Maximum Light

by Nancy Kress

  Somebody comes up behind me.

  “Hey, Walders. Jumpy, ain’t we?”

  It’s Bonnie DuFort, from C Company. She must of got left off park patrol again for bad conduct. She’s the kind the army should be rejecting, not me.

  “Fuck off, DuFort.”

  “I’m about to. Want to come?”

  I look at her, not saying nothing.

  “Yeah, I’m sitting in the corner with my widdle dunce cap again. And you’re not even really here anymore. Why haven’t you deleted this dump? Anyway, I’m not spending Saturday night around here. I’m going AWOL and meeting some she-wolves outside base and we’re training into town to right us some shared-responsibility sins. Want to come?”

  I shake my head no. I’ve never been one for rucky-fucky hunting—let the poor perverts do their sick thing, if they want to, who cares? DuFort don’t, she’s about as socially responsible as a cockroach. She don’t want to right any sins, she just wants a fight.

  “Still Little Miss Good Soldier,” DuFort taunts. “Still playing by the system rules.”

  “Shut up, DuFort.”

  “Still thinks the system’s going to reward her, just because she’s a young-young-young-ster.”

  I throw the shirt I’ve been holding all this time—Service green, with the NS logo on the pocket—on the floor. “All right! I’m coming.”

  “Great,” she says, and her eyes glitter.

  * * *

  We catch a train to DC. and meet two of DuFort’s friends in a bar. Teela and Dreamie. They’re a little older, mid-twenties maybe, neither one pretty. Dreamie’s reconfigured on something, probably thunder, her hands twitching and her eyes never still. Teela talks like she’s short a few lobes. Maybe burned ’em out. This isn’t supposed to happen to kids anymore—“tragic waste of our most precious resource”—yeah, right. I’m up for whatever they’re planning.

  Or at least, until I see what it is,

  “Go down, us, to International. The rucky-fuckies there, go in and out.” Dreamie talks like that. I can’t tell where she’s from. Maybe no place.

  “On,” DuFort agrees. “Go.”

  We catch another train. There’s a second when the maglev kicks in and I flash on the derailment at Lanham, but nothing happens to this train. We swing off in the high city, tall buildings all around and the place swarming with uniformed NSs working with the local cops. Traffic-and-crowd-control details. My eyes prickle.

  “Come on, Walders!” DuFort says. “Keep up!”

  We go down a series of alleys between and over buildings, badly lit. Dreamie and Teela really know the terrain. Finally we come out on a shallow ledge seven feet above the ground and deep in shadow; the lights are below us, shielded from weather by a little overhang. Beneath is a small street leading to a locked door.

  “Short cut for rucky-fucky actors,” Dreamie’s voice says softly to my left. “Go down, those, to the thee-ay-tah. La la la, rucky-fuckies.”

  I don’t answer. We wait. Eventually two girls come out of a nearby building and hurry toward the alley door. They palm it and go inside.

  “No,” Dreamie says beside my ear, so soft it could be a breeze stirring my hair. “Not girls. Not rucky-fucky.”

  We wait some more. As my eyes get used to the dark, I figure out that the smaller building opposite is a barracks or dorm or something, and the one right below us is part of the International Center. We’re not that far from the Hill—or from the building where the Congressional committee fucked me over.

  “La, la,” Dreamie breathes. The door opposite opens again. Two men stroll across, close together. They’re not holding hands, but it’s clear from their silhouettes that they’re together. Dreamie waits until they’re directly underneath, then jumps.

  She lands on one, takes him down. The other looks up—he can’t help it, poor bastard, it’s involuntary—and cries out. I see his upturned face clearly in the light above him, below us. Then Teela jumps, her feet knocking him onto the pavement. DuFort follows, giving a low, weird cry like nothing I hope to hear again.

  I don’t even think about it. I jump, too, and roll, coming up right beside Teela. She glances at me, smiling, knife in her hand. There’s just time for her face to change one minute’s worth before I knock the knife away from her victim’s crotch and deck her with a right cross. She goes down.

  Dreamie’s on top of the other one, with DuFort at his head holding his arms flat on the pavement. She slashes open his tunic and tights, cutting his prick a little, but not really. She waits a bit for that, savoring. She never even sees the kick I aim at her chin. Her head snaps back and she falls, quiet.

  DuFort lets go of the guy’s arms. She don’t know what’s going on, but she knows she don’t like it. She grabs up Dreamie’s knife and squares off at me.

  “I got no fight with you, DuFort. None.”

  She don’t believe me. She circles, looking for an opening. I’m not armed, but I don’t need to be. You learn a lot during the nights at government schools after the only kids left are the ones nobody wants to adopt. More than you learn in NS training. We circle, and feint, and it takes me a few minutes to get the knife away from her.

  By that time, the rucky-fucky boys are gone. They stagger to the door, palm it, slam it. I disarm DuFort, take the knife, and start off running. I don’t know the terrain, but she don’t know it neither. I run through streets until I’m sure she’s not on my ass, ditch the knife, and catch a train back to base. There I finish packing my stuff, call a cab, and go to a cheap hotel where NS lovers shack up. The air conditioning’s broke. I lie on the bed, sweating, thinking.

  The rucky-fucky boys got away inside all right. Not hurt.

  I saw the one’s face, tipped up in the light after Dreamie landed on his buddy.

  It was a beautiful face: skin a light brown, not white and not black and not Hispanic and not Asian, but sort of all of them. Firm molded mouth. Big hazel eyes, flecked with gold. Small round chin. A different face, half kid and half not. A face that could be anything, any age. I’m good at faces. I always have been. It was fifteen years older on that actor, but I still know the face.

  It was the same one I seen on the three chimps being carried away from the Lanham wreck.

  * * *

  The next day I go down to the train station to find a public terminal. Just my luck, the station’s turned into a circus, with the government holding one of its stewdee Shared Responsibility Fairs. There’s tables where volunteer doctors give patch vaccinations against whatever diseases feeble fusties get. There’s booths for getting physicals from smart systems, and booths for getting vid information, and booths for kids to get their free Grandma Ann dolls and All Of Us! board games, booths for getting fucked over by this agency or that agency. The fusties going to these things are talking and laughing like its a big treat to trot around a dusty train station getting poked at by doctors and interviewed by charities. Poor bastards.

  Music plays nonstop, real loud so anybody deaf can hear it. Stewdee stuff from the last century when these mossteeth were young. I try to close my ears to some fart bellowing about bridges and troubled waters. Wherever there isn’t no booths, there’s chairs jammed in so the geezers can sit down a lot, or railings so they can walk along without falling over.

  To get to the public terminal, I have to squeeze between a blood-test table and a weird booth giving away pets to geezers. “Studies show that the care of a pet raises life expectancy, happiness, and personal-health index,” the continuous-loop holo says, so cozy you want to barf on the whole program. Behind the holo is a live person, and behind him are stacked pens with kittens, puppies, and even rabbits. God, I hate rabbits. Twitching their nervous noses at you like they’re afraid you’ll squash them, scared of their own stewdee tails. But at least these rabbits looked healthy, not like the ones we saw more and more of in the woods behind the government school. Missing legs, stumpy ears. Once I saw one with three eyes.

  On top of the loud music, there’s y
ipping from the puppies and, of course, the noise of trains coming and going over on the maglevs. It’s a fucking zoo.

  “How much?” shouts a ragged moldy oldie at the blood-test table.

  The nurse yells, “It’s free if you’re over seventy, ten dollars if you’re not.”

  “And if you’re over ninety they pay you,” shouts another fusty, and everybody laughs.

  I get to the terminal, put in my credit chip, and wait. First a whole long thing with flashy graphics comes up, urging young men to get tested for fertility (“It’s a shared responsibility!”) Finally the system actually gets around to asking me what I want, and I go brain-blank.

  I know how to use a system, of course, but mostly I’ve just done the stuff everybody does: buy things, send mail, look up train schedules, snoop in files that their stewdee owners don’t make secure. I know the public interacts can do a lot of other things, but I don’t know what they are, and I don’t know how to ask.

  So I stare at the screen, which asks me again to proceed. Proceed how? I’m paying for these minutes. Finally I say, “I want to locate somebody, but I don’t know his name.”

  “I’m sorry,” the terminal says in that pleasant, stewdee voice they all have, “This system doesn’t recognize your request. Please either phrase it in spoken computer, or use the typing option.”

  I don’t know the spoken computer for this. You have to get the exact right words. So I type I want to find sumbody but I don’t kno his name.

  The terminal types back Enter current known information about subject person. Enter one item of information per line. It’s stopped saying please. That makes me feel more comfortable. It’s more like the Service.

  I type:

  He is a acter.

  He is about twenty yeers old.

  He has black hair.

  He has hazle eyes.

  He is about five feet ate inchs.

  He ways about 150.

  He is hansome.

  He acts in Washington.

  He is homosexal.

  The computer types Public citizen information does not include physical appearance or police records. Do you wish a list of Stage Guild actors and/or Screen Guild actors and/or virtual reality Guild actors with Equity-registered appearances in Washington, D.C.?

  Do I? Then I realize what an ass I’m being. I type He acts at the Internashunul Center. Right now. And there on the screen is the icon of a booklet.

  I page through it. A lot of names, listed by the things they’re in. There aren’t just actors but also dancers, musicians.… I remember the glide-y way he and his rucky-fucky lover walked and I say aloud, “Print just the names of dancers.”

  The system don’t know what I mean. So I page through the icon and print the list of every dance company in the summer season. There’s five: a jazz, a holo/light troupe, an Asian thing, a black folk dance thing, and a ballet.

  The amazing junk people will watch.

  I shove the list in my pocket and push my way out of the station, through the feeble-fossil crowd and the horrible music and the rows of booths and the Project Patriot holosigns. UNITED WE STAND! and AMERICANS HELPING AMERICANS! and YOUR FDA: PROTECTING YOU AND YOUR LOVED ONES. I go to find a cheap hotel. I don’t have no choice. If I don’t want to be noticed asking questions—and I don’t—I’m going to be in D.C. a while. Fortunately, nobody can’t spend much money confined to base, which I was a lot due to one thing or another, so I have credit saved up. It will last a few weeks. If I’m careful.

  How much are tickets to the International Center? Maybe I can crash the gate. No, I can’t. I can’t do nothing to get me noticed before it’s time. I’ll have to actually pay good credit for the tickets.

  Shit.

  * * *

  He’s not in the jazz dances. Everybody on the playbill has danced by the end of the first act, so at least I get to leave. He’s not in the holo/light troupe either, but at least the music don’t fart and there’s some good sfx. I fall asleep in the Asian folk dances, but that’s all right because even though his looks could have been Asian—he could have been almost anything—these dancers are really from Asia and I don’t think he’s one of them.

  The ballet dancers dance in masks.

  In fucking masks. They’re part of the costumes, part cloth or plastic or something and part holo, and they make the dancers look like birds or lights or fairies or whatever the hell they’re supposed to be. But there’s no way to identify anybody, and there are sixteen male names listed in the playbill.

  I squint at the stage through my zooms. From here, all the men look the same: slender, muscular, graceful, not real tall. He could be any of them, or none of them.

  I’m getting ready to storm out when I get an idea.

  The playbill, which I studied while waiting for the dancing to start, is probably printed fresh every day. but it has a “Season’s Substitutions” page, so you can see how often you didn’t get to see the performers you paid to see. Stupid idea. But some clenched-asshole computer type wanted to make the record complete. And there it is, the night Dreamie and Teela hit the rucky-fuckies:

  **Substituting for CAMERON ATULI in Dances at a Gathering and Moscow Morning pas de deux: MITCHELL REYNOLDS

  **Substituting for ROBERT RADISSON in Moderate Environment: ALONSO PERES

  Two dancers with bumps on their heads from being jumped on from seven feet up. One with a knife-nicked cock. But both back dancing the next night.

  Cameron Atuli or Robert Radisson.

  They both dance before intermission, some shit about a flood. Radisson, according to the playbill, is the stewdee standing around in a simple tunic, shifting his body every few minutes from one stupid pose to another. Atuli is a star. He dances in almost every scene, jumping and running and lifting some bitch who looks like she’s flying, although it’s probably all holo. I watch the whole damn ballet, until I’m sure. From his body movements when he lunges from her, the way he drops to his knees when they’re done making love, the angle he throws back his head to fake a howl. I can’t explain it, but I’m sure. The guy in the alley was Cameron Atuli, and it was Cameron Atuli’s face on the chimps in Lanham.

  The audience, all rusty fusties naturally, are going crazy: standing and clapping and yelling “Bravo!” I think the old lady next to me is going to have a heart attack, she’s so excited. An old gas attack behind me keeps saying, “The tradition lives. No matter what, Cissy, the tradition lives,” until I want to turn around and pop him. Tradition, my asshole. Good sperm is drying up and the country is moving into wheelchairs and youngsters like me are shattering ourselves trying to support all the old fucks, and this guy is thrilled out of his mind about the ballet tradition.

  But I don’t want to call no attention to myself, so I leave quiet, clutching the playbill that tells me when Cameron Atuli will dance next.

  I’ve already decided it has to be the International Center. The building plans are on public terminal: “an architectural treasure.” Any other building, a hotel or barracks or shit, and I’d be going in blind. Outdoors is too public, unless Atuli still uses the alley between his dorm and the Center. He probably don’t. Nobody’s that stupid.

  I know how I’ll get into the Center. You can’t bribe electronic security systems, but you can bribe computer rustlers. I know some, from my days before the Service. They’re expensive, and I don’t have much money, but that’s not the only way to pay. Most of the really good rustlers are old, they grew up when computers did, and I’m a gorgeous kid.

  And it all goes right. The rustler gets me in, and I find Atuli’s dressing room because his name is on the door program, and I wait. He strolls in, closes the door, switches off his holo costume of wiggling snakes. He takes off his mask. It’s the same face. He looks in the mirror, smiling at himself, and he sees me. I move in front of the door.

  He screams. I draw a stun gun—not the real thing, I can’t afford the real thing, but this rucky-fucky don’t know that—and say, “You don’t do th
at again. You really don’t. Now, tell me why I saw your face on three chimpanzees in the Lanham train wreck.”

  And it’s like he don’t even hear me. He’s looking around the room like there must be another door, which there isn’t. The old rustler I fucked shut down the security system for only ten minutes, with something called micro-intrusion, that he swore would confuse all the techie types while I got the info and got out.

  I say, “On! Talk!”

  And the rucky-fucky gabbles, “I’m Horethal. I’m Horethal.”

  “You’re what?” But my old rustler didn’t give me enough time, or he wasn’t good enough, or he screwed me. Because all of a sudden the door flies down and somebody with a real stun gun crashes through. And I go down.

  8

  NICK CLEMENTI

  Omar Khayyam was wrong.

  The moving finger, having writ, does go back and wash out. It does so by making what was sweet then, seem sour now, because it has all turned out so badly. The finger smudges the memory, and so smudges the past, which is all and only memory.

  My son had been a sweet child. There are vids of him at infancy, at two, at three—Maggie took a lot of vids of the children. Perhaps especially of John, the late-born child, the only boy, with his beautiful smile and wide brown eyes and fair skin flushed pink with health and activity. Maybe that was the problem. Sometimes beautiful people don’t know they must eventually become more.

  One warm July afternoon I returned from the labored daily walk I made myself take with the aid of a walking stick. The stick, an antique, was tipped with the carved head of an ass. This pleased me, but didn’t make the walk any easier. Each day I walked less far.

  John waited for me at the house, slouched in one of Maggie’s cheerfully flowered chairs, sipping bourbon. Scowling. I braced myself, the small imperceptible raising of mental shields, in itself dismaying when it’s your own child.

  “Hello, John.”

  “Dad.”

  “I’m glad to see you. Where’s your mother?”