Duplex

by Orson Scott Card

  “How smart was Plato, really?” said Ryan. “And you made up that smartness measure, anyway.”

  “IQ is so passé,” said Bizzy. “I think Einstein is overrated or I would have used his name for the measure. And Newton is already used for a unit of measurement. Did you eat all your candy yet?”

  “Threw it away,” said Ryan.

  “Self-control. That makes you a deci-Gandhi.”

  “I thought Dianne had left me a bowl of all the crap candy. Instead, she was giving me all the good stuff.”

  “She said.”

  “She was telling the truth,” said Ryan.

  “Now you have another micropower?”

  “I’ve lived with that girl her whole life,” said Ryan. “She was telling the truth. Which meant she was trying to be nice to me. Her reward was that she ended up with all the good stuff anyway.”

  “What’s going to happen, Ryan?” asked Bizzy. “That guy coming to the house. You breaking his hand.”

  “He broke his hand,” said Ryan. “I just provided the edge of a door for him to break it on.”

  “Things are violent. He meant for that blow to hit you.”

  “So I figured,” said Ryan. “People sometimes offer me gifts I don’t want.”

  “You aren’t a superhero. Stopping a kid from kicking another kid, you were magnificent, of course, all the videos on the internet confirm that, but still, these guys probably have guns and that guy proved they aren’t afraid to cause serious injury. That blow would have decked you.”

  “I don’t know how far my micropower goes,” said Ryan.

  “How strong does it make you?” asked Bizzy.

  “I don’t think it gives me any more strength than I would have with a full dose of adrenaline and perfect aim.”

  “And speed,” she said.

  “I don’t know if I’m faster than I would be on adrenaline. I just start sooner.”

  “Because you think faster?”

  “Because I just know. I don’t stop to think.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “Was I wrong about Door-Hitting Clown?”

  Bizzy said, “I don’t want you to die for me, Ryan.”

  “Your mother does. That was the deal. She spelled it out for me.”

  “I bet your mother would offer a counterargument,” said Bizzy.

  “Not sure of that,” said Ryan. “Not sure how much she actually loves me.”

  “She loves you,” said Bizzy.

  “Maybe she wishes she had aborted me, too,” said Ryan.

  Bizzy said nothing to that. They walked the rest of the way to school in silence.

  Ryan went to her locker with her. Then she went to his locker with him. Because he wasn’t going to let her out of his sight, and she thought that was a good policy.

  The day’s events began in Mr. Hardesty’s class, when he was tormenting a student who had no idea of the answer to a fairly simple question about the Emperor Diocletian. The door to the room opened, and a man in a dark suit stepped in.

  “I beg your pardon?” asked Mr. Hardesty.

  “I’m Lieutenant Alford of the FBI,” the man said, holding up a badge.

  “I’m Professor Hardesty of Yale, emeritus,” said Hardesty. “I carry my credentials in my brain.”

  Ryan was already on his feet when Alford of the FBI turned to face the class. “I’m here to bring Bo-jay-na Horvat to the front office to be signed out of school by her parents.”

  Bizzy was rising to her feet when Ryan pushed past her and stood halfway between her and Alford of the FBI. “She’s not going,” said Ryan.

  “What are you, her master? Is she on a leash?” asked Alford.

  “Her parents aren’t in the front office.”

  “Let’s go there and see,” said Alford.

  Hardesty chimed in. “Mr. Burke, I’m sure Bizzy doesn’t need your protection.”

  Ryan paid no attention to Hardesty. He just stood there between Alford and Bizzy.

  “I think I should go,” said Bizzy.

  “I think not,” said Ryan.

  “Boy, he sure takes being a boyfriend seriously,” said Kit, one of Bizzy’s friends.

  “It’s a Slovenian thing,” said Ryan.

  “You’re not Slovenian,” said Defense.

  “But Lieutenant Alford is,” said Ryan.

  Alford’s eyes got a tiny bit narrower. His brow creased a tiny bit more deeply. He was getting angry.

  “I’ll go, really, Ryan,” said Bizzy.

  Alford held out a hand as Bizzy started to step around Ryan.

  Ryan stepped farther forward and took hold of Alford’s hand. It was strangely clammy. “I stay between you and Bizzy the whole way.”

  “You’re not invited to this meeting,” said Alford.

  “I’m her plus-one,” said Ryan. “Let’s not quarrel.”

  Alford shrugged and walked up to stand against the chalkboard. He waved Ryan past him.

  Ryan maneuvered Bizzy to the front and guided her out the door of the room. Alford was right behind him.

  Ryan could see the flexing of Alford’s muscles. His distribution of weight between his feet. He could see Alford’s intended move as soon as the door closed.

  So Ryan didn’t wait for the door to close. As Alford got exactly in the middle of the door frame, Ryan struck him in the side of the head with all the force of his open hand and extended arm. Alford’s head crashed into the metal door frame. His head did not bounce off. Instead, it sort of stuck there. Then Alford slid down the door frame as if his skull were on a track. A thick streak of blood trailed after him.

  Bizzy gasped.

  Ryan said softly, “The FBI has no lieutenants. Only special agent on up to special agent-in-charge.”

  The door couldn’t fall shut behind them, what with Alford-not-from-the-FBI sitting there on the floor with his head welded to the jamb. Ryan looked up and down the corridor and saw a man in a black suit at either end. They probably had seen what Ryan did, because they were beginning to walk very briskly toward them, reaching for guns in shoulder holsters.

  Ryan dragged Bizzy back into the classroom. Everyone was looking at him in shock. “He wasn’t an FBI agent. He was a Slovenian terrorist, and he’s here to kidnap Bizzy and eventually kill her and her whole family.” He pulled Bizzy toward the wall of windows. She was a little bit shocked, it seemed, but even walking like a zombie, she followed his lead readily enough.

  Ryan pushed open the transom at the base of the window. He knew from experience that he could fit through it, but he had never analyzed Bizzy’s body with this aperture in mind. He lifted her up and fed her feet through the window.

  “No,” she said.

  Ryan tossed her in the air just a little, to flip her over so that she would go through facedown. “It’s not a long drop to the lawn below,” he said. He pushed her through until her center of gravity was beyond the sill. Then he opened the window next to that one and squeezed himself out as easily as ever. He reached the ground before her.

  “That just scraped up my whole front,” Bizzy said.

  “Whiny baby,” said Ryan. He took her hand again and led her off along the side of the building, heading toward the gym. He figured the agents were all over inside the main building and watching the exits. He began jogging and Bizzy kept up just fine.

  They made it to the gym unseen, apparently—at least, nobody shouted There they are. Ryan pulled her around the building and over to the woods that came up against the school grounds. He was hoping that the Slovenians didn’t have a helicopter watching—he couldn’t hear anything in the air, and anyway, this was obviously a completely incompetent group. “Lieutenant Alford” had a perfect mid-Virginia accent, as if he had grown up around Charlottesville, and pronouncing Bojana as bo-jay-na was a nice touch. B
ut they couldn’t even prep him with a proper FBI-sounding title? They didn’t warn him of what Ryan could do? Amateur hour.

  “I think you killed him,” said Bizzy, as they walked carefully through the woods.

  “I think so, too,” said Ryan.

  “Was that your plan?” she asked.

  “My plan was to keep you from going three feet with him. He was ready to knock me down as soon as the door closed. But I didn’t care who saw what I did, I just knew I had to strike first.”

  “But to kill him?”

  “Look, Bizzy, this micropower is new to me. I was on course to kill Errol that day, aiming right at his larynx. I had to try to redirect my blow so it wouldn’t kill him. Even then he needed a tracheotomy. So apparently my micropower sets me in motion to eliminate threats to people I love.”

  “He was going to hit you,” said Bizzy.

  “If he knocked me down, who would have protected you?” asked Ryan. “I’m not sure what your qualms are about. These guys plan to kill your mom, don’t they? And kidnapping you would just have been part of accomplishing that—after which they would have killed you, too. Is my assessment incorrect?”

  “No, I think you’re right. But killing is so . . . permanent.”

  “While saving you is apparently quite temporary,” said Ryan. “I think the guy at the east end of the corridor had his hand in a big thick bandage. I think he’s the guy at the door yesterday.”

  “You’re thinking you should have killed him, too?”

  “I had nothing to kill him with that night,” said Ryan. “Bizzy, I don’t plan these things. That’s the whole essence of my micropower. I notice things unconsciously so I just know what’s about to happen, and I am already taking preventive measures before I realize what I just unconsciously sensed. It happens like inhaling or digesting—I’m not choosing to do it, it already chose itself. So I was smashing his head into the door frame before I knew I was going to strike, and when I did realize it, I was afraid I wouldn’t be strong enough to incapacitate him. I thought the most I could do was knock him to the ground with a headache.”

  “I think you slotted his head,” she said.

  “Maybe he had an unusually flexible skull. I don’t know that he’s dead, and neither do you, but I must admit that if he is dead, then I feel pretty good that he probably won’t be coming after you anymore.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Me too.” She squeezed his hand. “I never said I disapproved.”

  Only then, with her consent, or forgiveness, or whatever—only then did he realize that yes, indeed, he probably had killed a man with a single blow from his left hand, his nondominant arm.

  Walking through the woods, he thought of the possibility of legal trouble. Assaulting a federal officer—that’s what the kids in the room probably thought. What Mr. Hardesty thought. Of course, the real FBI would immediately realize that he was a fake, but meanwhile the police might put out the news that two fugitives, one of them a murder suspect and—heck, they probably assumed Bizzy was his hostage. That’s how it would go on a cop show.

  “We’re not calling your mom for a ride home,” said Ryan.

  “They’re watching her, I’m sure, and she’d lead them right to us.”

  “But we need to call people,” said Ryan. “Dr. Withunga. We need to get a group of micropots together so we’re all strengthened.”

  “You were pretty strong alone,” said Bizzy.

  “I had another micropot with me,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You,” he said.

  “I don’t have a micropower,” she said. “I just have a thing I do with my face.”

  “And I just did a thing with my left arm,” he said. “I had you with me.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “We’re already there. Standing here at the edge of the woods. Right down there is a bus stop. When we see the bus coming along the road, we run down and get on, just in time. You have your youth pass?”

  “In my purse,” she said.

  “You have your purse?” asked Ryan. She held it up. “In plain sight.”

  “I wasn’t looking,” said Ryan. “I was watching our path through the woods so neither of us would twist an ankle or anything.”

  “Always looking out for me,” she said.

  “I believe that’s accurate, yes, ma’am.”

  The bus came along a few minutes later. It was a busy route, and Ryan didn’t care which bus they were on. They sank down in the seat so their heads wouldn’t show through the window. Only then did Ryan figure out what route they were on so he could figure out where to get off in order to catch a bus that would get them to Dad’s work site. If he could only remember which job he was on today. Not the McDonald’s. It was a house. Adding a second story, and the new footings were already done, so Dad would be there taking the roof off so they could put up the walls and getting the new roof on before it could rain again. And that house was . . .

  They got off the bus. They retreated between two commercial buildings until the bus they wanted came along. They were at Dad’s project before a full hour had passed since Ryan killed Lieutenant Alford. What a shame that the poor man would be stuck with that pathetic false identity in Ryan’s mind forever.

  Dad wasn’t there. But Niddy Adams was. “I need my dad,” said Ryan.

  “Your girlfriend?” asked Niddy.

  “Yes sir,” said Bizzy. “But we really need Ryan’s dad.”

  Niddy looked back and forth between them. “Emergency, I take it?”

  “Life and death,” said Ryan.

  “Literally,” said Bizzy.

  Niddy had his phone out already, was selecting who to call. “Anyplace we can hole up, out of sight, till he gets here?”

  “You don’t want to talk to him?” asked Niddy.

  “If you tell him I need him here, now, then he’ll come,” said Ryan.

  “I think he will,” said Niddy. “Just go in the house. The walls are still up on the downstairs floor.” His attention turned to the phone. “Ryan and his girlfriend are here and they need you right now . . . Yes, sir.”

  And that was it. The conversation was over before Ryan and Bizzy were three steps away.

  “Is that your dad’s boss?” asked Bizzy as they went through the garage and into the house. There was no furniture; it had been completely emptied. So they sat on the carpeted floor, out of sight from any windows.

  “No,” said Ryan. “He works for my dad. My dad is the boss.”

  “And he just ordered your dad to come?”

  “He told my dad that I needed him. We needed him.”

  “And your dad will come?”

  “He trusts Niddy,” said Ryan. “And Niddy trusted me.”

  “We’d have to burn down the house to get my dad out of the university library,” said Bizzy.

  “Let’s not do that,” said Ryan. “Unless his micropower is to completely disarm anyone with hostile intent toward his family.”

  “I wish,” said Bizzy.

  “Do you think your dad has a micropower?”

  “The ability to concentrate so completely on his scholarly undertakings that he wouldn’t look up for a nuclear explosion.”

  Ryan chuckled, but it died at once. “I’m scared,” Ryan said.

  “I’m not,” said Bizzy. “I have you.”

  “That’s what scares me,” said Ryan. “I know something much bigger is coming, and as far as I know, I’ve already used everything I’ve got.”

  Bizzy sat still for about a minute and then said, “I think you’ve got more in you than that.”

  “Why do you think that?” asked Ryan.

  “Because you still love me,” she said. “So you’ll have whatever you need.”

  She kissed him then.

  �
��That’s very distracting,” said Ryan, when he was able to breathe again.

  “I’m a girl, looking at a guy, asking him to—”

  “No movie lines,” said Ryan. “No jokes. What are we to each other, Bizzy? When this is over, when all the bad guys are dead or locked up, when you don’t need a protector anymore, what are we?”

  “You’re seriously asking that? Now?”

  “Do you love me? Or just need me?” asked Ryan.

  “I need you. I love you. Will you be my valentine, Ryan?” She kissed him again.

  “That’s not an answer,” he whispered. “But I understand. It’s all you can give me right now.”

  “You should ask yourself the same question. If this ends happily, and I don’t need you to protect me anymore, will you still love me?”

  “I loved you before I knew you needed me,” said Ryan.

  “Also not an answer,” she said. “But it’ll do.”

  The door opened and it was Dad.

  “So what is it?” he asked. “Bad guys chasing you? Or the police?”

  “Probably both,” said Ryan.

  “Definitely the bad guys,” said Bizzy.

  “Can I use your phone to call Dr. Withunga?” asked Ryan. “We need to get some micropots over to the house.”

  “Our house?” asked Dad. “You want to assemble people there? Isn’t that kind of ground zero?”

  “Exactly,” said Ryan. “When micropots gather together, all their abilities increase and have greater focus.”

  “Any of those micropowers include tear gas? Flame throwers? Automatic weapons? Grenades?”

  “No,” said Ryan. “I do know a guy with a nail gun.”

  “Which you don’t even know how to operate,” said Dad.

  “Not my fault,” said Ryan. “But I can take out garbage and put away dishes.”

  “Come on and get in my car,” said Dad.

  They got up and followed him out the door.

  “You think I should bring some of my guys along?” asked Dad.

  “No,” said Ryan. “If they have micropowers, we don’t know what they are, and if they don’t, there’s no reason to put anybody else in jeopardy.”

  “And what about your mother and Dianne?” asked Dad.