A Long, Long Sleep (16 page)

Åsa opened the door to my room, with a basket of clean laundry under her arm. “Oh, so sorry, miss,” she said with a little bob. “Thought you were out with your young man.”

Xavier! He didn’t know I was going into stass tonight! I flew to the nearest sketchbook and scribbled out a letter as fast as I could. “Åsa, I need you to do something for me!” I said.

“What?”

“I need you to give this message to Xavier tomorrow. Can you do that?”

“Of course, miss. But can’t you give it yourself ?”

“No, I’m going into stasis tonight.”

“Stasis? Whatever for?”

“Mom and Daddy are going away on business,” I said. “Please, just give this to Xavier?”

Åsa blinked at me a few times, and then nodded. I signed the letter, Love always, Rose, and tore it from the sketchbook. I pressed the folded sheet of paper into her hand.

“Why stasis?” Åsa asked. She was new to the dynamics of our household.

I sighed, disgruntled. “It’s hard to explain.”

Åsa’s face turned hard on me suddenly. “Ja, flicka,” she said. “I’ll do what you ask.”

After our farewell dinner, Daddy gave me a hug before Mom led me into my big closet, where we kept my stass tube. She helped me inside and kissed me. “You make me very proud. You know that, honey? You always make the right decisions in the end.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too. See you in a few months.”

“Have a nice trip.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

The music started, and I could smell the sweet perfume of the stass chemicals as the hatch slowly closed over me. Mom was right. This was the right decision.

I tried not to think of Xavier.

...

I kept my eyes closed, at first, and tried to hold on to my stass dream, which involved sailing on the surface of glowing molten lava. The lava should have been hot, but was as comfortable as a relaxing bath. Someone held my hand quietly, and I was surprised. Mom usually kept shaking me until I gave up on my stass and my dream. The quiet presence woke me more quickly than Mom’s prodding ever had. To my surprise, when I opened my eyes, the face smiling down on me was not Mom’s. “Xavier?”

He grinned as wide as a church door.

“How did you get in here?”

He jerked his head behind him, and I saw Åsa standing by the door. “Morning, miss.”

“What’s going on?” I asked, and the answer made me feel both elated and guilty.

Åsa had delivered my message to Xavier and asked him why I was going into stass. Xavier told her the truth, that they put me in regularly. When he’d admitted that he’d known me since I was seven, Åsa said nothing. But the morning after my parents’ departure, she’d knocked boldly on Xavier’s door and asked him if he knew how stass tubes worked. Xavier was a rather accomplished hacker, and within a few hours, he’d figured out a way to change the chronometer on my stass tube so it would read that I was still inside.

Åsa had decided she could take care of me while my par-ents were away. I could keep going to school, keep living my life, and keep Xavier. It wasn’t as if my parents looked at my academic achievements, and schools don’t complain when the children show up — only when they don’t. Mom and Daddy would never know. The day before they were to come home, I’d pop back into stass, and because of Xavier’s hacks on the tube, they’d be none the wiser. When I asked Åsa why she was doing this, she said only that it wasn’t her place to argue with my parents, but that she had been told to manage the household as she best saw fit while they were gone.

I felt guilty deceiving my parents like this. If it hadn’t been for Xavier, I’d have told them to put me back in and I’d dutifully wait for Mom and Daddy to return. But there was Xavier, and I wouldn’t give up this chance.

And so began the best year of my life. My parents did, in fact, come back two months later. I slipped happily back into stasis, and within eighteen hours they let me out for my champagne breakfast.

A month and a half later, when my parents were leaving again, I went into stass without a complaint. And when they came back after two weeks, they had no idea I had spent that time living my life. This happened again and again, all through that year. I would have missed my sixteenth birthday but for Åsa and Xavier. They held a private party for me, and Åsa sang me a birthday song in Swedish. For the first time, I watched the seasons change from summer to autumn to winter, and back to spring.

On the first clear, warm night that spring, Xavier and I sat out in the garden, wrapped in a blanket, watching the moon as it rose over the courtyard.

“I truly love this,” I whispered.

“I truly love you,” Xavier whispered in my ear, causing shivers to run down my spine. “I’m so glad I don’t have to lose you again,” he said, with a kiss on my temple. “And again, and again.” Each time he kissed me someplace else. “Every time, it’s like you’ve died.”

I looked up at his face, pale in the moonlight. “Does it really feel that way to you?”

“I grieve every time,” he said. “I’m always afraid I’ll never see you again.”

I shuddered, a memory of the dying winter around us. But Xavier’s arms kept me warm. “That won’t ever happen,” I reassured him.

“How can you know?” Xavier asked. “You’d have missed seven out of the last ten months if it weren’t for Åsa. You’d still be fifteen.”

“And you’d have left me behind again,” I whispered.

“You’re the one who keeps leaving me.”

“And until now I’ve been . . . waiting for you. But now you’ve gone so far. I’m starting to fall behind.”

Xavier touched my hair and stared into my eyes. “Do you think we should tell anybody?”

“Tell anybody what?”

“How much you get left in stasis. It can’t be good for you.”

“I’m too high- strung. I need to mellow out sometimes.”

Xavier scoffed. “I think your parents would be stassing any child they had, whether it was high- strung or not. I’ve never seen you be anything but sweet and compliant.” He kissed me along my forehead. “You’re almost inhuman, you’re so angelic.”

“That’s only because I know I can get away from it all if I need to,” I said.

“I’m inclined to believe it a fortunate accident of character,” Xavier said. Then he sighed. “Or maybe not so fortunate. Maybe if you weren’t so biddable, you wouldn’t let them keep you a child.”

I pulled away. “Don’t put it like that!” I said. “Besides, if I hadn’t been in stasis, you and I would never have gotten together.”

He smiled, running his fingers along my eyebrows. “Seven years isn’t an impossible age difference,” he said.

I didn’t say anything, but I started doing calculations in my head. According to my birth certificate, I should have been thirty- eight. I must have lost more years than I’d been aware of when I was very young. Mom and Daddy didn’t look so old to me, but then again, they did a lot of interplanetary travel. They spent lots of time in stasis, too. I looked at Xavier. If I’d never been put into stasis, I’d have been twenty- two when he was born. I could be his mother.

The thought made me uncomfortable. I snuggled in closer to him. “I love you,” I whispered.

“I love you, too, Rose,” he said. “Always.”

Always. I wondered if his spirit still watched me, from wherever dead spirits go.

Did he still love me now?

I drew the finishing touches on my newest Xavier sketch. It was a morbid, probably borderline obsessive way to spend my time, but it took my mind off Bren and Guillory and being hunted by an assassin. Xavier was still my touchstone, if only in my mind.

I never did ask where we were going, but by midafternoon Guillory’s hover yacht was skimming south over the ocean. The yacht had everything. Like a magician, he conjured a caviar luncheon shortly after midday. He even offered me a shower in the tiny yet elegant bathroom, which I declined. Instead I concentrated on my portraits of Xavier. I’d decided to fill this sketchbook with a progression of him from a small baby on up. I had just finished a portrait of Xavier at twelve when Guillory perked up, looking out the window.

He had spent most of the trip talking on his cell or work-ing with his notescreen. Now, as the setting sun began to turn the sky to gold, he said good- bye to his secretary, turned off his cell, and pointed out the window.

“Here we are,” he said.

I had half expected that he would take me to a private island. I wouldn’t have put such an extravagance past him. But it was an inhabited shore we were rapidly approaching.

“Where are we going?”

“I have an incognito suite at the hotel here,” Guillory said. “Useful when I want to escape for a few days. Most people know me as Mr. Jance here, so please call me Reggie, not Guillory.”

The hover yacht pulled into a hover bay at the coastline, rather than in a parking garage. Around the edge of the beach, a wide industrial magnetic strip bordered the entire island. No skimmers were allowed. That struck me as strange. Not to mention expensive. The magnetic strips weren’t exactly cheap.

“Where are we?”

“Nirvana,” Guillory said.

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, sorry, you wouldn’t know.” Guillory laughed his annoying comradely laugh. “UniCorp created a series of man-made islands just north . . . oh, I forget. Doesn’t matter, really. Truly beautiful, this place. They moved sand from the bottom of the ocean, built this little archipelago. When you look at it from above, the islands form the shape of the UniCorp logo. This one is Nirvana; it forms the head and horn of the unicorn. There’s a great beach just under the throat. Only the most elite can afford suites here.”

I was a little confused. “ Man- made islands?” It wasn’t an unheard of prospect, but all the previous attempts at the dawn of the second millennium had eventually failed quite abysmally, creating stagnant dead spots in the ocean and resulting in barren, poisonous sandspits, not luxury resorts. “What’s wrong with resorts on a natural island?”

“This place is assured to be secure. We’re in the safest part of the ocean —

virtually no risk of hurricanes or earthquakes. And there are no natives, so we didn’t steal the land from anyone.”

He said that as if it were a virtue, and maybe it was. But if I understood it correctly, the population of the world was substantially reduced already. To dump a vast amount of the planet’s financial resources into resorts on a man-made sandspit in the middle of the ocean —rather than bolster the economy of some tropical island, or, better yet, do without the wasteful resort at all —

struck me as a rather selfish way of looking at the planet. The history class I was taking with Bren had an entire unit on economics of the Reconstruction, and this flew in the face of all of it. Not to mention the devastation such a project would have caused to the seabed. Did they even know how many plants and animals had been thoughtlessly dispatched just to move the sand?

Because UniCorp had vast amounts of money, did ocean ecology suddenly not matter any longer?

But what did I know?

I was struck again by how powerful UniCorp was. It owned people and colonies, and even the earth itself had to shape itself to its whim. What else was UniCorp trying to shape? I thought of Otto and shuddered.

Porters appeared out of nowhere and collected my bag. I took a deep breath and followed them into the resort.

Mr. Guillory signed us in, and we both had retinal scans recorded before the doors would even open. Mr. Guillory’s name showed up as Mr. Jance when his retina was scanned, and at my scan, he entered my name as Rose Sayer. I hoped that would be enough to keep the assassin from guessing my whereabouts.

The constant scan on the net tickled. It wasn’t the name that caught him this time; it was the actual retinal scan, which flared in bright colors across his plasticized processors. The name attached to it was inaccurate, but his programming was flexible enough to believe in human error.

TARGET IDENTIFIED: RETINAL MATCH CONFIRMED, ROSALINDA SAMANTHA FITZROY.

LOCATION KNOWN: NIRVANA.

DIRECTIVE: RETURN TARGET TO PRINCIPAL.

He looked up the location of the Unicorn Islands and assessed ways to get there. It would not be easy. He eventually determined he would have to commandeer one of the new hover vehicles whose specs were all over the net.

While one section of his processors was calculating that, another was going through the now familiar routine of searching the net for the principal.

SCANNING . . . SCANNING . . . SCANNING . . . SCANNING . . .

PRINCIPAL UNAVAILABLE.

SECONDARY DIRECTIVE REINSTATED: TERMINATE TARGET.

INITIATE.

His processors predicted it would take him approximately ten hours to make it to the Unicorn Islands if he was able to procure a hover vehicle quickly. He was in luck. One hit him as he stepped onto the street.

He was knocked over by the skimmer’s superior weight, but the driver slammed on the controls and it slowed and veered, bouncing back and forth across the road like a tennis ball. He predicted the inertia of the machine and stood back up, grabbing the skimmer to keep it steady. The momentum spun it in a circle, and then it stood still. Twenty more vehicles milled about behind the one he had stopped.