Читать книгу To the Stars -- and Beyond - Damien Broderick - Страница 8

I CAN SPEND YOU

by Charles Allen Gramlich

They all looked up at the sound, the clink-clank-clunk of heavily laden saddlebags striking the doorframe as the prospector stepped into the eatery. Their eyes registered both the prospector and his bags, but it was on those worn leather satchels that their gazes lingered, that of the bartender and the cook who had come out of the kitchen to talk, that of the waitress with her thin, angular body and her attractively regular features, that of the few customers: a father and his little one, a couple who were courting, an orbit-trucker who sat humped over his table with a cup of steaming black in front of him. It was a negative ion sort of night, and business was slow at Memory’s Place.

Limping on what appeared to be two damaged feet, the prospector warped his way over to a table and sat down heavily. He seemed deliberately to choose a site in the middle of the room, as if he wanted everyone’s eyes upon him. He needn’t have worried. The punctuated thud of the saddlebags striking the floor beside him made sure he had all the attention anyone could wish.

The waitress, who had long cultivated a highly refined sense of boredom, suddenly developed a swift and animate sparkle in her gray orbs. It was perfectly logical to assume the prospector had hit it big, and that meant the likelihood of a generous tip. She was beside the fellow’s table and offering him a menu disk before his chair even had time to cough up all its creaks and cracks. It almost offended her when he waved the proffered disk aside, but she quickly erased the semi-feeling as the prospector leaned back in his chair and began to recite a list of foods that had obviously been ritualized years before.

It was a long list, but the waitress didn’t write it down. She had a near perfect memory and never needed to. But even if her memory had been awful she would not have forgotten this order.

­The old foods­, she breathed to herself. ­The old and very expensive foods­.

She did not look in the direction of the bulging saddlebags, but she knew, as everyone else in the room knew, exactly where they were located. Then she turned away from the prospector’s sharp-planed face and went to put in his order, her precise mind clicking over T-bone steak and lemon chicken, over scrambled eggs and buttermilk biscuits, over strips of crisp bacon and long-link sausage, over blackberry cobbler and ice tea.

­Ice tea for Memory’s sake. When was the last time anyone ordered ice tea­?

Of course, it was on the menu. All the foods were. Memory had kept them on because they were a link to a past that everyone needed to be reminded of occasionally. But no one ever ordered them. Or if they did, it was for a lark, a little late night fun after a few too many quantum bourbons and neuronal fizzes. The waitress had no ability to question the prospector’s choices, though. She wondered at them, but all she did about it was recite the list to the cook as she went past him into the kitchen and began laying out the ingredients from the store vault.

While he waited for his order to be readied, the prospector reached into a pocket and pulled out a silver flask that bore the marks of long use. The flask’s cap acted as a shot glass for the thick liquid he poured into it, a liquid as amber and viscous as new oil. The drink was a reward, a repayment for years of deprivation. It went down far more smoothly than it looked.

The food was another repayment the prospector wanted, and by the time he had savored his way through a second shot of liquor, the food began to come. It was just as he remembered, maybe better than he remembered, which surprised and frightened him a bit because of what it told him about his memory and the world it lived in.

Still, the forgetting didn’t really matter, because he soon began to learn the tastes again. Reconstituted or not, the steak was thick and dripping with juices. The chicken was creamy soft on the outside, puffy and air-light on the inside, like foam packing miracled into something delicious by all the spices of heaven. Best, though, were the biscuits. He could have written odes to their golden layers, though he preferred popping them buttered and whole into his mouth where they could be chopped into crumbs and washed down by sweet draughts of tea.

The prospector had thought that he remembered all his favorites among the old foods, but eating the bacon reminded him of fried ham, the sausage of jam-spread toast, the eggs of mushrooms and cheeses. He sent the waitress back for all the new/old things that came into his head, and he yelled after her for more tea, and for bread to sop up the juices.

And then he moved into the rhythm of eating, knife-slicing with one hand and forking bites of food to his mouth with the other. When he was finished with the main courses, he used the fork to punch in the top of the blackberry cobbler and drag out thick rafts of crust and berries, the size of the bites limited only by the width of his fork and the width of his mouth.

There came a moment, though, when the last berry went the way of the last scrap of bread, and the prospector sat back in his chair with an audible thump. He swallowed a belch, then looked around the eatery to see that no one was making even a pretense of not staring. They were watching him openly and with amazement, with what he knew to be a bit of disgust at his choice of foods and his table manners, but also a little bit of envy. And, of course, he knew why they were really watching him. They had to see how he was going to pay for his meal. They had to see what was in his bags. He made them wait just a moment longer.

The waitress had come to clean the table and to stand by expectantly. The two lovers had fallen silent, and the father and son were leaning forward in their seats. The bartender had been polishing the same spot on the same glass over and over, and even the trucker looked up from his fourth cup of black.

Inwardly, the prospector smiled, though it didn’t show on his face. He stood, and hefted his bags. The table had been cleaned but he took a preliminary swipe across it with his arm to wipe away imaginary crumbs, and to heighten the tension. Then he upended the bags, first one and then the other, and the riches spilled out in a glittering, clinking heap. The waitress gasped, and so did some of the others, and their eyes seemed held to that pile as if grabbed by the juice in an electric socket.

The prospector rooted around in the imbroglio until he came up with half of a short rib-bone that he handed to the waitress for payment. Then he tossed her a smoothed white knuckle as a tip and watched as she caught at the precious thing with both hands and still almost dropped it.

An entire skeleton­, the young father who was watching thought to himself. ­An entire human skeleton­. And it seemed new and fresh, not as if it had been dug up out of some long overlooked cemetery. He had never scanned so much raw piled wealth, not up close anyway. Of course, they had all seen videos of the national treasury, with its neat and overwhelming stacks of bones. But that was not like having the real thing poured out in front of you while you sat nibbling at your cation salad.

The other watchers seemed just as stunned, and all of them sat frozen while the prospector scooped up the remainder of his loot and left. Then they unfolded and reached for their things. The lovers were the first out the door, and the trucker took only as long as it required to drain the dregs of his polymer coffee before heading to his rig. The father watched them leave as he paid for his order with a few small bone coins. Then he walked over to where his son was standing beside the prospector’s empty chair. The young eyes were irised wide as if they could still see the jumbled tibias and femurs, the mandible and the ribs, the ilium, sacrum, radius, ulna, the carpals and metacarpals, the phalanges of the fingers.

“Did you see it, father?” the youth asked. “Did you?”

“Yes, son,” he said. “I saw it.

“A real human skeleton, father. Just like on the viddisks. It was incredible.”

“Yes it was.”

“You know, 00101’s father says that there are still bio-humans out there. Is that possible?”

“No, son. That rumor’s been around a long time, but we hunted down the last bio over twenty years ago now.” He reached out to pull his son close with steel-framed hands that could crush diamonds, but his touch was soft as a silkworm’s tongue. It seemed as if a nova of fizzing electrons had been loosed inside his co-processor, and a quick diagnostic could not tell him what was wrong. He wondered for a moment if it had been a mistake to kill the humans. He wondered….

* * * *

The prospector stopped for the night on a hill where he could watch the ribbon-shiny streets of the android town spread out before him.

At this distance, the swiftly moving transports looked like flowing jewelry, or maybe like the chasing lights his wife used to put up on their Christmas tree every year. He took a chance and built a fire, though it would be dangerously easy to spot. No machine ever needed a campfire to keep itself warm on a cold night. But then, he wasn’t a machine.

He unhinged the mask and breastplate that hid his identity and dropped them to the ground. His plastisteel boots were next, and he luxuriated in being able to stretch his bare feet out to the flames. The revealed face and revealed feet were both human, though it was strange that there were only three toes on each foot. Or maybe it wasn’t strange. In a world where human bones were the money that could keep a person alive, his toes had been easy to spare.

­But that was before­, he thought, as he reached into the saddlebags and drew out the crisp white skull that nestled there. ­Yes­. That was before his wife had died and left him a rich man.