"I guess."
"Are you augmented yet?"
"Not yet."
"And they let you travel? With things being the way they are? The filthy unaugments. What those people did to Rand Park is beyond description. You must get yourself done, honey. As soon as possible."
"Oh, I will."
He looked at her quizzically, and for a brief instant, Corrag felt a chill. His glance had made a secret appraisal that had not been favorable. Without excusing himself, the man took out nightshade glasses and plugged a wireless auralscape bud in his ear and leaned his seat all the way back. Arthur was hungry and began to fidget and cry. Corrag put him up to her breast and he suckled while the tubid took off and slung itself into top speed. Then the meals were served. The man beside her did not eat. Arthur was not a good traveler. He wanted to get down and crawl around, exploring. On their way into Ryanport, her aisle mate finally took off his eyeshades and gave a scowl at the sight of Arthur standing on his toes on his seat beside him and looking at the rows of passengers finishing their food towards the back of the container. For all his vaunted augment advantage, he didn't seem all that tolerant of others, thought Corrag. Then, when they stopped at Ryanport, he stood and switched seats and she never saw him again until they were in Lax and walking to the baggage desk and she passed him in the hall where he was standing very still and looking at nothing in particular against the wall. She realized in that instant, with bristling armed UCB troops thick at every crosswalk and every boarding gate, that she would never find her hosting couple Ernestine and George.
"Arthur," she said. "Get ready to run."
She picked up her pace. In the elevator going down, she stood in the middle, away from the glass walls, surrounded by people of every persuasion and physical type. In the main hall she walked by the rows of market customer agencies that had sprung up since the Federation had been deposed by the UCB. She picked one with no other clients at the desk and arranged for the rental of a zipbike, thinking she would enjoy greater security and anonymity on it. They were harder to spot in traffic from drones. She paid with the wad of Repho dollars Edmund had given her and the man at the desk had her sign a dingy old insurance screen with a stylus. Then he gave her the magnetic tab with the lot location printed on nanofilm. She put it in the pocket of her coat, picked Arthur up in one arm and slung the bag over her shoulder and marched out of the terminal.
The Democravian air greeted her with its once-sweet scents of youth and possibility now gone underneath the haze of the contaminated afternoon sky and the ever-present gaze of security cameras and circling drones. With Arthur in the sling tight against her back, she started out on the zipbike through the lot. At a checkpoint, a bottleneck at the terminal exit before everyone headed in the cardinal directions down the still solid Democravian infrastructure, the officer gave her a quick glance, took the nanofilm receipt, and waved her on. She kept behind a line of bot delivery vehicles in the slow lane headed up to the Mono Valley on 498. A couple of times she spotted surveillance drones crossing the sky ahead and pressed even closer to the convoy, but she presumed she had been marked and was being followed. She got off at an exit for Davisville and then tracked diagonally on little used county roads through Ysidro. She stopped at Ysidro state park where she and Ben had met Abel and Sandy. She pulled onto the shoulder. Nobody followed behind on the road for at least a half hour. She thought it better to press onwards to her destination. She continued on the back roads as the day began to wane behind her into Edmundstown, with its placid, suburban streets and its quaint commercial district and into the hills on the eastern end -- the ritzier neighborhoods of St. Michael's and Endura.
The zipbike slowed silently and stopped a block or so away. She would walk the rest of the way just to be safe. There was the house, its carport with the brown asphalt tiles still slightly moldering with age and the cracks in the curb just the way they'd been all her life. But the front door was new, in a blue pastel color that Alana would never have chosen. And instead of Ricky there was a stooped Asian man of an advanced age walking in slippers on the front lawn in the setting sun. Corrag walked with Arthur along the sidewalk and rang the doorbell of the next house. She heard the opening beats of Holly Jolly Christmas and realized with growing hope that it was the signature doorbell tune the Rosaleses had always used. And there was Mrs. Rosales in curlers and some yellowish cream smeared across her face. She was a lot older and frailer than Corrag remembered.
"Mrs. Rosales. Hi, it's me. Do you remember me?"
"Corrag?"
She did remember. Corrag was surprised that she remembered her name, She didn't recall having much first name basis contact with the Rosaleses.
"Hi. The house looks wonderful and the yard too."
"How nice of you to stop by and visit."
"Mrs. Rosales. Do you know where my parents are?"
"Well, they're not here."
"No, I know that. There's a new man in our house."
"Oh, he's wonderful. Shokuro is a wonderful neighbor. He's a lovely man. Shokuro!" She began to call the man. She wanted him to meet Corrag.
"No. Mrs. Rosales. I don't have a lot of time. I'd rather not."
"Shokuro! Hi there!"
"Mrs. Rosales, stop! My parents. Did they leave an address with you when they moved?"
"Well. The Mister would know about that. If they did, the Mister would have that information."
"Could you ask him for me?"
"Yes. You stay and talk with Shokuro. He’s a lovely man and has a very good job with some information business downtown."
A few minutes later, Mr. Rosales appeared at the door. He was wearing a brown corduroy jacket and smoking a cigarette. He was unshaved. He looked worried.
"Corrag. Why are you here?"
"I don't know."
"Do you and the child want something to eat before you move on?"
"That would be nice."
Mrs. Rosales set out a plate on the little kitchen table that folded in between the appliance bank and the wall when not in use. They had a new cat whom she called Luigi that jumped up on the folding table while Corrag sat there spooning gelatin and whipped cream into her mouth and Arthur's.
"Is he okay with that, dear? It's the special hyperfroth from that company, I forget its name, the doughboy."
"Pillsbury."
"Yes, from the Repho. We're getting all sorts of Repho goods nowadays. The cheap stuff is even cheaper than before. Somehow the good stuff is even more expensive. Of course for the majority life has always been hard, no matter who is running the show. But I like this hypercream. He seems to like it. His mouth reminds me of a neuralscape I saw once, when I was a lot younger. Do you like ice cream?"
"No, that's fine. We really need to get going, Mrs. Rosales. I appreciate this so much."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Your mother and father were so nice. Such nice people. Good people. I was so sorry to see them go. Where are they? Ricky and Alana. They were always a joy. And they had a daughter. I forget her name."
"That's me, Mrs. Rosales."
"Are you sure there wasn't another one. You can never truly be sure, dear."
"I'm pretty sure."
Mr. Rosales stood by the door with an absent look on his face.
"No. Don't go yet. Have another thing to eat."
"Why? You've been very kind to me."
"I must hold you here." He suddenly looked like he was winding down.
"Mr. Rosales. Have a seat. You look ill," said Corrag.
"They will be here soon."
"Who?"
Mr. Rosales did not say anything else. He took his wife by the arm and led her back into the kitchen. Corrag could hear them talking to each other. Mrs. Rosales kept repeating the question why.
"Why? Because that's what they require," bellowed Mr. Rosales. Corrag understood that he was speaking about the Augment. She and Arthur needed to get away. Just then she heard the sound of vehicles pulling up to the curb. She went th
rough the kitchen and yanked at the knob of the back door. Mr. Rosales walked over to stop her.
"Get away, Mr. Rosales. I don't appreciate what you've done." Her threat stopped him in his tracks and he sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. Mrs. Rosales was crying soundlessly.
Corrag got out the back door and felt her way along the back garden wall. She remembered there was a door there. She unlatched it and slipped away with her baby.
Corrag got back on the zipbike. Arthur was a good sport. He fell asleep before she even started the motor. She rode past her old house. There were soldiers swarming all over it and the Rosales residence. It struck her that the scene before her eyes would only ever be just a memory. It was the one possession that was truly hers. Not even Arthur, because he belonged to God. And there was nothing to do for it but take a final glance. The details would fade away in time, but the idea of that house contained all of herself in it, the receptacle of her earliest metamorphosis where she'd shed childhood like a skin.
Four hours later she and Arthur were idling in line at the Tijuana crossing. If they asked her to pull over she would try to get away into Tijuana and ditch the zipbike. It was dark. The customs agent pulled the mobile scanner over and she looked into it. She was still Sonia Pivak in the eyes anyway, and that still seemed to be okay. They were either being very canny or they had slipped up. There was no way of knowing which it was. Five hours of solid biking on Ruta Uno and after that she was in Rosaria, where the Coop had its greenhouse operation and where she knew she would find Alana and Ricky. She had been coming here for as long as she'd been alive for Ricky's surfing vacations.
There was a campground with popup campers and tents set up for the migrant workers who came from as far as Peru and Colombia to find work on the vast vegetable fields of the Cooperativa Popular. There were always surfers from all over. There was still a sign at the gate that had been made by Edmundstown VocAg classes featuring the Edmundstown Wildcat, a panther like creature adopted as a branding by the Coop.
She walked in a circuit among the cinder block structures and the more settled looking of the metal-sided campers. She looked for clues like laundry or a telltale flowerpot. But in the end, it was a voice, Alana's voice, admonishing her father for something. It was unmistakable. She couldn't hear the words until she got closer to the window.
"What could we do, Ricky? What could we do? Life goes on. Yes, on and on and you can choose. Choose. That's what I said. It's a choice. Of course it is."
Corrag felt like hugging herself, hugging the wind, the ocean beyond the beach, all of the expanse ahead and behind her. The world had filled again, and astonishingly it was Alana's front door. When it voice that had filled it. She knocked on the metal frame of the opened a crack she spoke.
"Hi, Mom. I love you."
"Corrag?"
Epilogue
The doctors at Xen Kai Matamoros Hospital had botched the operation to remove Ricky's augment. Without proper maintenance, Alana's had faded out on its own. But they'd had to cut into the cerebellum to remove his. In the evenings Corrag took him out through the surf and spoke to him while the waves rocked their boards, trying to get him to remember. Alana had a Nicaraguan friend, Mariela with a bad leg, who wasn't working in the fields, who took care of Arthur on the beach.
She stopped looking out past the beach, expecting a disaster.
The work was not its own reward. But she got used to the hours in the greenhouses training tomatoes to their trellises and setting out blocks of kale and arugula into their humps of corrugated soil. It was enough for the Cooperativa to grant her a pass to the social and cultural events. She thought she might try at some point to get on the comite that determined the calendar of opportunities for advancement, as they were called.
The UCB under Hans Kupertini actually seemed to be doing a good job consolidating popular support in the old Democravia. Ricky and Alana still got the PNS news on their emosponders, and there were several stories that featured the name of the up-and-coming minister of state, Benjamin Calder, who had been involved in the negotiations over Arctic rare earth mining between the UCB and the Homeland. He seemed to be having a stellar career.
There never was a push to round up the unaugmented people. Instead, there seemed to be a tacit acceptance of an evolutionary divergence, of a lingering commonality of interests that would prevent violence or turmoil or upset of the status quo. So they proceeded into uncertain times.
Arthur liked to see the rising humps of the great whales in the distance, migrating with their calves to their summer feeding grounds. It was one of his earliest memories. And he jumped and ran down the beach towards a man standing there. Ricky smiled as if in recognition.
"Don't you worry about your baby?" asked Alana.
"No. Not really. I'm thinking he's going somewhere good."
Corrag was at that place that she had sought in her desperate moments, of being called for something hopeful that made life worthwhile and dying seem a lesser evil.
Anthony Caplan is a former wire service journalist who has lived and worked on three continents. Currently he lives with his family in New Hampshire where he writes, keeps sheep and hopes soon to make his own cider.
Connect on Facebook
Connect on Twitter
Connect on Author Page - Oye Como Va
Read an excerpt of Savior - Book One of The Jonah Trilogy
The Victor's Heritage (The Jonah Trilogy Book 2) Page 28
