Are You There and Other Stories (36 page)

Joe thrashed awake, chest heaving, sweat turning cold on his skin. Faye sat in the chair by the window, smoking.

“Pretty bad?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Talk to me. It’s worse if you don’t talk. You might end up like Barney. Anthea listens but she’s not one of us.”

Joe looked up. “Who’s Barney Huff, besides the ‘Market Maniac’?”

“The first of us. He got crazy. That’s why Statama came for you and me. We were supposed to be forgotten.”

“I don’t get it.”

All Joe knew was that after years as a ward of the state a guy named David Statama showed up with papers and a ride to Fairhaven, where they administered drugs and zapped Joe’s head to make the bad dreams go away—which was good. It had been that way for the last year.

Faye regarded him appraisingly then shook her head. “Never mind, you don’t really want to know. Tell me more about your dream.”

He told her about the dream. Faye nodded, eyes darting. She kept hitching her shoulder. Tics.

“Mine was in that portal chamber, too,” she said, looking away distractedly. “Finally she stepped into the wrong one. Now she can’t die, and everything I get out of her is a nightmare cutup. Nothing’s right. Even the
shapes
are wrong, like they have an extra dimension. You’re always reading. You ever read H. P. Lovecraft? Never mind.”

“They’re just bad dreams,” Joe said. He was thinking he should have stayed at Fairhaven. He had always felt different, out of alignment with the world, with people. Then the dreams started last year, like the overlaying of an accelerated and abnormal consciousness.

Faye snorted. “You don’t know anything. And by the way, your green door? Forget about it.”

“Why? Maybe I lived there when I was real little and don’t remember.”

“You didn’t. You don’t come from anywhere like that. It’s nothing but a gene memory. Statama told me things. I begged him to tell me. Why do you think I left that lunatic asylum?”

The hectic light in her eyes was also in her speech, agitated, jumping around. Joe stood up. He was trembling. Faye dropped her cigarette into the dregs of her coffee and went to him, tried to hug him. But she was right: he didn’t really want to know things. He turned away.

“I have to shower,” he said.

“Joe—”

“I have to
shower
.”

He walked stiffly to the bathroom, shut the door and locked it. In the mirror he searched his eyes.

*

Statama had been tinkering with telomeres, attempting to imbue them with extended longevity, allowing chromosomes to reproduce infinitely instead succumbing to so-called “programmed cell death.” He discovered it was easier to accelerate the telomere’s degradation in a controlled fashion that wouldn’t produce progeric freaks. Interesting but of little practical application; no one wanted to grow old faster. When the problem of the Cygnus portal arose Statama thought he saw a way of using his discovery. Perhaps it would be possible to accelerate the total growth of a human being, from the cellular level up. Telescope a fully developed life cycle into, say, a one-year period? Statama was confident it could be done. But he knew he’d have to first create a “pure” clone, a generic template strained as close as possible to
sui generis
from which to harvest the next generation’s cells.

*

“Go ahead,” Anthea said. She handed him the scrawl rig, which consisted of a short, finely tapered wand and a flexible coil attached to the xplasma source, kind of a big kidney bean strapped around his waist under his loose coat. Originally intended for architectural design application and almost immediately co-opted by graffiti hounds, later morphed to Scrawlers. The wand felt good in Joe’s hand. The way it used to. Before Mr. Statama collected him from the orphanage Joe had been in the habit of sneaking out to hang with a loose affiliation of Scrawlers. Joe had never slept well, he had trouble concentrating, except on his sketchpads and books. Crazy Joey, everybody called him. Made more crazy by Father Orpin. That phrase:
We’re all the family you have, Joey
. White hair on the barrel chest, and the way he held Joe down.

Joe always had talent (his compulsive hand scribbling rudimentary tags, faces, impressionistic line art, filling cheap notebooks for the orphanage staff to shake their heads over). But it was the Scrawl jolt that electrified him and got him to
move
. He was eighteen. By now he would have been on his own, if Statama hadn’t put him in Fairhaven.

He and Anthea were in an alley half a dozen blocks from the apartment. It was 2 a.m. Joe thumbed the wand’s actuator, bonding to the edge of a trash converter. He eased up on the actuator and drew out a clear filament, almost invisible, then quickly slashed a bold design in 3-D neon xplasma green, hanging it out there, a weird mutated kanji entangling a jagged face, very deftly rendered in airy xplaz crystal. His old tag, reflecting in the black mirror puddles dropped in the buckled alley.

“Nice,” Anthea said.

Joe bounced on his toes, getting into it. He bonded to another spot on the converter, drew out a line, then depressed the actuator to thicken the stream, rotating the color selector with his middle finger, quick slashing an arrangement of V’s, adding a slouch hat, stubby line of a cigarette, squiggle of smoke. Four color Scrawl sketch. He’d done hundreds before Statama locked him up and even then had conducted Scrawl orgies in his mind whenever he could think straight.

Anthea laughed.

“Sam Spade,” Joe said.

“I know. All those V’s. You’re good.”

“Not that good,” Joe said, but he was grinning.

“Do another one.”

He thought a minute then bonded a third time to the trash converter (really fucking it up, just what normal people hated and Scrawlers loved; the xplaz was light as eggshells but the polymers made it sticky, hell to clean up, much worse than paint on brick) and quick-scrawled a face with zigzag, corkscrew hair.

“Hey!” Anthea said.

A searchlight speared into the alley. An amplified voice ordered them to freeze.

They didn’t. They took off fast, came out the back end of the alley and split in opposite directions, no discussion necessary, Joe reacting to blood memory, those orphan years.

They met back at the apartment, stealthy up the stairs. Faye slept twisted in the bed sheets, groaning. At her bedroom door Anthea turned her ghost eyes on Joe, waiting. She said, “My rig.”

He followed her into the bedroom. She stopped short and turned and opened his long coat, hunkered to unstrap the xplaz kidney, looking up at him, waiting again, letting the rig slip to the floor. Then she started on the belt buckle. He didn’t move.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Faye. I’m—I mean I said I wouldn’t without her.”

“What do
you
want?”

He touched her face, wanting but not knowing, and she moved her head like a cat so his fingers pushed the stretchy beret thing off, releasing that abundant hair. Then she tugged at his belt and opened his pants. He watched her, touching her crinkly yellow hair. After a few minutes she stopped what she was doing and looked up at him. He kept touching her hair but he was afraid. His aloneness had taught him to always keep something back; Father Orpin had taught him passivity and the unconscious trick of numbness; Faye had taught him to take direction. What would Anthea teach him? She seemed to be deciding. Then she stood up and undressed him completely, tenderly, pulling his shirt off over his head and tossing it. She took him to bed, and he felt the pressure to
be
something for her ease off.

“I had this friend,” she said, her head resting on his chest. Joe could feel her jaw move when she spoke. “He couldn’t come. At first I’m thinking Jesus he can go forever. Then I get worried, like he’s not coming because he’s not turned on enough. So there’s something the matter with
me?
Dumb stuff. But that wasn’t it. After a couple of nights he tells me his mom died right in front of him in a pulser wreck. She was in the front seat and he was in the back, and she just bled out. Now every time he’s with a girl it’s like he freezes, goes all remote, like being afraid of giving himself up, so it never happens. He just wants to cuddle, which is okay. I guess he really loved his mom. He never lets go.”

Joe listened but didn’t say anything.

“He was a real nice boy,” Anthea said. “We were best friends. But he didn’t want to be around me anymore after that time he told me. Like before, we were pretending there was no problem. When the pretending stopped he had to get away.”

“Nothing like that happened to me,” Joe said. “I don’t even remember my mother.”

“I was just telling you about my friend,” Anthea said. “He was a kid is all.”

Joe caressed Anthea’s bare back until she fell asleep.

*

He woke out of the old-man nightmare because Faye was kicking him. It was morning and Anthea was gone. Joe drew his arms and legs in, blocking Faye’s blows (foot shod in a suede ankle boot, sharp-toed).

“Hey—”

She was grunting, head down, her blue hair hanging lank in front of her face. She landed a solid strike on his elbow, that nerve. Joe yelped and rolled away off the mattress. The kicking stopped.

After a moment, grudgingly, Faye said, “Are you really hurt?”

The nerve was like a hot, buzzing wire, numbing his arm. “It’s just my crazy bone.”

“Your—oh.”

He got on his feet, back to her, and awkwardly pulled his shorts on one-handed.

“I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding that way. “But you were in the wrong bed.”

“Whatever.”

“Poor baby.”

He turned around. She was leaning against the doorjamb holding a cigarette in the crux of her middle fingers, watching him. She had acquired a new tic. Her left eye twitched like an invisible string tugging at the corner.

“You don’t even know what you are,” she said.

He took a breath. “Then tell me.”

*

In the beginning there was a rat named Homer. This rat had no parents, which was remarkable but not controversial. Homer was a “pure” clone and his cloned progeny lived less than one hour. Homer Jr. wasn’t sick. He simply aged too fast, as designed. Much too fast. Homer himself enjoyed a rat’s normal life span though he was moody and anti-social, didn’t sleep enough, and tended to bite. But Homer was an otherwise ordinary rodent, and if anyone had thought it was a good idea to send him to Beta Cygni via Tachyon Funnel Acceleration it would have proved a fatal trip, and never mind the years required; no complex life could survive the forces involved. However a few quick-frozen cells protected by lead-lined titanium baffles could remain intact and even thawed and nurtured to maturity (especially hyper rapid-aging maturity) with the assistance of computers and an automated nursery. But, really, what would have been the point? Something brighter and more adaptive than Homer Jr. would be required to locate and decode the alien portal technology.

*

Joe dressed quietly in the dark and went to Anthea’s room. She was awake reading.

“Can I borrow your rig?”

“Only if you borrow me, too.”

“Let’s go.”

*

Joe bonded to the iron fence surrounding a churchyard, drew out a filament, and scrawled a door. Basic stylistic warping, like a big, wavy stick of gum with gothic hinges. Anthea, watching for trouble, said, “And?”

Joe glanced at her, suppressing an urge to tic. A few days without D&B and he felt subject to constant alienating anxiety and the suggestion of a co-existing Other. He drew a filament off the first door and scrawled a second, this one standing directly in front of a six-foot monument. Broken winged cherubim visible through a scrawled version of his green door. Then he drew out
another
filament, like skipping stones, drawing it out, linking one scrawl to the previous, judging balance and weight, making the linking filaments so thin you could barely see them. Joe filled a portion of the bone yard with doors, his Scrawl version of the old man’s dilemma. Anthea laughed.

“Jesus, you’ve got
eight
.”

“Eight’s good,” Joe said and stopped. The kidney was almost empty. He removed the Scrawl rig and handed it to her. “I don’t need any more doors, I guess.”

Anthea tilted her head to the side and said, “Ever do it in a graveyard?”

“I just did.”

“Not
scrawl
.”

He grinned. “I know what you mean.”

“Well?”

Joe looked at her. His breathing was funny. He felt afraid but unrestrained. For once he knew what he was. “Pick a grave,” he said.

She looked at him.

“Come on,” he said.

She picked a very old one with an upright stone, the name and dates almost erased by time: Sarah Medoff 1965-to-something indecipherable.

“Take me from behind,” Anthea said.

He did, panting, surrounded by empty doors and the dead. He came and then he collapsed onto her, crying.

“Hey—” She reached around awkwardly and touched him, patted his thigh. “Hey, don’t cry,” she said.

*

TFA fired three Nursery Ships at one-year intervals across the interstellar gulf and they were never heard from again. It was the ultimate black-op, the ultimate long shot. Statama had his moment in the sun but the sun was in full eclipse. All human cloning was illegal, and Statama’s disposable variety would be even more so. He randomly named the “pure” originals: Barney Huff, Faye Rutherford, and Joe Null. These individuals, whose existence was forbidden by the same government that secretly sanctioned and financed their creation, were harvested and then dumped into the grinding mill of local welfare systems to be forgotten.

*

They huddled together in a corner booth of The Deluxe Diner. Traffic streaked by on the pulseway.

Joe asked, “Do you have money?”

“You mean running away money?”

“Yes.”

“How long would it have to be for?”

“I don’t know. I guess until they figured I was safe.”

“Who’s ever safe?”

“You don’t have to come,” Joe said, but he couldn’t look at her when he said it.

Anthea held onto his arm tighter. “I want to, Joe.”