Return to Pleasure Island by Cory Doctorow (ebook reader wifi .TXT) 📕

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###


Return to Pleasure Island
=========================

George twiddled his thumbs in his booth and watched how the brown, clayey
knuckles danced overtop of one another. Not as supple as they had once been, his
thumbs -- no longer the texture of wet clay on a potter's wheel; more like clay
after it had been worked to exhausted crackling and brittleness. He reached into
the swirling vortex of the cotton-candy machine with his strong right hand and
caught the stainless-steel sweep-arm. The engines whined and he felt them strain
against his strong right arm, like a live thing struggling to escape a trap.
Still strong, he thought, still strong, and he released the sweep-arm to go back
to spinning sugar into floss.

A pack of boys sauntered down the midway, laughing and calling, bouncing high on
sugar and g-stresses. One of them peeled off from the group and ran to his
booth, still laughing at some cruelty. He put his palms on George's counter and
pushed against it, using them to lever his little body in a high-speed pogo.
"Hey, mister," he said, "how about some three-color swirl, with sprinkles?"

George smiled and knocked the rack of paper cones with his strong right elbow,
jostled it so one cone spun high in the air, and he caught it in his quick left
hand. "Coming _riiiiiight_ up," he sang, and flipped the cone into the
floss-machine. He spun a beehive of pink, then layered it with stripes of blue
and green. He reached for the nipple that dispensed the sprinkles, but before he
turned its spigot, he said, "Are you sure you don't want a dip, too? Fudge?
Butterscotch? Strawberry?"

The boy bounced even higher, so that he was nearly vaulting the counter. "All
three! All three!" he said.

George expertly spiraled the floss through the dips, then applied a thick crust
of sprinkles. "Open your mouth, kid!" he shouted, with realistic glee.

The boy opened his mouth wide, so that the twinkling lights of the midway
reflected off his back molars and the pool of saliva on his tongue. George's
quick, clever left hand dipped a long-handled spoon into the hot fudge, then
flipped the sticky gob on a high arc that terminated perfectly in the boy's open
mouth. The boy swallowed and laughed gooely. George handed over the dripping
confection in his strong right hand, and the boy plunged his face into it. When
he whirled and ran to rejoin his friends, George saw that his ears were already
getting longer, and his delighted laugh had sounded a little like a bray. A job
well done, he thought, and watched the rain spatter the spongy rubber cobbles of
the midway.

#

George was supposed to go off-shift at midnight. He always showed up promptly at
noon, but he rarely left as punctually. The soft one who had the midnight-to-six
shift was lazy and late, and generally staggered in at twelve thirty, grumbling
about his tiredness. George knew how to deal with the soft ones, though -- his
father had brought him up surrounded by them, so that he spoke without his
father's thick accent, so that he never inadvertently crushed their soft hands
when he shook with them, so that he smiled good-naturedly and gave up a
realistic facsimile of sympathy when they griped their perennial gripes.

His father! How wise the old man had been, and how proud, and how _stupid_.
George shucked his uniform backstage and tossed it into a laundry hamper, noting
with dismay how brown the insides were, how much of himself had eroded away
during his shift. He looked at his clever left thumb and his strong right thumb,
and tasted their good, earthy tastes, and then put them away. He dressed himself
in the earth-coloured dungarees and workshirt that his own father had stolen
from a laundry line when he left the ancestral home of George's people for the
society of the soft ones.

He boarded a Cast Member tram that ran through the ultidors underneath Pleasure
Island's midway, and stared aimlessly at nothing as the soft ones on the tram
gabbled away, as the tram sped away to the Cast housing, and then it was just
him and the conductor, all the way to the end of the line, to the cottage he
shared with his two brothers, Bill and Joe. The conductor wished him a good
night when he debarked, and he shambled home.

Bill was already home, napping in the pile of blankets that all three brothers
shared in the back room of the cottage. Joe wasn't home yet, even though his
shift finished earlier than theirs. He never came straight home; instead, he
wandered backstage, watching the midway through the peepholes. Joe's Lead had
spoken to George about it, and George had spoken to Joe, but you couldn't tell
Joe anything. George thought of how proud his father had been, having three sons
-- three! George, the son of his strong right thumb, and Bill, the son of his
clever left thumb, and Joe. Joe, the son of his tongue, an old man's folly, that
left him wordless for the remainder of his days. He hadn't needed words, though:
his cracked and rheumy eyes had shone with pride every time they lit on Joe, and
the boy could do no wrong by him.

George busied himself with supper for his brothers. In the little wooded area
behind the cottage, he found good, clean earth with juicy roots in it. In the
freezer, he had a jar of elephant-dung sauce, spiced with the wrung-out sweat of
the big top acrobats' leotards, which, even after reheating, still carried the
tang of vitality. Preparing a good meal for his kind meant a balance of earthy
things and living things, things to keep the hands supple and things to make
them strong, and so he brought in a chicken from the brothers' henhouse and
covered it in the sloppy green-brown sauce, feathers and all. Bill, being the
clever one, woke when the smell of the sauce bubbling in the microwave reached
him, and he wandered into the kitchen.

To an untutored eye, Bill and George were indistinguishable. Both of them big,
even for their kind -- for their father had been an especially big specimen
himself -- whose faces were as expressive as sculptor's clay, whose
chisel-shaped teeth were white and hard as rocks. When they were alone together,
they went without clothing, as was the custom of their kind, and their bodies
bulged with baggy, loose muscle. They needed no clothing, for they lacked the
shame of the soft ones, the small thumb between the legs. They had a more
civilised way of reproducing.

"Joe hasn't returned yet?" Bill asked his strong brother.

"Not yet," George told his clever brother.

"We eat, then. No sense in waiting for him. He knows the supper hour," Bill
said, and since he was the clever one, they ate.

#

Joe returned as the sun was rising, and burrowed in between his brothers on
their nest of blankets. George flung one leg over his smallest brother, and
smelled the liquor on his breath in his sleep, and his dreams were tainted with
the stink of rotting grapes.

George was the first one awake, preparing the morning meal. A maggoty side of
beef, ripe with the vitality of its parasites, and gravel. Joe came for
breakfast before Bill, as was his custom. Bill needed the sleep, to rest his
cleverness.

"God-_damn_, I am _hungry!_," Joe said loudly, without regard for his sleeping
brother.

"You missed dinner," George said.

"I had more important things