Griffin's Egg

The straw market looked as though it had been through a storm.  The tents had been torn down, the stands knocked over, the goods looted.  Shards of orange and green glass crunched underfoot.  Yet a rack of Italian scarfs  worth a year's salary stood untouched amid the rubble.  It made no sense at all.

Up and down the market, flicks were industriously cleaning up.  They stooped and lifted and swept.  One of them was being beaten by a suit.

Gunther blinked.  He could not react to it as a real event.  The woman cringed under the blows, shrieking wildly and scuttling away from them.  One of the tents had been re-erected, and within the shadow of its rainbow silks, four other suits lounged against the bar.  Not a one of them moved to help the woman.

"Hey!" Gunther shouted.  He felt hideously self-conscious, as if he'd been abruptly thrust into the middle of a play without memorized lines or any idea of the plot or notion of what his role in it was.  "Stop that!"

The suit turned toward him.  It held the woman's slim arm captive in one gloved hand.  "Go away," a male voice growled over the radio.

"What do you think you're doing?  Who are you?"  The man wore a Westinghouse suit, one of a dozen or so among the unafflicted.  But Gunther recognized a brown, kidney-shaped scorch mark on the abdomen panel.  "Posner --is that you?  Let that woman go."

"She's not a woman," Posner said.  "Hell, look at her--she's not even human.  She's a flick."

Gunther set his helmet to record.  "I'm taping this," he warned.  "You hit that woman again, and Ekatarina will see it all.  I promise."

Posner released the woman.  She stood dazed for a second or two, and then the voice from her peecee reasserted control.  She bent to pick up a broom, and returned to work.

Switching off his helmet, Gunther said, "Okay.  What did she  do?"

Indignantly, Posner extended a foot.  He pointed sternly down at it.  "She peed all over my boot!"

The suits in the tent had been watching with interest.  Now they roared.  "Your own fault, Will!" one of them called out.  "I told you you weren't scheduling in enough time for personal hygiene."

"Don't worry about a little moisture.  It'll boil off next time you hit vacuum!"

But Gunther was not listening.  He stared at the flick Posner had been mistreating and wondered why he hadn't recognized Anya earlier.  Her mouth was pursed, her face squinched up tight with worry, as if there were a key in the back of her head that had been wound three times too many.  Her shoulders cringed forward now, too.  But still.

"I'm sorry, Anya," he said.  "Hiro is dead.  There wasn't anything we could do."

She went on sweeping, oblivious, unhappy.

He caught the shift's last jitney back to the Center.  It felt good to be home again.  Miiko Ezumi had decided to loot the outlying factories of  their oxygen and water surpluses, then carved a shower room from the rock.  There was a long line for only three minutes' use, and no soap, but nobody complained.  Some people pooled their time, showering two and three together.  Those waiting their turns joked rowdily.

Gunther washed, grabbed some clean shorts and a Glavkosmos teeshirt, and padded down the hall.  He hesitated outside the common room, listening to the gang sitting around the table, discussing the more colorful flicks they'd encountered.

"Have you seen the Mouse Hunter?"

"Oh yeah, and Ophelia!"

"The Pope!"

"The Duck Lady!

"Everybody knows the Duck Lady!"

They were laughing and happy.  A warm sense of community flowed from the room, what Gunther's father would have in his sloppy-sentimental way called Gemutlichkeit.  Gunther stepped within.

Liza Nagenda looked up, all gums and teeth, and froze.  Her jaw snapped shut.  "Well, if it isn't Izmailova's personal spy!"

"What?"  The accusation took Gunther's breath away.  He looked helplessly about the room.  Nobody would meet his eye.  They had all fallen silent.

Liza's face was grey with anger.  "You heard me!  It was you that ratted on Krishna, wasn't it?"

"Now that's way out of line!  You've got a lot of fucking gall if--"  He controlled himself with an effort.  There was no sense in matching her hysteria with his own.  "It's none of your business what my relationship with Izmailova is or is not."  He looked around the table.  "Not that any of you deserve to know, but Krishna's working on a cure.  If anything I said or did helped put him back in the lab, well then, so be it."

She smirked.  "So what's your excuse for snitching on Will Posner?"

"I never--"

"We all heard the story!  You told him you were going to run straight to your precious Izmailova with your little helmet vids."

"Now, Liza," Takayuni began.  She slapped him away.

"Do you know what Posner was doing?"  Gunther shook a finger in Liza's face.  "Hah?  Do you?  He was beating a woman--Anya!  He was beating Anya right out in the open!"

"So what?  He's one of us, isn't he?  Not a zoned-out, dead-eyed, ranting, drooling flick!"

"You bitch!"  Outraged, Gunther lunged at Liza across the table.  "I'll kill you, I swear it!"  People jerked back from him, rushed forward, a chaos of motion.  Posner thrust himself in Gunther's way, arms spread, jaw set and manly.  Gunther punched him in the face.  Posner looked surprised, and fell back.  Gunther's hand stung, but he felt strangely good anyway; if everyone else was crazy, then why not him?

"You just try it!" Liza shrieked.  "I knew you were that type all along!"

Takayuni grabbed Liza away one way.  Hamilton seized Gunther and yanked him the other.  Two of Posner's friends were holding him back as well.

"I've had about all I can take from you!" Gunther shouted.  "You cheap cunt!"

"Listen to him!  Listen what he calls me!"

Screaming, they were shoved out opposing doors.

"It's all right, Gunther."  Beth had flung him into the first niche they'd come to.  He slumped against a wall, shaking, and closed his eyes.  "It's all right now."

But it wasn't.  Gunther was suddenly struck with the realization that with the exception of Ekatarina he no longer had any friends.  Not real friends, close friends.  How could this have happened?  It was as if  everyone had been turned into werewolves.  Those who weren't actually mad were still monsters.  "I don't understand."

Hamilton sighed.  "What don't you understand, Weil?"

"The way people--the way we all treat the flicks.  When Posner was beating Anya, there were four other suits standing nearby, and not a one of them so much as lifted a finger to stop him.  Not one!  And I felt it too, there's no use pretending I'm superior to the rest of them.  I wanted to walk on and pretend I hadn't seen a thing.  What's happened to us?"

Hamilton shrugged.  Her hair was short and dark about her plain round face.  "I went to a pretty expensive school when I was a kid.  One year we had one of those exercises that're supposed to be personally enriching.  You know?  A life experience.  We were divided into two groups--Prisoners and Guards.  The Prisoners couldn't leave their assigned areas without permission from a guard, the Guards got better lunches, stuff like that.  Very simple set of rules.  I was a Guard.

"Almost immediately, we started to bully the Prisoners.  We pushed 'em around, yelled at 'em, kept 'em in line.  What was amazing was that the Prisoners let us do it.  They outnumbered us five to one.  We didn't even have authority for the things we did.  But not a one of them complained.  Not a one of them stood up and said No, you can't do this.  They played the game.

"At the end of the month, the project was dismantled and we had some study seminars on what we'd learned: the roots of fascism, and so on.  Read some Ha