by Jim Stark
"I know ... and I'm so skeeeered!” said Lars as he burst out into a brand new round of debilitating laughter. “But you wouldn't,” he managed to smother into her neck.
Lilly grabbed the back of his hair and pulled it slowly and relentlessly to the floor.
"Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow,” yelped Lars as he got to his knees, then sat, then leaned back until he was lying on the floor, still laughing—and not the least bit scared, in spite of the hurt. “You're too ... skinny ... to be that ... strong,” he said in installments, interspersed with jagged laughter and little cries of pain.
Lilly shook her head, and resolutely refused to accept the part of her being that was demanding to understand what the hell was going on here. She leaned forward, her hand still gripping Lars’ hair, and touched her mouth to his. Her anger—what she still had of it—vanished as quickly as did his laughter. Their lips brushed lightly as air at first. She loosened her grip as his fingers slid through her long black hair ... and cupped her skull. Then their tongues met, hesitantly at first, then with abandon. Lars wondered if Lilly was really okay with this, and the WDA agent wondered the same thing, only harder.
Too late.
Chapter 58
DETOUR
Thursday, March 17, 2033—1:25 p.m.
Lilly walked slowly through the woods, so to think, so to enjoy the absence of snow and the impending natural normality, but mostly to let her psyche find an airstrip and return to terra firma. She felt a whole cornucopia of terrible emotions ... regret, confusion, anger, frustration, fear, shame ... plus a recurrent rush at the unfading taste of Lars’ amazingly versatile tongue.
She had put an abrupt end to their exploding sexual encounter back at the hunting shack. She didn't know why she'd done it then, and she was no closer to an answer now. Something inside just froze up, like pistons fusing to cylinder walls in a seized engine. Lars had tried to talk her through it, but the WDA agent would have none of that either. She had literally glared him into a beaten silence. He still had his hands on her narrow waist when the deep-freeze struck her, and the young apprentice plumber had removed them with a sense of drama, slowly, with “surrender” written all over his face ... more like submission, Lilly angled her thought.
Now they were walking back from the squirrel hunt without a word, Lars leading the way and Lilly hanging back a good fifty yards. What had happened, or almost happened ... started to happen ... was way beyond discussion, and that non-event ... near-event ... partial event ... dominated every nook and cranny of both their guts. There was simply no emotional room for chitchat ... at least not without games piled on top of games, and neither of them was up for that.
Lilly decided to distract herself by reprising Sheena Kalhoun's Netcast, with her Sniffer held to her ear, for privacy. She was very pleased to learn that the new WDA-sponsored World Identity Bank had opened its doors—the first announcement Kalhoun had made. That was the kind of organization that Lilly had joined, and had expected to serve; a loving, global mom, effectively. “Way to go Sheena,” she whispered towards a nameless birch when that section of the archived recording ended.
She took the Sniffer away from her ear and decided to hold it in front of her, with the sound up higher, while she picked her way along the rough trail. She watched in brief glances as Kalhoun went over the second item, the one Lilly had heard but not seen while she was out in the bush behind the shack. And she allowed herself to lag even further behind Great White Horny Hunter—she wanted to watch Kalhoun's face as the WDA chief sorted out how to deal with the recent tidal wave of civil disobedience.
There was no hostility in the deeply lined, black-and-white visage, no real power trip, only a reasoned, compassionate response to an obviously intolerable situation. The deal was complete amnesty, no further arrests, and a new penalty: those who refused LieDeck-verification lost all their Net privileges for the rest of their lives.
"Another ten out of ten,” whispered Lilly, as her mind flashed back to the instant terror Lars had caused her with his childish prank. “Prick,” she muttered ... like that squirrel might have said—in its language—or felt—as it raced away from us hooting, sadistic humans, she considered.
Lars looked back through the bare trees and saw Lilly, now at least seventy-five yards behind, engrossed in her Sniffer. You could have done that after we made love, he thought sadly as he turned to resume his retreat from Eden.
Lilly simply stopped walking altogether when Sheena Kalhoun announced the new arrangement for LieDeck production. That's the end of Whiteside Tech's monopoly, she realized, and it's undoubtedly because of Randy. She pushed the “pause” button on her Sniffer and thought: But ... that's not fair ... to blame the father for the sins of the son. Michael's sale of the company is in jeopardy. And he's screwed ... politically! She was about to link with Michael on her Sniffer, then thought better of it. They were watching her, Control and his lackeys, and she wasn't in complete control of herself at the moment. And besides, she thought, first I need to have a long talk with ... uh...
Nothing came! Painful thought, she realized. There used to be good old Ed, but that was then. Control? she wondered. Hardly! Then a horrible thought came to her: Jesus, my reports, back to Control, were probably factored into the WDA's decision to switch suppliers for the LieDeck.
Who was there to talk to? About these kinds of things? Her mother would be of no help at all. Julia would love to advise, but ... please, Lilly thought, with a grimace. Lars was ... persona non flagrante delicto, she figured. And not Annette! And I'm pissed off with Michael. My God ... I'm ... clean out of friends!
Lilly looked up and saw that Lars was plodding on ahead. I should have done it with him, she felt before she could pour cold water onto the idea. “Not this lifetime,” she said in his direction as she disengaged the “pause” button. She continued to pick her way over fallen branches and wet spots as Kalhoun let Gil Henderson off the hook for his absurd suggestion that the WDA might have murdered Lester Connolly. Again, and in spite of Michael's new problems, the WDA agent felt proud of the organization she had served so loyally.
Then came Sheena Kalhoun's announcement that the WDA was partially unbanning the LieDeck ... for civilian use! That sat Lilly down on a hog's-back boulder! “Lars,” she hollered as she rewound back to the beginning of that section. “Come and hear this,” she yelled. “This is unbelievable!"
Lars looked back, waved minutely, and carried on his way.
"Fuck you,” Lilly said, not entirely unaware of the irony of her words.
Lilly made herself more comfortable on the rock, and looked up through the leafless trees at a cloudless blue sky. A perfect day for such a momentous and totally unexpected decision, she thought as she listened again to those truly amazing words. Too bad Lester Connolly didn't live to see this day. She wished Lars had come back to share this moment with her ... well, she did and she didn't. “Yes, I ... wish,” she scolded herself out loud—realizing too late that she had just confused her boss, who was surely watching her.
She stopped her review again at the end of Kalhoun's fifth and last announcement, turning off her Sniffer and tucking it back into her inside vest pocket. There was more, apparently, but Lilly could watch that later. She lifted her shoulders and stretched out her condor wings as she drew in an invisible cloud of very tasty Québec air. The WDA had handled the threatening global upheaval like farmers handle inclement weather. They had coped ... perfectly, she concluded.
Only two things still troubled Lilly as she leaned forward to watch a black bug skitter between her brand new hiking boots. The first, of course, was the impossible position that Michael was in. He would lose control of Whiteside Tech, and he'd lose the pending sale of the company too. And if that weren't enough to crush the man, he would also lose the Liberal leadership nomination! Only yesterday, Lilly had imagined herself as the future bride of Canada's very rich next prime minister. Now, their relationship was on the rocks ... or at least in limbo ... and Michael was ... what? .
.. disgraced? She resolved to call Michael later in the day, after she'd had time to rethink her feelings for him ... and Lars, she added silently.
The other thing that perplexed her was that the unbanning of the LieDeck was bound to help Evolutionaries attain Human Three Consciousness ... and a lot of other civilians, she amended her assessment. She wasn't ready to judge that as a good thing or a bad thing, but it certainly wasn't something that the WDA wanted to encourage. Had Sheena Kalhoun and her brigade of top strategists dropped the ball? Impossible, Lilly thought as she stood up and began walking slowly towards the hub of Victor-E. There has to be ... more ... substantive stuff. She took her Sniffer back out, restarted the archived recording, and listened to Sheena's parting shot, her “modest suggestion,” as she had called it.
"Holy shit!” Lilly said aloud, unintentionally, when Kalhoun signed off—and before she turned the device off. Evolution is toast! Nobody will buy from them now!
When she saw Sleepery #8 peek through the crowd of bare trees, she cut left, east, deciding to circumvent the Victor-E life-base. She'd walk for ten minutes with the sun on her right ear, then turn right ninety degrees, south, towards the sun, walk up as far as the highway, and then turn right a second time, and get into her car at the front of the E-tery ... without speaking to anyone. She'd been trained to avoid danger, and with the assault that Evolution had just suffered from Sheena Kalhoun ... Christ, those freaks wouldn't hurt a fly, she reminded herself. Well ... maybe a fly, but not a squirrel, she revised the thought. But “prudence” was the WDA's watchword. If anyone did blow a neuron pile at Victor-E, and something did happen to her, she'd have only herself to blame.
It was 2:20 p.m. before she was safely cocooned in her green Aura, and it felt good to be back where the rules of civilization applied. Almost unconsciously, the car backed out and headed east, towards Shawville, past Shawville, and sixteen miles on to the town of Quyon—and the turnoff for the Whiteside estate. She belatedly placed her Sniffer in the slot on the dash—she was supposed to do that whenever she drove, but it seemed that she wasn't thinking very clearly, or clearly enough. She eased the Aura up to the main gate, where a Patriot security guard said something at her through her closed window.
Lilly slapped her WDA badge briefly against the glass and shifted back into “drive” before the guard could acknowledge her right to go wherever the hell she pleased on this particular planet. “I'll tell Mr. Whiteside you're on your way in,” she heard him holler as she drove off. You just do that, she thought acidly as she accelerated past the mansion and hit the dirt road that led to the lodge. “You do that,” she said aloud, hardly caring that her Sniffer was on and the WDA was listening.
Chapter 59
STICK A FORK IN IT
Thursday, March 17, 2033—3:05 p.m.
Lilly found the door to Victor's room open a crack, and she could hear the sounds of the top-of-the-hour newscast. She couldn't resist peeking in before knocking. He was seated naked at his MIU, totally engrossed in the Netnews, as was his daily custom. Lilly had spent many hours watching Victor do this on archived InfoBank files, and his left hand was always compulsively gripping the arm of his big chair ... as if the thing was going to take off, she'd thought, or like he was on a scary circus ride. Today was different. Both of his hands were sitting peacefully on his lap. Curious, she thought.
She didn't feel right, spying on the only person she could think of to vent with, so she stole backwards down the carpeted hallway and tiptoed down the wooden stairs. At the bottom, she silently re-opened the front door, and started whistling a little tune from her childhood, the name of which escaped her. She closed the door audibly, and clomped up the stairs. By the time she reached Victor's suite, she found the door still open, but now the bald inventor was quietly reading a book, clothed in his paisley caftan, and his MIU was dark.
She stuck her head around the jamb. “Come on in,” he said when he looked up and saw her questioning face. “I could use some company.” As she entered, Victor couldn't help noticing that she was dressed for hiking. “Nice boots,” he said.
Lilly sat in the other soft chair, carefully avoiding the sofa. “So ... big day!” she said emphatically. “You caught Sheena Kalhoun's Netcast?"
Victor nodded, dog-eared a page, closed the book, and cocked his head. The certainty is gone, he observed in the agent's face. She's in the middle of an emotional twister. “I'm listening,” he said.
Lilly hated it when Human Threes made assumptions like that, especially when they were right. Still, he was listening, and she had come to talk ... I guess. “I was out at this guy Lars’ hunting shack,” she said. “Can we ... sit out on the deck?” she added. “Maybe you want to get a jacket or—"
Victor opened the door to the world and ushered her out without a word. The sun was shining, and he didn't want to be warm, particularly. Cool is nice.
There was a padded lawn chair and two pine chaise lounges at the far end of the big wooden deck, and Lilly chose one of the latter. I feel like a psychiatric patient, she said to herself. At least Victor's MIU can't pick up on the conversation out here, she thought as she settled in. She surveyed the melting ice cap of Wilson Lake. It looked like there was open water here and there, especially near the shore. There's probably ice underneath, but it's ... the thin edge of the wedge, she thought. Metaphor for ... well, for something.
Victor sat beside her in the chair, and threw his eyes out over a doomed skating rink. The white patches of snow on top of the ice slumped in wilted drifts. This is my very last spring, he felt.
The largely deciduous bushland was still leafless, brown, but there were also a lot of evergreens showing their namesake colors. “How come there's a bare strip of brown all around the edge of the lake?” asked Lilly. “It seems so even ... like someone trimmed the evergreens up to a certain level."
"Well,” said Victor, “the shores are crowded with cedar trees because they need more sunlight and water, and that strip of brown is exactly eight feet high. The deer wander around on the ice in winter, and eat the cedar ... well, they're not exactly needles, even though they are evergreens ... let's say the foliage. It's more digestible than the needles of other evergreens. The deer are about four feet high at the shoulder. Add another foot or so for the neck and head, and add another three feet for when they stand briefly on their hind legs to grab a mouthful, and voilà ... a neat eight-foot strip of bare cedar branches all around the lake."
Lilly found that rather interesting, but it was not what she had come to discuss. She proceeded to tell Victor all about the squirrel hunt, and he laughed heartily. She told him about going off in the bush behind the shack to pee, and about how Human Three Lars scared the bejesus out of her on her return, and about the kissing and the groping and the fear and the seized engine ... and about being in love with Michael Whiteside and going to Freeport and having a big idiotic fight and ... and the long walk back from the shack to Victor-E, including the prudent detour, and the confusion, and the horrible sense that she was essentially friendless. Then she stopped, without so much as one word about Sheena Kalhoun, the WDA, or her current “employment” problem.
"It's like ... I don't know what to feel,” she said after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence. “Or maybe I just forgot how to feel,” she ventured.
Lately, Victor had watched Evolutionaries and other would-be Human Threes work through “transition sessions” on his MIU, and it irritated him when people made stupid guesses like that, or fell back on 20th-century psychoanalysis, or clutched at the pointless spiritual hucksterism of the last remaining men and women of the cloth. Lilly Petrosian, a captain in the WDA, seemed to be inviting his assistance to resolve a tiny consciousness crunch, and Victor could only assume that she knew where he would be coming from. He stood up, walked slowly over to the railing, and looked down about fifteen feet to the wet ground and haphazard clumps of snow below. He remembered the whitened frigid world that had lived there until a week ago. He found himself wonde
ring for the millionth time why perfectly rational Human Twos couldn't do these things for themselves. Actually, he knew why. It wasn't so much a burning question as it was a piss-off for him. They could do it solo if they chose to, he said to himself. “You believe in God?” he asked—he didn't want to play games.
"No,” Lilly answered towards his back.
"Well, that's a good starting point,” he said. “Turn on your LieDeck,” he instructed as he returned to his chair. “That's legal now, isn't it?"
Lilly decided to comply, even if it meant that her WDA masters could now hear them. She knew better than to even try to hide anything from the WDA, but she had hoped for a little privacy. She turned the Sniffer on, setting the LieDeck on beeper mode, and placed the thing lens down on her stomach. At least they won't be able to see us.
Victor suppressed a powerful urge to scold. “Well, it's certainly not that you forgot how to feel,” he said loudly, “but I presume you already knew that. It implies that people learn how to feel, or decide what they will feel in this or that situation, which of course they do not ... well, Human Twos don't, anyway. It was Charles Darwin who first saw the evolutionarily-derived nature of emotion and its expression, and a lot of research has since elaborated upon and sharpened his observations. Your feelings are on autopilot ... much like a newborn baby's. The central fact about feelings is that they are not learned—they are modified and/or refined over time, yes, but not learned.” Victor hated having to start with these basics, but ... Human Twos are pitifully and willfully ignorant, even of such self-evident fundamentals.
"Human Three Consciousness is much like the awakening that science represented for Human Two,” he tried. “A few millennia ago, humans found out that the brain could do much more than create language and tools and get horses to pull plows. Your feelings are controlled by your instinct, as per the design of any animal's body's chemical and electrical systems, although your way of feeling is modified ... I would say somewhat ... by your parenting, education and your personal experiences. And...” Victor stopped pontificating briefly to look over at his audience of one.