by Nancy Kress
She could ask Thomas to find out.
But right now, she had to decide where to go, if she didn’t go home. Only she wanted to go home. She didn’t know how long this weird borrowed brain chemistry would last, and she wanted her own things around her, her pink bedroom and her crocheted blanket and Thomas. But if Cazie was there…
If Cazie was there, Theresa would just become somebody who could tell Cazie this wasn’t a good time to talk. Somebody who could say, “I’m sorry, but I’m tired and I need to sleep now.” Even if Theresa could only pretend to be that person for a minute. A minute might be enough, surely she could be somebody else for another minute…Leisha Camden. Leisha had always been calm and firm. Theresa would be Leisha Camden, calmly arguing the case for Sleepless rights with other lawyers, and Cazie would…
Cazie would override Theresa and chew her into tiny bits.
Theresa couldn’t be Leisha Camden in front of Cazie. It would be like propping yourself up with drinking straws in front of a hurricane. But maybe she could be Leisha Camden in front of herself. Pretend to have Leisha’s brain for just a minute, while she thought where to go and what to do. Leisha, who met problems head-on, trying to use reason to solve them…
If Leisha wanted to find out what was known about the fake holo of Miranda, she would go to the place most likely to know. Wherever it happened to be. Even Selene. But Selene wasn’t answering messages, and even if Theresa could nerve herself to space travel…but she couldn’t. She knew that. But maybe she wouldn’t have to go quite as far as Selene.
Theresa’s grip tightened on the holo cartridge. Could she really do this, even if she was pretending to be Leisha? Fly to an airport, hire a plane all by herself…no, it was too hard. Her breathing got ragged just thinking about it.
Then she thought about going home—and trying to avoid telling Cazie where Jackson was.
Theresa put her hands over her face, then straightened. She wasn’t Theresa Aranow, she was Leisha Camden. And thinking that would make her feel different, so her brain chemistry would shift just a little…She was Leisha Camden. She was.
“Manhattan East Airfield. Automatic coordinates,” she said to the car, and her voice did sound subtly different to her own terrified ears.
As the car lifted, Theresa had another thought. Take a neuropharm, Jackson always said. And Theresa never would, because she had been afraid of losing her special gift of pain, and the place it was supposed to lead her. She had always been afraid of using neuropharms to become somebody else.
Despite herself, Theresa laughed. It came out as a whimper.
She wondered who she would actually find, being whom else, in New Mexico.
The hardest part, it turned out, was hiring the pilot.
Theresa walked into Manhattan East’s airfield building on Lexington Avenue. It was a sleek old-fashioned building with wall programming entirely in shifting metals. People hurried past her toward various terminals or various doors. A group of men and women dressed in formal sarongs, laughing and joking. A man in a black holosuit, carrying a remote and a sheaf of printouts. A pleasant-faced elderly woman traveling alone. Theresa had just worked up enough nerve to speak to the woman when a round featureless robocam the size of a human head floated up to her.
“You’ve been standing still for two minutes, ma’am. May I help you with anything?”
“Oh, yes,” Theresa blurted to the floater. “I need…I want to hire a private plane. With a pilot. To fly the plane to…to New Mexico.”
“Our charter-plane booking service can be contacted from any customer terminal, ma’am. If there’s anything else I can—”
“But I don’t know how!”
“Excuse me, ma’am, while I run self-diagnostics.” The robocam whirred softly. “My programming shows no error in sensory functioning. You are a genemod adult?”
“Yes. I’m…I’m an adult. But I still don’t know how to use a customer terminal.” She could feel color flame in her face.
“Would you like me to demonstrate the system?”
“Oh, yes. Please.”
The robocam led her to a row of terminals. Theresa could at least recognize a credit-retina scan. She stood docilely against the screen until a pleasant low voice said, “Welcome to Manhattan East Airfield. Ms. Aranow. Desired flight number?”
The robocam said, “Charter plane service, please.”
“Certainly,” the system said.
Rows of writing appeared on the terminal. Theresa felt her color return; she was such a slow reader. But the robocam said, “Where do you wish to go, Ms. Aranow? And when do you wish to leave?”
“To New Mexico. Near Taos. And I want to leave right now. With…with a…” How did one ask for a pilot who wasn’t too scary? Theresa took a despairing step backward.
“Third flight requirement not understood. Please repeat,” the customer terminal said.
“Flying with somebody safe!”
“Three pilots with triple-A safety ratings are available within the next thirty minutes for domestic charter. Rush charges apply. Flying records displayed. Do you wish comlink with any of these three?”
The flying records were more small printing. But there were also pictures: three genemod-attractive faces. But not, somehow, donkey. No, of course not—these were techs. “That one. The woman. A comlink, yes.”
The pilot came on-line immediately. She looked in her late thirties, a strong face without makeup, all the beauty in the firm austere planes. Her voice, too, was firm and austere. “Ms. Aranow? You wish a pilot for an immediate flight to New Mexico?”
“Yes. No, I…don’t know.”
The pilot’s image leaned forward, studying the image of Theresa. “You don’t know?”
“No. Yes, I mean, I do know. I’m not going, I don’t need a pilot. It was a mistake.” She stumbled away from the terminal. The calm, strong voice stopped her.
“Ms. Aranow, the floater beside you will lead you directly to my plane. We can take off immediately. If you are ill, I can sent a go-’bot for you.”
“No, I…all right. I’m coming.”
She fixed her eyes on the floater, willing herself to see that and nothing else. Just a round gray ball, it wasn’t scary, just follow it without thinking…like Cazie would.
No, Cazie wouldn’t. Cazie would be flying her own plane to New Mexico.
All right, forget Cazie, she couldn’t be Cazie, but she needed to be somebody else because she, Theresa, couldn’t do this by herself, she could feel herself slipping into panic, who could she be, she hardly knew anyone but Leisha and Cazie…
And Jackson. Take a neuropharm, Tessie. All right, she was Theresa on a neuropharm. She was somebody who was chemically calm, someone who believed the world made sense—
“Hello, Ms. Aranow. I’m Pilot First Class Jane Martha Olivetti.”
Theresa was there already. The plane loomed beside them, even though Theresa didn’t remember riding the air field maglev from Manhattan East, or crossing the tarmac. Only now did she realize that the field was unshielded, or only peripherally shielded; this was real weather. Cold April wind. She shivered as she climbed into Pilot Olivetti’s plane.
“There are tranquilizer patches in the green box on that rack,” the pilot said in her calm voice. “EndorKiss in the red, HalluFun in the yellow. Sleep-Ease in the brown.”
Theresa looked longingly at the brown box. But most patches, Jackson said, were prepared for Changed bodies. He’d warned her not to use anything not adjusted for her unChanged chemistry.
“No, thank you. Just…just a blanket.” She was shivering, even though the plane was heated.
Somewhere over hills still topped with snow, Theresa fell asleep naturally. She woke when the pilot said, “Ms. Aranow, this is Taos. Do you want to set down here or at some private airfield?”
“Do you know where the airfield is for…for La Solana? Where Leisha Camden once lived?”
Pilot Olivetti turned in her seat and stared at Theresa. “Of cour
se. There used to be crowds of reporters and tourists going there all the time. And lately, people wanting to talk to Richard Sharifi about sending messages to his daughter. But it won’t do you any good to go there—Richard Sharifi never comes out. The most you’ll get is the standard recorded message.”
Theresa closed her eyes. What had she been thinking? Of course she wasn’t the first one to try to contact Miranda through La Solana. Probably everybody in the world had already tried—politicians and important people like that. And if Richard Sharifi didn’t see them, there was no reason he would see Theresa Aranow. She was a fool.
What would Cazie do?
“We’re here now,” she said to the pilot. “Go to La Solana.”
Pilot Olivetti shrugged and spoke to the plane.
Theresa saw the compound long before they reached it. A pale blue semi-ovoid on the desert floor, it shone as featureless and perfect as a robin’s egg. Terry Mwakambe, Miranda Sharifi’s most gifted practical physicist, had designed the shield for Leisha. There was nothing like it anywhere on Earth, except around the deserted island of Huevos Verdes, where Miranda and her people had created the Change syringes.
The shield wasn’t Y-energy, but something else—Theresa didn’t know what. It extended under the ground as well as through the air. Nothing with any DNA content not stored in the security banks got through the blue dome: not birds or worms or microbes. Nor did anything unaccompanied by DNA that was stored in the data banks: not ’bots or missiles or rocks. The shield also kept out all but a narrow range of radiation. And nothing that wasn’t nuclear could destroy the shield itself.
Theresa walked from the plane to the half-buried robin’s egg. Desert sun hit her uncovered head. A small wind stirred the incredible pile of rubble heaped against the shining blue. Stacks of holo cartridges. A child’s doll. A tattered American flag. Plastic flowers, bloody handkerchiefs, the bleached skull of some animal, wrecking tools, each bent and twisted. And a sealed, tiny coffin. Theresa’s gorge rose. Was it just symbolic, or did the coffin hold somebody’s unChanged baby, dead of a disease that could have been cured by more Change syringes?
A section of blue wall shimmered into a huge screen, ten feet square. It held the image of a man who appeared to be in his forties, although Theresa knew he was actually seventy-seven. The dark eyes above the heavy black beard looked weary.
“This is Richard Sharifi, Miranda Sharifi’s father. There is no admittance to La Solana under any circumstances. If you wish to speak a message for Miranda Sharifi, tell the recorder when you want it to start. All messages for Miranda will be beamed to Selene daily. No physical object you leave outside these walls will ever be retrieved or examined. Thank you.” The image disappeared.
That was it. Theresa clasped her hands in front of her. “Recorder start.”
“Recorder on.”
“My name is Theresa Aranow. You don’t know me. I’m…I’m not anybody. But there are babies dying from not being Changed—”
She stopped. Richard and Miranda Sharifi already knew that. What could she say that might interest them, convince them…of what? That people needed help? Who was she to think she could help anyone? Some days she could barely get out of bed in the morning.
But not this day. She tried again.
“I’m not anybody. I’m not even Changed. I wanted…I needed to keep what I am because I’m not normal for a donkey, and if I lose that then I lose Theresa. I lose…the way I’m supposed to be, to find what…I’m looking for.”
Something was happening inside her. The rush of competence she’d felt when she was being Cazie returned, only not because she was being someone else. Because she was being the most real, bedrock Theresa. The words rushed out the same way they had when she’d talked to Sister Anne at the convent for the Sisters of Merciful Heaven.
“I could be Changed, and maybe it wouldn’t matter. I’m expensive like I am, I know. I have to eat real food. I have to have a house kept free of germs. I have to have clean water. All those things cost money, and if I didn’t have so much money, and if my brother wasn’t a doctor, then it would be wrong for me not to be Changed because I would be such a burden on everybody else. But I do have money, and I do have Jackson, and so it would be wrong for me to arrange things so I don’t hurt. I have to hurt. Everybody needs to hurt in some way, or they get…sloppy. No, that’s not the word. Miranda—”
She was talking directly to Miranda, who wasn’t even on Earth, but that didn’t matter. Theresa rushed on.
“Miranda, I don’t know the word for how people get when they can’t feel hurt and alone. But something happens to them. When they take those kinds of neuropharms all the time they get so they can’t feel themselves, and then pretty soon they can’t feel other people either. They get like Cazie’s friends, and maybe even Cazie herself…I don’t know. Cazie is good underneath. But she did so many inhalers to cover up her hurt that pretty soon she couldn’t see Jackson’s hurt, and then pretty soon after that she couldn’t see Jackson at all. He’s just another piece of furniture in her life, or another ’bot.
“People have to hurt. They have to let themselves feel the hurt. They have to make themselves stand it, and not take it away with EndorKiss or neuropharms or sex or making money…it’s the only way we know we should do something different. That we should keep on looking harder, inside us and also inside everybody else…You can’t just go around the pain, you have to go through it to get to the place on the other side where your soul is…oh, I don’t know! I’m not smart enough to know! Something went wrong in my embryonic genemod, I’m not smart like Jackson or Cazie…but I do know that you have to give us more Change syringes, so babies can live long enough to even feel their own hurt and start to learn from it. Maybe you shouldn’t have given us the Change syringes at all. But you did, and now the Livers can’t survive without them because we donkeys just dumped them all, and we control the resources. So you have to give us more Change syringes so those children even live long enough to look for what matters.
“But there’s something else wrong, too. There’s a camp in New York—the state, not the city—that has a new kind of Change syringe. Red ones. And it’s doing something to those Livers. They’re bonding by pheromones or something in threes, so that if they go far from each other, they die. Really die. And the syringes came with a holo cartridge that has you in it, explaining the syringes are another gift from Miranda Sharifi. The Livers believe that. Only it’s wrong. The holo is a fake, and the new syringes just make it even harder for people to feel their own individual hurt and see each other. The triads are all blurred together in a blob, they’re not real people anymore, they have the comfort of never feeling alone but unless they can feel alone how can they ever feel their own hurt and then start to go through it to—”
“What new syringes?” Richard Sharifi said.
Theresa blinked. The image on the shimmering blue wall was real-time. Richard Sharifi’s sad dark eyes stared at her steadily, waiting for an answer.
“The…the new syringes somebody left at the…the camp in the mountains in New York, at…at…” She couldn’t remember the coordinates. “Red syringes, and there was a holo of Miranda that wasn’t really Miranda…”
Richard Sharifi turned his head. He frowned and said, “No—” His huge image abruptly shrank, until Theresa was looking at a screen no more than three inches square. On it Richard Sharifi was replaced by a plain woman with wild dark hair held by a red ribbon.
“Theresa. This is Miranda Sharifi.”
Theresa gasped, “Are you…are you sending from Selene?”
“Please tell me everything you can about this new syringe and holo cartridge left with the Liver tribe. Start at the beginning, go slow, and don’t leave anything out. It’s very important.”
A second three-inch-square image appeared—Richard Sharifi again, scowling fiercely. He said, “You should know that we have scanned you, your plane, and the area for any recording equipment. Your pilot is not observin
g you, and even if she were, this screen at that distance is too small for even the most powerful Sleeper zoom lenses to see. If you state to anyone that this conversation ever occurred, your chances of being believed are very low. Your medical records indicate—”
“Unnecessary, Daddy,” Miranda said, and now she was scowling, too. The tiny image of Richard Sharifi disappeared.
Theresa blurted, “You’re not at Selene at all, are you? You’re here…”
“Tell me everything about the new syringes, Theresa. Starting with how you happened to be in a Liver camp. No, don’t panic—I can’t send help out to you. Breathe deeply, look at this screen, Theresa, look at it—”
She did, gasping for air, through waves of panicky blackness. Around Miranda shimmered subtle shapes and colors, what were they, she felt a little calmer…Subliminals. Theresa breathed.
“Those…those are like a Drew Arlen concert!”
An expression of pain, complicated and deep, passed over Miranda’s face. “Tell me about the new syringes.”
Theresa did, growing calmer as she talked. Miranda listened without ever blinking her dark eyes. Dark like her father’s, too dark to be Cazie’s…But Theresa wasn’t pretending to be Cazie. She wasn’t even pretending to be Leisha Camden. She was Theresa Aranow.
“Miranda…turn off the subliminals. Please. I can…can do this. I think.”
For the first, and last, time, Theresa saw Miranda Sharifi smile.
When she was done talking, Theresa said, “But if you didn’t make the new syringes, who did? Jackson said we donkeys don’t have any biotech like that, that sophisticated—”
“Here’s what I want you to do, Theresa. Listen carefully, I want you to go home, and tell nobody about your visit here, or the new syringes. Not even Jackson. Also—this is very important—don’t speak anything about this into any terminal. Not even if you think it’s completely freestanding.”
Theresa put out her hand, but stopped short of the tiny image on the blue wall. Her fingers hung suspended. Hot wind stirred the rubble of weathered offerings at her feet.