooling system has been installed in my office at the Rattery. A large brick vault was constructed in the basement below the room and provided with shelves of corrugated iron on which blocks of ice are placed, about a ton a day in the sunnier months. An apparatus forces the cold air blasts from the vault into the office over chloride of lime, which removes all dampness. The equipment controls the temperature during the hottest days to a degree that I and my assistants always find comfortable.”
“That’s very nice, sir, but … the deplorable working conditions in the hair mills, the mulce camps, the bakeries, the money plants. The workers are restless and the voters are wondering.”
“Making money is a risky business, Hilter. There’s your headline. Now to the meat of things. People overlooked the positive side of the Big Shift. The excitement and energy these relocations produced. The economic benefits alone were staggering—a redistribution of financial assets, new business incentives, no more stagnation and pooling of guida. But the greatest benefit, frankly, was that no one ever lost hope. You could be washing tripe in Pisstown one day, and the next day be fishing plesio off the coast of Holly Island.”
“Thank you, sir, for speaking to the point.”
“Honesty is my major protocol, Gerald. I’m telling it like it is now.”
“Of course, sir, it often went the other way. One could be down-shifted.”
“Yes, fortunes lost, great romances ended, all by random selection, a lottery to be exact, and it makes everyone potentially equal with everyone else. Finally, the American dream will come to pass. By the back door, but at least it will come to pass. Before the Forgetting we hope.”
“And in the middle of the Big Shift, you introduced—”
“That’s right. Legal microsystems. The idea was, and it seemed radical at the time, to say to these displaced populations—go ahead, take the law into your own hands. Form street-level judiciary districts, write your own laws, elect your own judges and juries, and yes, even carry out your own punishments. You hang them in the park and everyone has a picnic. It’s really a simple concept. Imagine, there we were, in the age of Sinatra, extolling the virtues of the status quo. I say constant change is the answer, dizzying change. Upheavals of every kind. I take my inspiration from the Great Forgettings, all twelve of them.”
“There were twelve? I didn’t know a number had been arrived at.”
“Oh, yes. What we don’t know is how much time elapsed between them. Was it a lifetime, three lifetimes, or just a few ticks of the clock? Ten new moons or a short winter’s day? Nor do we know when the Forgettings began.”
“Some think they originated with the death of Arvey, during the time of Sinatra.”
“Perhaps that is true. Perhaps it is not. No one can remember.”
“They say the bolt of lightning that struck you when you were golfing left you with such a palsy in your writing hand, you couldn’t so much as sign a waiver for the longest time.”
“True. But I’ve recently taken up the pen again, this time to write verse. I’m working now on a poem that will have the power to kill, if read aloud, and properly. Perhaps it would not induce mortality in a healthy specimen, but a sickly individual, yes, very likely. The rhythm is crucial, absolutely crucial. You make the words fall into perfect rhythm, a monotony—then you cut in suddenly with a violently discordant element and you just might shock the heart into failing.”
“Thank you for your precious time, sir.”
“One more thing. The Jing. Soon I will place this practice into mandatory law.”
“The Jing?”
“Jing’s what makes us immune to all the dreaded diseases. When we have orgasms we lose jing, which destroys the immune system. The correct number of orgasms varies with the seasons. I like none in the winter, then two or three a week in the spring. Fall and summer are devoted to prolonged sex with my neut gals, without orgasm, which builds up jing and produces a heightened state of the brain called the Energy of the Golden Stove. When I sex with my gals, my head must point north. The jing flows a lot better that way.”
“Again, sir. Thanks for your time.”
“Don’t print any lies, Hilter. I’ll personally unman you with my garden shears.”
“Oh, no, sir. No lies.
Radio Ratt:
In an apparent act of self-sacrifice, a New Oleo neutrodyne chained himself to a greasewood shrub with a onety-five-foot logging chain attached to a twoty-inch metal collar around his neck. Thirty days and nights later, a gibnut hunter found his bones in the thicket, along with evidence that the neut had nourished himself only with what palmetto leaves and bark he could reach. The hunter also found a crude toilet, which the neut had dug into the cold, hard earth with an entrenching tool, and a note to President Ratt, written in spew. The contents have not yet been revealed.
NEAR THE END of the ninety-ninth day of Moldenke’s term in the sewer, Superintendent Montfaucon drew up to him in a two-man pedalboat. One of the seats was empty. “My friend, Moldenke. Turn in your tunic, your boots, and your rabot. Your sentence is over. Word’s come down.”
“Thank you, sir. That’s a great relief. Just that sudden, eh? Not a bit of warning.”
“Using Ratt’s guidelines, prisoners are released in random fashion, much the same way they were arrested in the first place.”
“Makes sense,” Moldenke said. “Everything in balance.”
“Correct.”
Though Montfaucon was strangely oblique in his thinking, dangerously impulsive, and given to violent episodes, Moldenke was cognizant of the fact that on his watch, sewer conditions had become more humane. There were new rubber mattresses for the dormitory beds, a cold-water shower room, increased allotments of fungu, occasional meals of green gland, even a bakery.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Montfaucon,” Moldenke said, “for your tireless efforts at improving the lot of us prisoners.”
“No encomia are necessary, Moldenke. Get into the boat. We’ll pedal to the exit. The rest of the way is against the flow. Prepare to pedal hard.”
Moldenke climbed down into the cramped little vessel and strapped his feet to the pedals.
“After this, I vow on my mothers grave to get a waiver. It’s the only way to stay on the straight and narrow.”
Montfaucon said, “Here, there’s a big clump coming. Break it up as we go by.”
Moldenke held the rabot firmly and thrust it against the irregular clump’s crust only to have it slip from his grip, bounce back, and strike Montfaucon in the midsection, taking the wind out of him.
“Sorry, sir. It was a bad bounce.”
Montfaucon drew his pistol. “I killed a lot of Americans in the Chaos and I won’t hesitate to shoot an ignoramus like you. I didn’t say to harpoon the thing. I told you to break it up.”
“Again, I’m sorry.”
“Are you an Arvian? You better be. Don’t you know they’re bringing him back.”
“I’m an Arvian all right. Can’t wait till they bring him around.”
Montfaucon put away the pistol. “We’ll be making a stop just ahead.”
Not far from the Sewer’s exit, where the daylight shown in, the new bakery came into sight. “There you have it, Moldenke. Now every prisoner will enjoy fresh johnnycakes with his fungu.”
Moldenke smelled baking dough and felt the heat of the ovens. “My compliments, sir. It looks like a fine installation. Floor to ceiling, steel and glass. Very nice. Just looking at it, I get goosebumps.”
“And when the tour boat comes by, all the baking activities can be plainly seen. Generations will benefit.”
There were ten or onety-two prisoners working in the bakery, some feeding bricks of poudrette to a stone oven, others kneading dough, some giving the johnnycakes their characteristic half-moon shape.
Montfaucon said, “Stop pedaling! Arret! Stop the boat. I’m going in. You come with me. I want to show you what it takes to run a good boulangerie.”
After guiding the boat into a small slip in front of the bakery, Montfaucon ran as fast as his hammy legs would carry him to the entrance, paused long enough to display a two-handed “thumbs up” gesture for Moldenke to see, then stormed in. Through the windows, Moldenke watched him slap a settler woman hard in the face before pushing her to the ground.
“Please, monsieur. Please!” The woman’s tunic had come open during the fall, exposing ragged, stained underdrawers.
“Look at you, you dirty thing. You spit in the dough, I saw you.”
“I did not, monsieur! I did not! It must have been an illusion.” She struggled to button her tunic.
“An illusion? Are you suggesting that I am subject to some sort of—” He drew his pistol and placed the barrel between her eyes.
Moldenke strolled inside. Half-kneeling, he said, “Sir, I think the woman meant an optical illusion. A reflection in the glass, perhaps.”
“He’s right, monsieur. I wouldn’t dream of spitting in the dough.”
Montfaucon’s hateful glare mellowed. The pistol was put away. “All right, Moldenke. I’ll admit, it could have been a reflection.” To the woman, he snapped, “Go back to work!” She leapt to her feet and began kneading dough again.
“What about the rest of you?” Montfaucon asked. “I want to see what you’re wearing underneath. Show me.” The workers obediently raised their tunics. Every pair of underdrawers was filthy and torn. Montfaucon pinched his nose with a thumb and forefinger. “Mother of God, this is not a bakery. This is a pesthouse! A septic nightmare! Tomorrow, everyone gets brand new unders. Several pair. The best available quality.”
“Now that,” Moldenke said, “that is an uncommonly large gesture, sir.”
“Thank you, Moldenke.” He drew his pistol and shot the worker standing nearest him, the bullet entering the man’s skull just above the left ear. He did not fall immediately, but took a few steps in the direction of the oven, then sank to his knees, feeling his head for the wound. Montfaucon followed him and fired a second bullet into the back of his neck. This time, the man fell to the floor with a thud.
“Balance,” Montfaucon said. “Everything in balance. I tend to agree with Ratt on that. Life … death … what’s the difference? Two pickets in the same fence. You agree, Moldenke?”
“Oui, monsieur. I certainly do. That’s definitely in the affirmative.”
Though the fatally wounded bakery worker’s fingers twitched, there were no other signs of life. One eye was open, the other shut.
Montfaucon winked at Moldenke. “Before you leave the sewer, I’ve decided to show you something very few ever see. Come, come.” The two followed a complex route through the bakery, squeezing sideways in narrow passageways behind ovens, ducking under conveyors, through a nondescript door that led to a narrow hallway, in turn offering a choice of several other nondescript doors. At the end of the hallway hung an Ophelia Balls portrait of Mrs. Moldenke, striking a stern, matronly pose.
“She’s something of a saint around here,” Montfaucon said. “And it’s because of her that I’m letting you in here.”
Moldenke could hear the clatter of machinery, the buzz of prison workers conversing. “The bakery extends quite a ways, doesn’t it,” he said.
“Non, non. This is not the bakery.” He opened one of the doors. “This is where edible paper is made … for money, for waivers, for wiping, for books. Your mother and me, in partnership. It’s one of our bold new concepts. Prison industry.”
They entered a cavernous room where prisoners were shoveling dry poudrette into vats while others, standing in the vats, mixed in buckets of sour mulce. The paste-like result was transferred to the bed of a steam press, which stamped each load into a sheet of paper. Workers then passed the sheet through a bleaching agent bath, misted it with lavender scent, and hung it to dry.
“Behold, Moldenke. You may have been her bodily child. But this is her brainchild. A perfectly harmonious system, all enclosed, entirely of waste, but which wastes nothing. You begin with sewer sludge, purified by secret processes until it is not only edible, but nutty in taste. You mix the poudrette with good fresh mulce, you press it, you bleach it. Voila! Nutritious, edible paper, with its many, many uses.”
“Mother was ahead of her time. A true original.”
“You’re free to go, now, Moldenke. Let’s pedal to the exit. And don’t forget to shade your eyes. This long in unnatural light, the sudden brightness could blind you.”
As they made their way back to the pedal boat, Montfaucon paused over the worker’s body, said “Look there, both eyes open now. He isn’t gone,” and fired a coup de grace into the forehead.
A tour boat floated past the bakery bearing a party of well-heeled neutrodynes from Indiana. Their guide offered commentary through a megaphone: “And here we have the newly completed baking facility, another example of Superintendent Montfaucon’s progressive thinking. The fuel you see being loaded into these massive ovens is made from one hundred percent desiccated sludge, or poudrette.”
Montfaucon waved vigorously at the passing boat.
“Oh, look, there is Superintendent Montfaucon himself!” the guide shrieked.
The neutrodynes applauded enthusiastically, one of them shouting, “Neuts for Montfaucon! You’ve got my vote!” The voice echoed up and down the sewer tunnel.
As Moldenke and Montfaucon stood at the exit gate, Montfaucon said, “You’ve not heard the news in a while, have you, Moldenke?”
