#findzeit

[greenjudy]

your stupid state has a problem with me

Have some Findzeit, as a treat.

“You’re in the wrong lane.” I glance to the right; Eric, in the passenger seat, is staring straight ahead, peevish. And pale, I notice, very pale.

“Jesus, Eric, if you wanted to drive, you should have…”

“…Couldn’t drive,” he says, sullen, looking at the dash.

“What? Why?”

“They wouldn’t give me a gas-burning car.”

This strikes me as pickiness bordering on eccentricity.

“Couldn’t you bite the bullet and just drive electric for once?”

“Your stupid state,” Eric says, “has a problem with me.”

While it’s necessary pretty much everywhere to get a special license to drive gasburners, it turns out that California has taken punitive measures to discourage gasburner driving up to and including making a gasburner license valid if and only if you’re behind the wheel of a gasburner.

“You don’t have a driver’s license?” I ask him, awed.  

“Fuck’s sake, Findzeit,” Eric mutters, shoving the hair out of his face, which is, I perceive, lightly sheened with sweat. “Get over. You’re in the wrong lane. Or did you actually want to go to Napa?”

“What—no, I mean, Napa’s nice—“

“I have a driver’s license,” Eric says. “I’m Sebring-rated.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“It means I taught people how to hydroplane, all right? California is just bigoted about cars.”

“Gasburners,” I note, “not exactly cars.”

“Of course they’re cars,” he barks. “They—they’re the original cars. What are you—“

“I grant that gasburners are important from an evolutionary point of view, but Eric, so are horse-drawn carriages, okay?”

Eric chokes.

“What? It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Are you really suggesting that gas-burning cars are nothing more than a step on the road to electrics? Nothing but a—a dialectical moment in the electric car’s emergence? You are really saying that? They’re nothing but part of the Aufhebung of the electric car?”

“I thought,” I say, eyes wide, “that was obvious.”

[greenjudy]

death and the buddy

Eckbo, a blazing figure in his white linen suit, looks up at the helicopter.  The lenses of his sunglasses are bright blue, almost the color of the sky.  He’s holding his Buddy in one hand, stylus in the other.  

Eckbo applies the stylus to the tiny input screen of his Buddy.  His movements are measured, leisurely.

The helicopter descends almost to his eye level.  He looks dispassionately into the freckled muzzle of the Fourier gun, and finishes his script.  He signals to Chance: two, then three fingers.  

Chance slides open his handheld and punches a few buttons.  At the same time,  somewhere deep within the IO, Annecue hits “enter.”  

I clear my throat, and speak into the radio.  

“You may have noticed,” I say, “that you don’t actually have control over your helicopter anymore.  We’ve also disabled your Fourier gun, but—“ there is a series of harsh, attenuated clicks, loud enough to hear over the sub-bass propeller hum—“but sure, go ahead and try it out for yourselves.”  

Eckbo, eye to eye with the denizens of the helicopter, gives them the finger.

“We’re going to, ah, suggest that you land your craft on the shuffleboard deck now,” I say.  “Please consider yourselves prisoners of war, as per the Mothra Convention agreements.”

“Moera Convention, you jackass,” Eckbo shouts from his position on top of the climbing wall.  

[greenjudy]

keep rolling, baby

The cryptographers just do not stop.  They may not actually ever sleep.  I find them at unique intervals everywhere at every possible time of night or day.  Now that I am their Rock God, they all greet me with big, loopy grins.  At one point, unspeakably worn out after an extended instrumental jam in MegaPhoenix, the tiny impromptu studio they set up on Deck Six, I asked Panda Friedman to explain how it all worked.  I had bluish circles under my eyes; Panda had a complexion whose dewy freshness was almost uncanny.  As I watched she applied her eye makeup deftly, with an unshaking hand.  

“Aw, sweetie,” she said.  “Back in the bad old days, you know, or maybe you don’t, at Horton Pfizer we’d just sleep around the clock.”  

“Sleep, you mean, like, a lot?” I floundered.

“No, baby, we’d sleep around the clock.  We’d let our circadian rhythms decay.  Did you know that if you stop setting your alarm clock, you will wake up just a little bit later every day?  And if you keep not setting your alarm clock, baby, and keep getting up whenever and going to bed whenever, eventually you will roll entirely around the conventional 24-hour light cycle until you are, like, waking up at two A.M. to start off your day?  Well, once that happens, you just keep rolling.  So that’s what we do: we just keep rolling, baby.”

[greenjudy]

closer to where it’s warm

an answer, of sorts, to @razziecat . A different bathtub encounter, but the configuration is the same.

“Were you in bed?” I ask, too late.  

“Just.  Just barely,” he says, “it’s okay.”  

“It’s not okay,” I whisper, closing my eyes.  “I’m sorry.  I’m a bastard without a bathtub, and I’m worried, and I need to think.”  

“No.  It’s okay,” he says again, as steam gradually fills our shared space.  

“The Marmoset is talking about DNA-map missiles,” I say, feeling my bones accede to a week’s backlog of exhaustion.  “I think she’d blow us up if we failed.  What do you think?”  

Eric is sitting propped in the doorway, his feet, braced against the frame, inches away from mine.  

“The Marmoset,” he murmurs.  “You must mean Wendy Margolis.  She’s…strange.  Hard as nails, though.  I can see her blowing us up if we fail, yeah.”  

“How do we not fail?” I ask, as the water rises around me.  “Something we can give them, some contract changes or something that might change their minds?  The cryptographers... they want to fraternize.  Can’t we give them that, can’t Belltower lean on the rest of the world?  If we let our guys go to conferences and stuff, I bet the other guys would follow suit.”  

Eric shakes his head.  

“I’m not allowed,” he says, “to offer them incentives.  That was the very first thing I asked, when they sent me here.”  

“Why?  Why is Belltower being so goddamned macho about this?  How is a hard line going to help anything?”  

“I have no idea,” Eric says, then shakes his head again.  “That’s…not true.  I have an idea.  I’m just hoping it’s not what I think.  They’re not—they don’t understand much.  They don’t understand the code,” he finishes in a rush.  

Hot water is creeping up around my hips and ribs.  My long, skinny legs are sticking out, but I don’t mind—once the tub fills, I’ll be able to submerge virtually everything else.  I slither down the tub, let the water cover my head, rush into my ears, let the pressure from the really actually lovely plumbing pummel my body and quiet my alarm.  When I resurface, I see Eric has closed his eyes.  He’s still shivering.  

“Come inside,” I say softly, “it’s weirdly cold on B deck.  Don’t stay on the threshold, man.  Close the door; the steam will keep us warm.”  Eric’s eyes flicker open, and we just look at each other for awhile, both of us fatigued almost beyond speech.  He hooks the sliding door with one toe, reaches out, and pulls it across, closed.  “Better?” I ask him.  

“Cold on the tiles,” he says.  

“That sucks,” I say.  I stand up in the bathtub, groping for the towel that hangs by the toilet—the neatly folded one, for the other one is still a little damp, smelling, I guess, of Eric—and I spread it on the floor.  “Dripping all over you, sorry,” I say.  “Don’t be cold.  Come closer to where it’s warm.”  

“Closer to where it’s warm,” he mumbles, and drops his head so his hair hides his eyes.  Abruptly he slides over, onto the towel, legs braced against the far wall.  We are facing each other in the tiny bathroom, his legs going one way, and mine, in the tub, going the other.  

[greenjudy]

when your auditor has a bathtub (and you don’t)

"The Pursers are worried," I tell Rehm.  I've shown up with my towel this time, about as blatant a statement as possible of my intentions.  He takes in my elderly yellow terry bathrobe without comment, stepping aside to let me through his stateroom door.

"They told you this?" he asks.  I shuck my bathrobe and hang it on the coat hook inside his door.

"It feels good to be naked with the lights on and the curtains open and not care," I say.  I walk toward his bed, looking out at the play of ship-lights reflected on the water.  "I mean, who will notice I'm naked?  Pirates? Wild creatures of the sea?  It's liberating." I scratch an armpit, and turn to face Rehm, who's gazing at me fixedly.  "I had dinner with the First Purser.  Jesus, did you eat?  I never see you in the dining room."

"Are you actually going to take a bath, or did you just come to take off your clothes in my stateroom?" Rehm asks.  We stare at each other for a second, the air between us suddenly tingly.

"Okay," I say meekly, slipping past him into his tiny bathroom.

The bath has already been drawn.  The water is scalding hot.

"Wasn't sure when you were coming," Rehm says, looking uncomfortable.

"I'll bring you some food next time," I say, and test the water with my toe.  "Jesus! Ow! Have to wait a sec, Eric, it'll take off my skin."

"Had no idea you were so desperate to go around naked," he mutters.  "Thought you just liked to run free in your socks."

"And I do," I agree, "and I do.  Never had the impulse to come to work naked, though.  Sometimes, on casual Fridays, I get going in bare feet.  Drives the Marmoset crazy."  I drop into his chair, he sits down rather nervously on his bed, and we stare at each other again.

"Are you getting used to me?" I ask quietly.

"I'll never get used to you," he answers, rising from his bed to go back into the bathroom.  I hear him puttering with bottles and caps, and I leave him in peace for a little.

"The First Purser," I say, "told me they've been worried about Captain Walt for quite some time. There've been signs."

"Signs?" Eric's poked his head around the doorframe.

"Signs, yeah, signs of instability, irrationality, just little things about the way he gives orders, stuff like that.  The shoulderpads," I add, swiveling around in the chair to face him.  "The shoulderpads were his idea, not a Monastic Travel and Shipping thing.  These cruise ships, I find out, are run like franchises.  The captain of the ship actually has the franchise, so there's policies, right?  But also quite a bit of leeway.  The Pursers think maybe the extra leeway is starting to kind of go to his head.

"And now, of course, that we're a nation...Eric, there's something I don't get about this.  Being a nation.  Could I, say, declare myself a nation?  How's the water?"

"Try it," he says, and I slide past him into the bathroom.

The water is still on the hot side, but I take a deep breath and step in.

"Hot, jesus, feels good," I gasp, and Eric slides down the wall and stretches out his bare foot and closes the bathroom door with his toe.