Anna To The Infinite Power (7 page)

“Sure, Dad,” Rowan said, but his heart wasn’t in the words. One of the things he’d looked forward to, should he win the Bellamy Scholarship, was that an ocean would separate him from Anna. If anyone should feel guilty it was he. He had to admire the way his father could explode, then quickly put aside his anger and forgive and forget. Rowan wished he had the same capacity. If he felt a grudge about anything he hung on to it for so long it ate away his insides.

He felt guilty, too, that he hadn’t mentioned the scholarship before this, but he was afraid his father would be hurt when he found out Rowan wanted to guide his own career. I should tell him now, Rowan thought, but he’s got enough on his mind with Anna.

“Well, I guess I got that out of my system. Anyhow, I feel better. Are you about ready to go home?” his father asked.

Rowan quickly wiped rosin off the stick of his bow, placed the bow in the violin case, and closed it. “Ready.”

“Let’s go, then. Let’s find out if your mother’s started dividing up the community property yet.”

Inside Michaela’s apartment, Anna sneezed. She glanced around suspiciously. “Do you have a cat or a dog? If you do, I’ll have to leave right now. I’m allergic. And phobic.” She would have complained about perfume as well, except that Michaela was wearing none today.

“No, I don’t have animals,” Michaela said. “I was just dusting a collection of mine. Maybe that made you sneeze.” She wore a black leotard over which she’d fastened a skirt. Jet earrings dangled from her ears.

“Are you a dancer, too?” Anna asked.

“Dancer?” She glanced down at her outfit. “Oh, the leotard, you mean. Oh, no. I just find it comfortable for meditation.”

Meditation? Was that some sort of new fad? Anna didn’t know anyone who meditated. What would the woman meditate about anyhow? Nothing good, Anna was sure.

“Come along,” Michaela said, leading the way to a sparsely furnished living room with a spinet tucked away in a corner. “It’s not exactly a grand, but it has good tone.” She motioned to the bench. “Sit down, Anna.”

Anna put her carryall on the floor and took a seat at the piano. “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to pretend I am not in the room. Play anything you like.” She sat down on the couch. “I’ll just listen. After I’ve heard you, I shall be able to tell in what areas you need work.”

Anna was not at all interested in playing anything. She thought for a moment, then decided on the easiest thing she could think of, Beethoven’s Für Elise. Although she had several pieces of sheet music in her carryall, including the one she’d chosen to play, she needed none of them. Once she’d learned a piece, she could see the notes as clearly in her head as if she were staring at the page. As far as she was concerned there was nothing wrong with her playing. She learned quickly, made few errors, and held to the rhythm called for. What more could anyone ask? “Don’t you have a metronome?”

“No, I don’t.”

That upset Anna. She was used to a metronome, liked a metronome. The tic, tic, tic, tic seemed to frame a little unit of time which she could precisely fill with just so many notes, all very neat. Oh, she would be lost without a metronome.

Michaela said, “You mustn’t worry about anything like that. Just go on and do the best you can. I shall be able to tell what you need.”

Anna felt very cross. She was certainly not going to perform well without a metronome. As her hands touched the keys, picking out notes, her tongue began to cluck out tics against the roof of her mouth, on and on relentlessly, a full accompaniment to the music. When she finished, she said, “Well, how did I play?”

Michaela grinned. “I don’t think you would have played a bit better with a metronome.”

“Thank you,” Anna said. “Shall I play anything else?”

“No, that won’t be necessary. That’s enough for today. I think I see exactly what’s needed. I’ll work up something for next week and we’ll really begin then.”

“But I’m supposed to have an hour.” Anna was disappointed. She had planned to concoct some excuse to give her a chance to find the INAFT machine. Now there would be no time.

Michaela said, “On the first day I always like to get acquainted with my pupils. Do you think you can amuse yourself while I see if I can find us a snack? You might enjoy looking at my collection of boxes.” She pointed toward a decorative screen that appeared to cut off a view of a dining room. “I’ve just put them all back in the cabinet near the dining table.”

This was the opportunity Anna had been waiting for. “May I use your bathroom first?”

Michaela nodded toward the hall. “First door to your left.”

Anna hurried out, paused before the bathroom door, and listened. When she heard the clink of china, she felt satisfied that Michaela was indeed in the kitchen, so she went on to hunt for the communications room. Because there were only two other doors, one belonging to a bedroom, she found what she was looking for quickly. Inside the room she directed the INAFT machine to give her the information she wanted, then pushed the hard copy button. Hurry, hurry, she silently pleaded. What if Michaela should catch her? Then with second thoughts, chided herself for her nervousness. What difference would it make if Michaela did catch her? There was no law that said you couldn’t use someone else’s machine.

She needn’t have concerned herself. In seconds, printed sheets spilled out of the machine just as she had suspected they would. But there was no time to read them. She snatched them up, hurried back to the living room, and quickly dropped the papers into the carryall she’d left on the floor. She couldn’t bring herself to leave the bag unattended now, so she took it with her to the dining area, where she planned to pretend she was absorbed in Michaela’s collection.

When she had made her way around the screen, just as Michaela had said, she found a display cabinet filled with numerous small boxes. In spite of all she had on her mind she was instantly drawn to them. Each, she discovered, was different. Some were decorated with glittering gems, some with colored glass, some with seed pearls. Others were fashioned of highly polished woods, many parqueted. There were mosaics, hand-painted scenics, all sorts of metals, more kinds of boxes and decorations than Anna could take in at a glance.

She moved closer to the cabinet, experiencing the same feeling that came over her whenever she saw something she wanted.

Michaela was still making noises in the kitchen. If I asked her for a box, Anna thought, she’d never give it to me. Collectors seldom parted with anything they’d saved.

Anna tried the glass door. Locked. She might have known. As she turned away from the cabinet, she noticed a lone box sitting on the table next to a dust cloth. Michaela must have overlooked it when she returned the others to the case. Anna picked up the box and studied it, admiring the iridescent mother-of-pearl that decorated the top and sides. Chances were that Michaela would never even miss it. Anna thrust it into her carryall, then hurriedly tiptoed back to the living room to sit on the couch.

Soon Michaela came in with a tray. She set it on the table in front of the couch, then sat down beside Anna. “Did you see my collection?”

Anna stared her straight in the eye. “I’m really not very interested in boxes.”

Apparently Michaela was unconcerned, because she shrugged and immediately changed the subject. “I’ve fixed us some toast.” She pointed to a tiny china bowl. “I hope you like marmalade. This is homemade -- a very special present from one of the teachers at the conservatory.”

Anna glanced sharply at the woman. Graham Hart had made a batch only a few months before because they’d had an extra allotment of sugar. Anna would have bet anything that the marmalade had come from him.

Michaela handed Anna a plate with toast on it. “How about some tea?”

“I don’t like tea.”

“Oh, dear, there isn’t another thing in the house.”

“I don’t need anything.” Anna glanced doubtfully at the toast. The bread looked better than any the stores were selling since the wheat crops had grown smaller, but she didn’t trust this woman. The stuff could be poisoned.

Michaela said, “Tell me, Anna, do you enjoy music?”

The question surprised Anna. She had never given it any thought. With two musicians in the family she’d been exposed to music always, supposed everyone was. It was just something you learned to live with, put up with. She found herself saying, “I guess I don’t think of it one way or the other.”

“What do you think of one way or the other?”

All Anna wanted was to get out of the place, but she made herself answer patiently. “I like math better than anything.”

Michaela nodded as if she had anticipated that answer. “That reminds me of something Debussy says. He says that music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.”

What’s that got to do with anything? Anna thought. She said, “That’s very interesting.”

“Yes, I thought so.”

Anna stared down at her toast. It had to be safe to eat. After all, poison would be too easy to detect and trace. And she was most curious about that marmalade. She reached for the spreader on the tray and helped herself from the china bowl. When she had a good sampling on her bread, she took a bite. Ah, ha! Lemon. The kind Graham Hart had made. Now she knew she was right.

As she mulled over that annoying idea, she was aware that Michaela was pleasantly chatting away. Anna began to notice that as the woman’s head moved, her shiny jet earrings swung and bobbed and almost seemed to flash with hidden light. Although Anna wasn’t taking in a word Michaela said, she found her eyes glued to the dancing earrings. How they glittered. For a moment they seemed like prisms, throwing dappled light all over the room, bouncing, whirling around her, making her dizzy. Then a stab of pain hit her between the eyes and traveled on into her brain, while outside her head thousands of tons of something unyielding was trying to crush her skull.

Anna thrust her plate of unfinished toast onto the table, grabbed her carryall, and shot to her feet. “I’ve got to go. I’m getting a terrible headache.”

Without waiting for leave, Anna dashed out the door. As she ran across the park toward her own apartment, she was certain Michaela’s green eyes were following her.

Anna, grateful that no one else was home yet, hurried to her bedroom, tossed her carryall on the bed, then flopped down and stretched out beside it. Her head pounded so badly she could think of nothing else. She even lacked the strength to get up and take the medication that sometimes relieved her. Instead, she placed her hands, which were very cold, on her brow. That seemed to help. She closed her eyes. After a time, the pounding let up slightly. She thought again about getting up for her medication, but continued to lie there until she eventually drifted into sleep.

When she awoke, she was surprised to find she had slept for several hours. Although she’d had no real lunch she wasn’t hungry. Her head felt much better, though, with only a dull ache left at the back of her neck. She rolled over and bumped something solid. Her carryall. She grabbed it eagerly and fished through to take out her prizes -- the papers that would tell who Anna Zimmerman was, as well as the pretty little box.

The box she placed beside her for later examination. She dug out her bed pillow from beneath the spread and propped it behind her. Although it was only mid-afternoon, the sky had darkened, looking as if rain threatened. Anna had to turn on her bedside lamp to see. Then she settled back to read about Anna Zimmerman.

When she had finally finished, she felt almost as frustrated as before. If the woman had only found the secret for creating the replicator she was working on, there would have been volumes of biographical material about her. As it was, most of the articles concerned her work. Only one had any information on her life, an obituary from a science journal.

Anna Zimmerman was forty-six years old when she died. She had been born during the Second World War in Berlin of a Jewish mother and an Aryan father. Both her parents had died in the gas chambers of a concentration camp. Anna Zimmerman had somehow escaped their fate and had been raised by a friend of her mother’s. As a young woman her brilliant mind had won her scholarships to the University of Berlin and later, in this country, to the University of California at Berkeley, where she took her doctorate. After, she worked for government research and development laboratories. She had never married and had left no survivors.

Perhaps that was another reason for choosing to clone her, Anna thought. She had no relatives to object. But it certainly doesn’t help me. Now there never would be anyone with whom she could feel she belonged, no one to ask, “Did Anna Zimmerman have bad headaches like mine?” She thought of all the other Anna Zimmermans. They had to be relatives of some sort. Maybe she belonged with them. Then she remembered how she had felt, looking at her doppleganger, and how the girl had reacted to her. No, they would never be comfortable together. Then why did she always feel that she was looking for some missing part of herself? Lately, with her new knowledge, the feeling had grown even stronger.

Anna got up and went to the window. A dense fog had settled over the park. She could not see Michaela’s apartment or anything else now. She might have been staring at a gray wall. Although her window was closed, she imagined she could feel the chill steal inside. She shivered. Suddenly, for no real reason, she was frightened. She could see nothing, and yet she felt there was something out there in the fog, in the mist, waiting for her, threatening her. That made no sense at all, yet she was certain it was true.

Was it creeping into the room now, touching her skin with icy fingers? She shrank away, eyes still fastened on the gray beyond the window. At the same time, she could hear music. She listened hard. Nothing. Then again she heard it, heard it inside her head, the same tune that had come from Michaela’s apartment that night. But that couldn’t be. How could she possibly remember it? Yet, remember it she did, and it was throbbing through her skull now worse than any headache. She had to escape from that sound, get out of that room.