by Ron Collins
Silly.
Maine didn’t think quantum foam would ever replace the sun as a true source of energy. It was too hard to mine, for one thing. And too dangerous for that matter. It would have to be done out in space, and the combination of the CIO and humanity had long ago concluded that space travel was a bad investment in human life.
But he enjoyed thinking about it.
Mostly, though, as he approached the center tonight, he hoped Beatrice would be there. On days when he trained, Maine usually attended the learning group through Think Space, but he didn’t want to miss being with her.
He felt anxious, though.
Didn’t know how to tell her he was moving.
He shook his free arm to relieve the stress, then gripped the shoulder harness of his bag with the other hand. His stride was long, and for just a moment he returned to Coach H’s preaching from earlier in the day — picturing the swing of each leg and working to place his feet exactly where he wanted them to be. Precise. Perfect. The act cleared his mind and left him free to think about the words he would use.
He worried about how she might react.
What if she freaked out?
What if she didn’t?
Which was worse, dealing with a distraught girlfriend, or facing the fact that she could write him off without a second thought?
“It’s not fair.”
But no one was listening to him.
He stepped through the center’s glass panel doors and into the brightly lit hallway that led further in. The gang was there in the Haven room, as always, a place that was big enough for all of them and came equipped with a full suite of projectors and TS pools. He took a moment to activate his study log so Mercy North’s monitors would register him in, then moved on.
The gathering noted his entrance.
“Hey,” he said, scanning the room while he hefted the bag onto a tall table.
“She’s not here yet, dude.”
Calvin Jude, who the session knew as “Dr. Strangejude,” was standing in a holographic representation of a strand of frog DNA, in which he had marked several elements for playback. Calvin had been interested in this for a couple months now, and the map had probably a hundred segments marked and listed. He appeared to be getting ready to splice in a new sequence somewhere, presumably to let a simulation run to see how his predefined mutation might change the creature’s evolutionary path.
There was a reason for his nickname, after all.
“Who’s not here?” Maine replied.
“Don’t make me laugh. You know very well who isn’t here. We all heard about you and Beatrice at Stone Canyon, man. News gets around.”
Maine blushed.
He looked for Beatrice again, and he was still disappointed to not find her.
Maybe she wasn’t even coming.
Or maybe she would just step in through Think Space — which would mean he’d wasted his time coming down here in person.
“You okay?” Calvin said as Maine took a seat. Kaley was at the center of the room, preparing.
“Yeah.”
“You look down.”
“Hmmm.”
“Seriously, dude. You could block the sun. Wanna talk about it?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Don’t want to talk about what, baby?” Beatrice’s voice from behind him made Maine jump.
Crap.
Next, she would see that his palms were sweating.
He turned and immediately felt more anxiety at her closeness.
She was her same gorgeous self, wearing a loose-fitting blouse that fell off one shoulder to display an electric tattoo that snaked over her collarbone and up into the small of her neck. Her platform shoes accentuated her height. Her hair fell across the other shoulder. She smelled … amazing.
Words fell out of his mouth like lumps of clay.
“I don’t know how to say it, but I need to let you know that my parents lost their compartment. We’re moving away.”
“Oh, man.” She paused, twisting her lips to one side as the information settled. “That sucks.”
“I’m sorry.”
She put her hand on his arm. “Are you all right?”
He shrugged. “I don’t want to move.”
“Why not?”
The offhand way she said it hurt him more than he thought it would.
Why not? he thought. How about “because I don’t want to have to travel into town every day to practice,” or maybe try “I like this group really well,” or maybe just “I love you and can’t imagine not being with you?”
He swallowed his anger and settled for: “Everything I’m interested in is here.”
“What he means,” Calvin said with a grin, “is that it’s going to be a lot harder getting into your pants if he doesn’t live here.”
Maine’s cheeks grew warm. He held Beatrice’s hand and walked a distance away so they could talk more directly.
“I’m sorry about him,” he said. “That’s not what I meant.”
“So … you don’t want to get into my pants?”
“No … I mean … that’s …” Maine put his hand to his head. “I’m in trouble any way I answer that question, aren’t I?”
Her shrug didn’t seem like a definitive answer, but her expression was a mix of interest and amusement.
Maine’s pulse rose into his throat.
“Look,” he finally said. “You’ve got to think I’m the dumbest ass on the face of the planet. But all I can really say is that I want to be able to see you.”
She reached up and kissed him on the cheek.
“It’s okay.” She gave him a close-lipped smile. “I don’t think you’re an ass at all. And we’ve got Think Space. My aunt and uncle have been living on different sides of the globe for three years. I’m sure we can find time.”
“I was hoping for more than that.”
“That’s nice,” she said.
“I mean it,” he said, bringing his eyebrows together. “I want to be with you every day.”
He had expected her to agree with him — at least to that point, anyway. He’d wanted her to say that the physical was better. Or maybe to push him away. Or get angry. Or … well … to do something. That was what he loved about her, after all. The fire that seemed to surround her, even when she was just sitting still. Her passion. The way she took every moment for exactly what it could be.
Instead Beatrice simply said, “We can make it work either way.”
At least she looked glum.
“Maybe you’ll find another pod close by,” she added. “Or at least maybe we can move our sessions closer? And either way we can still meet here at the club sometimes.”
He took a big breath to help release tension.
“Between you and Coach H, I’d be on a tram for half of my life.”
He considered his next comments carefully.
Looking into her eyes then felt just as if he were standing at the edge of the cliff at the lake, looking into a bottom of nothing but rocky spikes. He most definitely didn’t want to tram both ways, but the words he’d been practicing ever since practice had ended seemed to stick in his mouth.
“I’ve been thinking about starting out on my own.”
“Leave your parents?”
“Yeah.”
He hoped the tone of his voice would come off as the kind of independent toughness that would draw a rise from her. She was a daredevil, after all. The idea of having a brash side was something he wanted to cultivate.
“I was wondering if maybe you might want to come with me?”
Beatrice made her lips into a thin line.
“We could make it, you know. On our own.”
“I don’t know if that’s very smart.”
He frowned again. “What do you mean?”
“Living on scraps?”
“We can figure something out.”
“Seriously, Maine. Kids on their own … I mean, you can’t order what you want u
ntil you’re eighteen. So really you just wind up sleeping in the communal centers.”
He didn’t say anything for several moments.
She was right, but he hadn’t seen it as a problem. Finding space in a community shelter wouldn’t be hard — though he understood some would find it less than appealing. He wasn’t, however, turning eighteen for eight months, and she was still a few weeks behind. The units were their only real choice. But of all the things Beatrice could have said to the idea of running away together, practical advice on living conditions was not what he would ever have predicted.
“Didn’t you hear what I just asked?”
“Yes, I heard you ask me to live with you.”
“Doesn’t that mean something?”
“Of course, it does. I’m just saying that life out on your own like that is hard.” She let her glance fall from his. “I hear the centers can get ugly.”
“They aren’t that bad.”
“They’re dirty, and the people get in your way.”
“It’s only eight months.”
“I’m sorry,” Beatrice said. “That would just be silly when we can just wait and do it in comfort.”
He pursed his lips. “The Beatrice I knew up till now would have at least considered it.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Is it wrong for me to be concerned about the place I sleep? Is it bad to think about our safety?”
He furrowed his brow again. This was wrong.
Beatrice seemed odd, standing there so passively, leaning back propped on a table’s edge. Her lanky arms were set back to brace herself, the points of her shoulders pressed upward.
He’d just told her he was leaving, and she was distant and more reserved than he’d ever seen her.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“I’m fine as silk,” she replied with a smile that might have been electric an hour ago.
But he didn’t believe her.
He put a TS invitation up for her, and she accepted.
“Hey,” he said as soon as she appeared.
From his space, he couldn’t get a full read on her, but even here he could sense something was wrong. Her pattern felt different.
The flavor of challenge was gone.
Her enjoyment of the unique had been dulled.
Her flair for the dramatic was buried under a thousand different streams.
In their place she felt merely stable.
Normal.
Suddenly Maine felt the Central Inspector as a lump in his throat.
If he let himself, he knew he could imagine an artificial escort in her Think Space — maybe dressed as a security agent, standard-issue blue pants and a golden shirt with epaulets striking off the shoulders.
She’d been cut.
Stripped of the elements that made her brazen, the things that made her who she really was. He was as sure of it as he was of the feel of air moving into and out of his lungs.
They’d been afraid of her.
The Beatrice he knew was gone.
The saddest part was that she didn’t even understand what she’d lost.
The Beatrice he knew the day before would think the idea of living on his own was fabulous. She might or might not want to join him, but her impetuous nature would have spurred him on, and she would have found it fun to talk about.
But this was not the Beatrice he’d known.
“So,” he said, “you wouldn’t think I was doing something cool if I took out on my own?”
His stomach dropped even before she responded.
“No, Maine. That would be a bad idea.”
“Come on, man!” a voice came from the middle of the room. “Kaley’s ready. If you lovebirds will come along, we’re going to start our discussion.”
“Sure,” Beatrice called out, taking Maine’s hand. “Come on, Maine, let’s go.”
He felt her grip and returned it. But it didn’t feel the same.
She stepped around him.
He followed her, clenching his jaws, trying to keep breathing, and trying to keep a tear from forming at the corner of his eye.
As he took his seat, an image flashed into his mind: Beatrice Diaz, spread in midair, her hair flying about her face, and her body crossing under a cloudless blue sky as if she would never, ever come down.
CHAPTER 13
Maine stayed on the tram past his usual stop, continuing to the outskirts of town, out in the no-man’s land east into the desert. It was the deep-dark of night, 11:49 by the time he arrived at the Covina stop, the last place the city trams ran.
His brain was tired.
To avoid thinking about Beatrice during the group, he had thrown himself into Kaley’s explanation of the quantum foam, and now he couldn’t keep from using what he had learned as a backdrop for how he felt about Beatrice. Energy in the vacuum of space, decaying into particles, and those particles and their anti-partners meeting and annihilating within the span of such small space-time units as to be impossible to detect.
Couplings.
Pairings.
Matings.
Mutual destruction that kept an infinity of worlds going.
He couldn’t help but think of Beatrice as one of those particles, exploding full of fire into his world, then, rather than being allowed to crash into him, being mined of her passion and left to fade.
He walked down Donovan Street, past card clubs and pharmaceutical lounges from which thick chords of music pounded. A housing complex lay ahead.
The night was cold now.
Maine headed for the running track here — his favorite track, his favorite place to come because they didn’t light it, and so he could run in darkness, run through the night under nothing but stars.
As tired as he was now, he needed it.
He hopped the fence with ease.
He sat on a hard bench and fished his running shoes from his athletic bag, hearing Coach H’s voice in the talk he gave the team before every season.
“It starts with your feet, people. Everything starts with the feet.”
Then he would proceed to show the runners how to get their socks properly positioned, how to roll them over toes so they wouldn’t bunch up, how to bring them down the foot, over the heel. Then how to loosen the shoe and slide it properly into place, ensuring that tightening the fasteners didn’t cause creases in the socks.
“I don’t want any whining or complaining about blisters,” Coach H would say. “Blisters are a sign of a poor craftsman.”
Maine went through the ritual of this process as if he were born to it.
He stripped off his jacket, then stood up.
The air was cold enough that it stung against his bare arms, and stung when he breathed it in. Anxious about followers, he glanced over his shoulder to the entry gate.
No one was there.
He pulled each foot up behind his leg to stretch his quads, then got to work on the hamstrings and his core. The arms came next. When he was done, he scanned the grounds again, finding himself still alone.
This time he laughed at himself.
“Phantom pressure,” he said out loud. “You’re getting paranoid.”
Until he’d met Beatrice, no one else had really cared about his insane need to feel the stretch of his legs. Other than Coach H, maybe. No one else paid attention when he described the feel of his heart pumping or the scour of air scrubbing the inside of his lungs. Beatrice had, though. She’d wanted to ride along. She’d wanted to know.
She’d wanted to know more, too.
Gone deeper.
“It’s dangerous to want to win so badly,” his mom had told him when he’d talked about racing. “You want something like that too bad and they’ll take it away from you.”
But Mom was wrong, wasn’t she?
If the need to win was all it took to bring the CIO down on anyone, he’d have been cut a long time ago. They didn’t care about the need to win if it didn’t come with something else.
Striving to win a race didn’t c
ause people to revolt, he thought.
The CIO would care about his yearning to get away from his family, though. They would note his request, and that his parents were still able to care for him. Is that what happened to Beatrice? Had she gotten too bold in her interest in flaunting boundaries? Too independent for her own good?
The idea pissed him off.
He thought about that as he jogged down the track.
He had no choice. He wanted to win. He wanted to be the best.
But what if it were him? What if they had left Beatrice alone, and instead had taken away his need to win, his desire to compete that he felt so deeply in his bones he couldn’t separate himself from it?
What would she have thought?
What would she have done?
Maybe he was too young to understand love, but all he could say for sure was that something inside him hurt, and he wished more than anything else that Beatrice was here to talk to about it.
He wanted to think she would have fought for him.
That she would have done something.
His pace picked up down the straight, then he leaned into the turn.
A tear streaked from his eye. His vision blurred, but he didn’t care.
The track was dark anyway.
He was home.
His legs pumped, his feet pounded the composite surface, his arms and legs punching space like a machine. Breathing came in through the nose, out through the mouth. His muscles corrected for the torsional swing of his pelvis that he and Coach H had worked on earlier this morning.
There, in the mist of his vision and with his body pressing to use every bit of energy, he felt a remnant of Beatrice, a freewheeling essence that blazed against his mind as clear and brilliant as the stars that blazed against the nighttime sky above him.
He came out of the corner, picking up speed as he headed down the long stretch of track ahead. His timer was running, but he paid it no attention.
He was running under the stars.
As he ran, the image of Beatrice faded, and it was like the stars themselves had gone out.
When Maine woke up, late the next day, the sky was as overcast as his mood. He slid out of bed and went to the kitchen, knowing he’d overslept, but almost not caring. He’d dreamed of Beatrice and woke up feeling unhappy because of it.
