Specimen Days (34 page)

Finally he said, "We don't have much time, you know."

"Yes," she said.

"All that kid has to do is flag down some Samaritan in a pod. Which may have happened already. In which case, Magicom is about to be majorly on our asses."

"Yes."

"In which case, we should not be on the main road."

"No."

And yet she drove on with relentless, orange-eyed focus. Lizard, he thought. Fucking lizard.

He said, "There are old roads all over Pennsylvania. This looks like a turnoff coming up."

"Yes."

"I should probably drive."

"I drive."

"I only had a problem because we hurt that kid. I thought I'd explained that to you."

"I drive," she said.

He decided not to argue with her. She seemed to be a good enough driver. Stopping to change places would take time.

She took the road that led off the podway. A battered sign said HARRISBURG. They hove through the remnants of a settlement. The Council-administered states had begun tearing such places down, or so you heard. According to rumor, Magicom was trying to sell Pennsylvania but could find no buyers.

Catareen piloted the pod competently over the cracked and buckled road. Abandoned houses and storefronts rattled by, McDonald'ses and Wendy Kentuckys and Health-4-Evers, all weed and dark, shattered glass.

Most were empty. Some had been taken over by Nadians, who had put up their sun-blasted awnings. Who tended their young ones, their scraps of drying laundry, their little fires.

Catareen and Simon hove for hours unimpeded. They kept the pod headed west. The landscape was unchanging, empty houses and franchises and random shops and every so often a derelict shopping mall, all so similar that Simon worried they might have doubled back on themselves unwittingly. When these places were operating, they must have been more individualized. He worried that he and Catareen might be headed back to New Jersey. They might end up at the complex where they had stolen the deliverypod.

They could only trust the pod's directional. They could only drive on.

Night fell. They had each had two boxes of soymilk. They needed food. They hove silent and hungry across the dark nothing. The pod's lights showed mile after mile of broken road that led toward nothing more than the hope of Emory Lowell. They were pursuing a date and place Lowell had implanted in Simon five years ago.

If the Nadian was concerned, she made no sign. She merely drove with her incessant, reptile-eyed concentration.

Finally he said, "We should stop for the night." "Hour more," she answered. "No. We should stop now."

He saw her lipless mouth tighten. She was a lizard woman who wanted her own way. She was imperious andunempathic.

Then she said, "If you want."

She pulled to the side of the road. She deactivated the pod, which sighed and settled. Its headglobes faded. A pure darkness arrived, alive with the rasp and chirping of insects.

"We can get rid of some of the soymilk and sleep in the back," he said.

"Or house."

She indicated with her small, ovoid head a row of houses on the road's far side, sharply gabled against the stars, like a child's drawing of a mountain range.

"Technically they're still private property," he said.

She waggled her fingers in the air a Nadian gesture of dismissal, he supposed.

"Hey," he said. "We're criminals, right? What's a little breaking and entering?"

They got out of the pod. Simon stood for a moment on the weedy dirt, stretching his spine. They were in a vast black house-filled emptiness. An immensity of constellations hung overhead. This far from city lights, they were countless.

Nadia's sun was one of the stars just above the black roof silhouettes. That shitty little star over there.

He realized Catareen was standing beside him. They could move very quietly, these people. These lizards.

She said, "Nadia."

"Mm-hm."

"We say Nourthea."

"I know."

The name "Nadia" had always been an ironic approximation. One of the right-wing papers had started calling it Planet Nada, Spanish for "nothing," as its riches and wisdom kept failing to materialize. The name had stuck.

She said, "You have go?"

"Me, personally? No. I'm new. I was manufactured about five years ago. I'm actually one of the very last ones they made."

"Why not legal?"

"You mean, why do they bother chasing after a poor, harmless, old artificial like me?"

"Yes."

"A couple of years ago the Council identified all artificials as stolen property, because the whole debate about natural versus engineered life just went on and on. We were monsters and abominations. Or we were the innocent victims of science, and deserved protection. There was talk of special preserves for us. Somebody in Texas invented and patented a soul-measuring apparatus, but the courts disallowed it. Finally the people who were most appalled by us came up with a solution. Because we were manufactured, simulos were declared the property of Biologe. And because we were walking around loose, we were stolen. We had essentially stolen ourselves. We were declared contraband. We were ordered to return ourselves. But Biologe was out of business by then. So, next best thing, we were to turn ourselves in to the authorities until our rightful owner came to claim us. Which of course was never going to happen. We would be held in a sort of escrow until that time, aka never. A few actually did it. As far as I know, they're sitting in cells to this day with tags clipped to their ears. The rest of us did our best to disappear. But as stolen property, we're inherently illegal. We break the law by continuing to possess ourselves."

"And they hate?"

"Well, 'hate' may not be exactly the right word. You could say they think of us as a bad idea. A needless complication in the ongoing argument about the eternal soul. They just sort of want us not to be."

"Nadians also."

"Well. It's different. You're legal aliens. Being biological, your right to life is not in question. All your other rights are."

"We live with no stroth."

"Agonies are one of my changes of garments," he said.

"Yes," she answered.

The night hummed around them. Certain insects remained. The birds were probably gone forever.

Simon said, "I know you don't like questions." "Some questions."

"And I'm not going to ask you about your past or your family or any of those clearly forbidden subjects."

"Thank."

"But I would like to know. I mean, here we are. You had a job, you had a place to live. Granted, maybe not the greatest job, but given what's available to you"

"To one like me."

"Sorry, I don't mean to offend. You know what I'm getting at, right? Why are you here? If we get to Denver, if by some miracle Lowell is actually there, what do you hope will happen for you?"

"Die in Denver."

"That's a little melodramatic, don't you think?"

"No."

Then she went stare-y and blank. Although he could not see her clearly he knew what her nostrils were doing. He was learning to feel these conditions when they arose in her. The air changed between them. A legible and almost audible absence announced itself.

"Why do you do this?" he asked. "I mean, where do you go when you get like this?"

Softly, she exhaled the little Nadian song.
Ee-um-fah-um-so.

"I'm asking," he said, "because frankly it gets a little creepy for me when you zone out. I've pretty much come to understand that you tune back in eventually, but still. Would it be too hard for you to just, you know, hang in a little more? Would it be too un-Nadian?"

Nothing. The breathy song, soft in the darkness.

"Okay. Well, I'm glad we had this conversation. Let's go find a place to sleep, okay?"

"Yes," she said. She said that, at least.

They crossed the road and went into the development. It was one of the villages Titan had tossed up for the soon-to-be-rich. Front porches, dormers, window boxes. There'd been rumors that these places were made of something that broke down over time and produced toxic fumes, though the high incidence of cancerous tumors among the soon-to-bes could just as easily have had its roots in the soil or water of their various native lands.

Catareen led him straight to the third house in the first row. It seemed briefly that she must have been here before, must have had some connection to this particular house, though that of course was extremely unlikely. It was probably a Nadian thing about always choosing the third in a lineup or making arbitrary choices with a ritual show of certainty. Or something. Who knew? Who wanted, at this late hour, to go to the trouble of asking?

The front door was locked. Most people had expected to come back. The windows were locked, too. Simon suggested that they try another house, but Catareen had settled on this one. They ended up breaking a window with a plastistone Krishna that stood silently blowing into a silent flute among a circle of long-dead marigolds on the front lawn. The plexi, when it shattered, produced a sharp and hopeless musical sound.

After they crawled in through the window, they found themselves in a living room that had been stripped of all that could be easily carried. What remained was a sofa and two low, hulking chairs covered in pinks and golds and peacock blues bright enough to show even in the darkness. There was a low, carved table and a giant vid and a lightglobe in the shape of a period chandelier.

"Let's see if there's any food," Simon said.

They went into the kitchen, where they found old packets of curried this and pickled that. All of it needed water to reconstitute, however, and there was of course no water.

Catareen held a foil packet in her hands and turned it over and over, as if she hoped to discover some secret instructions for converting the husks within into food without the introduction of moisture. Watching her like that, Simon was filled with a sense of her unknown life scrabbling whatever crops she could from the sloggy, dead soil of Nadia, coming to Earth on one of the Promise Ships and arriving, at the end of the seventeen-year trip, in a post-meltdown world where an alien was lucky to get work in sanitation or child minding. Now she was here, in the abandoned kitchen of a relocated family, holding a packet of inedible food, on her way to a place where she had no business, where she was going simply because she could no longer stay in the place she'd been.

Simon said, "We'll figure something out about food in the morning. Let's just go to sleep now."

"Yes," she said. She laid the packet on the countertop carefully, as if it were precious and fragile.

They ascended the stairs, past the wall shadows of holopix that had been taken down. Upstairs were three modest bedrooms, each of which contained a stripped bed and an empty bureau. By some unspoken accord they both chose the rooms that had belonged to the children, as opposed to the slightly larger parental room, with the bigger bed in it.

"Good night," Simon said. She gave him a brief, military nod and went into her room.

Simon stretched out on the modest child bed. The emptied room, with its single window that gave onto the window of the house next door, resembled a nun's cell, though its vanished occupant had overlooked a holopic cut from a magazine and fastened to the wall, as well as a single pale-pink sock, which coiled like a question mark at the foot of the bed. The holopic was Marty Mockington, early years, twirling with a doomed and childish grace though a field of singing poppies. Simon watched Marty Mockington dance by, over and over, young and alive, glowing. It could not have been one of the kid's favorite pictures, or it wouldn't have been left behind. It must have been a lesser image among the dozens that would have covered the wall. Simon could briefly imagine the kid a girl, judging by the sock lying here before her wall of singing and dancing icons. Would she have imagined herself in the future, getting somehow from this little room to the world of the holopix? Probably. Kids believed in extravagant destinies. Now she must be… who knew where? Doing something slavish in the Southern Assembly, most likely, or, if she was lucky, if her parents had managed the paperwork, being trained for something semislavish up in Canada. Eurasia would be out of the question for people like this. The girl was wherever she was, and Marty Mockington, a lesser star in her private constellation, twenty years dead by now, went on dancing on her bedroom wall and would keep doing so for one hundred years or more, until the photons broke down, until the poppies started to fade and his exuberant interlude of dance (heel, toe, leap) slowed and slowed and finally stopped.

Simon shut his eyes. Dream fragments arrived. A room that was somehow full of stars. A proud and happy man whose hands were flames.

He woke with a light shining hard and white in his eyes. For a moment he thought he might still be dreaming, dreaming of a terrible light.

A male voice said from behind the light, "Here's another one."

Another
what,
Simon wondered.

A second voice, female, said, "He's not a Nadian."

"Nope. He's not."

Simon got off the bed and stood blinking in the light. He said, "We just needed a place to sleep. We weren't going to steal anything."

"What are they doing here?" the female voice said. "Ask him what they're doing here."

Simon's eyes adapted. He could discern two figures standing behind the glare. One was tall and hooded, the other shorter, with a nimbus of crackly hair standing out around her head.

Simon said, "We're travelers. We don't mean any harm."

"People say that," the male voice answered. "Harm comes anyway."

A third voice sounded from down the hall. It said, "What did you find in there?"

It was a boy's voice. A boy speaking with unboyish authority.