Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Daddy, I can’t—”

  “Sure you can. You’re the smartest one of us, and don’t think I don’t know you know it.”

  “But—”

  “Please, baby. Help me understand.”

  So I do. One sentence at a time, guessing at words, groping around to lay my hands on the meaning. It takes a long time. Right up until the minute I hear Precious start screaming.

  We’re out the door in half a second. But I can’t see her anywhere. And then the screaming stops.

  Donna comes running from the woods, yelling “Richard! Richard!” and it takes me a minute to realize she’s yelling for the dog. Her eyes are crazy. We all stop like the air holds us, only our heads swiveling. I can’t see Precious. I can’t see her. And then Donna, who’s got hearing almost as good as the dogs’, tears off into the woods to the left of the house.

  I hear the snapping before I see Richard. His jaws are working over a piece of meat that Donna must have given him, a piece of reward meat. He lies down peacefully eating it, the shifting of his head and body on the fallen leaves making little rustling noises. I hear the rustles, because suddenly these woods are the quietest things I ever heard. The quietest things I ever will hear again.

  Precious lies about eight feet away, down a little hill with a stream at the bottom. Her neck is broken. Her hands are smeared with beef juice, from the steak she tried to take away from Richard. Maybe she wanted a bite. Or maybe she thought it was a game: tug-of-war. But Richard wasn’t playing. He tossed Precious away—the bite marks are clear on her little arm—and Precious fell down the hill and landed wrong. She hit her head, or twisted her neck, or something. Later on the coroner would say it was a freak accident. Except for her arm, she isn’t bruised at all, or wet from the stream. She lies there in her new dirt-resistant pink overalls like she’s asleep.

  Daddy shatters the quiet with a howl like hell breaking open. I run to Precious and pick her up. I hardly even hear the rifle going off not ten yards from me. The other shots—four more, and then a last, senseless one for Leisha—I don’t hear at all. Not an echo, not a whimper.

  Nothing.

  I don’t know what makes people stay glued together inside, or not. Maybe it’s like Tony Indivino said: Behavior is just chaotic, mostly sensitive to small differences in initial conditions. I don’t know. Anything.

  Daddy doesn’t stay glued together. He starts drinking right after the funeral, and he doesn’t ever stop. He doesn’t get mean or weepy. He doesn’t explain why he could ride out Mama’s death but not Precious’s. Maybe he doesn’t know. He just sits at the kitchen table, night after night, and quietly empties one bottle after another. During the day, he waits for night. Pretty soon, I think, he won’t bother to wait.

  Donna doesn’t stick around to find out. She cries all the time for a few months. She wants to talk on and on about Precious, and I can’t listen. I can’t. Eventually she finds someone who will, a government counselor in Kellsville, who also finds her a job waiting on customers in a fancy restaurant. Customers like her. Bit by bit Donna stops crying. She makes some friends, then a boyfriend. I don’t see her much. And when I do, it’s hard to look straight into each other’s eyes.

  And me. I don’t know if I stayed glued together or not. I’m too mad to know.

  “You’re Dave’s girl,” Denny says, just like he hasn’t taken me back and forth from Kellsville in his truck for years. He’s one of those men terrified of female scenes. “What can I do for you, uh . . .”

  “Carol. You can let me stay here and keep house for you.”

  He looks like I could be rabid. “Well, uh, Carol, I don’t know about that, I thought you were keeping house for your father, he sure needs you since, uh—”

  “He doesn’t need anybody,” I said. “And you do.” I looked around me. Denny’s wife left him, finally, last month. Denny had one girl too many. Since she moved, Denny hasn’t washed a dish or a sheet or a tabletop. His girlfriends, who he mostly meets at the Road Nest Bar, aren’t the type given to housekeeping. The two cats stopped using their litter box. Denny’s got all the windows open to control the smell, which it doesn’t, even though it’s pouring outside and rain is blowing in sideways on what’s left of his cat-piss-soaked couch. Everybody’s got a limit how much reeking mess they can tolerate. Denny’s must be pretty high, but I’m still betting he’s got one.

  “I’m a good housekeeper,” I say. “And I can cook. Daddy says he’d take it as a favor if you let me live here. He knows I need to get away from the memories in our house.”

  Denny nods slowly. It makes him feel better to think that he’s helping Daddy. But he still has doubts.

  “The thing is, Carol, you know how folks are. They talk. And you ain’t a kid no more. I don’t want nobody to think—”

  “The only one that matters is Daddy, and he knows better. Besides, if you go on having lady-friend company, the ladies will tell them I sleep in the spare room and that you treat me like a daughter for my daddy’s sake.”

  Again Denny nods. He likes the idea of having lady-friend company and a clean house, too. “But I can’t, uh, pay you nothing, Carol, things are tight right now. Maybe later when—”

  “I don’t want any money, Denny. All I want is for you to teach me how to use the Subnet. On your terminal, same as you taught Daddy. For two hours a day, at least in the beginning.”

  He doesn’t like that. Too much time. But just then one of the cats squats and shits on the table, into a plate of rice so congealed the rice grains are hard as kitty-litter pellets.

  “Okay,” Denny says.

  All winter I work like hell. I throw out Denny’s couch and everything else I can’t boil. I scrub and pound and make a new couch out of boards and blankets. I cook and launder and shop with Denny’s dole credits. Twice a week I walk over to Daddy’s to do the same for him. And half the night I practice what Denny teaches me, until I’m tired enough to sleep. A lot of days my eyes ache from the constant reading, and not only on the Subnet, either. I spend hours in the science sections of the Net. When one of Denny’s girlfriends complains that I “talk snooty,” I realize that my vocabulary has changed. Well, why not . . . everything else has.

  By the time crocuses push up through the snow, Denny can’t teach me any more. Actually, I know much more than Denny’s taught me, because I found other people on the Subnet who also taught me things. There’s an entire class of Subnet riders—mostly young, mostly with little to lose personally—who like nothing better than showing off what they know. I’ve learned how to let such people impress me.

  However, that sort of petty rider only knows so much. So does Denny. And I have nothing to trade. So far I haven’t been able to get the Subnet to tell me the one thing I want to know the most. And I’m not going to find it out by staying here.

  I write notes to Denny and Daddy, and I walk down the mountain to the highway.

  The Red Goldfish Trucking Company is guarded by dogs. There’s a fence, too, of course, a single strand of token wire to mark the Y-energy-alarmed barrier surrounding the facility. I push against the invisible field with one hand, and it feels solid as brick. But any power-generated security system has to be turned on, and that means it can be turned off. Dogs are harder to turn off, unless you kill them, and it’s hard to get anything like a bullet or a slab of poisoned meat through most Y-energy security fields without setting off the alarm. There’s a Subnet rumor that the Sleepless have developed a missile to penetrate Y-barriers, plus a field that will stop that same missile and anything else, including air. But it’s only a rumor. Sleepless do not sell weapons. They’re too smart to arm their enemies.

  I stand a few inches outside the fence and gaze in at the Red Goldfish Trucking Company. It’s a windowless foamcast building standing in the middle of rows of white trucks, each with a red goldfish painted on both sides. Before the goldfish, those trucks bore flowing blue script that said Pennsylvania Shipping. Before that, they had the blue daisies of Flower De
livery Systems. Before that, the orange lettering of Stanley Express. It was a Stanley Express truck that delivered Leisha the pregnant dog to Daddy’s new business.

  No record exists on-line of that transaction. It’s hard enough to track the company itself on the Subnet, let alone its customers. Or its owner.

  I watch through the fence for two nights, very carefully, until I’m sure about the dogs. There are three dogs, all German shepherds, all unneutered males. They’re probably genemod for strength and hearing. They’re superbly trained, much better than poor Donna could have done. They sleep in shifts. They are not genemod for intelligence.

  You can do certain things to the genetic makeup of dogs and they remain functioning dogs. Other things you can’t do. You can’t really boost a dog’s intelligence much. If you do, you end up with a pattern of neural connections too complex for the hindbrain to handle. It’s like a cable jammed with too much information. The signal breaks down. The pups just sit in one place and shiver and whimper. They can’t be fixed, and eventually you have to kill them. Some scientists at Harvard published a paper about this on the Net. Some underground labs in Ohio and Florida already knew it. They advertised HIGH IQ DOGS! on the Subnet. Until they didn’t anymore. Somebody’s looking for them, too, although I don’t think it’s an angry customer. I think it’s the cops.

  The cops are the main link between the Net and the Subnet. But they’re not the only link.

  Red Goldfish Trucking’s dogs patrol the entire fence every six minutes. They’re efficient, alert, and dedicated. But they’re still dogs.

  Just before one of them passes my place outside the fence, I roll over on my back. I’m wearing perfume: a scent genetically created as a wolf attractant for use in Consolidated Wilderness Areas. It was developed at the University of California at La Jolla, which holds the patent. It was also developed at underground labs in Idaho and Minnesota. You can order it at Subnet 784jKevinMart, access route 43ICE7946, through JemalTown, Cash Drop Described Elsewhere.

  The guard dog smells me. His gait falters. His gaze shoots sideways to me, on my back on the ground, all fours in the air, the posture of submission in wolf packs. And dog packs. But I’m outside the fence. After that brief falter, he resumes his normal pace and trots on.

  Six minutes later, I’m still there.

  At midnight the dogs change shifts; I don’t know on what conditioned signal. The new dog goes through the same reaction to me: faltering, then going on. I roll slightly, wiggling, my limbs in the air. At 3:00 A.M., I go home. Workers show up here every day at four.

  I’m back the next night. And the next. During the day I work for a housecleaning company that sends out maids to rich houses. Very quickly I become popular with their customers. I’m skillful at using the special bots for each job, and I’m especially good at cleaning up disasters left by other, malfunctioning bots.

  On the twentieth night, the 4 P.M.-to-midnight dog stops on his side of the fence, reaches through the Y-energy with one paw, and cuffs me roughly on the butt. He’s the alpha male, the biggest of the guard dogs, the one who carries his tail the highest and his ears pricked forward the farthest. He tears a gash in my padded trousers and then trots away on his regular patrol.

  I lie still, waiting for him to return. Six minutes later he does, cuffs me again, and moves on.

  By the end of the month, half his body juts through the Yfence, which from the inside he doesn’t know is there, while he rolls me around on the ground. Sometimes he’s rough, sometimes just playful. I have deep scratches on my neck and hands. I try to keep him away from my face, and when I fail, I wear heavy makeup at work. When the dog’s on top of me, snapping and fake-growling, I try to never remember Precious.

  It’s not the dog’s fault. His brain is hard-wired. All the dogs in a pack pick on one dog. That’s the function of the omega dog, the last and lowest: to give all the other dogs something to pick on and exploit. The pack needs that outlet to work off tension they might otherwise use fighting each other. The omega dog is in their genes.

  Sometimes, when Alpha takes my arm in his jaws and shakes it, I put my hand on his neck. I can feel the beeper, just under his skin. It’s transmitting the electronic signal that lets him penetrate the fence if he happens to brush up against it without setting off alarms. And anything attached to him would also penetrate: you don’t want the alarms going off just because your guard dog’s tail brushed a Y-field and that tail just happens to have a burr stuck on it.

  On the thirty-third day, I roll through the fence, smelling like a female wolf, my arms wrapped around the Alpha guard dog. Inside, he cuffs me sharply on the shoulder and leaves me there. He’s been trained never to let a stranger inside. But I’m a member of his pack filling a necessary position. It makes all the difference.

  The Subnet claims, over and over, that it keeps no records. But the Subnet itself is a record, endlessly down-loaded. If there’s one, there’ll be others. Nobody can remember every business deal without help. Especially if you need to know who you had better not try to deal with a second time.

  Nothing inside Red Goldfish Trucking is locked. But nothing gives me what I want, either. The windowless building is mostly used for storing cargo and fixing trucks, with a tiny, filthy office walled off in one corner. There’s a terminal, although I know better than to think I’ll find anything on that. It’s free-standing, but the government has new microwave equipment that can lift data off even free-standing terminals, as long as the terminal’s switched on. The Subnet says it also has that equipment for sale. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe anything on the Subnet unless I try it out for myself, like I did the dog attractant. However, I know the Red Goldfish records won’t be electronic.

  They’re plastic, written by hand on stiff blue cards stored in a blue box in the back of the closet. And they’re in code.

  Beta dog comes into the office. He’s off duty. I have to let him knock me around for a few minutes before he curls up in the corner and goes to sleep.

  I take the whole box with me, ride Alpha back through the fence, and catch the next bus out. On the bus I fall into the deepest sleep of my life. It feels like a reward.

  There are five blue plastic cards, headed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That could mean chronological order, or groupings of dif ferent kinds of trucking jobs, or almost anything else. Each card is densely covered in small neat handwriting, row after row of it, letters and numbers and symbols with no breaks between. Card 5 is covered only two-thirds of the way down.

  Donna stares as I walk with my suitcase into the Kellsville restaurant where she works. It’s not a cheap table-delivered soysynth place; it has real food and human servers, including Donna. She wears a black uniform with a blue apron. Her red hair is piled on top of her head. She looks like Mama.

  “Carol! What on God’s green earth . . . Daddy said you went clean over into Ohio to work!”

  “I did. I’m back. Can I stay with you a bit?”

  “ ‘Course you can, honey! And I want you to meet my boyfriend Jim, he’s a real sweetie and I just know you two’ll—”

  “Is there a housecleaning firm in town? I’ve been working as a maid.”

  Donna laughs. “In Kellsville? You got to be kidding. But in the city, maybe. . . there’s a gravtrain goes back and forth every day now, they just started it. But honey, you look terrible. You all right?”

  I look at her. It’s like looking at Mama: just as dead to me, just as far away. Donna’s put Precious clean out of her mind. She doesn’t know anything about deep black places you can fall into and never get out. She just doesn’t know.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Tell me your address and give me your key. You have a terminal, Donna?”

  “One came with the apartment,” she says proudly. “Though I don’t use it much except for vid. You’re welcome to it, honey. You’re welcome to anything you find there, except Jim.”

  She laughs, and I try to smile, and then I go to her place and get to work cleaning it up. />
  The next three months I work as fiendishly as I did at Denny’s. Every day I take the new gravtrain to the city and work my cleaning job. They’re glad to have me; I’m experienced with every kind of maintenance bot they have. Every night I sit at the terminal in the ten-by-ten living room of Donna’s apartment, trying not to hear Donna and Jim making love in the ten-by-ten bedroom.

  I start with free code programs off the Net. I feed in all the data from the five blue plastic cards and run the programs. None of them makes any sense out of the data.

  After a month I’ve saved up enough credits to download programs that cost money. None of them works either.

  “What’re you doing on that terminal all night every night, honey?” Donna asks. “You’re getting circles under your pretty eyes. Don’t you want to come out dancing with us and have a little fun? Jim’s got some pretty peccy friends!”

  “No, thank you,” I say. “You seen Daddy lately?”

  Her face goes flat. “Tomorrow. You know I go every Tuesday. You want to come with me?”

  I shake my head and go back to the terminal. Donna doesn’t say anything more. After she leaves, I can still smell her perfume, flimsy and sweet, in the stale air.

  The best code breakers aren’t programs you can buy. They’re netsites that take your data and run it through their own decryption algorithms. All are very expensive, although you can negotiate with them. They’re on the Subnet, of course. From what I read, some of them use programs stolen from the government. The best ones might even be stolen from the military. Maybe.

  The problem is guessing which ones might be best. Housemaids don’t make a lot of money, not even when they’re called cleaning bot technicians.

  Finally I contract with a Subnet site called Bent. They seem to do business in Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. It’s a heavily shielded transaction, although it uses regular credit, not a cash drop. I give them the data off the blue plastic cards, and they empty my bank account. Afterwards I close the account and open a new one with a different e-bank.