Fountain of Age

by Nancy Kress

  Then I sat on the filthy curb like a drunk, a doper, a bum, and cried.

  * * * *

  It was easier to get into Manhattan back then, with the Dome only half-finished. Not so easy to get into ViaHealth Hospital. In fact, impossible to get in legitimately, too many rich people in vulnerable states of illness. It took me six weeks to find someone to bribe. The bribe consumed half of our savings, Miriam's and mine. I got into the system as a cleaning-bot supervisor, my retinal and voice scans flimsily on file. A system-wide background check wouldn't hold, but why should anyone do a system-wide background check on a cleaning supervisor? The lowliest of the low.

  Then I discovered that the person I bribed had diddled me. I was in the hospital, but I didn't have clearance for Daria's floor.

  Robocams everywhere. Voice- and thumbprint-controlled elevators. I couldn't get off my floor, couldn't get anywhere near her. I'd bribed my way into the system for two days only. I had two days only off from my job.

  By the end of the second day, I was desperate. I ignored the whispered directions in my earcomm—"Send an F-3 ‘bot to disinfect Room 678"—and hung around near the elevators. Ten minutes later a woman got on, an aging, overdressed, and over-renewed woman in a crisp white outfit and shoes with jeweled heels. She put her thumb to the security pad and said, “Surgical floor."

  "Yes, ma'am,” the elevator said. Just before the door closed, I dashed in.

  "There is an unauthorized person on this elevator,” the elevator said, somehow combining calmness with urgency. “Mrs. Holmason, please disembark immediately. Unauthorized person, remain motionless or you will be neutralized."

  I remained motionless, looked at Mrs. Holmason, and said, “Please. I knew Daria Cleary long ago, on Cyprus, I just want to see her again for a minute, please ma'am, I don't mean anybody any harm, oh please...."

  It was on the word “harm” that her face changed. A small and cruel smile appeared at the corners of her mouth. She wasn't afraid of me; I would have bet my eyes that she'd never been afraid of anything in her life. Cushioned by money, she'd never had to be.

  "There is an unauthorized person on this elevator,” the elevator repeated. “Mrs. Holmason, please disembark immediately. Unauthorized person, remain motionless or you—"

  "This person is my guest,” Mrs. Holmason said crisply. “Code 1693, elevator. Surgical floor, please."

  A pause. The universe held its breath.

  "I have no front-desk entry in my system for such a guest,” the elevator said. “Please return to the front desk or else complete the verbal code for—"

  Mrs. Holmason said to me, still with the same small smile, “So did you know Daria when she was a prostitute on Cyprus?"

  This, then, was the price for letting me ride the elevator. But it's not like reporters wouldn't now ferret out everything about Daria, anyway.

  "Yes,” I said. “I did, and she was."

  "Elevator, Code 1693 Abigail Louise. Surgical floor.” And the elevator closed its doors and rose.

  "And was she any good?” Mrs. Holmason said.

  I wanted to punch her in her artificial face, to club her to the ground. The pampered lousy bitter bitch. I stared at her steadily and said, “Yes. Daria was good."

  "Well, she would have to be, wouldn't she?” Sweetly. The elevator opened and Mrs. Holmason walked serenely down the corridor.

  There were no names on the doors, but they all stood open. I didn't have much time. The bitch's secret code might have gotten me on this floor, but it wouldn't keep me there. Peter Morton Cleary unwittingly helped me, or at least his ego did. The roboguard outside the third doorway bore a flashy logo: CLEARY ENTERPRISES. I dashed forward and it caught me in a painful vise.

  But Daria, lying on a white bed inside the room, was awake and had already seen me.

  * * * *

  The Renewal Center keeps me for an extra week. I protest, but not too much. What good will it be if I leave early and fall down, an old man in the street? Okay, I could rent a roboguard—not a good idea to take one from the Feder Group, I don't want Geoffrey tracking me. It's not like I won't already have Agent Alcozer and the other Agent, the hard-eyed beauty, whose name I can't remember. Memory isn't what it used to be. Renewal only goes so far.

  It's not, after all, D-treatment.

  But I don't want a roboguard, so I spend the extra week. I refuse Geoffrey's calls. I do the physical therapy the doctors insist on. I worry the place on my bony finger where my ring used to be. I don't look at the news. There's going to be something, at my age, that I haven't seen before? Solomon was right. Nothing new under the sun, and the sun itself not all that interesting either. At least not to somebody who hasn't left the Brooklyn Dome in ten years.

  Then, on my last day in the Center, the courier finally shows up. I say, “About time. Why so long?” He doesn't answer me. This is irritating, so I say, “Katar aves? Stevan?” Do you come from Stevan?

  He scowls, hands me the package, and leaves.

  This is not a good sign.

  But the package is as requested. The commlink runs quantum-encrypted, military-grade software piggy-backing on satellites that have no idea they're being used. The satellites don't know, the countries owning them don't know, the federal tracking system—and the feds track everything, don't believe the civil-rights garbage you hear at kiosks—can't track this. I take the comm out into the garden, use it to sweep for bugs, jam two of them, and make some calls.

  The next day I check myself out. I wave at the federal agent in undercover get-up as a nurse, get into the car that pulls up to the gate, and disappear.

  * * * *

  "Max,” Daria said from her hospital bed all those decades ago, in her voice a world of wonder. She snapped something in Farsi to the guard ‘bot. It let me go and returned to its post by the door.

  "Daria.” I approached the bed slowly, my legs barely able to carry me. Half her head was shaved, the right half, while her wild black hair spilled down from the other side. There were angry red stitches on the bare scalp, dark splotches under her eyes, a med patch on her neck like a purple bruise. Her lips looked dry and cracked. I went weak—weaker—with desire.

  "How ... how you have...” Her English had improved in ten years, but her accent remained unchanged, and so did that adorable little catch in her low voice. To me that little catch was femininity, was Daria. No other woman ever had it. Her green eyes filled with water.

  "Daria, are you all right?” The world's stupidest question—she lay in a hospital room, a tumor in her brain, looking like she'd seen a ghost. But was the ghost me, or her? I remembered Daria in so many moods, laughing and lusting and weeping and once throwing a vase at my head. But never with that trapped look, that bitterness in her green, green eyes. “Daria, I looked for you, I—"

  She waved her hand, a sudden crackling gesture that brought back a second flood of memories. Nobody had ever had such expressive hands. And I knew instantly what she meant: the room was monitored. Of course it was.

  I leaned close to her ear. She smelled faintly sour, of medicine and disinfectant, but the Daria smell was there, too. “I'll take you away. As soon as you're well. I'll—"

  She pushed me off and stared incredulously at my face. And for a second the universe flipped and I saw what Daria saw: a raggedy unshaven putz, with a wedding ring on my left hand, whom she had not seen or heard from in eight years.

  I let her go and backed away.

  But she reached for me, one slim hand with the sleeve of the lace nightgown falling back from her delicate wrist, and the Daria I remembered was back, my Daria, crying on a rocky beach the morning my shore leave ended. “Oh, Max, stay!” she'd cried then, and I had said, “I'll be AWOL. I can't!"

  "I can't,” she whispered now. “Is not possible ... Max....” Then her eyes went wide as she gazed over my shoulder.

  He looked older than his holograms, and bigger. Dressed in a high-fashion business suit, its diagonal sash an aggressive crimson, the clothes cu
t sleek because a man like this has no need to carry his own electronics, or ID, or credit chips. Brown hair, brown beard, but pale gray eyes, almost white. Like glaciers.

  "Who is your guest, Daria?” Cleary said in that cool voice the Brits do better than anybody else. I served under enough of them in the war. Although not like this one; no one like this had crossed my path before.

  She was afraid of him. I felt it rather than saw it. But her voice held steady when she said, “An old friend."

  "I can imagine. I think it's time for your friend to leave.” Within an hour, I was sure, he would know everything there was to know about me.

  "Yes, Peter. After two more minutes. Alone, please."

  They gazed at each other. She had always had courage, but that look chilled me down to my cells. Only years later did I know enough to recognize it, when the Feder Group was involved with hostile negotiations: I offer you this for that, but I despise you for making me do it. Done? The look stretched to a full minute, ninety seconds. There seemed to be no air left in the room.

  Finally he said, “Of course, darling,” and stepped out into the hall.

  Done? Done!

  What had Daria become since that morning on the rocky Cyprus beach?

  She pulled me close. “Nine tonight by Linn's in alley Amsterdam big street. Be careful you not followed.” It was breathed in my ear, so softly that erotic memories swamped me. And with them, anguish.

  She was not my Daria. She had stolen my Daria, who might have sold her body but never her soul. My Daria was gone, taken over by this manipulating, lying bitch who belonged to Peter Morton Cleary, lived with him, fucked him....

  I hope I never know anger like that again. It isn't human, that anger.

  I hit her. Not on her half-shaven scalp, and not hard. But I slapped her across her beautiful mouth and said, “Face it, Daria. You always were a whore.” And I left.

  May the Master of the Universe forgive me.

  * * * *

  I have never been able to remember the hours between ViaHealth Hospital and the alley off Amsterdam Avenue. What did I do? I must have done something, a man has a physical body and that body must be in one place or another. I must have dodged and doubled back and done all those silly things they do in the holos to lose pursuers. I must have dumped my commlink; those things can be traced. Did I eat? Did I huddle somewhere behind trash cans? I remember nothing.

  Memory snaps back in when I stand in the alley behind Linn's, a sleazy VR-parlor franchise. Then every detail is clear. Hazy figures passed me as they headed for the back door, customers maybe, going after fantasies pornographic or exciting or maybe just as sad as mine. A boy in one of the ridiculous caped-and-mirrored sweaters that were the newest fashion among the young. A woman in a long black coat, hands in her pockets. An old man with the bluest eyes I have ever seen. These are acid-etched in my memory. I could still draw any one of them today. The alley stank of garbage cans and urine—how did Daria even know of such a place?

  And what was I expecting? That she would come to me, sick and thin from illness, wobbling toward me in the fading light? Or that Peter Cleary would arrive with goons and guns? That these were my last minutes on Earth, here in a reeking alley under the shadow of the half-finished struts that would eventually support the Manhattan Dome?

  I expected all of that. I expected nothing. I was out of my mind, as I have never been before or since. Not like that, not like that.

  At nine o'clock a boy brushed past me and went into the VR parlor. He kept his head down, like a teenager ashamed or embarrassed about going into Linn's, and so I only glimpsed his face. He might have been Greek, or Persian, or Turkish, or Arab. He might even have been a Jew. The package dropped into my pocket was so light that I didn't even feel it. Only his hand, light as a breeze.

  It was a credit chip, tightly wrapped in a tiny bit of paper that brought to mind that other paper, with Daria's kiss. In ink that faded and disappeared even as I read it, childish block letters said LIFELONG, INC. MUST TO BUY TONIGHT!

  The chip held a half million credits.

  I hadn't even known that she could read and write.

  * * * *

  The car that takes me from the Brooklyn Renewal Center is followed, of course. By the feds and maybe by Geoffrey, too, although I don't think he's that smart. But who knows? It's never good to underestimate people. Even a chicken can peck you to death.

  The car disappears into the underground streets. Aboveground is for the parks and paths and tiny shops and everything else that lets Dome dwellers pretend they don't live in a desperate, angry, starving, too-hot world. I lean forward, toward the driver.

  "Are you an Adams?” This is an important question.

  He glances at me in his mirror; the car is not on auto. Good. Auto can be traced. But, then, Stevan knows his business.

  The driver grins. “Nicklos Adams, gajo. Stevan's adopted grandson."

  All at once I relax. Who knew, until that moment, that my renewed body was so tense? With reason: It had been ten years since I'd seen Stevan and things change, things change. But “gajo,” the Romanes term for unclean outsiders, was said lightly, and an adopted grandson holds a position of honor among gypsies. Stevan is not doing this grudgingly. He has sent his adopted grandson. We are still wortácha.

  Nicklos stays underground as we leave Brooklyn, but he doesn't take the Manhattan artery. Instead he pulls into a badly lit service bay. We move quickly—almost running, I have forgotten how good it feels to run—to a different level and get into a different car. This car goes into Manhattan, where we change again in another service bay. I don't question the jammers; I don't have to. Stevan and I are wortácha, partners in an economic enterprise. Once we each taught the other everything we both knew. Well, almost everything.

  When the car emerges aboveground, we are in open country, heading toward the Catskills. We drive through the world I have only read about for ten years, since I went into the Silver Star Retirement Home. Farms guarded by e-fences or genemod dogs, irrigated with expensive water. Outside the farms, the ghost towns of the dead, the shanty towns of the barely living. Until the micro-climate changes again—give it a decade, maybe—this part of the country has drought. Elsewhere, sparse fields have become lush jungles, cities unlivable heat sinks or swarming warrens of the hopeless, but not here. A lone child, starveling and unsmiling, waves at the car and I look away. It's not shame—I have not caused this misery. It's not distaste, either. I don't know what it is.

  Nicklos says, “The car has stealth shields. Very new. You've never seen anything like it."

  "Yes, I have,” I say. Reuven's ‘bot dog, a flash of nearly invisible light, my arms flailing at the stupid thing. My ring with Daria's hair, her kiss. All at once my elation at escaping Brooklyn vanishes. Such foolishness. I'm still an old man with a bare finger and an ache in his heart, doing something stupid. Most likely my last stupid act.

  Nicklos watches me in the mirror. “Take heart, gajo. So ci del o bers, del o caso."

  I don't speak much Romanes, but I recognize the proverb. Stevan used it often. What a year may not bring, an hour might.

  From your mouth to God's ears.

  * * * *

  From the alley behind Linn's I went straight to a public kiosk. That was how little I knew in those days: no cover, no dummy corporation, no off-shore accounts. Also no time. I deposited the five hundred thousand credits in my and Miriam's account, thereby increasing it to a 500,016. Fortunately, the deposit proved untraceable because Daria knew more than me —how? How did she learn so much so fast? And what had such knowledge cost her?

  But I didn't think those compassionate thoughts then. I didn't think at all, only felt. The credits were blood money, owed me for the loss of the other Daria, my Daria. The Daria who had loved me and could never have married Peter Morton Cleary. I screamed at the screen in the public kiosk, I punched the keys with a savagery that should have gotten me arrested. As soon as the deposit registered, I went to a tr
ading site, read the directions through the red haze in my demented mind, and bought a half million worth of stock in Lifelong, Inc. I didn't even realize that it was among the lowest-rated, cheapest stocks on the exchange. I wouldn't have cared. I was following Daria's instructions from some twisted idea that I was somehow crushing her by doing this, that I was polluting her world by entering it, that I was losing these bogus credits exactly as I had lost her. I was flinging the piece of her dirty world that she'd given me right back in her face. I was not sane.

  Then I went and got drunk.

  It was the only time in my life that I have ever been truly drunk. I don't know what happened, where I went, what I did. I woke in a doorway, my boots and credit chip with its sixteen credits stolen, someone's spittle on my shirt. If it had been winter, I would have frozen to death. It was not winter. I threw up on the sidewalk and staggered home.

  Miriam screaming and crying. My head pounded and my hands shook, but I had thrown up the insanity with the vomit. I looked at this woman I did not love and I had my first clear thought in weeks: We cannot go on like this.

  "Miriam—"

  "Shut up! You shut up! Just tell me where you were, you don't come home, what am I supposed to think? You never come home, even when you're here you're not here, this is a life? You hide things from me—"

  "I never—"

  "No? What is that plastic bubble with your old uniform? Whose hair, whose kiss? I can't trust you, you're devious, you're cold, you—"

  "You went through my Army uniform? My things?"

  "I hate you! You're a no-good son-of-a-bitch, even my mother says so, she knew, she told me not to marry you, find a real mensch she said, this one's not and if you think I ever really loved you, a stinking sex maniac like you but—” She stopped.

  Miriam is not stupid. She saw my face. She knew I was going to leave her, that she had just said things that made it possible for me to leave her. She continued on, without drawing new breath or changing tone, but with a sudden twisted triumph that poisoned the rest of our decades together. Poisoned us more, as if “more” were even possible—but more is always possible. I learned as much that night. More is always possible. She said—