by Jim Stark
Doreen closed down her MIU. She had never gotten the hang of the thing. Michael knew that no disrespect was intended, but it bothered him mightily when she did that, just turned the machine off. “Bye Mom,” he said at the blank screen of his MIU.
Chapter 12
NO PUSHING
Tuesday, February 8, 2033—5:55 p.m.
Julia hung up her coat and pirouetted into the restaurant's kitchen in the old motel, arms high, blue slippers flitting as she spun. “Hi all,” she sang.
"Hi Julia,” said the two women who staffed the stoves of the E-tery. Claire Lapine was on duty, and she looked every bit of her sixty-two years in the faded white apron that snugly embraced her bulbous body. Even her round face was strangely pinched. She had something on her mind, something she'd already discussed with Annette. “There's lots of people for you to please today,” she said dryly, without even looking up, “what with the hockey tournament and all."
"Oh yes, lots of cute boys,” chirped Julia, glancing over the counter at the tables and clapping her hands gleefully. “It's sort of too bad it gets dark so early and there's no sun coming in through the windows. They really like that. Remember last summer when they had the softball tournament? That was so fun, eh?"
"You probably shouldn't—uh—touch the boys on the back of their necks so much,” suggested Claire as she stirred the cream of mushroom soup. “You know ... as you pass behind them?"
"Why not?” whined Julia. “I like it, and so do they."
"It's just ... they're not used to it, like we are,” tried Claire.
"But there's nothing wrong with it,” wailed Julia. “Please, Claire, don't make me not do stuff that's okay."
Claire stopped stirring soup and rethought her position. “I'm sorry,” she said. “You're right, of course. It's ... their problem, if it's a prob—"
"Oh goodie,” said Julia, with a bountiful smile. “I know they get all tingly, but they wouldn't go all the way down to being, like, Human One, eh? I mean not in here. We're all real safe here. I just wish they could all be like us. Why don't they just change over, Claire?"
Claire didn't have a good answer for that question. She was still surprised at her own “conversion” to Evolution, six years ago, in 2027. Her daughter Ginette had talked her into a weekend visit and ... well, as so often happened with relatives and friends, that was that. There was no point in not joining, not after that weekend, not ever. “They probably will, Julia, some time. I guess they've got, you know, issues, parents or family members or bosses who might object, or who don't understand ... the kind of people who need to control or judge. You aren't supposed to push, you know."
"I never ever ever ever push,” said Julia as she started pouring the ice water, trying to get exactly two cubes into each glass. “I just act like me, and I'm a wonderful girl, eh?"
Claire gave Julia a big hug for an answer, from behind, the way Julia liked best. “Of course you are, sweet Julia,” she said.
"My brother calls me that all the time,” she said merrily as she put down the water jug and lifted Claire's hands up onto her breasts. “He's a really good brother ... mostly,” she added. “For a Normal."
"There's lots and lots of wonderful Normals,” said Claire pointedly as she extricated her hands and went back to her soup. “But just like me, they have to find their own way over, I guess, one at a time, when they're good and ready."
"Well, here goes,” said Julia as she gingerly picked up a tray of four teetering glasses. “I hope I don't spill any water today,” she sang, hunching over the tray and peeking up to make sure there were no chairs or tables about to trip her. “Or get those cute boys too all revved up,” she conceded as she waddled ever so carefully out of the kitchen.
Chapter 13
THAT'S ... NICE
Tuesday, February 8, 2033—6:05 p.m.
Lilly walked from the Mainspoke into the back of the restaurant with great relief, and stood for a moment by the entrance to the kitchen, borrowing some heat from the stoves and breathing the aromas of lasagna. Her body shivered, but her emotions were still on fire from the treatment she'd been accorded by the governing council, by the clan, by Annette. How can a WDA agent ever gain acceptance? she wondered. Maybe we can't. Maybe I'm in for a year of full-bore ostracism—sent off to Coventry, as the Brits say. But maybe my outside work with Victor Helliwell and Michael Whiteside will help me forget this situation at Victor-E. One thing is for damned sure: I'll never feel comfortable living here.
"Lilly!” cried Julia, with all the effervescence of a long-lost friend.
Lilly looked up to see who could be calling her name out in this place, especially in that tone of voice. It was Julia ... and she's wearing a see-through dress, with a white cardigan—open in the front—wide open ... and clearly visible red bikini undies.
"How are you?” said Julia as she planted her hands on the agent's shoulders and went on tiptoe to pop a quickie kiss on her cold cheek. “Jeeze, you're freezing! C'mon and sit at my special table. That'll be so fun!"
She put an arm around Lilly's waist and ushered her along. “Annette told me on my Sniffer that you'd be eating here,” she said, giving Lilly's ribs a friendly little rub, “so I kept my special winter table open for us. They said I could stop serving tables and have my dinner with you when you got here. I like to serve tables in the E-tery, especially if it's the hockey tournament. I get to bring the water with the ice in it. Did you ever see so many good-looking boys? Yummy! I never wear a bra when it's the hockey tournament. They like that a lot. They get all tingly. They come back every year. Of course I never hardly ever wear a bra anyway, except when..."
Lilly sat at the same table she had used earlier, and wondered when the conversation could move on to something a little more interesting than Julia's unabashed titillations. Lilly found it surprising that she'd actually been forgiven by Julia, to the point where this particular Whiteside seemed to have become her ... friend? she thought. My only friend around here so far, she shuddered to realize. She's probably forgotten that I pissed her off a few hours ago.
"So, how are you?” asked Lilly.
"I just told you,” said Julia, clapping her hands and laughing. “We got such a happy place here. I wonder how come everybody doesn't live in Evolution. So, how come you don't, Lilly?"
"Well I ... do, in a way,” she said. “I mean I—"
"No, no. I mean be one,” said Julia. “I'll get the soup for you,” she decided abruptly, fearing that she had just pushed. “They're kind of busy in there with all...” The end of her sentence got lost in the other conversations that filled the room.
There were several Evolutionaries eating their dinners in the restaurant ... probably with outside friends who don't want to eat in the mess hall, thought Lilly, not people who are unwelcome in there ... like me. She watched Julia almost dance into the kitchen, and heard her laughter as she joked with the cooks.
Two hockey-playing teenagers materialized at the counter, perched themselves on stools, and suddenly one of them was insisting that he needed a clean glass. He seemed to know in advance that the clean glasses were stored under the counter ... right beneath where he and his buddy were sitting. Julia made no effort to button up her cardigan and happily obliged, and the boys’ eyes almost leapt out of their heads when she bent over. She knows they're ogling her breasts, observed Lilly, but she revels in it. Disgusting!
Lilly couldn't watch the scripted pantomime at the counter any more, so she checked out her environs in more detail, as she was trained to do whenever her attentions weren't otherwise occupied. These Evolutionaries were distinguishable mostly by their hair. They never cut it, or most of them didn't. They tied it back in ponytails, braided it, piled it up top or just let it fall like a tent. There was no rhyme or reason to it, and of course there was no rule or religious purpose behind the custom. They just seemed to prefer letting it grow, immune as they were from the judgments of others. They seemed to have literally disqualified themselves from th
e very expensive “dos and don'ts” of the fashion industry. They don't exactly dress to impress, Lilly thought. Anything seems to be acceptable on the clothes front. At least they're clean.
She noticed that there were several other Evolutionaries who were not eating ... just sitting around, playing chess, reading books, chatting with each other. As the WDA agent looked more closely, she noticed that this brand of layabout was ... they're at least thirty-five, she figured. Jeeze, she realized, those are some of the retired ones! It just felt wrong that an ordinary thirty-five-year-old should be retired, but that's what Evolution was all about. Work your ass off, scrimp, save up, invest, retire young ... works for them, I guess.
"I eat deer year round,” said an unshaven thirty-year-old local at the next table. “Why the fuck should I kill my beef when I can eat deer all year round?"
Lilly glanced to the left and behind. There were three men, eating supper, and they were obviously not Evolutionaries, by their deportment and their appearance. They were the real country “workin’ stiffs” that she'd come across in the Netfiles, hailing from the second-lowest socio-economic rung on the non-Evolutionary ladder, just above welfare folk in the pecking order. I think this guy is bragging about being a poacher!
"But it's not often you get a trophy rack,” continued the hunter. “I got mine four years ago, back in twenty-nine,” he said through a mouthful of lasagna. “North of the Gatineau Park, near where that guy shot his best buddy with a shotgun in the chest. Same year that happened, too. He's still babbling, I heard ... the guy that shot him, I mean. Total fuckin’ nervous breakdown. But that musta been something to see, eh? Bang! Right in the fuckin’ chest."
"He died, that guy?” asked one of his buddies, meaning the victim.
"Well I fuckin’ guess, eh?” came the indignant retort.
"You drawin’ wood?” asked the third man, a squat fellow with his toque still on and a surprisingly high voice. Black tumbleweeds of curly hair pushed out from underneath the collar of his T-shirt, even at the back.
"Ninety-five dollars a cord,” said the hunter with the trophy rack.
"Fuck, I can get it for like eighty-five,” scoffed the high voice.
"Delivered and stacked?” asked the first chap.
"Oh, delivered and stacked!” repeated the unjust scoffer. “Okay, gimme four cord on Saturday. I can pay youse on Monday, eh? My check from the Dumont job should get to me by then. Made good money on that one, by the Jesus. Broke the fuckin’ hydraulics on my backhoe doin’ it, but old man Dumont paid to fix it, the crazy old bugger."
"How come?"
"Fucked if I know. I just said he had to, so he did."
The three proletarians guffawed over that one.
"Here you go,” said Julia as she carefully placed a plastic tray in front of Lilly. There was a bowl of steaming homemade cream of mushroom soup, spicy biscuits and a glass of milk. Julia was very proud that she hadn't spilled a thing. “I'll go get—"
"I'm not having the lasagna,” interrupted Lilly. “Just ... the soup and the biscuits are fine, thanks, and then I'm going to bed early."
"That's ... nice,” said Julia, with a confused look on her face. “But ... I'll go get my soup now, okay?"
Lilly dropped her head as Julia walked away. She'd just made a point of treating her only friend like a waitress. She decided not to assume that the guy who ate deer all year round was a poacher. She just wasn't up to an arrest.
Chapter 14
NET-MINDING
Tuesday, February 8, 2033—6:40 p.m.
When Lilly got up to her apartment, it was filled with the heady smell of “slightly-singed-on-top” lasagna and the muffled sounds of dozens of diners, eating and talking, directly below. I've lived in worse, she said to herself ... just not for a long time.
She went over to the only frost-free window in the apartment, the bay window facing the back. She felt herself being drawn there by an eerie new perspective on the bubble. It was aglow. The dull gray sheet of Pliesterine was now almost yellow against the velvet backdrop of a black Québec sky, as the powerful banks of lights shone through. The wee patch of snow on the top would appear black now from above—the pupil in a Cyclops’ eye, a sight she'd seen dotting the nightscape when she'd flown over the north-eastern U.S. a few years back. It made her feel a bit queasy, as if such a structure could only contain a mystery, an unknown force that no Earthly power could comprehend, let alone counter.
"It's enough that we control things,” she remembered learning at the Academy. It may well be enough, she thought now, but do we have control? Should we have control? Are there dynamics at work here that are beyond our control? Beyond anyone's control? Where is this movement going? And ... why the hell am I worrying about stupid stuff?
She stood at the window for several minutes, her arms folded across her ribs and her face betraying nothing. There were probably Evolutionary eyes out there, possibly video cameras, watching her as she looked at her domain—their domain. What do they imagine I'm thinking or feeling? she wondered. Show no fear, she reminded herself. She resolved to remain right where she was, at the window, while she reviewed her day.
The dinner conversation with Julia had been fractured, but with the exception of her own opening gaffe, there had been no more dumb misunderstandings or bent feelings, either way. Actually, Lilly remembered saying very little. Julia, on the other hand, had talked non-stop ... about how she had tried that “grass stuff” a few years ago, after it was declared legal, and how she got seriously scared of everything and everyone, and never did it again. She didn't really need it, she explained, because she was “like on a natural high.” She seemed to feel that a natural high was one advantage of her mental retardation; that plus the fact that she could never understand how the “big world” was run, and how she was therefore liberated from worrying about it. She had bragged about how she could excuse herself from worry about all things that were beyond the borders of Victor-E or the reach of her MIU. Lilly had pointed out to Julia that the people she faced on the Net were “real live people,” and that they lived all over the world, but Julia said she always preferred to believe they were right behind her Netscreen. She said she only faced with Evolutionaries anyway, and they all said it was okay for her to pretend that they were “only a pane of glass apart."
It was disturbing to Lilly, the way so many modern people seemed to prefer cyberlife to warmlife. It was as if the Net provided an unlimited supply of “imaginary friends,” as if the forgivable lunacy of childhood had become a legitimate playground for otherwise sensible adults. She felt that if she and Julia had actually been “a pane of glass apart,” Netlinking rather than sharing dinner on the warm, Julia would have blanked her off the screen, with no guilt or regret. It was embarrassing that a woman with an IQ of eighty-two (according to her Netfile) would find her, Captain Lillian Petrosian, to be socially inept—and none too swift. Julia had also bragged—albeit innocently—about having a “CQ” of one hundred and ninety-five. Intelligence isn't everything, thought Lilly, but this “CQ” thing that these Evolutionaries go on about is ridiculous. There's no such thing as a “consciousness quotient."
She took a final squinty look at the dark, snow-covered world she had been sent to, and at the glowing bubble with the spidery legs that gave her the willies. Then she closed the drapes. I'll get used to it. I wish I could be with Ed tonight.
Lilly went into the bedroom, took off her clothes, and walked naked to the bathroom. She knew that her WDA-supplied MIU could catch her in the act, even when it was off, but she had never minded that. She couldn't relate to the sexual free-for-all that so many Evolutionaries and half the Normals in the world seemed to prefer these days, but she did not consider herself a prude. As a matter of fact, she rather enjoyed the possibility that her WDA handlers got an occasional peek at her unusually tall body. Her body was her very best friend—something she had learned to articulate and accept, ironically, from an Evolutionary Netshow originating in Nigeria, where
most every body was black. Ed, her ex, was black, and it was because of him that she'd started watching African Netshows. In fact, while she'd never considered herself a bigot, Ed was the first African-American she'd ever taken seriously, as a human being. Good old Ed, she thought as she turned on the shower. He got me past a few bad attitudes about race ... and sex ... and interracial sex. Still, there was something disturbingly nice and safe about the relative scarcity of non-Caucasian races in the Great White North, and Lilly felt vaguely guilty about her feelings on that score.
It took a bit of fiddling to get the water temperature exactly right, but once she'd done the deed, it was glorious to step in and just let it pour ... well, let it pour as much as the “reduced flow” showerhead would allow. She closed her eyes, and made a slow rotation in the small tub ... too small for me to submerge in, she noted with disappointment. Still, this was the first time since she got off the plane that she'd felt truly warm. Her feet were the last part of her to lose the chill, and the physical pleasure of it all salved her psyche as much as her long, thin body. “Many are cold, but few are frozen,” she remembered her ex-boyfriend telling her just before she left for the airport in Miami. The Bible according to Ed.
After the shower, she put on her fuzzy blue housecoat. There was no wind outside, but the extreme cold seemed to seep insidiously through the windows. She did a quickie inspection of the thermostats in the bedroom and the living area, and cranked them from seventeen degrees up to twenty. As best she could recall, that was the metric equivalent of seventy-five. “Canadians and their damned Celsius,” she muttered. I mean Québécois, she chastened herself silently. This separate and sovereign nation-within-a-nation thing was too much for Americans to internalize ... like metric ... Celsius ... whatever.
She sat down at her MIU, slipped her index finger into the bioID slot while ordering the boot-up, and then went back to the bedroom to get the comforter. On her return, she wrapped it around her waist and her legs and tucked it under her feet before sinking into the soft swivel chair. She had no make-up on, and she still had a towel wrapped around her head, cocooning her wet hair. No matter. She wouldn't be working long anyway, and she had no intention of facing anyone ... at least not visually.