sixty-five, and your cardiovascular system the youngest at twenty-five.”
“You’ve been examining my medical records?”
“Affirmative.”
“I told you to fetch one file, not my entire chart!”
“You told Bug to unlock your archives. Bug is getting to know you.”
“What else did you look at?” The elevator eased to a soft landing at S40
and opened its doors.
“Bug reviewed your diaries and journals, the corpus of your zine writing,
your investigative dossiers, your complete correspondence, judicial records,
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awards and citations, various multimedia scrapbooks, and school transcripts.
Bug is currently following public links.”
Zoranna was appalled. Nevertheless, she realized that if she’d opened her
archives earlier, they’d be through this imprinting phase by now.
She followed Bug’s pedway directions to Nancy’s block. Sub40 corridors
were decorated in cheerless colors and lit with harsh, artificial light—
biolumes couldn’t live underground. There were no grand promenades, no
parks or shops. There was a dank odor of decay, however, and chilly
ventilation.
On Nancy’s corridor, Zoranna watched two people emerge from a door and
come her way. They moved with the characteristic shuffle of habitually
deferred body maintenance. They wore dark clothing impossible to date and,
as they passed, she saw that they were crying. Tears coursed freely down their
withered cheeks. To Zoranna’s distress, she discovered they’d just emerged
from her sister’s apartment.
“You’re sure this is it?” she said, standing before the door marked S40
G6879.
“Affirmative,” Bug said.
Zoranna fluffed her hair with her fingers and straightened her skirt. “Door,
announce me.”
“At once, Zoe,” replied the door.
Several moments later, the door slid open, and Nancy stood there supporting
herself with an aluminum walker. “Darling Zoe,” she said, balancing herself
with one hand and reaching out with the other.
Zoranna stood a moment gazing at her baby sister before entering her
embrace. Nancy had let herself go completely. Her hair was brittle grey, she
was pale to the point of bloodless, and she had doubled in girth. When they
kissed, Nancy’s skin gave off a sour odor mixed with lilac.
“What a surprise!” Nancy said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“I did. Several times.”
“You did? You called?” Nancy looked upset. “I told him there was something
wrong with the houseputer, but he didn’t believe me.”
Someone appeared behind Nancy, a handsome man with wild, curly, silver
hair. “Who’s this?” he said in an authoritative baritone. He looked Zoranna over. “You must be Zoe,” he boomed. “What a delight!” He stepped around
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Nancy and drew Zoranna to him in a powerful hug. He stood at least a head
taller than she. He kissed her eagerly on the cheek. “I am Victor. Victor Vole.
Come in, come in. Nancy, you would let your sister stand in the hall?” He
drew them both inside.
Zoranna had prepared herself for a small apartment, but not this small, and
for castoff furniture, but not a room filled floor to ceiling with hospital beds.
It took several long moments for her to comprehend what she was looking at.
There were some two dozen beds in the three-by-five-meter living room. Half
were arranged on the floor, and the rest clung upside-down to the ceiling.
They were holograms, she quickly surmised, separate holos arranged in
snowflake fashion, that is, six individual beds facing each other and
overlapping at the foot. What’s more, they were occupied by obviously sick,
possibly dying strangers. Other than the varied lighting from the holoframes,
the living room was unlit. What odd pieces of real furniture it contained were
pushed against the walls. In the corner, a hutch intended to hold bric-a-brac
was apparently set up as a shrine to a saint. A row of flickering votive candles illuminated an old flatstyle picture of a large, barefoot man draped head to
foot in flowing robes.
“What the hell, Nancy?” Zoranna said.
“This is my work,” Nancy said proudly.
“Please,” said Victor, escorting them from the door. “Let’s talk in the
kitchen. We’ll have dessert. Are you after dinner, Zoe?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Zoranna. “I ate on the tube.” She was made to walk
through a suffering man’s bed; there was no path around him to the kitchen.
“Sorry,” she said. But he seemed accustomed to his unfavorable location and
closed his eyes while she passed through.
The kitchen was little more than an alcove separated from the living room
by a counter. There was a bed squeezed into it as well, but the occupant, a
grizzled man with an open mouth, was either asleep or comatose. “I think
Edward will be unavailable for some while,” Victor said. “Houseputer, delete
this hologram. Sorry, Edward, but we need the space.” The holo vanished,
and Victor offered Zoranna a stool at the counter. “Please,” he said, “will you have tea? Or a thimble of cognac?”
“Thank you,” Zoranna said, perching herself on the stool and crossing her
legs, “tea would be fine.” Her sister ambulated into the kitchen and flipped
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down her walker’s built-in seat, but before she could sit, a mournful wail
issued from the bedroom.
“Naaaancy,” cried the voice, its gender uncertain. “Nancy, I need you.”
“Excuse me,” Nancy said.
“I’ll go with you,” Zoranna said and hopped off the stool.
The bedroom was half the size of the living room and contained half the
number of holo beds, plus a real one against the far wall. Zoranna sat on it.
There was a dresser, a recessed closet, a bedside night table. Expensive-
looking men’s clothing hung in the closet. A pair of men’s slippers was parked
under the dresser. And a holo of a soccer match was playing on the night
table. Tiny players in brightly colored jerseys swarmed over a field the size of a doily. The sound was off.
Zoranna watched Nancy sit on her walker seat beneath a bloat-faced
woman bedded upside down on the ceiling. “What exactly are you doing with
these people?”
“I listen mostly,” Nancy replied. “I’m a volunteer hospice attendant.”
“A volunteer? What about the—” she tried to recall Nancy’s most recent
paying occupation, “—the hairdressing?”
“I haven’t done that for years,” Nancy said dryly. “As you may have noticed,
it’s difficult for me to be on my feet all day.”
“Yes, in fact, I did notice,” said Zoranna. “Why is that? I’ve sent you
money.”
Nancy ignored her, looked up at the woman, and said, “I’m here, Mrs.
Hurley. What seems to be the problem?”
Zoranna examined the holos. As in the living room, each bed was a separate
projection, and in the corner of each frame was a network squib and trickle
meter. All of this interactive time was costing someone a pretty penny.
The woma
n saw Nancy and said, “Oh, Nancy, thank you for coming. My
bed is wet, but they won’t change it until I sign a permission form, and I don’t understand.”
“Do you have the form there with you, dear?” said Nancy. “Good, hold it
up.” Mrs. Hurley held up a slate in trembling hands. “Houseputer,” Nancy
said, “capture and display that form.” The document was projected against
the bedroom wall greatly oversized. “That’s a permission form for attendant-
assisted suicide, Mrs. Hurley. You don’t have to sign it unless you want to.”
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The woman seemed frightened. “Do I want to, Nancy?”
Victor stood in the doorway. “No!” he cried. “Never sign!”
“Hush, Victor,” Nancy said.
He entered the room, stepping through beds and bodies. “Never sign away
your life, Mrs. Hurley.” The woman appeared even more frightened. “We’ve
returned to Roman society,” he bellowed. “Masters and servants! Plutocrats
and slaves! Oh, where is the benevolent middle class when we need it?”
“Victor,” Nancy said sternly and pointed to the door. And she nodded to
Zoranna, “You too. Have your tea. I’ll join you.”
Zoranna followed Victor to the kitchen, sat at the counter, and watched
him set out cups and saucers, sugar and soybimi lemon. He unwrapped and
sliced a dark cake. He was no stranger to this kitchen.
“It’s a terrible thing what they did to your sister,” he said.
“Who? What?”
He poured boiling water into the pot. “Teaching was her life.”
“Teaching?” Zoranna said, incredulous. “You’re talking about something
that ended thirty years ago.”
“It’s all she ever wanted to do.”
“Tough!” she said. “We’ve all paid the price of longevity. How can you
teach elementary school when there’re no more children? You can’t. So you
retrain. You move on. What’s wrong with working for a living? You join an
outfit like this,” she gestured to take in the whole tower above her, “you’re
guaranteed your livelihood for life! The only thing not handed to you on a silver platter is longevity. You have to earn that yourself. And if you can’t,
what good are you?” When she remembered that two dozen people lay dying
in the next room because they couldn’t do just that, she lowered her voice.
“Must society carry your dead weight through the centuries?”
Victor laughed and placed his large hand on hers. “I see you are a true
freebooter, Zoe. I wish everyone had your initiative, your drive! But sadly we don’t. We yearn for simple lives, and so we trim people’s hair all day. When
we tire of that, they retrain us to pare their toenails. When we tire of that, we die. For we lack the souls of servants. A natural servant is a rare and precious person. How lucky our masters are to have discovered cloning! Now they
need find but one servile person among us and clone him repeatedly. As for
the rest of us, we can all go to hell!” He removed his hand from hers to pour
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the tea. Her hand immediately missed his. “But such morbid talk on such a
festive occasion!” he roared. “How wonderful to finally meet the famous Zoe.
Nancy speaks only of you. She says you are an important person, modern and
successful. That you are an investigator.” He peered at her over his teacup.
“Missing persons, actually, for the National Police,” she said. “But I quit
that years ago. When we found everybody.”
“You found everybody?” Victor laughed and gazed at her steadily, then
turned to watch Nancy making her rounds in the living room.
“What about you, Mr. Vole?” Zoranna said. “What do you do for a living?”
“What’s this Mr.? I’m not Mr. I’m Victor! We are practically related, you
and I. What do I do for a living? For a living I live, of course. For groceries I teach ballroom dance lessons.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Why should I kid? I teach the waltz, the foxtrot, the cha-cha.” He mimed
holding a partner and swaying in 4/4 time. “I teach the merletz and my
specialty, the Cuban tango.”
“I’m amazed,” said Zoranna. “There’s enough interest in that for Applied
People to keep instructors?”
Victor recoiled in mock affront. “I am not AP. I’m a freebooter, like you, Zoe.”
“Oh,” she said and paused to sip her tea. If he wasn’t AP, what was he doing
obviously living in an APRT? Had Nancy respoused? Applied People tended
to be proprietary about living arrangements in its towers. Bug, she tongued, find Victor Vole’s status in the tower directory. Out loud she said, “It pays well, dance instruction?”
“It pays execrably.” He threw his hands into the air. “As do all the arts. But
some things are more important than money. You make a point, however. A
man must eat, so I do other things as well. I consult with gentlemen on the
contents of their wardrobes. This pays more handsomely, for gentlemen
detest appearing in public in outmoded attire.”
Zoranna had a pleasing mental image of this tall, elegant man in a starched
white shirt and black tux floating across a shiny hardwood floor in the arms
of an equally elegant partner. She could even imagine herself as that partner.
But Nancy?
The tower link is unavailable, said Bug, due to overextension of the houseputer processors.
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Zoranna was surprised. A mere three dozen interactive holos would hardly
burden her home system. But then, everything on Sub40 seemed substandard.
Nancy ambulated to the kitchen balancing a small, flat carton on her
walker and placed it next to the teapot.
“Now, now,” said Victor. “What did autodoc say about lifting things? Come,
join us and have your tea.”
“In a minute, Victor. There’s another box.”
“Show me,” he said and went to help her.
Zoranna tasted the dark cake. It was moist to the point of wet, too sweet, and
laden with spice. She recalled her father buying cakes like this at a tiny shop on Paderszewski Boulevard in Chicago. She took another bite and examined
Nancy’s carton. It was a home archivist box that could be evacuated of air, but the seal was open and the lid unlatched. She lifted the lid and saw an assortment of little notebooks, no two of the same style or size, and bundles of envelopes with colorful paper postal stamps. The envelope on top was addressed in hand
script to a Pani Beata Smolenska—Zoranna’s great grandmother.
Victor dropped a second carton on the counter and helped Nancy sit in her
armchair recliner in the living room.
“Nancy,” said Zoranna, “what’s all this?”
“It’s all yours,” said her sister. Victor fussed over Nancy’s pillows and covers and brought her tea and cake.
Zoranna looked inside the larger carton. There was a rondophone and
several inactive holocubes on top, but underneath were objects from earlier
centuries. Not antiques, exactly, but worn-out everyday objects: a sterling
salt cellar with brass showing through its silver plating, a collection of military bullet casings childishly glued to an oak panel, a rosary with corn kernel
beads, a mustache trimmer. “What’s all this junk?” she said, but of course she
knew, for she recognized th
e pair of terra-cotta robins that had belonged to
her mother. This was the collection of what her family regarded as heirlooms.
Nancy, the youngest and most steadfast of seven children, had apparently
been designated its conservator. But why had she brought it out for airing just now? Zoranna knew the answer to that, too. She looked at her sister who
now lay among the hospice patients. Victor was scolding her for not wearing
her vascular support stockings. Her ankles were grotesquely edematous,
swollen like sausages and bruised an angry purple.
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Damn you, Zoranna thought. Bug, she tongued, call up the medical records of Nancy Brim, nee Smolenska. I’ll help munch the passwords.
The net is unavailable, replied Bug.
Bypass the houseputer. Log directly onto public access.
Public access is unavailable.
She wondered how that was possible. There had been no problem in the
elevator. Why should this apartment be in shadow? She looked around and
tried to decide where the utilidor spar would enter the apartment. Probably
the bathroom with the plumbing, since there were no service panels in the
kitchen. She stepped through the living room to the bathroom and slid the
door closed. The bathroom was a tiny ceramic vault that Nancy had tried to
domesticate with baskets of seashells and scented soaps. The medicine
cabinet was dedicated to a man’s toiletries.
Zoranna found the service panel artlessly hidden behind a towel. Its
tamper-proof latch had been defeated with a sophisticated-looking gizmo
that Zoranna was careful not to disturb.
“Do you find Victor Vole alarming or arousing?” said Bug.
Zoranna was startled. “Why do you ask?”
“Your blood level of adrenaline spiked when he touched your hand.”
“My what? So now you’re monitoring my biometrics?”
“Bug is getting—”
“I know,” she said, “Bug is getting to know me. You’re a persistent little
snoop, aren’t you.”
Zoranna searched her belt’s utility pouch for a terminus relay, found a
UDIN, and plugged it into the panel’s keptel jack. “There,” she said, “now we
should have access.”
“Affirmative,” said Bug. “Autodoc is requesting passwords for Nancy’s
medical records.”
“Cancel my order. We’ll do that later.”
Cyberpunk Page 14
