Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  "This is my father's farm," he informed Michael proudly. Then he explained that his friends were all from nearby farms.

  Michael was halfway through the tall glass when he realized it had been spiked. With vodka? That would neatly counter the Synthetic Sleep.

  Kanwal proudly tapped his chest. "I am seventeen this year. I have finished my public schooling. My father wants to buy a truck. He will start a business delivering fruit to the cities." Kanwal rolled his eyes. "He says he is getting too old for farm work. He wants to drive a truck while his sons do the tough work!"

  The other boys erupted in laughter. Michael grinned too. "Your old man must think a lot of you."

  "Oh, I don't know," Kanwal said. "I think he just wants to hit the road to look for a new wife."

  The boys giggled and moaned. "He's old," someone muttered, "but not too old!"

  "He wants us to believe it, anyway," Kanwal said. "But I'm seventeen! He should be looking for a wife for me."

  "Isn't that your mother's business?" Michael asked.

  Kanwal shrugged. "My mother is dead three years. My youngest brother does all the cooking now."

  "No sisters?"

  Kanwal made a face. "No. Of course not. My old man wanted to get ahead, not raise a servant for another man's family. We are very modern here. We don't believe in dowry. If I had a sister, my father would have to pay her dowry. Still, it makes it hard to find a wife. My father was married when he was fifteen. Look at us. We are sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old. No one has a wife. Hey." He turned to his friends. "Know who's making the most money these days? The marriage broker!"

  The boys guffawed again, but Michael frowned. Kanwal noticed, and responded by rubbing Michael's shoulder in a friendly way. "You have a wife?"

  Michael shook his head, declining to explain to Kanwal that though he'd been married at twenty-four, it had not lasted two years. There's nothing left, Michael.

  Kanwal might have read his mind. "Divorced?" he asked.

  Michael scowled. "You watch too much TV."

  Kanwal giggled, along with his friends. "American women like to have many husbands and only one son."

  "We could use some American women here," one of the boys chimed in from the back of the group.

  Michael felt the vodka inside him, dissolving his diplomacy. "Women are not toys. They're people, with their own dreams, their own ambitions."

  "Oh yes," Kanwal agreed with a hearty nod. "They are goddesses." The boys all offered confirmation of this.

  Kanwal went on, "This farm would be a happier place if we had a woman in the kitchen again. Hey, but no one wants to be a farmer anymore, not even my old man."

  Michael sat up a little straighter. This sentiment had not been reported by his census teams. "Why do you say that? This farm has had a profitable year, despite poor weather."

  "Oh, we're doing all right," Kanwal agreed. "But do you think it's easy? Laboring all day in the hot sun, and we don't even have a tractor. The water buffalo are still our tractor. It's shameful! I want to move to Bangalore, learn computers, work in an office."

  "Ah, Kanwal," one of his friends interrupted. "Everybody wants to work in an office, but it's the farm for us, you know it."

  Kanwal gave his friend a dark look. "Not all of us. Every evening I walk all the way to town, just so I can spend half an hour at the home of a link-wallah, exploring the net. Half an hour! That's all he allows, because he has many clients, but half an hour is not enough time to get any real training—maybe if I could print out lessons, but I can't, because I don't have the paper. But I have a plan.

  "I can read well. We all can. I've read every book in the two library booths at South Market. Do you know what we're doing? My friends and I? We're putting our money together to buy our own terminal. I have a friend in town who can get an uplink." Kanwal nodded, his dark eyes happy at his inner vision. "There is formal schooling online, from all over the world, and some of it at no cost. You hear how well I speak English? I learn fast. Hey." He looked at his friends again. "Maybe we're better off with no wives yet. No children to care for, right? Make our careers first. It's what the Bangalore families tell their young men." He turned back to Michael. "You have children, mister?"

  "No," Michael said, feeling a sudden tightness in his gut. There's nothing left, Michael. I'm leaving.

  Kanwal's brows rose in surprise. "No children? Not even from the wife who divorced you?"

  "No," Michael repeated firmly, his cheeks heating with more than the torrid afternoon. She had not wanted to try again. I'm leaving.

  From the back of the crowd the anonymous heckler spoke. "Hey, Kanwal, waiting a few years for a wife doesn't sound too bad, but I don't think I want to wait that long."

  The boys again erupted in laughter, while Michael's cheeks grew even hotter. He was only thirty-two, but to be thirty-two and without children … did that make him a failure in their eyes? It was a stunning thought, and one he didn't want to examine too closely.

  Quickly he drained his vodka smoothie while Kanwal went right on massaging his shoulder, his dark eyes shining with confidence, and ambition. "That's right, mister. You watch us. In two years, we will all be middle class like you."

  VIII

  Two in the morning, and sleep wouldn't come. Cody listened to Wade's soft snoring. She could just make out his silhouette in the faint amber glow spilling from the bathroom nightlight. Maybe new life had begun in her womb tonight, maybe not. It would be a few days before she would know.

  She got out of bed, feeling a lingering stickiness between her legs. She groped for a nightshirt and pulled it on, then padded into the living room, where the curtains stood open on a sweeping view of Denver's city lights.

  She always took on the toughest jobs.

  So why was she so damned scared of the project at Victoria Glen? She'd looked over the specs after dinner. They'd been nasty, but Cody had dealt with worse. Kick. Kick! No sweat.

  Except she was sweating. Her palms were slick, and the soles of her feet.

  So? She'd been scared before. The only thing to do was face it down.

  She took a long swallow from the bottle of Venezuelan water, then she got her VR helmet from a closet. Sitting on the sofa, she pulled the helmet on, encasing herself in a safe black vault. Nice, simple environment. She almost felt she could go to sleep.

  Almost.

  She instructed the wireless system to link with her server, where she'd stored the download of the Victoria Glen site, prepared by a redevelopment company called New Land.

  She gazed at a menu, then, "Document three-seven-zero," she whispered. "Go."

  The menu faded as a world emerged, creeping in like sunrise over a tired city. New Land had recorded a full sensory walk-through. Cody's helmet translated the digital record, synthesizing sight, sound, temperature, and encoded odors. Her lungs filled with sun-warmed air, brewed over old wood and oil-stained asphalt.

  She found herself afloat, a few feet above an empty street. It ran straight, like a canalized river cutting through a landscape of vacant lots and boarded-up houses. A few sparrows popped up and down in brush that sprouted around a chain-link fence. Warning signs glared from the abandoned buildings:

  KEEP OUT

  HAZARDOUS MATERIALS SITE

  DANGER—NO TRESPASSING

  It took her a minute to realize this was Victoria Street, and that first house, with its sagging porch cuddled under a steeply sloping roof, that was Randi's house. It had been the upper limit of Cody's permitted territory, and a safe place to run if ever she needed shelter. The house next to it had been a rental, with a fleet of showy cars perpetually drifting in and out of the front yard. Only a rusted hulk was left now, crumbling in the shade of a large tree leaning over a gap-toothed fence from the yard next door.

  Looking at the tree, Cody felt hollow inside.Jacaranda, she realized. As a kid she'd never known its name, just enjoyed gathering the purple blossoms that showered from it in the spring. She and Tanya would have
pretend weddings and toss the fallen flowers in the air. Where had they learned that? Cody couldn't guess. Neither one of them had ever seen a wedding.

  The tree looked so much bigger than she remembered.

  Pushing the trackball forward, she went gliding down the street, a ghost returned to haunt the old neighborhood.

  She drifted past the fence. She hardly dared to look, but there it was: a tiny block of a house, built close to the ground like a bunker. The roof had gaps in it. Head wounds. The windows were boarded up. It didn't matter. It was all there. All of it, still lurking inside her mind. She closed her eyes, and reality thickened, like flesh on the bones of the past. Little Tanya from down the block was knocking on the door, jump rope in hand. It was a hot summer evening. Cody got her own rope, and they practiced together on the sidewalk, singingseashells, taco bells, easy, ivy, over. No way they were supposed to be outside that late, but mama was still at school and Tanya's big sister was sleeping.

  They sang very softly, seashells, taco bells, so Passion wouldn't come charging at them out of his girlfriend's house across the street, screaming dumb-bitches-shut-up. His motorcycle was there, but his fuck-this-fuck-that music wasn't pounding the neighborhood, so she guessed he was asleep.

  They were practicing cross-arms when a tanker truck came rumbling into sight from the direction of Randi's house. They stopped jumping to watch it go by. It was a big truck. The tank had been painted gray. It didn't have the name of any gas station on it.

  "Look," Tanya said. She pointed at the truck's undercarriage and giggled. "It's peeing."

  A stream of liquid ran from beneath the truck, splashing black against the street. Tanya waved at the anonymous bulk of the driver. Across the street, Passion was screaming What the fuck is that noise?

  · · · · ·

  Cody snatched the helmet off. Her heart felt like it had melted into her arteries, a pounding starfish in her chest. Oh no, oh no. She stared at the looming shapes of furniture in the dimly-lit room. She hadn't remembered the truck in years and years. Maybe it had felt too dangerous to remember. Oh God, oh Jesus. Her palms were sweating.

  Just a few seconds after the truck had passed her eyes had started burning. She ran into the house and threw up. Passion was screaming outside, shooting his gun. Cody lay on the broken tiles of the bathroom floor and cried, she felt so sick, until mama came home and moved her into bed. She didn't say anything about the truck and its stinky pee, because she should never have been out on the sidewalk.

  Carefully, Cody lay the helmet on the cushion beside her. Wade was snoring softly in the bedroom. The antique clock on the mantle was ticking, ticking.

  What had gone into the street that night? And on other nights, what had spilled from the kitchen drug labs? From the ubiquitous activity of auto repair? From the city's fights against rats and roaches? What had trickled through the soil, into the ground water, returning through the faucet of the kitchen sink?

  Splash of clear water into a plastic cup held in a little girl's hands; the dry tang of chlorine in her throat.

  There had been toxins in her body that killed her daughter. Cody had always assumed it was herfault, that she'd been incautious on a job, that somehow she had poisoned herself; but what if it wasn't so?

  Her lips pressed together in a hard line. Any hazardous substance report generated by the cleanup of Victoria Glen would be kept confidential by the redevelopment company. She'd be able to gain access only if she could offer compelling evidence of on-site injury, and that was doubtful. She'd only lived there until she was ten, until Mama got her the scholarship to Prescott Academy. Cody had left for boarding school and never had come back.

  So there was only one way to learn what ten years on Victoria Street had done to her. She would have to take on the job herself.

  IX

  Rajban was up early. Michael found her in the kitchen when he woke, peeking into cabinets with all the stealth and caution of a kid looking for treasure but expecting to find a tiger. "Good morning," Michael said. She jumped, and the cabinet door banged shut. Her hands were already soiled with the gray dirt of the courtyard. Michael sighed. She certainly had an affinity for gardening.

  Ignoring her fright, he beckoned to her to come to the sink, where he showed her how to slide her hands under the soap dispenser. The sensor popped a spray of soap onto her palm. She lathered it, carefully imitating Michael's every gesture. Water came from the tap in a tepid spray, like a stolen column of soft rain. Michael dried his hands, Rajban dried hers, then together they made a breakfast of papayas, bread, and yogurt.

  · · · · ·

  After they ate, Rajban disappeared into the garden while Michael readied himself for work. Last of all, he picked up his shades. The Terrace glyph waited for him, surrounded by a pink query circle. He linked through. "Anybody there?"

  No one answered. He left the link open, confident someone would check back before long. Next he put a call through to Muthaye, but she didn't pick up either. A moment later, the house announced a visitor at the door.

  "Ooh, company," Ryan said, as the line to the Terrace went green.

  Etsuko sounded puzzled. "Who is that?"

  "No ID," Ryan muttered. "Pupils dilated, skin temperature slightly elevated. He's nervous."

  "Or angry," Etsuko said. "Be careful, Michael."

  "Hey," Michael said as the house repeated its announcement, this time in Hindi. "Good morning and all that. Back again, huh?"

  "Been waiting all morning for your shades to activate," Ryan agreed. "You have to understand—your life is so much more interesting than ours. Now hurry up. Go find out what he wants before my next appointment."

  Michael summoned an image of the visitor into his shades. "So I guess it's not Muthaye at the door?"

  "No, mate. No such luck. A local gentleman, I should think. Looks a little stiff, if you ask me."

  Etsuko snorted. "By your standards, Ryan, anyone could look stiff."

  Rajban slipped in through the French doors. Michael sighed to see that her hands were dirty again. Some of the dirt had gotten on her face. Still, she looked at Michael with eyes that were brighter, fuller than they had been only yesterday. Then she looked at the door … hoping it was Muthaye too? Come back to visit her as promised.

  "Say," Ryan said. "Maybe she knows the guy."

  "Right." After all, someone had to be looking for Rajban, regardless of what Muthaye said. A brother, perhaps? Someone who cared. Michael slipped the shades off and handed them to Rajban, motioning that she should put them on. Tentatively, she obeyed. For several seconds she stared at the scene, while her mouth twisted in a small hard knot. Then she yanked the shades off, shoved them into Michael's hands, and ran for the courtyard.

  Ryan said, "Women react that way to me too, from time to time."

  No one laughed.

  Michael stared after Rajban, dread gnawing like a rat at his chest. Despite Muthaye's words, he had envisioned only a happy reunion for her. What would his role become, if her family demanded her back, and she refused to go?

  Stop guessing.

  He slipped the shades back on and went to the front door. "Hark. Open it."

  The stranger in the alcove was tall and lean, like a slice taken off a fuller man, then smoked until it hardened. His black hair was neatly cut and combed. His dark eyes were stern. They remained fixed on Michael through a slow, formal bow. "Namaste."

  "Namaste," Michael murmured, feeling the hair on the back of his neck rise. There was something about this man that set him on edge. The intense stare, perhaps. The unsmiling face. The stiffness of his carriage. Smoked and hardened.

  "I am Mr. Gharia," the stranger said, in lilting but well-pronounced English. "And you, I have been told, are Mr. Fielding. I have come to inquire about the woman."

  Michael felt stubborness descend into his spine, a quiet, steely resistance learned from the heroes of a hundred old cowboy movies. "Have you?"

  Vaguely, he was aware of Etsuko muttering, "Gharia?
Which Gharia? There are dozens in the census, approximate height and age …"

  Mr. Gharia apparently had a stubborness of his own. He raised his chin, and though his head came barely to Michael's shoulder, he seemed tall. "It is improper for this woman to be residing within your house."

  Michael had never taken well to instructions on propriety. Remembering the look of fear and distaste on Rajban's face as she fled to the courtyard, he ventured a guess, and dressed it up as certainty, "This is not your woman."

  Mr. Gharia looked taken aback at this discourteous response; perhaps a little confused, but by his reply Michael knew that his guess had been correct. "I am a friend of the family, sir."

  When Michael didn't respond to this, Gharia's tone rose. "Sir, a widow deserves respect. This woman must be returned immediately to her family."

  A widow. So her husband was dead. Muthaye had said he'd left home a full year ago. Michael had assumed he'd gone for treatment, yet now he was dead. Did Rajban know? Had anyone bothered to tell her? Thinking about it, Michael felt an anger as cool, as austere, as shadows under desert rock. "This woman has no family."

  "Sir, you are mistaken."

  "The family that she had cast her out like useless rubbish."

  "I have come to inquire about her, to be sure she is the woman being sought."

  "She is not that woman," Michael said. "She is a different woman altogether."

  "Sir—"

  "You would not have me put her on display, would you? Now sir, good day." He stepped back, allowing the door to close.

  Gharia saw what he was about. "It doesn't matter who she is!" he said quickly. "Any Hindu woman must be shamed to be kept as a whore. It is intolerable! It—" The door sealed, cutting off Gharia's tirade with the abruptness of a toggled switch.

  "Christ," Michael muttered.

  "Nice show," Ryan agreed, but his voice was somber. "Michael, this isn't a game you want to play. Etsuko's IDed this Gharia fellow. He's a religious activist—"