Falling Free (Vorkosigan Saga)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Helmut Gonzales appeared. Before he could open his mouth, Anias spoke. “This is a recording. I’ve gone out. If you wish to leave a message, I have set the vone to record for fifteen seconds.”

  Anias remained smiling and blinking vaguely into the screen for a deliberate count of five seconds as Helmut obediently began to fumble some words together, and then shut him off in midsentence.

  *

  Chalmys DuBauer had once called himself an exile in time. Being by early training and temperament more an engineer than a poet, he spoke precisely and not metaphorically. He’d spent some twenty-five subjective years serving aboard the early atomic ram ships traveling near the speed of light to and from Earth’s only successful pre-wormhole colony. This had translated into almost one-hundred-sixty objective years on Earth and Beta Colony, and left him permanently out of synchronization with the history of either planet. The most intense technical training was thrice made wholly obsolete by the slip and flow of time between his destinations. He had left wife and children behind on Beta Colony when he was drafted to help officer the hurried, fearful return expedition to America upon the news, twenty-four light years old, of the great war. His family was swallowed up by time before his much-delayed return, captaining a ship of a government that had not even existed when he had first left Earth. The Beta Colony to which he returned was as successful as his early dreams had pictured, but not in ways that he had ever imagined. It was not a success that he had helped to build. He had had a pleasant enough stay with his sole surviving child, a girl not yet conceived when he had left; she was an ancient, frail, content great-grandmother who seemed to find him as inexplicable as a leprechaun. She made him dizzy with dislocation. And in the time it took for his last return to Earth, the discovery and rapid development of the new wormhole technology, with its instantaneous jumps through the gulfs of space, drained his sacrifices of the last of their meaning.

  So he retired. He built an old-fashioned house, like the best from the days of his childhood, set in enormous grounds in the geographical location of his birth, and retreated into it like a hermit crab into its shell. Journalists and historians made him an object of persecution for a while, but he defended his privacy with caustic efficiency and continued the existence of an inverted Robinson Crusoe.

  To this refuge Anias journeyed on the day following her peculiar commission. She found no one about at the gate in the force screen, not an unusual state, so she blandly let herself in and went hunting for her unapprised host. It was a fine, hot day, so she concentrated her search on the grounds. Chalmys always claimed that his years spent shut up in metal boxes hurtling through space had given him claustrophobia. Anias noticed that this condition came and went with good weather; his mild passion for the outdoors never extended to enduring discomfort. After about fifteen minutes of systematic strolling, Anias ran him down in a section given over to growing elegant antique flowers.

  Chalmys’s garden drowned in the light of the summer afternoon like a coral reef, exotic with form and color. Insect songs, permeating an atmosphere soft and warm as the breath of some overheated animal, made a quiet more palpable than silence, like the soundless roar in the ears of a diver who pushes through the pressure of depth. A walk of marble chips, painfully white, wound through billows of tall midsummer flowers toward a group of old oak trees which towered at the far end and made an island of cool darkness. Chalmys rested on a bench in their shade, as indolent as a manatee, and watched his visitor scuff amiably through the chips toward him. He was a heavy man of middle height and middle age. Sandy hair, graying at the temples, was brushed straight back from a broad forehead. The rather round contours of his face were saved from softness by a pair of uncomfortably penetrating gray eyes, now half closed.

  Anias looked out of place in the brilliant garden, like a creature of subterranean night thrust abruptly into noon. The effect was heightened by the affectation of unrelieved black in her clothing, for she wore a tight-fitting jumpsuit with long sleeves and a silky shimmer, and soft black ankle-high boots. They had been appropriate for the air-conditioned interiors she had come from that morning.

  “Well,” said Chalmys, not bothering to rise as she approached, “where did you come from and how did you get in?”

  “Rio, this morning,” she replied, unrepressed by this quelling opening. “I gather you haven’t erased my voiceprint from your front gate since I was here last. Good thing, or I’d probably still be sitting out there ringing the bell and swearing, waiting for that cook of yours to answer—if he noticed.” She seated herself beside him, and he belied the tone of his greeting with a kiss. “I left a message on your vone recorder that I was coming. Might as well have saved my breath. Anyway, I took the shuttle into Toronto this morning, and rented a lightflyer to come down here.”

  “You had good weather for it,” he observed, rousing himself just enough to encourage her to go on.

  “It was a pretty trip. Say, I noticed a lot of new farming in that radioactive strip by the big lake north of you—”

  “Cleveland,” he interposed with private dryness. “They’re doing a lot of oilseed production up there with the new radiation-resistant hybrids. Sunflowers that really shine.” He blinked as blandly as a crocodile, and waited for his visitor to justify her existence.

  Anias let her gaze travel over the opulent garden. “Your flowers look all right,” she said enviously. With a blurred whirr, and a grasshopper alighted on her leg. “Awk!” She recoiled and shook it off.

  Chalmys smiled. “They don’t bite.”

  “They look like they should. Why do you let so many bugs into your garden? You have to keep the force field up for the killer mosquitoes anyway.”

  “You sound like my gardener.” He paused thoughtfully. “Nostalgia, I suppose. When I grew up in this area, bugs were an integral part of summer. Postwar bugs are a different proposition, I admit.”

  Silence lay undisturbed between them for a few minutes. Chalmys relented first, and gave her an opening.

  “How’s the feelie-dream business? Are you fleeing your creditors?”

  She grinned. “Yes and no. Actually, business is not bad. Triad is selling well. The Peruvian Moral League condemned it, which gave a big boost to sales. My Rio distributor was pretty smug about it—I wouldn’t be surprised to find he’d bribed someone to put it on their list. He wants me to do a sequel to it. In fact, he has a contract for one.”

  “I thought all feelie-dreams were pornographic,” Chalmys observed, amused.

  “No, there are some composers who do juveniles,” she replied seriously, readily diverted to her favorite hobbyhorse. “But so few children have sets, it’s a limited market. I’ve been thinking about doing one myself, about Beta Colony, if I can pump you for background.”

  “A curious idea. Can you make accurately detailed dreams about a place you’ve never been, nor are ever likely to go?”

  She shrugged. “My dreamers haven’t been there either, so who’s going to quibble over details? You’re the only one who could criticize it, and you don’t do dreams. How can I lose? Anyway, it actually takes more control to keep the body out of the dream. And it works both ways. That’s why those cheap porno feelies are so awful. No craft, no control. You’re in the middle of some torrid sex fantasy, supposedly, and find yourself thinking about the composer’s bank account, or the state of his bowels, or his upcoming tax audit—whatever’s really on what passes for his mind. It’s indescribable. You’d have to try it to believe it.”

  “No, thanks,” he said placidly. “I have an unconquerable aversion to having my brains hot-wired.” He waved a heavy hand at the two silver circles on Anias’s temples. “My ancient American upbringing, no doubt.”

  “I suppose you can’t help being an antique,” she returned, unoffended. “Still, it takes a lot less surgery for a dreamer implant than a composer implant. Quite painless. And then you could buy my work.”

  “I beg to remain untempted. It’s not the pain I
object to, it’s the principle.”

  “Suit yourself. Anyway, I didn’t fly all the way up here to sell feelie-dream sets. I was thinking of some research—”

  “For a pornographic feelie-dream? But my dear, how delightful! I should be happy to assist you.” He took her hand and kissed it ostentatiously.

  She grinned and repossessed it. “Lunatic. Though we may do that, too. But I was really wondering if I could hide out here for a week or two to get some work done. I’m getting pestered to distraction at home.”

  “Aha. I thought it was creditors. Are you very late in filling your contract?”

  “Some. A bit. Well, several months, really. In fact, my distributor’s threatening to serve process.” She attempted a look of maligned innocence.

  “And you have, of course, spent the advance—”

  “In advance. Of course.” She studied the toes of her boots. “But that’s not the point. I just don’t want to do the same dream now, or anything like it. It was pretty light stuff. I want a whole new departure. I have some new ideas I want to work out.” She decided the terms of her peculiar contract probably forbade being more explicit. A shame; there was no one she would rather have discussed it with than Chalmys. Of all her acquaintances she valued his opinions as being the most unaffected by special interest, fashion, or bias. It was the positive side of the coin to his sometimes maddening indifference to current culture.

  “Of course, my dear. Play hooky as long as you like,” Chalmys obligingly endorsed her self-invitation. “You can have the same room you used on your last visit, if it pleases you; it hasn’t been used since. See Charles about sheets, and meals, and all those domestic arrangements. And sometime when it’s mutually convenient, I’ll show you my latest museum pieces.”

  Chalmys’s hobby, aside from gardens and epicurean living, was reconditioning old technical equipment for museums. He possessed an elaborate workshop in which he would tinker away happily for hours on the microscopic filigree of their circuits. Some of his projects dated back beyond his own youth and early training; in effect his expertise took in anything manufactured in the old gross way from inorganic materials. He was totally lost with modern bacterial electronics, where computers were grown, not made. His work was greatly valued by a few historians of science, and virtually unknown to everyone else.

  Anias understood his work, if anything, even less than he understood hers, but they shared an equally passionate hatred of interruption. Each gave the other the same respect for working time that they wished to receive. Mutual non-botheration was a great bond between them. In the days that followed, Anias could skip meals, in the heat of composition, with the perfectly tranquil assurance that no one would come looking for her. Chalmys in turn was unaffected by any obligation to play host, provide entertainment, or disturb his own routine. When occasionally their orbits did cross, it was in a relaxed glow of mutual gratitude for the other’s previous absence.

  It was such a time, after dinner about a week after Anias’s arrival, that found them stretched out on lawn chairs, soft as sofas, near the house. They lay side by side, stargazing. In the west the sky glowed magenta and lemon, clear green shading into ultramarine. Venus sparked above the sunset, and a few of the brightest stars were beginning to shine. The trees and grass about them breathed the warm immemorial hay-scent of the Midwest summer. Anias lay idly counting the sputter and glow, like shooting stars, of the mosquitoes flying into the automatic force screen some hundred feet above them.

  “… seven, eight … Hey, Chalmys, is it true those things can drain the blood from a man in fifteen minutes?”

  “Doubt it,” he responded lazily. “I suppose if you were attacked by a swarm, you could get significant blood loss. But for all that they’re five inches long, they’re mostly legs and wings. I don’t suppose they can load on more than ten cc’s a bite. The real problem is the venom.” He took a swallow of his tall iced lemonade. “Even then, two or three bites wouldn’t kill you, unless you were one of those people who are violently allergic. It might make you pretty sick, though, especially if they’d been breeding in the high radiation areas—they can give a nasty burn.”

  “Beware of the ones that glow blue in the dark, eh? Twelve, thirteen—ooh, there went a pretty one.”

  They maintained a companionable silence for a time, sipping their lemonade. “How’s the new dream coming?” Chalmys finally asked. “Are you getting as much done as you’d hoped?”

  She hesitated. “Yeah, the actualization part is going really smoothly.”

  “And yet you damn with faint praise. What’s disturbing you? If I’m not out of line,” he added, by way of offering to shut up.

  “No, no … Do I seem disturbed?” she asked anxiously.

  “You’re not completely transparent,” Chalmys reassured her mendaciously. “But to someone who observes you fairly closely … um … what you’re working on does seem to affect your behavior. Libido, for instance.”

  Anias grimaced wryly. “Yeah, well … You’re right, of course.” She reached out and touched him briefly, for reassurance, whether for herself or him she was not sure. “This thing has been rather … anti-aphrodisiac.”

  “That’s a departure. What’s the theme?”

  Anias teetered on the edge of temptation, then, rather deliberately, gave in. “Death, mostly. It’s a commission. A pretty weird one, too. Look, I’m really not supposed to talk about it, but …”

  “But?” Chalmys repeated ironically, drawling the word out. “I think I know that ‘but.’ You mean to extract a promise of confidentiality, and then tell all.”

  “If you say, ‘That’s just like a woman,’ I shall hit you,” Anias promised. “But … Chalmys, this thing is really weird, and in more ways than just its imagery. And the more I work on it, the weirder it gets. That’s partly an effect of getting it into dream form. Things do tend to take on a life of their own, just normally. It’s an extraordinary commission. I suppose that’s why I took it.” She described the visit of Rudolph Kinsey, and ended by bringing Chalmys the complete scenario and a globe light.

  She watched him anxiously as he read through its pages. He finished it, turned it over, and read it through again. She braced herself inwardly for criticism of her acceptance of it, but Chalmys’s first comment, as he turned the pages over a third time, took her entirely by surprise.

  “Did you notice,” he said, “that this thing is designed to be played as an endless loop?”

  “What? I can’t imagine wanting to,” she replied. “Of course, it does go in kind of a circle, now that you mention it. I figured it’s a sort of artistic affectation. Maybe the guy’s been reading too many Twentieth-century novels.”

  “It’s just an impression,” Chalmys conceded. “Still … what do you know about your patron?”

  “Just what I’ve told you. He comes on like a crooked lawyer. Who am I to make judgments, though?”

  “Oh, you can be very perceptive, when you get your head out of the clouds long enough. It doesn’t seem to be altogether a conscious process, though.”

  Anias wondered if that was a compliment.

  “So you couldn’t contact him if you wanted to,” Chalmys went on thoughtfully. “No address, no vone number, contract not recorded—how do you know he can pay you, by the way?”

  That hideous thought had not previously occurred to Anias.

  “In short, you don’t even know if that’s his real name. The trouble with you, my dear, is that you have too honest a mind. I’ve no idea how you came by it. It can’t have been your upbringing.”

  Anias sat up. “What an insult! And what are you, the criminal mastermind, sitting at the center of his web of intrigue?”

  Chalmys grinned. “Would you prefer me to say, too distracted a mind? But to return to the point. Yes, I agree, it’s a most disturbing commission, but the things that bother me most about it don’t even seem to have occurred to you. Yet you were there; I wasn’t. One mustn’t get carried away
by speculation.”

  “Chalmys,” said Anias seriously, “do you think I should be doing this?”

  “Heavens, what a question to ask me! This is your business. I don’t have to work for a living, how should I tell someone who does how to go on? But …”

  “But?” Anias drawled wickedly.

  “Is it possible to harm someone with a feelie-dream? I am rather at a disadvantage, never having experienced one.”

  “Well, there are addicts,” Anias allowed. “People who spend way too much time on them, and get carried away by their favorites. But I don’t see that feelie-dreams are different from any other pleasure in that respect, in spite of what the Church says. Other than that, I think even the nasty ones do more good than harm. You can be as unpleasant as you like in a feelie, and no one is hurt.”

  “Except for whatever soul-curdling effects habits of thought may have.”

  “How would you measure that? No, I think feelies are just a new way for people to go on doing the same old things.”

  “You answer your own question, then.”

  “I might have known you wouldn’t.”

  He handed her back the papers, then asked curiously, “Does your Mr. Kinsey strike you as someone for whom that”—he pointed at the papers—“would be his fondest fancy?”

  “No,” answered Anias slowly. “Not but what I think his’d be pretty rank. If anything, I got the impression he might be an agent for someone.”

  “I think so too. It’s a curious puzzle. I shall be interested to hear how it ends. Do keep me posted, when you get back to Rio.”

  “What, will you answer the vone?” laughed Anias.

  “Only for you, my dear, only for you.”

  *

  Anias finally succeeded in talking herself out of her doubts, and finished the dream within the next week. It was a relief to be done with it. Usually there was great satisfaction in completing a work. This time she felt more drained than content, like someone coming up for air after too long under water. The cessation of pain was not the same thing as pleasure. Yet she was proud of the mastery of her craft the dream displayed. Anias’s imagination was vivid, visceral, full of poetic power, and she had poured that power into the dream. And then there was the money. Perhaps caveat emptor was the best approach after all.