Return to Pleasure Island - Cory Doctorow (christmas read aloud .TXT) 📗

/> Imagineer!"

George knew that the lands on Pleasure Island were flattened and rebuilt on a
regular basis, as management worked to stay ahead of the lightspeed
boredom-threshold of the mainland. Still, he said, "Well, Joe, that's marvelous.
I'm sure you'll do a fabulous job."

Joe sneered at him. "Oh, I know I will. We all do just _fabulous_ jobs, brother.
Just some of us _have_ fabulous jobs to do."

George refused to rise to the bait. He could always outwait Joe.

Joe said, "We're thinking of giving it a monster theme -- monsters are testing
very high with eleven-to-fourteens this year. Dragons, ogres, cyborgs, you know.
We may even do a walk-through -- there hasn't been one of those here since the
sixties!"

George didn't know what Joe wanted him to say. He said, "That sounds very nice."

Joe gave him a pitying look, and then his chest started ringing. He extracted a
slim phone from his shirt-pocket and turned away. A moment later, he turned
back. "Gotta go!" he said. "Meeting with Woodrow and Orville, down at Ops!"

Alarm-bells went off in George's head. "Shouldn't Bill go along if you're
meeting with Orville?"

Joe sneered at him, then took off at a fast clip down the midway. George watched
him until he disappeared through one of the access doors.

#

Bill was clearly upset about it. George couldn't help but feel responsible. He
should have called Bill as soon as Joe told him he was meeting with Orville, but
he'd waited until he got home.

He'd been home for hours, and Joe still wasn't back. Bill picked absently at the
dinner he'd made and fretted.

"He didn't say how Orville found out?" Bill asked.

George shook his head mutely.

"Why didn't he invite me?" Bill asked. "I always handle negotiations for us."

George couldn't eat. The more Bill fretted, the more he couldn't eat. It was
long dark outside, hours and hours after Joe should've been home. Bill fretted,
George stared out the window, and Joe didn't come home.

Then, an electric cart's headlights swept up the trail to their cabin. The
lights dazzled George, so he couldn't see who was driving. Bill joined him at
the window and squinted. "It's Joe and Orville!" he said. George squinted too,
but couldn't make anything out. He took Bill's word for it and joined him
outside.

It was indeed Orville and Joe. Orville was driving, and Joe was lolling
drunkenly beside him. Orville shook hands with Bill and nodded to George, who
lifted Joe out of the cart and carried him inside.

When he got back, Orville and Bill were staring calmly into each other's eyes,
each waiting for the other to say something. Orville was dressed in his working
clothes: a natty white suit with a sport-shirt underneath. His bald head gleamed
in the moonlight. His fleshy, unreadable face was ruddy in the glow from the
cabin's door. George bit his tongue to keep from speaking.

"He's drunk," Orville said, at last. Orville didn't beat around the bush.

"I can see that," Bill said. "Did you get him drunk?"

"Yes, I did. We were celebrating."

Bill's eyes narrowed. "So you know."

Orville smiled. "Of course I know. I set it up. I thought you'd approve: Joe
clearly needed something to keep him out of trouble."

Bill said, "This will keep him out of trouble?"

Orville leaned against the cart's bumper, pulled out a pipe, stuffed it and lit
it. He puffed at it, and watched the smoke wisp away in the swamp breezes. "I
think that Joe's going to really like life with the Imagineers. They're
Management's precious darlings who can do no wrong. Anything they ask for, they
get. There won't be any more discipline problems."

Bill said, "Why not?"

Orville grinned without showing his teeth. "Where there's no discipline,
there're no discipline problems. He can work whatever hours he wants. He'll have
access to anything he needs: budget, staff, an office, whatever. It's his dream
job."

Bill said, "I don't like this."

George wondered why not. It sounded pretty good to him.

Orville puffed at his pipe. "Like it or not, I think you'll have a hard time
convincing Joe not to do it. He's sold."

Bill went back into the cabin and closed the door.

"He took that well, don't you think?" Orville asked.

George said, "I suppose so."

Orville said, "Is everything working out all right for you? Shifts OK?
Co-workers?"

George said, "Everything's fine. Thank you."

Orville tapped his pipe out on the bumper, then got back into the cart. "All
right then. Good night, George."

#

George started cooking dinner for two. More and more, Joe spent the night in a
suite at one of the hotels, "working late." George didn't know what sort of work
he was doing, but he sure seemed to enjoy it. He hardly came back to the cabin
at all. The first time he'd stayed out all night, Bill had gone back to the
Island and gotten Orville out of bed to help him search. After that, Joe started
sending out a runner, usually some poor Ops trainee, to tell them he wasn't
coming back for dinner. Eventually, he stopped bothering, and Bill stopped
worrying.

One night, a month after Orville had come out to the cabin, George slathered a
muskrat's carcass with mayonnaise and lemon and dragonfly eggs and set it out
for him and Joe.

Bill hardly ate, which was usually a signal that he was thinking. George left
him half of the dinner and waited for him to speak. Bill picked his way through
the rest, then pushed his plate away. George cleared it and brought them both
mason jars full of muddy water from the swamp out back. Bill took his jar out
front of the cabin and leaned against the wall and stared out into the night,
sipping. George joined him.

"We're getting old," Bill said, at last.

"Every night, the inside of my uniform is black," George said.

"Mine, too. We're getting very old. I think that you're at least thirty, and I'm
pretty sure that I'm twenty-five. That's old. Our father told me that he thought
he was fifty, the year he died. And he was very old for one of us."

George thought of their father on his deathbed, eating the food they chewed for
him, eyes nearly blind, skin crazed with cracks. "He was very old," George said.

Bill held his two whole hands up against the stars. "When father was my age, he
had two sons. Can you remember how proud he was of us? How proud he was of
himself? He'd done well enough that he could lose both his thumbs, and still
know that his sons would take care of him."

George shifted and sighed. He'd been thinking about sons, too.

"I've wanted a son since we came to the Island," Bill said. "I never did
anything about it because I couldn't take care of Joe and a son." Bill turned to
look at George. "I think Joe's finally taking care of himself."

George didn't know what to say. If Bill had a son, then he couldn't. They
couldn't both stop working to raise their sons. But Bill always made the
decisions for them. George didn't know what to say, so he said nothing.

"I'm going to have a son," Bill said.

#

Bill did it the next night. He told Orville that he'd need a month off, and
after eating the dinner George made for them, he made a nest of earth and
blankets on the floor of their cabin.

George sat in the corner and watched Bill as he stared at his thumbs. It was the
most important decision one of their kind ever made: a clever son of the left
hand, or a strong son of the right. George knew that his son would come from the
left hand. In the world his father had put them into, cleverness was far more
important than strength. After all, Bill was having the first son.

Bill put his clever left thumb in his mouth and slowly, slowly, bit down. George
felt muddy tears pricking at his eyes. Bill's hand coursed with silty blood. He
ignored it, and used his strong right hand to take the severed thumb from his
mouth and bed it down with infinite care in the nest he'd built.

George cautiously moved forward to peer at the thumb, which was already moving
blindly in its nest, twisting like a grub. Bill looked on, his eyes shining.

"It's perfect," George breathed.

George felt an uncharacteristic welling up inside him, and he put his arm around
Bill's shoulders. Bill leaned into him, and said, "Thank you, George. This
family wouldn't exist without you."

They both slept curled around the nest that night.

By morning, the thumb had sprouted tiny arm- and leg-buds, and it inched itself
blindly around the nest. George marveled at it before going to work.

Joe stopped by his stand that day. His belly was bigger than ever, and his skin
was cracking like their father's had. "Big guy!" he shouted, vaulting the
counter into George's stand. "Where's Bill today? He wasn't at his post."

George said, "Bill had a son last night. From his left hand."

Joe rolled his eyes, which had gone the murky yellow of swamp water. "Wonderful,
right? Ugh. There are better ways to achieve immortality, bro. I'm designing a
crawl-through for HorrorZone: you're an earthworm crawling underneath a
graveyard. It's gonna be huge: maggots as big as horses, chasing the Guests
through the tunnels; huge ghost hands grabbing at them. We're building a giant
tombstone as the weenie, you'll be able to see it from anywhere on the Island.
We'll build out over the midway for HorrorZone -- it's the biggest rehab we've
done since they brought in electric power."

As usual, George didn't know what to say to Joe. "That sounds very nice," he
said.

Joe rolled his eyes again and started to say something, but stopped when three
Guests came up to George's booth. George hardly recognised the Mitchell
brothers. The youngest was already three-quarters donkey, so dangerously close
that it was a miracle he hadn't been picked up already. He was hunched over, and
his hands were fused into fists. His hair had grown down over his shoulders in a
coarse mane, and his lips bulged around his elongated jaws.

The middle and eldest were well on their ways, too. The points of their ears
poked out from under their hair, and they carried themselves painfully, forcing
their legs and hips upright.

George flipped over his phone and punched 911, but left it out of sight below
the counter. Loudly, he said, "Come on over, boys! You look like you could use
one of George's triple-dips, the best on the midway!"

From the phone, he heard the security operator say, "Thank you, George, we'll be
along in a moment." Surreptitiously, he racked the receiver and smiled at the
boys.

"How are you enjoying your stay, boys?" he said.

"It'th aw-thome!" the youngest said around his clumsy teeth.

George handed him a cone piled high with floss, then started building two more
for his brothers. Joe smirked at them. George hoped he wouldn't say anything
before security got there.

The eldest said, "I don't think my brother's feeling too good. Is there a doctor
here I can take him to?"

The youngest, face sticky with confection, kicked his brother. "I'm fine!" he
said. "I