Home Fires (2 page)

“If there are several trains…?”

“Nothing before noon—I’ve got to pack. The first one after that.”

He was ready to go, but she whispered, “I’ll miss you, Mr. Grison.” Already feeling the pangs of treachery, he gave her a quick kiss.

Dianne, his secretary’s assistant, greeted him with a bright smile and a cheerful hello as he left his office. Skip reflected that Susan would have work for her. As for him, he would have work for himself.

A doorman touched the bill of his cap. “Lester told me you were out early, Mr. Grison.”

If he had made any reply at all, he had forgotten it by the time he reached his apartment.

ANSWERS
might or might not be of help. He touched
VOICE
. “Gifts for returning servicewoman.”

“Price?”

“Ten thousand and up.”

“Age?”

Chelle’s subjective age would have gone up by two years and what? A hundred-day or so. “Twenty-five.”

“Designer dresses and suits, jewelry, small red car, total makeover.”

“More.”

“Cruise, private island, show horse…”

He telephoned Research. “Boris? What do returning servicewomen want most? Somebody must have done a survey, and there might be two or three. Let me know.”

*   *   *

His gift met him at the station. “Are you Skip Grison?” Smile. “I’m Chelle’s mother.”

He studied her. She was shorter than Chelle and almost slender. Simply but stylishly dressed. “You’re younger than I expected,” he said.

She smiled again, a charming smile. “Thank you, Skip. You have my ticket?”

“Not yet. We can square it with the conductor.”

“You’ll be billed if I have to pay my own way. You understand that, I hope.”

He nodded, trying to place her perfume. Apples in a garden? Sun-warmed apples? Something like that.

“There would be a surcharge of twenty percent.”

“Certainly. I’ll take care of it.”

Another charming smile. “You look baffled, Skip.”

“I am. I pride myself on my ability to think on my feet, and I was told to expect you. But I…”

“In a courtroom.”

“Correct. I was going to say that even though I put in an order for you and knew you were coming, something about you took me by surprise. I need a moment to collect my thoughts. Where’s your luggage?”

“A nice porter took it for me. I gave him the number of your compartment.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You knew it?”

She nodded. “I found it out—it wasn’t difficult. Thirty-two C.”

“You’re right,” he said. And then, grateful for the opportunity to break off their conversation, “Let’s go find it.”

One side was Changeglass, switched off now for full transparency. His scuffed suitcases were on the lone chair, a red-fabric overnight bag on the lower bunk, a bed currently disguised as a couch. The door of the tiny private bath stood open; after a glance inside, Skip closed it. He stowed his briefcase under the lower bunk.

She was throwing switches. “Good reading lights,” she said. “That makes all the difference.”

He said, “It’s only a day and a half.”

“Thirty-four hours, if it’s on schedule. So one day and ten hours, since these Bullet Trains always are.”

“We need to talk.” Removing his overnight bag, he took the chair.

“That’s what I’m here for.” She smiled, warm and friendly. “To talk with you and my darling Chelle.”

“Can you play the part?”

“I don’t play parts, Skip. Really, I don’t.” Now she attempted to look severe, but the smile kept getting in the way. “I am your Chelle’s mother.”

“You mean that she’ll accept you, wholeheartedly, as her mother.”

“She will, Skip, and she’ll be right. You, thinking me a fraud, will be mistaken. Please try to understand. For thousands of years, we thought death the end, even though we knew of cases in which that had been untrue. Until we could raise the dead ourselves, we refused to believe that death was not necessarily final.”

Almost unnoticed, the train glided from the station.

“You call me Skip.”

She smiled yet again. He felt that he should by now have come to detest that smile, but found that it enchanted him instead. “I do, Skip, and I shall continue to do so.”

“Chelle calls you…?”

“Mother.” She sat down on the lower bunk.

“Then I’ll call you Mother Blue.”

Her eyes flashed. “Not without a quarrel. I have never used Charles’s surname, and I most certainly don’t intend to begin after going though a world of nonsense to terminate our contract. I am Vanessa Hennessey. You may call me that. Or Ms. Hennessey. Or Vanessa. But not Essy or Vanie or anything of that silly sort.”

“Vanessa, then. I don’t know where Chelle’s mother is buried, but it should be easy to find out. Suppose that I do, and that I take Chelle there and show her the grave—her real mother’s grave. What would you do then?”

Vanessa laughed. “Why should I do anything? Why should my daughter do anything, for that matter? I was dead, and now I’m alive. Pay close attention, Skip. You haven’t been thinking.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

“Are you? We’ll find out eventually. Every brain scan I ever had—and there were a good many of them—has been uploaded into the brain of a living woman whose own brain was scanned and wiped clean. Once it had been done, that living woman became me, the woman sitting across from you now.”

“Ms. Vanessa Hennessey.”

“Exactly. I’m so glad you understand.”

This time it was he who smiled. “Who is legally dead.”

“An error that could be corrected by any competent attorney. Surely you know that a person missing for seven years can be declared legally dead. You must also know that those people sometimes turn up, after which the record is set straight.”

“I paid a small fortune to have you resurrected.”

“A very small one. Yes.”

He wanted to pace, as he had so often in court. “Thus it’s against my interest not to accept you myself.”

The delightful smile. “I’m glad you understand.”

“Thus I shall venture one more question, and no more. None after this. Currently, I am paying the company by the hundred-day. I paid for the first in advance.”

She nodded. “That’s standard.”

“Suppose I stop paying?”

She laughed. “As you will, eventually. I understand that. Let’s say
when
you stop paying. We both know that you will. I’ll be returned to Reanimation. My brain will be scanned and wiped, and the earlier scan uploaded.”

“You’ll be dead.”

“I will. But I will die secure in the knowledge that death is not final—that if ever I’m wanted enough, I can be recalled to existence.” Smiling, she turned to look at the factory buildings and city streets they passed. “I’d heard that these things were wonderfully fast, Skip. But hearing it and seeing it … How fast can it go?”

“Sixty-seven kilometers an hour. Or so they say. That’s almost twice as fast as the fastest motor vehicles, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were stretching the facts a little.”

“Marvelous!”

“It is. We’re riding on a thin film of air, which is what makes the energy expenditure feasible. These cars are very light, of course. They say four men can lift one.”

She laughed and clapped like a delighted child. “I’d love to see that done. To really see it, I mean, with my own eyes. They do all sorts of tricks on tele.”

*   *   *

Later, in the dining car, she said, “You haven’t asked me about Chelle. Not one thing. I’ve been waiting for it, Skip, but it hasn’t happened. Want to tell me why?”

He shook his head.

“She divorced me, you’re quite correct. She divorced her father, too, after she enlisted. Were you aware of that?”

“No.” He studied the menu before touching several items.

“It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love me, and it certainly doesn’t mean I don’t love her. If you thought she didn’t love me, why did you spend so much to bring me back?”

“I hope she’ll like having you again. I wanted to get her something that would delight her, and you were the only gift I could find that seemed to have much chance.” He hesitated. “I wanted to get you a separate compartment, a nice one near mine. We were too late with that, the train was full.”

“We?”

“Susan. Susan’s my secretary. She takes care of things like that for me. I asked if you’d mind sharing a compartment with me. They said they’d tell you that you had to.”

“They did. I made no objection.”

“Aren’t you going to order?”

“I suppose. What’s the green button?” The slight smile that twitched her lips made him suspect that she already knew.

“It means that you’re ordering what the previous diner at the table ordered. Women—young girls for the most part—often want to do that. I don’t know why.”

“But you know about them.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I won’t pry, Skip.” The smile appeared in earnest. “Not now, because I know I wouldn’t find out anything. Later, possibly. Some girls are terrified of ordering anything too costly. I was never one of those, but I knew some like that.”

He nodded.

“Others are afraid they’ll order something they don’t know how to eat. Lobster or pigs’ trotters, a dish that takes finesse. If they order what the man orders, he can’t object to the price, and they can see how he eats it.”

“So you ordered what I ordered, without knowing what it was.”

“It seemed simpler like that. Either I’m not hungry at all, or I’m so hungry I’ll eat anything. I’ll know when the food comes. Wouldn’t you think they’d have a waiter to take our order? He could answer our questions then.”

Skip nodded absently. “They do that in second class.”

It evoked a throaty chuckle. “We privileged few needn’t worry about keeping the proles employed. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with the system.”

“It may be.”

“I was a wealthy woman, Skip.”

He nodded.

“I’ve almost nothing now. Just a few noras that a woman gave me before she let me out at the station. I’m going to need more.”

“You want more. I anticipated that.”

“May I have it?”

“Not now. I have to have some way to control you.”

“Surely there are others.”

“There are, but I like this one.”

She laughed. “You’re rather too much fun to cross blades with. I could cut Charles to pieces in two minutes—it was part of the reason I opted out. Would you like to stay in our compartment while I shower and get ready for bed?”

He shook his head.

“No? I was hoping you would. I was going to charge you for it.”

“No. I’ll wait in the bar car.”

A waiter arrived, trailed by an assistant who carried an identical meal. “Questions?” The waiter looked from one to the other. “Additional needs? Monsieur? Madame?”

“I’ve a thousand,” Vanessa told him, “but you can’t supply any of them.”

*   *   *

As Skip sat in the bar car sipping Chablis-and-soda, the barmaid’s assistant’s helper muttered, “I wouldn’t call you an enthusiastic drinker, sir.”

“I’m not,” Skip told her. “I’m just waiting for the dead woman in my compartment to go to bed.”

REFLECTION 1

The Journey

We sleep, and believe we wake with the minds we carried into bed with us, bearing them as a bride borne in her groom’s arms, the lifted, the treasured, the threshold flier; so we believe.

But we do not. That weary mind has been dispersed in sleep, its myriad parts left behind on the tracks, lying upon the infinite concrete ties between endless, gleaming steel rails.

We wake, and compose for ourselves a new mind (if some other does not compose it for us), a mind compounded of such parts of the old one as we can discover, and of dreams, and of odd snatches of memory—something read long, long ago, possibly something sprung into thought from a tele listing, the skewed description of a better presentation, the show as it existed in Platonic space. From such trifles as these and more we construct a new mind and call it our own.

And yet the personhood, the soul remains. A roommate I had one year woke each morning as a beast, woke roaring, shouting, and fighting. Fighting air, for the most part, for I soon learned to absent myself before his autocall, or to jump back if circumstance forced me to wake him myself; there is such a beast in all of us—no, several such beasts.

Chelle told me once that she woke each morning as a child, though strictly speaking it was untrue. It was most often true, I think, when she had been drinking and she was awakened an hour or two later, still somewhat drunk. She was small and guilty then, weeping for misbehavior she knew not of, a child like so many accustomed to being blamed and punished, quite often severely, for an act done or a word spoken in purest innocence. Thus I, who had met her at the university, came to know the child she had once been, and in truth to love and dread that child.