“Looking for this?” Harrisch held up the little box with the big red button, the wire dangling down to the floor. “There’s really no need for it.” He laid the buzzer down on top of one of the machines, well beyond November’s reach. “I’m just here for a bit of conversation. I imagine you’re feeling well enough for that. Aren’t you?”
November pushed herself up higher on the pillows, drawing as far back from the exec as possible. “What do you want?”
“Why so nervous?” Spreading his empty hands apart, Harrisch let his smile fade. “Is there something I’m doing that’s making you afraid? What is it?”
“You gotta be kidding-” November looked around herself for something she could throw at the exec, something hard rather than soft, that would do real damage. Musing about dreams and their meanings was over for the time being. “Get the connect out of here.” She wondered if she could scream or shout loud enough to get the attention of anybody passing by in the corridor beyond. That’s the problem with hospitals, November thought grimly. They were so damn loud, nobody ever knew what was going on. No wonder people die here. “Just get out,” she said again. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“That’s a rotten attitude to take.” Harrisch appeared genuinely wounded. “What did I do to deserve that from you? Employed you, paid you… made your whole life possible, the way you wanted to live it. If it weren’t for people like me, farming out the work outside the corporation, freelancers like you wouldn’t exist. You oughta thank me.”
“Your ass, connect-head.” November’s initial panic had been replaced with a simmering anger, the way it always was, given enough time. “I wasn’t even working for you this time-you were just stringing me on with the possibility of a job-and you nearly got me killed.” She reconsidered the words. “‘Nearly’… shit. You did get me killed. Cooked up like a connecting flounder.”
“Seems rather a harsh way to put it…”
“Deal with it, pal.” November felt the back of the hospital gown pull open against the pillow as she folded her arms across her breast. “You left me hanging out there, looking like yesterday’s burnt toast. The only reason I’m alive-the only reason I’ve been brought back from the dead at all-is because somebody else popped for the bill here. Somebody who had a lot less reason to do it than you should have.”
“Please.” Harrisch sighed elaborately. “You might like to try to see these issues from my perspective. DynaZauber corporate practice is a strict implementation of Denkmann’s Pimp-Style Management™ philosophy-or to put it another way, PSM is the codification of what we just do as a matter of course. We really wrote the book on a lot of those things, almost more than Denkmann did. The ego annihilation, the perpetual screw; all that stuff.” A note of pride sounded in Harrisch’s voice. “So you can just dispense with any notions about loyalty being anything other than a one-way street when you deal with DZ. We take, we don’t give-even when you’re on the payroll, that’s how it works out. Anything else would violate the essential sadomasochistic underpinnings of our management style, and then the whole system falls apart. And we’ve got too much invested in it to let that happen.”
“Aw, man. Spare me.” I’m lying here with a new skin stitched on because of these jerks-she didn’t need a lecture on why getting connected by them was supposed to be such a wonderful thing. “If getting connected by you people comes without lubricant… I’m a big girl now. I’ll deal with it. Easier than listening to you sonsabitches.”
“You know-” Harrisch sat down on a corner of the bed; November had to draw her feet up beneath the blanket to avoid him. “Some people come through experiences such as you’ve been through… and they’re better people for it.”
“Oh, I am; believe me.” November glared at him. “I’m just not going to waste it on you.”
“I see.” The expression on the exec’s face was one of sly assessment. “And who does get the benefit of your transformed nature? Or let’s put it another way: who are you hoping will get it?” Harrisch leaned closer to her; he smelled of expensive cologne and adding-machine printouts. “Maybe it’s that poor bastard McNihil. Because you’re so grateful to him.”
“Hardly.” November wished she had found something to throw at this smiling apparition. “He’s taken-remember? Even if I was interested in him, which I’m not. He’s got that major bent for his dead wife. Not exactly the kind of thing it’s possible to walk in on.”
“True.” Harrisch gave a shrug. “Unless… he wanted you to.”
“Give it up.” Her short laugh held contempt. “This shows why you were having such a hard time recruiting him. You don’t know how his mind works.”
“And I suppose you do? Tell me then: why’d McNihil pay your bill, for the skin grafts and all the rest of it? He must’ve had a reason.”
She regarded the DZ exec warily, then shook her head. “I don’t know why.”
Harrisch slowly nodded, deep in his own thoughts. “I don’t, either,” he said after a moment. “Kind of a mystery. I was really hoping that you might be able to clue me in on it. Because there’s always a reason.”
Like there is for your coming around here. The act wasn’t fooling November. She could see inside Harrisch’s skull with the same abstract X rays she used to turn on the men in the trains, the ones who’d wanted to press themselves on and into her previous skin. They always want something, she thought. Harrisch was no different in his wanting, his lust for connection, even if his eventual orgasm was wired into something other than his fleshy genitals, some part whose up-and-down movements were more accurately charted on a stockbroker’s report.
“Like I said.” November wasn’t scared of the exec any longer; the twinge of fear had been rooted in some vestigial organ of her own body, childish and irrational; it would probably be a long time before a lit match wouldn’t make her bladder tremble. “I don’t know why he did it. Maybe McNihil thought he was responsible for what happened to me-”
“I doubt it,” said Harrisch. “Asp-heads don’t feel guilt. Everything’s justified to them.”
“Then he really should’ve gone to work for you. Without being pushed.” She regarded the exec without flinching. “But I don’t know the why of that, either. If the guy’s got his reasons, he keeps them to himself. After all-” She tilted her head and looked at Harrisch from the corner of her eye. “He didn’t tell you why he was picking up my tab, did he? He just did it, that’s all.”
“True.” Harrisch watched his own hand smoothing out a section of the bedsheet, then glanced back up at her. “But you’d like to know, wouldn’t you?”
She felt as though she were looking down at the exec from some lofty mountaintop. “And somehow you’re going to make that possible, I take it.”
“Perhaps.” Harrisch shrugged. “I just came to offer you a little… travel assistance. To go somewhere… interesting.”
“With you?”
“Not necessarily.”
Her eyes narrowed, as though sharpening her gaze enough to see into the DZ exec. “Is this a job offer? Because if it is, you’re wasting your time.” November had already made her decision, before this clown had shown up. “I’m not doing any kind of work you might be looking for. Not anymore.”