You don’t mean you spent it all, Rupert?” demanded Rupert Mudge’s wife—just as he’d figured she would—with that disgusted look on her face that he was getting so very sick of seeing.
She was a hip-heavy, short-legged bottle blonde with permanent frown lines in the corners of her mouth that made her face look like a wooden puppet. She wore a tattered red-and-yellow flower-print dress and the work boots she used in her housecleaning job.
I’m outgrowing that woman, Mudge thought as he ran a hand through his luxuriant hair. He’d gone from partly bald to this glorious brown mane thanks to Fontaine’s plasmids. He shook his head—harder than he needed to, so he could make all that hair fly about—and then he reached for his new ADAM. He already had a good charge of EVE going to activate it.
“You take that plasmid stuff back to Fontaine’s!” Sally grated between grinding teeth. “I worked hard for that money!”
“Oh Christ, Sally,” said Mudge, injecting the plasmid, “a man’s gotta put on a good appearance out there in the world. I need…” His teeth started chattering as the stimulant effect of SportBoost hit him. The room was swirling slowly around him, pulsing with energy. It was like he was the center of the universe. It scared him and exhilarated him both. It almost made the shabby little studio apartment they rented in the so-called Sinclair Deluxe seem like something worth living in—if it weren’t for the cracks in the walls, the naked lightbulb, the leaks in the corners, the smell of rotting fish. “Sal … Sal … Sally … I need … I needa … needa … needa show people I’m fast and strong, I’m gonna get one that makes you smart…”
“Ha! I wish you’d taken the smart one first! Then you’d’ve been smart enough not to blow our little stash of moolah on any of this! You don’t need that fancy hair; you don’t need those muscles—”
“These muscles are gonna get me a new job on the Atlantic Express! They’re gonna put up a new line!”
“What I heard, more people are taking the trams and the bathyspheres—the Express might be, what you call it, obsolete. They aren’t gonna rehire you nohow after you went flippy on the foreman!”
“Aww, that big lug flew off the handle for nothin’!”
“You were on one of those crazy plasmid things, and you went nutso on him! You threw a wrench at his head!”
“Plasmids—you gotta get used to ’em, is all! I wasn’t used to it yet! All the fellas are usin’ ’em!”
“Sure—and most of ’em are going broke from it! They sit around jabbering, high on the damn things! Not a single one as doesn’t have side effects! What’s them marks on your face, there?”
“What, you never got a pimple?”
“That ain’t no pimple; it’s like skin growing where there oughtn’t to be any!”
“Woman—shut your trap and bring me some dinner!”
“Shut my trap! I’ve been working all day scrubbing floors in Olympus Heights for the high muckety-mucks, and I gotta come back to a dump and hear ‘bring me some dinner’! Why don’tcha try earning your dinner! How about them apples—the apples we ain’t got! How’m I going to pay for the food if you spent all the money on plasmids! You know Ryan doesn’t allow no soup lines around here!”
“I heard that Fontaine’s starting up some kinda soup kitchen…”
“I wouldn’t go near that man, if I was you. Mazy says he’s a crook!”
“Aw, what does that loopy bimbo know? Fontaine’s okay. I thought maybe I could get some work over there … I’m strong now! Look at that!” He flexed his bicep—and his shirt ripped with the expanding muscle. “That’s from BruteMore! Plasmids are the future, see!”
She sat down on the sagging sofabed across from him. “That’s what worries me—the future.” Her voice was soft now. And that had a way of upsetting him even more than when she yelled. “I wish we could afford a place with a window. Not that there’s much to see but fish. A person gets sick of looking at fish.”
His knee bouncing with nervous energy, Mudge looked around the small, dingy apartment for something to sell at the pawnshop. He wanted another SportBoost. Just to make sure. He didn’t like to run short on plasmids. All he had was another BruteMore in the icebox. The radio maybe—could he sell that? She kind of prized that radio. Only luxury they had left …
“Funny, Mr. Sinclair calling this flophouse ‘deluxe,’” Sally said. “Must be his sense of humor. But we won’t have even this if you don’t get off your tuckus and work. What I make can’t keep us in a home—’specially with you jabbing yourself with those crazy goddamn potions!”
“Oh, stop running your yapper…” Maybe he’d take his last hit of BruteMore—see how it did with the SportBoost real fresh in his system. He wondered if he could get Sally to take some BreastGro …
He got up, went to the icebox—he’d hidden the BruteMore behind an open, half-empty can of beans.
He injected it standing right there, with his back to Sally. A glowing red energy suffused him. He could feel it move through his body—it was like individual cells growing from inside.
Sally kept rattling on. “This area wasn’t supposed to be no permanent place to live! Supposed to be temporary housing for train maintenance! Not much better than one of those shacktowns we had in the Depression, when I was a kid, out in Chicago!
“You know what they’re starting to call this parta Rapture under the train station? Pauper’s Drop! Can you beat that? Pauper’s Drop, Rupert! That’s where you’ve taken me! I shoulda listened to my old man. He warned me about you. What’re you doing over there? Look at you! You look like you’re getting all swollen up … it ain’t natural!”
He spun to face her—and look at the expression on her face! Sally knew she should’ve kept her mouth shut. Her scrambling away like that—that was a clue. She was trying to get to the door.
“Should’ve kept your mouth shut, woman!” he roared. The metal walls seemed to vibrate with the sound. “Your old man warned you, did he? I’ll show you somethin’ that old fool never thought of!”
She was tugging at the door handle. Rupert Mudge turned, seized the icebox, lifted it up, spun around—and threw it at her.
Funny how light it seemed in his hands …
And funny too, how fragile she turned out to be. She had seemed like a real terror, sometimes. A little ball of fury. But now, just a big wet red splash all over the rusty metal door. And the wall. And the floor. And the ceiling. And a head all by itself, facing into the corner …
Uh-oh. Sally was paying the bills around here. And now she was dead.
He’d better get out of here. Get over to Fontaine.
Mudge stormed out the door, headed for the passage to the Metro. Yeah—Fontaine’s. Find work there. Any work at all. No matter what they asked him to do. Because he had needs. That’s what Sally hadn’t understood. He had powerful needs—and a need to be powerful.
Arcadia, Rapture
1955
“You know what’s missing, here?” Elaine said, looking around at the enclosed parkland. “The sounds of birds. There’re no birds in Rapture.” A soft, golden, artificial light suffused the air. Pushed by hidden fan blades Bill himself had installed, the breeze blew the perfume of daffodils and roses to them.
Bill and Elaine were sitting on a bench holding hands. They’d decided to spend most of his day off together. They’d had lunch and then gone for a long walk. It was getting near dinnertime, but it was a delight being in the park. Smelling flowers, looking at the greenery. Hearing a stream chuckling and murmuring. He found himself wishing they’d brought their little girl, Sophie.
Not quite four years old, Sophie liked to scamper to the miniature wooden bridge and toss blades of grass into the creek of filtered water, watch them float downstream to vanish into the walls. She would play happily among the ferns, the artfully random boulders, the small trees.
Still, he reckoned Sophie was having a good time back in the flat, playing that Sea Treasure board game with Mascha, the little daughter of Mariska Lutz. Mariska was an Eastern European woman Elaine had hired out of Artemis Suites as a part-time nanny. Funny to think Sophie and Mascha had never known a world beyond Rapture. Ryan suppressed most images of the surface world in Rapture’s classrooms. That troubled Bill as much as The Journey to the Surface. But there were things that troubled him more. Like Mr. Gravenstein putting a gun to his head in front of his ruined grocery store. The memory still haunted Bill.
“No birds here, love, that’s right enough,” Bill said at last. “But there are bees. From the Silverwing Apiary. There goes one of the little buggers now…”
They watched the bee zip by: pretty much the only wildlife inside Rapture, unless you counted certain people. The bees were necessary to pollinate the plants, and the plants created oxygen for Rapture.
“Ah, there’s your pal Julie,” Elaine said. Her lips compressed as she watched Julie Langford walk up.
Bill glanced at Elaine. Did she really think he had some kind of hanky-panky going on with Julie Langford?
The ecological scientist was a compact woman of about forty, her pragmatic haircut held by barrettes. She wore transparent-framed glasses and olive-colored coveralls for her work in the tree farm and the other green zones of Rapture. Bill liked talking to her—liked her quickness, her independent way of thinking.
Julie Langford had worked for the Allies devising a defoliant in the Pacific, he knew, exposing Japanese jungle bases. He’d also heard that when Andrew Ryan talked her into coming to Rapture, the U.S. government had gotten peeved after she’d abandoned her federal job. She’d vanished, in fact, from North America. They’d been combing the world looking for her ever since.
“Hello, Bill, Elaine,” Julie said distractedly, glancing around at the plants. “Still not quite enough natural light getting through down here. Need to add more sunlight mirrors in the lighthouses. Those junipers are going brown around the edges.” She put her hands on her hips and turned politely to Elaine. “How’s your darling little girl?”
Elaine smiled distantly. “Oh Sophie’s good, she’s just learning to—”
“Good, good.” Julie turned impatiently back to Bill. “Bill, I’m glad I ran into you. I need to talk to you about the boss—just for a minute. Alone, if you don’t mind.”
Bill turned to his wife, wondering how she’d feel about it. “You mind, Elaine?”
“Go on, I’m fine. Do as you like.”
“Back in a mo’, love.” Clearly she wasn’t fine with him strolling off with Julie, but Elaine was a cheerful girl most of the time. It wouldn’t do her any harm to feel a little jealousy now and then, keep her from taking him for granted. He kissed Elaine on the cheek and walked off toward the little bridge with Julie, hands in his pockets, trying to look as unromantic as possible.
“Don’t mean to drag you away from the little lady,” Julie said in a way Bill thought was a bit condescending toward Elaine. “But I need an ally, and I know you love this park.”
“Right. What’s afoot, Julie?”
“I tell you, Bill—here I am, a batty plant woman working for years to expose the Japs in the jungle, melting away plant life, and now I’m down here trying to do the complete opposite. ‘We’ll create a second Eden down there,’ Ryan says. All that, and now he wants to turn this place into a paying tourist attraction—for residents of Rapture, I mean.”
“What? But I thought this was a public park.”
“So it was to be. But he doesn’t really believe in public ownership of anything. And he’s trying to keep up with Fontaine. So he’s raising capital. Which means charging for everything you can imagine. Hires me to build a forest at the bottom of the ocean—then turns a walk in the woods into a luxury. Something you have to pay for! You know how he is. ‘Should a farmer not be able to sell his food? Is a potter not entitled to a profit from his pots?’ But what am I going to do? He’s my boss, but he listens to you, Bill. Maybe you can talk him out of this. We need some kind of free public space in Rapture. A commons. People just need it—they need the breathing room.”
Bill nodded, glancing at his wife, pleased to see Anya Anyersdotter had stopped to talk to her. Elaine was smiling. She liked Anya, a smartly dressed little woman in a pageboy haircut, prone to freethinking. Anya designed shoes and clothes and had her own boutique—one of Rapture’s success stories.
Bill turned back to Julie. “But here, what am I to do, Julie? You know about his own private forest fire?”
“What? No!”
“Oh yeah. Tells me: ‘I once bought a forest. Then they,’ says he, ‘claimed the land belonged to God—demanded I establish a public park there. A public park, where the rabble can stand about gawping, pretending they’ve earned that natural beauty! Land that I owned! Congress under that bastard FDR tried to nationalize my forest—so I burnt it to the ground.’”
“Not truly…”
“Oh yes. Truly. You think he could be talked into making anything into public property?”
She made a soft little grunting sound and shook her head. “Maybe not.” She gestured at the gemlike parkland around them. “Once he told me, ‘God did not plant the seeds in Arcadia. I did.’ But I designed all this—with a little help from Daniel Wales…”
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