VIOLET EYES

by Nicole Luiken

  Wendy grasped the handle of the bat. I held on to it for a moment, looking into her pain-darkened eyes, then surrendered it.

  Relief made a road map of Mr. Lindstrom’s face. “You’ve made the right decision—No!”

  Wendy held the bat high over the computer like an executioner’s sword. She took several preparatory swings, like a batter warming up, while her father pleaded with her to stop.

  She didn’t seem to hear; she licked her lips, gaze intent and tightly focused, as if in a trance.

  Her first blow was tentative, barely jarring the monitor where it sat on the CPU. Her second tipped it off the pedestal and cracked the screen. After her third stroke imploded the cathode-ray tube, she went berserk.

  She clubbed the computer as if it had just betrayed her. Tears sheened her eyes. “This is for the time you went off to Peru and left me behind.” Thunk. “This is for the kachina doll you brought me back from New Mexico.” Crash. Mr. Lindstrom flinched with every swing. “And the pottery shard from Laos. Did you think it made up for your absence?” The monitor lay in splinters on the floor now, the keys scattered like dice, the drive boxes cracked, but she kept bashing and bashing until Carl gently plucked the bat from her hands.

  He pressed her face against his shirt and looked over her shoulder at Mr. Lindstrom’s image on the monitor. “She doesn’t mean it.” His voice was flat. “This week has been very traumatic for her.”

  Mr. Lindstrom went off the deep end. “Don’t you tell me about my daughter, you computer! How can you understand her feelings when you don’t have any of your own?”

  Carl didn’t react to the insult, just quietly ushered Wendy offscreen.

  Jimmy’s watch beeped again. I gave him the nod. “Kill a VCR.” He did so efficiently, with a minimum of fuss.

  The distant crash forced Mr. Lindstrom’s head up. “I need to talk to your boss,” I told him.

  “Cynthia’s trying to get him on the tube right now,” he said moodily. “He’s in Japan, and it’s five in the morning there. The connection’s going to take some time.”

  In Japan, when they’d just taken Mike? I don’t think so. “Better hurry. You have exactly nine minutes before another piece of your history disappears forever.”

  Mr. Lindstrom spent all nine of them trying to make me feel guilty about the treasures I was destroying.

  “What about the treasures of mine you’ve destroyed?” I countered, but he only looked bewildered. Questions about Project Renaissance would have to wait until Mr. Japan appeared.

  Two computers later Mr. Japan came on. He didn’t look tired to me: he looked hopping mad. He didn’t wait for me to talk, just started ranting about tear gas and punishing us to the full extent of the law.

  “Punishment?” I raised an eyebrow. “What are you going to do? You’ve already kept me in prison for seventeen years of my life.”

  He didn’t seem to hear. I had to dismantle a sewing machine in front of him before he finally shut up. “Are you ready to hear my demands now?” I asked. “They’re quite simple; you shouldn’t have any problem understanding them.”

  He glowered at me.

  “Yes or no?” I asked sweetly, stripping the casing off a pocket calculator.

  “Yes!”

  “Good. I want Mike back.” I started to give him an ultimatum, but he cut me off.

  “Mike who?”

  “Oh, come on! You know who. My other half.”

  “Half of what?”

  I was so mad I killed two Apples before his screaming got through.

  “I don’t know anyone named Mike!” He turned to his executive assistant: “Get me a list! Get me a list! What the hell town is she from?”

  “Renaissance,” I said.

  “Renaissance, Canada?”

  I swore. I believed him. “Carl, go back to Mr. Lindstrom.” He cut Mr. Japan off midsquawk.

  Mr. Lindstrom hadn’t moved, his head in his hands.

  “Mr. Lindstrom!”

  His head came up slowly, face ravaged. Of course, with a new baby he probably hadn’t gotten much sleep last night. “Angel?”

  “Your boss can’t help me. I need someone else, the head of the Renaissance Project.”

  He looked just as puzzled as Mr. Japan had. Apparently, Renaissance was using the Historical Immersion Project without the project leaders’ knowledge. But there had to be a link somewhere.

  “Where do you send your reports?” I asked.

  “To Mr. Tajamura.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “The special reports. The ones that profile only a few students, like Mike and me. The ones that accused me of cheating on your social studies test.”

  His face cleared a little. “You mean the reports for special funding?”

  “Yes! Those are the ones. I need to contact those people.”

  Jimmy’s watch beeped, and Mr. Lindstrom flinched.

  “It’s okay,” I soothed him. “You have two freebies. This is my fault for following the wrong path. Can you get hold of the grant people?”

  “I suppose.” He looked doubtful.

  “Do it.”

  It took time. Both freebies ticked away, and we started destroying computers again. We were down to ten now, and everyone was getting a little tired of smashing them.

  “Anyone want to take a closer look?” I asked.

  Carl rolled up his sleeves. “I’ve always wanted to take one of these apart.”

  The dismantling spelled a kind of torture to Mr. Lindstrom. “Don’t!” He was reduced to pleading as if Carl were an actual human being.

  “I’m not hurting it,” Carl said calmly. He unscrewed the back. “It has no eyes to pierce, no heart to cut, no feelings to bruise.” He lifted the microchip board out. “Its not alive.”

  “It’s a national treasure!”

  Carl looked up, blue-gray eyes steady. “It has no soul. By what right do you compare it to me?”

  Mr. Lindstrom shut up.

  It occurred to me that Carl was very, very angry, though, as usual, nothing showed in either his voice or his face. “How is it similar to me? Show me how it is the same, and I’ll put it back together again.”

  Mr. Lindstrom’s nostrils flared. “You’re both just computers, made out of plastic and silicon.”

  “A fruit fly has chromosomes like you. Are you the same?”

  “A fruit fly doesn’t pretend to be other than what it is. You’re an impostor.” Mr. Lindstrom glared.

  Wendy opened her mouth to speak, but Carl stopped her with a motion. “No, let me defend myself.” He turned back to Mr. Lindstrom.

  “I have a mother and a father, just like you. I was born, as you were. My lungs were only half-developed, and my heart was weak, so instead of abandoning me to a half-existence in a bubble, my parents saw to it that I received mechanical Augmentation. The scientists did nothing to my brain. I am as human as you are.”

  “You don’t laugh, you don’t cry, you don’t get angry You have no emotions, no foibles, no capacity for love. How can you call yourself human?”

  Wendy bit her lip to keep from speaking.

  Carl took the points one at a time. “My voice box is manufactured, like the rest of me. I can laugh, but the sound is unnatural, so I prefer not to. My Augmented body does not produce the hormone that causes human tears, but that doesn’t mean I’m never sad. I feel. I love.”

  Wendy could hold back no longer. She wrapped her arms around Carl’s waist like a kudzu vine. “And I love him, so just shut up, Daddy. You’re wrong.” She kicked the Apple II, and they walked away from the monitors, down to the far end of the attic.

  I told Jimmy to take charge of the antiques for a while and faced Mr. Lindstrom, who looked more desperate than ever. “You’re going to lose your daughter if you don’t stop attacking Carl like that.”

  He shook his head. “She doesn’t really love him. It’s a rebellion. She started dating him the day Raven and I told her we were going to have a baby.”

  “But yo
u had problems with her before the baby.”

  “For years.”

  “Let me guess: they started just after you and her mother got divorced, right? Wendy started slipping away, and you don’t know why?”

  Mr. Lindstrom flushed at the edge in my voice. “Family structures have changed over the years. It was only a contract marriage. Her mother and I had always planned to go our separate ways after Wendy turned five. The digs I went on weren’t suitable for children, so Wendy lived with her mother. For a while she would beg me to take her with me. Then one day she stopped asking.” He looked away.

  “Did you ever stop and think maybe she wanted to go with you because she was being mistreated by her mother or stepfather?” I asked scornfully.

  “What?” He looked startled at the idea. “Oh, the eighties bugaboo, abuse. No, it’s different in the future. The psychologists have tests. If there’s even a possibility of abusiveness, the person wouldn’t be allowed to have children, and Noreen and her second husband had a little boy of their own.”

  The last piece tumbled into place.

  “Would you like to get your daughter back?”

  “Why do you think we moved here?” he asked bitterly. “It was so we could grow into a family. I think it was actually working, before Raven got pregnant.”

  “I can help you.” Wendy would be furious with me for breaking a confidence, but I wasn’t sure if I would ever see her again after today, and I wanted to help my best friend. “I may need support later on. If I help you, will you do me a favor?”

  He smiled faintly, unbelieving. “If you can get me my daughter back, I’ll sign my house over to you.”

  “A favor’s all I need,” I said easily. I probably wouldn’t even need that. It was strictly insurance. “Let’s start with Carl. She loves him now, but that wasn’t why she started dating him. Do you know why she did?”

  “I already told you: because she was mad at me, and she knew I would disapprove.”

  “Wrong. She did it because you hurt her, and she felt a kinship with Carl.”

  “Kinship? With a robot?”

  “She’s tried to tell you a hundred times,” I said gently. “She told you every time you asked her why she didn’t play the piano anymore. Do you remember what she said? ‘Because I have a tin ear.’”

  It took him several seconds to comprehend, and then he denied it. “No. I saw her when she was born. She was perfect. She’s not a robot.”

  “No, she’s not. Neither is Carl. But she does have an artificial ear. I imagine she got it one of those times when you were off on a dig and her stepfather slammed her head into a coffee table.”

  “No.” He kept shaking his head. “Impossible. He wouldn’t have been allowed to have children.”

  “I don’t think he did. I think he and Noreen tricked you. I think she deliberately waited until your divorce was nearing and allowed herself to get pregnant. I think Lee was your child and Wendy knew it. When she begged you to take her away, did she beg you to take Lee, too?”

  I read the answer in Mr. Lindstrom’s bloodless face.

  “That’s why she’s so upset with you about the baby, because she thinks you’re replacing Lee, whom she loved but you ignored. And that’s why she’s so protective of this baby even when it was still in the womb. She failed Lee; she would die before she let harm befall another brother.”

  Mr. Lindstrom’s mouth moved, but no sound came out at first. He wet his lips and tried again. “Lee. He—he died in a boating accident. He was run over by their own speedboat. Wendy—Wendy jumped in and pulled him out. All bruised. The father went to jail for criminal neglect, too much alcohol in his blood. Oh, God—” He started weeping. “You don’t think—”

  I did think. Lee was probably beaten to death and the accident faked. And Wendy had been carrying that knowledge all this time. She would have been thirteen at the time and helpless.

  “My son,” Mr. Lindstrom was saying. “Wendy …”

  “I’ll get her,” I said gently—

  —and the picture fuzzed out, the connection cut. I found myself face-to-face with the screen image of a large, obese man.

  No time to call Wendy. I shifted gears abruptly, blinking back my own tears. Lee was four years dead; Mike was missing now. A crack had appeared in the wall of silence surrounding Project Renaissance, and I had to exploit it to the max or lose him. I studied my opponent.

  The man had brown hair, sideburns, a large nose, and thick glasses. The smile on his full lips was not matched in warmth by his pale blue eyes.

  “Hello, Uncle Albert,” I said flatly. “Where’s Aunt Patty?”

  “I think we’ve gone beyond such charades,” he said. “My name is Dr. Frank.”

  Not just a spy, then, but one of the scientists. “Dr. Frankenstein.” The name came automatically to my lips, bringing with it a flash of memory. Hadn’t there been a doctor at the Orphanage whom Nikita had called Dr. Frankenstein? Was this the same one?

  “As you wish, Angel.” Dr. Frankenstein’s voice was surprisingly rich. He had used a somewhat different voice for the role of inept Uncle Albert. “Dare I ask what you’re up to now? And where your partner in crime, Mike, is?”

  Hope jolted my heart. Had Mike escaped, then?

  Dr. Frankenstein was watching me very closely, his full lips pursed.

  I bounced back down to earth. “Don’t give me that crap. You have Mike, and I want him back.”

  Dr. Frankenstein blinked, his eyes magnified hugely by his glasses. “An interesting ploy. Are you trying to make me think you don’t know where Mike went when he escaped? Hmmm. I shall have to think about this.”

  The screen went blank.

  I didn’t turn away. “I know you’re still watching me. And your ploy won’t work either. Let Mike go or I’ll take this town apart brick by brick.”

  Dr. Frankenstein reappeared. “From what I hear, you’ve already made a fair start. Shall we deal, then? You stop indulging your criminal tendencies, and I’ll take you to Mike.”

  “Uh-uh.” I shook my head. “No dice. I keep killing typewriters until Mike’s standing in front of me.”

  “Who do you think you’re dealing with? Your dumb jock of a coach? An archaeologist like your friend’s father? I don’t care how many artifacts you chop up. Not one of them is as rare as one of the violet-eyed. If you want to see Mike, you have to come to us.”

  “Now, that really would make me stupid, putting myself in your power.”

  He looked amused. “You’re already in my power.”

  “Not for long,” I said softly.

  The smile was wiped from his face like chalk under the sweep of an eraser. “No,” he said. “Mr. Tajamura will make the connection between the cameras and funding for the Renaissance Project in a couple of hours at the most. You’ve destroyed his pet project, and hell be sure to pull Renaissance down with him. But that will take time. By the time the newshounds arrive Mike will be hidden so deep you’ll never see him again. I swear it.”

  I believed him. My bluff had been called. “You win,” I said. For now.

  “Splendid. An aircar will pick you up in ten minutes.” The screen greened out.

  CHAPTER 13

  I STOOD ALONE on the school lawn as an aircar alighted like a butterfly in front of me. Wendy and the others had wanted to wave me off, but I had insisted they wait out of sight. I didn’t want to cause any more trouble for them than I already had.

  The back windows of the aircar were tinted black. The rest of the craft was white, a small, sleek plane the length of a station wagon. It had stubby wings, tail fins, and a bullet nose. I could see four engines poking out of the back and sides, but they gave off only a full-throated growl.

  I kept my expression blasé, refusing to be impressed by the next century’s version of a car.

  I’d had vague notions of jumping the pilot and making him take me to Mike, but the pilot stayed safely inside the separate cockpit. The passenger door slid open, and I climbed insid
e.

  A single seat faced backward, overlooking a compact cargo space, and I sat down. I had barely fastened the webbed seat belt when the aircar lifted straight up off the ground. As we accelerated forward, I looked toward the windows to see what direction we were going, but the black tint shut everything out. For all I knew, the pilot might fly a wide, wide circle in the air, then land right back where we had started once it got too dark for me to see.

  The idea intrigued me and, partly out of boredom and partly because I didn’t want to think about what lay ahead, I ran with it. What buildings in Chinchaga might house the brain cortex of the Renaissance Project?

  It would have to be a fairly large building and also one that I would have no reason ever to go inside.

  The town hall, the fire station, the hospital, the old folks’ home? Not the town hall, because I’d written my driver’s license test there. The firehouse would need to be maintained in case of a real emergency. While I’d never been sick for more than a day in my entire life, I had visited Maryanne in the hospital once.

  The old folks’ home chimed as a possibility. I couldn’t remember any of my friends visiting relatives there—which wasn’t surprising considering the Historical Immersion scam. Chinchaga was understaffed when it came to children and senior citizens.

  I was still going over possibilities when the aircar landed several hours later. Darkness had fallen, and four sober men in gray-and-black military uniforms escorted me the short distance from the aircar to the Renaissance building—four armed men. I felt positively dangerous.

  Trees lined the walk, eliminating several locations. The placement of the trees seemed right for Chinchaga’s retirement home, but I had paid so little attention to the place that I couldn’t be sure.

  In daylight the main floor could have been a sunny place to play cards and while away one’s golden years. I caught a glimpse of lots of plants and windows before the guards led me down a dimly lit carpeted hall to a series of four doors, each locked and bolted, in the center of the building. I didn’t realize the last door opened to an elevator cage until the floor began to sink.