The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [74]
"It didn't affect my job," Jones muttered, not looking the human in the eyes. "And it's not like I ever used the thing but to piss. So now I piss like a birther woman."
"Didn't bother you at all, then? Doesn't bother you that Mayda works these thugs up like that?"
They were angry. Jones could understand that. If there was anything that made him feel a kinship with the birthers, it was anger. Still, the weight of their resentment...of their loathing.their outright furious hatred.was a labor to bear. They had hurt him. He had never intentionally harmed a birther. It was the Plant's decision to utilize cultures for half their workforce (more than that would constitute a labor violation, but the conservative candidate for Prime Minister was fighting to make it so that companies did not have to guarantee any ratio of non-clones; freedom of enterprise must be upheld, he cried). Let the strikers mutilate the president of the Plant, instead. Let them hang him and his underlings in the shadow of the Vat. But didn't they see ― even though Jones worked in their place while their unemployment ran out and their families starved like the protestors ― that he was as much a victim as they?
This man was under the employ of his enemies. Of course, he himself had once been under their employ. Still, could he trust this man as his partner in crime? No. But he could do business with men he didn't trust. He wouldn't turn his back to Moodring, either, but in the end he needed to eat. Five thousand munits. He had never earned a coin until he had escaped the Plant, and never a legal one since.
He could go away. Somewhere hot. Have his tattoo removed. Maybe even his useless vestige of "manhood" restored.
Parr went on, "A third bit of incentive. You're no fool, so I'll admit it. The people who hired me.you once worked for them, too. If you decline, well.like I say, they'd like to get a hold of you after what you did to those two men."
Slowly and deliberately Jones's eyes lifted, staring from under bony brows. He smiled. It was like a baring of fangs.
"You were doing well, Nevin. Don't spoil it with unnecessary incentives. I'll help you kill your man."
"Sorry." Ever the smile. "Just that they want this to happen soon, and I don't want to have to look for a partner from scratch."
"Why do you need a partner?"
"Well let me tell you."
2: The Pimp Of The Inverse
From his perch atop the Vat, with its stained streaked sides and its deep liquid burbling, Jones watched night fall in Punktown. The snow was a mere whisking about of loose flakes. Colored lights glowed in the city beyond the Plant, and flashed here and there on the Plant itself, but for less gay purposes. Once in a while there was a bright violet-hued flash in the translucent dome of the shipping department, as another batch of products was teleported elsewhere on this planet, or to another. Perhaps a crew destined to work on an asteroid mine, or to build an orbital space station or a new colony, a new Punktown, on some world not yet raped, merely groped.
He watched a hovertruck with a covered bed like a military troop carrier pull out of the shipping docks, and head for the east gate. A shipment with a more localized destination. Jones imagined its contents, the manufactured goods, seated in two rows blankly facing each other. Cultures not yet tattooed, not yet named. Perhaps the companies they were destined for did not utilize tattoos and decorative names ― mocking names, Jones mused ― to identify the clone workers. Jones wondered what, if anything, went