("Straight Trade" was originally published in Speculon in January 2001.)
"And what do you do?" the pretty woman with the big eyes asked, leaning forward on the couch to rest her elbows on her knees. She had to lean close and talk loudly so Cimmaron could hear; some dreadful caterwauling music drowned out quieter conversation. The woman's name was Amelia, she'd told him, and she was an actress and model. She wore an elegant pale blue dress. The color made Cimmaron think of robin's eggs, of sticking the point of his tongue into a shell and sucking out the yolk.
"I sell junk." His pleasure at saying the familiar line was somewhat spoiled by the necessity of having to raise his voice.
She frowned prettily. Cimmaron imagined that she would do everything prettily, even dying.
"Do you mean like junk bonds?" Amelia asked. "Or..." She looked around and leaned even closer, giving Cimmaron a glimpse down her dress, at her pale, freckled breasts. "Or like heroin?"
Cimmaron smiled indulgently, wondering which answer she would prefer. Either possibility was likely here, he supposed. This was a record producer's party, full of the rich and the decadent and the superfluously beautiful. Most of the guests were outside on the three-level deck, some of them enjoying the cool night air, most of them occupied with wheeling and dealing, backstabbing and seducing.
Cimmaron and Amelia sat inside, on overstuffed black-upholstered furniture in a conversation pit. Everything in this house was recessed, hidden-- the lighting was indirect, the surround-sound speakers invisibly placed, the hallways curving gracefully away from sightlines.
The hopes, motives and secrets of the party guests were hidden, too, of course. But not beyond Cimmaron's ability to find them, and part them out.
"Bonds or heroin," he said thoughtfully. "Neither, really. I mean just what I said -- I sell junk." He smiled, wondering how the facial expression looked, how he looked. Good enough, he assumed, natural -- a fit for the setting, at least.
Pleased by Amelia's puzzled frown, he went on. "I sell scraps, broken pieces, things people have thrown away." He spread his hands in a showman's gesture. "But one woman's trash is another's treasure."
Amelia clearly didn't understand, but he could sense she was intrigued.
"Are you some kind of... artist?" she asked, her voice an oddly endearing mix of wariness and hope.
"No, just a simple merchant." He stood up, abruptly tired by the hinting and luring and drawing her in. He wanted to get down to business -- that was all he really cared about. The acquisition of new things, new junk.
She blinked up at him, startled by his sudden movement, her upturned face momentarily illuminated by a discrete shaft of light. She looked glossy, her makeup and clothes and hair all perfect. So much a creature of surface, but Cimmaron knew better. Everyone had depths. Everyone.
"Come on," he said, making his voice kind. "You'll want to see what I have to offer."
"Your... junk?" She got to her feet with hesitant grace, like a doe on the edge of bolting.
"Somebody's junk anyway," he agreed. "Maybe your treasure." He extended his hand.
After a moment of looking at his face, into his eyes, she grinned and took his hand.
My appearance must be very good indeed, he thought, pleased.
"Where do you keep your junk?" She wrinkled her nose impishly, prepared to laugh with him in case this was all a joke. "In the lining of your jacket? In the trunk of your car?"
"In my office," he said, leading her up the carpeted steps out of the conversation pit, toward the hallway. Her hand was pleasantly warm in his.
"You have an office here?"
"Of course." His office was... well, everywhere, potentially. Wherever he needed it to be. He stopped halfway down the dim hall. Several closed doors closed at intervals along gently curving walls. Guest rooms, maybe a bathroom or study, Cimmaron supposed. "Pick a door," he said.
She pulled her hand away and looked behind herself nervously, toward the room they'd departed. "Look," she said uncertainly, "You seem nice, but I thought you wanted to show me something, I mean, I don't --"
"Please," he said, doing his best to appear harmless. "You misunderstand. Just choose a door, and open it, and look inside. You don't have to go in, if you don't like what you see." He paused. "If there's a bed, I mean, or anything else you find... threatening, feel free to walk away."
Still frowning, stepping away from him, she touched the first door, the one nearest the living room.
"Fine," he said. "Open it." He clasped his hands behind his back.
Her hand drifted down to the cut-glass doorknob and twisted it. The door opened inward, and the woman looked inside. Light touched her face, making her skin glow.
She gasped. "The windows," she said. "There's... light outside!"
"It is always sunny in that country," he said. "Go inside, if you like. That's my office."
Captivated, clearly enthralled by the white light, she did as Cimmaron said.
He followed, and shut the door after them. The familiar smells of his office soothed him -- old books, hot tea, a hint of citrus.
Amelia stood in the center of the faded, obsessively patterned rug, turning slowly in the shafts of sunlight from the arched windows, looking like an angel of wonder.
Cimmaron looked around, too, comforted as always by the place he'd taken over so many years ago.
The walls were all but obscured beneath the papier-maché masks, the purple and red tapestries, and the picture frames holding everything from line drawings to watercolors to photographs. In some places there were multiple layers of things nailed and pinned to the walls, inches deep, confusing the eye's attempt to gauge the room's dimensions.
Dark wood bookshelves filled most of the visible space, stretching to the rafters, twenty feet high. The shelves served almost as hedges in an English maze, creating corridors and cul-de-sacs, a labyrinth that wound intricately into distances even Cimmaron himself had never fully explored. The room was narrow in width but vast in length -- perhaps, potentially, infinite -- though the arrangement of shelves and the two visible walls disguised that fact.
The majority of Cimmaron's beloved junk rested on the shelves, though he had a special vault for larger things. He seldom came across anything too big to fit on a shelf. Most people simply didn't have things of that magnitude inside them.
Pi–atas, model fighter planes, and mobiles made of plastic butterflies, cat bones, sea shells and other things dangled from the rafters. The ceiling itself was invisible, presumably up there somewhere in the darkness, though sometimes, after a brandy or two, Cimmaron thought he saw alien stars overhead.
The three windows that Amelia liked so much were single panes set in pointed arches that started at the floor and went up nearly ten feet. The light coming in was so bright that looking out the windows provided no view whatsoever, only blinding glare, but the light itself was lovely enough to satisfy most.
Cimmaron often wondered what was out there, beyond the windows, but he didn't wonder enough to investigate. Shortly after taking over this office, he'd carefully nailed the windows shut, and only a sort of superstitious caution kept him from putting heavy drapes over the windows. Caution, and the light's occasional usefulness as a lure for hesitant customers.
"This can't be here," Amelia said at last, her voice small. She didn't have to speak up -- the loud music from the producer's party didn't intrude here at all. In a very real sense, that party was taking place in another world.
"Believe it's a dream," Cimmaron said. "If that makes you feel better. I have some things I think you'd be interested in."
"Your junk," she said. She sounded a vague, like someone with a minor case of shock, but Cimmaron didn't think she was going to faint or go mad on him. Not many people did -- the office had its unsettling properties, certainly, but it emanated a kind of peaceful reassurance, too.
Reassurance was a useful quality in a trap.
"Your junk," she repeated, a little more firmly. "Your treasure."
"Just so. Have a seat." He gestured to a leather armchair. "Would you like anything? A drink, a snack?"
"N-no," she said, sitting down. "I'm fine."
"Good," he said briskly. "Then on to business." He went to the nearest shelf, curious to see what the office would choose for her. Cimmaron himself didn't arrange the objects on the shelves. They arranged themselves, shifting constantly, though never when he could see. Nor did he choose what particular items to show his customers-- the office did that, with unerring precision.
Five items rested on a plain silver tray on the chest-level shelf: A serpent-headed, many-armed idol made of jade; a convex porcelain mask, white and featureless except for wavy gold-inlay lines radiating around the eyeholes like stylized sunrays; a faux rose with a wire stem and a bud made of black leather; a bone bracelet carved all over with grapevines; and a large marble made of cloudy red glass, with a black flaw like a cat's vertical pupil -- or a goat's horizontal one, if you turned it sideways.
When Cimmaron looked at the marble, a cold sharp pain flared inside his chest, as if something were gouging him under his ribs. The pain subsided in a moment, but he frowned at the marble all the same-- it bothered him. He hadn't ever seen it before, but that in itself was not strange. There were many things in his office that had been there before his own arrival, things he'd never seen -- of the five items on the tray, he'd only encountered the porcelain mask before. He thought about flicking the marble away with a hard thump, or just pocketing it, but... the office had presented it, to be one of Amelia's selections, and Cimmaron didn't feel right about resisting that. There could be consequences.
He picked up the silver tray by the handles, glad he didn't have to touch the red marble, and went to Amelia. She sat perched on the edge of the chair, her back straight and her hands knotted between her knees.
Cimmaron held the tray out to her. "These are the things I think you'll like," he said, careful to keep his voice mild and steady. "If none of them interest you, I will select others, and if I fail twice, you are welcome to browse." That was just a formality, something Cimmaron felt compelled to say. Literally compelled -- the words just came out, whether he chose to speak or not. No one had ever failed to choose one of his initial offerings, for all the good the choosing did them.
Amelia looked at the five items on the tray, and her hand drifted up, as if independent of her mind, and started to reach for them. Her forefinger brushed the red marble, making it roll a little, so that the black flaw turned sideways. From cat's eye to goat's eye.
Then she lowered her hand and, with visible effort, tore her eyes from the tray. She looked at Cimmaron, who almost grunted with surprise. She has a strong will, he thought, cautiously pleased. She may have more inside her than the usual baubles.
"I don't like to sign contracts I haven't read," she said, her voice surprisingly firm. "I like to know the terms up front."
Cimmaron inclined his head graciously. "Of course. I offer a straight trade. One of mine for one of yours. For my purposes, we can assume that everything is of equal quality. That's not true, of course -- some bits of junk are manifestly more valuable than others, though they're all equally useless or hindering to the person getting rid of them -- but I find that these things even out over time. And you're free to walk away at any moment, if you like." No one had ever left, or refused to agree to a trade, and Cimmaron didn't think big-eyed Amelia would be the first.
"These aren't really things, are they," she said matter-of-factly, not really asking a question at all. She still didn't look at the tray, as if, Cimmaron thought, she didn't trust herself to do so.
"Call them... metaphors," he said. "They have to look like something, so we can interact with them. But you're right, they're not actually objects. They're... qualities?"
"I can give up something I don't need," she said slowly, "some quality of mine, and take something I do need."
"'Need's' a tricky word. Let's say something you can use."
She cocked her head. "What do you get out of this?"
He smiled and shrugged. "The pleasure of helping people. Everyone needs meaning in their life, Amelia. This is my meaning, and it has yet to fade for me."
She glanced at the tray, then back at his face quickly. "You said it's a straight trade... but if that were the case, you wouldn't have so many things here. You'd just have one. And even then, the first one, the first item of trade, had to come from somewhere."
Cimmaron kept smiling, but it took an effort. His customers seldom thought clearly enough to make Amelia's realization, but he had encountered the question once or twice before. "I am not the first proprietor of this establishment. My predecessors may not have followed my policy. Some may have demanded more from their customers."
She nodded thoughtfully. "Like two-for-one trade-in at a used bookstore. But even then, that's a lot of business, to get this many things... those shelves go on and on. Did some of the past proprietors... maybe not trade at all? Did they maybe just take things, sometimes?"
Cimmaron set the tray down on the floor with difficulty -- otherwise, he might have dropped it. "Are you trying to suggest something?" he asked through gritted teeth, straightening up.
She smiled. "I choose the red marble," she said.
He took a deep breath. Maybe she hadn't meant anything by what she'd said-- maybe she didn't know. But what if she did? Why would she go on with the transaction, then?
"And what do you offer in exchange?" he asked. "Your singing voice? Your sharp tongue? The memory of the best lover you've ever known?" His voice shook a little, and for the first time in his proprietorship, he contemplated giving her a fair trade.
He wasn't a merchant at all, really -- more a collector. Normally he lured his customers in, gave them a glimpse of things they wanted, strengths and pleasures they would never otherwise know. Once they offered him something of their essential selves in trade, opened themselves up for his perusal, he took it all, and nothing of his customers remained after that, just the objects that represented them, parted out and stacked on shelves. The whole of them, reduced to the mere sum of parts. But he would let Amelia go, give her the red marble in exchange for some paltry bit of her soul, and say good riddance. He didn't want that marble in his office anymore anyway -- just the memory of that pain in his chest troubled him.
"I'll give you all of it, of course," Amelia said pleasantly. "That's your usual fee, isn't it? You give me the marble, and I give you everything of myself."
"I don't understand," he said, stepping back. The light from the windows intensified, bathing Amelia and the chair in light.
"My only condition is that I take possession of the marble first," she continued. "I don't pay up front, Cimmaron. And when you take the parts that make up me, you don't get the marble back. That's not included in the deal."
Cimmaron whimpered. Normally he insisted on taking the customer's quality first, and then, when they opened themselves, simply cleaned them out. "This is most irregular," he said.
"There was a time," Amelia said, "When this was a shop, not an office. The shop could appear anywhere, in an empty lot, at the end of a dark alley, but it was public, you didn't have to be invited in. People could come and buy, and while the prices were dear, they always got what they paid for, trouble and all. No one cheated. How did you come to own this shop, this shop you changed into an office, do you even remember?"
"I traded that memory," he said, shading his eyes against the light. "I exchanged it for eternal life and a changeable face, and put it on a shelf far back in the dark, where it could get lost." He looked around for something, a weapon, something to fend her off, though she had made no move toward him, and her voice was still pleasant. The light was so bright that he couldn't see her features at all, only a silhouette in the middle of the white.
She bent over and picked something up, then held it out in her hand. The light caught the object, which glowed red like a tiny dying sun, with a horizontal black flaw. "This is your memory," she said, "the thing you traded away. The memory of what you did to conquer this place. Of the man you were before you conquered, before you took a nonsense name and a succession of mask-faces. Don't you ever wonder why anyone would trade in eternal life, Cimmaron, so that you could take it? Or what you might have given up for that immortality? Once I take this memory of yours, I'll know. I'll know all about you."
"You can't have it," he said hoarsely, clenching his hands into fists. He didn't remember his life before becoming Cimmaron, had no idea what that marble contained, but he knew, in the very meat of his brain, that no one should ever know what he'd been, or what he'd done to win this position.
And if he took Amelia's whole personality, if there was no her anymore to possess the traded memory, what would become of it? Might it not, conceivably, wind up back in his own head? "No. Get out. We reserve the right to refuse service --"
"Quiet," Amelia said, and her voice was somehow a perfect match for that blinding light from outside, an incandescent, unquenchable force. "This is still a shop. However you've perverted it, you can't change its nature. There are rules. An offer has been made, a fair offer, and you can't refuse it. Did you forget that, too, that you can't turn down a fair offer here?"
He made a choked, mewling noise. He had always made the offers in the past, he had possessed all the power, and he'd always cheated. He didn't believe Amelia would cheat, but he couldn't bear to make this deal. "I can quit!" he shouted. "I can abandon my office, the shop, I can leave it, and then I don't have to deal!"
"Oh, no," Amelia said. "You can't quit. It's not that simple." She lowered the marble, slightly. "But you can trade."
He swallowed hard, understanding. "You want the shop."
"I've been searching for it all my life," she said simply. "And unlike you, I learned about it. I also learned about the light outside, and what it can do, which is something you never studied. Something I don't think you want to know."
Cimmaron shuddered. Whatever the light stood for, he knew it was antithetical to his cheats and thefts. If there were consequences waiting for him in that light, he didn't want to know about them.
"I'll trade," he said, and tears welled in his eyes. "You can have the whole shop, everything in it, my life, my disguises. You can have it."
"And what do you want in exchange?" she asked.
Cimmaron's old collector's instincts stirred, sensing the tension she tried to hide.
What indeed, he thought. She had to give him something. He could ask for her conscience, her sense of honor and fair play. That would be a nasty trick -- she'd have to accept, it was a more than fair offer, and without her conscience she'd be just like he was. He opened his mouth to say the words, the savage poetry of it was so perfect, but he stopped his tongue in time.
If he traded the shop for her conscience, then he'd have that conscience, wouldn't he? And he'd have to face all the things he'd done, all the people he'd tricked and reduced to fragments that, in their disconnection, became little more than mere beautiful junk.
He couldn't face that.
"I'll give you the shop for..." He hesitated. "For a kiss," he finished hoarsely. "And a quick death."
She sighed, a long exhalation. "I could almost pity you," she said, nearly too quiet for him to hear.
She put the marble down, then stepped toward him. She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.
She tasted sweet, and for a fleeting moment that pain returned to Cimmaron's chest, and he wondered what he'd missed in life, what he'd given up. He had thousands of loves stacked on his shelves, but he didn't remember ever experiencing love himself.
"The first part of our bargain is fulfilled," Amelia said formally, stepping back. Now the light had filled the shop so totally that Cimmaron could see nothing, not even Amelia's face. Only the whiteness, intense, but not hot.
I never meant to be a villain, Cimmaron thought, his eyes open against all that whiteness. Did I?
"For the second part of our bargain," Amelia said, "Just... walk into the light. It will be quick, and merciful."
Fear fluttered in his chest, but the bargain was made, wasn't it? He couldn't turn back. "May all your trades be so generous," he murmured.
Cimmaron took three steps forward and hesitated. He looked back, but saw nothing, only white.
He took the last step, through the now-open windows, and though he would die now, he was comforted by the knowledge that he would die whole.
Tim Pratt lives in Oakland, California, where he works as an assistant editor for Locus magazine. His stories have appeared in Realms of Fantasy, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Strange Horizons, and other nice places, and he has work forthcoming in The Third Alternative and The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives. His story "Little Gods" was a finalist for the 2003 Nebula Award, and his first collection -- also titled, coincidentally, Little Gods -- was published this fall by Prime Books. Tim co-edits slipstream 'zine Flytrap with his fiancee, Heather Shaw. For more information about Tim, visit his web site.
© Tim Pratt
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