by Dave Smeds
The fact is, outdoor plumbing was one adjustment to life in the 1880s that I didn’t cope with as gracefully as I accepted others. But I wasn’t about to give Vivica the satisfaction of hearing me say that.
“This isn’t intervention,” I said. “It’s just intrusion. You’ve had your say. I want you to leave.”
“Your money’s almost gone, you know,” Vivica said. “What will you do then?”
“My credit is excellent. Now I believe I asked you to leave?”
The cat rolled its eyes, not at all a feline mannerism. “All right, all right. The timer’s running down anyway. But this isn’t over, Terri.”
“Bye bye,” I said.
I shut the dampers, restoring the darkness. When I opened the outhouse door and the moonlight shone in, the cat was nowhere to be seen.
o0o
In the morning, Daniel came in from milking the cows, ate his breakfast, and headed for the barn again almost before he had finished swallowing the last bite. As he crossed the yard, Sarah’s gaze followed him through the frosted kitchen window. She glanced at me, then down at the floor.
Only after Marancy went down for her nap did Sarah summon the courage to speak. I was at the sink peeling potatoes. She was at the kitchen table, grating cheese.
“It’s been so good since you came,” Sarah said. “Pa was so sad when Mama died.” Once she might have added, “and even before Mama died,” but I had weaned her from such talk. “Did you two have a fight?”
“A fight? Not exactly.”
I put down the peeler and moved to the chair across from her. I reached out and cupped her hands.
“He’s . . . upset with something he learned about me. He’s disappointed in me,” I said.
Sarah’s brows drew together until a pair of vertical wrinkles scored her normally doll-like forehead. “Pa thinks you’re his Helen of Troy. He told me so.”
“He said that before he knew certain sides of me.”
“What’s so awful about you? What didn’t he know?”
To my surprise, the words came easily. “Do you know what an addiction is?”
“No, ma’am.”
“It’s when someone has a craving for something that makes them feel good. They want it all the time, and they do anything to have it. They get so they can’t help themselves.”
“Like Uncle Caleb, and his drinking?”
“Like that.” I had not met Daniel’s brother-in-law. Daniel didn’t allow him to come ’round anymore. Caleb might even be dead; he hadn’t been seen in Stephenson or Green County in quite some time.
“But you don’t drink more than a sip of cordial, now and then,” Sarah protested.
“My problem is not alcohol.”
“Then what do you hanker for?”
“All this.” I waved at the hand-carved dining table, the knothole in the rafters, the rag carpet in the hallway, woven by Daniel’s grandmother when she lived back East. Things unique to this house, and to this particular juncture in time. “I can’t stop wanting to be with your father, wanting to be with you. Wanting to be here.”
“That doesn’t sound so wicked.”
“No. No, it doesn’t,” I answered. “I don’t believe it is.”
“Pa shouldn’t worry about it, then.”
“I agree,” I said. I offered her my lap. She climbed into it and I held her tight. “I promise you everything will be fine soon. One way or another.”
She cuddled, and for a moment I thought things between us would be fine. But she was so quiet, and the frown hadn’t gone away.
o0o
Once again, I found an intruder in the outhouse when I arrived. This time the avatar was a weasel. Weasels were a common enough sight on the farm. After all, we had hen’s eggs to steal. This one, though, didn’t run away upon being discovered.
“A varmint. How appropriate,” I said.
“I don’t think Sarah quite believed your explanation of the difficulties between you and her father,” the weasel said. Small and rodentish as the voice was, I recognized it as belonging to Andrew, from my old therapy group. “She’s a bright child. I imagine she’s going to keep digging until she gets a thorough explanation, don’t you think?”
“And I suppose you plan to help her along with that?” I snapped.
“Oh, no. That would be out of line. I’m not Kenneth, you know.”
“Thank goodness for small favors,” I replied.
“I’ve taken a look at your session logs. You handle your responsibilities so well as Annabeth. You should try that as Terri. You do have responsibilities, you know. People you should be there for.”
“So you say. Right now my responsibility is to empty my bladder. Are you planning on helping me with that, too, or can I have some privacy?”
The weasel hesitated. Andrew had clearly come to say more, but perhaps he had been expecting that I would be more willing to listen. He wasn’t great at being a point man. “As you wish,” he finally said. He hopped off the bench and down the wooden step.
He turned around when he reached the footprint-littered snow. “You know, you were a real help to me when I was in over my head. I wish you could take some of the advice you gave me then.”
I shut the door.
o0o
At lunchtime, I sent the girls out to the barn to fetch their father. He hadn’t come in all morning.
I watched through the window. Daniel met the children at the barn door. But he didn’t accompany them as they set out for the house.
The girls stopped midway back, confused. They waved for him to follow. Still he stood there.
What I saw confirmed my fears. I had lost him. He wasn’t able to be my Daniel anymore. His matrix couldn’t adjust enough to deal with the information Kenneth had given him. He was too aware of the nature of his existence. He couldn’t forgive me.
Sarah was picking up on the dissonance. At any moment, she might begin to ask him questions I couldn’t have her knowing the answers to.
“God damn it,” I murmured.
I had no choice. I went to the kitchen wall and placed my palm against it. “Access,” I said.
The interface appeared. I quickly re-set the Character Parameters to baseline. I’d lose the enrichment incorporated since then, but it couldn’t be helped.
I also authorized Highest Level Security. The modification would ding my account more than I had planned, but my credit was adequate, if not as robust as I’d implied to Vivica.
My “friends” would not be able to hack in again, not even to view the logs as Andrew had. Their measures had inconvenienced me, but I wasn’t done here yet.
I restored the wall to its 1880s look and returned to the window. Out in the yard, Daniel and the girls were now behaving as they should. Daniel was grinning as he swung Marancy in a circle. Sarah was giggling. Soon all three headed for the house, full of good cheer and looking forward to their midday meal.
o0o
I opened the oven. As the aroma of potato and cheese and onion poured out, smiles beamed all around. I put the casserole on the table, served everyone’s portions, and we began to eat.
The cheese contained an authentic pungency that few of my era would know, but that wasn’t what made the meal special. Its value came from the lack of pretension, from the company, from the setting, from the sheer comfort of familiar ingredients prepared in a familiar way. No declaration of approval from some culinary maven was needed to know I had done well. This recipe and way of enjoying it fulfilled the soul.
In this place and time, I knew where I stood.
Not a hint of the recent troubles tainted the scene. Sarah had no questions. Daniel exuded his traditional good humor. When he stood up from the table, he gave me a little kiss that set the girls to grinning behind their hands.
“I’d better get the team hitched up if we’re going to make it to over to Buster Hastings’s place on time,” he said.
Sarah brightened. “We’re going visiting?”
“Tha
t’s right,” I said. “Didn’t you notice the extra casserole?”
The children cheered and scampered out to the barn at their father’s heels.
I followed more sedately, filling a wicker basket not only with the second casserole but a loaf of the bread I’d baked the day before. Charity for an old widower who lived nearby.
By the time I came out Daniel was in the midst of positioning the horses in front of the sleigh. The animals tossed their heads and whinnied, eager to be heading out after days of confinement. I helped the children tie bells to Meadow’s tail. The mare tolerated it with only a twitch or two. Dusty, the gelding, snorted his disdain at the prospect. “One of these days,” Sarah promised him, but she wasn’t ready to force the issue this time, nor would I have let her.
The song praises the delights of an open sleigh, but an open sleigh is hardly meant for comfort. Ours was closed, its chassis rounded inward to form a cockpit. Daniel filled the footwarmer with hot charcoal and set it down in the front with a metallic clunk. He draped it with the fitted flannel cover and we climbed in. The heavy sleigh blanket went round us, supplementing the smaller ones around our bodies. I fastened the cover by its hooks and we were cozy in our cocoon, only our muffed heads and Daniel’s gloved hands poking through into the chill air. Daniel flicked the reins and we were off.
Buster lived close by. In a later day and age, the distance between our dwelling places would be inconsequential, but for us it was a shift from the everyday world to the special. The girls shouted hurrahs as we rounded the hillock and saw the old farmhouse, smoke rising from its chimney, golden retriever barking in the yard to announce our arrival.
Buster limped onto his porch. “Jake!” he bellowed at his pet. “Get over here.” Fortunately he was obeyed, or the hairy beast might have licked us to death as we fetched the casserole and bread from the luggage compartment.
As we paraded inside, warmth enveloped our weather-reddened noses and made them glow. Buster had a glow of his own, a bright-eyed energy as his loneliness was broken, at least for the next hour. “You two have growed an inch since Christmas,” he declared with enthusiasm, patting Sarah on the head. He didn’t bend to do the same to Marancy; his stiff spine didn’t allow it.
We continued in to the kitchen to put the food down, and found a ham lying on the table. “That’s for you,” Buster said.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Daniel protested.
“It’s little enough in return,” the old fellow insisted. “I have a little too much of some things, now that Myrna’s gone. No use it going to waste here.” He patted the ham. “I may not be much good in a kitchen, but I do know how to hang a pig in a smokehouse.”
The old farmer sounded pleased with himself, and he had a right to be. “We’re grateful to you,” I said.
“Any word from that son of yours in California?” Daniel asked.
Buster opened a drawer and lifted out an envelope. I made out a San Francisco postmark.
“Still making a good life for himself,” Buster informed us. “Wants me to come and live with him now that his eldest is gettin’ married. I told you about young Will, right?”
“Yes.” Daniel chuckled. Buster had mentioned his grandson’s engagement the last five visits in a row. “So are you going?”
“Shucks no. I’ll stay right where I am, thank you. Couldn’t imagine it any other way.”
Buster had homesteaded this farm. It had never been owned or operated by anyone else. I knew he would stay until the day the dog trundled in and found him laid out stiff and cold in his bed, a tintype cameo of his wife on the nightstand beside him.
“Neither could we, Buster. Neither could we,” I said, squeezing his hand.
He blushed to have a woman touch him. “You’re right good neighbors to me. Keeps a body goin’.”
We stayed as long as Buster remained talkative. He made sure we understood we were welcome to stay longer, but we didn’t want to wear him out.
The old man escorted us out to the sleigh. As we approached, Jake padded up and looked at us with a regard that I found disturbingly human. I studied him to be sure his behavior didn’t resemble that of the cat and the weasel in the outhouse.
The retriever’s tail wagged and the exuberant tongue made its traditional assault on little Marancy’s face, much to her delight. The dog was a dog. The integrity of the milieu was secure. Everyone was behaving according to pattern.
o0o
On the way home, we let Meadow and Dusty set their own pace, the horses’ natural laziness balanced by their desire to get back home to their stalls. Buster’s farm slipped over the horizon, and we cruised along beside sparkling white fields.
Marancy climbed into my lap and leaned back against me. Sarah leaned in from the side, and together we settled against Daniel. My big handsome man wrapped his free arm around my shoulders and braced so that we were all steady and could, if we chose, remain nestled all the way home.
Daniel’s gaze swept over the landscape. He looked at me and smiled. “Ain’t it a wonder, Annabeth? Could it be any better?”
A family outing. A good deed accomplished. Beauty all around. And a simplicity and peace I’d never found in the 22nd Century. No, it couldn’t be any better.
“It’s like a dream,” I replied.
The words carved out a chunk of me below my sternum. It added to the awful, hole-in-the-middle sensation already there. I wanted to blame Kenneth and Vivica and Andrew for creating it, but the truth was, the hollowness had taken root well before the first intervention episode.
A dream. Yes. And only a dream. For months my life as Annabeth had seemed to be the greatest sort of wakefulness. No more. An illusion only has power when one can’t see the man behind the curtain. I could hold firm against my friends’ doubts about the choices I had made, but not against my own.
It was time to do what I’d decided to do when I’d accessed the interface. I’d needed this last sliver of an afternoon to savor, but the clock had run down.
“I love you, Daniel. I love you, Sarah. I love you, Marancy.”
Deep within the compartment of the sleigh, beside the dwindling warmth of the foot warmer, I clicked my heels three times.
The sleigh ceased to move. The moment was as frozen as the ground had been: Clouds of breath — human and equine — hung in the air as if painted. Marancy’s eyelids were poised half down, captured in mid-blink. Sarah was preserved in the midst of lifting the blanket, curious to learn what I was doing with my feet. Now she would never find out.
Daniel’s right hand was forever steady on the reins, keeping our course true.
I closed my eyes. As soon as I opened them, the details of the room around me grew more distinct, became impossible to ignore: The equipment, the blinking indicators, the glow of the clock.
Outside, beyond the smartglass and walls programmed to keep the climate at bay, snow was falling. It was winter, for those who troubled themselves to notice. I could still hear the tinkle of bells on a horse’s tail.
Return to Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION TO “EVAPORATION”
Poor Elton Elliott. In the early 1990s, Science Fiction Review, a long-running fanzine helmed by Richard E. Geis, was going to be re-envisioned as a newsstand publication containing, among other things, original fiction. Elton had expressed a desire for submissions of stories exploring nanotechnology, and I yielded to the temptation and sent him an early draft of “Suicidal Tendencies.” He liked it. Wanted to buy it. But the big plans for SFR fell through before the first issue could appear. (And before I got paid.) Which was for the best, as it turned out. Encouraged by the interest, I significantly revised and expanded the story, sent it to Full Spectrum 4, and it was accepted.
Just as that was in process, Elton called to say the plans for SFR were a “go” again, and he renewed his offer for “Suicidal Tendencies.” I explained the novelette was no longer available. Hating to leave a supportive editor in the lurch, I agreed to write a replacemen
t story. That was “A Marathon Runner in the Human Race,” which Elton would have published except once again, the project failed to get up and running. The story was soon accepted by Kris Rusch at F&SF and was published in that magazine in early 1994.
Elton was passionate about editing a “nanotech issue” somehow, though, and soon found a new means of doing so by selling an anthology to Jim Baen at Baen Books. The title was to be Nanodreams. Elton gave me another call. I wrote “Evaporation” for the book, and the third time was the charm. In the summer of 1995, the book appeared on store bookshelves across the nation.
As mentioned in the introduction to “Suicidal Tendencies,” this may be one of my nanotech stories, but it does not fit into the milieu of the others. The future it imagines is totalitarian. In part, that is because the plot was already on-hand when Elton commissioned a piece from me for Nanodreams. About four years earlier, Harry Harrison and Bruce McAllister had solicited proposals for stories for Deathworlds, an anthology of tales of hostile worlds such as the one from Harry’s famous short novel, Deathworld. That anthology had not sold, but I knew I didn’t want to let the outline go to waste. Nanodreams turned out to be an ideal opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
EVAPORATION
Part One
Glenn Ashwood woke to a fierce sunrise, cracked mud beneath his naked body.
The stark, antiseptic quarters of the jumpship brig had vanished. Glenn was outdoors now — out in raw air, looking up at a blue sky shimmering with heat. A small waning moon he didn’t recognize hung just west of the zenith, its craters indistinct in the daylight.
He sat up, scanning right and left. No buildings. The only sign of human presence save himself were the impressions left in the dry lakebed by the transport. Sand dunes, outcroppings, and bleak, eroded hills ringed him in every direction, without a single shred of vegetation nor any trace of cloud. Whatever rain had created the mud beneath him had done so months, years, even decades earlier.