A Long, Long Sleep

by Anna Sheehan

  Åsa had decided she could take care of me while my par-ents were away. I could keep going to school, keep living my life, and keep Xavier. It wasn’t as if my parents looked at my academic achievements, and schools don’t complain when the children show up — only when they don’t. Mom and Daddy would never know. The day before they were to come home, I’d pop back into stass, and because of Xavier’s hacks on the tube, they’d be none the wiser. When I asked Åsa why she was doing this, she said only that it wasn’t her place to argue with my parents, but that she had been told to manage the household as she best saw fit while they were gone.

  I felt guilty deceiving my parents like this. If it hadn’t been for Xavier, I’d have told them to put me back in and I’d dutifully wait for Mom and Daddy to return. But there was Xavier, and I wouldn’t give up this chance.

  And so began the best year of my life. My parents did, in fact, come back two months later. I slipped happily back into stasis, and within eighteen hours they let me out for my champagne breakfast.

  A month and a half later, when my parents were leaving again, I went into stass without a complaint. And when they came back after two weeks, they had no idea I had spent that time living my life. This happened again and again, all through that year. I would have missed my sixteenth birthday but for Åsa and Xavier. They held a private party for me, and Åsa sang me a birthday song in Swedish. For the first time, I watched the seasons change from summer to autumn to winter, and back to spring.

  On the first clear, warm night that spring, Xavier and I sat out in the garden, wrapped in a blanket, watching the moon as it rose over the courtyard.

  “I truly love this,” I whispered.

  “I truly love you,” Xavier whispered in my ear, causing shivers to run down my spine. “I’m so glad I don’t have to lose you again,” he said, with a kiss on my temple. “And again, and again.” Each time he kissed me someplace else. “Every time, it’s like you’ve died.”

  I looked up at his face, pale in the moonlight. “Does it really feel that way to you?”

  “I grieve every time,” he said. “I’m always afraid I’ll never see you again.”

  I shuddered, a memory of the dying winter around us. But Xavier’s arms kept me warm. “That won’t ever happen,” I reassured him.

  “How can you know?” Xavier asked. “You’d have missed seven out of the last ten months if it weren’t for Åsa. You’d still be fifteen.”

  “And you’d have left me behind again,” I whispered.

  “You’re the one who keeps leaving me.”

  “And until now I’ve been . . . waiting for you. But now you’ve gone so far. I’m starting to fall behind.”

  Xavier touched my hair and stared into my eyes. “Do you think we should tell anybody?”

  “Tell anybody what?”

  “How much you get left in stasis. It can’t be good for you.”

  “I’m too high- strung. I need to mellow out sometimes.”

  Xavier scoffed. “I think your parents would be stassing any child they had, whether it was high- strung or not. I’ve never seen you be anything but sweet and compliant.” He kissed me along my forehead. “You’re almost inhuman, you’re so angelic.”

  “That’s only because I know I can get away from it all if I need to,” I said.

  “I’m inclined to believe it a fortunate accident of character,” Xavier said. Then he sighed. “Or maybe not so fortunate. Maybe if you weren’t so biddable, you wouldn’t let them keep you a child.”

  I pulled away. “Don’t put it like that!” I said. “Besides, if I hadn’t been in stasis, you and I would never have gotten together.”

  He smiled, running his fingers along my eyebrows. “Seven years isn’t an impossible age difference,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything, but I started doing calculations in my head. According to my birth certificate, I should have been thirty- eight. I must have lost more years than I’d been aware of when I was very young. Mom and Daddy didn’t look so old to me, but then again, they did a lot of interplanetary travel. They spent lots of time in stasis, too. I looked at Xavier. If I’d never been put into stasis, I’d have been twenty- two when he was born. I could be his mother.

  The thought made me uncomfortable. I snuggled in closer to him. “I love you,” I whispered.

  “I love you, too, Rose,” he said. “Always.”

  Always. I wondered if his spirit still watched me, from wherever dead spirits go.

  Did he still love me now?

  I drew the finishing touches on my newest Xavier sketch. It was a morbid, probably borderline obsessive way to spend my time, but it took my mind off Bren and Guillory and being hunted by an assassin. Xavier was still my touchstone, if only in my mind.

  I never did ask where we were going, but by midafternoon Guillory’s hover yacht was skimming south over the ocean. The yacht had everything. Like a magician, he conjured a caviar luncheon shortly after midday. He even offered me a shower in the tiny yet elegant bathroom, which I declined. Instead I concentrated on my portraits of Xavier. I’d decided to fill this sketchbook with a progression of him from a small baby on up. I had just finished a portrait of Xavier at twelve when Guillory perked up, looking out the window.

  He had spent most of the trip talking on his cell or work-ing with his notescreen. Now, as the setting sun began to turn the sky to gold, he said good- bye to his secretary, turned off his cell, and pointed out the window.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  I had half expected that he would take me to a private island. I wouldn’t have put such an extravagance past him. But it was an inhabited shore we were rapidly approaching.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I have an incognito suite at the hotel here,” Guillory said. “Useful when I want to escape for a few days. Most people know me as Mr. Jance here, so please call me Reggie, not Guillory.”

  The hover yacht pulled into a hover bay at the coastline, rather than in a parking garage. Around the edge of the beach, a wide industrial magnetic strip bordered the entire island. No skimmers were allowed. That struck me as strange. Not to mention expensive. The magnetic strips weren’t exactly cheap.

  “Where are we?”

  “Nirvana,” Guillory said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, sorry, you wouldn’t know.” Guillory laughed his annoying comradely laugh. “UniCorp created a series of man-made islands just north . . . oh, I forget. Doesn’t matter, really. Truly beautiful, this place. They moved sand from the bottom of the ocean, built this little archipelago. When you look at it from above, the islands form the shape of the UniCorp logo. This one is Nirvana; it forms the head and horn of the unicorn. There’s a great beach just under the throat. Only the most elite can afford suites here.”

  I was a little confused. “ Man- made islands?” It wasn’t an unheard of prospect, but all the previous attempts at the dawn of the second millennium had eventually failed quite abysmally, creating stagnant dead spots in the ocean and resulting in barren, poisonous sandspits, not luxury resorts. “What’s wrong with resorts on a natural island?”

  “This place is assured to be secure. We’re in the safest part of the ocean —

  virtually no risk of hurricanes or earthquakes. And there are no natives, so we didn’t steal the land from anyone.”

  He said that as if it were a virtue, and maybe it was. But if I understood it correctly, the population of the world was substantially reduced already. To dump a vast amount of the planet’s financial resources into resorts on a man-made sandspit in the middle of the ocean —rather than bolster the economy of some tropical island, or, better yet, do without the wasteful resort at all —

  struck me as a rather selfish way of looking at the planet. The history class I was taking with Bren had an entire unit on economics of the Reconstruction, and this flew in the face of all of it. Not to mention the devastation such a project would have caused t
o the seabed. Did they even know how many plants and animals had been thoughtlessly dispatched just to move the sand?

  Because UniCorp had vast amounts of money, did ocean ecology suddenly not matter any longer?

  But what did I know?

  I was struck again by how powerful UniCorp was. It owned people and colonies, and even the earth itself had to shape itself to its whim. What else was UniCorp trying to shape? I thought of Otto and shuddered.

  Porters appeared out of nowhere and collected my bag. I took a deep breath and followed them into the resort.

  Mr. Guillory signed us in, and we both had retinal scans recorded before the doors would even open. Mr. Guillory’s name showed up as Mr. Jance when his retina was scanned, and at my scan, he entered my name as Rose Sayer. I hoped that would be enough to keep the assassin from guessing my whereabouts.

  The constant scan on the net tickled. It wasn’t the name that caught him this time; it was the actual retinal scan, which flared in bright colors across his plasticized processors. The name attached to it was inaccurate, but his programming was flexible enough to believe in human error.

  TARGET IDENTIFIED: RETINAL MATCH CONFIRMED, ROSALINDA SAMANTHA FITZROY.

  LOCATION KNOWN: NIRVANA.

  DIRECTIVE: RETURN TARGET TO PRINCIPAL.

  He looked up the location of the Unicorn Islands and assessed ways to get there. It would not be easy. He eventually determined he would have to commandeer one of the new hover vehicles whose specs were all over the net.

  While one section of his processors was calculating that, another was going through the now familiar routine of searching the net for the principal.

  SCANNING . . . SCANNING . . . SCANNING . . . SCANNING . . .

  PRINCIPAL UNAVAILABLE.

  SECONDARY DIRECTIVE REINSTATED: TERMINATE TARGET.

  INITIATE.

  His processors predicted it would take him approximately ten hours to make it to the Unicorn Islands if he was able to procure a hover vehicle quickly. He was in luck. One hit him as he stepped onto the street.

  He was knocked over by the skimmer’s superior weight, but the driver slammed on the controls and it slowed and veered, bouncing back and forth across the road like a tennis ball. He predicted the inertia of the machine and stood back up, grabbing the skimmer to keep it steady. The momentum spun it in a circle, and then it stood still. Twenty more vehicles milled about behind the one he had stopped.

  He ripped the door off the skimmer and dropped it on the road with a clang.

  The operator cowered inside the vehicle.

  “My directive requires transport,” he announced. “I am com mandeering this vehicle.” He climbed in without further preamble.

  The Plastine ignored the terri fied occupant as he slid out the open door. There was no reason to terminate a bystander who was not trying to hinder him.

  – chapter 18—

  Mr. Guillory’s cell beeped the moment we entered the hotel room. “Reggie,” he said, switching it on.

  “Mr. Guillory, I thought you’d like to know,” said the voice I recognized as his secretary. He’d been talking to her on and off the whole afternoon. “They’ve located the Plastine. I’m downloading the report into your screen now.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Guillory said, and he opened up his screen.

  I crept behind him to see. A holorecording, looking distorted and strange on the flat screen, showed my shiny plastic attacker jumping into the middle of a road. While the hover skiffs behind the Plastine bounced back and forth between the magnetic pedestrian strips, like pucks on an air hockey table, the Plastine ripped the door off a now rather battered skiff and drove off. Another shot from a different angle showed the occupant of the hover skiff falling onto the road, rolling, and keeping flat as half a dozen hover skiffs passed harmlessly over his head.

  Then the scene changed. I couldn’t hear the newscaster’s voice, but someone was interviewing the man, who had a scrape on his cheek from his high- speed fall onto the road.

  Mr. Guillory’s secretary continued. “The police say the Plastine is hard to track, and he appears to have disabled the satellite link in the skimmer, but they should have him apprehended within the hour.”

  “Thank you, Stella. Keep us updated.” He turned back to me. “Well. See? I told you it would all be all right.”

  I took a deep breath. If nothing else, I was now certain that this thing existed.

  Guillory poked at his screen to check the time. “There’s this great open- air restaurant down by the base of the horn,” he said. “Care to join me?”

  I shook my head. “I couldn’t eat,” I said.

  “Suit yourself. This whole suite is ours. Your room is down that corridor; mine’s just off here. You can turn the music or the holoview as loud as you like. All the rooms here are soundproof. Anything you need, don’t hesitate to contact room service. You have my cell code?”

  I nodded, and Guillory left me to my own devices.

  I felt uncomfortable in this room. I’d been in rooms like it, usually at charity balls with my mother. I was always on display at those balls, more a prop than a person. Just as Guillory reminded me of a golden statue, this room reminded me of a jewelry box. Just the thing to house that golden statue. I sighed and went to find the bathroom.

  Since the bath had done me such good the night before, I drew another in the opulent bathroom and sank into the purified and imported water. I knew the source of the water shouldn’t make a difference, but it all felt false to me, like drawing a computer image instead of using oil paints. After my bath I climbed into a fresh uniform, leaving the bag and everything else in the bathroom.

  I went into the central room of the suite, automatically scanning the room for my notescreen. It wasn’t near ten yet, but Otto might be worried. Then I remembered that I didn’t have my notescreen with me. I could probably have used Guillory’s, but he hadn’t left it available, and I wasn’t about to go poking through someone’s screen without their permission. So much for talking to Otto. For today, anyway. I idly wondered if Guillory’s secretary had called yet, to con firm the Plastine’s capture. Perhaps I could go home tomorrow? I really did want to talk to Otto. He’d find this place hilarious. UniCorp playing god, with their man- made islands and their man- made people. I wondered about Dr. Bija, too, if Guillory or anyone had bothered telling her where I was. I was afraid I might miss my next appointment. Otto, Dr. Bija, Zavier, my studio . . . I hadn’t realized it until this moment, but I really had created something of a life.

  Now I was worried — what if this attacker meant that I would lose my new life, too?

  I debated turning on the holoview I saw in the corner, but decided against it. I glanced at the clock. I opened the window to the balcony, and the sound of the ocean washed over me. Despite being gilded and expensive, the room was fairly comfortable. I curled up on the chaise longue with my sketchbook, but I soon found myself nodding. With a hint of relief, I let myself fall asleep to the sound of the surf outside.

  My rest was interrupted. Mr. Guillory burst loudly into the room. “Rosalinda!

  I’m glad you’re up!”

  I blinked, bleary- eyed. It was pitch- dark outside, and the scent of the air had that peculiar lightness that occurs sometime after midnight.

  Guillory had changed from his blue suit into a yellowish brown lounge suit, obviously his idea of casual wear. He glanced at the open patio for a moment before sliding the glass door closed, shutting out the sound of the false surf. He headed over to the bar and poured himself a drink. “I was half- afraid you’d have gone to bed.”

  “I fell asleep here,” I mumbled, trying to figure out a way of saying, I really should find my room now.

  “Good, good,” Guillory said, not really hearing me. He turned around with a drink in his hand and pulled one of the gilded chairs a little closer to my chaise, sitting down rather heavily. In his brown suit, perched in the golden chair, with the g
lass of amber fluid in his hand, he looked like a statue of an Egyptian pharaoh, half- god, overlooking his domain. The ice in his glass glinted like diamonds.

  “So,” he said. “Rosalinda. You know, I’ve been thinking. It was such a surprise when you joined our little UniCorp family. Rejoined, I should say. When I first met you, I thought I really knew you. I thought I had you pegged. But I realize I don’t. I just made up some image of you. You’re not very much like your parents, are you.”

  I sat a little straighter and gripped my sketchbook. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I know,” Guillory said with a smile. “I’m running their company, after all.

  Quite a legacy, that is. You know, Jackie was real heavy into charities. Balls and such, that kinda thing.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said, put off by the casual way he’d called Mom Jackie. “We’d go shopping for matching dresses and she’d take me to charity galas, balls, dinners, poker tournaments.”

  “That must have been a lot of fun,” Guillory said. “Must have gotten a lot of attention, two beautiful women walking in like bookends. Your mother, she was a real hot- looking woman back in the day. I’ve seen pictures. Looked a lot like you, you know.”

  I swallowed. This was making me uncomfortable. “Thanks,” I whispered.

  “No wonder she landed your dad, huh? Most powerful man in the world.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said.

  “No, really,” Guillory said. He leaned forward in his chair, as if telling me a secret. “Forget what anyone says. Forget the elected of ficials and the world leaders and the religious icons. They’re all well and good, but power —the real power — lies with people like you and me.”

  I wasn’t sure I was glad he’d included me in that statement.

  “Your father knew what he was doing,” Guillory continued, leaning back in his chair again. He took a sip of his drink. “Think about it. Multitier the company so that if any one section folds, the others can compensate. I mean, they got their NeoFusion, but then they just got their fingers into everything.