Jimmy Guang's House Of Gladmech Part 1

Jimmy Guang's House of Gladmech.

by Alex Irvine.

Jimmy Guang Hamid smoked tobacco cigars until he found out that vat-grown lungs were still p.r.o.ne to immune-rejection problems and that the vat wranglers hadn't made much headway on what they called amongst themselves the Larynx Problem. Then he went over to herb-and-marijuana panatelas, anxious to maintain his image as a Golden Age wheeler-dealer, but not so anxious for a long convalescence or opportunistic infection following a double pulmonary.

But he was in Kyrgyzstan, anyway, a long way from organ vats, and the only people there who cared about his image were the Russians. The Russians were the only people who cared about lots of things in the brutalized city of Osh, a still-proud prominence in the tank-tracked, cl.u.s.ter-bombed, spider-mined, cruise-missiled ruins of what had once, a hundred years or so before, been the southern part of the Soviet Empire. Now Kyrgyzstan was a member of the Islamist Federation, a loose group of non-Arab Muslim states, and the Russians fought with the IF out of concern over concentration of power in Central Asia but mostly out of sheer terror of what would happen if their soldiers were ever allowed to come home.

Jimmy Guang was not a deeply religious man, although he'd been raised a Muslim and inhabited the belief the way he inhabited his tastes in food or music. He took no sides between the IF and the Russians and the Chinese, who hovered like a storm waiting to break from the East. He had come to these wars thinking he could make money.

He came to the city of Osh, on the flanks of the Ferghana Valley, a sliver of warm green pointing up into the windswept expanse of the Tien Shan ranges. Once Osh had been a major stop along the Silk Road. Alexander the Great had slept there. Mohammed had prayed there. Now there wasn't much left after sixty years of sporadic war, but it was close to Tashkent without being too close, and the last thing a foreign entrepreneur wanted was to be too close to Tashkent. Or, for that matter, Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, which was still alive with bad, bad bugs the Russians had left during their previous visit.

Osh was no longer a major part of anything. It still had its legendary bazaar, and it was still warmer than just about anywhere else in K-stan, but even for war profiteering it didn't offer the potential of Karachi or Almaty or Yerevan. Still, Jimmy Guang came there with his cigars and his pinstriped suits and his silk ties, a good hundred years out of fashion, and he started making deals. He knew people in Singapore, his father was still living in Jaipur and an uncle in Xian, he'd gladhanded his way over the Khyber Pa.s.s and through the Karakoram, sneaking through the Muslim hinterlands of China on the strength of his gap-toothed grin and fragmentary bits of half a dozen languages he'd picked up around the house when he was a kid. Jimmy Guang Hamid could get things.

He set up quietly, in a bombed-out storefront on Lenin Street, not far from the bazaar but not too close either. Jimmy Guang was always careful about distance. For the first week he swept and cleaned and arranged, covered over holes in the walls and made himself a pallet behind a curtain. He would take his meals at restaurants, the better to be seen, but not expensive restaurants because behind his facade of leisure and comfort Jimmy Guang Hamid was desperately poor. He washed in the restrooms of the restaurants he patronized; he burned incense under his shirts so he could save the expense of cleaning them; he scavenged in the burned-out university campus for flaps of furniture vinyl to st.i.tch onto his shoes. If he did not succeed here in Osh, there was a good chance that he would starve to death on his way back to India or China.

He was as piratical and polyglot a stereotype as had ever been encountered in those parts, and that's exactly how he wanted it. Let them think him a buffoon. Let them insult the many strains of his ethnicity, and the many colors of his ties. He would consider bargains.

It only took a few days for him to get to know people, and a few days after that to broker his first deal, between a Russian quartermaster suffering from an excess of toothpaste and an Uzbek merchant who had found himself awash in vodka straight from Kiev. The Uzbek traded mostly among the more fundamentalist IF brigades, who wouldn't drink the vodka anyway, and the Russian would make a killing from his alcoholic and lonely compatriots.

"Amazing thing, war," Jimmy Guang said in his creolized Russian to the quartermaster, whose name was Yevgeny. They clinked gla.s.ses. "Even in the midst of all this misery and misunderstanding, still there is commerce. Still we find ways to get what we need. Something grand about it."

Allahu akbar, thought Jimmy Guang, even though he wasn't particularly religious.

Yevgeny muttered a toast and drank. Jimmy Guang knew in that moment, early on a Thursday morning in May of 2083, with a fine sharp breeze shuddering down out of the Pamir range, that he would survive. He had been right to come to Osh.

The man who sold Jimmy Guang his first gladmechs reminded him of his father, and for that reason Jimmy Guang walked away from the deal certain that he had gotten the worse of it. No man could bargain with his father.

"I have no use for these," the old German trader said.

"Nor do I," Jimmy Guang said. He thought it odd that a German should remind him of his father Reza, a proud glowering Persian who claimed ancestry among the Mughal conquerors of India. He had already decided to buy the robots, six creaking Izmit general-services models. He knew he could put them to use, and he was beginning to have financial reserves sufficient to quiet his anxieties about the return voyage to India, should that become necessary.

"Put them in a pit, have them fight each other," said the Russian who had inspected the truck and pocketed three of Jimmy Guang's cigars to ignore its doubtful papers. "That's what they do everywhere else."

"Is that so," said Jimmy Guang, and just like that his course was set.

On the edge of the university campus was a long row of corrugated-tin sheds. One, which judging from the deep oil stains in its concrete floor had once held heavy equipment, was still intact. It measured forty meters long by some twenty-five wide, which Jimmy Guang figured was big enough to cordon off an arena and still pack in something like a thousand spectators. He placed a call to the robots, and was surprised to see them all arrive in a Russian army truck driven by the beneficiary of Jimmy Guang's smoky baksheesh the day before.

"I was waiting for you to tell them where to go," the soldier said as he got down from the truck's cab. He was tall and heavy and blond. Jimmy Guang could not imagine what it would be like to fight him when he was fully suited and armed. "Monitoring you. My name is Slava. You want these robots to fight, you're going to need them fixed up a little. I'll do it."

"There's no money for a mechanic," said Jimmy Guang, thinking that brushing Slava away would cost him more cigars. He resolved to get better encryption for his personal commlink.

"I'll do it free. Just to see them fight." A toothy grin split Slava's blunt face.

This was a deal Jimmy Guang could not refuse. He and Slava got the six Izmits off the truck and into the hangar, where they spent the rest of the day cleaning and cordoning off the arena s.p.a.ce. Then Jimmy Guang gathered the mechs together.

"What we're going to do here is you're going to fight each other," he said.

"This is outside our parameters," one of the mechs said.

"We are not adaptive intelligences," added another.

Jimmy Guang had antic.i.p.ated this. "The instructions are simple. A waste-management task. Each of you is to render the others fit for a standard industrial recyc. This requires separation of extremities from the trunk. Are you familiar with this protocol?"

"I am," each of the robots said.

After that, it was a matter of hanging posters, making sure there were enough pretty girls to run concession stands, and letting it be known that the house would take forty percent of all wagers. A few days later the six Izmits, painted different colors on Jimmy Guang's theory that this would promote audience identification and therefore wagering, banged and jerked each other to sparking pieces before an raucous and intensely partisan crowd of locals. By the end, the last surviving robot careened around the arena to thunderous cheers, missing one arm and trailing glittery strings of fiber-optic from holes punched in its trunk.

Jimmy Guang made enough on the evening that he didn't have to worry about hunger for two weeks. With some of what was left over he had his trousers hemmed and splurged on a box of tobacco cigars from Ankara, vat problems or no. That night he sat in his office listening to Russian rockets exploding in the hills, and he thought to himself: You can take your mind off anything. You can even take your mind off love. But you cannot take your mind off being hungry.

Of course the next day he fell in love.

Marta was her name. Jimmy Guang met her while trying to sell her uncle Gregor razor blades and Sri Lankan p.o.r.nography. She looked curiously at the p.o.r.n disks, then crinkled around the eyes and looked at her feet when she saw him watching her. This combination of humor and modesty caught his attention, as did the fall of her hair across her eyes. She had his mother's eyes, thought Jimmy Guang, that sharp black gaze that missed nothing. "Marta is ruined," her uncle said. "The Russians did it. At least she fought."

She had three missing teeth, Gregor went on, where a Russian soldier had hit her with a rifle b.u.t.t to stop her fighting back. Gregor told the story like it had happened in a video. Jimmy Guang listened to it with growing embarra.s.sment that made him look more closely at Marta. A crease of scar split her upper lip on the left side, and he thought about her missing teeth. He himself was missing a tooth, although he had no dramatic story other than gingivitis and an unsympathetic dentist.

And he had been ruined himself a time or two. He waited until Gregor was preoccupied with the finest filth Colombo could produce, and then he sidled up next to Marta and asked if she would like to take a trip to the Toktogul Reservoir.

No, she said. It was too heavily guarded.

Jimmy Guang knew a way in.

He smiled at her, made sure that the gap was visible between bicuspid and incisor on the upper right side of his mouth.

Marta glanced at him, then looked away. Her left hand rested at the corner of her mouth. It has been a long time since I went swimming, she said.

He didn't see her for nearly a week after their first meeting, but she was never far from his mind. The thought of her distracted him as he d.i.c.kered with Yevgeny over another truckload of robots. When he'd paid too much for the robots and even absently agreed to take the stolen truck off Yevgeny's hands, he went back to his office and thought about how much he wanted to watch Marta swim. She would remove her vest and shoes, perhaps her top skirt. Maybe she even would appear in a bathing suit, or he could present her with one. That was it. Yes. She would strip down to her bathing suit, every line and motion clean and wary as a cat's, and he would sit on the bank with a cigar while she stepped into the black water, disturbing the reflections of mountains, and swam, eyes closed and corners of her mouth relaxed into a faint smile. It struck him that he very badly wanted to see her happy, and he could not understand why.

Jimmy Guang's second evening as gladiatorial impresario teetered on the edge of debacle from the moment the grim cl.u.s.ter of Russian soldiers entered the arena. What had been a raucous crowd of several hundred fell nearly silent. Jimmy Guang heard muttered profanities in Kirghiz, Russian, Arabic.

The lone officer in the group of Russians approached Jimmy Guang. "You are fighting robots here," he said.

Jimmy Guang saw no way to plausibly deny this, so he nodded.

The officer nodded back. "How much to watch?"

A delicate situation, this. The officer might be leading Jimmy Guang into an admission of war privateering. He might simply expect Jimmy Guang to announce that he and his men could watch for free, which would of course remind everyone present of the inequities that had provoked the Islamic Federation's war in the first place.

Or, thought Jimmy Guang, he might be willing to pay.

"Rubles, dollars, or yen?" he said.

The Russian officer paid for himself and his men-in American dollars-and they moved in a loose group toward one corner of the arena. Slava Butsayev was already there, and he came across the arena floor to join the other Russians. Jimmy Guang continued his introductory patter-he had already begun flamboyantly naming each of the robots and claiming an ill.u.s.trious heritage of victory for most-until he was interrupted by a teenage Kirghiz boy who leaned forward as one of the Russian soldiers walked by and spat on the man's boots.

Jimmy Guang knew for the rest of his life that many people might have died in those next few seconds, and that he might have been one of them. But in the endless moment that stretched out after the boy's expectoration, he thought of only one thing: walking across the Khyber Pa.s.s to India, penniless and hungry with hundreds of kilometers of empty mountains between him and the nearest human who cared.

"No!" he shouted, and rushed to put himself between the soldier and the defiant boy. "No!" The soldier took a step, and Jimmy Guang, to his everlasting surprise, put a hand in the man's chest and nudged him back. "Not in here! Everyone pays the same here, everyone watches the same here. The war is outside! The war stops at the door!"

A long moment pa.s.sed, and then the Russian officer touched him on the shoulder. Jimmy Guang shut his mouth and made himself ready to die.

"Tell the boy to clean up his mess," the officer said.

Jimmy Guang looked at the boy. He grew more acutely aware that had saved a life. Perhaps more than one.

His bravado began to melt away, and as it did Jimmy Guang felt the enormity of what he was doing begin to impress itself on him. He drew his handkerchief from his breast pocket and pa.s.sed it to the soldier, who wiped his boot and handed it back. Jimmy Guang, already regretting the loss of his only good silk handkerchief, held it out for the boy to take. A small voice in the back of his mind said, Now you've done it. Now you'll always be stuck in between them. At the edge of his field of vision he saw Slava Butsayev looking intently at him, as though he were one of the robots with unclear prospects in the ring.

When the cloth had disappeared into the boy's pocket, Jimmy Guang stepped back into the center of the arena and said, "In Jimmy Guang's House of Gladmech, everybody gets along."

He didn't find out until the next day that Marta had been in the audience that night. They were swimming, or at least she was. He, as he had in his fantasy, sat a little away from the water, hat low over his eyes against the glare and a fine macanudo between his fingers. She swam, sleek as a dolphin, out into the reservoir. Jimmy Guang saw a gleam from the dam: soldiers' binoculars. Anger swelled in his chest as he thought of Marta's missing teeth, what she had suffered. The marvelous strength of her. He was beginning to love that strength.

Later, as they ate supper back in Osh, she was distant, preoccupied, a bit cold. For twenty minutes he pried gently, and at last she came open.

"All the Russians in your audience."

"Russians, Kirghiz, Uzbeks," said Jimmy Guang. "They all pay the same, and they don't kill each other in the stands."

"They didn't this time," she said. "But if you keep doing this, it will happen. You can bet on it. And then you can bet on one other thing."

"What's that?"

Her face was to the window, her reflection a woman-shaped vacancy against a field of stars. "That the Russians will come after you, and I'll be alone again."

The next Tuesday, the Russian captain found Jimmy Guang drinking coffee on the patio of a restaurant called Fez that faced a broad square in one of the older parts of Osh. He introduced himself as Vasily Butsayev, and shook Jimmy Guang's hand. Jimmy Guang offered him a cigar, and Captain Butsayev politely declined.

He had come alone, which piqued Jimmy Guang's interest. Solitary Russian officers had a tendency to disappear in Osh, reappearing piece by piece in family mailboxes back in Petersburg or Komsomolsk. Either Captain Butsayev was more courageous than the average Russian, or he knew the right people in Osh and therefore had no reason to be afraid. It was this second possibility that had provoked Jimmy Guang's offer of a cigar.

"Is Slava Butsayev a relation of yours?"

A strange look pa.s.sed across the captain's face. "He is my younger brother. I understand he is spending his spare time working on your robots."

"He is an energetic and knowledgeable young man," said Jimmy Guang. It was the truth. He had come to enjoy the young blond Russian's company around the hangar, and without a doubt Slava kept the mechs in better condition than Jimmy would have been able to. "I am fortunate that he agreed to work for free."

"Better than some other things he could be doing," Butsayev said with a thin smile. The waiter appeared, and he ordered coffee. "A good show you put on last night," he said when it had arrived.

Jimmy Guang shrugged modestly. "Considering what I had to work with."

"This is why I am here. You are known to us as a broker of deals."

Those words opened up a huge pit in Jimmy Guang's stomach. He swallowed and said with great delicacy, "I seek only to make things a little more bearable for those who must spend much of their time amid the horrors of war."

Captain Butsayev smiled. He had good teeth. "Do not be afraid, Mr. Hamid. I'm not here to arrest anyone for profiteering, and if I were," he glanced at Jimmy Guang's threadbare suit, "there are others I would visit before you."

The pit closed, and Jimmy Guang breathed a little easier. Butsayev wanted to deal.

"If I can get you more robots," the captain went on, the tone of his voice lightening, "can you set up more matches?"

"If you get me more robots," said Jimmy Guang, "there would of course be more matches. But I am not certain that my finances are up to purchasing quant.i.ties of robots. These are hard times."

"They are," agreed Captain Butsayev. "But let us be clear about something. We know, and the Islamic Federation knows, and the Kirghiz militias up in the mountains know that this war solves nothing. The IF continues because fighting us keeps their donations flowing from the rich fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. The Kirghiz fight us because they are always fighting someone. And we Russians, why are we here?" Butsayev looked pained. "I fear that the civilian government of Mother Russia is uneasy at the prospect of half a million discharged soldiers returning home at once."

Jimmy Guang thought of Marta. He tried not to let it show. Captain Butsayev studied him for a moment. The Russian had hard blue eyes and heavy bones in his face. It was the face of a man who knew that the war would leave him with bad dreams and loneliness in his old age.

"When I said you put on a good show last night," Butsayev said at last, "I didn't mean the robots."

Jimmy Guang's shoulders twitched. Even after a week, he could still feel the Russian soldier's gaze boring through him to the thin teenager with eyes hardened by privation. People walking through the square did not notice him, did not know how difficult and frightening it was to be talking to a Russian captain without knowing what the Russian captain wanted him to say. The collar of his shirt pinched under his chin when he opened his mouth.

Captain Vasily Butsayev held up a hand, and Jimmy Guang's mouth shut. "I am not a peacenik, Mr. Hamid. And I am not a soft man. But I do not love war for its own sake." He stood. "I believe you know Master Sergeant Yevgeny?"

Since there was no way to deny this, Jimmy Guang nodded.

"Good. Speak to him." With that, Captain Butsayev touched the brim of his cap and left Jimmy Guang trying not to hyperventilate at his sidewalk table that was suddenly not nearly far enough away from the war.

The next day, though, he talked to Yevgeny, and four days after that he staged another round of matches with Indian-made salvage mechs whose cutting torches glowed in the eyes of eight hundred Kirghiz and two hundred Russian spectators, none of whom killed or tortured or a.s.saulted any of the others while within earshot of the old heavy-equipment shed. And the week after that was the same, only with two Chinese riveters pitted against a walking sc.r.a.pheap of domestic-service units. This was such a success that Jimmy Guang went looking for a larger venue, and found a hangar outside the Russian security perimeter at Osh's airport. It was three or four times the size of the university shed, and Jimmy Guang made sure that his gladiator fans knew that there was now room to bring their friends, and he painted large signs to hang on all four of the hangar's walls. JIMMY GUANG'S HOUSE OF GLADMECH, the signs proclaimed, "gladmech" being Jimmy Guang's zippy coinage for the mayhem that occurred inside. And beneath that, NO VIOLENCE EXCEPT BETWEEN MECHS. Jimmy Guang had made it clear to Captain Butsayev, and to the local IF commander he knew only as Fouad, that the first killing or serious maiming that occurred at one of his matches would be the last. All agreed that the airport hangar should be a war-free zone.

And thus it was that Jimmy Guang's House of Gladmech became the only place in Kyrgyzstan where Russians and locals could meet without violence.

Things were going well for Jimmy Guang. He was making enough money to have his suit mended and take Marta for dinners at Fez and the odd German-Chinese restaurant near the destroyed munic.i.p.al building, the Russians and the Kirghiz and the IF would all do business with him, and he was discovering that it in fact felt good to be doing a little good in the midst of so much misery. He imagined that somewhere, someday, militant robot-rights types would hear of his activities and pillory him as the worst kind of murderous slaver; but it seemed to him that if he could carve out a s.p.a.ce wherein enemies could meet without killing, it was worth the loss of a bunch of mechs who would soon have been rusting in a boneyard anyway.

And he was falling deeply in love with Marta.

Wartime romances are odd things, Jimmy Guang considered one day after Marta had left his office in a smoldering fury. Lovers are hard to each other, as if angry words and bitter actions can test one's ability to weather war. As if one must worry not just about stray bullets or microorganisms, but about one's lover being emptied of humanity by the proximity of war.

Marta had been testing him, he thought. It was unclear whether he had pa.s.sed.

Yevgeny had stopped into his office while she was visiting, and a long look had pa.s.sed between him and Marta before she disappeared behind the curtain into his small personal s.p.a.ce. "I've found some real prizes for you," Yevgeny said. "American seafloor mining mechs, complete with cutting torches and shaped charges."

"In the name of the Prophet," said Jimmy Guang, "I can't let shaped charges into my arena. What happens if one isn't aimed exactly at the opponent and I lose a whole section of spectators? I'd be ruined."

Yevgeny shrugged. "Okay, if you don't want them."