Hormat sat stock-still. Mike could almost hear the wheels turning inside his head, the sprockets clicking into place. “I see,” he said. He hesitated over the next question, then risked it. “May I ask…how long…?”
“Thirteen years,” Annie said.
His eyes went round.
“About a week,” Mike said.
Hormat’s eyes opened even wider. He kept looking back and forth between Annie and Mike, and the longer he looked the more surprised he looked. Finally he made himself stop, looked down at his coffee, and took a long drink of it. He set the cup down on the table, folded his big wrinkled hands around it, and said to it—Mike knew he was addressing both of them—“Thank you. For sharing your secret with me.”
He and Annie both said, “You’re welcome,” at the same time.
Hormat hesitated, turning his coffee mug around and around in his hands.
“Go ahead, ask,” Annie said. “Whatever it is. You rescued Mike and placed yourself at risk to do so. If anyone ever had a right to ask nosy questions, you do. I don’t promise to answer, but get it off your chest.”
The dwarf nodded his thanks and asked his question. “Why? Why are you each…‘Under’?”
NOW IT WAS Mike and Annie’s turn to hesitate. This was a turning point, and both knew it. For Mike, at least, time came to a stop while he writhed on the point of the dilemma.
Mike had dragged Hormat here in the half-conscious hope that together, he and Annie might be able to befriend him—or more accurately, to cement the tentative friendship he had already offered by saving Mike’s life—and using that new intimacy, pump him for all he was worth. Mike knew Hormat wanted to tell them why he and his friends were all here/now; the dwarf had come right up to the very edge of explaining things on the drive here—and then changed his mind and pulled back. Mike and Annie had about fifteen minutes, tops, to change his mind and push him over the edge: their one and only window. In a few hours it would be time to start meeting and trying to negotiate with both Haines and the time-travelers, and they dared not do so in ignorance.
But charm alone wasn’t going to cut it. If they wanted Hormat to trust them enough to answer their intimate questions, they were going to have to answer his. Fast.
But—this question? Of all the things he could possibly have wanted to know?
It was the one question they had both solemnly sworn never ever to ask each other, that single promise constituted their sole contract with each other. Whatever Annie’s reasons for coming Under, she was not prepared to discuss them even with someone she was willing to share a bathroom with, and there was only one of those on Earth. As for Mike, up until a few seconds ago he had planned to make it through his entire life without ever telling anyone why he’d come Under. He didn’t even know if he could make himself tell Annie…and Hormat was just—
—the total stranger who’d just saved his life, at no benefit to himself.
Mike opened his mouth to speak—
—and Annie cut him off.
He was so shocked he failed to grasp the meaning of her first half dozen words or so, so startled they were being spoken that he could not comprehend them. After that he paid close attention.
“I came here,” she said, her voice hoarse but firm, “because I had to. It was this or die. I moved into Dreamworld full-time because I could find no place for me in the real world.”
Hormat nodded slightly at once, as if he understood. Mike did not have a clue what she was talking about, and without looking directly at her, let his face say so.
“When last measured,” she went on, “my IQ was over one-seventy. This world is not a comfortable place for the highly intelligent. I have never been physically attractive. My personality is abrasive. And I am a midget. I have had, I think, an unusually lonely life. Children of my own were never a realistic hope. I kept hoping anyway…” She stopped speaking for a moment, cleared her throat noisily, and continued. “At forty, I stopped. By then I’d long since found a reasonable form of sublimation. I was a social worker, in child services. I will not tell you where. I had dozens of children, and they all needed me. I had a place in the world, a purpose. I worked very hard. But—” She paused again, and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “But the social services system was badly flawed, and kept getting worse. Overextended, underfunded, understaffed, overmanaged. Overwhelmed. One day there was bad trouble. Ugliness…even beyond what we had come, God forgive us, to accept as normal.” She glanced at Mike, took a slow deep breath, and went on. “I will not describe it, but when it was done a child was dead, another badly injured, and two others severely traumatized. And I had put two foster parents and my boss in the hospital. They pulled the plug on the foster father a few days later. The judge who arraigned me for that said he wished he could give me a medal instead.”
Mike wanted to go to her, might have done so if he’d had a clue what to do once he got there.
“I was out of work, for good, and I needed a lot of money for attorneys. Bail had cleaned me out. Dreamworld was just about to open, then, hiring all the little people it could find. I came here for an interview, looked around…and went Under that very day.
“I could no longer be part of a system that can’t protect kids at risk or in terror, can’t supply decent care. It no longer helped, enough, to know that for all its abominable failures it’s by far the best system the world has ever seen. I just couldn’t choke down one more restaurant meal knowing that somewhere in the same city mothers were scavenging for their babies. I had to leave the world…and I preferred to do it without dying.”
She broke off for a moment, got her voice back under control. Mike sat with his jaw open, listening.
“Here in Dreamworld, no child suffers, no adult is exploited, all are made joyful. The place charges a lot—but the customers get their full money’s worth. This is a pocket universe, a little island of Right and Good and Fair. A writer I like named Hiaasen once argued that the very attempt to build such a perfect pocket world is intrinsically evil—he was talking about Disney, Dreamworld wasn’t around then—but he never did say why. I discovered that I utterly disagree.”
Hormat kept nodding; Annie’s words seemed to resonate with him.
“So I decided to stay forever,” she went on, “because I found that here I can stand the pain of being alive…and…” She paused, admitting something to herself. “…and because here, I can be of real help, actually accomplish something. I didn’t realize that at first: I thought I was just hogging a free spot in the lifeboat, and did it only because I had to…but after a few months, I came to see that I might, if I stayed alert and kept busy, perhaps earn the right to stay here.” She put her hands flat on the table. “So I did.”
Hormat let several breaths go by before saying, softly, “I see.”
Then he and Annie both turned and looked at Mike.
HE HAD BEEN so absorbed in Annie’s speech that it took him that long to comprehend that it was his turn now. He began to hastily reassemble for inspection the entire structure of Why I Should versus Why I Mustn’t and What If I Do versus What If I Don’t—
Annie saw his face and tried to let him off the hook. “I don’t see any need to press Mike for specifics of his own situation, Hormat. I said earlier that this world is not a comfortable place for the highly intelligent—and he is, I assure you, considerably smarter than I am. That alone should satisfactorily—”
Mike found that he was talking, and listened to hear what he would say.
“Mom was all the family I ever had. My father died before I was born. She was a schoolteacher, high school physics. We were happy a long time. Then when I was nine, it got hip for a while for middle-class people to do crack—I don’t know if you heard about that in here, Annie. Mom had this asshole boyfriend, and he turned her on. You know what crack cocaine is, Hormy?”
Hormat nodded. “I know what it is.”
“I don’t really understand why she started. It doesn’t matter: she did. After a whil
e she wasn’t a teacher anymore. There was no family to help us. Everything we had went into Mom’s pipe. Up in smoke. Mom’s money, my college money, then the house…it took a long time. Years.
“I really busted my ass. I really did. I read everything I could find, I talked to counselors and doctors and priests and ex-crackheads and social workers and cops, I found out everything they knew, I tried all the theories they had and invented stuff of my own. None of it worked.
“I stopped going to school and tried to take care of both of us, but it was hard. The only time she ever showed any gratitude was if I stole money and gave it to her. So I did. Or if I went out and scored for her, when she was too sick. So finally I did that too, sometimes. I mean, I couldn’t stop her doing it, I could at least make it easier for her—I felt like I had to do something for her.”
He discovered that Annie had hold of his right hand; he didn’t remember her taking it.
“Then a couple of weeks ago I scored her some and screwed up the purity test and it was a bad batch and she died right in front of me.”
Annie squeezed. Good thing it wasn’t the other hand. He didn’t squeeze back. He wanted to cry, but seemed to lack the necessary tears. Might as well finish the story.
“So now I had a no-brainer choice. Drop out of the world, or go into the system Annie was just talking about. I know kids who went through that system. I know a lot about it. So I figured wherever I was gonna run to, I was probably gonna have to stay there like forever. So I asked myself where I wanted to be forever, and then I studied the place and made my move and Annie helped me and here I am.”
Annie topped off his coffee. It was the first he’d realized she was not still holding his hand. He took the cup and drank. It stayed down. There were no more words inside to come up. He was done.
He waited for their reactions. He expected Annie’s first, so it was a surprise when Hormat spoke, and the words he chose Mike found baffling.
“Well done,” the dwarf said.
Mike grappled with that a little and gave up, set it aside for later and looked up at Annie.
She had nothing to say. She simply stood there, holding the coffee pot and looking at him. Her face was calm, serene, quite composed. But tears were pouring down her cheeks. The effect was striking. He had never seen anybody cry with their eyes without also crying with their face.
“I screwed up, you see?” he said to her. God, now he was doing the same thing! He knew he wasn’t crying, but his eyes were leaking. He wiped away the water impatiently. “It was important and I screwed up big-time. So I came here, because nothing ever gets that screwed up here.”
She nodded.
He found a tissue and blew his nose.
She put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I believe my role at this point is to produce soothing clichés,” she said softly, “but I do hate sounding like an idiot. I can’t say ‘I know how you feel,’ because I don’t. I can’t say ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ because you obviously know that and it doesn’t help, enough. I can’t say ‘You did your best,’ because you just told me that, and it obviously doesn’t help enough, either. Hell, you’ve never once done less than your best for me, and you’ve only known me a week.”
He tried to smile. “It’s okay, Annie.”
“Perhaps it will be,” she said, “if you’ll listen to just one cliché. One you may not already know.”
“Sure.”
“It’s okay to be glad it’s over.”
The idea was astonishing. “It is?”
“Relieved I would be,” Hormat agreed quietly.
“So would I,” Annie said. “It is permissible to feel relief on the way out of Hell.”
“It is?”
She squeezed his shoulder. “You say you screwed up. The fact that you had no choice at all doesn’t help: you screwed up, and nothing hurts like that. Your mother screwed up, too. Twice as bad—no, more than that—because she was responsible for you, and still committed slow suicide. It was only a matter of time. She was smart, you say, so she must have known that…and that must have hurt her, too.”
“Yeah.”
“And now neither of you is screwing up anymore. How can that not be a relief? To both of you?”
“Uh…” Something began to unknot inside him. He knew it would take a long time…but now that the process was begun, time was all it would take.
“Don’t grunt. Good God, boy, look at it this way: no matter how long you live, you’ll never screw up that badly again—and you’re twelve years old.”
In spite of himself, he grinned. “That is something to be proud of, isn’t it?” he said.
She smiled and let go of his shoulder. “I wish I could say the same. Now excuse me, all right? There are pressing matters on the table. Hormat?”
“Yes?” the dwarf said, seeming to come out of a fog.
“Your time is nearly up, is it not?”
He started and hastily checked his finger. “Yes,” he said. “Another few minutes.”
Shit! They’d taken too long—spilled their guts for nothing—Hormy had to go…
Annie nodded. “Tell me, Hormat: why have you and your friends come back to this era?”
Mike dropped his jaw.
Hormat’s face turned to stone. He and Annie locked eyes for at least ten seconds, and then he closed his eyes for at least another ten. Oddly, he was for once not frowning. Then he opened his eyes and looked at Mike. Something happened to his face that Mike couldn’t pin down. There were no discernible muscle movements, but somehow it lost ten years in the space of a few seconds.
Hormat smiled. It was the first smile Mike had ever seen on his face, and it was wondrously ugly.
“We came to bring you a free lunch,” he said.
C H A P T E R 17
COMPLIMENTARY COMESTIBLES
Mike’s determination not to interrupt was strongly tested. Everybody knew there was no such thing as a free lunch; it was a Heinlein proverb, one he himself had always found to be true. He was positive there was no such thing as a free rock of crack cocaine. But he kept his mouth shut. Everybody knew there was no such thing as time-travel, too.
“Why, Hormat?” Annie asked.
Hormat shifted his eyes to her. “For the same reason you came Under, Annie,” he said, still smiling. “We could no longer bear not to.” He turned back to Mike. “For the same reason you came Under, Mike. Because all our other choices were worse.”
This was all a little too philosophical for Mike; he was aware that Hormat was getting himself in deeper shit with every minute. “We figured something was after you guys,” he prompted. “Aliens or something.”
Hormat shook his head. “No. We’re running from history. Nothing more. Human history.”
“What do you mean?” Annie asked.
Hormat’s smile slowly faded. “I’ve thought about this,” he said. “How to tell you…whether to tell you…how much to tell you—I wish I could think about it another month…”
Annie reached across the table and took his hand. “Just tell us,” she said.
He closed his eyes. “The future is horror,” he said.
“Of what kind?”
“Of all kinds.” He opened his eyes and saw that they did not understand. “In my time,” he said, “there are fewer than a quarter of a billion humans.”
Mike was aghast. His own world held over seven billion.
Annie looked startled. “On Earth, you mean?”
“Alive,” he corrected. “Anywhere. Less than a quarter of a million live off Earth. Our birthrate is below replacement.” He winced. “Well below.”
“My God,” Annie breathed.
“Wait,” he said. “You have seen my friends and me?” He looked down at himself and then back up. “We are the best of us.”
Mike stared. “You’re—”
“We are the biggest and strongest and healthiest volunteers that could be found,” Hormat said. “I know to you we seem small and weak. But when I come fro
m, I am considered a giant, of abnormal strength and endurance. There may be a hundred people in all my time who could take me in a fair fight—and most of them are on this mission.”
“Dear God,” Annie breathed. “What went wrong?”
Hormat sighed. “Everything. All at once. No man can say with certainty which happened first or caused the other—but the global economy collapsed utterly, and the Ice Age came, and technological civilization all but died, and the planetary ecosystem was ruined, almost beyond our ability to repair. And the ‘almost’ does not matter, for in the process, the gene pool was hopelessly corrupted. Civilization had lasted just long enough and been just reckless enough to fill the biosphere with more toxins, carcinogens, and other mutagens than it could handle…and they all interacted.
“There was a Dark Age that was nearly the last…and science was rediscovered too late. My generation has, by the skin of our teeth as you say, and by enormous good fortune, just barely staved off an ecocatastrophe so total that nothing vertebrate could have survived—and we have even made some remarkable scientific breakthroughs. We have limited use of nanotechnology, which your time only dreams about so far, and two other powerful technologies you have no names for because you have not even dreamed of them yet—” He broke off and smiled a bitter smile. “It is the best joke of all time, when you think about it. We could easily feed and clothe and house and amuse a population larger than yours, if we were lucky enough to need to. But we ourselves are doomed. Our DNA is irreparable. We have made our time a comparative paradise for those who remain alive in it…but the end is in sight. And we can no longer bear to look at it.”
“What year do you come from?” Mike asked.
Hormat seemed not to hear the question. “So we looked away. We looked at the past, because there was nowhere else to look. We traced the roots of our doom, with bitter hindsight. We identified a point in history when—if only they had known what we knew now—everything might have been made right, and disaster averted.”
“The early twenty-first century,” Annie whispered.
The Free Lunch Page 20