Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Sarah makes her presentation at the morning’s second meeting, knowing that she is not sufficiently prepared. It goes neither well nor badly; she was always good at winging it. But her mind is too much on the lunch-hour meeting across the street.

  At 12:10, already late, she is dashing from the building when a young woman blocks her path. “Margaret Lambert?”

  She is startled: by the use of her despised first name, by the expression on the young woman’s face. It somehow seems both stern and compassionate. Sarah says, “Yeesssss . . .”

  “You have been served,” the girl says, and hands Sarah an envelope. Almost immediately she melts into the noon crowd. Sarah opens it. Mack is suing her for divorce. On the way to the marriage counselor. Where he agreed to meet her twelve minutes ago. He has had her served on the way to the marriage counselor.

  Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, Sarah lets out a cry of sheer anguish, high and almost inhuman, the scream of a rabbit with steel teeth clamping closed on its leg. People stop, jerk around, stare.

  Oblivious, she starts to sob. The paper blurs. Sarah cannot stop sobbing.

  He wants custody of the kids.

  She is eased onto the Throne, which is surprisingly comfortable. But why shouldn’t it be comfortable, considering what such “private usage” is costing her. The fee for her five minutes on the Throne will considerably reduce her grandchildren’s inheritance. Liam doesn’t mind, but not all of the others are so understanding. She knows that Amarinda thinks that Sarah should take advantage of the new euthanasia capsules, painless and instantaneous and so tiny, as if death were made less monumental by arriving through a dribble of liquid like a raindrop. Amarinda wants her inheritance before it is all spent on “frivolities” like this. The child was always greedy, always.

  But it is her money. Once Samuel’s, now hers.

  The techs attach things to her: electrodes, implants, leeches, and maggots—she doesn’t know what they are. It doesn’t matter. What do these young men and women think of her skin, so dry and pitted and spotted that it might as well be the Martian surface where her son died?

  “Are you ready, ma’am?” a young woman asks. Pretty, even with that bizarre haircut and the fashionable body staining. The staining looks like port-wine birth marks, which in her day people tried to cover with make-up or laser off. She remembers how young skin, stained or not, feels: her own once, her children’s, Liam’s, his children’s. That baby smell at the back of the neck, like powder and dew.

  “Ready,” she says. They lower a small screen in front of her eyes, a screen no bigger than the envelope for a letter, when people still sent love letters through the mail.

  Sarah can’t stop wailing. She sounds like Aidan shrieking with a full diaper. Mack has just dumped a load of shit on her, and she stands on the sidewalk and sobs. Eventually a man—tentative, nervous, kind—puts a hand on her arm.

  “Miss, are you all right?”

  She is not all right. Her husband wants a divorce she did not see coming, her job is shaky, her kids might be taken away, she has had five hours sleep every night for months. There is no other way to get everything done, and even so she can’t do it all. Mack, she realizes, is one of the things she didn’t get around to. Not often enough, not with enough attention—give me another chance! Give us another chance!

  “Miss, can I call you an ambulance? Are you in pain?”

  She is in pain. Everything in her hurts. David, Ava, Aidan—she cannot lose them. She cannot. But Mack has the money, the stellar job, the jokey easy ways that David and Ava love: Daddy! Daddy’s home! I love you best, Daddy! And although Sarah does not admit this to herself, not yet anyway, Mack also has the girlfriend willing to be the stay-at-home mom that Sarah cannot be. She doesn’t know the girlfriend’s name, doesn’t officially know that she even exists, but in some way that transcends chronology, she knows about Denise.

  There is always a Denise.

  “Picture time as a loaf of bread,” Dr. Martin Callister had said in his holo interview. She had watched the program three times, leaning forward in her powerchair, trying to ignore the pain that meds no longer quite masked. “If you slice bread directly across the loaf, then each thin slice corresponds to a section of time—say, Tuesday, March 4 at 9:30 A.M. On that slice is everything happening at that moment. The slice behind it is 9:29 A.M.

  “But what if you slice the bread not straight across but on the diagonal? Then a slice might contain moments from March 4, from April two years earlier, from September two hundred years earlier.”

  “A pretty analogy,” the interviewer said. She was a skinny, snide redhead, her tone stained with forced amusement. “But time is not bread.”

  “No. But time is as real as bread, a physical entity subject to mathematics. And the equations say that everything is simultaneous. Where equations go, engineering eventually follows.”

  “So you’ve built a time machine.”

  Dr. Callister, a large mild man with gray eyes that reflected light, gazed at her. “No. No travel is involved. A user cannot affect anything that has happened, ever. All the Chrono does is show on a screen what is already there, was there, will always be there.”

  “And so you can see the future, too?”

  “No.”

  “Why not, if it’s included on your so-called ‘diagonal slice of time’ ?”

  “We don’t know why not.”

  “A flaw in the science, then,” the interviewer said triumphantly, as if she’d just won a contest.

  “A flaw in the engineering, perhaps,” Dr. Callister said.

  “So why should tax payers fund this flawed contraption?”

  Dr. Callister said mildly, “You’re an ass.”

  Watching, she laughed aloud, a sharp hard sound, like she imagined meteors made striking the rocky surface of Mars.

  The kind man on the sidewalk raises both hands, lets them fall helplessly, looks around. As if this were a signal, two women approach from opposite directions. Sarah puts her hands over her face. She is appalled at herself, embarrassed clear to her marrow, but she can’t stop crying. Her life has just shattered open, and the tender insides, light-sensitive, burn under the terrible laser of her own gaze.

  Machinery turns on. A low hum, a sudden warmth, although maybe she only imagines that. Still, the reason these five minutes are so expensive is the enormous energy required, so maybe the heat is real. The small screen in front of her eyes brightens.

  “You do understand, Gran, that you can’t change anything? Can’t even communicate with anybody living or . . . you do understand?” Liam, in the robocar, his face furrowed with anxiety that she will be disappointed.

  “I know, Liam.” She does know. He does not, not anything really. He is too young. It is not his father that she wants to see.

  On the screen, Sarah stands sobbing on a city sidewalk. How young she looks! Three strangers flutter ineffectively around her. After that day, she never saw them again. Never got to thank them for their humane, useless sympathy.

  Sarah concentrates her will. This is why she has left off the meds today; they blunt her concentration. She wills her message—because she must try, she has known she would try since the moment she saw Dr. Callister’s holo—across eighty years, toward the sobbing woman who has reached her emotional and physical limits and cannot go on.

  If I knew then what I know now . . . People say it all the time in the retirement home. Her friends, those few still alive, repeat it like a mantra. They mean: I wouldn’t have married Emily or I would have had RenewGen much earlier or I would have bought that stock at 130 or I would never have let Aidan go to Mars to die. But that wasn’t what she wanted to tell Sarah. That sort of advice would not have changed anything, because nothing can ever be changed. What happens to us was set in motion long before we were born, by fate or history or genetics or a loaf of bread.

  But one’s perceptions of what happens—maybe that can be changed. And she has a secret weapon.

 
It will be all right, she thinks at the screen, throwing everything that she is into the thought. In the end, it will be all right. He will not get the kids. You will come to know that he wasn’t worth this unspeakable agony, that he did you a favor by leaving. In a few years you will meet Sam, all sweetness and money. There will be other sweetnesses, too, unexpected moments when happiness will suddenly bubble through you like all the fragrances of spring. You will survive the loss of Mack, and Sam’s eventual death, and even Aidan’s. It is all survivable, and you are strong enough to do it. Get off the damn sidewalk!

  She squeezes her eyes shut and tongues the capsule hidden in her cheek. Her tongue brings it forward and she bites hard. Death is the only thing stronger than pain. In a head-to-head contest, death always wins.

  “Gran?” comes Liam’s voice, from very far away.

  Sarah finally lowers her hands from her face. The gesture hurts; everything on her hurts. The air has suddenly brightened into glittery shards, sharp enough to wound. Her own red blouse blinds her. Each blade of intensely green grass could slice bread. Strangers press too close to her.

  “I said, do you want us to take you to the hospital?”

  “No, no . . . I . . . no.” And then, “I must get off the sidewalk.”

  They let her. She lurches away, process papers in her hand. The envelope falls to the sidewalk. Sarah doesn’t know where she’s going.

  Not to the marriage counselor. That much is damn sure.

  She has stopped crying. She stumbles on, moving forward. There is no other way to go.

  “Gran! Oh my God!”

  “Is she dead?” a tech says, disbelief in his voice. “We never had . . . none of the beta tests . . .”

  She doesn’t hear them. She is flowing out, through and in and yet not of, space and time. Then nothing, but not before her sudden clutch of fear gives way to a moment of bizarre, utterly calm peace. An unexpected gift.

  It will be all right, someone says to her.

  And it is.

  SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME

  “I still hate this,” Trevor said. “That you’re doing this to Becky.”

  “So you’ve told me,” I said wearily. “Many times.”

  We sat in the clinic waiting room, done in Martian rust reds, very trendy for such an illegal operation. But, then, this was very upscale illegality. Trevor, who had so much money he never thought about it, hadn’t asked how I was paying for Becky’s surgery, and I hadn’t volunteered that I’d cashed in my retirement fund at Payne, Jeffers. We’d been waiting on the rust-red conformachairs, which were not as comfortable as advertised, for nearly an hour.

  Trevor scowled at me. “Amanda, as a tactic this lacks—”

  “Sweetness,” I said. “I know. I’m not a sweet person, Trevor. This is a surprise? You’ve known this about me since we were nine. We didn’t become friends because you value sweetness.”

  “I didn’t—”

  But I was, all at once, beyond restraint. I turned on him. “And Jake didn’t marry me for sweetness, either. Who wants to go to bed with a lump of marzipan—he used to say that to me! And he didn’t leave me for lack of sweetness, either, or he wouldn’t have chosen . . . what does she have that I don’t?”

  My voice had risen to a shout. The three other people in the waiting room, two of whom were holo-masked, stared. I twisted my hands together and spoke more softly. “He’s just erased me from his life. That’s what I really can’t stand—that he acts like I never existed at all.”

  Trevor put his arms around me. I collapsed against his thin chest and narrow shoulders—delicate frames were hot just now with gays—and sobbed quietly. The man sitting two chairs away moved to four chairs away.

  After I finally blew my nose, I said, “Trevvy, I have to know. Jake was the love of my life.”

  “Jake is a cheating and lying bastard, and anyway, I’m the love of your life.”

  “Not carnally.”

  “Overrated.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “Well, no.” He held me at arm’s length. “You look like a dead spot in the ocean. Go put on some makeup. Obsession is not a good look for you. Anyway, Becky should be the love of your life.”

  His expression stopped my remaining sniffles. Trevor always smiles and he is never, ever critical of me. Not seriously. I said, “She is.”

  He didn’t bother to correct the lie. But he looked away from me, and something in my neck went cold. I’d lost my soon-to-be-ex husband. If I lost Trevor, too . . .

  “I’m here, Amanda. Always. And no, I don’t need sweetness from you. I just need—”

  My wristband brightened and said, “Ms. Rydder, the surgery went fine, and you can see Rebecca now. First door to your left.”

  “I ran the camera images of Jake as Becky saw him until I found a good one.”

  I charged through the door. Becky lay in a smartcrib, watching a holo-mobile two feet above her. Bright, nonexistent shapes twisted and flowed in the air. Becky’s plump little hands reached for them until she saw me. She crowed with delight, and I picked her up and cuddled her, studying her right eye.

  It was clear, stained-glass green with thick, dark lashes. Just like Jake’s eyes.

  No scars on the smooth baby skin.

  No grogginess from the anesthesia, no pain, no cloudiness in her iris.

  You couldn’t tell that anything had been done to her at all.

  Using the software was as uncomplicated as the implant itself. What was hard was setting it up. The manufacturer doesn’t do that for you, understanding more than anyone the absolute necessity of customized, unhackable encryption on dedicated and shielded computers. Most wearers of Opti-Cam implants are not six-month-old infants. Last month alone, six major mobsters were indicted and an Asian dictator assassinated using information from Opti-Cams.

  Trevor set up my system. It was pretty minimal: receiver, screen, retransmitter, basic encryption. He protested the retransmitter. “This data isn’t something you should view on anything but this one screen here in your bedroom, off-line for all the Internets. Don’t retransmit to your wrister or, quod di prohibeant, to any screen anywhere at your job. Do I have to remind you that this whole setup is illegal?”

  “Just get it working. And drop the Latin—it’s pretentious.”

  “You never did have any sense of verbal fashion, Mandy. No, don’t touch that. . .wait a minute. . .there.”

  The screen brightened to an expanse of white. I was about to protest that the system didn’t work when I realized: Becky was staring at the ceiling.

  She lay in her crib across the room, drowsy and blinking. The white expanse disappeared, reappeared, disappeared again. I said, too shrilly, “Mobile on,” and her smartcrib activated it. Becky’s eyes opened wide and she cooed. My screen showed somersaulting kittens made of light, seen from Becky’s perspective as the camera behind her cornea sent its images to the receiver.

  “Mobile off.” The kittens disappeared. I crossed the room and loomed over Becky, looking back over my shoulder. On-screen was her view of me, head turned away.

  Trevor said, “I still don’t think you’ve thought this through. And I still hate it. Becky—”

  “Won’t know a thing. She doesn’t feel the implant, and the images don’t get stored in her brain, at least not any more than they would from her own vision. Nothing connects to her memory. There are dozens of studies proving that.”

  “With adult subjects. Not infants.”

  “Infants remember even less than we do.”

  “I wish you remembered less,” Trevor said. “Remembered less, felt less, schemed less—”

  I’d stopped listening to him. I watched Becky watch me until her lids fell into sleep and the screen went blank.

  This was Wednesday. On Friday Jake would pick up Becky for his weekend of shared custody.

  “What’s with you?” Felicity said to me in the ladies’ room nearest our cubicles. “You’re jumpy as a cat.”

  �
��Cats aren’t particularly jumpy. Neither am I. Just stressed about the GloBiz account.”

  Felicity frowned, but before she could point out that GloBiz was consistently thrilled with our campaign for them, I was out of the ladies’ room, out of the building, in a cab home. Only 4:00 p.m., but so what? Even a copywriter deserves a dangerous, illegal, utterly stupid hobby.

  In my bedroom I turned on the dedicated computer. Becky gazed at the back of a head in a moving car. One head, not two. Jake, alone, had picked her up at day care.

  Then his apartment, not Pam’s. I had never been inside either one, but I recognized his half of what had once been our furniture. He put Becky on the floor to crawl, and whenever she glanced over at him, I glimpsed the slippers I’d given him for his last birthday.

  In college, I’d been a film major. No Fellini retrospective, no Welles film work, had ever enthralled me like the images on my screen that Friday evening. Jake’s slippers, Becky’s toys, a rubber ducky floating in the bathtub. Quick shots of Jake’s face, laughing or talking to her—why didn’t the implant have audio! Pam did not appear. When Becky finally fell asleep, I turned off the computer and then sat for a long time in the dark, tears running down my face, rage in my heart.

  He had no right to do this to me. To Becky. To live his life as if I’d never occupied the center of it.

  At midnight I gave in and keyed his number into my cell. He answered sleepily. “Hello?”

  Not breathing, I clutched the phone.

  More sharply: “Hello?” And then, “Amanda, if this is you, you’re violating the restraining order. Please stop. I mean it this time. I’ll go back to court if I have to.”

  I said nothing. Tears and rage, tears and rage. Long after he hung up, I clutched the phone as if I could crush it.

  On Saturday, Pam appeared in Becky’s field of vision.

  At first I got only flashes of her; Becky was not interested in focusing on this unknown person. It was eerie to glimpse a red-shirted elbow, the toe of a black boot, the back of a blond head. It disassembled her, made her less than real. Eventually, however, she sat down in front of Becky and fed the baby strained applesauce.