Sharp and Dangerous Virtues

by Martha Moody

  If Akira hadn’t told Chelsea who he was, Theodore would be sitting in Chelsea’s living room at this instant, reading out loud from one of her English detective books about church bells and dogs. Instead he had strangled Chelsea, then carried her body upstairs into her bedroom and taken off her daytime clothes, including her underwear. He put her in her pale purple nightgown. “Such a cheerful color, lilac, don’t you think?” she’d said to him on a better day, and he’d quoted a poem he’d made up in his childhood:

  Peonies are sure to please

  and lilacs are always nice

  Spring makes me happy to my bones

  when the world breaks out in spice

  “That says it just about all,” his great-aunt had said.

  “What do you mean, breaks out in spice?” Aunt Stella asked. “That to me is unclear use of language. But the first three lines are lovely.”

  “Isn’t a peony the flower that ants like?” Chelsea had asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” Tuuro (Theodore) answered. “And the flower needs the ants because they eat the coating around the bud so the flower can open.”

  “Amazing,” Chelsea had said, smiling shyly across her kitchen table. “How one thing helps another.”

  After she was dead, Tuuro combed Chelsea’s hair, touched up her lips with lipstick, laid her on her back in her bed, and pulled up the covers. He touched her cheek, already cool. “Good-bye, little woman,” he wanted to say, but the words stuck in his throat. How dare he bid her good-bye? It seemed impossible—inhumane—that he could kill a person and then gaze on that person with tenderness. How could God let Tuuro end up in these terrible situations? He thought of the dog loping down the street dragging the torn scarf. At least Chelsea was inside and protected. It would be days before someone found her. Those bruises on her neck … Tuuro was seized with the fluttering thought—doomed? naive?—that they would fade.

  “Could you please talk to General Nenonene?” he said, turning to Akira, his mouth dry. “Ask if maybe I could go through Esslandia”—he made a point of using the new name—“and get back to Dayton?”

  “You are something,” Akira said. “You have the conscience of an insect. Don’t you think we know you very well?” She stood up, wandered to the back door. “Know exactly what you did?”

  The door opened, and immediately there were a dozen uniformed people in the room, men and women of all shades, with guns out and hard faces. Tuuro put his hands up, knowing that his shock was giving them pleasure.

  Wait a minute, he thought, if I drop my hands they’ll shoot me. The action was suddenly clear to him, best for everyone involved.

  He dropped his hands. The room was silent. What? He glanced around wildly, then grabbed for one of the guns. Contain him! someone shouted, and there were arms around Tuuro from all sides, a human vise so strong he felt as if his eyes would pop. But no shots. This was a disciplined crew.

  “IT’S NOT CHEAP,” Gentia said. They were sitting in a living room, Janie on the leather sofa and Gentia in a floral upholstered chair. “Do you have resources?”

  “You mean money? Not really.” Janie had been through every drawer and closet at Lila’s and come up with absolutely nothing. Janie wouldn’t stoop to stealing from Aunt Lila’s wallet, although it was unlikely Aunt Lila would notice. In last week’s recycling bin there had been six empty brandy bottles. If Janie didn’t remind her with a written list, Aunt Lila would go out shopping and come home without food.

  “There are some alternative payments.” Gentia shrugged her eyebrows concedingly. “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.” Janie was twelve.

  “Good enough. Thirteen’s kind of my limit, although I can’t say the men care. You on birth control?”

  Janie, eyes widening, shook her head no. She had heard this woman was a sort of travel agent: she found ways to get people where they wanted to go. A whole network, Janie’s perc contract had said. Everyone was in on it: police, the military, judges, politicians.

  “That’s okay, we’ll have him wear protection. Listen, you know what a young girl’s got that’s better than money?” Gentia tilted her head and looked at Janie sidelong, a nasty glint in her eyes. Janie flushed and looked away. “That’s right, you know. We got guys like it better than anything. All the stress these days … It’s a relief to them.”

  “You want me to have sex with people?” Janie squeaked. She thought of leaving this house and running home. But she had no home. Her father was living on the military base and Aunt Lila slept with a bottle and didn’t even know when Janie was awake and on her perc at two in the morning.

  “Not people!” Gentia looked shocked. “Just one gentleman. I got an army guy who can really help you. You’re lucky, dollface. I couldn’t buy my way out of a paper bag with pussy. But you can go anywhere.”

  “OH, GOD,” SHARIS said, resting her forehead in her hand. In front of her on the editon scenes were playing in hypertime.

  “George and Gentia?” Chad said. Sharis nodded. “How’re the Schneiders?”

  “Oh, Kevin had sinusitis, so that was a crisis, but he’s better now, and the grandmother’s in one of her crying moods, and Lenny has some investments in South America they’re nervous about …” Sharis sighed, looked at the screen again. George was sitting soddenly in the kitchen; Gentia bustled behind him, heading offscreen toward the living room. “I’m sure Gentia would have fired me on Easter if we weren’t her neighbors.”

  “Sharis?” Chad said softly, patting his knees. Sharis stood and walked to him, sat down, curled up her knees and leaned her head against his chest. A child’s pose, she knew, but she never recalled doing this with her father. “What’re you going to do next?” she said.

  Chad loved her heavy head, the hot smell of her hair. “I think I’ll do the park system. I love the park system.” The land had been largely donated: generosity, civic-mindedness.

  Sharis nodded. “You support us, honey,” Chad said. “You do everything. I don’t tell you enough how I’m grateful.”

  She didn’t make a sound, and her head was still down, so Chad was at first confused when he felt wetness on his chest. She was crying.

  “JANIE!”

  Up the condo stairs. A knock on the guestroom door. “Janie, are you awake yet? I’ve got breakfast, French toast and eggs.” A new day. This brandy swilling had to stop. The last thing the world needed was another lesbo lush.

  Lila pushed open the door, a shaft of light spilling into the dark cube of the room. Empty.

  Later, she would think: how stupid could I be? How did I miss it? But she knew exactly how she missed it. Within the hour she was missing it again.

  “SO,” GENERAL NENONENE said. “We forgive you, we set you up in a happy life, we feed you, we make everything perfect, and now this.”

  “I didn’t ask for anything.”

  “She was kind to you, I heard. Kind. Is that how you repay kindness?” Nenonene scratched the back of his scalp with one finger.

  Tuuro replayed—again—his last moments with Chelsea. He shook his head. “She said I was nothing to her. And I …” he stopped himself. I wanted to be so much, he thought.

  Nenonene laughed, a low rumble that spread out from his chest like an earthquake. “You don’t think I’ve heard such insults? You don’t think such words have been”—bean, he said, very British—“aimed at me? But, you! You are nothing.” He spoke into an intercom, and a heavyset man appeared in the office, the rawhide-skinned man that had sat with them at Allyssa’s dining room table, the night Tuuro first met Nenonene.

  Nenonene stood to leave. He cast Tuuro a quick look and snapped his middle finger against his thumb, as if he were flicking off a fly.

  The functionary sighed. He sat down behind the desk and slipped an unusually thin perc from his pants pocket. He ran through holo-screen after holo-screen, intermittently tapping the perc’s face with his finger. He never looked at Tuuro. At some point Tuuro lifted his hand to scratch his nose. “Don’t move,�
� the man said.

  “Give me your ID card,” the man ordered a moment later, holding out his hand.

  I made her nothing, Tuuro realized. The irony of it made his scalp twitch. She called me nothing so I made her nothing, while here I am still alive, a general breaking his schedule to talk to me, a man making taps on his perc on my behalf. He saw again the horror of what he’d done. I should kill myself, he thought, and then: no, I should stay alive. Because the alive is the punishment.

  “Okay,” the man said, feeding Tuuro’s ID card into a slot at the side of his perc. “You’re erased.”

  “I should go back to my apartment?” Tuuro asked, confused.

  “Oh, no.” The man smiled. “We’ve erased you.” He gave Tuuro a chastising look. “And the apartment was never yours.”

  Tuuro was aware of his heartbeat. “I don’t understand. Where do I go now?”

  The man shrugged. “Up to you. As far as we’re concerned, you’re nobody.”

  THE CAPTAIN CLOSED his office door. “I need you to help me, but I can help you, too.” A captain Grady didn’t particularly like, lateral in the chain of command, with a rugged face and a soft middle. During the Gridding, it was rumored, he had lost his temper and broken a private’s arm.

  “Sir?”

  “Look here.” The captain beckoned Grady to the window in his door that opened to the office lobby, a window Grady knew was mirrored on the other side. “See?”

  In the lobby, a female youngie wearing trousers and a pullover shirt was sitting on a plastic chair. The youngie looked straight ahead, her right foot tucked up under her left thigh. “She’s good,” the captain said. “Fourteen. Nice and tight.” He pointed at her leg. “Flexible, too.”

  “That’s nice.” She looked younger than fourteen, Grady thought. A proto-youngie. A smudged look around her eyes and her chin oddly red. Tainted goods, and not her fault.

  “You want her?”

  Grady shook his head.

  “She’ll do anything. You just tell her. She’s a baby.”

  “I don’t want to sleep with her. Not at all.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” The captain kicked the door; in the waiting room the girl jumped. “When’d you get so fucking righteous?” It would have reassured him, Grady realized, for Grady to go along. Maybe a month before he would have. A month before, when his copilot had believed that Grady had the soul of a Taconoute.

  “What do you need me for?” Grady asked, remembering there was a favor, tired of his life. He thought—hopelessly, belatedly—that he had missed his chance to be a hero: he could have agreed to take the youngie for an hour and set her free. But where would that leave him? With reprimands in his file and a captain looking for trouble.

  “Transport,” the captain growled. “But let me have another night first.”

  “YOU KNOW,” THE specialist said, turning to Diana, holding up the vial like a glass of fine wine, “you’ve got a nice sample of your friend’s tissue here. Are you sure you don’t want a clone?”

  For a moment she hesitated, thinking of Charles’s eyes with their downturned corners, the soft curl of his upper lip. But then she caught herself. “I want a mixture of us,” she said. “Just stick an egg and sperm together and implant it.” That was what Charles would have wanted, she was sure. A random conception to lure a special soul. Diana ached that Charles was already fading on her; the other day she couldn’t get a clear picture of his hands.

  Money: that was all it had taken to leave Dayton. She had ridden in the back of a beer truck returning to Cincinnati, slipped inside after its last delivery to Dayton. There was a middlewoman she’d talked to via perc but never met, who apparently got a cut of the bills Diana had slipped to the man in the grocery. From Cincinnati she’d taken a bus to Chattanooga, where the specialist had his practice.

  “Why don’t I do ten sperm-and-eggs, and we’ll implant the best one?”

  “No. No thank you. No preselects. I want it like the old days. I want an accident.”

  Oh, I certainly remember you, the specialist had said. The rebel.

  “There’s a reason they’re the old days, Diana,” the specialist said, kneading his neck with his right hand. “We’ve made reproduction so much crisper. There’s no need these days to risk the random.”

  “I was random,” Diana pointed out. “You were random.”

  “TRACE IT? THAT’S a little ambitious. You’re forgetting about privacy features. You must think we’re miracle workers.”

  Yes, Lila thought. It’s no problem, she’d told Janie’s father via perc, I know these old computer broads who can do anything. They can find the boy that Janie was talking to.

  Janie’s father had been surprisingly calm. “You sure she went to South Carolina?”

  “That’s where the boy was,” Lila said. “I don’t think she’d lie to me.”

  “I’m glad she got out,” Janie’s father said. “Just find her for me so I know.” He’s military and he knows something, Lila thought.

  The afternoon after Janie disappeared, Lila had smashed her last three bottles, using her finger to dab up a final taste. That evening she went out for a new supply. It took Nelson and Solganik almost a week to get to her house—they had a waiting list, they said—and Lila went through at least a bottle of brandy each day. She forgot about the lemons and the honey.

  When Nelson and Solganik arrived, Lila wasn’t sure what day it was or how long Janie had been gone. The computer broads’ matching shirts today were pale blue. “What I can do is cut into your wall and open the broadband, see if it’s set up any central circuits,” Nelson said. “If you’ve got those you know a line’s been used pretty frequently. It’s an automatic function, part of that whole self-healing package they used to talk about. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you, honey?” Lila looked blank. “What’s your department again? Waste disposal?”

  “Water,” Lila said. “A little more elemental than your line of work.”

  “I’d say communication’s pretty elemental.”

  Lila left the women fiddling with their wires and went and sat on the edge of Janie’s bed, looking out the window at the condo parking lot. A few cars were still there, but many of them hadn’t been moved in days. Where were the owners? Had everybody really gone? Lila should go, too. She wondered how Nelson and Solganik moved in and out of Dayton. But how could she ask them without feeling even more foolish? And even if she knew, how could she leave? She had the city’s water to look after; more importantly, her condo was the place Janie called home.

  Solganik appeared in Janie’s doorway. “We’ve got a surprise for you,” she said, looking pleased. “You thought that little girl was talking to South Carolina? That little girl was smart. Remember that sequence Nelson gave you when we were here the last time? When you wanted to get a message to your friend on the Grid?”

  “I kept it with me,” Lila said. “I stuck it in my bra.”

  Solganik’s face cracked into a smile, and Lila had a surge of panic that she didn’t have enough bottles. The store would be closed or the shelves would be empty or … “That little girl must have memorized that sequence,” said Solganik, “because that little girl was talking to the Grid.”

  THE IMPLANTATION WORKED. Diana was pregnant again. Diana had already been sure.

  “You know you’re taking a terrible risk,” the specialist said. “I can’t continue to treat you without a waiver.”

  Treat her? Why should she need treatment? A woman pregnant by her lover; what could be more natural?

  “I CAN’T TALK to you now,” Lila said into her perc. She was in her car.

  “You’ve got to talk to me, Lila,” Kennedy said. “I’m going crazy here. Have you ever had desires you can’t handle? Desires for, you know, terrible things? You know that female agent of havoc, the one who didn’t get killed, the one whose photo they keep showing on the media? I can’t stop thinking about her. Lila, I dream about her. Those dreams. Isn’t that sick? It disturbs me so muc
h I can’t stand it. I’m afraid to fall asleep.”

  Lila said: “She’s a teenager!”

  “I know, that makes it even worse! What’s wrong with me? A woman that young, a killer … It’s not like I’m trying to think about her, I’m trying not to think about her. But there she is when I’m dreaming. And I’m a person who feels guilty even setting a mousetrap. Jesus, what is this dark goo bubbling up inside of me, Lila? What is wrong with me?”

  Lila had never heard Kennedy sound frantic. “For crying out loud, Kennedy, what does it matter?” Lila said. “It’s just dreams, okay? It’s nothing you’d act on.” In the last four days, Lila had sent twenty messages about Janie to Allyssa, using the pathway she’d tucked in her bra, and still there was no answer. Polite requests, angry requests, threats—still no information. Just tell me if she’s with you, Lila begged. I won’t come after her. I ask you in the name of all things human.

  All Lila got back from Allyssa’s address, over and over, was the interface: WE ARE ESSLANDIA. WE NEED NOTHING.

  Lila had reported Janie’s absence to the police, but they didn’t have much hope.

  Lila said, “I don’t mean to be harsh, but right now I’m worried about the kid staying with me who’s disappeared, and that’s not a dream at all, that’s real.”

  “What kid?”

  “I told you already! The relative of that Michelle, my friend from Agro.”

  “Oh, that’s right …” Kennedy sounded befuddled.

  “I don’t care about your stupid dreams!” Lila screamed, tossing her perc to the floor of her car. “Stop bothering me about nothing!”

  a very clear window

  “WHY DO YOU think I’d know, darling?”

  “You know everything!” Lila was fine. One drink sharpened her. It was a matter of balance.

  “Well,” Ferrescu conceded, “I do.” Lila felt a sweep of revulsion that her compliment had worked so easily. She thought back to moments before and her confusion when a man who looked like Ferrescu’s elderly uncle had opened the door. “Is Ferrescu …” she had started, then realized it was him: “ … ready for the Queen of Water?”