A table featuring radio-frequency bugs and taps was doing a bang-up business. A man and woman with towering headdresses and face paint were boldly retailing the whole gamut of the covert-listening industry: bodywires, gooseneck flashlights, wire crimpers, grounding kits, adhesive spongers, dental picks and forceps, and box after box of fingernail-sized audio bugs. Who but nomads, the perma-nently unemployed, would enjoy the leisure of patiently listening, col-lating, and trading juicy bits of overheard dialogue? Oscar examined a foam-filled box jammed with hexhead cam wrenches.
“Let’s try this other row,” Greta urged him, eyes bright and hair tousled. “This one’s medical!”
They drifted into a collateral realm of undead commerce. Here, the market tables were crowded with hemostatic forceps, surgical scis-sors, vascular clamps, resistant heat-sealed plastic gloves from the long-vanished heyday of AIDS. Greta pored, transfixed, over the bone screws, absorption spears, ultracheap South Chinese magnifier specta-cles, little poptop canisters of sterile silicone grease.
“I need some cash,” she told him suddenly. “Loan me some-thing. ”
“What is with you? You can’t buy this junk. You don’t know where it’s from.”
“That’s why I want to buy it.” She frowned at him. “Look, I was the head of the Instrumentation Department. If they’re giving away protein sequencers, I really need to know about that.”
She approached the table’s owner, who was sitting at his open laptop and chuckling over homemade cartoons. “Hey, mister. How much for this cytometer?”
The hick looked up from his screen. “Is that what that is?”
“Does it work?”
“I dunno. Kinda makes the right noises when you plug it in.”
Pelicanos appeared. He had bought her a secondhand jacket — a gruesome sporty disaster of indestructible black and purple Gore-Tex.
“Thank you, Yosh,” she said, and slipped into the jacket’s baggy entrails. Once she’d snapped the ghastly thing up to her chin, Greta inunediately became an integral part of the local landscape. She was passing for normal now, just another poverty-stricken bottom-feed female shopper.
“I wish Sandra were here,” Pelicanos said quietly. “Sandra would enjoy this place. If we weren’t in so much trouble, that is.”
Oscar was too preoccupied for junk shopping. He was worried about Kevin. He was struggling to conjure up a contingency plan in case Kevin failed to make a useful contact, or worse yet, if Kevin simply vanished.
But Greta was picking her way along the tables with heartfelt enthusiasm. She’d transcended all her pains and worries. Scratch a scientist, find a hardware junkie.
But no, it was deeper than that. Greta was in her element. Oscar had a brief intuitive flash of what it would mean to be married to Greta. Choosing equipment was part of her work and work was the core of her being. Domestic life with a dedicated scientist would be crammed full of moments like this. He would be dutifully tagging along to keep her company, and she would be investing all her atten-tion into things that he would never understand. Her relationship with the physical world was of an entirely different order from his own. She loved equipment, but she had no taste. It would be hell to furnish a home with a scientist. They’d be arguing over her awful idea of win-dow curtains. He’d be giving in on the issue of cheap and nasty table-ware.
His phone rang. It was Kevin.
Oscar followed instructions, and located the tent where Kevin had found his man. The place was hard to miss. It was an oblong dome of tinted parachute fabric, sheltering a two-man light aircraft, six bicycles, and a host of cots. Hundreds of multicolored strings of chemglow hung from the seams of the tent, dangling to shoulder height. A dozen proles were sitting on soft plastic carpets. To one side, five of them were busily compiling a printed newspaper.
Kevin was sitting and chatting with a man he introduced as “General Burningboy.” Burningboy was in his fifties, with a long salt-and-pepper beard and a filthy cowboy hat. The nomad guru wore elaborately hand-embroidered jeans, a baggy handwoven sweater, and ancient military lace-up boots. There were three parole cuffs on his hairy’ wrists.
“Howdy,” the prole General said. “Welcome to Canton Market. Pull up a floor.”
Oscar and Greta sat on the carpet. Kevin was already sitting there, in his socks, absently massaging his sore feet. Pelicanos was not attending the negotiations. Pelicanos was waiting at a discreet distance. He was their emergency backup man.
“Your friend here just paid me quite a sum, just to buy one hour of my time,” Burningboy remarked. “Some tale he had to tell me, too. But now that I see you two …” He looked thoughtfully at Oscar and Greta. “Yeah, it makes sense. I reckon I’m buying his story. So what can I do y’ all for?”
“We’re in need of assistance,” Oscar said.
“Oh, I knew it had to be somethin’,” the General nodded. “We never get asked for a favor by straight folks till you’re on the ropes. Happens to us all the time — rich idiots, just showin’ up out of the blue. Always got some fancy notion about what we can do for ’em. Some genius scheme that can only be accomplished by the proverbial scum of the earth. Like, maybe we’d like to help ’em grow her-oin… Maybe sell some aluminum siding.”
“It’s not at all like that, General. You’ll understand, once you hear my proposal.”
The General tucked in his boots, cross-legged. “Y’know, this may amaze you, Mr. Valparaiso, but in point of fact, we worthless subhumans are kinda busy with lives of our own! This is Canton First Monday. We’re smack in the middle of a major jamboree here. I’ve gotta worry about serious matters, like… sewage. We got a hun-dred thousand people showin’ up for three days. You comprende?” Burningboy stroked his beard. “You know who you’re talking to here? I’m not a magic elf, pal. I don’t come out of a genie bottle just because you need me. I’m a human being. I got my own problems. They call me ‘General’ now … But once upon a time, I used to be a real-live mayor! I was the elected two-term mayor of Port Mans-field, Texas. Fine little beachfront community — till it washed away.”
An elderly woman in a hairy robe entered the tent. She carefully tied two knots into a dangling cord of chemglow, and left without a word.
The General picked up the thread. “You see, son — and Dr. Pen-ninger” — he nodded at Greta in courtly fashion — “we’re all the he-roes of our own story. You tell me you’ve got a big problem — hell, we’ve all got big problems.”
“Let’s discuss them,” Oscar said.
“I got some excellent career advice for you overachievers. Why don’t you clowns just give up? Just quit! Knock it off, hit the road! Are you enjoyin’ life? Do you have a community? Do you even know what a real community is? Is there any human soul that you poor haunted wretches can really trust? Don’t answer that! ’Cause I already know. You’re a sorry pair of washouts, you two. You look like coyotes ate you and crapped you off a cliff. Now you got some crisis you want me to help you with… Hell, people like you are always gonna have a crisis. You are the crisis. When are you gonna wake up? Your system don’t work. Your economy don’t work. Your politicians don’t work. Nothing you ever do works. You’re over.”
“For the time being,” Oscar said.
“Mister, you’re never gonna get ahead of the game. You’ve had a serious wake-up call here. You’re disappeared, you’re dispossessed. You’ve been blown right off the edge of the earth. Well, you know something? There’s a soft landing down here. Just go ahead and leave! Burn your clothes! Set fire to your damn diploma! Junk all your ID cards! You’re a sickening, pitiful sight, you know that? A nice, charming, talented couple… Listen, it’s not too late for you two to get a life! You’re derelicts right now, but you could be bon vivants, if you knew what life was for.”