Woman On The Edge Of Time (46 page)

Morgan and Redding muttered long, and Argent, when he dropped by late in the morning, looked glum and edgy. He eyed her, questioned the nurses briskly, frowned and frowned. Redding paced and muttered and then went in with a hypodermic and a local anaesthetic and changed the medication the dialysis bag was leaking into her.

“That ought to settle it,” Redding said cheerfully, but he frowned at her skull as if he would like to take it all apart.

A new watchfulness surrounded her. She was sorry to see that Tina and Sybil were genuinely frightened. Tina nagged her to eat and buzzed between window and door like an angry
fly. When Tina was in the day room, Connie tried to give Sybil reassurance.

“All right! You were unconscious for twelve hours! How can that be all right?”

“Sybil, don’t worry! Please. The only thing wrong with me is what they got stuck in my head. And I’m doing what I can to get it out Believe me.”

“They’re frightened.” Sybil’s eyes were somber. “They put off the implants scheduled for Monday, until they figure out what’s happening to you.”

“Good! That’s my first victory. Tina was scheduled for Monday.” With Luciente’s help, she might be able to scare them again. What else could she do? It was the only way she could see to struggle.

Every day for a week she tried to summon Luciente, but without success. Once she felt herself slipping into that other future, till she drew back with horror. Why couldn’t she call Luciente? Since they had implanted the dialytrode, she had not been able to reach over on her own, not to the right future, the one she wanted.

She was more lightly doped and time blurred by less dimly. Tina was caught trying to slip out of the ward in a laundry cart, and put into seclusion for two days. When Tina was let out, dizzy and twitching with drugs, Connie rose shakily and touched her shoulder. “Too bad you didn’t make it,” she whispered. “Try again.”

“I only got four days. I’m scheduled for Monday.”

In the orange and beige patient lounge, Alice sat in front of the TV, smiling in a slack way. She watched whatever moved in front of her. Connie thought that if she crept up to shut the set off, Alice would go on watching the blank screen with that same blank smile. The staff kept telling Alice she would be released soon, but they were cautious because of Skip. Alice ate a lot. She would not start eating until the attendant got her started, but then she methodically ate everything. She was gaining weight.

The next Monday, after they had wheeled out Captain Cream and Tina to be implanted, she cast herself on her bed and flung herself toward Luciente, she did not care how. The going over was rocky. For a time the ward dimmed and yet she did not arrive in the future. She passed out. It was more like
fainting than falling asleep. But at last she stood with Luciente’s hands on her shoulders in a small clearing. Outcroppings of gray-green stone. Pine needles lay everywhere, drifted against the rocks. Luciente wore a brown and green jumpsuit uniform.

“Where are we?”

“Near the front,” Luciente said. “We’ve gone up.”

“Is that why I couldn’t reach you?”

“Communing’s been harder. Something is interfering. Probability static? Temporal vectors are only primitively grasped … . I tried to reach you before we shipped out, but since then I’ve been too jammed.”

“Where’s your kenner?” She stared at a band of pale brown skin on Luciente’s left forearm.

“Back at the foco. We take them off for fear we’ll use them without thinking. They can home on the frequencies. We use these for locator-talkers.” Luciente touched a small netted egg around her neck. “I myself, I confess, I feel naked without my kenner. It’s part of my body. I only take it off to couple or sleep.”

“Suppose it got lost?”

“I’d lose two-thirds of my memory … . Marigold at Treefrog had an accident in which both left arm and kenner were destroyed. Arm we could restore but not kenner. Marigold killed perself … . For some it’s only a convenience. For others part of their psyche.”

Bee came pacing along a trail toward them, carrying a piece of equipment on his back. He looked larger than ever here, and unusually alert. His smile still spoke of luxurious calm and sunny energy. “G’light, Pepper and Salt. I forgot to tell you last time I believe you should trade that wig in on a porcupine.”

“It’s beginning to grow out. It kind of itches.” On impulse she took off the tipsy reddish brown wig and showed him her crew cut. She could feel a bald spot at the plug of cement, but the rest of her scalp was growing hair straight up.

Both Bee and Luciente giggled without malice and petted her, exclaiming how stiff and bristly the half-inch hair felt. She did not mind their teasing because it carried affection and besides, she knew how funny she looked. This ward had a real mirror in the bathroom.

Bee clucked over the plug in her scalp. “This can’t be good. What have they in there?”

“Something to control me. A machine.”

Bee looked wasted with sadness, that expression from the beginning of Jackrabbit’s wake. “We’re all at war. You’re a prisoner of war. May you free yourself.” Gently he hugged her.

She laughed shortly, disentangling herself. “How can I?”

“Can I give you tactics?” Bee turned her chin back toward him. “There’s always a thing you can deny an oppressor, if only your allegiance. Your belief. Your cooping. Often even with vastly unequal power, you can find or force an opening to fight back. In your time many without power found ways to fight. Till that became a power.”

“But you’re still fighting. It isn’t over yet!”

“How is it ever over?” Luciente waved a hand. “In time the sun goes nova. Big bang. What else? We renew, regenerate. Or die.”

“But you don’t seem to believe really in
more
—not more people, more things, or even more money.”

Luciente leaned against a pine, her fingers playing with the ridged bark. “Someday the gross repair will be done. The oceans will be balanced, the rivers flow clean, the wetlands and the forests flourish. There’ll be no more enemies. No Them and Us. We can quarrel joyously with each other about important matters of idea and art. The vestiges of old ways will fade. I can’t know that time—any more than you can ultimately know us. We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.”

“Do you think I don’t know you, Luciente?”

“Grasp, as people. I mean you can’t fully comprend our society, any more than I could one a hundred years past us. What new arts will our great-great-grandchildren invent? What old arts discover? What musical instruments will they build? What games? What inknowing? What new foods, what styles of cooking? What sciences we can’t imagine? What new way of healing? Will they sail far into our galaxy? Travel on the submicroscopic strata? When each region is ownfed, when reparations are completed, what then? Sometimes … sometimes I want to live forever!” Luciente flung back her head. “But I know I’ll find my death ripe. I’ll want to lay my body
down, I myself, and be done. But now I’d like to travel forward into that future as you traveled to us. I know there’s no real point to it Now suffices. Yet I’m very glad to be knowing you, Connie.”

A strange high whistling came through the air, nearer and nearer. Bee and Luciente froze; then they motioned to her and began trotting swiftly in the direction Bee had just come from.

“Fast! Run!” Luciente mouthed at her over her shoulder. Bee dropped back to urge her forward as they ran.

The high penetrating screech grew louder and louder still. It bored through her ears and seemed to whine round and round in her skull. Pain like a drill sang in her marrow. No longer did the pain seem to enter only through her ears; her bones seemed to vibrate at a pitch too high to bear. She was a tuning fork shivering in pain.

“Run, Connie! Run!” Bee urged. “Sonic sweeps kill. The reflectors are over the bridge. Run!”

She tried to keep up, but she could not run as fast. Panting, her sides stabbing, she fell farther and farther behind. They paused to wait Luciente ran back to drag her along. The high drill of the whining shook her. She crumpled to the ground, clawing at her head. “Go on! Save yourself!”

“There. Her eyelids fluttered. She’s coming out of it”

She opened her eyes. The nurse stood over her. An aide bustled off with a message.

“What were you trying to say when you came to?” Nurse Roditis bent close. “Something about going on.”

“I don’t know.” She closed her eyes.

“Were you hallucinating?”

“She doesn’t have a history of hallucination.” Acker was hanging around the foot of her bed.

“That injection worked. Dr. Morgan will be pleased. But I don’t know what they’re going to do if this keeps happening.” Nurse Roditis sounded stem and judgmental. She made tsk-tsk sounds as she straightened the covers over Connie.

Luciente gripped her arm, pulling her down into the dugout. Behind decorative-looking screens and small pieces of equipment, some like the one Bee had been carrying on his back, the ground had been scooped out to rock. Her friends were occupying a slight rise over a stream. “Baffles and reflectors,”
Luciente explained tersely. “Keep down! They’ll be attacking our line.”

“Where is everyone?”

“We’re on the right flank. The line curves to our left, all the way to the river.”

Otter was cuddled in the dugout next to Connie, examining a bright fallen leaf from one of the maples growing along the stream. Pines stood behind them and a fringe of brilliant maples before. Their red and gold leaves were just starting to fall in drifts on the banks, to float past borne on the rocky stream, to collect in patches of color in eddies and pools.

“How does this touch you?” Otter asked and read off:

She looked at Otter in confusion. Otter was dressed in the same mottled jumpsuit, her hair in two long braids. From her broad nose to her glittering slits of eyes she looked proud of herself. Connie asked, “Is it a code message?”

“Code? It’s a poem—a cinquain. You don’t like it?”

“But … how can you write poems about leaves now!”

Otter’s brows wrinkled. “How not? We’re close to death. Then it’s natural to write poems, no? And we fall like leaves … .”

“Here they come,” Luciente said calmly, and they all settled into alert poses with their weapons.

The ground shook violently under her, yet she heard no explosion. In effect, nothing seemed to cause what was happening, yet the ground shook again and she felt sick. Again the ground shook and a tree split and toppled in front of them. Other trees were falling, while a boulder crashed from its perch and rolled fifty feet to lodge in a small basin. Cones pelted them as the birds fled crying terror, the jays shouting Thief, Thief as they flew. To their right someone screamed.

Then she saw the enemy coming: tall figures entirely encased in seamless metallic uniforms, clanking with heavy
metal and wearing helmets that enclosed their heads. They dodged from tree to boulder, from boulder to bush on the other side of the stream.

“Hold your fire,” Luciente whispered.

She found she was gripping something like a gun, although it was aimed by peering through a scope and focusing her eyes. Nervously she practiced with it. It responded quickly but she could not quite get the knack of stopping it. She was supposed to lock it in position somehow before she looked away from the target, but she kept stopping it too late.

More and more metal figures flitted clumsily through the trees, getting ready to attack in force across the water. “Hold your fire,” Luciente whispered again emphatically. “Pick off the ones that get through the barrage.” The she added in the tone of a prayer, “Forgive me, if you are living and I kill you.”

Bee and Otter mumbled a similar prayer, before Otter whispered, “Do you suppose any of them are people?”

The troops were massing in the far woods, preparing to break cover. More and more moved up into position. Finally they came clanking out, running pell-mell in waves down the shallow embankment to jump the small stream. Silently they came, except for the clanking of their metal parts. They did not scream or whoop.

Suddenly she was standing in the living room of the apartment where she had lived with Martin. Hot. Sweat ran down her back and collected under her breasts. The air was so thick and sulfurous she began to cough. She was frightened, her stomach ached with fear. Why? Martin was down there somewhere. Yes, in the street he was barricaded behind turned-over cars, throwing bottles and rocks at the police. The riot police, the TPF, armed with rifles and shotguns and pistols and tear gas canisters and gas grenades, came clanking down the street, stiff and mechanical. But their voices bouncing off the houses were course with the joy of fury:
Motherfuckin cocksuckin nigger spics!

She stood at the window watching, clutching herself across the breasts in her flower print summer dress. Martin was out there somewhere, screaming helpless rage and about to be murdered, as the police gunned down a fourteen-year-old they said had stolen a car, starting this riot. Then one of the police
had turned and, seeing her at the window, raised his gun and shot right at her. The window shattered inward. In terror she screamed and fell to the floor among the breaking glass. For two days she had picked bits of glass out of her arms. But he had missed her. They had missed Martin too that time.

“I think she’s coming to, Doctor.”

“Patty, did you get hold of Redding? Get on it Find him.”

“Doctor, his secretary says he’s on the way over.”

“If we lose this implantation, it won’t look good,” Dr. Morgan muttered. “When did she say he left?”

“Ten minutes ago, Doctor.”

“Did she say he was driving straight uptown?”

“She didn’t say, Doctor.”

“And you didn’t ask,” he said with sour satisfaction, glad to find somebody to blame for something. “What about Dr. Argent?”

“I couldn’t get hold of him, Doctor. He’s guest lecturer this morning at Dr. Sanderman’s pathology class. His secretary expects him in his office around eleven-thirty.”