Stross Charles - Trunk and Disorderly.pdf

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TRUNK AND DISORDERLY
by Charles Stross
Charles Stross has been in rehab since 2004, recovering from the
bad attack of singularitis that led to the Accelerando outbreak. His
doctors report that he is much improved since the excision of his
dot-com gland, and may eventually be capable of writing normal SF
again, under suitably controlled circumstances, although he is
unlikely ever to return to his previous proto-Ballardian normality.
The following story was discovered cunningly encoded in a scarf he
was crocheting at the clinic; we believe it may cast some light on his
illness.
* * * *
1. In Which Laura Departs and Fiona Makes a Request
“I want you to know, darling, that I’m leaving you for another sex
robot—and she’s twice the man you’ll ever be,” Laura explained as she
flounced over to the front door, wafting an alluring aroma of mineral oil
behind her.
Our arguments always began like that: this one was following the
script perfectly. I followed her into the hall, unsure precisely what cue I’d
missed this time. “Laura—”
She stopped abruptly, a faint whine coming from her ornately
sculpted left knee. “I’m leaving,” she told me, deliberately pitching her voice
in a modish mechanical monotone. “You can’t stop me. You’re not paying
my maintenance. I’m a free woman, and I don’t have to put up with your
moods!”
The hell of it is, she was right. I’d been neglecting her lately, being
overly preoccupied with my next autocremation attempt. “I’m terribly sorry,”
I said. “But can we talk about this later? You don’t have to walk out right this
instant—”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” She jerked into motion again, reaching
for the door handle. “You’ve been ignoring me for months, darling: I’m sick
of trying to get through to you! You said last time that you’d try not to be so
distant, but look how that turned out.” She sighed and froze the pose for a
moment, the personification of glittering mechanistic melodrama. “You
didn’t mean it. I’m sick of waiting for you, Ralph! If you really loved me you’d
face up to the fact that you’re an obsessive-compulsive, and get your
 
wetware fixed so that you could pay me the attention I deserve. Until then,
I’m out of here!”
The door opened. She spun on one chromed stiletto heel, and swept
out of my life in a swish of antique Givenchy and ozone.
“Dash it all, not again!” I leaned my forehead against the wall. “Why
now, of all times?” Picking a fight then leaving me right before a drop was
one of her least endearing habits. This was the fifth time. She usually came
back right afterward, when she was loose and lubed from witnessing me
scrawl my butchness across the sky, but it never failed to make me feel like
an absolute bounder at the time; it’s a low blow to strike a cove right before
he tries to drill a hole in the desert at mach twenty-five, what? But you can’t
take femmes for granted, whether they be squish or clankie, and her
accusation wasn’t, I am bound to admit, entirely baseless.
I wandered into the parlor and stood between the gently rusting
ancestral space suits, overcome by an unpleasant sense of aimless
tension. I couldn’t decide whether I should go back to the simulator and
practice my thermal curves again—balancing on a swaying meter-wide slab
of ablative foam in the variable dynamic forces of atmospheric re-entry, a
searing blow-torch flare of hot plasma surging past, bare centimeters
beyond my helmet—or get steaming drunk. And I hate dilemmas; there’s
something terribly non-U about having to actually think about things.
You can never get in too much practice before a freestyle
competition, and I had seen enough clowns drill a scorched hole in the
desert that I was under no illusions about my own invincibility, especially as
this race was being held under mortal jeopardy rules. On the other hand,
Laura’s walk-out had left me feeling unhinged and unbalanced, and I’m
never able to concentrate effectively in that state. Maybe a long, hot bath
and a bottle of sake would get me over it so I could practice later; but
tonight was the pre-drop competitors’ dinner. The club prefers members to
get their crashing and burning done before the race—something to do with
minimizing our third-party insurance premium, I gather—so it’s fried snacks
all round, then a serving of rare sirloin, and barely a drop of the old firewater
all night. So I was perched on the horns of an acute dilemma—to tipple or
topple as it were—when the room phone cleared its throat obtrusively.
“Ralph? Ralphie? Are you all right?”
I didn’t need the screen to tell me it was Fiona, my half-sister. Typical
of her to call at a time like this. “Yes,” I said wearily.
 
“You don’t sound it!” she said brightly. Fi thinks that negative
emotions are an indicator of felonious intent.
“Laura just walked out on me again and I’ve got a drop coming up
tomorrow,” I moaned.
“Oh Ralphie, stop angsting! She’ll be back in a week when she’s run
the script. You worry too much about her, she can look after herself. I was
calling to ask, are you going to be around next week? I’ve been invited to a
party Geraldine Ho is throwing for the downhill cross-country skiing season
on Olympus Mons, but my house-sitter phoned in pregnant unexpectedly
and my herpetologist is having another sex change so I was just hoping
you’d be able to look after Jeremy for me while I’m gone, just for a couple
of days or maybe a week or two—”
Jeremy was Fiona’s pet dwarf mammoth, an orange-brown knee-high
bundle of hairy malevolence. Last time I’d looked after Jeremy he puked in
my bed—under the duvet—while Laura and I were hosting a formal orgy for
the Tsarevitch of Ceres, who was traveling incognito to the inner system
because of some boring edict by the Orthodox Patriarch condemning the
fleshpits of Venus. Then there’s the time Jeremy got at the port, then went
on the rampage and ate Cousin Branwyn’s favorite skirt when we took him
to Landsdown Palace for a weekend with Fuffy Morgan, even though we’d
locked him in one of the old guard towers with a supply of whatever it is that
dwarf mammoths are supposed to eat. You really can’t take him
anywhere—he’s a revolting beast. Not to mention an alcoholic one.
“Must I?” I asked.
“Don’t whine!” Fi said brightly. “Nobody will ever take you seriously if
you whine, Ralphie. Anyway, you owe me a favor. Several favors, actually. If
I hadn’t covered up for you that time when Boris Oblomov and you got
drunk and took Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s yacht out for a spin around the
moon without checking the anti-matter reserve in the starboard gravity
polarizer....”
“Yes, Fi,” I said wearily, when she finally let me get a word in
edge-ways: “I surrender. I’ll take Jeremy. But I don’t promise I’ll be able to
look after him if I die on the drop. You realize it’s under mortal jeopardy
rules? And I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to protect him from Laura if she
shows up again running that bestiality mod your idiot pal Larry thought it
would be a good idea to install on her when she was high on pink noise that
time—”
 
“That’s enough about Larry,” Fi said in a voice dripping liquid helium.
“You know I’m not walking out with him any more. You’ll look after Jeremy
for two weeks and that’s enough for me. He’s been a little sulky lately but
I’m sure you’d know all about that . I’ll make certain he’s backed up first,
then I’ll drop him off on my way to São Paolo skyport, right?”
“What ho,” I said dispiritedly, and put the phone down. Then I
snapped my fingers for a chair, sat down, and held my head in my hands
for a while. My sister was making a backup of her mammoth’s twisted little
psyche to ensure Jeremy stayed available for future torments: nevertheless
she wouldn’t forgive me if I killed the brute. Femmes! U or non-U, they’re
equally demanding. The chair whimpered unhappily as it massaged my
tensed-up spine and shoulders, but there was no escaping the fact that I
was stressed-out. Tomorrow was clearly going to be one of those days,
and I hadn’t even scheduled the traditional post-drop drink with the boys
yet....
* * * *
2. The New Butler Calls
I was lying on the bottom of the swimming pool in the conservatory at
the back of Chateau Pookie, breathing alcohol-infused air through a hose
and feeling sorry for myself, when the new butler found me. At least, I think
that’s what I was doing. I was pretty far-gone, conflicted between the need
to practice my hypersonic p-waggling before the drop and the urge to drink
Laura’s absence out of my system. All I remember is a vague rippling blue
curtain of sunlight on scrolled ironwork—the ceiling—and then a huge stark
shadow looming over me, talking in the voice of polite authority.
“Good afternoon, Sir. According to the diary, Sir is supposed to be
receiving his sister’s mammoth in the front parlor in approximately twenty
minutes. Would Sir care to be sober for the occasion? And what suit should
Sir like to wear?”
This was about four more sirs than I could take lying down. “Nnngk
gurgle,” I said, sitting up unsteadily. The breather tube wasn’t designed for
speech. Choking, I spat it out. “M’gosh and please excuse me, but who the
hell are you?”
“Alison Feng.” She bowed stiffly, from the waist. “The agency sent
me, to replace your last, ah, man.” She was dressed in the stark black and
white of a butler, and she did indeed have the voice—some very expensive
training, not to mention discreet laryngeal engineering, went into producing
 
that accent of polite condescension, the steering graces that could direct
even the richest and most irritable employer in directions less conducive to
their social embarrassment. But—
“You’re my new butler?” I managed to choke out.
“I believe so.” One chiseled eyebrow signaled her skepticism.
“Oh, oh jolly good, then, that squishie.” A thought, marinating in my
sozzled subconscious, floated to the surface. “You, um, know why my last
butler quit?”
“No, sir.” Her expression didn’t change. “In my experience it is best to
approach one’s prospective employers with an open mind.”
“It was my sister’s mammoth’s fault,” I managed to say before a fit of
coughing overcame me. “Listen, just take the bloody thing and see it’s
locked in the number three guest dungeon, the one that’s fitted out for
clankie doms. It can try’n destroy anything it bally likes in there, it won’t get
very far an’ we can fix it later. Hic . Glue the door shut, or weld it or
something—one of her boyfriends trained the thing to pick locks with its
trunk. Got a sober-up?”
“Of course, sir.” She snapped her fingers, and blow me if there wasn’t
one of those devilish red capsules balanced between her white-gloved
digits.
“Ugh.” I took it and dry-swallowed, then hiccupped. “Fiona’s animal
tamer’ll probably drop the monster off in the porch but I’d better get
up’n’case sis shows.” I hiccupped again, acid indigestion clenching my
stomach. “Urgh. Wossa invitation list for tonight?”
“Everything is perfectly under control,” my new butler said, a trifle
patronizingly. “Now if Sir would care to step inside the dryer while I lay out
his suit—”
I surrendered to the inevitable. After all, once you’ve accepted
delivery of a dwarf mammoth on behalf of your sister nothing worse can
happen to you all day, can it?
Unfortunately, I was wrong. Fiona’s chauffeuse did indeed deposit
Jeremy, but on a schedule of her own choosing. She must have already
been on the way as Fi was nattering on the blower. While Miss Feng was
introducing herself, she was sneakily decanting the putrid proboscidean
 

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