Futures Near and Far (16 page)

The sun was well up over the East African coast, and most of
Louis’s troop of reef apes had taken to the water to cool off and to forage for
mollusks and seaweed. The primates acknowledged his arrival with glances and
low hoots. He assumed his usual observational distance, close by the edge of
the group, but not within it.

Three young males had apparently discovered something
exciting. They flailed their arms, shouted, and repeatedly dived into the
chest-deep waters. Louis dunked his head and peered through the transparent sea
to where the males romped.

One of the apes grabbed at the side of a submarine rock. The
object of interest was a large abalone, a real prize for any member of the
troop. The ape tried to yank the shellfish free. Failing, he rose for a breath,
and one of his companions replaced him.

The second ape, who Louis had named Otto, got a firm hold
almost immediately. The abalone peeled free. Louis surfaced.

Otto came up brandishing his treasure, a radiant smile on
his face. His competitors turned to the remainder of the troop and raised even
more racket than he, as if to borrow some of the glory by mere enthusiasm.

Otto rewarded the pair with shreds of abalone flesh, took a
larger piece to the alpha male, and climbed onto a dry projection of reef.
Sara, one of the females, unabashedly courted Otto’s favor.

Even after decades of studying the animals, whenever Louis
witnessed a smile such as the one on Otto’s face, he was amazed at how human
the species could seem. Subcutaneous fat smoothed out the wrinkles typical of
chimp or gorilla faces. Under the mop of scalp hair, Otto’s brown face
displayed only the faintest traces of hair. His nostrils, instead of pointing
skyward, hid beneath a true nose.

Louis had to smile himself. He appreciated the
forthrightness of reef apes. They kept their emotions near the surface, easy to
read, like children. Compared to the currents and eddies of human interaction,
Louis found it soothing to walk among them.

Which was why he was not alarmed to note that one of the
males seemed to be shadowing him.

It was Jerry, a large but relatively timid male. He was much
closer than any of the troop usually came.

Louis faced him, making sure not to challenge through
eye-to-eye contact. Jerry pretended to be examining a strand of kelp for tiny
snails. His calculated indifference indicated non-hostile intent. Louis turned
back to the main portion of the troop.

Then it occurred to him that he had just seen Jerry back on
the beach, taking sand baths with several of his siblings. How had he come so
far into the water so quickly?

Louis glanced toward shore. To his shock, he saw Jerry still
among the dunes, happily playing. Which meant the reef ape near him—

—was a fake.

He whirled, opening his mouth to raise his personal body
shield to maximum, but the primate, having closed the gap, cuffed him on the
side of the head. Louis swayed, unable to resist as Jerry dunked him under the
surface.

Something needle-sharp plunged into his neck. Louis inhaled
salt water. He thrashed, but iron hands held him by the hair at the back of his
head. The ersatz Jerry, every bit as strong as the real one, dragged him
halfway toward the beach before Louis gained the composure to attempt to
sub-vocally issue orders — to raise his shield, and to ask the Net to initiate
a recording.

It didn’t work. Trembling with a whole new level of fear,
Louis realized that his tongue and vocal cords had been paralyzed. He struggled
doubly hard to get free. He managed to lift his head from the water, gaining
just enough time to cough before his assailant shoved him under again.

By the time they reached the shore, Louis was
half-conscious, able only to retch and to strain for air. Jerry dragged him up
on the sand.

Louis’s head began to clear. He wriggled free and made it
two steps before being slammed into the grit. Jerry grabbed Louis’s right arm
and broke it, and while Louis vomited into the sand, the ape broke the left
one.

Louis screamed.

Easily restraining Louis’s wrists with one hand, Jerry
leaned down to face his captive. If any doubts had remained that this might be
a genuine reef ape, they dissolved into the pupils of those dark eyes.

With a stubby forefinger, Jerry wrote four words into the
wet sand beside Louis’s head: “Your word against mine.”

Louis writhed, acrid sweat popping from his armpits. He
understood. A vision of the next hour flashed before his eyes: Veronica bashing
him on the rocks, breaking his knees, and doing God knew what else before she
finally drowned him. She might even wait around for his nanodocs to repair him,
and kill him two or three times more.

She held him down, letting the ramifications of the
situation sink in.

He began to whimper. She couldn’t possibly get away with it.

Sure I can,
said
the dark eyes. Panting, searching for anything to keep his mind away from the
agony, it came to him: It was no felony to impersonate a reef ape.

A brief twist of his limbs sent a broken splinter of bone
out his skin. Louis thrashed, tongue rolling in the sand and puke. The prospect
of a court case, assuming he dared expose to the public how skillfully she had
taken her revenge, offered no solace. It was part of the unreachable future. In
the here-and-now, his body suffered, he had not yet died and been repaired.
Ahead was the longest hour of his life.

The surf washed away the sentence in the sand. The bone of
the other arm emerged into the air.

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My grandfather
Bert Warner was born and raised along the Pecatonica River at the boundary line
of Wisconsin and Illinois. The same was true of his parents. I, on the other
hand, am a native of California. Aside from a dimly remembered trip when I was
five years old, I had no images of the area from my direct experience. Yet as
Pop, as we kids called him, continued over the years to refer to his place of
origin with deep affection, I increasingly came to see it. It was not just a
place of my imagination. It meant more. When I needed a pre-technological
setting for the following story, it was only natural that I was inspired by those
visions.

In its own way, winter is a season of bounty. Insulated by
technology, people of our time usually fail to appreciate that. While I lived
with Daniel and his children on their long-ago farm, I would stroke the icicles
hanging from the fence rails. At night I would stand outside gazing at the
crisp clarity of the stars until my teeth chattered. The harshness of the
season was my ally; it brought my dear ones into an even tighter circle around
me, the better to savor their company.

Daniel harvested ice the morning of Groundhog Day. He
brought the load on the sled to the outside hatch of the cellar. The girls and
I came down by way of the pantry stairs. I hung the kerosene lamp from its hook
and we gathered in the pool of light to watch him work.

The blocks came sliding down the ramp, each successive one
crashing into those below, flinging tiny shards of ice into our faces. Perched
in my arms, Marancy giggled at the bracing pinpricks of sensation. To a
three-year-old, it was pure entertainment.

“Our mama used to worry we’d get poked in the eyes,” Sarah
commented. “She always made us stay upstairs.”

“Now, now. Your mama was only looking out for you.” I tried
to sound firm. I was determined that the fondness my step-daughters had for me
did not come by diminishing their esteem for their birth mother. But inwardly,
I glowed.

When the last of the blocks had made its journey, Daniel
slid down the ramp himself. He lifted away the slats that covered the ice
bunker and fetched a shovel from the rack. I handed Marancy into the care of
her older sister and reached for a second shovel.

“You’ll get your apron dirty. Mind the girls,” Daniel said.

I blinked at the curtness. “Of — of course,” I stammered,
and returned to the stairs. Marancy climbed into my lap as Sarah and I sat on
the treads.

Daniel worked quickly, mucking out the bottom of the bunker
with robust scoops and dumping the sludge into two large buckets.

While I sat there, I fought to keep my expression smooth,
even managing to smile indulgently whenever I felt the girls’ attention on me. But
I was stung. Daniel might be a 19th Century man, but he had never before used
gender roles to shut me out. The Pecatonica River Valley had been newly settled
when Daniel’s parents arrived; he’d seen his own mother guide a plow across a
muddy field with the rear end of the ox in front of her nose the whole while. Just
a week past, he and I had worked elbow to elbow to clear the snow drifts from
the barn door after the big storm.

I silently condemned the meddler who had spoiled that
harmony.

When the bunker was clean, Daniel exchanged the shovel for a
pair of ice hooks and maneuvered the blocks across the floor. One by one they
dropped into place. He covered them with an insulating layer of fresh straw,
then replaced the slats, hiding the storage cavity away for another year. Done,
he smiled at Sarah and Marancy.

“Those’ll keep a good long time,” Daniel announced, slapping
the ice-melt from his gloves. He said it as someone who relished a cool serving
of canned peaches after a day’s toil under a hot summer sun. We all shared his
approving glance at the jars of fruit, jam, and preserves on the shelves, the
reward of the hours I had spent over the stove at harvest time.

My spirits were rising until I saw what he was really
staring at: the corner containing the remnant left from the previous year, a
legacy not of my work, but that of his late wife.

I glanced down, pretending to be absorbed in checking the
slats to be sure they were seated evenly over the bunker. When I looked up
again, Daniel had climbed the ramp to empty the buckets into the snow beyond
the woodpile.

o0o

In the afternoon, I baked bread. The girls kept me
company, churning butter and cracking walnuts, their young faces aglow with the
anticipation of sampling the first loaf hot from the oven. Their father avoided
me, remaining outside to top off feed bins and patch the hen coop.

He came in at suppertime, of course, but he was not his
usual ebullient self, brimming with observations about the day. He ate quickly
and left early, offering the excuse that he needed to fetch more wood for the
stove. He said it as if I’d wasted what was there before, as if my breadmaking
were some sort of whim and not a necessary and regular contribution to our
lives.

The rift yawned even wider at the end of the evening. I came
into the bedroom after settling the girls in the loft and found him already
beneath the blankets and the room dark. I had to re-light a candle in order to
put away my slippers and let down my hair.

I left the candle burning as I slid, shivering, beneath the
many layers of flannel and wool. I wanted to see Daniel while we talked.

I knew he was awake. His muscles hadn’t relaxed nor had his
breathing become rhythmic. I waited. Finally he opened his eyes. He stared at
the rafters, not at me.

“You didn’t have to store ice in your cellars, where you
come from. You had other ways to keep food cold.”

“Yes.”

“You had all kinds of incredible things. More’n I can begin
to guess at.”

“Things don’t make a person happy. What I have here is what
I find incredible.”

“But it ain’t a true life. Ain’t the one you were born to
live.”

“When a parent adopts a child, is the child any less
precious because it didn’t arrive the usual way? Just like I adopted Sarah and Marancy,
I’ve adopted you and this place.”

“Ain’t no ‘just like’ about it. It’s not the same at all.” His
voice went hoarse. “Is Annabeth even your name?”

“I—” I couldn’t answer. The question upset me too much. I
knew I was going to break down. I fled for fear my hysterics would awaken the
girls.

No place in the house was soundproof enough. I bolted
outside and high-stepped, bare feet on packed snow, to the outhouse. I shut
myself in and gave up all attempts at self-control. I sobbed so hard I strained
an abdominal muscle. The tears poured down until I nearly choked.

“You poor dear.” The voice came from the darkness beside me.
I yelped in surprise.

I flung open the dampers of the pot-bellied stove. The glow
of the embers through the grill revealed the household’s gray tabby sitting on
the bench beside the toilet lid. Or that is to say, it appeared to be the
household’s gray tabby, but I had just left the real cat in the bedroom, curled
up in its basket on the cedar chest.

I made a guess. “Vivica?”

“Yes.”

My tear ducts snapped shut. I continued to shudder a little,
but that was because all I was wearing was a nightgown. I thrust more fuel into
the stove. I was tempted to throw the cat in as well. “Were you the asshole who
blabbed to Daniel?”

“No, that was Kenneth. I was opposed to the idea, actually. I
figured it would just make you dig in your heels.”

“You were right about that much.”

“Terri, Terri, Terri,” the faux-cat said. “So we can’t force
you to withdraw, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for you to stay. Come to your
senses.”

“You know how judgmental that sounds?”

“It’s called intervention. It’s an act of concern.”

“Yeah, everybody’s willing to butt in now that I’m happy. When
I could really have used some cheering up, you all were nowhere to be found.”

“Maybe that’s true,” Vivica suggested, though it didn’t
sound like a concession to my ears. “Or maybe you didn’t give us a chance. Tell
you what. I’m going to the gymnastics championships on Luna in a couple of
weeks. I have a spare ticket. You could tag along. I’ve booked a great suite at
the Hilton. Dori and Sam are gonna show up for the finals. Be like old times.”