by Moira Crone
“What do you know?” For some reason, for the first time, I had the feeling the whole thing had to do with something she knew, I just didn’t see exactly how.
“Look, he can’t be awakened. You could try, but he’s on sleeping tablets. It’s not going to happen. He will be out until morning. I dose him very carefully, we have to regulate his mood—”
I followed her down the hall.
“He distinctly told me, ‘I can’t let anyone see me like this,’” she repeated, and then she opened the door. “Go ahead. Look.”
My guardian, my “father,” was lying supine on the bench with the green cushion.
The mustache was almost funny. He had a healthy-looking new prodermis, orange-brown, a slight potbelly, which was exposed, as his robe had fallen open. His forearms were thick and resculpted, the wrists beautifully veined. Middle aged, not young, that was the look. There was a pen on the floor, near his hand. It sat on top of a group of papers spread out like a fan. His large-lettered handwriting, full of loops and flourishes, decorated every page I could see.
What had Lazarus been thinking? Or what had the doctors in Memphis been thinking? A man’s man? An adventurer? It was as if he’d given up his will to the varietologists.
Then, the soft snore of an old, old man. A true Yeared. Where was my guardian?
“He’s been writing, you see, it seems to calm him,” Marilee said softly. “He was dosing himself with these pills to sleep. He took too many; we had to splash water in his face. Stand him up and force him to walk, to bring him around. Vee and I were very upset. Now I give them to him. He can’t be roused, I know. At six, he will awake.”
I defied her. I went to him, grabbed his thick arm—touched him, I didn’t care. She was shocked. “Lazarus. Lazarus.”
“Stop, please,” she said.
He wouldn’t wake. He was as limp as one of those hanging skins of Mo Lion’s.
I followed her wishes—I had to. Full of questions, I closed the door.
V
7:00 AM October 18, 2121
Audubon Foundling House, Audubon Island
New Orleans Islands, Northeast Gulf De-Accessioned Territory,
U.A. Protectorate
I woke in the attic I had slept in as a boy, at dawn. The light came in stripes through the jalousies, and across my thighs. That had not changed. And neither had the noise—the cawing and whooping of the birds announcing the morning on Audubon Island. Louder than ever now, since the park had gone back to the wild. I was just as I was when I was a boy—except I had been dreaming about Camille.
I lay still, paying attention to the tiny explosions all over my skin. I could feel whirling movements passing from one spot to another, and thought of them as exchanges among my busy cells, as a kind of business, an economy. Behind my eyes, the buzzing of my brain—whirring, high pitched. Once, Lazarus had told me that lying awake in bed was the epitome of idleness. Rebellious, I lay there, listening, remembering. I had the sense, and I wasn’t in any way drunk, that every event in the recent past fit into a pattern, that I was watching evolve.
I pushed it back. I thought of my Trust. Marilee knew something.
I crept down the stairs. It was so early the kitchen door was closed, which meant Marilee wasn’t yet up. I pressed my hand on Lazarus’s tall office door, and entered. I saw him—still apparently asleep, inside his strange new physique.
I went to the desk, and was about to turn on the screen, to see if I could break into the Home accounts, get some answers—when he stirred—
“What? What?” His familiar rasp. “Malcolm? My lucky Malcolm? How is it? How are you? My one success?”
His tight Heir eyes smiled. They were more crusted over with crystals than usual—the silicon syrup, dried. He waved one of his new thick hands, wiped the sand out.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Success?”
“Oh, my, how can you ask? Isn’t it your Boundarytime in a month?” Lazarus asked, rising into a sitting position, closing his satin robe. His old optimistic voice, the tone rising as if he had a joke. He was wide awake, ready to launch into a speech (because he’d been lying awake, in idleness). “Of course success. How can you ask that? You always did what you were told, always bore up under the worst, anything Jeremy or the audiences demanded, devised. I envied your, your—” He searched for the word. “Obedience, doggedness. How you never wavered. How you held to the principle, in face of everything—” He spread his arms out as if to hug me. “Prologue.”
Of course I wouldn’t come to him. It wasn’t done, and I had to follow the rules, forget that wild night in the Far East, in Mississippi. And Mo Lion’s madness. Lazarus was never one to breach decorum, to break taboos. Did he know of my adventure? Did he know how far I’d strayed? He couldn’t.
“It’s all right,” he said. “The rules don’t matter anymore. You want a hug? ”
What did he mean the rules don’t matter anymore? “I am fine,” I said. “Not accustomed.”
He put his arms down, and sized me up with his eyes
“You are just skin and bones, boy,” he said. “Fasting for the—”
“Yes, and a rough journey,” I said. I looked at him hard. Something was very off, wrong, besides his new strange skin.
“Well,” he said, in expectation. “And the ear? What there?”
I minimized my encounter in Port Gramercy, didn’t want to confess all my transgressions. My greatest sin, of course, was wanting to see a Nat girl. I wouldn’t admit that if I didn’t have to. He’d be so disappointed in me. I wasn’t over the offered embrace. Why would he want to break a rule like that? So fundamental? I just blurted it out. “What’s the issue with my Trust?”
He crossed his feet, folded his arms. His eyes scanned the room, as if he were looking for a prompt, a subject. Finally he asked, “How did you hear about that? I can explain.”
Finally. Reality. My voyage behind me. “Yes, did Ariel do something to it? Show my background to the WELLFI officials? It’s the courts, isn’t it? How can we fight it?”
“Ariel?” Lazarus looked as if he couldn’t quite make this question out. As if he had expected me to say something else.
“It’s encumbered. It’s claimed—”
“Ariel?” Lazarus repeated.
“That plan of his for taking over his Trust—”
“I didn’t give Ariel anything, except my apology,” Lazarus said, and sighed deeply. Then he stared at me. “He left, in a hurry, for Defuniak in Florida. He has some investigations. He believes you two have history there—or something—probably true—he located the archives, finally. You came from the West Florida Federation, he discovered that—” Then, rather abruptly, he fell silent.
Even for an Heir, it was a big pause. I could feel time actually creeping along, light changing in the room; I thought hours were passing us by. Finally, he unfolded his arms, so he looked more vulnerable, and then, he said it. “Okay. I promised your Trust, to Vee’s enclave. I put all the accounts of the Foundling House in their hands—so they could go ahead and move. Before they drowned. I took your Trust and made it part of the guarantee to get Chef Menteur out of that water-logged—so they didn’t have to go through with that monstrous exhibition. I couldn’t bear it. I just couldn’t—”
“You did what?”
“I put up—collateral. So they could move, build on higher ground. Not lose their option—”
My chair was leaning back on the desk, balanced on two legs. At the shock of this statement, I came forward; almost fell out onto the floor. I got up and stood against the desk, so I was looking down on him. “You did what? Vee? He doesn’t—”
“Well they were going to drown when another surge came. We are going into another era like the one of the Great Storms—Katrina, Rita, Jerome, Isadora, Althea of 2016—you don’t go back that far, but I do. There are five thousand in Chef Menteur; I suppose some have already gone on the Exodus by now. And there was what I had left in the Home’s accounts and your Trust. Th
at was my calculation. Vee didn’t ask me. I did it on my own. It wasn’t fair to you. I know.” His voice sagged, scratchy but familiar. I played this voice in my mind all the time. To hear it saying such a thing, that he hadn’t thought of me—“I know I am not the kind to do this sort of thing, and to steal, and to disappoint you, for I have disappointed you—I see it in your face.”
“You? You took my Trust for them?”
“Ginger wasn’t doing the so-long according to the prediction. Wasn’t—on time. The Sim Verite wasn’t going to come off in time for them to move—the option, the window, was expiring, so when Vee told me this, I—” It was so peculiar to see Lazarus this way, justifying himself. His falsely tan, thick face, his unblinking eyes, looked so awkward. “They were selling tickets to his own daughter’s—think of it.”
“I was there, I know what they were doing.” I paused. “They made the money. They made it, the place was packed.”
“Well then, she had a turn for the worse.” Lazarus looked expectant, as if he were waiting for my approval. He was an Heir—he shouldn’t ask me for approval. Then he said, “I am so terribly, terribly sorry you had to ever, ever, I never wanted you to ever, ever, witness—”
I ignored the apology. “Well then what?” I could feel something like an old armor, closing around. “What got into you? You would never do such a thing. Isn’t, wasn’t, my Trust close to mature, and wasn’t it mine?” I felt a white fire, anger, thrusting in me in flashes, the way it had when I went at Gepetto. Strangle the little man inside this sack of a Hemingway? What did Mo Lion call these creatures? Bonesnakes? Was I a guerilla now? But I loved him; I knew that I loved him, at the same time as I came around toward him in anger. “What about me? What about the one who did everything the way you said?” I was shouting. “You handed my Trust to Chef Menteur? To diers?”
“I know I was wrong. I know I was wrong,” was all he could mumble. “There was the possibility that Vee’s people wouldn’t need it, but it had to be there, to be their guarantee—What if the patrols stopped the Sim altogether? Was it awful—?”
I nodded. It had been horrible. But how could I agree?
“I know my gesture was completely wrong, as regards to you. Completely, it cannot be justified. And look—even that gesture was meaningless. She went ahead and what did you call it when you were boys? Bit the black for an audience. All my projects have been rather hollow. I believed in them all. I did. That’s the irony of it, they turned out to be hollow.”
“Don’t call me hollow!” I was shouting.
He was startled for a moment, but then, quickly, he nodded, agreed, weakly, with that ridiculous new “handsome” face of his. “If they made their money that monstrous way, if Chef Menteur has its security, then, I can remove the pledge,” Lazarus said. “It is ten minutes on the Net. But do you see how I might have felt I was right? Thousands were doomed? Simple people, Vee and all his cousins? People we sort of love?” His airy voice went even lower. “You were the only success of your generation, all the rest have been set off roaming. I did them no good at all. Sometimes you feel you can make a decision that will save you—but it wasn’t mine to decide. That one single move in a long life can set the whole of it right—a long long life. But can’t you see, Malcolm? What I was thinking? I know it wasn’t mine to decide.”
I understood what he was thinking. But he was wrong to think it. He was wrong to think those things as I had—as I had been wrong to think I had a right to assault Heirs, to throw them off stages, to protect dying Nats at Heirs’ expense. Which is what Lazarus had done: protected them at my expense.
After a silence, Lazarus asked, “Do you think you might ever forgive me? One day?”
The old order had to come back. It had to be one way or the other. He had to see. “You couldn’t do this,” I shouted at him, to clear my own confusion. “You going to go on now and liberate all the enclaves? Is that what this he-man body is about? You going to free them? Start a rebellion? Give all the Trusts out there to the cyclers so they can run them into the ground? Is that what you want me to do? Finally see the light and give everything to the diers? That’s what it is now? I am not you. I am what you made me. I am stronger than you.” I knew at the same moment that I had thought these things in the last few days. I had seen Mo Lion’s part. These very things I was shouting at Lazarus about. I was having this argument with myself as much as with him. This fact enraged me more. I had not been stronger than these sympathies. I was ashamed. I had felt every one of them. I knew why Lazarus had done what he’d done. I remembered the moment when I realized the hooded father backstage was Vee and the sorrow in his face.
“Of course it isn’t fair,” Lazarus said. “I said I will put it back. I swear to you. As soon as I can get on the screens, get to the WELLFI Bank.”
“You better,” I threatened.
“I will, I will.” Weary, exhausted.
I had to allow my heart to slow; I had to put aside enough fury to find what I wanted to say. Ultimately, I looked straight at Lazarus, began:
“I am your son. You told me never to give in and I didn’t, and now—now, that is just what you do. Desert me. You told me to put off my very life, for now, for now—feel nothing—” It was another layer of confusion: I was showing him my feelings, which was something he taught me never to do. “You said I could iron it all out later—”
“I told you that?” He seemed surprised, horrified.
“You told me I was supposed to postpone—I was supposed to—” I was angrier about this than the Trust, really. I backed away, toward the diamond-paned windows in the alcove that surrounded the desk. If I got too close, the anger would magnetize me, draw me to hit him. Something in me wanted to kill him. I didn’t know what he could do and not do, anymore. I hated it, that I loved my anger. “You told me to put my life into the Trust. I am waiting to live now because of you. Because of you, I am still waiting—” I started forward again. “Don’t give me that expression, as if you deserve no blame—” You are speaking to Lazarus, I told myself, but it didn’t help.
Lazarus covered his head with both of his orange-tan arms and a strange sound came from him, gravelly, and slightly like a horn. I had no idea what was going on. The oddness of it. I wasn’t sure the sound was coming from him, even. I hated it. I despised this man. More than I had Gepetto, and in the same way. For not being what he said he was. For not apologizing for his false life.
I became aware of a line, only just vaguely aware. On the other side of it, was cruelty. I went up to it, right up to it. I did not know which self—the armored boy I once was, or the other new one—would cross over. I was so furious I couldn’t distinguish. One part of my heart, against the other part. “You destroyed my life,” I said, finally.
“But you are fine, you are alive,” he said, trying to be happy.
“You told me, not yet!” I said.
His old eyes flashed up at me. “Your Trust will be back. I’ll put Dr. Greenmore in charge, how about that? She’ll keep Ariel’s lawyers away, your record sealed. She has a thousand times the influence I could ever have.” He paused, looked pitiful. “I don’t know anymore what I believe. You are right. I am not to be trusted. Right to be furious, even. We live a very long time, but we are not gods—we think we are, but we are as far from it—every day we get farther—all this time doesn’t even make us wise! I thought I was wise but I wasn’t!”
I said, “You have to believe in what you told me.” In the fury of this, I saw all the things I would have done differently if he had released me, let me go—told me he was wrong. I saw for a moment Camille’s wide eyes, looking up at me, from the bottom of the jail stairs, there to free me. Free me. I needed—a core, a center, a constant sense. One heart, not two.
I wanted to kill Lazarus. I really wanted to kill him. I had never met that much rage within me, never—
I left, so I wouldn’t try.
*
“He keeps saying these things,” Marilee complained when
she came back from Lazarus’s office holding the luncheon plate he had not touched: elegant brown brosias. Tucked under her arm was a slim folder—I wondered if it were some paper records of my accounts she put there on the kitchen table where I sat. “That his efforts have come to nothing—that if you live long enough you are there to see everything you have built go back to ruin. Things fall apart.” She paused, looked forlorn for a moment, continued, “He came back from his Re-description, and everything was all right for a few days—we were sending the last children off, doing the best we could. Then he started saying he didn’t want to be somebody new, it was all posturing, costuming, without meaning. He said who could be fooled by such hocus pocus? Two-hundred-year-olds were supposed to believe in these charades, this programming? Take on a new personality? The drugs and probes were supposed to erase it all? He grabbed me—grabbed me! It was in the hall one night. He asked me, ‘We are just this? This shallow? That’s what they think?’ He said perhaps we could build up the foundling house again. I said we could get more orphans—the boys might be as fine as you and Ariel. I said we could start over. But there is no money of course. Where were the Trusts going to come from? From putting them out to be Altered? Lazarus deplores the surgeries. Money was a question, but there are always more orphans, the enclaves throw them out all the time, it hasn’t stopped, I told him. We could round up a group in a week, if he’d allow it. I could go out in the boat or to the U.A. border and find ten in two days, I told him. Then he asked us about our family. He had never asked before, like that. We told him about Ginger—what they were doing with her cancer on the Undernet, gathering an audience, a fan base. It really set him off. He insisted he would do something, so we wouldn’t have to ‘Put on that horrible display,’ but we said we had no choice, we’d been advertising it for a year—” Her shoulders relaxed. “But then one morning over two weeks ago—he told us the guarantee was there—” She nodded, vigorously. “We shouldn’t wait. We should move.”