The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction Part 21

Barry was just getting used to the idea of going on to six-digit figures when a woman in a green sofa wheeled up to him and asked what kind of music he liked.

"Any kind, really."

"Any or none, it amounts to much the same thing."

"No, honestly. Whatever is playing I usually like it. What are they playing here? I like that."

"Muzak," she said dismissively.

It was, in fact, still the Sondheim medley, but he let that pa.s.s. It wasn't worth an argument.

"What do you do?" she demanded.

"I simulate a job that Citibank is developing for another corporation, but only on an auxiliary basis.

Next year I'm supposed to start full-time."

She grimaced. "You're new at Partyland, aren't you?"

He nodded. "First time tonight. In fact, this is my first time ever in any speakeasy. I just got my license yesterday."

"Well, welcome to the club." With a smile that might as well have been a sheer. "I suppose you're looking for endors.e.m.e.nts?"

Not from you, he wanted to tell her. Instead he looked off into the distance at the perambulations of a suite of chairs in another ring. Only when all the chairs had settled into place did he refocus on the woman in the foreground. He realized with a little zing of elation that he had just administered his first snub!

"What did Freddy say when you came in?" she asked in a conspiratorial if not downright friendly tone. (His snub had evidently registered.) "Who is Freddy?"

"The usher who showed you to your seat. I saw him sit down and talk with you."

"He told me about some j.a.panese department store."

She nodded knowingly. "Of course-I should have known. Freddy s.h.i.+lls for Topic magazine and that's one of their featured stories this week. I wonder what they pay him. Last week their cover story was about Ireina Khokolovna, and all Freddy could talk about was Ireina Khokolovna.""Who is Ireina Khokolovna?" he asked.

She hooted a single derisory hoot. "I thought you said you liked music!"

"I do," he protested. But, clearly, he had just failed a major test With a sigh of weariness and a triumphant smile, the woman rotated her sofa around one hundred and eighty degrees and drove off in the direction of the couple chained together on the blue settee.

The couple rose in unison and greeted her with cries of "Maggie!" and "Son of a gun!" It was impossible for Barry, sitting so nearby and having no one to talk to himself, to avoid eavesdropping on their conversation, which concerned (no doubt as a rebuke to his ignorance) Ireina Khokolovna's latest superb release from Deutsche Grammophon. She was at her best in Schumann, her Wolf was comme ci, comme fa. Even so, Khokolovna's Wolf was miles ahead of Adriana Motta's, or even Gwyneth Batterham's, who, for all her real intelligence, was developing a distinct wobble in her upper register.

Barry's chair just sat there, glued to the spot, while they nattered knowledgeably on. He wished he were home watching w.i.l.l.y Marx- or anywhere but Partyland.

"Mine's Ed," said the occupant of the bentwood rocker, a young man of Barry's own age, build, and hair style.

"Pardon?" said Barry.

"I said," he said, with woozy precision, "my name is Ed."

"Oh. Mine's Barry. How are you, Ed?"

He held out his hand. Ed shook it gravely.

"You know, Barry," Ed said, "I've been thinking about what you were saying, and I think the whole problem is cars. Know what I mean?"

"Elaborate," Barry suggested.

"Right. The thing about cars is ... Well, I live in Elizabeth across the river, right? So any time I come here I've got to drive, right? Which you might think was a drag, but in fact I always feel terrific. You know?"

Barry nodded. He didn't understand what Ed was saying in any very specific way, but he knew he agreed with him.

"I feel . . . free. If that doesn't seem too ridiculous. Whenever I'm driving my car."

"What have you got?" Barry asked.

"A Toyota."

"Nice. Very nice."

"I don't think Pm unique that way," said Ed.

"No, I wouldn't say so."

"Cars are freedom. And so what all this talk about an energy crisis boils down to is-" He stopped short. "I think I'm having a fugue."

"I think maybe you are. But that's all right. I do too. It'll pa.s.s."

"Listen, what's your name?"

"Barry," Barry said. "Barry Riordan."

Ed held out his hand. "Mine's Ed. Say, are you trying to pick up an endors.e.m.e.nt?"

Barry nodded. "You too?"

"No. In fact, I think I've still got one left. Would yon like it?"

"Jesus," said Barry. "Yeah, sure."

Ed took out his ID folder, took his license from the folder, tickled the edge of the endors.e.m.e.nt sticker from the back of the license with his fingernail, and offered it to Barry.

"You're sure you want me to have this?" Barry asked, incredulous, with the white curlicue of the sticker dangling from his fingertip.

Ed nodded. "You remind me of somebody."

"Well, I'm awfully grateful. I mean you scarcely know me."

"Right," said Ed, nodding more vigorously. "But I liked what you were saying about cars. That made a lot of sense."

"You know," Barry burst out in a sudden access of confessional bonhomie, "I feel confused most ofthe time."

"Right."

"But I can never express it. Everything I say seems to make more sense than what I can feel inside of me."

"Right, right."

The music changed from the Sondheim medley to the flip side of The Four Seasons, and Barry's chair lifted him up and bore him off toward the couple in the blue settee, while Ed, limp in the bentwood rocker, was carried off in the opposite direction.

"Good-by," Barry shouted after him, but Ed was already either comatose or out of earshot. "And thanks again!"

The MacKinnons introduced themselves. His name was Jason. Hers was Mich.e.l.le. They lived quite nearby, on West 28th, and were interested, primarily, in the television shows they'd seen when they were growing up, about which they were very well-informed. Despite a bad first impression, due to his a.s.sociating them with Maggie of the green sofa, Barry found himself liking the MacKinnons enormously, and before the next switchover he put his chair in the LOCK position. They spent the rest of the evening together, exchanging nostalgic tidbits over coffee and slices of Partyland's famous pineapple pie. At closing time be asked if they would either consider giving him an endors.e.m.e.nt. They said they would have, having thoroughly enjoyed his company, but unfortunately they'd both used up their quota for that year. They seemed genuinely sorry, but he felt it had been a mistake to ask.

His first endors.e.m.e.nt proved to have been beginner's lock. Though he went out almost every night to a different speakeasy and practically lived at Partyland during the weekends, when it was at it's liveliest, he never again had such a plum fall in his lap. He didn't get within sniffing distance of his heart's desire.

Most people he met were temps, and the few Permanent License holders inclined to be friendly to him invariably turned out, like the MacKinnons, to have already disposed of their allotted endors.e.m.e.nts. Or so they said. As the weeks went by and anxiety mounted, he began to be of the cynical but widely held opinion that many people simply removed the stickers from their licenses so it would seem they'd been used. According to Jason MacKinnon, a completely selfless endors.e.m.e.nt, like his from Ed, was a rare phenomenon. Quid pro quos were the general rule, in the form either of cash on the barrel or services rendered. Barry said (jokingly, of course) that he wouldn't object to bartering his virtue for an endors.e.m.e.nt, or preferably two, to which Mich.e.l.le replied (quite seriously) that unfortunately she did not know anyone who might be in the market for Barry's particular type. Generally, she observed, it was younger people who got their endors.e.m.e.nts by putting out.

Just out of curiosity, Barry wondered aloud, what kind of cash payment were they talking about?

Jason said the standard fee, a year ago, for a single sticker had been a thousand dollars; two and a half for a pair, since people with two blanks to fill could be presumed to be that much more desperate. Due however to a recent disproportion between supply and demand, the going price for a single was now seventeen hundred; a double, a round four thousand. Jason said he could arrange an introduction at that price, if Barry were interested.

"I will tell you," said Barry, "what you can do with your stickers."

"Oh, now," said Mich.e.l.le placatingly. "We're still your friends, Mr. Riordan, but business is business.

If it were our own personal stickers we were discussing, we wouldn't hesitate to give you an endors.e.m.e.nt absolutely gratis. Would we, Jason?"

"Of course not, no question."

"But we're middlemen, you see. We have only limited flexibility in the terms we can offer. Say, fifteen hundred."

"And three and a half for the pair," Jason added. "And that is a rock-bottom offer. You won't do better anywhere else."

"What you can do with your stickers," Barry said resolutely, "is stick them up your a.s.s. Your a.s.ses, rather."

"I wish you wouldn't take that att.i.tude, Mr. Riordan," said Jason in a tone of sincere regret "We do like you, and we have enjoyed your company. If we didn't, we would certainly not be offering thisopportunity."

"Bulls.h.i.+t," said Barry. It was the first time he'd used an obscenity conversationally, and he brought it off with great conviction. "You knew when my license would expire, and you've just been stringing me along, hoping I'd get panicky."

"We have been trying," said Mich.e.l.le, "to help."

"Thanks. Ill help myself."

"How?"

"Tomorrow I'm going back to Center St. and take the exam again."

Mich.e.l.le MacKinnon leaned across the coffee table that separated the blue settee from Barry's armchair and gave him a sound motherly smack on the cheek. "Wonderful! That's the way to meet a challenge -head on! You're bound to pa.s.s. After all, you've had three months of practice. You've become much more fluent these past months."

"Thanks." He got up to go.

"Hey-" Jason grabbed Barry's hand and gave it an earnest squeeze. "Don't forget, if you do get your Permanent License-"

"When he gets it," Mich.e.l.le amended, "Right-when you get it, you know where you can find us. We're always here on the same settee."

"You two are unbelievable," Barry said. "Do you honestly think rd sell you my endors.e.m.e.nts?

a.s.suming"-he knocked on the varnished walnut coffee table-"I pa.s.s my exam."

"It is safer," Mich.e.l.le said, "to work through a professional introduction service than to try and peddle them on your own. Even though everyone breaks it, the law is still the law. Individuals operating on their own are liable to get caught, since they don't have an arrangement with the authorities. We do. That's why, for instance, it would do you no good to report us to the Communications Control Office. Others have done so in the past, and it did them no good."

"None of them ever got a Permanent License, either," Jason added, with a twinkle of menace.

"That, I'm sure, was just coincidence," said Mich.e.l.le. "After all, we're speaking of only two cases, and neither of the individuals in question was particularly bright. Bright people wouldn't be so quixotic, would they?" She underlined her question with a Mona Lisa smile, and Barry, for all his indignation and outrage, couldn't keep from smiling back. Anyone who could drop a word like "quixotic" into the normal flow of conversation and make it seem so natural couldn't be all wrong.

"Don't worry," he promised, tugging his hand out of Jason's. "I'm not the quixotic type."

But when he said it, it sounded false. It wasn't false.

Barry was as good as his word and went to Center St. the very next morning to take his third exam.

The computer a.s.signed him to Marvin Kolodny, Ph.D. in cubicle 183. The initials worried him. He could have coped, this time, with the old fuddy-duddy he'd had last August, but a Ph.D.? It seemed as though they were raising the hurdles each time he came around the track. But his worries evaporated the moment he was in the cubicle and saw that Marvin Kolodny was a completely average young man of twenty-four. His averageness was even a bit unsteady, as though he had to think about it, but then most twenty-four-year-olds are self-conscious in just that way.

It's always a shock the first time you come up against some particular kind of authority figure-a dentist, a psychiatrist, a cop-who is younger than you are, but it needn't lead to disaster as long as you let the authority figure know right from the start that you intend to be deferential, and this was a quality that Barry conveyed without trying.

"Hi," said Barry, with masterful deference. "I'm Barry Riordan."

Marvin Kolodny responded with a boyish grin and offered his hand. An American flag had been tattooed on his right forearm. On a scroll circling the flagpole was the following inscription: Let's All Overthrow the United States Government by Force & Violence On his other forearm there was a crudely executed rose with his name underneath: Marvin Kolodny, Ph.D.

"Do you mean it?" Barry asked, marveling over Marvin's tattoo as they shook hands. He managed to ask the question without in the least seeming to challenge Marvin Kolodny's authority."If I didn't mean it," said Marvin Kolodny, "do you think I'd nave had it tattooed on my arm?"

"I suppose not. It's just so... unusual."

"I'm an unusual person," said Marvin Kolodny, leaning back in his swivel chair and taking a large pipe from the rack on his desk.

"But doesn't that idea"-Barry nodded at the tattoo-"conflict with your having this particular job?

Aren't you part of the U. S. Government yourself?"

"Only for the time being. I'm not suggesting that we overthrow the government tomorrow. A successful revolution isn't possible until the proletariat becomes conscious of their oppressions, and they can't become conscious of anything until they are as articulate as their oppressors. Language and consciousness aren't independent processes, after all. Talking is thinking turned inside-out. No more, no less."

"And which am I?"

"How's that?"

"Am I a proletarian or an oppressor?"

"Like most of us these days, I would say you're probably a little of each. Are you married, uh . . ."

(He peeked into Barry's file.) ". . . Barry?"