The Dead - Michael Swanwick, ebook
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THE DEAD
Michael Swanwick
We've been worried about technological unemployment for decades, but, as the bleak and elegant
story that follows suggests, now there may be another threat to your job security: dead people.
They're back from the grave and looking for work…
Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and has gone on to become one of the most popular
and respected of all that decade's new writers. He has several times been a finalist for the Nebula
Award, as well as for the World Fantasy Award and for the John W. Campbell Award, and has
won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the
Asimov's
Readers Award poll. In 1991, his
novel
Stations of the Tide
won him a Nebula Award as well, and last year he won the World
Fantasy Award for his story
Radio Waves
. His other books include his first novel
, In the Drift,
which was published in 1985, a novella-length book
, Griffin's Egg,
and 1987's popular novel
Vacuum Flowers.
His critically acclaimed short fiction has been assembled in
Gravity's Angels
and
in a collection of his collaborative short work with other writers
, Slow Dancing Through Time.
His
most recent book is a new novel
, The Iron Dragon's Daughter,
which was a finalist for the World
Fantasy Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He's just completed a new novel
, Jack Faust.
He's had stories in our Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth Annual
Collections. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter, and their son Sean
.
Three boy zombies in matching red jackets bused our table, bringing water, lighting candles, brushing
away the crumbs between courses. Their eyes were dark, attentive, lifeless; their hands and faces so
white as to be faintly luminous in the hushed light. I thought it in bad taste, but "This is Manhattan,"
Courtney said. "A certain studied offensiveness is fashionable here."
The blond brought menus and waited for our order.
We both ordered pheasant. "An excellent choice," the boy said in a clear, emotionless voice. He went
away and came back a minute later with the freshly strangled birds, holding them up for our approval. He
couldn't have been more than eleven when he died and his skin was of that sort connoisseurs call
"milk-glass," smooth, without blemish, and all but translucent. He must have cost a fortune.
As the boy was turning away, I impulsively touched his shoulder. He turned back. "What's your name,
son?" I asked.
"Timothy." He might have been telling me the specialite
de maison.
The boy waited a breath to see if
more was expected of him, then left.
Courtney gazed after him. "How lovely he would look," she murmured, "nude. Standing in the moonlight
by a cliff. Definitely a cliff. Perhaps the very one where he met his death."
"He wouldn't look very lovely if he'd fallen off a cliff."
"Oh, don't be unpleasant."
The wine steward brought our bottle. "Chateau Latour '17." I raised an eyebrow. The steward had the
sort of old and complex face that Rembrandt would have enjoyed painting. He poured with pulseless
ease and then dissolved into the gloom. "Good lord, Courtney, you
seduced
me on cheaper."
She flushed, not happily. Courtney had a better career going than I. She out-powered me. We both
 knew who was smarter, better connected, more likely to end up in a corner office with the historically
significant antique desk. The only edge I had was that I was a male in a seller's market. It was enough.
"This is a business dinner, Donald," she said, "nothing more."
I favored her with an expression of polite disbelief I knew from experience she'd find infuriating. And,
digging into my pheasant, murmured, "Of course." We didn't say much of consequence until dessert,
when I finally asked, "So what's Loeb-Soffner up to these days?"
"Structuring a corporate expansion. Jim's putting together the financial side of the package, and I'm doing
personnel. You're being headhunted, Donald." She favored me with that feral little flash of teeth she made
when she saw something she wanted. Courtney wasn't a beautiful woman, far from it. But there was that
fierceness to her, that sense of something primal being held under tight and precarious control that made
her hot as hot to me. "You're talented, you're thuggish, and you're not too tightly nailed to your present
position. Those are all qualities we're looking for."
She dumped her purse on the table, took out a single-folded sheet of paper. "These are the terms I'm
offering." She placed it by my plate, attacked her torte with gusto.
I unfolded the paper. "This is a lateral transfer."
"Unlimited opportunity for advancement," she said with her mouth full, "if you've got the stuff."
"Mmm." I did a line-by-line of the benefits, all comparable to what I was getting now. My current salary
to the dollar—Ms. Soffner was showing off. And the stock options. "This can't be right. Not for a
lateral."
There was that grin again, like a glimpse of shark in murky waters. "I knew you'd like it. We're going
over the top with the options because we need your answer right away—tonight preferably.
Tomorrow at the latest. No negotiations. We have to put the package together fast. There's going to be a
shitstorm of publicity when this comes out. We want to have everything nailed down, present the fundies
and bleeding hearts with a
fait accompli
."
"My God, Courtney, what kind of monster do you have hold of now?"
"The biggest one in the world. Bigger than Apple. Bigger than Home Virtual. Bigger than HIVac-IV," she
said with relish. "Have you ever heard of Koestler Biological?"
I put my fork down.
"Koestler? You're peddling corpses now?"
"Please. Postanthropic biological resources." She said it lightly, with just the right touch of irony. Still, I
thought I detected a certain discomfort with the nature of her client's product.
"There's no money in it." I waved a hand toward our attentive waitstaff. "These guys must
be—what—maybe two percent of the annual turnover? Zombies are luxury goods: servants,
reactor cleanups, Hollywood stunt deaths, exotic services"—we both knew what I
meant—"a few hundred a year, maybe, tops. There's not the demand. The revulsion factor is too
great."
"There's been a technological breakthrough." Courtney leaned forward. "They can install the infrasystem
and controllers and offer the product for the factory-floor cost of a new subcompact. That's way below
the economic threshold for blue-collar labor.
 "Look at it from the viewpoint of a typical factory owner. He's already downsized to the bone and labor
costs are bleeding him dry. How can he compete in a dwindling consumer market? Now let's imagine he
buys into the program." She took out her Mont Blanc and began scribbling figures on the tablecloth. "No
benefits. No liability suits. No sick pay. No pilferage. We're talking about cutting labor costs by at least
two thirds. Minimum! That's irresistible, I don't care how big your revulsion factor is. We project we can
move five hundred thousand units in the first year."
"Five hundred thousand," I said. "That's crazy. Where the hell are you going to get the raw material
for—?"
"Africa."
"Oh, God, Courtney." I was struck wordless by the cynicism it took to even consider turning the
sub-Saharan tragedy to a profit, by the sheer, raw evil of channeling hard currency to the pocket Hitlers
who ran the camps. Courtney only smiled and gave that quick little flip of her head that meant she was
accessing the time on an optic chip.
"I think you're ready," she said, "to talk with Koestler."
At her gesture, the zombie boys erected projector lamps about us, fussed with the settings, turned them
on. Interference patterns moired, clashed, meshed. Walls of darkness erected themselves about us.
Courtney took out her flat and set it up on the table. Three taps of her nailed fingers and the round and
hairless face of Marvin Koestler appeared on the screen. "Ah, Courtney!" he said in a pleased voice.
"You're in—New York, yes? The San Moritz. With Donald." The slightest pause with each
accessed bit of information. "Did you have the antelope medallions?" When we shook our heads, he
kissed his fingertips. "Magnificent! They're ever so lightly braised and then smothered in buffalo
mozzarella. Nobody makes them better. I had the same dish in Florence the other day, and there was
simply no comparison."
I cleared my throat. "Is that where you are? Italy?"
"Let's leave out where I am." He made a dismissive gesture, as if it were a trifle. But Courtney's face
darkened. Corporate kidnapping being the growth industry it is, I'd gaffed badly. "The question
is—what do you think of my offer?"
"It's… interesting. For a lateral."
"It's the start-up costs. We're leveraged up to our asses as it is. You'll make out better this way in the
long run." He favored me with a sudden grin that went mean around the edges. Very much the financial
buccaneer. Then he leaned forward, lowered his voice, maintained firm eye contact. Classic
people-handling techniques. "You're not sold. You know you can trust Courtney to have checked out the
finances. Still, you think: It won't work. To work the product has to be irresistible, and it's not. It can't
be."
"Yes, sir," I said. "Succinctly put."
He nodded to Courtney. "Let's sell this young man." And to me, "My stretch is downstairs."
He winked out.
Koestler was waiting for us in the limo, a ghostly pink presence. His holo, rather, a genial if somewhat
coarse-grained ghost afloat in golden light. He waved an expansive and insubstantial arm to take in the
interior of the car and said, "Make yourselves at home."
 The chauffeur wore combat-grade photomultipliers. They gave him a buggish, inhuman look. I wasn't
sure if he was dead or not. "Take us to Heaven," Koestler said.
The doorman stepped out into the street, looked both ways, nodded to the chauffeur. Robot guns
tracked our progress down the block.
"Courtney tells me you're getting the raw materials from Africa."
"Distasteful, but necessary. To begin with. We have to sell the idea first—no reason to make things
rough on ourselves. Down the line, though, I don't see why we can't go domestic. Something along the
lines of a reverse mortgage, perhaps, life insurance that pays off while you're still alive. It'd be a step
toward getting the poor off our backs at last. Fuck 'em. They've been getting a goddamn free ride for too
long; the least they can do is to die and provide us with servants."
I was pretty sure Koestler was joking. But I smiled and ducked my head, so I'd be covered in either
case. "What's Heaven?" I asked, to move the conversation onto safer territory.
"A proving ground," Koestler said with great satisfaction, "for the future. Have you ever witnessed
bare-knuckles fisticuffs?"
"No."
"Ah, now there's a sport for gentlemen! The sweet science at its sweetest. No rounds, no rules, no holds
barred. It gives you the real measure of a man—not just of his strength but his character. How he
handles himself, whether he keeps cool under pressure—how he stands up to pain. Security won't
let me go to the clubs in person, but I've made arrangements."
Heaven was a converted movie theater in a run-down neighborhood in Queens. The chauffeur got out,
disappeared briefly around the back, and returned with two zombie bodyguards. It was like a conjurer's
trick. "You had these guys stashed in the
trunk
!" I asked as he opened the door for us.
"It's a new world," Courtney said. "Get used to it."
The place was mobbed. Two, maybe three hundred seats, standing room only.
A mixed crowd, blacks and Irish and Koreans mostly, but with a smattering of uptown customers as
well. You didn't have to be poor to need the occasional taste of vicarious potency. Nobody paid us any
particular notice. We'd come in just as the fighters were being presented.
"Weighing two-five-oh, in black trunks with a red stripe," the ref was bawling, "the gang-bang
gangsta
,
the bare-knuckle
brawla
, the man with tha—"
Courtney and I went up a scummy set of back stairs. Bodyguard-us-bodyguard, as if we were a combat
patrol out of some twentieth-century jungle war. A scrawny, potbellied old geezer with a damp cigar in
his mouth unlocked the door to our box. Sticky floor, bad seats, a good view down on the ring. Gray
plastic matting, billowing smoke.
Koestler was there, in a shiny new hologram shell. It reminded me of those plaster Madonnas in painted
bathtubs that Catholics set out in their yards. "Your permanent box?" I asked.
"All of this is for your sake, Donald—you and a few others. We're pitting our product one-on-one
against some of the local talent. By arrangement with the management. What you're going to see will
settle your doubts once and for all."
 "You'll like this," Courtney said. "I've been here five nights straight. Counting tonight." The bell rang,
starting the fight. She leaned forward avidly, hooking her elbows on the railing.
The zombie was gray-skinned and modestly muscled, for a fighter. But it held up its hands alertly, was
light on its feet, and had strangely calm and knowing eyes.
Its opponent was a real bruiser, a big black guy with classic African features twisted slightly out of true,
so that his mouth curled up in a kind of sneer on one side. He had gang scars on his chest and even uglier
marks on his back that didn't look deliberate but like something he'd earned on the streets. His eyes
burned with an intensity just this side of madness.
He came forward cautiously but not fearfully, and made a couple of quick jabs to get the measure of his
opponent. They were blocked and countered.
They circled each other, looking for an opening.
For a minute or so, nothing much happened. Then the gangster feinted at the zombie's head, drawing up
its guard. He drove through that opening with a slam to the zombie's nuts that made me wince.
No reaction.
The dead fighter responded with a flurry of punches, and got in a glancing blow to its opponent's cheek.
They separated, engaged, circled around.
Then the big guy exploded in a combination of killer blows, connecting so solidly it seemed they would
splinter every rib in the dead fighter's body. It brought the crowd to their feet, roaring their approval.
The zombie didn't even stagger.
A strange look came into the gangster's eyes, then, as the zombie counterattacked, driving him back into
the ropes. I could only imagine what it must be like for a man who had always lived by his strength and
his ability to absorb punishment to realize that he was facing an opponent to whom pain meant nothing.
Fights were lost and won by flinches and hesitations. You won by keeping your head. You lost by getting
rattled.
Despite his best blows, the zombie stayed methodical, serene, calm, relentless. That was its nature.
It must have been devastating.
The fight went on and on. It was a strange and alienating experience for me. After a while I couldn't stay
focused on it. My thoughts kept slipping into a zone where I found myself studying the line of Courtney's
jaw, thinking about later tonight. She liked her sex just a little bit sick. There was always a feeling, fucking
her, that there was something truly repulsive that she
really
wanted to do but lacked the courage to bring
up on her own.
So there was always this urge to get her to do something she didn't like. She was resistant; I never dared
try more than one new thing per date. But I could always talk her into that one thing. Because when she
was aroused, she got pliant. She could be talked into anything. She could be made to beg for it.
Courtney would've been amazed to learn that I was not proud of what I did with her—quite the
opposite, in fact. But I was as obsessed with her as she was with whatever it was that obsessed her.
Suddenly Courtney was on her feet, yelling. The hologram showed Koestler on his feet as well. The big
guy was on the ropes, being pummeled. Blood and spittle flew from his face with each blow. Then he
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