Hopscotch

by Kevin Anderson

  He swiped the keycard, unlocked the access door, and tugged it open, dragging Olaf's clothes along with him. He would get dressed in the stairwell, after the door was safely locked behind him.

  Olaf stumbled after him in Teresa's petite body, but Eduard pulled the access door shut before he could reach it. In the dim stairwell the reader panel blinked green, then red, automatically slamming dead bolts into place. The hapless maintenance man now found himself stranded on the roof, without clothes, in a strange woman's body. Muffled pounding came through the door.

  After he climbed into the worn coveralls, Eduard pocketed the keycard, but then decided he had no use for it. Instead, he set it on the top stair, where someone would find it. Olaf shouldn't have to pay a fine for losing that, at least.

  Eduard finished dressing. His clumsy fingers had difficulty with the seam-sealing tape, but at last he felt comfortable in his new identity. He could easily fake being a building maintenance man. After all, he'd been one.

  As he trotted down the stairs, already tired, he realized how out of shape Olaf was—especially in comparison to Mordecai Ob's physique. Even as the victim of a scam, Olaf had gotten the better end of the deal. He'd probably be too embarrassed to report it anytime soon. Eduard certainly hoped so.

  Meanwhile, Eduard had what he needed: a new, unrecognizable face and form. Now he could run.

  48

  Lights flashed, media spotlights dazzled the audience . . . but this time the attention wasn't for Garth.

  Pashnak accompanied him to see the debut of Juanita Cole, an innovative new creator whose work had been billed as “the most intriguing, most breathtaking to hit the art world in decades.” Garth heard this with a bemused smile, because the same hyperbole had been used to describe him not long ago. JOY and several other “panorama experience” art exhibitions had been raging successes for Garth. In only a year, Stradley had made him a star.

  Now, the hype-meister had presented them with two VIP invitations, encouraging Garth to see Juanita's astonishing accomplishments (not surprisingly, she was another one of Stradley's “projects”). It was always good to study the work of another groundbreaking artist.

  “Juanita's doing innovative things with aerogel sculpture,” Pashnak said as they wove their way through the well-dressed crowds. Tuxedoed security guards scrutinized each special invitation. “I could quote you some of Juanita's preliminary reviews, if you want more background.”

  “I've seen the reviews.” Garth studied the trappings of the exhibition: the laser rainbows and media scancopters, familiar from his own FRUSTRATION show, followed by JOY. Back then, he'd been swept up in the excitement, but this spectacle made him feel oddly uncomfortable. Perhaps a twinge of jealousy? “Maybe we shouldn't have come on opening night. We'll be lost in the noise, and we won't get a chance to have a good look. Let's come back in a week, when there's more elbow room.”

  Pashnak grabbed his arm. “It's not the same as opening night. Besides, you should get out more, keep in contact with your audience, understand what they want. How else can you connect with them?”

  Garth gave a reluctant sigh. “Even when you're pestering me, you're right.” He remembered how he had wandered among the innovative craftsmen at the open-air bazaar, searching for inspiration, studying techniques. Now that he was a success on his own, was he afraid to see what miracles another hot new talent could produce?

  He had increased his audience with each subsequent offering: FRUSTRATION, then JOY, then TRIUMPH. Thanks to the springboard Mordecai Ob had given him—despite what the dead Bureau Chief had done to Eduard—Garth was a bona fide sensation, a feeling both new and refreshing after so much obscurity.

  Still, as Pashnak led him into Juanita Cole's splashy debut, he felt the uneasiness return. Right now, he would rather have been visiting the baby—Emily—again, though that was impossible. Even after months, some part of him still responded to the psychological bond he had formed with the baby girl during pregnancy and childbirth. Sometimes, when his longing got bad enough, Garth wanted to hold Emily, touch her, but the mother seemed uncomfortable with his continued interest. She had fulfilled their contract, she said, and he'd gotten his birth experience. She asked him not to come again.

  With no other place to direct his emotions, Garth had incorporated those feelings into a new project. Maybe he'd send the curly-haired mother a free pass.

  Passing through the sparkling door arch, they were welcomed by professional greeters. Some of the smiling attendees even knew Garth's name, and Pashnak automatically made the appropriate acknowledgments for him.

  Garth walked through Juanita's wilderness of art. The hall had been made into a labyrinth of eerie, alien sculptures, free-form moldings of translucent aerogels, ultralightweight foams that were little more than solidified air. Juanita had concocted impossible geometries, overbalanced and distorted forms that gravity would never have allowed. The phantom material flexed and contracted with temperature variations, pulsing like something organic and alive.

  “It's a fairyland,” Pashnak said.

  “Or a nightmare.” But Garth's face held a flickering fascination.

  In the surreal multicolored forest, spangles of fiberoptics bristled through the aerogels. Mood lights shifted spectrum from red to blue; some of the sculptures were photoreactive, emitting time-delayed photons in different colors.

  They walked through the twisted, flexible forms and colors, ducking low and squeezing between. Spectators chattered excitedly among themselves. On their faces Garth saw childlike delight.

  Sensing his mood, Pashnak said, “This is totally different from your panorama experiences, Garth. You've got nothing to worry about.”

  He looked up at the ceiling, where aerogel clouds hung like frozen smoke. “Of course not. Who said I was worried?” His denial rang hollow, though. He had never been able to hide his feelings from his perceptive assistant.

  Working feverishly and never slowing down, Garth had achieved more fame than he had ever dreamed. Stradley had set him up for exhibition after exhibition. Everything ran like clockwork.

  In quiet moments of taking pleasure in his accomplishments, Garth usually turned his thoughts to Eduard and his plight. Pondering his friend's downfall and continuing ordeal, Garth was exploring darker territory in his next work—LOSS, a counterpoint to TRIUMPH. In LOSS, he examined broken dreams, failed attempts at finding happiness, the cruel emptiness after death, discord, or circumstance. He wove in subtle emotional threads, from profound grief to simple bittersweet regret, a mother's separation from her child. Life went out of control sometimes and crashed into a wall. Like Eduard had.

  Garth had not heard from his friend since the final night in Club Masquerade. Eduard was still on the run, still a fugitive, while Daragon and the BTL continued to pursue him. Garth wanted to help, but didn't know how. So he had created his new masterpiece in honor of Eduard . . . though he doubted his friend would ever see it. He intended to make LOSS his best work ever.

  Stradley had openly expressed skepticism about the work in progress, though. “Garth, you did your brash debut with FRUSTRATION. That's okay. It was an ‘angry young man' piece—not pleasant but profoundly moving. Everybody's entitled to one of those. The critics loved it, you got plenty of attention, and you made your audience. But nobody wants to pay credits for a show that'll depress them. LOSS? Who the hell wants to see that?”

  “I need to do it. It's the piece that . . . that wants to come out next.”

  Rolling his eyes, Stradley had muttered about crazy artists with no business sense. “All right, but I advise you that it won't be good for your career. Something called LOSS will be tough for me to push in a big way. You understand that?”

  “I understand. But I have to do it.” His work would speak for itself.

  In the wake of his successes, Garth had watched many people imitating his “panorama experience” technique. He had broken new ground, and now others trampled the same path, making it wider. Garth had b
een a pioneer, and a successful one at that . . . which placed him one step away from being passé in the fickle world of critics.

  Tonight, though, he found a new pioneer blazing a new trail. Juanita Cole's remarkable aerogel work dazzled him. These bizarre sculptures evoked primal reactions, a flowing feminine sensuousness, a powerful male rigidity. Her creations appealed to more than just his eyes and mind; they appealed to his instincts, as well. Young and angry, brash in her own way, she would make her mark, too.

  Garth stopped to contemplate a swirling mass of blue-green aerogel, a foaming circular funnel called Descent into the Maelstrom that seemed to draw him into its center. Fiberoptics cascaded in a descending ellipse, and his stomach twisted. He was forcefully reminded of the ocean in Hawaii, the clutching water and the undertow, the sensation of drowning. . . .

  Dizzy, he reached out for Pashnak. Once he regained his balance, he touched the sculpture's outer edge, pressed down on the ethereal material.

  “Please do not touch, sir.” A strident, automatic voice buzzed close to his ear as protective systems activated. “If you persist, security will be notified.”

  Garth stepped away, embarrassed.

  On their way back to the studio, Pashnak marveled at what Juanita had created. Garth, though, found it difficult to concentrate, and his reactions disturbed him. He wished it didn't bother him that Juanita Cole had begun to garner the same kind of attention he himself used to get. It seemed petty. I should be happy for her. I really should. But the paparazzi already considered him old news. Would the fickle public soon stop enjoying his exhibitions, quickly tiring of the “same old thing”?

  Pashnak looked at him with compassionate eyes. Attuned to Garth's thoughts and moods, the assistant understood what had triggered his funk. “Don't worry, Garth. You aren't one to rely on your past triumphs. Complacency leads to stagnation, after all. You have to keep pushing the envelope to redefine the boundaries. It's part of who you are.”

  “If you say so,” Garth said as they approached the door to the studio.

  “Yes, I do say so. And you'd better listen to me,” Pashnak said. “I'll make you some coffee. Then you'll feel better.”

  Garth slumped down on the sofa and thought about Juanita Cole. Before going to the exhibition he had checked on her background, learning who she was, where she'd come from. He imagined her to be a person filled with enthusiasm and drive, someone who had recovered from remarkable adversity, used her inner agony for artistic inspiration. She intrigued him.

  Instead of an anguished upbringing, though, Juanita actually knew her parents, had even grown up with her mother. They lived a comfortable, uninteresting, middle-class existence. She hadn't endured any tragedies, any hardships. She'd lived a bland, quiet, normal life.

  He couldn't figure out where Juanita got the power to put into her work. In order to achieve such pathos, wasn't an artist required to experience flaming emotions, highs and lows, the proverbial agony and ecstasy? Like he had endured with each item on his List?

  Somehow, though, Juanita Cole had found the flame within herself.

  Pashnak brought him a steaming cup of coffee. Garth took a sip and burned his tongue. The assistant hovered for a moment, before realizing that Garth wanted to be left alone. He touched the artist's shoulder compassionately, then quietly departed to his rooms.

  Alone, Garth contemplated in silence. He needed to regain his inspiration.

  Inspiration.

  Setting the coffee aside, Garth picked up his datapad and switched it on. Scrolling through the files, he scanned to see if there was anything worthwhile left on his List.

  49

  Eduard had managed to survive for months—that was something, at least. But with each passing day, the prospect of safety became slimmer and slimmer. He found himself at the ragged limits of what he could do.

  This wasn't the way he had imagined life as a Phantom would be.

  In the dead of night, Eduard crept out of a dark doorway from the access tunnels where he'd been lurking. In this quiet and cluttered section of the city, the streets were narrow, the shadows deep, tinged only by reflected lights on the popular boulevards.

  With COM monitoring all travel, he couldn't leave the city. Even so, the sprawling metropolis contained a million hiding places, but now he was hungry. Hungry enough to venture out again.

  Eduard listened, holding his breath. He glanced both ways, took another step into the open, exposed now but ready to dash back into hiding. Nothing . . . only the night and the distant sounds of traffic.

  The Beetles would never drop the case. Daragon would die before he ceased his search. Eduard had been fleeing, hopscotching from one person to another, scamming, running. He had thought it would get easier, but guilt made each swap as distasteful as the first. He had hated Mordecai Ob for using people, and now with each snatched body Eduard was himself doing a similar thing to escape prosecution. But fear kept him on the run.

  Eduard didn't know where he was anymore, or even what he looked like. Before long he'd traded Olaf's mediocre physique plus some of his precious unmarked credits to a dumpy-looking woman. No questions asked.

  Because of his dire straits, Eduard had been unable to check her health beforehand. He should have been suspicious when she'd agreed so readily to take Olaf's uninteresting body, without requiring a medical scan. Only after he'd run off, with no way to trace her again, did Eduard realize that something was terribly wrong. The dumpy woman suffered from a degenerative muscular condition, and Eduard was stuck with it until he could trick someone else into swapping.

  From there, he'd hopscotched into a swarthy, ugly parolee who'd been sentenced to live in a brutish Quasimodo body for a year. The parolee willingly accepted the overweight woman's body, degenerative condition or not, though he would suffer a stiff fine at the end of his term. Still, he could at least go about his business without being bombarded by scornful expressions and glares and insults, and he'd get his original form back at the end of his sentence anyway.

  After a while Eduard traded the muscular parolee for a rail-thin underground worker, a weakling often tormented by fellow employees in the subsurface tunnels. To the worker, the parolee's ugliness didn't matter—only the sheer brawn did. Down in the dirty tunnels, no one could see what he looked like anyway. . . .

  Eduard took one crisis at a time. He did not worry about slippage, the ever-present chance that he might lose himself in a swap. That was the least of his concerns. He was forced to hopscotch for keeps, in a hurry and without a record of the transaction, without any legal contract or medical scans. Therefore, he had to keep swapping into less desirable bodies as his resources ran out. He always got the worse end of the deal—older, uglier, more decrepit.

  He'd done his best to cover his tracks. With all of his precautions, everything he had done—backtracking, hopscotching, hiding—he should have slipped through the Beetles' net, but they maintained a tight, nearly invisible cordon at all routes out of the city. Thanks to public COM reports, Eduard knew that Daragon remained hot on his trail. Each time he hopscotched, he left a vital clue or loose thread.

  After Olaf had gotten himself rescued from his embarrassing rooftop predicament, he'd reported the body theft to the Bureau of Tracing and Locations. Before long, Olaf had gladly traded back to his original lanky form, offering Teresa's waifish body to the delighted woman who had suffered from the degenerative disease. Not long afterward, the parolee had sought medical treatment for his new dumpy female body, which had then placed that transfer on record.

  Thus, Daragon followed Eduard step by step.

  Now, Eduard stood in the dark streets, shivering in his rail-thin form. He had few clothes, few resources left. He began to walk toward the boulevard, to see what food he could find or scam.

  The business district beyond the darkened fringe glistened with holographic advertisements. Eduard could be anonymous among the shops and restaurants and mingling groups of people. The boulevard seemed a long way to walk, b
eyond a greenway and darkened park. He didn't have many unmarked credits left, but he needed a decent meal. . . .

  As he crept toward the central business district, Eduard looked up to see a shadow eclipsing the faded starlight: a surveillance chopter, completely black except for the white BTL logo on the side.

  A blaze of lights pounded around him. Eduard knew better than to ask questions or concoct explanations. He bolted back into the shadowy alleys where the buildings pressed close together. Debris was piled around the collapsed entrances.

  With warbling alarms, BTL hovercars streaked into position. In the buildings around him, lights winked on, then went dark as people opaqued their windows, barricaded their doors.

  And Eduard ran.

  He raced for the nearest doorway with his head bent low, lungs already burning, heart pounding. This rail-thin body was weak and tired, never meant for such sudden turmoil.

  Over the thunder of booted feet across street stones, loudspeakers bellowed his name. “Eduard Swan, we know you're down there. Surrender yourself immediately.”

  The voice changed as another person picked up the transmitter. “Eduard—it's Daragon. I'm here. I won't let anyone kill you. Stop and give yourself up. This is foolish.”

  Eduard didn't answer. That would take too much breath. He ducked into the sagging doorway and plunged down a metal staircase into tunnels beneath the old buildings. He had lived here for weeks and knew his way around better than any of the Beetles did—he hoped.

  But his pursuers had computer-guided maps and infrared detectors that could sense the residual heat of his every footstep. Eduard didn't have the energy to outsmart them. He just had to get away.

  Inside the tunnels, homeless refugees scrambled out of his way, faces he had seen but not spoken to in the shadows. Everyone down here was hiding from something, and though he wished he could have done something to help them all, Eduard had no time or resources to solve anyone else's problems.