Bugs Read online

  ‘I am not teef. I look for your address, to tek you home.’ She picked up a library ticket. ‘Vat is?’

  ‘A library ticket. Don’t they have them in … er, Scotland?’

  ‘No, only in America. Is everythink in this vonderful country. Everythink. Evel Knievel. Oral Rubberts. Jems Din. Jems Garner. Disc camera. Fonny greetink cards. K-Mart store. Joan Collins. Like sign says, I heart America.’ Discovering a plastic card interrupted her train of thought. She held it up. ‘Vat is? Credit card?’

  ‘Not exactly. It’s a bank card. You use it … well, to cash cheques.’

  ‘Identity card? In plastic. How modern! I have so much to learn. Do you know, I have only yesterday drunked one banana daiquiri. But I must sent you home now, you are ill.’

  ‘I feel much better, really.’

  ‘Or perhaps you are too ill to move? I get doctor, yes?’

  ‘No, really, I’m fine. Just a bit of a headache.’

  She held up a photo. ‘Your vife?’

  ‘We’re … uh, separated. She’s in England.’

  KK seemed oddly disappointed, as though she would have preferred a married man.

  ‘So. You vork here alone? For Cyberk Corporation.’

  He nodded his aching head. ‘Well …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Actually, I got fired today.’

  ‘You don’t vork?’

  ‘Nope. I’ve got to find a job, heh, heh.’

  Smartly, she gathered up his papers and restored them to his wallet. ‘I phone texi for you.’

  ‘Don’t bother. I can walk. It’s not far.’

  She helped him into his clothes, then walked down to the street with him and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

  ‘Tek care, darlink.’

  ‘When will I … er, see you again?’

  She sighed. ‘Fred, ve do not meet. Ve are sheeps.’

  ‘Sheeps.’

  ‘Passing in night. Ve may meet again, in some shopping-mall. Who knows?’

  But even after that dismissal he could not help feeling elated as he walked home. A beautiful, wealthy, mysterious woman had taken him home and undressed him. Well, almost. He walked home in a glow of unmerited self-satisfaction, from the rich side of the lake to the poor side.

  He was too self-satisfied even to take note of the two insurance companies, dividing the world into hardware and spirituality.

  His letter-box sprang open at the turn of a key, spewing bright circulars over the floor, a jackpot of junk. There was a sample chocolate hair-mousse and an offer of pet insurance. (‘One morning, Bud Papadom’s dog bit the mail-carrier. Funny? Not after an allergy caused toxic shock syndrome. Bud ended up with HALF A MILLION DOLLARS in bills. Every year, thousands of pet-owners like yourself face unexpected crippling bills for vet care, damage, liability, and even full pet replacement. Ask yourself …’). Two envelopes marked URGENT turned out to be a circular for a tyre sale and an invitation to join a health club (‘FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS OFF your first year’s membership!’).

  The television provided a background to his browsing. He glanced up to see a reporter looking serious: ‘According to police, the assailant may be the same man who shot up other Little Dorrit restaurants in Cleveland, Canton, Columbus and Cincinnati. This is Bug Stemnull, IBS News, Chicago.’

  Fred chucked all in the brown metal wastepaper-basket, even the letter from his Congressman, printed in blue. Even this:

  Manfred E. Jones, YOUR FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS IS WAITING!

  Dear Manfred E. Jones,

  Get ready to be rich, Manfred E. Jones! Yes, FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS has already been won by someone. Could it be Manfred E. Jones? YES!!! Manfred E. Jones of Mpls, MN, replying to this letter could be the luckiest thing you ever did!

  CERTIFICATION OF READINESS TO AWARD FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS to Manfred E. Jones.

  URGENT!! Detach the special label with your name, Manfred E. Jones, your Mpls, MN, address, and your LUCKY PRIZE NUMBERS. Affix the special label to your special order form. If you wish to be entered for the FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS, affix the gold coin sticker marked YES. If you do not want the FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS, Manfred E. Jones, simply affix the black sticker marked NO. Hurry! Send your entry today to me – Grantly Fortnight. We must receive your entry, Manfred E. Jones, by the printed date, or the FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS must be burned.

  Why not? he thought, throwing himself down on the unmade studio couch. Is America, after all. Is money to burn. Lying on his back gave him a good view of the cracked ceiling, smoke-stained by some previous tenant (who had no doubt moved to a hobo jungle for the summer) and now the haunt of a couple of hopeful spiders. He looked around at the unwashed dishes, the brown curtains over tiny basement windows. The place looked suitable for an unemployed alien, or anyone leading a pointless life.

  In the laundry room next door, someone loaded the washing machine with marbles and started it up.

  I can always do reviews until something turns up, Fred frequently told himself. Now was the time to find out. The morning after KK, he went to the Minneapolis Sun-Times and found the office of the reviews editor.

  A thin nervous-looking man was sorting books into stacks. The room was full of little stacks of books, on counters, shelves, desks.

  ‘Hi. Makes you realize what a literate country we really are, doesn’t it? Fifty thousand titles a year, many of them with books attached. One or two almost readable. I’m Bill. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’m Fred, and literate. I’d like to do a review or so.’

  ‘Do I hear the over-refined accents of an Englishman?’

  ‘I’m not so sure about the over-refined part –’

  ‘Thank God, an Englishman. Maybe you can help us out with the Bloomsbury books.’ He got up and led the way to a desk on which stood a large cardboard box overflowing with books. ‘We got a shitload, man.’

  ‘Bloomsbury books?’

  ‘There’s one published every week. God knows why. Just look here: Harvest of Bloomsbury, a biography of Leonard Woolf’s gardener (by the gardener’s granddaughter); Bloomsbury Memory, by the sister of Vita Sackville-West’s maid; Bell, Woolf and Candle, a reminiscence of the pastor of the church where they would have gone, if they hadn’t all been atheists; and so on. Plenty here. Take your pick.’

  ‘Well I …’

  ‘I was afraid you’d say that.’ Bill scratched his head, and a faint shower of dandruff descended on a portrait of Virginia Woolf presiding over Through Parted Curtains: Impressions of a Bloomsbury Neighbour.

  ‘There’s always a cookbook or a medical around, and a tax guide. I don’t know which is more dangerous: The Rutabaga Gourmet, Endocrine Balance for Winners or Your Tax-Free Lifestyle. The last one advises people to set up corporations with their pets as officers. Oh, and speaking of pets …’

  He reached beneath a table and pulled a huge carton into view. ‘Interpreting Your Dog’s Dreams. A real winner there. Or how about Let Your Cat Speak? Listen to the blurb: “Ever wonder what your cat is thinking? Now you can find out! Proven sign-language technique allows direct contact. Just as scientists teach sign-language to apes, you can teach your cat a handful of signs and have real conversations within hours.”’

  He moved to a large table heaped with gaudy titles. ‘Confessions of priests and nuns. Nobody wants this stuff. All they ever show is that their lives are as humdrum as anybody’s. Here’s a priest who managed to write a preface comparing himself to Flann O’Brien, would you believe? Flann O’Brien? Gimme a break.’

  ‘Probably thinking of Pat O’Brien.’

  ‘How about a novel? Romanian novels are pretty hot stuff, so are Polish. Jawel Zbaglsky. Only’ – he turned to a metal bookcase – ‘I guess those are all gone. They get snapped up as soon as they come in, you know. Likewise Central American surrealists. García López, Marcia Gómez, Alberto Camuz. Let’s see – nope, those are all gone, too.

  ‘Then there’s genre fiction: we almost never review that, although we do a very occasi
onal round-up. How about an adult Western from Longhorn Books? Hot Spurs, for example. Or Barb-Wire Woman. No? Couple tons of bodice-rippers, too, and a whole range of romances: the Swirling Ecstasy series, the Penetrating Fire series, the Exploding Passion series.

  ‘Crime? Here’s every kind of crime fiction from Agnes Dustworthy’s Murder at High Tea to Jake Hacker’s My Gun Is Long. Plenty in between, too. Whole range of detectives, including five old ladies, two jockeys, a blind musician, four priests, a one-legged rabbi, three nuns (one of whom is an albino) and four investigative journalists. And that’s only the amateurs. We also have a complete range of professional PIs, including a midget, an astrologer, a pair of Siamese twins and a hard-boiled trans-sexual named Julian O’Toole.

  ‘Science fiction offers a rich choice. Here’s a black lesbian adult science fiction novel with an explicity rating of six. Plenty of environmentalist ecodisaster novels: psychic teenager wanders the ruined freeways of Los Angeles. Likewise plenty of militarist items that get turned into board games: psychic teenager kills giant spiders of Fomalhaut. We’ve also got juvenile sci-fi, either chemically dependent or martial arts, take your pick. Or this, Buyers of the Dream, profiles of thirty famous science fiction fans. Can you beat that? Famous fans! Probably have their own fan clubs …

  ‘Or, heck, if science fiction doesn’t do it, how about a good old fantasy?’ He opened the door to a room Manfred had not noticed before, filled floor to ceiling with shelves of paperback novels depicting heroic or erotic figures wielding swords. The books bore titles like Flameharp of Fearqueen, The Sword of Many Colors and Stormcurse: Book XI of The Darkquest Cycle. He picked up The Many-Shadowed Moonblade and waved it. ‘How about this one? Part of the Stormchild of Maskmoon tetralogy, or why not try Dreamcolors of the Dark Oracle, or maybe Firecrystal Moonwolf? What do you say?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I –’

  ‘You sure? Because we got plenty, a shitload here. See, about ten years ago somebody made the mistake of reviewing one of these and the word got out. I mean, Christ, they print fifty of these fuckers a month! And look at these titles. You could crank out titles like these with a computer program. Landlady of Dreamsword, The Watchers of Hawk – look at all this stuff. Jammed in here …’

  As Bill picked and pulled at the tightly packed books, one of the metal shelf units began to shift.

  ‘Better watch out, Bill. That shelf looks shaky, like it’s –’

  ‘I mean, look at all this stuff. The Axe of Swords, Ring of the Crystal Serpent – who buys all this stuff?’

  ‘Bill, I shouldn’t –’

  ‘I mean, just who would buy –?’

  Suddenly there was a groan of collapsing metal, the shelves vomited paperbacks, and Bill went down beneath a cascade of bright covers. Entirely covered except for one foot, he lay perfectly still. For a moment, Fred thought he was dead. Then the foot stirred, and a faint voice came from beneath the heap of covers portraying leather-clad princesses, sword-flourishing heroes, satanic villains, demonic dragons, Wagnerian gods and the endless cycle of titles, The Ice Harp, Dreamcrystal, Stormsong of Lady Bladefire, Flamedragon of Moonmask, The Many-Dreamed Flamestaff, The Crystal Moon of Lord Dreamsword: Book VII of The Firemask Cycle … Wolfs-word of Feardream: ‘Just tell me that – who would buy this stuff?’

  Later in the morning, Fred’s hundred-dollar car pulled into the visitors’ parking-lot of Cyberk Corporation in a cloud of blue smoke. Fred made his way inside, found his cubicle with some difficulty and started packing: two books, a packet of sugarless chewing gum, a coffee cup.

  Sturges Fellini leaned in at him. Fellini seemed always to be leaning in one door or another.

  ‘Fred, can we have a meeting this afternoon? Three-thirty?’

  ‘I don’t work here any more. Mel Pratt fired me yesterday. I’m just collecting my stuff.’

  ‘Fired you? That’s idiotic. We need more people, not fewer. Consider yourself back on the payroll now. I’ll talk to Mel about it.’

  ‘I don’t know … uh, Sturge. Maybe this is all for the best. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m really suitable for this job.’

  ‘You’ve got another offer? Well, just forget it, Fred. We’ll match anything they can pay. How does an immediate raise of twenty-five per cent sound?’

  Fred set down his books again. ‘Three-thirty this afternoon?’

  ‘In conference room forty-three.’ Fellini disappeared, then reappeared, like a music-hall entertainer singing his way offstage. ‘Oh, by the way, I want to talk about Mel. I think he’s been overdoing it, stressing out.’

  He then made his exit.

  Chapter Nine

  After Sturge Fellini rehired him, Fred suffered a rare attack of conscience. (Surely there was a limit to how much money you could rip off on the basis of one hiring mistake. Oh, yeah? he replied. Sez who? In arguments with his conscience, Fred usually fell back on lame impersonations of Edward G. Robinson.

  As a compromise, he spent the rest of the day making an honest effort to find out what his job really was. First of all, he read the two books thoroughly. The Dumb Child’s Computer Dictionary explained to him that the ‘computer’ was a large array of switches called relays. These relays could click on and off. When a relay was on, it represented the binary number 1; off represented 0. Since binary numbers were either 1s or 0s, this made a local area network very adept at handling highspeed communications, using packet-switching, token-ring networks, and data-compression algorithms such as Huffman codes.

  In attempting to reread this passage, Fred discovered that several pages of text had been omitted (all the entries between ‘Computer’ and ‘Data Transmission’). He turned to Talk Good Software, a book whose cover claimed it could

  professionalize your conversation. Do you look blank when someone talks about TRS conflicts? What if the boss asks your opinion of LANs? Do you know one windowing environment from another? Can you talk confidently about stacks, heaps, operating systems, assemblers?

  Inside, this book did not explain much. Rather, it contained buzz-words and formulas. If someone dropped the word ‘CD-ROM’, the proper response was evidently:

  CD-ROMs (compact disc read-only-memories) are all right in their place, but I feel they’re being oversold. In any case, they’ll soon be supplanted by WORMs (write-once-read-many) which at least we can write to. (NOTE: Never say write on, always write to.)

  For ‘CPU’, the good talk was:

  (CPU is no longer a buzz-word. By now, nearly everybody knows the CPU is the central processing unit, that is, the chip in the middle of the machine that runs the whole ball of wax. All a computer is, really, is a CPU and some PERIPHERALS (q.v.). To make points, talk about ‘multiple CPUs’ and PARALLEL PROCESSING (q.v.).)

  Fred looked up ‘Artificial Intelligence’:

  Artificial intelligence (call it AI) is not really a meaningful term by itself. I prefer to narrow the discussion to EXPERT SYSTEMS (q.v.), ROBOTICS(q.v.), PATTERN RECOGNITION (q.v.), LANGUAGE MANIPULATION (q.v.), or INFORMATION RETRIEVAL (q.v.).

  He tried ‘Robotics’:

  Mistakenly applied by most people only to factory robots. In fact, robotics covers the theory and practice of machines that imitate human behaviour of all types. At one extreme, robotics might apply to the development of an artificial prosthetic limb; at the other extreme, it covers sophisticated psychological theories of perception and judgement (i.e., how do humans recognize one another?) etaoinshrldu

  NOTE: We have landed and are taking over your world, O puny earthlings. Do not think you can escape our NETWORK (q.v.).

  At lunchtime, he cornered Carl Honks and Corky Corcoran and tried to ask intelligent questions.

  Carl shook his head. ‘You mean, you don’t know what instantiation is? OK, look.’ There then followed an explanation Fred could not follow. He nodded his head through it, however, and then asked Corky a question.

  Corky said: ‘Hey, real-time just means immediate. Like driving your car, your reactions have to be
in real time. You can’t hit the brakes an hour late, dig?’

  A beautiful black-haired woman came into the lunch-room and passed close by them. Fred forgot all robot questions.

  ‘My God.’

  ‘Yeah, nice.’ Corky looked impatient, though Carl was smirking appreciatively.

  ‘Who is she?’ Fred asked.

  ‘Who knows? Wearing a visitor’s badge. Probably a sales rep from somewhere. Anyway, like I was saying, an application that is real-time has to …’

  Pratt came over and sat down with them. The Lincoln face looked tired. ‘I see you’re back.’

  ‘Sturge hired me again,’ Fred said, shrugging off all responsibility.

  ‘Yes, well … I made a mistake. Been making a lot of mistakes lately, “old boy”.’ The horrible gasping laugh. ‘Maybe I’m due for some vacation.’

  No one else laughed. Pratt’s hooded eyes, now bloodshot, looked around the table. ‘You guys are one hell of a great team. I’ll have to be a better team leader. I guess I kind of went off the deep end, there, all that talk about hands.’ Pratt studied his own hands, the long gecko fingers drumming on the table edge, as on a keyboard.

  ‘You certainly went into the subject,’ Fred volunteered.

  ‘I was all wound up, there. Concentrating on hands is all wrong. I should have concentrated on the head. You ever think of all the ways we use the word head? Like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and like his blood be on our heads, and like go to the head of the class. We come into the world head first, and go out feet first, right?’

  Three chairs scraped in unison.

  Corky said: ‘Gotta go, Mel. Catch you later.’

  Carl said: ‘I got a meeting. See you all.’

  Fred said: ‘Must get back to work, eh?’

  Nothing stopped Pratt. He hitched his chair round to the next table and continued. ‘Like the whole notion of chance is heads and tails, right? The ancient Celts were headhunters, did you know? They beheaded their enemies and stuck the heads up on stone crosses. The head of state …’