“Could you tell me her name?”
Davis closed his eyes. Klinger looked away.
“Please,” Klinger said.
“I don’t think so, John. I don’t think that would help . . .”
Klinger took a deep breath. “Please tell them that’s what I want. I want to know her whole name and I want the right equipment to transmit a message to her. Tell them that.”
The big man didn’t seem to be breathing. He was shaking his head. “Klinger . . . Klinger . . .” The big man took a breath at last. “Her name was Semples . . . Linda Semples. She was a black prostitute, Klinger. A smash junkie. Her pimp killed her. He killed her because she was threatening to tell the police about his lab, his friends, the distribution from Victorville to Vegas. She fucked for money, Klinger. Or she did once. She was getting old. She was forty years old and the only thing that kept her in business, Klinger—I’m sorry to have to say this, but you’ve got to understand and accept it or this isn’t going to end—was the kinds of things she’d do in bed with a man—”
Davis was looking at his hands, which were clenched white. He would not look up. Klinger knew it must have felt cruel for him to say these things, and he was not a cruel man. Klinger realized then how much he loved the man.
“You’re doing this over a dead hooker, Klinger—a dead hooker with a mean pimp. You’re doing this over a forty-year-old whore who liked honkies like you about as far as she could piss. I think you can be helped, Klinger, but it’s got to stop here. She’s dead, Klinger. You didn’t really understand this—you didn’t know a thing about her—otherwise, you wouldn’t have done all of this, am I right?”
Klinger was looking at him. He was holding the Phantom, not aiming it, just holding it.
“I’d like you to leave now, sir,” Klinger said. “I’ll be staying here waiting for her next transmission. I don’t know how long I’ll be here, but I’ll signal when I’m ready to leave. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell them.”
Davis got up slowly, as if reluctant to leave. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. He wasn’t blinking now. Neither of them was.
When the big man was gone, Klinger sat down at the card table, closed his eyes, and recited to himself once again the message, letting the fingers on his good hand move as if he were typing on a keyboard somewhere:
. . . to the woman who slept under a bridge who loves poetry who dreams I know you better than you were ever known in life I love you please answer me John K. . . .
His fingers typed it again and again—although there weren’t any keys—although there never would be.
When the door to the shack flew open and three men with shotguns exploded into the little room, Klinger’s head was down on the card table, almost asleep. He managed to raise the Phantom just enough to let them know what he wanted them to do, and they obliged.
The blast from the weapon to his right raised him in the air, filled his left shoulder with a winter frost, and set him down on the floor not far from the card table. Lying there, looking up at the corrugated metal of the ceiling and feeling the frost move into his arms and legs, he knew the ID alarm on the printer had never gone off. That was the terrible thing. The pain in his shoulder was nothing.
She had moved on.
They always do, he remembered someone—Tompai or Corley or Whirley—saying years, years ago.
He thought of the fixer Nakamura who had fallen in love with a ghost and finally gone insane.
Then he let them help him up in all the blood and get him to the car.
That night, in the medical ward of the county jail, he had the very last dream. Her skin was dark, of course, and she was older, much older than he was. But how could it matter? They talked. They talked about his life and about hers and when they were through, they both fell silent. They didn’t touch. They didn’t touch each other.
This is the last, she told him.
I know, he said.
You didn’t need a machine at all . . .
I know that now.
I love you, too, John. I always have, John, she said. And I always will.
When he repeated the same words back to her—feeling them more than he had ever felt them in his life—he awoke in the darkness of the hospital room and saw clearly how it would all go.
He would heal. There would be a trial. There would be a few months in another kind of ward. Then there would be a new job, a very different kind, and, in the end, everything would be right again.
Moving On
Story Notes
What is the nature of love? What do we fall in love with when we fall in love? Do we look for someone as vulnerable as we are, or as strong, or both, or neither? The longer I live the more I believe that the human need for love is so great that it can in the long run prevail against ego’s defenses; and that if any of us were alone on a desert island we could probably come to love, truly love, in one capacity or another, almost anyone else on the face of this earth. In terms of the setting—Los Angeles after the Big One, the “waking-dead” feeling of the place—I have to credit the years 1980 to 1982 that I worked as a scientific writing consultant and media specialist for my university’s Seismic Policy Research Center, a center funded by state and federal grants. During those two years I learned more than I ever wanted to learn about human beings and large disasters (yes, we indeed looked at FEMA and saw even then the problems that would blossom decades later—because organisms are organisms): that one way or another the Big One was indeed going to come; that according to disaster studies, human beings (rather than becoming animals tearing each other’s throats out) actually help each other if given a chance because “therapeutic communities” form instantly and naturally, as if we were all waiting for the “peace of civilization” to end so that we might wake to what we truly are; and that policy-makers have been known to say or write such things privately as “If a 9.0 quake were to strike this city and the effect were to be felt mainly at the 20,000 pre-1933 buildings—buildings that currently house mostly the poor, the elderly, and minorities—that would solve other problems facing us; so, no, I’m not entirely sure we should spend the money to retrofit those buildings.” But much more important than the setting is the science of the Listeners—for which I’m indebted to Dr. Gregory Benford, Nebula Award-winning author of Timescape. Greg has helped make rational and science-fictional more than one McAllister story that would have been far too “soft” without the science he provided.
This story first appeared in 1993 in the third volume of Ellen Datlow’s OMNI Best Science Fiction anthology, and later, when online publications began appearing, in her magazine Event Horizon.
The Girl Who Loved Animals
They had her on the seventeenth floor in their new hi-security unit on Figueroa and weren’t going to let me up. Captain Mendoza, the one who thinks I’m the ugliest woman he’s ever laid eyes on and somehow manages to take it personally, was up there with her, and no one else was allowed. Or so this young lieutenant with a fresh academy tattoo on his left thumb tries to tell me. I get up real close so the kid can hear me over the screaming media crowd in the lobby and see this infamous face of mine, and I tell him I don’t think Chief Stracher will like getting a call at 0200 hours just because some desk cadet can’t tell a privileged soc worker from a media rep, and how good friends really shouldn’t bother each other at that time of the day anyway, am I right? It’s a lie, sure, but he looks worried, and I remember why I haven’t had anything done about the face I was born with. He gives me two escorts—a sleek young swatter with an infrared Ruger, and a lady in fatigues who’s almost as tall as I am—and up we go. They’re efficient kids. They frisk me in the elevator.
Mendoza wasn’t with her. Two P.D. medics with side arms were. The girl was sitting on a sensor cot in the middle of their new glass observation room—closed-air, antiballistic Plexi, and the rest—and was a mess. The video footage, which six million people had seen at ten, hadn’t been pixeled at all.
I knew that Mendoza would have preferred someone more exciting than a twenty-year-old girl with a V Rating of nine point six and something strange growing inside her, but he was going to have to settle for this christening.
I asked the medics to let me in. They told me to talk into their wall grid so the new computer could hear me. The computer said something like “Yeah, she’s okay,” and they opened the door and frisked me again.
I asked them to leave, citing Welfare & Institutions Statute Thirty-eight. They wouldn’t, citing hi-sec orders under Penal Code Seven-A. I told them to go find Mendoza and tell him I wanted privacy for the official interview.
Very nicely they said that neither of them could leave and that if I kept asking I could be held for obstruction, despite the same statute’s cooperation clause. That sounded right to me. I smiled and got to work.
Her name was Lissy Tomer. She was twenty-one, not twenty. According to Records, she’d been born in the East Valley, been abused as a child by both sets of parents, and, as the old story goes, hooked up with a man who would oblige her the same way. What had kept County out of her life, I knew, was the fact that early on, someone in W&I had set her up with an easy spousal-abuse complaint and felony restraining-order option that needed only a phone call to trigger. But she’d never exercised it, though the older bruises said she should have.
She was pale and underweight and wouldn’t have looked very good even without the contusions, the bloody nose and lip, the belly, and the shivering. The bloody clothes didn’t help either. Neither did the wires and contact gel they had all over her for their beautiful new cot.
But there was a fragility to her—princess-in-the-fairy-tale kind—that almost made her pretty.
She flinched when I said hello, just as if I’d hit her. I wondered which had been worse—the beating or the media. He’d done it in a park and had been screaming at her when Mendoza’s finest arrived, and two uniforms had picked up a couple of Cs by calling it in to the networks.
She was going to get hit with a beautiful Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder sometime down the road even if things didn’t get worse for her—which they would. The press wanted her badly. She was bloody, showing, and very visual.
“Has the fetus been checked?” I asked the side arms. If they were going to listen, they could help.
The shorter one said yes, a portable sonogram from County, and the baby looked okay.
I turned back to the girl. She was looking up at me from the cot, looking hopeful, and I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what she thought I could do for her.
“I’m your new V.R. advocate, Lissy.”
She nodded, keeping her hands in her lap like a good girl.
“I’m going to ask you some questions, if that’s all right. The more I know, the more help I can be, Lissy. But you know that, don’t you.” I grinned.
She nodded again and smiled, but the lip hurt.
I identified myself, badge and department and appellation, then read her her rights under Protective Services provisions, as amended—what we in the trade call the Nhat Hanh Act. What you get and what you don’t.
“First question, Lissy: Why’d you do it?”
I asked it as gently as I could, flicking the hand recorder on. It was the law.
I wondered if she knew what a law was.
Her I.Q. was eighty-four, congenital, and she was a Collins psychotype, class three dependent. She’d had six years of school and had once worked for five months for a custodial service in Monterey Park. Her Vulnerability Rating, all factors factored, was a whopping nine point six. It was the rating that had gotten her a felony restraint complaint option on the marital bond, and County had assumed that was enough to protect her . . . from him.
As far as the provisions on low-I.Q. cases went, the husband had been fixed, she had a second-degree dependency on him, and an abortion in event of rape by another was standard. As far as County was concerned, she was protected, and society had exercised proper conscience. I really couldn’t blame her last V.R. advocate. I’d have assumed the same.
And missed one thing.
“I like animals a lot,” she said, and it made her smile. In the middle of a glass room, two armed medics beside her, the media screaming downstairs to get at her, her husband somewhere wishing he’d killed her, it was the one thing that could make her smile.
She told me about a kitten she’d once had at the housing project on Crenshaw. She’d named it Lissy and had kept it alive “all by herself.” It was her job, she said, like her mother and fathers had jobs. Her second stepfather—or was it her mother’s brother? I couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter—had taken it away one day, but she’d had it for a month or two.
When she started living with the man who’d eventually beat her up in a park for the ten o’clock news, he let her have a little dog. He would have killed it out of jealousy in the end, but it died because she didn’t know about shots. He wouldn’t have paid for them anyway, and she seemed to know that. He hadn’t been like that when they first met. It sounded like neurotransmitter blocks, MPHG metabolism. The new bromaine that was on the streets would do it; all the fentanyl analogs would, too. There were a dozen substances on the street that would. You saw it all the time.
She told me how she’d slept with the kitten and the little dog and, when she didn’t have them anymore, with the two or three toys she’d had so long that most of their fur was worn off. How she could smell the kitten for months in her room just as if it were still there. How the dog had died in the shower. How her husband had gotten mad, hit her, and taken the thing away. But you could tell she was glad when the body wasn’t there in the shower anymore.
“This man was watching me in the park,” she said. “He always watched me.”
“Why were you in the park, Lissy?”
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and gave me a smile, the conspiratorial kind. “There’s more than one squirrel in those trees. Maybe a whole family. I like to watch them.”
I was surprised there were any animals at all in the park. You don’t see them anymore, except for the domesticates.
“Did you talk to this man?”
She seemed to know what I was asking. She said, “I wasn’t scared of him. He smiled a lot.” She laughed at something, and we all jumped. “I knew he wanted to talk to me, so I pretended there was a squirrel over by him, and I fed it. He said, Did I like animals and how I could make a lot of money and help the animals of the world.”
It wasn’t important. A dollar. A thousand. But I had to ask.
“How much money did he tell you?”
“Nine thousand dollars. That’s how much I’m going to get, and I’ll be able to see it when it’s born, and visit it.”
She told me how they entered her, how they did it gently while she watched, the instrument clean and bright.
The fertilized egg would affix to the wall of her uterus, they’d told her, and together they would make a placenta. What the fetus needed nutritionally would pass through the placental barrier, and her body wouldn’t reject it.
Her eyes looked worried now. She was remembering things—a beating, men in uniforms with guns, a man with a microphone pushed against her belly. Had her husband hit her there? If so, how many times? I wondered.
“Will the baby be okay?” she asked, and I realized I’d never seen eyes so colorless, a face so trusting.
“That’s what the doctors say,” I said, looking up at the side arms, putting it on them.
Nine thousand. More than a man like her husband would ever see stacked in his life, but he’d beaten her anyway, furious that she could
get it in her own way when he’d failed again and again, furious that she’d managed to get it with the one thing he thought he owned—her body.
Paranoid somatopaths are that way.
I ought to know. I married one.
I’m thinking of the mess we’ve made of it, Lissy. I’m thinking of the three hundred thousand grown children of the walking wounded of an old war in Asia who walk the same way.
I’m thinking of the four hundred thousand walljackers, our living dead. I’m thinking of the zoos, the ones we don’t have anymore, and what they must have been like, what little girls like Lissy Tomer must have done there on summer days.
I’m thinking of a father who went to war, came back, but was never the same again, of a mother who somehow carried us all, of how cars and smog and cement can make a childhood and leave you thinking you can change it all.
I wasn’t sure, but I could guess. The man in the park was a body broker for pharmaceuticals and nonprofits, and behind him somewhere was a species resurrection group that somehow had the money. He’d gotten a hefty three hundred percent, which meant the investment was already thirty-six grand. He’d spent some of his twenty-seven paying off a few W&I people in the biggest counties, gotten a couple dozen names on high-V.R. searches, watched the best bets himself, and finally made his selection.
The group behind him didn’t know how such things worked or didn’t particularly care; they simply wanted consenting women of childbearing age, good health, no substance abuse, no walljackers, no suicidal inclinations; and the broker’s reputation was good, and he did his job.
Somehow he’d missed the husband.
As I found out later, she was one of ten. Surrogates for human babies were a dime a dozen, had been for years. This was something else.
In a nation of two hundred eighty million, Lissy Tomer was one of ten—but in her heart of hearts she was the only one. Because a man who said he loved animals had talked to her in a park once. Because he’d said she would get a lot of money—money that ought to make a husband who was never happy, happy. Because she would get to see it when it was born and get to visit it wherever it was kept.
The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories Page 19