by Robert Reed
One final question, they promised. Certain high officers within the Florida organization, testifying to U.N. investigators, reportedly stated that Florida himself wanted the boy, your son, to learn everything possible about Aaron Florida. Even while the world was coming apart at the seams, the old man was busy finding means by which he could insure his good name—
“What’s the question?” asked Mom.
Any comment on the story?
“No,” she told them. Each of them. “And if you make any attempt to contact my son, or any of us again, I’ll call the police.” She screeched, “I mean it!” and hung up on them.
It was the harassment, in part, that made us pack and move.
Another home. A different city. My folks didn’t mention it at the time, and haven’t since, but I think beginning again must have had its appeal. I’m sure that was part of it.
Beth had been the least injured in the crash. She spent just one night in the hospital, then she went home.
Of course her folks welcomed her, and they exhausted themselves explaining how they had done what they had done because of fear and love. Beth heard it many times, in many moods—how they felt horrible now for having seemed so cruel, but would she please try to understand their desperate logic? They had wanted their only daughter to live. They would have done anything to make sure she would escape. And of course Beth took care of them as always, accepting their apologies without a word. Her mother developed an infection after having been outdoors that one time; and Beth spent several weeks at her bedside, mopping her gruesome face and singing to calm everyone’s frazzled nerves.
But we noticed changes in our friend. Despite her loyalty, we couldn’t help but see changes. She was darker. Sadder. Sometimes she would say things—harsh, even cynical words pointed at her folks’ weaknesses. “The frail ones,” Beth called them. “The old worn-outs.” I felt uneasy when I heard her speaking in such ways. Even tiny doses of bitterness didn’t wear well on Beth, and I tried ignoring them when they showed.
Everything was different in the world now.
Jack kept living in the treehouse. There was a string of long, loud expensive parties at the Wellses’ house, and there was talk that enough people had complained to the social services office that now, at last, the Wellses themselves were under investigation for some type of child abuse. But before any action could be taken—in the dead of the night, and without warning—all of the family, excepting Jack, packed and drove away to parts unknown. Afterwards Jack said, “I watched them go. I sat up in the tree and watched and then I went back to bed. It didn’t matter to me.” His hard eyes didn’t blink. “Not a bit,” he swore, and he sighed. I think he was sad because that was the truth. He couldn’t have cared less.
“So what are you going to do?” Marshall asked. “Huh?”
“I’ll stay where I am. What do you mean?”
“What about the social services people? Do they know where you are?”
“Oh, sure.” Jack shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “They came looking for me a couple times. They even brought cops the last time, but shit…they might as well have been hunting a snow dragon, as close as they got to me.”
I went up into Jack’s treehouse just one last time.
We were moving in a week. I wasn’t entirely healed—my leg was still buried inside a massive cast with plastic and plaster and electronic therapy devices to make my muscles hold their tone—but Cody rigged block and tackle and pulled me up through a window, everyone helping me over to the long bench. My bad leg was propped up, my toe pink in the sun. It was all like old times, and it was all so different too. I halfway wanted to cry.
Everyone had gifts for me. Going-away gifts.
Marshall gave me a game to be played alone—intricate pieces and a large colorful board—and I told him, “Thanks.” Beth wanted me to have a book, her personal favorite. “Thank you.” Jack had found a dead pig in the woods, a little boar, and he had boiled away the rancid meat and then varnished the skull for me. “It’s great. Thanks,” I said. And Cody, knowing me best, slipped down into the maze wearing a smile and carrying tools. Bwink! Bwink! Bwink! I laid there waiting. Bwink! Bwink! Bwink! Then she returned, bringing me the lowest hatch on the treehouse, complete with its new lock coded to my own thumbprint.
I told all of them, “Thanks. I mean it!”
We talked and talked, darkness falling and nobody wanted to stop. There were cans of beef and beans for dinner, my folks having given me a grudging okay to eat “down there.” We had our meal cold. Then Beth looked across the bottoms and said, “Remember the first time we were all up here together, Ryder?” and that launched me into a string of memories. It became night, and late, and everyone had some moment they wanted recalled—“That’s what happened? Really?”—which led to other moments. And days. And seasons. “Remember when we did this, Ryder? And that? Tell us what happened again. Please?”
We slowly drifted into a conversation about Dr. Florida.
Was he a good man, or bad? There was a lot of talk defending both verdicts nowadays. In the end we decided that maybe he was both things at the same time, in equal measures, and then we paused for a long moment. It was Marshall who mentioned my old art teacher and his lover, the physical education teacher of whom lusty things had been said. Saying his name was enough to make us dip our heads in respect. He and she had been found dead after the Florida War. They had made some kind of suicide pact, it appeared. When the hounds were coming and everything looked hopeless—the earth’s defenses taxed and nobody talking of victory—they had overdosed on drugs and died in bed together, in each other’s arms. Curled up like spoons, we had heard. People we halfway knew—
I blinked and shook my head, then something occurred to me.
“Marshall?” I said. “Someone else died. Someone else we know.”
“Who?” he asked.
“Remember those guys we saw years ago? The ones hunting snakes with pellet guns?” I could see them plainly. We were eight years old and sitting on the slabs, watching them, and then we went down on the bottoms and found the dead snake. A female, I realized. “I saw his picture on the news a few weeks ago.” I told Marshall, “Faces are tough. I just realized who he was.”
“Who was he?” asked Beth.
“I never knew his name,” I admitted.
Cody asked, “What killed him?”
He had been one of the U.N. soldiers storming the moon’s moon at the end. I remembered the poor dead snake and me thinking that someday, in some fashion, he would pay for murdering it. Now he was vapor between the planets. He was dead in some ultimate fashion, and a hero, and I was old enough to realize it had nothing to do with what I had seen. It was just one of those things. The boy was dead and sleeping beside God, I thought, and I felt rather wise and sorry at the same time. For a minute.
Then Jack asked, “How do you think we would have lived up there?” He waited a moment, then he said, “If we’d really gone, I mean.”
“Up where?” asked Marshall.
“The asteroid. If things had really gone bad and we’d gotten away.”
Marshall said, “It would have been strange.”
Cody said, “I’m glad we’re here.”
“Me too,” said Beth. “I like the earth just fine, thank you.”
Then Jack told us what he had imagined—the five of us, plus five hundred other kids, growing up in the near-freefall with jungle around us and garter snakes in the air. And he told us, “Cody would have been in charge, see. And I would have been the top scientist. And the rest of you would have helped us run things—”
“Wait!” said Marshall. “I’d be the top scientist!”
Jack said, “No,” in the dark. “You wouldn’t be,” he promised. There was something absolutely certain about his voice. For a moment he sounded rather like Marshall.
“You?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure. Me.”
They started to wrestle. I heard them, and I felt them th
rough the long bench. I pulled my bad leg off its perch and sat up, looking out the windows, out toward the pasture. It was close to midnight. A pair of flashlights were bobbing in the distance, showing people walking straight for the oak. My parents, I sensed. My folks. It’s almost finished now, and I sat there wishing for a few more minutes. Just a few—
Then the scream rose from the woods, harsh and roaring and unmistakable.
Marshall and Jack quit wrestling. It hadn’t been a serious fight, and now they rose to their feet, Jack saying, “Quiet.”
Nobody spoke, everyone waiting.
There was no second scream. My folks were nearly to the oak, and I breathed and said, “I couldn’t tell. Was it the same one? Jack?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “I’ve heard it a bunch of times lately. But I haven’t seen it.” He paused, then he said, “Maybe it’s one of the others. One of its clone kids. Maybe it’s wandered up here.”
“I bet so,” said Marshall.
“I bet not,” said Cody. “I bet that’s ours. It crawled out of that well somehow.”
“Do you think so?” asked Beth.
“I do.”
Jack said, “I don’t know.”
“But I killed it,” Marshall told us. “I know I did—!”
“Ryder?” Mom was below us.
“Ryder?” called Dad. “You there, son?”
We sat in silence for a long moment. What if I stayed? I thought. Could I hide with Jack for a little while? Maybe? Then Cody rose and bent and picked me up as if I weighed nothing, holding me flush against her broad flat chest. “We’ve got to get you down,” she told me and everyone.
“Safe and sound,” said Beth.
Which was what I wanted, I realized. Honestly. I said, “Okay,” and they slipped the ropes around me, and all of them held the heavy rope as they eased me downwards in the darkness.
Which brings me to now. Almost.
A few weeks ago, by chance, I found myself in that part of the country. I drove my new skimmer off the main highway and headed through the shrunken remnants of the old city, going slow, noticing all the empty lots and the old houses collapsing to rubble and the weeds and grasses and little trees creeping out of the parklands to claim the empty ground. Marshall’s old house was my first landmark. It was still standing, still occupied, and I parked in front of it and climbed out into the blazing summer heat.
Someone had painted its dark bricks a ridiculous gold color.
The yard itself was hard-packed earth sprinkled with all sorts of bikes and toys and cheap playground equipment. His folks must have moved away long ago, I realized. I waited for a minute, wondering what sorts of kids might live here now. But none showed themselves, not even at the windows, and I finally turned and strolled down the hill toward my old house.
Where was Marshall? I wondered. A few years back, I happened to run into one of his cousins—a pretty woman quick to speak her mind. “He was busy flunking out of schools for a long while,” she informed me. “I’m not sure what schools and what fields, but I think he had troubles at home. With his mom. That had to be part of it.” She shook her head and grinned, saying, “That old warhorse. His mom, I mean. I got the feeling he was flunking just to bug her silly. Does that make sense?”
It did. I nodded, saying, “It does. Sure.”
“Anyway, the last word I heard is that he’s happier now. He got away from her and all that expectation crap.” She told me, “He did the big emigration,” and I asked what she meant. “Up to the moon! Didn’t you hear? He’s some sort of accountant with a mining corporation, and I guess things are okay. The last I got word—”
“The moon?” I asked.
“The one and only.” Her face brightened. “Hey, wait,” she said. “I remember you. You were that one kid, right? The one with the…with the…God, which one were you?”
I deflected her. And now Marshall’s on the moon, I guess.
Sometimes I’ll watch the TV channels that show live scenes from the moon. I’ll hunt for Marshall in the crowded places. A couple times I’ve seen a tall, angular figure almost graceful in the light gravity—was it him?—but I can never be certain. The right complexion and the right height, yes, but I’ve never quite seen the face.
A rectangular hole was all that remained of my house, the basement walls cracked and ready to crumble. For a long minute I stood on the edge of the hole, and I let triggers trip in my head. Crystal moments flooded through me. I saw faces, parades of them, and there were robust odors and certain sounds and real objects seemed to be lying in my hands. But it wasn’t this place tripping the triggers; it was me. All me. Wherever I go and whatever the circumstances, I carry that vanished house inside my aging skull.
I blinked, breathing hard and stepping away from the hole.
My hands were empty. I looked at them and shook them hard and then turned and went on my way.
The Wellses’ house was gone too. But Cody’s moms still lived across the street, their home and yard forever tidy. I went to the front door and wished I hadn’t. The personal said nobody was home and would I like to leave a message? “Do you remember me?” I asked. The personal watched me with its single glass eye, then said, “Ryder?” I said, “Hello,” and it said, “Ryder? Would you like to leave Tina and May a message?”
“No,” I said. “Thanks, no.”
I crossed the street and walked down the weedy graveled road, grateful for my solitude. I didn’t feel in the mood to talk to anyone just now. I thought about Cody, sure. I’d seen her several times in the last ten years or so. She had played minor league ball for a couple of years, in the men’s leagues; then she was hit by a pitch—a hundred-and-twenty-mile-an-hour rocket delivered by some tailored, ape-armed brute—and the doctors said, “Not again. Never again.” So she quit the game, toying with some tamer games before finally settling as a coach in a little college and marrying an English professor twenty years her senior. Of all people. She has kids now, a boy and girl, and I’ve stayed with her a few times. She seems happy enough. The carbon plate in her head makes her content. “Go on. Touch it,” she told me once. “Feel it? Do you? That’s how close I came to having all my lights go out. So you bet I’m happy. And thankful. I’m just so glad to be here still.”
Cody’s moms would have talked about her and their sweet grandchildren, I knew. That would have been fine on most days. But I didn’t want it now. I crossed the pasture alone, careful to keep alert and not to remember too much. I had too much to do. The grass was tall and ever so green, green in spite of the heat, and I lifted my eyes and found the battered old oak, one of its main limbs gone and no trace of any treehouse whatsoever.
Cody’s moms would have talked about Jack too. Sure.
He was theirs for a time. They had adopted him after I moved, making some arrangement with social services. They gave him their spare bedroom when he was cold or ill, and they let him come and go as he wished. Cody had told me about it. There were tensions, sure. He wasn’t an easy son. But he ended up in a very good school on pure merit. He ended up getting a string of degrees in ecology and gene tailoring too. And he became part of the huge team that’s planning for the terraforming of Mars—a vast, multigenerational project sponsored by the U.N.
I’d seen him once since I’d moved from the city.
The boy is father to the man, they say. Jack was certainly that way. He had the same fierce independence and those changeless hard eyes. He told me how he was working to build predators for the new Mars—big red cats that would hunt in packs, bat-winged wolves for the thick new atmosphere, and a giant furry snake with a shrew’s blazing metabolism—
“A snow dragon?” I asked.
“Better,” he promised. “Faster. Larger. Smarter.” He winked and said, “It’s my private project. Plenty of shits don’t think it’ll work, but I know better. You wait. You’ll see.”
I passed under the old oak. Our footworn slope had grown up into vigorous weeds, and the bottoms were more gras
s and trees now. I strolled out into the middle, my eyes open, missing nothing. I could see new, oddly shaped treehouses in the woods beyond—lightweight, enduring things built from carbon fibers and foam metals—and sometimes I’d hear kids hollering or just laughing. I heard them and the wind in the trees too.
I considered walking toward Beth’s old house for a glimpse, then I stopped myself. From this side, at this time of year, I wouldn’t see anything unless I climbed the stairs and intruded in someone else’s life. Later, I told myself. Later. I would pass by the place later, in my skimmer, on my way out of town.
I’ve been married for twelve years now.
My wife is sweet and young and a wiz at business. We inherited the family business when my folks retired, and we’ve had some successes selling real estate. Then five years ago, out of the blue, I learned that Beth was living not two hundred miles from me. Her folks were with her, still living, medical technologies just keeping pace with their feeble bodies; and on a whim, I drove to see her and for a little while, now and again, we tried to conduct an affair.
I don’t think either of us enjoyed ourselves.
Beth would talk and talk about willing herself into some different life. She was angry for the hold her parents had on her, and for her many weaknesses; then with the next breath she would tell me how many times they had prodded her to go and get a true career. They didn’t need her so much of the time, they claimed.
“So do it,” I would say. “Take the offer.”
“But they don’t mean it,” she would tell me. “That’s the thing. They’re just talking that way to make themselves feel better.”
In the end, in a clumsy fashion, I put an end to our affair.
