A Darkness in My Soul

and said. "That'll be roughly a hundred thousand poscreds. Put it on my earnings sheet, why don't you?"
        He sputtered. He fumed. He roared. He glowered. He quoted the Government Rates for Employees. He quoted the Employer's Rights Act of 1986, paragraph two, subparagraph three. He fumed a bit more.
        I watched, looking unshaken.
        He pranced. He danced. He raved. He ranted. He demanded to know what I had done to earn any pay whatsoever. I didn't answer him. He finished ranting. Started fuming again. In the end, he put it down in the book and vouchered the payment before pounding on a table in utter frustration and then leaving the room with a warning to be on time the following day.
        "Don't push your luck," Harry advised me later.
        "Not my luck, but my weight," I said.
        "He doesn't take to a subordinate position. He's a bastard."
        "I know. That's why I needle him."
        "When did the masochism arise?"
        "Not masochism-my well-known God-syndrome. I was just passing one of my famous judgments."
        "Look," he said, "you can quit."
        "We both need the money. Especially me."
        "Maybe there are other things more important than money."
        Someone pushed us aside as equipment was trundled out of the hex-painted room.
        "More important than money?"
        "I've heard it said…"
        "Not in this world. You've heard wrong. Nothing's more important when the creditors come. Nothing's more important when the choice is to live with cockroaches or in splendor."
        "Sometimes, I think you're too cynical," he said, giving me one of those fatherly looks, something I inherited along with his last name.
        "What else?" I asked, buttoning my greatcoat.
        "It's all because of what they tried to do to you. You should forget that. Get out more. Meet people."
        "I have. I don't like them."
        "There's an old Irish legend which says-"
        "Old Irish legends all say the same thing. Look, Harry, aside from you, everyone tries to use me. They want me to spy on their wives to see if they have been laying with someone else. Or they want me to find hubby's mistress.
        Or I get invited to their cocktail parties so that I can perform parlor tricks for a batch of drunks. The world made me cynical, Harry. And it keeps me that way. So, if we're both wise, we'll just sit back and get rich off my cynicism. Maybe if a psychiatrist made me happy-go-lucky and at peace with myself, my talent would disappear."
        Before he could reply, I left. When I closed the door behind me, they were wheeling Child down the corridor.
        His empty eyes stared fixedly at the softly colored ceiling.
        Outside, the snow was still falling. Fairy gowns. Crystal tears. Sugar from a celestial cake. I tried to come up with all the pretty metaphors I could, maybe to prove I'm not so cynical after all.
        I slid into the hovercar, tipped the Marine as he slid out the other side. I drove into the street, taking the small curb too fast. White clouds whooshed up behind me and obscured the AC building and everything else I put behind me.
        The book lay at my side, the dust jacket face down because it had her picture on it. I didn't want to see amber hair and smooth lips imitating a bow. It was a picture that disgusted me. And intrigued me. I couldn't understand the latter, so I pretended to more of the former than I felt.
        I turned on the radio and listened to the dull voice of the newscaster casting his tidbits on the airwave waters with a voice uniformly pleasant whether the topic was a cure for cancer or the death of hundreds in a plane crash. "Peking announced late today that it had developed a weapon equal to the Spheres of Plague launched yesterday by the Western Alliance…" (Pa-changa, changa, sissss, sisss pa-changa, the Latin music of another station added in unconscious sardonic wit) "… According to Asian sources, the Chinese weapon is a series of platforms…" (Sa-baba, sa-baba, po-po-pachanga) "… above Earth's atmosphere, capable of launching rockets containing a virulent mutant strain of leprosy which can be distributed across seventeenmile-wide swaths of territory…" (Hemorrhoids really can be dealt with in less than an hour at the Painless Clinic on the West Side, another station assured me, though it faded out before it would tell me how much less than an hour and just how painless.) "…