by Dave Smeds
“Maybe. There’s another way he could have done it. He may have learned remorphing in the process of creating his reef ape species. If so, he could have programmed the hotel nanoplayers to do his dirty work, without help from anyone.”
“Surely we can prove he had that kind of training.”
“Even if we do, it will only show how he might have done it, it won’t prove if he did it.”
Veronica sighed. “But Helen — it’s what happened.”
Helen choked down a sip of coffee and loosened the kinks in her shoulders, the kinks that told her Veronica was telling the truth. “I know. But as your lawyer, I have to advise you not to press charges.”
“Why?”
“Using a nanoplayer to impersonate a human being is a mindwipe crime. The D.A. won’t risk her maestro status for you unless she knows she can win. The defense will have extremely wide latitude. Judges just don’t send someone to mindwipe without giving the person the fullest hearing possible. You’ll be subject to the most ruthless kind of cross-examination. Any part of your personal history that might have a bearing on the case is fair game. Do you really want to be dragged through the shit, Veronica?”
“I’m not ashamed of my life,” the client replied.
“Let me spell it out. Your three biggest pieces of research, your claims to fame, were done in close collaboration with male colleagues.”
“Yes. So?”
“Male colleagues who were your lovers at the time.”
Veronica stiffened. “I don’t meet many men outside my discipline. And I happen to be drawn to men I admire for their professional acumen.”
Helen kept forcing out the words. “Imagine a brilliant attorney facing a jury, speaking eloquently of how you manipulated lovers into giving you credit for ideas which were largely their own. Imagine him pointing out that you and Louis Sheldon had once had a brief fling. Imagine a woman desperate to maintain her rank in her profession.”
Helen ordered her desk to generate another cup of coffee. “Come on, Veronica. Going public is only going to magnify the incident out of proportion. He didn’t hurt you. You even enjoyed it, apparently, before you discovered who was fucking you.”
Veronica swayed, as if her bones had turned to air. “He made me an accessory to my own rape,” she said, so softly that Helen scarcely made out the words.
“The point remains,” the lawyer said, almost as softly, “that Louis Sheldon can hurt your reputation a lot more than an unproved accusation of nanoplayer misuse will hurt his. Short of an accomplice stepping forward out of the blue, the D.A. is not going to pursue the felony. Without the impersonation charge, the rape’s just personal assault. That means if we pursue it as a civil case and lose, you’re liable for false accusation. If Sheldon insisted, the judge could strip you down to journeyman. Do you really want to set back your career eighty or a hundred years?”
Veronica drew up her feet. Her arms curled around her elbows. Helen thought of a turtle, vanishing into its shell.
“It never changes,” Veronica said, in a voice that dropped the bottom out of Helen’s stomach.
“No, it doesn’t,” Helen whispered, knowing exactly what Veronica meant. For a long, bitter moment, she wished she were not such a persuasive lawyer.
Long after it had visually disappeared, Veronica’s face seemed to float in front of Helen’s desk. What had been hot anger on her arrival now lay deep behind those haunted eyes, a flame made into ice, as permanent and unstoppable as a glacier. Helen shivered, knowing that though the legal case had died unborn, the matter was not resolved.
o0o
As he stepped out of his research offices five years later, Louis had not thought of Veronica Rizal in a long time. She’d vanished from his sphere entirely after his lawyer had put a stop to a certain ineffective, behind-closed-doors attempt to block his confirmation to adept. Since then, his life had been busy. These days, his main concern was dealing with the frequent visitors to the hominid sanctuary — media personnel, tourists, colleagues looking to ride his coattails.
This day, there were no visitors. Louis had deliberately arranged a complete day of quiet. He’d sent the staff away as well, giving him the run of his small patch of paradise. He waded into the shallows with a cheerful, confident stride, master of his domain.
The sun was well up over the East African coast, and most of Louis’s troop of reef apes had taken to the water to cool off and to forage for mollusks and seaweed. The primates acknowledged his arrival with glances and low hoots. He assumed his usual observational distance, close by the edge of the group, but not within it.
Three young males had apparently discovered something exciting. They flailed their arms, shouted, and repeatedly dived into the chest-deep waters. Louis dunked his head and peered through the transparent sea to where the males romped.
One of the apes grabbed at the side of a submarine rock. The object of interest was a large abalone, a real prize for any member of the troop. The ape tried to yank the shellfish free. Failing, he rose for a breath, and one of his companions replaced him.
The second ape, who Louis had named Otto, got a firm hold almost immediately. The abalone peeled free. Louis surfaced.
Otto came up brandishing his treasure, a radiant smile on his face. His competitors turned to the remainder of the troop and raised even more racket than he, as if to borrow some of the glory by mere enthusiasm.
Otto rewarded the pair with shreds of abalone flesh, took a larger piece to the alpha male, and climbed onto a dry projection of reef. Sara, one of the females, unabashedly courted Otto’s favor.
Even after decades of studying the animals, whenever Louis witnessed a smile such as the one on Otto’s face, he was amazed at how human the species could seem. Subcutaneous fat smoothed out the wrinkles typical of chimp or gorilla faces. Under the mop of scalp hair, Otto’s brown face displayed only the faintest traces of hair. His nostrils, instead of pointing skyward, hid beneath a true nose.
Louis had to smile himself. He appreciated the forthrightness of reef apes. They kept their emotions near the surface, easy to read, like children. Compared to the currents and eddies of human interaction, Louis found it soothing to walk among them.
Which was why he was not alarmed to note that one of the males seemed to be shadowing him.
It was Jerry, a large but relatively timid male. He was much closer than any of the troop usually came.
Louis faced him, making sure not to challenge through eye-to-eye contact. Jerry pretended to be examining a strand of kelp for tiny snails. His calculated indifference indicated non-hostile intent. Louis turned back to the main portion of the troop.
Then it occurred to him that he had just seen Jerry back on the beach, taking sand baths with several of his siblings. How had he come so far into the water so quickly?
Louis glanced toward shore. To his shock, he saw Jerry still among the dunes, happily playing. Which meant the reef ape near him—
—was a fake.
He whirled, opening his mouth to raise his personal body shield to maximum, but the primate, having closed the gap, cuffed him on the side of the head. Louis swayed, unable to resist as Jerry dunked him under the surface.
Something needle-sharp plunged into his neck. Louis inhaled salt water. He thrashed, but iron hands held him by the hair at the back of his head. The ersatz Jerry, every bit as strong as the real one, dragged him halfway toward the beach before Louis gained the composure to attempt to sub-vocally issue orders — to raise his shield, and to ask the Net to initiate a recording.
It didn’t work. Trembling with a whole new level of fear, Louis realized that his tongue and vocal cords had been paralyzed. He struggled doubly hard to get free. He managed to lift his head from the water, gaining just enough time to cough before his assailant shoved him under again.
By the time they reached the shore, Louis was half-conscious, able only to retch and to strain for air. Jerry dragged him up on the sand.
Louis’s head
began to clear. He wriggled free and made it two steps before being slammed into the grit. Jerry grabbed Louis’s right arm and broke it, and while Louis vomited into the sand, the ape broke the left one.
Louis screamed.
Easily restraining Louis’s wrists with one hand, Jerry leaned down to face his captive. If any doubts had remained that this might be a genuine reef ape, they dissolved into the pupils of those dark eyes.
With a stubby forefinger, Jerry wrote four words into the wet sand beside Louis’s head: “Your word against mine.”
Louis writhed, acrid sweat popping from his armpits. He understood. A vision of the next hour flashed before his eyes: Veronica bashing him on the rocks, breaking his knees, and doing God knew what else before she finally drowned him. She might even wait around for his nanodocs to repair him, and kill him two or three times more.
She held him down, letting the ramifications of the situation sink in.
He began to whimper. She couldn’t possibly get away with it.
Sure I can, said the dark eyes. Panting, searching for anything to keep his mind away from the agony, it came to him: It was no felony to impersonate a reef ape.
A brief twist of his limbs sent a broken splinter of bone out his skin. Louis thrashed, tongue rolling in the sand and puke. The prospect of a court case, assuming he dared expose to the public how skillfully she had taken her revenge, offered no solace. It was part of the unreachable future. In the here-and-now, his body suffered, he had not yet died and been repaired. Ahead was the longest hour of his life.
The surf washed away the sentence in the sand. The bone of the other arm emerged into the air.
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INTRODUCTION TO “HOMESPUN AND HANDMADE”
My grandfather Bert Warner was born and raised along the Pecatonica River at the boundary line of Wisconsin and Illinois. The same was true of his parents. I, on the other hand, am a native of California. Aside from a dimly remembered trip when I was five years old, I had no images of the area from my direct experience. Yet as Pop, as we kids called him, continued over the years to refer to his place of origin with deep affection, I increasingly came to see it. It was not just a place of my imagination. It meant more. When I needed a pre-technological setting for the following story, it was only natural that I was inspired by those visions.
HOMESPUN AND HANDMADE
In its own way, winter is a season of bounty. Insulated by technology, people of our time usually fail to appreciate that. While I lived with Daniel and his children on their long-ago farm, I would stroke the icicles hanging from the fence rails. At night I would stand outside gazing at the crisp clarity of the stars until my teeth chattered. The harshness of the season was my ally; it brought my dear ones into an even tighter circle around me, the better to savor their company.
Daniel harvested ice the morning of Groundhog Day. He brought the load on the sled to the outside hatch of the cellar. The girls and I came down by way of the pantry stairs. I hung the kerosene lamp from its hook and we gathered in the pool of light to watch him work.
The blocks came sliding down the ramp, each successive one crashing into those below, flinging tiny shards of ice into our faces. Perched in my arms, Marancy giggled at the bracing pinpricks of sensation. To a three-year-old, it was pure entertainment.
“Our mama used to worry we’d get poked in the eyes,” Sarah commented. “She always made us stay upstairs.”
“Now, now. Your mama was only looking out for you.” I tried to sound firm. I was determined that the fondness my step-daughters had for me did not come by diminishing their esteem for their birth mother. But inwardly, I glowed.
When the last of the blocks had made its journey, Daniel slid down the ramp himself. He lifted away the slats that covered the ice bunker and fetched a shovel from the rack. I handed Marancy into the care of her older sister and reached for a second shovel.
“You’ll get your apron dirty. Mind the girls,” Daniel said.
I blinked at the curtness. “Of — of course,” I stammered, and returned to the stairs. Marancy climbed into my lap as Sarah and I sat on the treads.
Daniel worked quickly, mucking out the bottom of the bunker with robust scoops and dumping the sludge into two large buckets.
While I sat there, I fought to keep my expression smooth, even managing to smile indulgently whenever I felt the girls’ attention on me. But I was stung. Daniel might be a 19th Century man, but he had never before used gender roles to shut me out. The Pecatonica River Valley had been newly settled when Daniel’s parents arrived; he’d seen his own mother guide a plow across a muddy field with the rear end of the ox in front of her nose the whole while. Just a week past, he and I had worked elbow to elbow to clear the snow drifts from the barn door after the big storm.
I silently condemned the meddler who had spoiled that harmony.
When the bunker was clean, Daniel exchanged the shovel for a pair of ice hooks and maneuvered the blocks across the floor. One by one they dropped into place. He covered them with an insulating layer of fresh straw, then replaced the slats, hiding the storage cavity away for another year. Done, he smiled at Sarah and Marancy.
“Those’ll keep a good long time,” Daniel announced, slapping the ice-melt from his gloves. He said it as someone who relished a cool serving of canned peaches after a day’s toil under a hot summer sun. We all shared his approving glance at the jars of fruit, jam, and preserves on the shelves, the reward of the hours I had spent over the stove at harvest time.
My spirits were rising until I saw what he was really staring at: the corner containing the remnant left from the previous year, a legacy not of my work, but that of his late wife.
I glanced down, pretending to be absorbed in checking the slats to be sure they were seated evenly over the bunker. When I looked up again, Daniel had climbed the ramp to empty the buckets into the snow beyond the woodpile.
o0o
In the afternoon, I baked bread. The girls kept me company, churning butter and cracking walnuts, their young faces aglow with the anticipation of sampling the first loaf hot from the oven. Their father avoided me, remaining outside to top off feed bins and patch the hen coop.
He came in at suppertime, of course, but he was not his usual ebullient self, brimming with observations about the day. He ate quickly and left early, offering the excuse that he needed to fetch more wood for the stove. He said it as if I’d wasted what was there before, as if my breadmaking were some sort of whim and not a necessary and regular contribution to our lives.
The rift yawned even wider at the end of the evening. I came into the bedroom after settling the girls in the loft and found him already beneath the blankets and the room dark. I had to re-light a candle in order to put away my slippers and let down my hair.
I left the candle burning as I slid, shivering, beneath the many layers of flannel and wool. I wanted to see Daniel while we talked.
I knew he was awake. His muscles hadn’t relaxed nor had his breathing become rhythmic. I waited. Finally he opened his eyes. He stared at the rafters, not at me.
“You didn’t have to store ice in your cellars, where you come from. You had other ways to keep food cold.”
“Yes.”
“You had all kinds of incredible things. More’n I can begin to guess at.”
“Things don’t make a person happy. What I have here is what I find incredible.”
“But it ain’t a true life. Ain’t the one you were born to live.”
“When a parent adopts a child, is the child any less precious because it didn’t arrive the usual way? Just like I adopted Sarah and Marancy, I’ve adopted you and this place.”
“Ain’t no ‘just like’ about it. It’s not the same at all.” His voice went hoarse. “Is Annabeth even your name?”
“I—” I couldn’t answer. The question upset me too much. I knew I was going to break down. I fled for fear my hysterics would awaken the girls.
No place in t
he house was soundproof enough. I bolted outside and high-stepped, bare feet on packed snow, to the outhouse. I shut myself in and gave up all attempts at self-control. I sobbed so hard I strained an abdominal muscle. The tears poured down until I nearly choked.
“You poor dear.” The voice came from the darkness beside me. I yelped in surprise.
I flung open the dampers of the pot-bellied stove. The glow of the embers through the grill revealed the household’s gray tabby sitting on the bench beside the toilet lid. Or that is to say, it appeared to be the household’s gray tabby, but I had just left the real cat in the bedroom, curled up in its basket on the cedar chest.
I made a guess. “Vivica?”
“Yes.”
My tear ducts snapped shut. I continued to shudder a little, but that was because all I was wearing was a nightgown. I thrust more fuel into the stove. I was tempted to throw the cat in as well. “Were you the asshole who blabbed to Daniel?”
“No, that was Kenneth. I was opposed to the idea, actually. I figured it would just make you dig in your heels.”
“You were right about that much.”
“Terri, Terri, Terri,” the faux-cat said. “So we can’t force you to withdraw, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for you to stay. Come to your senses.”
“You know how judgmental that sounds?”
“It’s called intervention. It’s an act of concern.”
“Yeah, everybody’s willing to butt in now that I’m happy. When I could really have used some cheering up, you all were nowhere to be found.”
“Maybe that’s true,” Vivica suggested, though it didn’t sound like a concession to my ears. “Or maybe you didn’t give us a chance. Tell you what. I’m going to the gymnastics championships on Luna in a couple of weeks. I have a spare ticket. You could tag along. I’ve booked a great suite at the Hilton. Dori and Sam are gonna show up for the finals. Be like old times.”
“Spare me the pity gestures, Viv. I like it just fine where I am.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Terri. Look around. This is so primitive. So . . . filthy.” The cat lowered its nose to the gap between the bench and the closed toilet lid and snorted at the fumes wafting up from the cesspit. “You can’t tell me you like having to put up with this stench every time you go to the bathroom. I have to believe you’d see how much you don’t belong here if you were in a rational frame of mind.”