Barter
(1985)*
Lois McMaster Bujold

	Her pancakes were all running together in the center of the griddle, like conjugating amoebas. Too much milk in the batter, Mary Alice thought. She should have measured it. She poked dubiously at the fault line with a spatula, trying to chivy the congealing paste back to its original assigned quarters. The spatula, cracked down the middle from metal fatigue, hooked some of the half-cooked goo on its ragged edge and drew it out of the pan as she was setting the tool down. It dripped on the burner, and smoked. She batted at it hastily with a kitchen towel, which scorched and sparked.

=<O>=

	The television blared suddenly from the next room at triple volume. "Turn it down!" Mary Alice screamed. The Space Kidettes at any audible level was bad enough, but this ... She glanced at the digital clock, which read 3:16 AM in glowing red numerals. Since the sun was shining outside, she deduced the kids had been messing with the reset button again. No matter—if it was The Space Kidettes, it had to be nine thirty AM Saturday. I have measured out my life not in coffee spoons, she thought bitterly, but in TV schedules. She bounded into the living room, hands pressed to her ears.

=<O>=

	"Down!" she screamed again, and blasted the button herself. "You let you baby brother mess with those controls again, and I'm going to turn it off!" The Ultimate Threat ...

	"Aw, Mom ..."

	"You're out there, I'm not—you're supposed to be keeping an eye on him."

	"I didn't see him."

	"How could you not see him—he had to be standing in front of you to turn the knob!"

	Baby brother deedled to himself in loud delight, and emerged around a corner dragging a cat by its hind leg. "Let the cat go, Bryan ..."

	Janie huddled, miffed, closer to her electronic panderer of injection-molded delights, eyes widening lustfully at Malibu Barbie with Swimming Pool, fifteen cents worth of assorted petroplastics bloated to a week's grocery budget. "Mom, I want one of those for Christmas ..."

	"It's August, for God's sakes," snapped Mary Alice, retreating to her kitchen. The pancakes were burning and the other cat was up on the counter top, lapping out of the batter bowl.

	"Aargh!" gritted Mary Alice. She scooped up the cat and flung it back into the living room, hoping the baby would get it, too. She stared into the bowl, wondering how much the cat had eaten, and where. It wasn't like margarine, where the rough tongue left little telltale swirly grooves, that helped you figure out which side to cut off. She carried the bowl to the sink and skimmed off a token ladleful or two, dropping them into the disposal side with a white splat. Well, it was all going to be cooked anyway ...

	Her eldest son swaggered through. General Teddy Han Solo Moore, Jr. age seven. On his way to battle, evidently, massing his troops.

	"Mom, have you seen Luke Skywalker?"

	"I think your baby brother had him. He's probably bitten his head off by now, the little geek ..."

	"What kind of pancakes are those?"

	"Banana."

	"I don't like banana."

	"So pick out the banana bits—out, out, you little ingrate," she snarled. "I'll call you when it's ready."

	Her husband slinked past, toward the kitchen door.

	"Where are you going? Breakfast is almost ready."

	"Coffee's all I want. I'm going to start my diet again today."

	"I fixed for five."

	"I can't help that."

	"You could have told me."

	"You didn't ask me. Anyway, I'm going down to Lawson's with Harold Krieger to get some out-of-town papers. Gonna help him look through the help wanteds.

	Going to the video arcade, she thought in numb resentment, to blow another five bucks on Pac-Man with ol' buddy Unemployed Harold. And I didn't buy a shower cap last week, for the fourth month in a row, because two dollars and sixty-nine cents was too much to spend and I can tie my hair out of my face with that old scarf, which hasn't quite rotted through ...

	"All right, kids, come eat."

	"Mom, can I have min in the living room?"

	"I don't like banana!"

	"Deedle-deedle ..."

	"Mrwowrr ..."

=<O>=

	She hurtled through the living room on a fast roundup, using the flat of her hand like a cowboy's bullwhip. Keep those dawgies movin', Rawhiiide ... Janie refused the already-poured orange juice and demanded ice water, two cubes. General Solo picked out banana pieces with elaborate scorn. Deedle-deedle, with high shrieks of "Die, die!" threw all his to the cats, who swirled like sharks beneath his high chair. Mary Alice was not sure if the cries wre directed to his breakfast of the bombees.

	Mary Alice, grimly, ate her way through two adult portions, thinking of the starving children in China, and wishing there were some way to teleport them all her leftovers. A silence fell, briefly, and she took her first slurp of coffee of the morning. It had been poured some time back, and was now cold. In the quiet, from the living room, floated a liquid choking sound, rich, rhythmic, and resonant; one of the cats was throwing up. On the carpet, of course. They never did in on the linoleum.

=<O>=

	The morning was all downhill from there. Janie walked through the cat barf before Mary Alice could get to it, because she was pulling Bryan off the counter top where he had just field stripped the Mr. Coffee filter basket into six constituent components. It was simple enough to snap back together—Mary Alice was becoming quite practiced—but it had been full of wet coffee grounds, which were now poured down the stove burners. Malibu Janie and General Solo had a screaming argument over Which Channel; Mary Alice flatly refused to referee on the grounds that any way you looked at it, she lost, caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of Strawberry Shortcake and Smurfs. The dishes, refusing to do themselves, remained piled on the counter top, an obstacle course for foraging cats. Cats, contrary to rumor, are not graceful beasts at all, but klutzes. They knocked Mary Alice's last remaining large platter on the floor, where it shattered.

	Mary Alice stood in the kitchen doorway and vibrated miserably, torn between the cat vomit and the sharp slivers of crockery lying ready to slice bare feet. She just could not keep slippers on those kids. She had a vision of a morning spent in the emergency room, waiting for stitches to be taken in wounds festering in Cat Germs.

=<O>=

	It was then the doorbell buzzed.

	Mary Alice, muttering words that should not be said out loud in front of children, clawed the door open, ripping a fingernail. "Whatever it is, we don't want ..." she began, and paused.

	"What an odd little man. Not an inch over five feet, he had a pale, lose complexion, and breathed asthmatically. He was dressed in a shimmering silken material that seemed to move through all colors, no colors, unnameable colors, as he moved. A suitcase of a sort, like a salesman's sample case but covered with a similar material, hung by his side—floated, Mary Alice realized; he wasn't holding on to it. Mary Alice, alone with three children and two cars, might have been alarmed, but she made it a rule never to be afraid of men shorter than herself. Besides, he looked ill.

	"Give me," he gasped, in an odd, guttural accent, "all your ammonia."

	"I beg your pardon?" She sucked on her bleeding finger, gone wide-eyed.

	"Ammonia—must have ammonia. Have no money—will trade. What price ammonia?"

	As it happened, Mary Alice was in very good shape with respect to ammonia. There had been a coupon special that week at the supermarket, two for the price of one. Mary Alice loathed coupons. They made her feel like a rat in a paper maze, jerked through a lot of meaningless motions, cut and save, fold and paste, push the lever and ring the bell, for a reward of a few pennies. But they were like money, and you couldn't throw money away.

	She eyed the little man in awed fascination. "Uh ... what have you got to trade?"

	His answer was drowned in a sudden blare of noise from behind her, its content, if any, obliterated in its volume. She fled out the door and slammed it behind her, like dropping a portcullis against massed shock troops. It helped some. He was opening his—sample case? Candy store? Engineering department? Odd-shaped objects glittered and gleamed in the case, and Mary Alice blinked, dizzied.

	"Look, uh, Klaatu, Beelzebub, whoever you are—you're welcome to my ammonia, if you really need it. The only thing I need is an off-switch for my kids, and I'm sure you don't have that ..." She smiled, an artificial rictus, at her own old joke.

	The little man brightened. "Ah!" he said. "Biostasis field. Very easy, nice lady. Have lots of spares."

	Mary Alice froze, then thawed, trembling slightly. His words, devoid of clear detonation to her whirling mind but fairly pulsing with implicit promise, conjured ecstatic visions. She almost grasped his sleeve, but drew her hand back, a little afraid he might pop out of existence like the soap bubble he rather resembled, without even a drip to mark his passing.

	"Come in," she breathed, "come in to my kitchen. Watch your step ..."

	The three kids, glued to the tube—it was a commercial—didn't even look up as they passed. Mary Alice wished she'd bought stock in Kenner in 1976. She tiptoed through the shards on the kitchen floor and dragged back a sticky chair for her visitor. He sat, heavily, with a grateful smile. His wheezing was becoming quite noticeable. "Nice lady," he gasped. "Ammonia—now?"

	"Uh, sure." She bolted down to the basement, where the ammonia and other cleaning compounds were stored on a high shelf, theoretically out of the reach of deedle-deedles. Although since the incident with the bag of powdered sugar and the bottle of Palmolive Green from the top pantry shelf, she had lost faith in height alone as a safety measure. She tramped back up the stairs with a half-gallon plastic jug anchoring each arm. She heaved one into his lap with an anxious smile. "Bo-Peep Cloudy all right with you?"

	He nodded, sneezing, and fumbled the cap off. He blinked and smiled as the fumes rose. "Yes ..." he aspirated, and attempted to raise the bottle to his mouth with weak and trembling arms. It slipped, sloshing ammonia onto his shimmering clothing. It did not soak in, neither did it bead, but sheeted off into a messy puddle on the floor, leaving not a track behind. "Help ... me ..." he whispered.

	Hoping sickly that she wasn't helping him to commit suicide, she popped to the Dixie cup dispenser. Empty. She tried the cupboard—also empty; the glasses were all stacked with the rest of the dishes, encrusted with food, stale milk rings, and greasy fingerprints. Wait, there was one—Janie's McDonald's Going Places cup. Mary Alice glanced nervously over her shoulder—Janie really had screaming fits when anyone else dared to use her private cup. But her middle child was still ensconced in the living room. Mary Alice grabbed a jug and glugged in ammonia level with the top of Birdie's green airplane, nerved herself, and held it hastily to her guest's lips. He drank greedily, thanking her with grateful golden eyes. The pupils, she noticed, were diamond-shaped, not round.

	He finished the cupful and sat a little straighter, breathing more quietly and steadily. He rested a few minutes in the chair, not speaking, apparently regaining his strength. He took another glassful of Bo-Peep Cloudy, and recapped the jug. Mary Alice had set the second jug on the floor. Now she pushed it slowly toward him with her foot. "You were saying something about a stasis field?" she reminded him hopefully.

	"Biostasis field," he corrected. "Yes. Use all the time for traveling. Very easy. You want remote switch?"

	"Uh ... I guess."

	"All right. I fix." He knelt, re-opened his case, and  rummaged within. He paused a moment, picked up the second jug and tightened its cap securely, and set it within the case. The bottle shrank, melting and curling away from Mary Alice—but not toward any other part of the kitchen. It curled away from all sides at once. When it was reduced to the size of a straight pin, her guest placed it carefully in a holder displaying a long row of other tiny, ambiguous shapes, and sighed satisfaction.

	"How many you want?" he inquired. "You call in children, I fix."

	"Well, there's Teddy, and Janie, and Bryan ..." Her eye fell on one of the cats, sleeping stretched out in the middle of a sunbeam on the kitchen table, its tail resting across a plate pooled with pancake syrup and floating banana bits. Teddy always poured too much syrup. She felt a slight maternal qualm at the thought of subjecting her firstborn to an unknown operation. "Can you do cats, too?" she asked.

	"Can do anything," he stated confidently.

	"All right—let's start with that one," she pointed.

	The cat was placed on her guest's lap, where it settled, pouting at having its nap disturbed. The little man stroked it, then held a curious device the size of a cigarette lighter above the back of the beast's neck. A strange blue light, at once transparent and material, descended into the thick black fur and vanished.

	"Okay, see." He handed her the device. "Press here."

	The cat jumped down, stretching disdainfully. Mary Alice pressed. The cat froze in a blink, as though strobed. Unbalanced, it fell over and lay stiffly.

	"Wow," Mary Alice breathed. "How do you start it up again?"

	"Press there."

	The cat flipped indignantly to its feet and scampered off.

	"I'll call the other one," said Mary Alice happily, pressing the electric can opener. At is quiet whir, both cats appeared as though conjured. The operation was repeated in a moment. Mary Alice experimented for a few minutes, turning the cats on and off.

	"How long does this thing keep working?" she asked. "I mean, do the batteries run down or anything?"

	"Not run forever," the little man said. "Takes big power, you bet. Power cell only good for—your time ..." He lost himself in a mental calculation, lips moving. "One hundred ten years."

	"That'll be okay," she reassured him. "That'll be just fine." She moved to the doorway of the living room. "Oh, Teddy ..."

=<O>=

	She lined them up on the couch, one two, three, like the Chinese monkeys, with the cats on either side like bookends. Last of all she turned off the television set. Silence, blessed silence, fell broken only by the drip, drip of the refrigerator defrosting itself.

	"Must you go so soon?" Mary Alice asked the little man. "You only just got here. Shouldn't you rest?"

	"Must go," he shrugged.

	"But my husband isn't home yet. He could roll in any time now. Just a few more minutes? Please?"

	The little man shook his head apologetically. "Must go."

	"Wait." An idea tugged at Mary Alice's brain. It was worth a try, anyway. "Just one second—" She galloped back down the basement stairs, and returned in a flash with another white plastic jug with a red and blue label. "Can you use any of this?" It was only three-quarters full, but still ...

	He uncapped it, and sniffed. His face lit up. "Ah!" he cried. "Hooch!"

	He tilted the Clorox jug up on his arm, hillbilly style, and took a swallow. "Ahhh!" He smiled, then belched hugely. Mary Alice, remembering what had happened in her toilet the time she had mixed ammonia and chlorine bleach, thinking to clean and disinfect at the same time, was not surprised. "Nice lady. Maybe I got one, two more minutes ..."

	They waited, Mary Alice popping up every few minutes when a car was heard passing, or a car door slammed in the neighborhood. With a few moments quiet, she began to think.

	"You know," she said after a while, "my husband doesn't really need an off switch."

	"Oh?" said the little man. "I go, then."

	"No, wait—what I mean is, do you have anything like an, uh—an on switch, in the bag of tricks.?"

	The little man rubbed his lips thoughtfully, and took another slug of Clorox. "Sounds like a focal stimulator."

	"What's that?"

	"We use instead of toxic caffeine-laden beverage. To work."

	"Work, eh? That sounds about right," Mary Alice mused. "Can I trade you that gallon of Clorox for one?"

	The little man looked at the jug respectfully and grinned. "Nice lady, you got deal."

	Mary Alice sat back down and prayed for a power outage at the video arcade. At last came the familiar engine noise in the driveway, the crunch of gears and the squeal of brakes.

	"What's this, company?" asked Teddy, Sr., entering the kitchen.

	"Uh, hello, dear. Mr., uh, Klaatu is a Jehovah's Witness. We've been having the most fascinating conversation ..."

	"Oh," he said, his eyes glazing over. "Well, I'll leave you to it, then." He turned on the water, and rummaged in the cupboard for a suitable vessel. He finally chose a sherbet dish, and drew a drink of water. The little man, from his chair, sighted upon the back of her husband's neck. The glowing red blur sang quietly as a mosquito through the air and vanished into the skin of the nape.

	"Do you want anything to eat, dear, after skipping breakfast?"

	"Oh no. Harold and I stopped at McDonald's. I had two Big Macs, fries, and a shake, so I guess I don't want anything till lunch ..." He yawned. "See if you can keep the kids quiet, huh? I'm going to try to get a nap and—"

	Mary Alice pressed her button.

	Her husband blinked "—clean out those gutters. Should have done them last fall, y'know. There's no time like the present ..." He bounded energetically back out the kitchen door, heading for the garage and a ladder.

	The little man shouldered his Clorox bottle and bowed his way out.

	"Do stop by again, any time you're in the neighborhood," Mary Alice invited cordially. "Just let me know you're coming, and I'll lay in plenty of ammonia and bleach. Bye!"

	She turned back to her house with a sigh. She had much to do herself, but at least it wouldn't be undone four times faster. One could not keep the kids switched off all the time, of course—thirty years down the line, applying for Social Security, she might still have a pre-schooler in the house if she were too self-indulgent. But there was no rush. First she would clean the kitchen, then the rest of downstairs. Then, perhaps, she might sit down with a glass of fresh iced tea, and listen to a record. Not the high, piping voiced of Chipmunks or Smurfs, hiccuping over the peanut butter jammed in the grooves, but a record of her own, maybe Parkening Plays Bach. The television would remain off. The silence was not total; scraping noises from the eaves intruded gently through the summer-open window, but that was all right. She began to sweep the kitchen, planning her day. Her day.

The End