Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 24

"It doesn't matter how careful you are. It's dangerous."

"Mom-"

"Tara." Mom puts her fork down, and uses that voice. "Promise me." Tara finishes her meal in silence, while Mom stares at her and doesn't eat another thing. They're going to make her sleep in the hospital bed tonight, with the lights that don't go off and the shadows behind the oneway mirror all the time.

It's okay. She can sleep anywhere. And she has a plan.

I was supposed to sleep on the couch. Predictably, I spent the entire night in the observation room. Tara seemed to be sleeping, under the pale blue light, her hair fanned out on the pillow and her knees drawn up against her chest as always. I sat and watched her with the observation room lights off, so every time Dr. al-Mansoor or the staffer came in for the check, a wedge of light fell across the floor and dazzled me for a minute.

Each time, they paused in the doorway, glanced through the window for a moment, smiled at me, and withdrew. I think Dr. al-Mansoor was hoping I'd fall asleep on the bench. Not quite.

At two in the morning, Tara began to thrash.

She kicked the covers off and rolled out of bed, rolled under the bed in the s.p.a.ce of time it took me to hit the call b.u.t.ton and dive for the connecting door, shouting her name. I crawled after her, scrabbling on hands and knees. The metal railing caught my shoulders, knocking me off my knees and onto my belly, and I squirmed after her. She jammed herself into the s.p.a.ce by the head of the bed and curled on her side, knees drawn up, hands pressing me back, pressing me away. Battling, until her arms went soft and her feet kicked, or I should say s.h.i.+vered.

I couldn't hear her breathing.

I got my hand around the slender flexible bones of her ankle and pulled. She went limp as I dragged her out, and first I thought she was making herself dead weight, but when I got her into the light I saw how limp she was. I thought it was the light turning her blue, but then the door thumped open and the light came on and I could see it was her skin, as well.

You're supposed to check the airway. Her mouth fell open, slack, and I ran my fingers into it. Her tongue hadn't fallen back, but I thought my fingers brushed something smooth and resilient, hard, at the back of her throat.

"Jillian," Dr. al-Mansoor said, her hand on my shoulder.

"She's choking," I said, and let her pull me out of the way. "I think she palmed a grape at dinner. I didn't think-" Stupid. Stupid. No, I didn't think at all.

Dr. al-Mansoor yanked off her rings. They rattled on the floor, disregarded, gold and diamonds knocked aside as she straddled my daughter's hips, straightened her neck. She placed t he heel of her interlocked hands under Tara's breastbone and I loved her with all my heart.

I remembered Tara crowding away from me under the bed, her eyes wide and wild, her desperation. Tara was the smartest kid I've ever known. She'd had swimming courses, first aid courses. She was ten. Not a baby, just ask her. She knows more about entomology and dinosaurs and stellar astronomy than I ever will.

She'd known I'd come after her. She'd known I could save her. She'd jumped out of the bed so I would see that she was in distress. And she'd crawled away from me, buying time.

They talk about possession. After a crisis, you hear people say they have no idea what they were doing.

I knew exactly what I was doing. I reached down and grabbed Dr. alMansoor's wrists and held on tight. "Jillian, let go," she said. "It's just the Heimlich maneuver."

Her face was inches from mine, her eyes red with sleeplessness rather than asphyxiation. He scarf has fallen back, and her hair was all tangled over her shoulders. It didn't matter. We were all women here.

"Thirty seconds," I said.

She stared at me. She leaned against my hands but I held on to her wrists. Tight.

"Brain damage," she said.

Dreams can happen fast. The length of the REM cycle affects it, of course, but sometimes even when they seem to take hours, days, they're over in seconds. Just the forebrain trying to make symbolic sense of electrical noise kicked up by the random signals firing up the brainstem. "Hadiyah. Thirty seconds. Twenty seconds. Let her talk to Albert."

She licked her lips. And then she jerked her chin sharply, and I saw her mouth move, counting. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen- Albert is waiting. He's in a hurry, too. This time, he grabs Tara's hand in his manipulator without preamble and almost drags her into the tunnel, his many legs rippling indigo-azure-gold as they race underground. But this time its different, dream-different, the microphone gone and a kind of control panel in its place, not made for Tara's hands. She stops, confused, just inside the arched doorway and waits for Albert to show her what to do. And isn't it funny, now that she thinks about it, that the doorway is tall enough for her, when Albert's only two feet high?

He takes the controls in his manipulators. They move over the keypad with arachnid grace. "Tara," the air says.

"Albert?" At her voice, colors ripple across the panels before him. He turns, regarding them with every evidence of thought in the tilt of his expressionless face on the ball-jointed neck. She shouldn't try to guess what he feels. She knows that.

She does it anyway. "You figured out how to talk to me."

"I did," he says. "Come here. Put your hands on the plate. We don't have much time."

"Before my mother stops us?"

He chitters at her, his antennae bristling. "Before the program ends. This is a simulation. I am the last remaining, and we used the last of the power to reach you. We looked and looked, and you were the first we found."

"You're dying?"

"Our sun is dying," he says, and her face crumples painfully. She sniffs back stinging. "Soon, the computers will fail. We've lived in them for a very long time. The rest have gone ahead, to conserve power. I chose to stay and search."

"But you can't-I just got to talk to you-"

"Will you let me give you our history?"

"Of course," she says, reaching out. He stops her, though, as sharply as he urged before, his manipulator indenting the flesh of her hand.

"Wait," he says. "I will put it in your brain. You have to give permission. It could change you."

She stops. His manipulator is cool and hard, the surface sandpapery. "Change?"

"Make you more like us."

She looks at him. His antennae feather down, lying against his dorsal surface like the ears of an anxious dog. He's still. Maybe waiting, she doesn't know. "And if I don't, you die."

"We die," he says. "Either way."

She stares at him. The stinging in her eyes grows worse, a pressure in her sinuses and through her skull. She pulls her hand from his manipulator, reaches out resolutely, and places both palms on warm yellow metal as the first tear burns her cheek.

"Don't mourn." The voice is uninflected, but his palp reaches out softly and strokes her leg. "You will remember us."

We made it to nine. I yanked my hands back, Hadiyah pressed hers down. The first push didn't do it. She realigned, lips moving on what must have been a prayer now, and thrust forward sharply, the weight of her shoulders behind it.

Something glistening shot from Tara's lips and sailed over Hadiyah's shoulder, and Tara took a deep harsh breath and started to cough, her eyes squinched shut, tears running down her cheeks.

"He's gone," she said, when she got her breath.

She rolled over and grabbed my hands, and wailed against my shoulder like a much younger child, and would not be consoled.

There's enough room in Tara's implant for three or four Libraries of Congress. And it seems to be full. It also seems like she's the only one who can make sense of the information, and not all of it, and not all the time.

She's different now. Quieter. Not withdrawn, but ... sad. And she looks at me sometimes with these calm, strange eyes, and I almost feel as if she's the mother.

I should have stopped her sooner. I didn't think.

At least she hasn't tried to strangle herself again.

Hadiyah suggested we not tell anybody what had happened just yet, and I agreed. I won't let my daughter wind up in some government facility, being pumped for clues to alien technology and science.

I won't.

She's ten years old. She's got school to get through. We'll figure the rest of it out in our own time. And maybe she'll be more like herself again as time goes by.

But the first thing she did when she recovered was paint a watercolor. She said it was a poem.

She said it was her name.

L'esprit d'escalier SCENE 1.

Time: 1962 Place: Delancey Street, Lower East Side, New York City They cas.h.i.+ered him when he failed to kill the dragon. He'd expected no less; a warrior of the General's tenure learned that honor and acknowledgement seldom went hand in hand.

He had refused the option of a dignified withdrawal, a quiet resignation. He'd made his enemies earn his absence, forced them to cast the unearned blame: a kangaroo court, a dishonorable discharge, imprisonment. Fire and water didn't mix, and the General understood that. He hadn't broken. He had made his enemies crush his pearl, tear his fins, take him to the wall.

He took a perverse sort of pride in it, as the water in the broken fountain in the atrium of the Delancey Street brownstone where he now resided stirred his ragged fins. The tiles he swam over were cracked, their cobalt-blue glaze split, revealing plain, fired red clay beneath. The lotuses that s.h.i.+mmered under the skylight were browned at the edges. There was no frog in his pond, no splish and no splash, no minnows and no mud and no dragonfly nymphs to make tasty afternoon snacks when the sunlight painted his scored scales mottled red and black and gold, revealing the cicatrix of an old scar on his flank, near the tail half-gnawed away. It all looked flat, plain, through his one remaining eye. Bondage. A cell for a forgotten hero.

It didn't matter. The General knew his honor was intact, even in ignominy. His opinion was the one that mattered.

His, and his G.o.d's.

SCENE 2.

Time: Eternity Place: a fern bar in the Afterlife. There is a pool table, a black pay telephone in a silver carapace, and a painting of dogs playing poker on the wall. A stair with a bra.s.s banister dominates stage right, ascending to mezzanine level with a door at the top through which all entrances and exits will occur.

The lights fade up on Ginsberg, Marlowe, Eliot, Shakespeare, Keats, and Sh.e.l.ley clumped chattering around the bra.s.s-railed, dark-wood bar. A ponytailed blond bartender in a black turtleneck polishes cobalt-blue gla.s.ses with a stained cotton cloth.

The pay telephone rings shrilly, and continues to ring. No one answers.

Marlowe (to Ginsberg): Forsooth, thou'rt an ugly man, Allen- Ginsberg: I'm an angry man. (Beat, as he winces in pain.) You ought to know the symptoms. (They exchange a long look, wrathful or smoldering. Marlowe turns away first, and steals Shakespeare's beer. Shakespeare, deep in conversation, does not appear to notice.) Eliot (at large): I don't belong here. I don't belong here- Keats (coughing into a handkerchief spotted with strawberries, or perhaps blood): Oh, stop it, Tom. You don't belong anywhere, to listen to you. England, America, it doesn't matter. You might as well be adrift on a raft in the middle of the ocean, one wave away from drowning, the way you carry on.

Sh.e.l.ley: Can we not talk of drowning, lack?

Keats: Sorry. I didn't think. (He coughs.) Ruddy cough. Doesn't it know I'm dead? I know I'm dead. You'd think a cough could follow the clues as well. Kit's not got a bleeding, sodding hole in his skull and Will's not rotten with the French pox. Why am I bound to this d.a.m.ned cough?

Marlowe: It's all about priorities.

Ginsberg: We ought to have a poetry reading.

Shakespeare (doubtful): Poetry?

Keats: Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Ginsberg: And that's why you can't stop coughing, Jack. You write lousy poetry.

Keats: As I know you to be in pain with your cancer, Allen, I'll forgive the insult.

The door opens. A wild-haired man in denim picks his way down the stairs, clinging to the bra.s.s railing as if he might blow-or stagger-away, otherwise. It is the poet Richard Brautigan, bleeding from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Shakespeare folds into himself at this new arrival. His shoulders slump. He glances down at his hands, and turns hack to the bar. Marlowe nudges him good-naturedly with a shoulder, and Shakespeare returns a glare.

Shakespeare: He's not one of us, Kit.

Marlowe: (Draping his arm congenially around Shakespeare's shoulders; Shakespeare doesn't seem to mind. Brautigan reacts with dismay.) Pshaw. The lad wors.h.i.+ps thee, Will. Least thou can'st do is tend thy hand in welcome. Beside that, he's but newly dead, and miserable.

Shakespeare: The lad has some years on you, Kit. And Allen's more newly dead than he- Marlowe: Living, perchance some years. But I am senior here. Even to you, sweet William, though only John's my junior. And Allen didn't die by his own hand- Ginsberg (overhearing): Shocking everyone, I'm sure. Which reminds me, has anyone seen Oscar lately? Or Byron?

Sh.e.l.ley: George doesn't get enough adulation here to suit him.

Marlowe:-go. Talk to the lad.

Shakespeare looks up and back down quickly, but apparently he's accidentally caught Brautigan's eye. Shakespeare heaves a sigh as Brautigan smiles broadly and staggers forward, while his quarry pretends to be engrossed in a conversation with Marlowe.

Marlowe: Ah, Will. You only look at me when you wish to evade another.

Shakespeare: You're not going to treat me as your muse, now, are you, Kit?

Brautigan (insinuating himself between Marlowe and Shakespeare, his shoulder to the former as Marlowe gives Shakespeare an utterly deadpan look): Will? What are you drinking? (He raises a hand to the bartender, while Shakespeare and Marlowe exchange a glance behind his shoulders.) Terry, get my friend here another. And one for me as well, please. Have you written anything new, Will? A sonnet?

Shakespeare: No, d.i.c.kon. I've told thee before; I write not, now that I am dead.

Ginsberg: I don't see why being dead should stop you. Nothing else apparently did.

Brautigan: A little respect, Allen.

Ginsberg (pressing a fist into his side and wincing): Why start now? s.h.i.+t, Terry, don't you have any morphine in this place?

Bartender: If this were the old days, I'd tell you to check behind the bricks.

Somebody would have left some heroin lying around.

SCENE 3.

Time: the Millennium Place: Delancey Street, Lower East Side, New York City Terry Mas.h.i.+ter's alarm goes off at 11:43 a.m., but the clock is fast, so it looks like noon. He gropes for the snooze b.u.t.ton halfheartedly and slaps it twice to make it work, then settles back into the nicotine-scented embrace of his comforter, dragging his pillow over his head. It is a cold, icy Thursday in March.

It is time to go to work.

The snooze delay expires; the alarm clock sounds again. Terry slaps it off, but this time he doesn't snake his hand back into the warmth of his swaybacked pressboard bed. Instead, he flips up the lid of a plywood cigar box with a pen-and-ink drawing of a girl in a feathered Robin Hood cap and the words A5 You Like It on the lid, and strokes his talismans. The b.u.t.t of an unfiltered Camel cigarette, a magic bean, a page torn from an issue of Vogue. A subway token, a silver 1962 quarter that rings when you drop it, a Moleskine notebook, illegible from having been dropped in a mud puddle or something worse. Other things, more or less at random.

He pulls out the magazine page, pressed flat, the text and images slightly blurred between two scratched layers of gla.s.s, and the fibers of the torn edge visible, preserved forever in their anaerobic prison. Staring at an exaggerated sketch of a redheaded girl in a black beret, he slides his other hand inside his sweatpants and idly begins to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e.

He's not thinking about the girl in the picture. He's thinking about the girl who drew it.

It's laundry day.

That nuisance accomplished, he returns the pressed page to the cigar box, climbs out of the sag in the middle of the mattress, sheds his sticky sweatpants into a pile on the floor, and staggers toward the shower, scratching his belly. Later, clean, he slicks his thinning, greying blond hair back into a ponytail and fixes it with an orange-wrapped elastic, then skins on jeans, Chucks, and a green T-s.h.i.+rt that reads Sunflower in flaked white print across the chest.

He sits down for two hours before work to write on a five-year-old, off-brand personal computer. Five pages of playscript is a better than average day. He reads it over, and thinks it's pretty G.o.dd.a.m.ned funny. n.o.body else does, but such is life.