Marlowe and the Spacewoman (25 page)

A small video stream was projected onto Marlowe’s retina, looking to him like it was hanging in midair just above the bed.  It showed the dim interior of the mailbox.  A single envelope lay flat on the bottom of the box.  Marlowe had installed the mail cam in frustration after the postal service delivered a series of damaged packages and then claimed the packages had been undamaged at the time of delivery.  It wasn’t until after the installation that he found out the postal union had gotten a law passed that made mail cam video inadmissible in court.  However, on the not so off chance that someone might mail him a bomb, he left the camera in place.

“Turn on the postal suspender.”

“Very well,” intoned House.

Tiny jets embedded in the bottom and sides of the mailbox irised open, and air began billowing in, pushing the envelope onto its edge.  Marlowe adjusted the various air streams via the PDI, rotating the letter slowly until the face of the envelope, with the return address, was visible.  He groaned.  It was from the Office of His Honor the Governor of the City.

“I’ll get it tomorrow.  Tell Nina I’m going to bed and she has the run of the place.  But don’t let her leave.”

“Of course not.”

“Or father, for that matter.”

“Very well, if you feel it necessary.  Should I also instruct his clothing nozzle to only issue straitjackets?”

“Sarcasm suits you, House.  Locking him in will be sufficient.  And be sure to instruct Nina how to get pajamas with the clothing nozzles.”

“I’m already in the process of doing that.  It turns out she’s tired too and wishes to retire.”

“It has been one hell of a day, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, I think that description is apt.”

“What did Nina say about her ship?”

“She’s given me enough information to contract out to an astronomer.  If we can find one with the right equipment, the ship can probably be located in a day or two.  Assuming it really is out there, orbiting the sun.  The search probably won’t be that cheap.”

“While the City pays, cost is no object.  I’m going to bed now.  Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

Marlowe sprayed on his pajamas.  He made the mistake of looking at them in the mirror and almost went blind.  No doubt House had a hand in the end result: fuzzy canary yellow flannel sleep clothes so bright his eyes actually hurt when he looked at them.  He decided the best thing to do was cover them up with his bedsheets and sleep.  He was overdue for his Id backup, anyway.

Marlowe crashed onto the bed.  The blankets let out a wincing gasp, squirmed out from under his body and then reversed course to slither over him.  “Good night, Marlowe,” they whispered warmly.  “We love you.”

“I love you too,” came Marlowe’s half-asleep, automatic response.

“Ahem.  When would you like to wake up tomorrow?”

Marlowe felt his face sink into the loving embrace of his pillow.  “Usual time, please.  Thank you, House.”  He had planned to do a little surfing on the CityNet before turning in, but he was asleep ten seconds later.

CHAPTER 14

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

Despite the physiological importance of sleep, Marlowe felt it had one major drawback: dreams.  Unfortunately, the nano probes couldn’t suppress dreams.  Oh, he’d tried.  They could be programmed to jolt him awake upon the onset of REM sleep, but that approach had certain drawbacks.  House terminated their first experiment with that approach three days in after an extremely grumpy, psychotic, and hallucinating Marlowe had scurried up into his neighbor Sarah’s elm tree, convinced he was a squirrel appointed by City Internal Revenue Service to audit the number of nuts in her house.  Using his optical zoom and an open bedroom window, he shouted aloud the number of nuts he saw, and had tallied nearly a thousand before Sarah and her boyfriend stormed out of the house and sprayed him down from the tree with her hose.  The fact that it was three in the morning didn’t help matters.

He identified this moment as the point where his relations with Sarah had begun their terrible descent, which was only exasperated by the events of the following summer.  They’d both had a little too much to drink at the neighborhood block party (the last one ever held, it turns out), Marlowe craving a buzz and programming his nano probes accordingly, Sarah drowning her sorrows after a fight with her boyfriend.  They had ended up together in her bed, and Marlowe, realizing the magnitude of this mistake far too late, snuck out and attempted to scale the fence between their houses in order to get home.  Instead he knocked the fence over, thus launching a bitter dispute over whether or not she should pay half the replacement cost.

So in an effort to maintain neighborhood tranquility, Marlowe endured the dreams, which were never pleasant and mostly patterned off of childhood memories.  Considering the traumas he had suffered as an adult, this would strike most people as a good thing, but most people hadn’t endured his childhood.

A part of his brain recognized and dimly noted that he was having the Hounds dream again.  He was underground, in the maze of gray concrete tunnels underneath City Hall.  He raced past the door with the “EXIT” sign over it (a trap for the uninitiated), struggling to suppress a wail as he sought the correct path.  The barking of the dogs had gotten louder over the last ten minutes, and he was getting tired, slowing down.  His six-year-old legs could only carry him so fast.  

He’d initiated the chase by tracking down his brother and declaring that it was his birthday in the hopes of getting a present.  He’d seen it lots of times before, Dad showering his brother with more gifts than usual one day every year, and now Marlowe had figured out that he had a birthday too.

“Clones don’t get birthdays,” said his brother, “but since you’re a clone of me, that means it must be my birthday.”  He made a sour face.  “No, that’s not right.  My birthday is next month.  So today must be my,” and he paused in thought for a moment until a smile crept across his face. “My clone birthday!  Today’s my clone birthday.”

Marlowe didn’t think that was exactly how it worked, but he was only six.  His brother, being  ten and wise in the ways of the world, must know what he was talking about.  And as Marlowe generally feared his brother, he didn’t dare disagree.  

“Since it’s my clone birthday,” continued his brother, “that means I should be getting a gift from you.”  He eyed Marlowe sharply.  “You did get me a gift, right?”

Marlowe thought about this.  Somehow everything had gotten turned around.  He thought he was supposed to get a gift.  Now it looked like he’d actually lose a gift.  He could feel the tears forming behind his eyes, and fought not to let his brother see.  “I don’t have a gift for you,” he sniffled.

“You don’t have a gift for me on my clone birthday?  What kind of clone are you?”  He frowned, waiting for a response, and Marlowe, sensing what was coming, took the pause as an opportunity to glance down and make sure his shoe laces were tied.

His brother smiled.  “That’s alright.  Instead of a gift, we’ll play our favorite game.”

Marlowe was relieved to see that his shoe laces were indeed snugly tied.  These conversations always ended up with them playing his brother’s favorite game.

“The Fox and the Hounds!  And you’re the fox!  Tally ho!”

Marlowe sprinted, his tiny feet pitter pattering out of the room and down the corridor.  This was his head start as his brother went to get the guard dogs.  When they first started playing this game, his brother had rubbed Marlowe down with a raw steak or ground beef, to encourage the dogs.  And after they’d cornered or caught Marlowe, he slipped them some of their favorite treats before Dad showed up and pulled the dogs off.  Now the meat smell was no longer needed as an incentive, which was just as well from his brother’s perspective, as Dad had started locking up the meat.  

The end was the only good part of the Fox and the Hounds.  First because the dogs with their claws and teeth and frenzied state were called off, and second because that was the only time Dad took any interest in Marlowe or his condition.  His brother always got his hide tanned too, and although Marlowe was never allowed to watch that, he took some satisfaction in knowing it was happening.

Marlowe ran for Mum’s room.  Dad would certainly protect him, but unfortunately Dad was at work, too far away to stop the hunt in time, even if his brother hadn’t jammed the wireless and he could call for help.  Mum was never terribly warm or sympathetic towards Marlowe, but she and Dad had been fighting lately, so maybe, just maybe, she’d relent this time.

Of course, Mum was a long ways off.  Not as far away as Dad, but still a fair distance.  After they’d started fighting, Mum had moved to a new room.  It was deeper underground, in the Security section, and there were a whole bunch of doors that wouldn’t open until Marlowe entered the proper codes in the keypads.  He’d watched Dad and his brother carefully when they entered those sections, and had quickly figured out how the keypads worked and the codes they used.  But this would slow him down, so it was important to get as large a head start as possible.

The problem with Security section and all the keypads was that Marlowe, being only six, couldn’t quite reach the keypads.  There were three doors he had to get through, and in order to enter the code, he had to jump up as high as he could to punch in the numbers.  One digit per jump.  Six digits in a code.  And half the time he hit the wrong number and had to hit the ‘Clear’ button and try again.  He could easily lose an entire minute at a door.  His brother, being much taller, only lost ten, maybe fifteen seconds per door.  So that head start was really important.

And this being a dream, Marlowe’s success rate on entering the key codes was even lower than it had been in reality.  And the dogs were always nipping at his heels as the doors closed behind him.

Marlowe got through the last door and ran down the short corridor with the funny doors.  These doors weren’t solid, but had gaps in them, so you see inside the rooms without opening them.  But the gaps were also too small to squeeze through.  

“Mummy, mummy, mummy!” shouted Marlowe as he shot down the corridor.  He slid to a halt at her door and started jumping up and down, trying to enter the code into the keypad.  He could hear the dogs, just outside the corridor, their howling and baying crazed.

The door slid open and Marlowe rushed in.  Mum was lying on her thin, short bed, a bed almost as small as Marlowe’s, staring at the ceiling, her bare feet hanging over the edge.  She was still wearing the new ankle bracelet Dad had given her after their last fight, probably an apology gift.  Though Marlowe found it clunky and thought there were nicer ankle bracelets out there Dad could have given her.

“What do you want?” asked Mum, not rising.

“The Hounds are coming.  Make them stop.  Make them stop, mum!”

His mother swung her legs around the side of the bed and sat up.  “I’m not your mum,” she said simply.  “If you don’t like this game, you shouldn’t play it.”

“Please mum, I have a news chip for you.”  Marlowe fished around in the pockets of his overalls.  Every day, when his dad finished reading the news and threw the chip in the recycler, Marlowe would bide his time and sneak in to retrieve it.  He couldn’t visit Mum every day, but kept a chip on him all the time just in case.  She was more willing to help him if he had something for her, and the thing she liked most was a news chip.  Though Marlowe didn’t understand why she didn’t just get her own.

His fingers closed around the chip and he pulled it out, covered with pocket lint, and dropped it into her lap.  “See?”

Mum took the chip and slipped it under the thin pillow on her bed.  She sighed.  “You look like him, you know.  It’s so hard to see that.”

Marlowe scratched at his head, something he’d seen Dad do when he was confused.  “Like my brother?”  He sort of understood what a clone was, but given that he had blond hair and his brother ginger, he figured he was missing some information.  “That’s not what Dad says.”

“Let’s not talk about Dad, OK?”

“OK mum.”

Suddenly the corridor outside erupted in an explosion of growls and snarls.  The hounds had arrived, their claws skittering across the floor of the corridor as they rushed towards Marlowe and his mum.  Fortunately, his mum’s door had closed automatically behind Marlowe, and he was pretty sure his brother wouldn’t open it and let the dogs in while mum was present.  And she had told Marlowe during his last visit that she couldn’t leave the room because of the bracelet Dad had given her.

The hounds piled into the door, their snouts snapping through the gaps as they scrabbled over each other, trying to get closer, trying to get in.  Marlowe saw his brother jog up behind them.

“Child, what do you think you’re doing,” asked Mum in a firm tone.  

“I don’t have to listen to you,” said his brother uncertainly.  “Dad said so.”

“Oh really?  You care to come in here and say that to my face?”  Mum sounded really angry.

His brother paused, fidgeting behind the dogs.  “Uh, no?”

The dogs seemed to sense the balance of power shift, because they stopped growling and barking and started plopping down on the floor, panting heavily.

“Now you march right up to your room and think about what you’ve done wrong today while I decide whether or not to tell your father.”

Marlowe watched his brother visibly sag.  Dad’s thrashings were legendary; he’d never been thrashed himself, but what he didn’t know about them directly from his brother he could guess from what he heard through the door when one was happening.  His brother seemed to think they were worth it when he won a game of the Fox and the Hounds, but today he clearly wasn’t going to win.

“Yes mother,” said his brother with head bowed.  If she didn’t tell, he’d owe her a favor.

“Wait,” said Mum.  “Don’t you have something else you want to say?”

His brother looked confused for a moment, then even more dejected.  He turned his face towards Marlowe, but kept his eyes pointed at Marlowe’s chest.  His voice was soft, his mouth twisted in a grimace of distaste as he spoke.  “Sorry.”

“And wish me a happy birthday,” shouted Marlowe suddenly, shocked at his own brazenness.

His brother glared at him, suddenly defiant.

“Oh, give him that much,” said Mum.

“Happy birthday, Spares,” said his brother before scampering off, the dogs in tow.

“Thanks, mum,” said Marlowe once the coast was clear.

Mum turned cold gray eyes on him, eyes which he noticed for the first time were rimmed with red.  “How many times do I have to tell you?  I’m not your mum.  I look at your face and I don’t see anyone I want or love.”

Marlowe woke briefly from the dream, the memory of that disdainful stare haunting him,  before drifting back to sleep.  He always realized something important right after that dream, but could never remember in the morning quite what.