Jane’s fingers toyed along his forearms, riffling through the curling hairs; sometimes he felt that he was merely a Zyunsinth substitute—furry little humanoids, they must have been. Give Jane a blow-up King Kong and she’d probably be equally content.
“If they won’t find us because you did have a beard,” she was ruminating idly, “and don’t have one now, maybe I should grow a beard as a disguise.”
He turned. Because she sat atop the sink cabinet, their faces were on the same level. Her eyes, as usual, were quite serious.
“You… could… really do that, couldn’t you?”
Jane nodded. “You’re making me remember, Kevin, not only what, but how. I don’t think I was ever meant to know these things. I was made to glean, to store, to release. But never to… modify.”
He put his fingertips to her cheek, drew his thumb against the grain of the almost-invisible downy hairs at her jawline. Every woman, even the fairest haired, hid a shadow of the man in her, and vice versa. In fact, maleness itself was a piece of inborn genetic engineering—an intrauterine modification performed upon the wholly female fetus every human being begins as.
“I suppose the blueprint is there,” he admitted. “It’s merely a matter of adjusting the hormones. You’re trying to tell me something that I don’t want to see, aren’t you, Jane? You’re telling me that… they didn’t just make you different. When they released you again on the Crow Wing bluff as an independent being, they opened the gates to your learning to manipulate yourself.”
“Not them, Kevin. You.”
He stiffened. “You keep saying that! They made you, not me.”
“You are unmaking me, Kevin. When we make love, you like me to have orgasms—”
“You like it, too!” he countercharged, horrified by the implications he saw yawning before him.
“Oh, yes. It is very pleasant. But I learned that, how to do it whenever I wanted to, from the library books. I don’t know why so many women have difficulty; it’s all in the books and so simple. ,. like growing fingernails. I learned it before I knew what it felt like because I wanted you to… like me.”
“God.” He pushed her hands away. A tic spasmed underneath his eye. “You make me feel like some Svengali, some cheap tin manipulator. Jane, I always wanted you to be what you could be, not what I needed you to be. Never that. Better you’d gone with them.”
“Maybe,” she said, looking into the mirror yet seeing neither of them. “But now I need you so that I can be what I can be, and therefore, I must be what you need.”
He shook his head. “Give me a break; that’s what I need. You’ll confound ’em in the temple, believe me. Look, we gotta blow this joint. We’ll talk the metaphysics of being another time.”
“Okay.” She hopped off the countertop, unannoyed.
They dressed in placid silence in the other room. Jane seemed over her whimsical impulse to grow a beard. Kevin smiled as he picked up his watch from the nightstand and slid it on his wrist, putting himself back into the time stream, armoring himself to think like a fugitive.
The timepiece’s rich gold glinted a reminder of the life he’d left—not wealthy, but well enough off compared to being on the run. The watch also, belatedly, reminded him of his parents, whose extraordinary gift it had been on his graduation from med school. His dad had never owned more than a Timex, and his mom kept her one good watch for special occasions, an ancient Lady Elgin with a tiny low-grade ruby inset into the winding stem…
Bearded ladies and gold watches… Kevin caught himself; he was getting wacko—should retire from the shrink game permanently. It might be a forced retirement.
“If I had some of that,” said a fully dressed Jane, “I would buy you a new razor.”
“Thanks for the thought.” Kevin glanced at the shrinking roll of hundred-dollar bills he was about to stuff in his wallet.
Jane reached for a bill and he handed her one.
“IP’—she looked up eloquently—“if they didn’t know better, they might think these were the most vital life form here. Everyone guards them so carefully. Can I have one?”
“Not on your life. It’s dangerous to have something everybody else wants—and you already have a head start on that score, my Lady Jane. I’ll keep it. Less chance of losing it, and we need every penny now. In fact, I’m going to live dangerously and try—” Kevin pulled the tattered business card Kandy had given him from his jacket pocket. “Try being ‘James Anderson’ for a day and get some of my old money out of the new bank. ‘Jim Anderson’—God, that’s Father Knows Best! Trust Kandy to go for some crazy juxtaposition.”
“What’s Father Knows Best?” Jane asked dutifully as she trotted out the motel room behind him.
“History, my dear,” Kevin said, letting the heavy door slam shut. “Ancient history.”
Daylight is never so relentless as on a white-washed winter day. The flat off-white ground and sky joined forces to glare at Kevin. He wished for sunglasses, then decided they weren’t important enough to risk discovery by buying. So many little things in life seemed hopelessly distant now.
He supposed he should dump the van and find some other wheels, but the enormity of buying—stealing? Oh, come on, get serious, Blake… you, steal a car? You’d leave a trail a mile wide—the enormity of changing vehicles confounded him.
The nice part about the van, and maybe the only nice part, was its very blandness. At first glance it looked like a delivery truck—bakery or diaper service, name your cover. Dirty melting snow had spattered the wheel wells and added a chic black-dotted veil to the adulterated license plates, further obscuring them.
Nobody’d look twice at the van. Kevin ducked to face himself in the side mirror before mounting the front seat. Nobody’d look twice at him now, either, he thought, a little miffed by how easy it was to become a complete nonentity when one’s usual props were stripped away.
And Jane… he smiled at her across the way. In her standard winter duds, she looked a hundred percent, apple pie, Minnesota-wholesome normal, God bless her rosy cheeks.
Maybe they would make it, he thought. Maybe they just would bloody well make it.
Chapter Thirteen
* * *
Kevin cased the Upper Midwest Savings & Loan building from the parked van, feeling like Clyde Barrow in a lifted Ford.
He’d gone in and out of banks a hundred times without even noticing the obligatory guard stationed near the main doors, but now the guy with the holstered gun looked seven feet tall.
Retired guys, potbellied and farsighted, that’s who they got for bank guards, he reassured himself.
“Is that where the money is?” his Bonnie asked with utter innocence.
“Yup.”
“They need a big place for it.”
“All that room is for the people who watch the money. Now listen, when we go in, stick with me. Don’t look at anybody, don’t talk to anybody. And if anything goes wrong—”
“Wrong?”
“If an alarm goes off, or the guard comes running, or the cashier hits me in the face with a lemon meringue pie…” Jane absorbed all his worst-case scenarios with equal seriousness, her eyes nine-year-old round. “If anything seems wrong—just get away from me. Don’t get caught.”
“It would be like going back to them?”
“Worse. The aliens would only take your memory; these geeks would rip out your soul.”
“A soul doesn’t exist.”
“Yeah, it does, only it’s a little hard to pin down.”
“Like a memory?”
“Exactly like a memory.”
Kevin cracked the van door, checked for oncoming traffic and slid out. The street squeezed dirty slush up to his anklebones. He squeegeed around the van to let Jane out and together they walked up the badly shoveled sidewalk. Where the S&L building began, the snow miraculously vanished, revealing only wet concrete sidewalk.
“Something must have landed here,” Jane speculated.
“Yeah
. Under-sidewalk heating. Old Upper Midwest S&L must be doing all right.” Kevin took her arm, although there was no danger of slipping now. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous; it’s my fucking money…
People brushed past in the noon-hour rush. Good cover, Kevin congratulated himself. He glanced back at the van. It looked as legitimate as any other vehicle drawn up to the row of parking meters, lined up like dull silver soldiers to infinity… Parking meters, holy shit!
“Jane! Wait here! Don’t move.”
Kevin parked her against the institution’s windows and sprinted back to the van, clawing for change in his jeans.
Some criminal mind, he jibed himself… planning to snatch his worldly funds from under the feds’ noses and he forgets to plug the friggin’ parking meter—!
He tore off and jammed the hampering gloves inside his jacket. His bare fingers instantly stiffened in the wind chill. Only nickels and dimes and pennies squeezed out of his jeans pockets. For want of a quarter… He finally found one and crammed it into the meter slot. The red line popped into position: fifteen minutes. He vacillated. What if something went wrong? A nickel made it twenty-five. Reassured, he could afford to worry again about something else.
Jane! He whirled, his eyes paging back to where he’d parked her—right behind the bus stop sign… gone. Gone. Ohmigod… Should have dragged her along, even if it made a spectacle, should’ve something!
Kevin started back up the street, his eyes raking passing figures like a pickpocket’s. Everybody wore down jackets. All the women were dark-haired and just-so tall. He crammed cold hands into jacket pockets to hide his fists and lurched toward the S&L’s grandiose glass entry. Maybe she’d gone in to get out of the cold.
A fat man in a furred Russian hat stepped into his path as a bus arrived. Kevin smelled diesel fumes swirling behind him, heard the brakes grind. Even now Jane could be stepping up the black rubberized stairs, wandering God knows where, whisked away as surely by the Metropolitan Transit Commission as by any otherworldly aliens…
The fat man tried to belly-brush Kevin aside. Kevin turned, savage. “Watch the hell where you’re going—!”
At the bank’s window-wall, obscured by the fat man until he had moved, Jane was standing with her nose pressed against plate glass. Kevin joined her, anger still flaring under his relief.
“I told you to stay where I left you.”
“Some people came and pushed me down.”
He glanced along the stone-and-glass facade. Waiting bus riders were strung out like birds on a wire, each hugging the debatable shelter of the building’s skirts. Jane had been edged three windows down. He squeezed her arm.
“Sorry. Guess I panicked. What’s so fascinating inside?”
“Them.”
Kevin looked, feeling foolish. A hallmark of urban sophistication was being able to walk by everything without noticing anything.
The S&L’s first floor was carpeted in Kelly green. Walnut-veneer desks at regular intervals, each wearing a visitor’s chair like a motorcycle its sidecar, made a giant hound’s-tooth pattern on the vivid background. Crisply feminine workers—all young, impeccably groomed, skirted and bloused and bowed at the collar or dripping tasteful gobs of gold and sterling silver jewelry—minced across the carpet on soundless high heels.
“These are the people who watch the money?” Jane wanted to know.
“Some of them.”
“They remind me…”
“Yes?”
“Of them. The ones on the ship.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Kidding?” she inquired politely.
“I mean, you don’t mean it!”
“Why would I say something I don’t mean?” Jane turned again to regard the unstill life beyond the window glass. “They remind me of them. So many, so busy, so alike.”
Kevin digested the comparison. Watching bank employees through a plate glass window was indeed a rather alien experience, if you thought about it. Who were these people, and what were they all doing here? If you didn’t know…
Sobered, he took Jane’s arm and guided her through the big glass doors into the vaulted marble lobby where the guard with the huge black leather holster stood watch near the mid-sized parlour palm in the large ceramic pot.
Another guard patrolled the cashiers’ domain, where travertine check-writing stations sprouted like stone mushrooms. Kevin and Jane paused at an unoccupied island while he worried out Kandy’s card.
“Stay here.” He reluctantly ordered a change of plan, eyeing the line before the nearest cashier. Jane was too unpredictable; he couldn’t risk her saying something outré to the cashier. “I’m gonna have to get some blank checks. Remember, if there’s any trouble—if anybody… talks too much to me, or if that guard there comes toward me, just run for it. Hey, it won’t happen. This’ll be a piece of cake, a shoo-in, a—”
Jane was looking more disoriented by the instant. Kevin patted her cheek, still chilly from the outside cold, gave her a look that lasted long enough to mean good-bye, even though he didn’t believe it, and affixed himself to the line behind a man smoking a pipe.
The fancy travertine floor wept as winter-decked people stood there in their snow-heavy boots. Kevin eyed the black panning boxes that housed the videotape cameras, then ducked his head.
The line trudged forward, a baby step at a time. The pipe fumes ahead of him smelled of ripe berries, mixing uneasily in his nostrils with the bus’s vile after-stink. Already the heated air was turning his down jacket into an oven; something itched on his throat. When he scratched it, his fingernail came away bloody. He remembered too late the shaving nick of the morning.
He looked behind him again. Jane still stood where he’d left her, doodling with the chained ballpoint pen on one of the forms. Kevin hoped it wasn’t anything too incriminating…
The line lurched a silly little millimeter forward. Kevin followed, pushing up his jacket sleeve to read his watchface. Ten minutes into his hard-bought twenty-five. Yeah, they’d make it. He peered around the pipe smoker to count how many preceded him. Only four. They’d make it, just as he’d promised Jane. He stopped fidgeting and started mentally rehearsing the spiel he’d give when he got to the head of the line.
* * *
Jane looked up. Pillars of brass-trimmed beige marble soared above her. She’d worked off her gloves to play with the pen and now ran her palm over the cool, stainless steel core bisecting the marble table. It was nice and high, she thought, the table—just right to stand at, lean on. But cold. Everything here was cold, although it was inside and seemed well heated—shiny and hard and cold.
And the people… Jane turned full circle for a panoramic view of the lobby. She’d never seen so many people walking inside a building before, not even on the university campus. The hard floor rang to the click of their boots and shoes. The sounds echoed up and up to the highest pillar top.
Jane glanced to where Kevin had been standing. Somebody else stood there now. An odd, disquieting feeling exploded in her, like a pull on an internal, invisible string. She edged sideways and peered harder. She saw a lady in a plaid coat, and the outline of a cocked pipe farther ahead… but—
She released the marble pedestal to which she’d clung since Kevin had left her. She stepped away, feeling as if the earth had been scooped away from her feet until she had only the cold square foot of marble upon which she now stood.
Kevin had kept warning her something might happen. What if nothing had happened? How was she to act then? What if he was simply… gone?
Jane turned around, so fast her head felt funny, but then her head was beginning to feel even funnier—closed, cluttered and muffled. People’s voices echoed against the brazen sky, making no sense. Footsteps neared and washed away. Kevin had vanished, swallowed by the crowded emptiness…
Jane’s eyes began darting from place to place, clicking images into focus, burning them into her brain in rapid succession. They were all meaningless. Then—
/> She saw it. She fixed on one small strand of sanity in the melee. Sound softened, words unwound and made fleeting sense again. “—and then I go, ‘If that’s the way you feel,’ and he goes—”… “—selling at forty-nine and seven- eighths, not bad considering—”… “—she’d be a much better manager if she’d come to terms with her marriage; that man—”
Jane smiled and let the noise peel past her. She moved toward what she saw, toward what would save her.
Chapter Fourteen
* * *
Kevin saw the pipe smoker’s broad gray tweed back melt before him. He stepped up to the decorative grate and grinned at the clerk.
“Just, uh, opened a new account. I need some temporary checks while I’m waiting for my personalized ones. You know the U.S. Mails.”
She laughed on cue. “I’m surprised you weren’t given some when you opened the account.”
“Well, I was. But I lost ’em. Christmas and all.” Kevin tried to remember what his most charming, truth-telling, social smile felt like. It’d been so long since he’d used it, two whole weeks maybe.
“If you’ve got your account number?”
“Sure. Um… 67334989—dash—08. Gosh, these things are long.”
The clerk flashed an automatic smile. Her long lacquered nails clicked the sequence into the computer keyboard. She nodded and, eyes still glued to the unseen screen, asked, “Address is 1708 Dupont Avenue South, Mr. Anderson?”
“Right.” At least the Anderson part was right, Kevin consoled himself, ignoring his ignorance of the rest. “And I want some cash now, too.”
The clerk didn’t bat a mascara-gobbed eyelash, but slapped a checkbook holder and a slim batch of blank checks down on the hard cold marble, “I’ll have to run a statement for you. It might take a while to get the computer.”
“Oh, sure…” He glanced to the central computer station, where two clerks were already fidgeting. His cashier joined the procession to see the Great God Microchip.
Kevin twisted to glance back—six people behind him, all staggered to watch the front of the line and therefore arranged into an impossible barrier. He couldn’t even see the station at which he’d left Jane, much less Jane.
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