Fountain of Age

by Nancy Kress

  Who has changed utterly. Rosie scrambles off the gravel scoop and pushes away the attendant, a push so strong the girl falls against the corridor wall. Rosie grabs my hand and drags me forward. At the doorway, both ‘bot and human bodyguards block the way. Rosie submits to a body search that ordinarily would have brought death to any man who touched a Rom woman in those ways, possibly including her husband. Rosie endures it like a pagan queen disdaining unimportant Roman soldiers. Me, I hardly notice it. I can't stop looking at Daria.

  Still eighteen, but utterly changed.

  The wild black hair has been subdued into a fashionable, tame, ugly style. Her smooth brown skin has no color under its paint. Her eyes, still her own shade of green, bear in their depths a defeat and loneliness I can't imagine.

  Yes. I can.

  She says nothing, just stands aside to let us pass once the guards have finished. The human one says, “Mrs. Cleary—” but she silences him with a wave of her hand. We stand now in a sort of front hall. Maybe it's white or blue or gold, maybe there are flowers, maybe the flowers stand on an antique table—nothing really registers. All I see is Daria, who does not see me.

  She says to Rosie, “What do you know of Cyprus? Were you there?"

  She must think Rosie was a whore on Cyprus when Daria herself was—the ages would be about right. But Daria's question is detached, uninvolved, the way you might politely ask the age of an historical building. Dating from 1649? Really. Well.

  Rosie doesn't answer. Instead she steps behind me. Rosie can't say my name, because of course we are all under surveillance. She must remain Mrs. Kowalski so that she can go home to Stevan. Rosie can say nothing.

  So I do. I say, “Daria, it's Max."

  Finally she looks at me, and she knows who I am.

  * * * *

  The Rom have a word for ghosts: mulé. Mulé haunt the places they used to live for up to a year. They eat scraps, use the toilet, spend the money buried with them in their coffins. They trouble the living in dreams and visions. Wispy, insubstantial, they nonetheless exist. I could never find out if Stevan or Rosie actually believed in mulé. There are things the Rom never tell a gajo.

  Daria has become a muli. There is no real interest in her eyes as she regards me. This woman, who once, in a hospital room, risked both our lives to bring me riches and atonement and shame, now has lived beyond all risk, all interest. Decades of being shut away by Peter Cleary, of being hated by people who make periodic and serious efforts to kill her, of being used as a biological supply station from which pieces are clipped to fuel others’ vanity, have drained her of all vitality. She desires nothing, feels nothing, cares about nothing. Including me.

  "Max,” she says courteously. “Hello."

  The throaty catch, the hesitation, is gone from her voice. For some reason, it is this which breaks me. Go figure. Her accent is still there, even her scent is still there, but not that catch in the voice, and not Daria. This is a shell. In her eyes, nothing.

  Rosie takes my hand. It is the first time in forty years, except for when she was crazy Mrs. Kowalski, that Rosie Adams has ever touched me. In her clasp I feel all of the compassion, the life, that is missing from Daria. Nothing could have hurt me more.

  I can't look any more at Daria. How do you look at something that isn't there? I turn my head and see Agent Alcozer round the corner of the hallway outside the apartment, running toward us.

  And then, at that moment and not a second before, I remember what stank about San Cristobel.

  The scam went through fine. But afterward, Moshe came to me. "They want to do it again, this time with a mole. They've actually got someone inside the feds, in the Central Investigative Bureau. It looks good."

  "Get me the details,” I said. And when Moshe did, I rejected the deal.

  "But why?” Anguished—Moshe hated to let a profitable thing go.

  "Because,” I said, and wouldn't say more. He argued, but I stood firm. The new deal involved another organization, the one the mole came from. The Pure of Heart and Planet. Eco-nuts, into a lot of things on both sides of the law, but I knew what Moshe did not and wouldn't have cared about if he had. The Pure of Heart and Planet were connected with the second big attack on LifeLong, on that Greek island. The Pure of Heart and Planet along with their mole in the feds, altered and augmented in sacrifice to the greater glory of biological purity, a guy from what used to be Des Moines.

  Alcozer runs faster than humanly possible. He carries something in his hands, a thick rod with knobs that I don't recognize. Weapons change in ten years. Everything changes.

  And Daria knows. She looks at Alcozer, and she doesn't move.

  The bodyguards don't move, either, and I realize that of course they've reactivated the force fence around the apartment. It makes no difference. Alcozer barrels through it; whatever the military has developed for the Central Investigative Bureau, it trumps whatever Sequene has. It handles the guard ‘bot, too, which just shuts down, erased by what must be the jammer of all jammers.

  The human bodyguard isn't quite so easy. He fires at Alcozer, and the mole staggers. Blood howls out of him. As he goes down he throws something, so small you might not notice it if you didn't know what was happening. I know; this is the first weapon that I actually recognize, although undoubtedly it's been upgraded. Primitive. Contained. Lethal enough to do what it needs to without risking a hull breach, no matter where on an orbital or shuttle you set it off. A MPG, mini personal grenade, and all at once I'm back on Cyprus, in the Army, and training unused for sixty-five years surfaces in my muscles like blossoming spores.

  I lurch forward. Not smooth, nothing my drill sergeant would be proud of. But I never hesitate, not for a nanosecond.

  I can only save one of them. No time for anything else. Daria stands, beautiful as the moment I saw her in that taverna, in her green eyes a welcome for death. Overdue, so what kept you already? But those would be my words, not hers. Daria has no words, which are for the living.

  I hit Rosie's solid flesh more like a dropped piano than a rescuing knight. We both go down—whump!—and I roll with her under the antique table, which is there after all, a heavy marble slab. My roll takes Rosie, the beloved of my faithful friend Stevan, against the wall, with me on the outside. I never hear the grenade; they have been upgraded. Electromagnetic waves, nothing as crude as fragments. Burns sluice across my back like burning oil. The table cracks and half falls.

  Then darkness.

  * * * *

  Romani have a saying: Rom corel khajnja, Gadzo corel farma. Gypsies steal the chicken, but it is the gaje who steal the whole farm. Yes.

  Yes.

  * * * *

  I wake in a white bed, in a white room, wearing white bandages under a white blanket. It's like doctors think that color hurts. Geoff sits beside my bed. When I stir, he leans forward.

  "Dad?"

  "I'm here."

  "How do you feel?"

  The inevitable, stupid question. I was MPG-fragged, a table fell on me, how should I feel? But Geoff realizes this. He says, quietly, “She's dead."

  "Rosie?"

  He looks blank—as well he might. “Who's Rosie?"

  "What did I say? I don't feel ... I can't..."

  "Just rest, Dad. Don't try to talk. I just want you to know that Daria Cleary's dead."

  "I know,” I say. She's been dead a long time.

  "So is that terrorist. Dead. It turns out he was actually a federal agent—can you believe it? But the woman you saved, Mrs. Kowalski, she's all right."

  "Where is she?"

  "She went back downstairs. Changed her mind about D-treatment. Now the newsholos want to interview her and they can't find her."

  And they never will. I think about Stevan and Rosie ... and Daria. It isn't pain I feel, although that might be because the doctors have stuck on my neck a patch the size of Rhode Island. Not pain, but hollowness. Emptiness. Cold winds blow right through me.

  When there's nothing left to desire, yo
u're finished.

  In the hallway, ‘bots roll softly past. Dishes clink. People murmur and someplace a bell chimes. Hollowness. Emptiness.

  "Dad,” Geoff says, and his tone changes. “You saved that woman's life. You didn't even know her, she was just some crazy woman you were being kind to, and you saved her life. You're a hero."

  Slowly I turn my head to look at him. Geoff's eyes shine. His thin lips work up and down. “I'm so proud of you."

  So it's a joke. All of it—a bad joke. You'd think the Master of the Universe could do better. I go on an insane quest for a ring eaten by a robotic dog, I assist in the mercy killing of the only woman I ever loved, I save the life of one of the best criminals on the planet—my own partner-in-law in so many grand larcenies that Geoff's head would spin—and the punch line is that my son is proud of me. Proud. This makes sense?

  But a little of the hollowness fills. A little of the cold wind abates.

  Geoff goes on, “I told Bobby and Eric what you did. They're proud of their grampops, too. So is Gloria. They all can't wait for you to come back home."

  "That's nice,” I say. Grampops—what a word. But the wind abates a little more.

  "Sleep, now, Dad,” Geoff says. He hesitates, then leans over and kisses my forehead.

  I feel my son's kiss there long after he leaves.

  So I don't tell him that I'm not going back home any time soon. I'm going to have the D-treatment, after all. When I do have to tell him, I'll say that I want to live to see my grandsons grow up. Maybe this is even true. Okay—it is true, but the idea is so new I need time to get used to it.

  My other reason for getting D-treatment is stronger, fiercer. It's been there so much longer.

  I want a piece of Daria with me. In the old days, I had her in a ring. But that was then, and this is now, and I'll take what I can get. It is, will have to be, enough.

  —THE END—

  * * *

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