by Jim Stark
She passed several dozen rooms that were work areas, and then came to the pool and the big hot tubs. Nudity seemed slightly more rational here, but Lilly was put off by the uncluttered ease with which people of all ages seemed to share the facility, without any clothing. There were several old Evolutionaries splashing around and lying about—men and women in their sixties and seventies—and that was particularly hard for Victor-E's new WDA monitor to accept. A little dignity pulleeease! she thought.
It also bothered her that children were as welcome in the pool as anyone else. As she stood at the door, a couple of boys—fourteen or fifteen, she guessed—walked by, with erections. Nobody else seemed to take particular note of that fact, but Lilly averted her eyes, turned, and left. It was one thing for her to walk in front of her own MIU and know that she might be observed by other mature people ... but this is something else again.
Lilly remembered that not so very long ago, some Islamic countries still forced the women to cover up entirely. Even their faces were wrapped in hoods that had little mesh grills across the eyes, to see out of—sort of a low-tech two-way mirror. Well, the male leaders of some Islamic countries did that, she reminded herself. They felt they knew, as men, that if you saw a woman's face, you might like it, and then want to see more of her, and if that happened, you'd probably like to see the whole works, and then you'd want to fuck it, or have to, even if she was unwilling. And if a woman let a man see her eyes, and then got raped, well, she pretty much brought it on herself, didn't she?
The fact that some men went through life one peek away from rape was astonishing—not to the animals of the wild, but to the willingly self-tamed human animals who said they preferred “civilization” to the law of the jungle. Evolutionaries flat-out refuse to be strangers to the human body, their own or anyone else's, she said to herself, which means everything is different for them ... or almost everything!
Lilly passed on the chance to go into the empty mess hall. For whatever reason, the headache she had finally shaken seemed to be creeping back. There was a full year to get used to these people ... if one ever does ... so she walked back towards the Mainspoke, completing the loop of the wide oval hallway. She saw six people along the way, and she got six polite nods. She remembered to return the map into the wooden box when she got to the revolving door, then she left the bubble and headed back down the Mainspoke to the E-tery, and to her apartment. All's well that ends well? she asked herself silently. Not today.
It was almost noon, so as she passed through the restaurant, she stopped briefly to tell a waiter that she was still not feeling well and would prefer to have her lunch upstairs, if that would be okay. “No problem,” said a smiling young man who had the word “LARS” printed on the wide, lower part of his apron in green capital letters. His name, I presume, thought Lilly. It pays to advertise, I suppose. When she looked back up from the apron to his face, he was still smiling at her, as if he had enjoyed being looked over. She found his manner discomfiting and turned away quickly, before her mind could go further down the road of imagining “LARS” in the buff, bouncing on the end of a diving board.
"Oh, Ms. Petrosian,” he called after her.
"Yes,” she said, looking back over her shoulder.
"Catch,” said the smiling waiter as he threw her a set of two keys.
Lilly caught the keys.
"Your new car is just outside—the green Aura. This guy delivered it like ten minutes ago. I plugged it in for you, and if—"
"Thanks,” said Lilly, meaning for the keys.
Chapter 17
TWO TRICKS
Saturday, February 12, 2033—10:45 a.m.
Julia collapsed in laughter onto the jacket-strewn couch in the Kid-Kare common room. No way could she make head nor tail out of these kids when they all yelled at once. It seemed that sometimes they did it on purpose, just to see her crack up and roll around like she did.
"One at a time,” she pleaded as she took off her snow-caked knitted woolen mittens and wiped tears from her eyes. “Davey, get one of the older kids to take off your boots and then you put them on the rack where your name is ... by yourself, okay? Olivia, go and pee if you have to pee ... and hurry up so—Fran, you go with her, okay? And Barry...” She made a serious effort to erase any shadows of joy from her face—Barry was only eight, and he often misunderstood others’ glee for heartless ridicule. Julia took off her outerwear and threw the garments in a heap, for now. “Okay ... tell me what happened,” she asked the sulker.
"I wanna face my mom,” he said towards his wet snow boots. “I'll ... tell my mom."
Julia sat him down on the floor and pulled off his boots and snowsuit. Then she stood him up, took his small hand and resisted the temptation to drag him along at her own pace, which was always twice that of little Barry Lochlear. There were two other women working day care with her, and they could handle twenty kids who were simultaneously disrobing from a half-hour frolic on the sliding hill. The din of shrill voices was music to Julia, sometimes confusing, but always delightful. “Come along, Barry,” she chided as they approached the office closest to the common room. “So, did you get in a fight with somebody?” She knew that wasn't it, but the boy would be flattered that she thought he might have had his first physical dust-up.
Barry wasn't going to answer questions any more than he was going to hurry up. Julia sighed. The day would come when Barry Lochlear would be a fine young man, and they could laugh about his roller-coaster childhood, but that day was surely a few years away. “Sorry to interrupt,” Julia said to the male worker sitting at the MIU. “Barry has to talk to his mom.” She didn't say “again,” but their eyes met, and he knew.
"Hey, that's okay,” said the man. “It's kind of important for a boy to talk to his mom sometimes,” he said authoritatively, seemingly speaking from a vast personal experience in such manly matters. “I have to go to the bathroom anyway."
"Thanks,” said Julia ... for the MIU and for the message for Barry. She called Alice Lochlear on the Net, Barry's mother.
"Hi Julia,” Alice said as her image popped on the screen a few seconds later. She was wiping perspiration from her brow with a large white towel and breathing hard. She wore a pink Spandex gym suit that left little to the imagination, and several of her classmates in the background wore less, or nothing at all.
"Hi,” said Julia as she looked behind Alice to see the other women in her exercise group, puffing their way to better fitness and ravenous appetites.
"Everything okay?” panted Alice. “Hi honey,” she said upon seeing her downcast son slouching despondently beside Julia, leaning against her leg, holding her hand. “Do you ... wanna talk?"
"I'll wait outside,” said Julia diplomatically as she physically disengaged Barry's tiny hand from her own. “Don't be too long, okay?” she said to the boy.
Barry peeked up at the screen without raising his head. He wasn't sure why he felt so rotten, but he knew he wouldn't feel that way if he could hang out with his mom instead of going to this dumb Saturday kid's play-outside deal. His mother was doing the waiting game, just jogging in place to keep her heart rate up. She likes jumping around in the gym better than playing with me, he felt. He knew she'd say that wasn't true if he said it out loud, and then she'd go on and on about how it should be fun to spend time with the other kids, and how everybody needs some time to do things by themselves, and how he spent entirely too much time on the MIU anyway ... and on and on and on.
"Well?” she finally asked. “Did somebody hit you or something?"
"No,” pouted the boy.
"Did somebody take something that was yours?” she tried, drawing the towel down her face and glancing back at her classmates. “Don't make me guess, okay? I don't think it's fair for you to—"
"Allan called me a chicken,” Barry blurted out. “He always calls me names, and—"
"Always?” asked Alice.
"He hates me, Mom,” pleaded Barry. “He never wants to play with me, and he a
lways calls me bad names."
Alice Lochlear stopped her bouncing, and flashed an apologetic look at the youngish woman who was leading the class. This would probably take a while. “So ... why did he call you a chicken,” asked the mom.
"I didn't want to go down the big part of the hill,” explained Barry as he stared hard in behind his mother's face at the dozen or so bobbing bodies. Mom used to always let me hang out there while they did all their exercise stuff. It's not fair she makes me come here now.
"So ... why didn't you want to go down the big part?” she asked.
"I just ... didn't want to,” said Barry, dropping his eyes and rotating his toe back and forth on the floor, as if to squish a bug.
"Because you were scared?” she asked. “It's okay to be scared, Barry. I'd be scared to slide down the big part myself, and I'm not going to do it either. So ... he wasn't exactly wrong about why you wouldn't do it, eh? But he was wrong to call you a name, that's for sure. So ... you go tell him that he was wrong to call you a chicken ... and make him say that he's sorry. If he doesn't say he's sorry, then you tell me, and we'll mediate the issue ... later ... okay?"
"Okay ... I guess,” said Barry.
He was too young to work a technically complicated gambit like this, and Alice knew she'd have to get to the real problem pretty soon. Many of his “upsets” seemed to happen between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m., when she was at her aerobics class. He could see all the nude bodies he wanted on the Net or in the pool, but ... he wants to see the bodies of the people he knows best, especially me, stark naked, bouncing, and ... well, having sex. It's tough to be eight years old and horny, she thought, but I've got to break this daily pattern of concocted or provoked fusses ... just so he can ogle. “See you later,” she said lovingly as she started jogging on the spot again and tossed her big white towel off screen. “Net, down, now,” she said as she turned away.
Julia had been listening by the door, and the MIU worker was returning from the washroom. Barry was standing in there, staring at the blank screen, sniffling and trying to sob. The whole situation stank, so Julia quietly asked the man whose office it was to give her ten or fifteen minutes, and went in to cope with reality ... well, with Barry's reality.
She pulled two swivel chairs in front of the MIU screen, facing each other, and they sat down. It took her several minutes of handholding and assurances to get the boy to come out of his funk and start talking, even about trivial stuff. A few minutes later, she started asking him about his fears. He was much too young to express himself on sexual matters, but Julia did manage to extract an important admission out of him. He just hated going to bed at night. Julia figured it had to be fear. She was something of an expert on kids, and their problems almost always came down to fear. Now she had something solid to work with.
"Something about going to bed scares you,” she said matter-of-fact. “I helped lots of kids with their scary stuff and all that. That's why I work in the Kid-Kare, ‘cause I like to help children, and I'm really good at it. So, how about I be the friend that helps you find the answer to this problem, okay?"
Well, it took a lot of guessing, but Julia finally guessed right. “I had that problem too, when I was your age,” she said to the boy. “And I had a mom who loved me a lot, just like your mom loves you, and we even had a maid too, but I didn't ever have anybody to explain it to me so I could understand, and if my mom could have explained that when I was eight, I would have understood, but they didn't know how to explain it in the olden days. I was twelve years old before it went away on its own, so I had ... what's twelve minus eight?"
Barry rolled his eyes. “Four,” he said.
"So I had this problem for like four years when I coulda maybe not had it. Boy, it used to scare me so bad I was scared to even go to bed, just like you are. It's lucky we had this chance to talk, eh? So ... do you want me to just tell you, or should we use the MIU to help us get it exactly right?"
Barry Lochlear thought about it for a moment. “Let's use the Net,” he decided. There was always a chance that the explanation, whatever it turned out to be, might involve a few naked grown-ups.
Julia turned both chairs towards the screen, then she accessed the “children's aid” file and ordered up: “Monsters—under beds.” Slowly, step-by-step, with Julia occasionally inserting pauses so she could confirm that the boy was following things, an interactive cybermom walked young Barry through a basic Human Three analysis of the problem.
In juvenile language, he was “reminded” that babies were much the same as kittens and puppies, reliant upon automatic instincts to get what they needed and make it all the way to grown-up cats or dogs. But people, of course, were luckier, insofar as they could think better and better as they grew up, and use words, and understand things that cats and dogs had no chance of ever understanding. But a person's instinct was still there, just like a kitten's or a puppy's instinct. And the instinct made kittens and puppies get real scared ... for their own good, because unless they had a nice human family to take them in as pets, they had to grow up and survive in a forest or a jungle, where there were lots of bigger animals who had to eat little animals for their own survival. The problem was that the parent cats and dogs couldn't use words to explain to their babies about all of the terrible dangers of the wild world, so the instinct made up some imaginary monsters in their brains so that kittens and puppies got the idea of being scared and either fighting or running away before they even had to face these dangers on their own, so they would be good and ready when the real thing came along. The same rationale held for nightmares, and animals had nightmares to help them get ready to deal with the reality of the jungle, to teach them that in addition to needing food, they were food.
"It's pretty much the same for us when we're kids,” said cybermom in a voice that signaled the arrival of the epiphany. “Our instinct is the same as in kittens and puppies and little ducklings and baby wolves and mice and all of the other animals, because we're just animals too. Our instinct makes up imaginary things to scare us on purpose ... like monsters under the bed! But we don't have to be afraid of being eaten by other animals, do we? No! We know that in our brains, but our instinct doesn't know that. The instinct is trying to do its job, and it feels that it has to get us ready for life in a forest or a jungle, but that's not true any more, is it? We live in nice safe houses or in apartments or clans, don't we? But the problem of monsters under the bed doesn't go away just because we know this stuff in our brains. Kids all over the world still have this problem, even though human beings haven't lived in the forest or the jungle like the other animals for hundreds or even thousands of years. But ... we have figured out how to fix the problem! Isn't that great? There's two easy tricks. One is really easy—I'll teach you that one first—but then the other one takes a little practice.
"The easy trick...” the cybermom laughed, signaling to Barry how clever the trick was. “The easy trick is to put your mattress right on the floor—no way is there any room for a monster under your bed now! Poof! No more problem!
"But you've got to use the second trick too,” continued the image on the screen. “You have to use that special advantage that you have that grown-up sheep and horses and even elephants don't have—your great big beautiful brain!
"An animal feels whatever it feels, and its little brain always thinks about whatever it's feeling. But we humans can think about anything we want! We can think about what we're feeling—and that's okay most of the time—but we can also not think about what we're feeling! When we're really hungry, for instance, we can get all upset about being hungry, and we can cry about it—that's what babies do, right?—or we can drop whatever we're doing and go off and search for food, or we can think about it and realize that lunch is coming in about an hour, and then concentrate on something else until lunchtime rolls around, right? And when we decide to concentrate on something else, well, the feelings of hunger disappear, or at least we don't notice them so much, and they don't bother us so much.
We humans can control what we feel—not completely, but a lot—by using our brains to not think about what our instinct is trying to make us feel.
"Now, here's some examples and some games you can do so you can see how this works and get some experience at actually doing it. First, imagine that you just got into your pajamas, and your mom or dad or a friend is trying to get you to go to bed, and you don't want to because you think or feel that as soon as—"
Julia ordered a pause. Alice—Barry's mom—had stolen in the open door while they were focused on the MIU, and although Julia noticed, little Barry didn't. A quick nod told Julia that it was okay, to just carry on. She began going over the material with Barry. He seemed to understand pretty well, but as the cybermom had anticipated, children needed the advantage of experience too ... conditioning. After a few minutes of discussion, Julia judged that Barry was ready to go back to the MIU and try out those examples. But then there was a slight sound from the door, and that broke the mood. Julia turned her head ... and saw Lilly.
"I'm just looking around,” Lilly said from the doorway.
Barry's mother turned around to see who it was. “I don't freaking think so!” Alice said angrily.
"Mom!” said Barry, who was happy to see her but scared by her hostility towards the tall new lady that he'd never seen before.
Julia was surprised and alarmed to see Alice and Lilly glaring at each other. She had no idea what had brought that about. “Alice,” she intervened, “I think Lilly was just—"
"I'm in charge when it comes to my son,” said Alice, “and I do not need you to—"
"What is your problem?” asked Lilly indignantly. “I was just—"
"OUT!” screamed Alice. She closed the door hard, literally forcing the WDA monitor outside.
"Why did you do that?” asked Julia.