Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 23

But there's a sky, and she walks out under it. It's not any kind of sky she's seen. It's big and pale, and seems ... flat, and very high up. There aren't any clouds, and it looks dusty under the big red sun.

It might be a desert. She's read someplace that deserts have skies like that. And it's not just a picture. Tara can taste it, feel the pebbles under the soles of her shoes, the heat baking off the cracked tarmac. Except the tarmac isn't really tarmac: like it, but chocolate-brown, or maybe that's the dull red dust.

And Tara doesn't think they have people like Albert in the kinds of deserts she'd get to on a plane.

As for Albert, he's a long segmented being like a giant centipede, though he can't be a centipede because of the inverse square law. Which says that if you breathe through a spiracle, you can't breathe if you get that big. Of course...

. . . he isn't necessarily an Earth arthropod. And when she watches him, she sees all his segments swelling and relaxing, independent of each other. They each seem to have a top and bottom plate that slide rather than one hard sh.e.l.l like an arthropod would have. So it's more like armor than an exoskeleton. And Albert isn't his real name, of course, but Tara doesn't know his real name, because she can't talk to him.

He has a lot of legs, though, and lots of little fine claws and then two big bulky claws too, like a lobster instead of a crab. He chitters at her, which freaked her out the first few times, and grabs her hand with one k.n.o.bby manipulator. It's all right. She's already reaching out, too.

I didn't call Tara's father, just arrived to pick her up at the usual time. I'd talk to Tara first, I decided, and then see what I was going to say to Jerry. He's a good guy, works hard, loves his kid.

He panics. You know. Some people do. Tara doesn't, not usually, and so I wanted to talk to her first.

She sat in the back, big enough to be out of a booster seat but not big enough to be safe with the airbags yet. She was. .h.i.tting a growth spurt, though; it wouldn't be long.

RSD has all sorts of side effects. There are people who think it's psychosomatic, who dismiss it, more or less, as malingering. I got some resistance from my mom and my sister when we decided to go ahead with the surgery, of the she's-just-doing-it-for-attention and she'll-outgrow-it sort.

My Tara was a brave girl, very tough. She broke her arm on the playground a few days after her eighth birthday. I didn't figure out there were other issues until the cast was off and she was still complaining that it hurt. And then, complaining that it hurt more, and the hurt was spreading up her shoulder and down her side. And her right hand was curling into a claw while it took us nine months to get a diagnosis, and another ten months after that to get her into the trial, while she suffered through painkillers and physical therapy.

I watched in the mirror as she wriggled uncomfortably under her shoulder belt and slouched against the door, inspecting bitten fingernails. "How was school?"

"Fine," she said, turning to look out the window at the night rus.h.i.+ng past. It was raining slightly, and she had rolled her window down to catch the damp air, trailing her fingers over the edge of the crack.

"Hands in the car, please," I said as we stopped under a streetlight. I couldn't see in the darkness if her eyes were bloodshot, or if those shadows under her chin were bruises.

Tara pulled her fingers back, sighing. "How was work, Mom?"

"Actually, I got a call from Mrs. Mendez today."

Her eyes widened as I pulled away from the stop sign. I forced my attention back to the road. "Am I in trouble?"

"You know it's very dangerous, what you taught Silkie to do, don't you?"

"Mom?" A plaintive question, leading, to see how much I knew.

"The fainting game. It's not safe. People die doing that, even grownups." Another stop sign, as she glared at her hands. "Silkie went to the emergency room."

Tara closed her eyes. "Is she okay?"

"She will be."

"I'm always careful, Mom-"

"Tara." I s.h.i.+fted from second to third as we rolled up the dark street and around the corner to our own house, the porch light gleaming expectantly by the stairs, light dappled through the rain-heavy leaves of the maple in the front yard. "I need you to promise me you'll never do that again." Her chin set.

Wonderful. Her father's stubborn mouth, thin line of her lips. Her hair was still growing back, so short it curled in flapper ringlets around her ears and on her brow.

"Lots of kids do it. n.o.body ever gets hurt."

"Tara?"

"I can't promise."

"Tara." There are kids you can argue with. Tara wasn't one of them. But she could be reasoned with. "Why not?"

"You wouldn't believe me." And she didn't say it with the petulant defiance you might expect, but simply, reasonably, as an accepted annoyance.

"Try me."

"I can't promise," she said, "because the aliens need me."

Albert chitters again. It's hot. Really hot, and Tara wants water. But there never seems to be any water here. Albert tugs her hand. He wants her to follow. She goes with him and he takes her the same way he always does. Toward the big steel doors, and then down into cool darkness, the hum of big fans, and then he'll bring her underground and there will be a thing like a microphone, only at her height, not a grown up one. And she'll talk and sing into it, because that seems to be what Albert wants her to do, while luminescent colors roll across his armor plates in thin, transparent bands.

She's never seen anything alive here. Except Albert.

She talks into the microphone, though, sings it silly songs and talks about things. Her mother and father, and the divorce. The time in the hospital, and the friends she made there. Insects and arthropods, bicycles and card games. Her friends and teachers, and how happy she is to be back in a real school.

Colors rippling across his carapace impatiently, Albert waits. They've done this before.

I blamed the implant. n.o.body likes to think her kid is experiencing symptoms of undifferentiated schizophrenia, after all. I rescheduled for the next day and took the morning off and we made an emergency appointment with Dr. al-Mansoor.

Tara waited outside while I went in to talk to the doctor. She looked bleary-eyed under the scarf tucked over her hair, the flesh slack over her cheekbones and shadowed around the eyes. I like Dr. al-Mansoor. And it was pretty obvious she hadn't planned on being in the clinic at seven AM to see us, but she'd managed to get there.

I put a cup of coffee on her desk before I sat down. She took it gratefully, cupping lean fingers around the warm paper, her wedding ring flas.h.i.+ng as she lowered her head over the steam. "You have a concern, Jill?" she asked.

Her given name is Hadiyah, but I always have to remind myself to use it, even though we'd gotten to be good friends over the last four months or so. I think she respected the questions I asked. None of the other parents were in the medical profession.

I looked down at my own coffee cup and cleared my throat. Best to just say it. "I think there's a problem with Tara's implant."

They'll catch her if she tries it here. So Tara sits and folds her hands and tries not to rock impatiently, first in the waiting room and then in the office while Mom and Dr. al-Mansoor talk, mostly over her head. There's a dollhouse on the ledge, though, along with some other toys that Tara is mostly too old for, and Tara busies herself with the dolls and the furniture until she gets bored, and starts running the red firetruck back and forth along the ledge. She stages a four-alarm fire and a rescue, complete with hook-and-ladder work on the dollhouse, though the sizes are off and the dolls have to make a death-defying leap from the second floor to be caught at the top of the ladder by a half-scale fireman.

She's totally lost track of the grownup conversation, and they're not talking about her now anyway but about some other girl in the trial, though Dr. al-Mansoor is very careful not to say her name. "She hasn't had any similar ideations, though ... "

The conversation stops, and Tara looks up to find Mom and Dr. alMansoor staring at her. "Did I do something wrong?"

"Tara," Dr. al-Monsoor says, smoothing her scarf over her hair, "where did you learn to play the fainting game?"

Tara bites her lip. Her hair falls across her eyes and she pushes it back. She never promised not to tell. "At the hospital," she says, dragging it out. She turns back to the dollhouse and saves another Ken doll from the flames.

"Who taught you?"

This Ken doll didn't jump hard enough. He falls short of the ladder, and the miniature fireman lunges frantically to catch him. He gets one of Ken's outreached hands, and clutches it. Firemen have gloves, big rubber ones, so it must be the gloves that are slipping in the sweat, not Ken's hand. Ken sways perilously as the fireman hooks his feet in the rungs of the ladder and hauls on his hand, Tara mimicking both Ken's cries for help and the fireman's rea.s.surances.

The grownups are silent, watching. Until Tara's mother clears her throat and says, carefully, "Tara? Did you hear the question?"

"One of the other girls," Tara says, letting Ken rock back and forth a little, hands slipping. She watches him carefully. Maybe if the fireman slides a little higher, ladder rungs gouging his tummy, he can keep his grip. Oh, no, gasps Ken. Don't worry, I've got you! cries the fireman.

"Which girl?"

Tara shrugs. She won't remember. That's not a lie, and they can't make her remember, either. The fireman hauls Ken up once his predicament stops being interesting.

Tara prefers a happy ending.

"Tara," Mom says, quietly, "she could be in a lot of danger. You have to tell us."

It takes a long time. But eventually, she does.

I barely knew Jodi Carter. She was older than Tara, twelve or thirteen, and they hadn't been room-mates. But they'd spent time together, in the common room or the girls' bathroom.

I wondered how many other girls Jodi had taught the fainting game. At least, from what Dr. al-Mansoor said, it didn't seem like she was having the hallucinations. I was guiltily glad it wasn't my job to answer either of those questions.

Dr. al-Mansoor and I had a hasty conference while Tara banged around a little more with Barbie dolls and firetrucks. My worry that Tara was the only child to report some sort of hallucination after receiving the implant was enough to make my hands cold.

We got Tara checked in-back in her old room, in fact-and Dr. alMansoor put her under observation. No restraints, but she'd be under fifteen-minute checks, though the room had a one-way window so she'd at least have the illusion of privacy.

I argued for the right to sleep in the waiting room. Dr. al-Mansoor countered with an offer of her office couch. Tara and I went home to fetch her pajamas and get her some lunch while Dr. al-Mansoor and Mrs. Carter had a long talk with Jodi, who was already checked in for observation of her apparent hallucinations.

Afterwards, Dr. al-Mansoor and I sat and drank more coffee-worse coffee, this, from the staff room pot, lightened with artificial creamer and too sweet because that was the only way it was drinkable-out of chipped mugs, and waited while one of the clinic staff got Tara settled in. She was furious that I'd told her she had to stay, and after she had exhausted herself on a temper tantrum and two sulks, I decided it was just as well if I gave her a little time alone to get the leftover wrath out of her system. At least Tara wasn't a kid who held grudges.

"I didn't know about this fainting game thing," Dr. al-Mansoor said, blowing over her coffee.

"It's not new." Pediatric psychiatry isn't my specialty, but you hear things, pick up around the edges in the journals. "Like inhalant abuse. Every generation figures it out, or anyway some of them do. The question is-"

She nodded. "And then there's the whole issue of whether the implant is causing hallucinations."

"Only when she's on the verge of unconsciousness."

"And a hypnagogic state doesn't do it. Sleep's no good. It's got to be hypoxia."

My turn to stare into my coffee. "Apparently. What do you think of the character of the hallucinations?"

"Some alien ent.i.ty trying to communicate with her? It's a common marker for schizophrenia."

"But that's the only symptom she's got. No mood swings, she's obviously rational-"

Dr al-Mansoor smiled. "Odd, isn't it?" And then she c.o.c.ked her head to one side as if she was listening, and held up one finger to silence me. "Oh," she said. "You know, I may have something here."

The plastic chair creaked under me when I resettled my weight. It wasn't late, just after lunch, but it felt like six or seven o'clock at night. I was a little shocked every time I glanced at my watch. Busy day. "Well, don't keep me in suspense."

"The implants use a quantum computer chip."

"Tell me something I didn't know."

"Well, the chips were all manufactured at the same time, right? And the same place. Probably all from one condensate. So what if there's quantum interference? I mean"-she waved her long, elegant hand beside her face, her diamond flas.h.i.+ng-"what if the chips can transmit electrical patterns back and forth between the girls? Feebly. And when their synapses are already misfiring from the hypoxia, those patterns get overlaid, and Tara's subconscious mind translates those signals into symbols, as they would in a dream-"

"The symbol being some kind of alien trying to communicate. Is that possible? The transferal, I mean." What I knew about quantum mechanics could be written on an index card, but it sounded ...

h.e.l.l, it sounded like an excuse not to pull the chip that was Tara's promise of a normal life out of her head. It might be a straw, but it wasn't a bad-looking straw.

She made a face, pulling her jaw back and flattening her lower lip, and then wrinkled her nose. "I guess so?"

"Why is it only Tara?"

"There's something wrong with her chip? Or something right with it. If that is what's going on, it's functional telepathy."

"That would mean there wasn't any problem, really."

"Other than half the clinic strangling themselves for the fun of it, you mean."

"Right." I thumped back in my chair. I'd lurched forward at some point, without realizing it. "That. Tara won't promise. She thinks her alien friend needs help."

"If she promises, can you trust her?"

"Tara? Yes. What about Jodi?"

"I'll ask Mrs. Carter what she thinks. We'll have to address it with all the kids. One of the staff is making calls. Tara seems a special case, though. For her, we could edge the voltage down a little and maybe get rid of the hallucinations, if my guess is right. Which it probably isn't. But that might affect pain management."

"Right," I said. I put my half-empty cup down on the edge of Dr. alMansoor's desk. "I'll go talk to her. If asking nicely doesn't work, there's always extortion."

Mom comes back before dinner, and takes Tara down to the cafeteria to eat. Tara likes the cafeteria. There's always something she doesn't get at home very often. Today it's meatloaf and apple pie, with brown gravy. The meatloaf, not the pie.

Mom's watching her worriedly, and pus.h.i.+ng kidney beans and cottage cheese-and other stuff Tara can't figure out why anybody would eat- around on her salad bar plate. "Dr al-Mansoor thinks the things you're seeing are feedback from the implant," she says, when Tara is halfway done with her meatloaf.

"I think it's from the implant," Tara agrees. She picked out a mockneck s.h.i.+rt to hide the bruise across her throat. Mom frowns at it. "But maybe not feedback. I've been thinking about Albert."

"Albert?"

"The alien." Tara slashes her fork sideways. "I don't think it's just him. I think it's a whole species."

Mom leans forward, arms folded behind her fussed-at plate. "He told you his name?"

"No." Tara drops her fork and jerks her hands back and forth beside her head. "He talks in colors or something. He's Albert because of Albert Einstein." She drinks some milk and picks up the fork again. "But he keeps wanting me to talk in a microphone into a computer. I think he's trying to learn how I talk. Anyway, I think he's in trouble. He needs help."

"What kind of help?" Mom starts chasing the kidney beans around her plate again, pretending like she's only being polite.

"I don't know," Tara says. She stops herself abruptly, chews and swallows the mouthful of mashed potatoes before mom can yell at her. She reaches out and picks a hard, round red grape off her mother's plate, waiting for the nod of permission. It crunches sweetly between her teeth. She takes another one. "I just ... it seems really important."

"How do you know?"

"I just know."

Mom picks up one solitary kidney bean on the end of her fork and stares at it. She slips it into her mouth and chews slowly. "Tara," she says.

"It's more important that you don't risk your life playing the fainting game anymore. If Albert's real, and he's a grown-up scientist, even if he's an alien, he'd agree with me. Don't you think?"

"I'm always careful. That's the problem. I think if I had just a little more time with him, we could talk."