Are You There and Other Stories (37 page)

He looked at her and knew that, at least for now, they belonged to each other. It was something new and it scared him but he wasn’t going to let it go.

“I’m worried about Faye,” he said. “She’s not going to make it by herself.”

“Do what you have to.”

*

At “birth” the clones onboard the Nursery Ships began transmitting unconscious thoughts to their Earthbound “pures.” Space itself was warped by the alien portal effect, the technology deriving from intensified states of consciousness, perhaps, and seeking in the absence of its creators a localized substitute. The warped overlaying of Barney Huff’s rapid-aging clone drove Barney to madness. At which point Statama petitioned that Faye and Joe, his remaining abandoned children, be brought in before they hurt themselves or others. That was done.

*

They watched from an alley a block away. A vehicle drew up to the curb, black, beetle-skinned pulser under manual direction, semi-official-looking. Joe pulled Anthea into the shadows. Two men climbed out of the pulser and entered the apartment building. Presently they returned with Faye, slumped, dragging feet between them. Drugged.

“Let’s go somewhere,” Anthea said.

“Wait.”

The back door of the vehicle opened and a tall man with white hair stepped out. David Statama. Joe squeezed Anthea’s hand. Statama eased Faye into the vehicle then stood talking to the other men. Presently they got into the pulser but Statama remained in the street. He gazed up at the building, hands in the pockets of his coat. He turned and looked up and down the block. It was as though he
knew
Joe was near and was only waiting for him to come out and then they would go home together. Home was the place where the bad dreams were quelled.

Joe squeezed Anthea’s hand until it seemed the little bones would crack.

*

There was an old man. Machines had raised him, had told him his name was Joe. Machines had given him his directions. This old man found himself inside an asteroid following an elliptical orbit around Beta Cygnus 2. Joe subsisted on a steady diet of fear and insecurity, and he longed for things he’d never seen. Now he blundered between black sheets that might have been anything he believed them to be. A wish, a terminal, a switching station between stars, an abandoned mistake that dropped travelers to their deaths on a double dozen worlds. The machines had suggested that Joe might find his way home by deciphering portals. But he could not begin to fathom the technology, which seemed more shadow than substance. Soon he would die. Or he could step through a portal and also die, though perhaps in a place acquainted with “home” in his deep gene memory, a place of human habitation, blue skies, doors that opened readily. The old man slouched back and forth between the black funhouse mirror-portals and couldn’t decide. Madness was a disintegrating filter.

*

In a motel room on the outskirts of metropolitan Seattle eighteen year old Joe Null thrashed awake. Cold sweat wrung out of his body. His mind yawed toward some unknowable abyss. He was his own beginning and end, which meant he didn’t
have
to belong to anyone, or even to his fears. But he was not alone; he had choices and he had begun to make them. Anthea returned to the bed with a glass of water. Joe took it gratefully. He hoped it would always be him that she found waiting.

Home is the place where bad dreams are quelled.

Human Day

R
aymond held the loose eye in a cereal bowl. The eye looked like a big, brown-and-bloodshot marble. It sounded like one, too, when he tilted the bowl. On the curvature opposite the pupil the interface shone like a gilded thumbprint. Robbie the Rover, a canine simulacrum Ray had designed in the image of a Golden Retriever, stood frozen by the work bench, left orbit gapping.

“Ready or not,” Raymond said, “it’s D-Day.”

He pushed the eyeball into the open socket, regarded it critically, touched up the fur with a tiny makeup comb. He removed his glasses and wiped them on his shirt tail then put them back on and sighed.

“Dog day,” he mumbled.

Robbie the Rover looked like a study in taxidermy.

Raymond worried his hands together. It was now or never, and it couldn’t be never. He had been hiding in this secret underground shelter for almost a year. His supplies were depleted, the generator fuel nearly exhausted.

He had to find out what was happening up there in the world. Had to find out if
they
had fully taken over: his children of the Rift.

Raymond seated himself at the work table and activated the remote control device. A red point of light glowed briefly in the simulacrum’s left eye—the power-on indicator—then immediately faded out, so the illusion would not be compromised to the disappointment of his sweet little Samantha. Of course, the light should have shone in both eyes. The right one was still not working. The screen on the controller setup flickered, flashed out, flickered again and became steady. It displayed a flat image of Raymond seated before the remote control console, leaning forward, looking at himself looking at himself, through Robbie the Rover’s eye.

Raymond turned in his chair and manipulated the controller. The fake dog padded over to him just like the real thing, looked up, cocked its head to the side, lolled its tongue, wagged its tail.

“Good boy,” Raymond said.

He got up and shuffled in his slippers to the heavy door. Using the hand crank, he rolled it aside, greased wheels grinding. The tunnel beyond breathed stale air into his face. Coughing, he returned to the work table. Robbie the Rover stood by the chair. Raymond almost started to pet it, he was so lonely. Instead he sat down and took up the controller.

“Go be my eyes,” he said. “My eye, I mean.”

And he sent the simulacrum on its way to the world above.

His life depended on a toy. Samantha’s toy. His daughter was gone but her toy remained durable.

*

It had begun the day the Mayovsky Accelerator erupted. Sam should not have been there. That was Raymond’s fault. She was so damn
curious
. Daddy’s girl, minus the twitchy eccentricities.

“What’s it doing?” she had asked. They were standing together on the observation platform. “Are those big things magnets?”

Four gray metal blocks the size of economy cars tumbled on gimbals suspended above the floor. In the center of all that tumbling the air blurred, like worn fabric. A low frequency hum vibrated deep in their bones.

“Not magnets, exactly, sweetheart. It’s something new, kind of a mini-super collider. I’m rubbing at the onion skin between universes.” As always Raymond had taken full credit, even for a project of this scope. Well, it
was
his money driving it. And it wasn’t called the
Mayovsky
Accelerator for nothing.

“It
looks
like rubbing,” Samantha said.

And then something like a funnel of light warped out of blurred place and lashed upward, knocking Raymond off his feet. When he looked around, Sam was gone from the platform. They found her body beneath the tumbling blocks.

*

Raymond watched Robbie’s progress on the RC screen. The dog made its way up twisty, chemically lit passages. When it reached the outer door it stopped. A featureless, metal slab filled Raymond’s screen. This blast door had not been opened once in the last year, not since Raymond had fled beneath the earth. You could do anything if you had enough money. Anything but the most important thing: prevent a death that had already occurred. Originally the shelter was Raymond’s hedge against terror or environmental disaster; it had become his refuge from transdimensional invasion.

He stood up and pressed the lock release button for the outer door. When he resumed his seat the RC screen presented the outline of the open door and the darkness beyond. He activated Robbie the Rover’s night-vision, and proceeded. As soon as the simulacrum was clear, Raymond shut the outer door and secured it.

Robbie climbed upward, eventually coming to the roughest section of the access tunnel. Here the passage was drilled through raw earth and rock, with no obvious shoring. Further on and Ray had to guide Robbie carefully into a tunnel not much larger than would allow for a crawling man. If anyone were to stumble upon it, the access to his shelter would appear to be nothing more than a natural gap in the earth.

Robbie came out into a tangle of blackberry vines and dazzling sunlight. Ray killed the night-vision. Past the brambles and weedy lot a highway crossed before a park. Beyond that the city rose against the sky. He thought for a minute, then put Robbie the Rover in rest mode. Better to wait for dark.

*

Robbie the Rover slept in the brambles, and Raymond slept in his secret shelter. Or tried to. He tended either to sleep constantly, or barely at all. This was a barely-at-all period. He pillowed his head on his folded arms and breathed slowly, too conscious of himself to relax. Finally, giving in to his anxieties, he sat back and knuckled his gummy eyes, reached for the remote and activated the monitor.

A quarter mile away, Robbie opened
his
eyes. Eye.

There was movement. Raymond leaned closer to the monitor. Nighttime had descended upon the world above. A figure approached through moonlight, coming straight for Robbie the Rover’s bramble bed.

Discovered already!

For a moment, Raymond could do nothing. Then he tapped the auto-dog key, and Robbie stood up and behaved like a real dog, without detailed direction from the RC. Sam would have loved this feature.

The approaching figure halted.

Robbie barked in a friendly way. He was incapable of barking in a threatening manner, being, essentially, a child’s toy. Raymond had stocked his secret shelter for every contingency, including Samantha. Now loneliness was the final contingency. In another month
would
he have been petting Robbie? Fawning over its meticulously hand-woven fur?

On the monitor, the figure moved closer. It was a man, or what looked like a man. He was saying something. Raymond turned up the gain on Robbie’s ears.

There, boy, how’d you get yourself stuck in that mess, huh?

The man carefully pulled apart loops and tangles of spiked vine.

Raymond nudged the controller, and the dog stepped out of the brambles and past the man.

You’re very welcome
, the man said.

Okay, he seemed human enough, but best to maintain distance.

Ray pushed the simulacrum forward at top speed, which amounted to something short of a trot. Robbie was into the street before Ray realized it. Sudden light splashed on the paving, a shadow swung, an engine roared. The view streaked violently, flipped around, froze on a new, cockeyed angle facing the sky. The moon shone like a crooked and lidded eye in a field of pale stars. The sound was gone. Raymond pushed, toggled and twisted the RC to no effect. He slumped back in his chair and pressed his palms to his temples, pressed hard enough to feel painful pressure. The image on the monitor stuttered and flipped and froze again, this time on a square of pavement. He redoubled the pressure on his temples, but only for a few seconds; he
knew
, of course, that there couldn’t be a connection. He leaned close to the screen, squinting through his glasses. He held his breath a moment, then wondered what would happen if he held it for a certain number count, say one hundred, which would be uncomfortable and perhaps even impossible for him to reach without breathing, would
that
encourage the restoration of his link to Robbie? Yes, yes: it was just as irrational as the pressure thing. So what?

Before he could even start the count, the image came alive again. He was looking out of the back of a vehicle where, evidentially, someone had placed him. The man from the brambles and another man stood framed in the opening. The speaker crackled. In a burst of static one of the men said:
Poor guy
. And the other said:
He ran right in front of me
.

Struck by the vehicle, then. But was he found out? No one referred to a broken mechanical dog as “poor guy.”

The hatch came down, but before it could slam shut the image froze again. Raymond waited but didn’t bother with temple-pressure or breath-holding magic. After all, he was a scientist, an inventor—a rational man. Anyone would have to give him that.

*

“Ray, you need help.”

So his wife had said, or the Tonya-thing imitating his wife. Raymond had looked up from his bowl of Corn Flakes.

“Do I?” he said.

“Please, Ray.”

She was convincing. The real Tonya had done a fair amount of pleading and histrionic hand-wringing as well. Oh, they were good. Raymond had lowered his gaze back to the Corn Flakes. Only a few remained, milk-soggy, unappetizing. He moved them around with his spoon.

The Tonya-thing said, “Jack called again. They’re worried about you at the project.”

I’ll bet
, he’d thought.
Worried that I’m on to them. And they’re correct to be worried.

“Ray.” It was turning on the crocodile tears. “I’m going to call your brother.”

“Don’t you do that.” Raymond continued to stir his Corn Flakes. Something in his voice made the kitchen very quiet. He could hear the Tonya-thing breathing. “I don’t want you to do that.”

Now its breath hitched with suppressed sobs. It sounded
so much
like his Tonya. Raymond told himself not to look up,
begged
himself not to look up. The weeping continued.

Raymond looked up.

And his heart caved in a little. He could be wrong. What-might-be-Tonya saw the doubt in his eyes.

“Don’t call Bill—yet,” Raymond said. “Sit down first.”

Tonya sat. Raymond worked his hands together, his palms sweaty. He removed his glasses and wiped the lenses on his shirt tail.

“Listen,” he said. “I know I have a history of . . . instability. I
know
that. But believe me, Tonya, believe me please, it has nothing whatsoever to do with what’s happening now. And something
is
happening. Something dreadful.”

“Samantha—”

“It isn’t
about her
. Please just listen. Please.”

She nodded, paying attention, encouraging him. And so he told her about the Mayovsky Accelerator experiments, about the rift they’d opened, the wound in the onion skin between universes. If you had enough money you could do anything—anything but raise the dead.

“This is the part that sounds crazy, that sounds, well, coincidental,” he had said to Tonya. “Given my
history
, I mean. But coincidence isn’t always meaningless, accidental. And just because somebody once displayed symptoms of paranoid delusional behavior, that doesn’t mean that somebody couldn’t be right, did it?”

Tonya shook her head, and in a very small voice said, “No.”

“It didn’t mean
they
weren’t here, for instance. You see what I’m saying?”

Tonya smiled one of her brave, brittle smiles, and that’s when he had begun to retreat again. Retreat from the imitation Tonya.

“They—?” she said.

“Yes, yes. They. THEY.
Them
, if you prefer.”

She flinched. He saw it, even though she tried not to show him.

Flinched.

“I’m sorry, Ray. I don’t understand. What was coincidental?”

He sighed, dropped the spoon.

“Even if you were who you claim to be, you wouldn’t believe me.”

He threw his head back and stared at the ceiling. Time ticked by. The Tonya-thing touched the back of his hand, and he pulled away.

“Please don’t touch me,” he said. Then, still looking at the ceiling, he added: “I have no quantifiable data to prove anything. This is pure intuition. That’s the beauty of it, at least from your perspective. There’s no way to prove you’ve taken over. And pretty soon there won’t be anyone to prove it
to
, anyway. You think I don’t
know
that?”

*

Raymond came awake in the dark. The shelter lights automatically cycled off after an hour, if he didn’t override the mechanism; it was an energy-conserving measure. He sat up abruptly, his heart thudding, a dream howling retreat down a black well in his mind. Groping out, his hand bumped the RC, and the monitor blinked out of sleep-mode. A moving image gathered. He was connected again! Robbie the Rover was prowling down a dark hallway, evidently on Natural Dog mode. Raymond activated the night-vision. Open doorways appeared. It seemed to be an ordinary home. Another door suddenly opened at the end of the hallway, revealing a blaze of light and an emerging child in a night gown. The girl, maybe nine years old, reached back and switched off the light. Robbie’s night-vision adjusted to the dramatic shift. The girl popped forward, green-ghostly, her eyes twin points. She was saying something, but Raymond couldn’t hear her. The girl walked toward him, stooped over, reaching out.

She was petting him.

Her voice barely a whisper, she was saying:
Good boy, good boy
.

Raymond tilted Robbie’s head back slightly. The girl’s face was difficult to read by night-vision. A young child around nine years old. Samantha’s age.

Time to sleep, good dog
.

The screen went blank.

Raymond squinted, wiggled the controller, listened intently. But audio and visual were both gone. Unconsciously, Raymond touched his hair, muttered:
Good boy
.

*

Raymond was dozing, and someone was knocking on the door. Gradually he opened his eyes. The knocking continued. His eyes opened wider. He jerked his head to the right, looking across the shelter. Of course he could see nothing, the lights having cycled off again. Raymond slapped the override button next to the bed, and a couple of dim panels stuttered on. There was nothing to see. And no one was knocking on the door; the sound had to be coming from Robbie the Rover’s remote display.