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I can close my eyes and she
appears in my mind as she did the moment I first saw her: tiny,
fragile, with unnaturally pale skin and slanted chocolate eyes. Her
hair was white as the moon on a cloudless evening. It seemed, that
day, that her eyes were the only spot of color on her haggard little
face. She was seven, but she looked three.
And she acted like nothing we
had ever encountered before.
Or since.
We had three children and a
good life. We were not impulsive, but we did feel as if we had
something to give. Our home was large, and we had money; any child
would benefit from that.
It seemed to be for the
best.
It all started with the
brochures. We saw them first at an outdoor caf\xE9 near our home. We
were having lunch when we glimpsed floating dots of color, a
fleeting child’s face. Both my husband and I touched them only to
have the displays open before us:
The blank vista of the Moon,
the Earth over the horizon like a giant blue and white ball, a
looming presence, pristine and healthy and somehow guilt-ridden. The
Moon itself looked barren, as it always had, until one focused. And
then one saw the pockmarks, the shattered dome open to the stars. In
the corner of the first brochure I opened, at the very edge of the
reproduction, were blood-splotches. They were scattered on the
craters and boulders, and had left fist-sized holes in the dust. I
didn’t need to be told what had caused it. We saw the effects of
high velocity rifles in low gravity every time we downloaded the
news.
The brochures began with the
Moon, and ended with the faces of refugees: pallid, worn, defeated.
The passenger shuttles to Earth had pretty much stopped. At first,
those who could pay came here, but by the time we got our brochures,
Earth passage had changed. Only those with living relatives were
able to return. Living relatives who were willing to acknowledge the
relationship–and had official hard copy to prove it.
The rules were waived in the
case of children, of orphans and of underage war refuges. They were
allowed to come to Earth if their bodies could tolerate it, if they
were willing to be adopted, and if they were willing to renounce any
claims they had to Moon land.
They had to renounce the stars
in order to have a home.
We picked her up in Sioux
Falls, the nearest star shuttle stop and detention center to our
home. The shuttle stop was a desolate place. It was designed as an
embarkation point for political prisoners and for star soldiers. It
was built on the rolling prairie, a sprawling complex with laser
fences shimmering in the sunlight. Guards stood at every entrance,
and several hovered above. We were led, by men with laser rifles,
into the main compound, a building finished almost a century before,
made of concrete and steel, functional, cold, and ancient. Its halls
smelled musty. The concrete flaked, covering everything with a fine
gray dust.
Echea had flown in on a
previous shuttle. She had been in detox and sick bay; through
psychiatric exams and physical screenings. We did not know we would
get her until they called our name.
We met her in a concrete room
with no windows, shielded against the sun, shielded against the
world. The area had no furniture.
A door opened and a child
appeared.
Tiny, pale, fragile. Eyes as
big as the moon itself, and darker than the blackest night. She
stood in the center of the room, legs spread, arms crossed, as if
she were already angry at us.
Around us, through us, between
us, a computer voice resonated:
This is Echea. She is yours.
Please take her, and proceed through the doors to your left. The
waiting shuttle will take you to your preassigned
destination.
She didn’t move when she heard
the voice, although I started. My husband had already gone toward
her. He crouched and she glowered at him.
"I don’t need you," she
said.
"We don’t need you either," he
said. "But we want you."
The hard set to her chin eased,
just a bit. "Do you speak for her?" she asked, indicating
me.
"No," I said. I knew what she
wanted. She wanted reassurance early that she wouldn’t be entering a
private war zone as difficult and devastating as the one she left.
"I speak for myself. I’d like it if you came home with us,
Echea."
She stared at us both then, not
relinquishing power, not changing that forceful stance. "Why do you
want me?" she asked. "You don’t even know me."
"But we will," my husband
said.
"And then you’ll send me back,"
she said, her tone bitter. I heard the fear in it.
"You won’t go back," I said. "I
promise you that."
It was an easy promise to make.
None of the children, even if their adoptions did not work, returned
to the Moon.
A bell sounded overhead. They
had warned us about this, warned us that we would have to move when
we heard it.
"It’s time to leave," my
husband said. "Get your things."
Her first look was shock and
betrayal, quickly masked. I wasn’t even sure I had seen it. And then
she narrowed those lovely chocolate eyes. "I’m from the Moon," she
said with a sarcasm that was foreign to our natural daughters. "We
have no things."
What we knew of the Moon Wars
on Earth was fairly slim. The news vids were necessarily vague, and
I had never had the patience for a long lesson in Moon
history.
The shorthand for the Moon
situation was this: the Moon’s economic resources were scarce. Some
colonies, after several years of existence, were self-sufficient.
Others were not. The shipments from Earth, highly valuable, were
designated to specific places and often did not get there. Piracy,
theft, and murder occurred to gain the scarce resources. Sometimes
skirmishes broke out. A few times, the fighting escalated. Domes
were damaged, and in the worst of the fighting, two colonies were
destroyed.
At the time, I did not
understand the situation at all. I took at face value a cynical
comment from one of my professors: colonies always struggle for
dominance when they are away from the mother country. I had even
repeated it at parties.
I had not understood that it
oversimplified one of the most complex situations in our universe.
I also had not understood the
very human cost of such events.
That is, until I had
Echea.
***
We had ordered a private
shuttle for our return, but it wouldn’t have mattered if we were
walking down a public street. I attempted to engage Echea, but she
wouldn’t talk. She stared out the window instead, and became visibly
agitated as we approached home.
Lake Nebagamon is a small lake,
one of the hundreds that dot northern Wisconsin. It was a popular
resort for people from nearby Superior. Many had summer homes, some
dating from the late 1800s. In the early 2000s, the summer homes
were sold off. Most lots were bought by families who already owned
land there, and hated the crowding at Nebagamon. My family bought
fifteen lots. My husband’s bought ten. Our marriage, some joked, was
one of the most important local mergers of the day.
Sometimes I think that it was
no joke. It was expected. There is affection between us, of course,
and a certain warmth. But no real passion.
The passion I once shared with
another man–a boy actually–was so long ago that I remember it in
images, like a vid seen decades ago, or a painting made from someone
else’s life.
When my husband and I married,
we acted like an acquiring conglomerate. We tore down my family’s
summer home because it had no potential or historical value, and we
built onto my husband’s. The ancient house became an estate with a
grand lawn that rolled down to the muddy water. Evenings we sat on
the verandah and listened to the cicadas until full dark. Then we
stared at the stars and their reflections in our lake. Sometimes we
were blessed with the northern lights, but not too often.
This is the place we brought
Echea. A girl who had never really seen green grass or tall trees;
who had definitely never seen lakes or blue sky or Earth’s stars.
She had, in her brief time in North Dakota, seen what they
considered Earth–the brown dust, the fresh air. But her exposure had
been limited, and had not really included sunshine or nature
itself.
We did not really know how this
would affect her.
There were many things we did
not know.
Our girls were lined up on the
porch in age order: Kally, the twelve-year-old, and the tallest,
stood near the door. Susan, the middle child, stood next to her, and
Anne stood by herself near the porch. They were properly
stair-stepped, three years between them, a separation considered
optimal for more than a century now. We had followed the rules in
birthing them, as well as in raising them.
Echea was the only thing out of
the norm.
Anne, the courageous one,
approached us as we got off the shuttle. She was small for six, but
still bigger than Echea. Anne also blended our heritages
perfectly–my husband’s bright blue eyes and light hair with my dark
skin and exotic features. She would be our beauty some day,
something my husband claimed was unfair, since she also had the
brains.
"Hi," she said, standing in the
middle of the lawn. She wasn’t looking at us. She was looking at
Echea.
Echea stopped walking. She had
been slightly ahead of me. By stopping, she forced me to stop
too.
"I’m not like them," she said.
She was glaring at my daughters. "I don’t want to be."
"You don’t have to be," I said
softly.
"But you can be civil," my
husband said.
Echea frowned at him, and in
that moment, I think, their relationship was defined.
"I suppose you’re the pampered
baby," she said to Anne.
Anne grinned.
"That’s right," she said. "I
like it better than being the spoiled brat."
I held my breath. "Pampered
baby" wasn’t much different from "spoiled brat" and we all knew
it.
"Do you have a spoiled brat?"
Echea asked.
"No," Anne said.
Echea looked at the house, the
lawn, the lake, and whispered. "You do now."
Later, my husband told me he
heard this as a declaration. I heard it as awe. My daughters saw it
as something else entirely.
"I think you have to fight
Susan for it," Anne said.
"Do not!" Susan shouted from
the porch.
"See?" Anne said. Then she took
Echea’s hand and led her up the steps.
That first night we awakened to
screams. I came out of a deep sleep, already sitting up, ready to do
battle. At first, I thought my link was on; I had lulled myself to
sleep with a bedtime story. My link had an automatic shut-off, but I
sometimes forgot to set it. With all that had been happening the
last few days, I believed I might have done so again.
Then I noticed my husband
sitting up as well, groggily rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
The screams hadn’t stopped.
They were piercing, shrill. It took me a moment to recognize them.
Susan.
I was out of bed before I
realized it, running down the hall before I had time to grab my
robe. My nightgown flapped around me as I ran. My husband was right
behind me. I could hear his heavy steps on the hardwood
floor.
When we reached Susan’s room,
she was sitting on the window seat, sobbing. The light of the full
moon cut across the cushions and illuminated the rag rugs and the
old-fashioned pink spread.
I sat down beside her and put
my arm around her. Her frail shoulders were shaking, and her breath
was coming in short gasps. My husband crouched before her, taking
her hands in his.
"What happened, sweetheart?" I
asked.
"I–I–I saw him," she said. "His
face exploded, and the blood floated down."
"Were you watching vids again
before sleep?" my husband asked in a sympathetic tone. We both knew
if she said yes, in the morning she would get yet another lecture
about being careful about what she put in her brain before it
rested.
"No!" she wailed.
She apparently remembered those
early lectures too.
"Then what caused this?" I
asked.
"I don’t know! " she
said and burst into sobs again. I cradled her against me, but she
didn’t loosen her grip on my husband’s hands.
"After his blood floated, what
happened, baby?" my husband asked.
"Someone grabbed me," she said
against my gown. "And pulled me away from him. I didn’t want to
go."
"And then what?" My husband’s
voice was still soft.
"I woke up," she said, and her
breath hitched.
I put my hand on her head and
pulled her closer. "It’s all right, sweetheart," I said. "It was
just a dream."
"But it was so real,"
she said.
"You’re here now," my husband
said. "Right here. In your room. And we’re right here with
you."
"I don’t want to go back to
sleep," she said. "Do I have to?"
"Yes," I said, knowing it was
better for her to sleep than be afraid of it. "Tell you what,
though. I’ll program House to tell you a soothing story, with a bit
of music and maybe a few moving images. What do you say?"
"Dr. Seuss," she
said.
"That’s not always soothing,"
my husband said, obviously remembering how the House’s Cat in the
Hat program gave Kally a terror of anything feline.
"It is to Susan," I said
gently, reminding him. In her third year, she played Green Eggs
and Ham all night, the House’s voice droning on and on, making
me thankful that our room was at the opposite end of the
hall.
But she was three no longer,
and she hadn’t wanted Dr. Seuss for years. The dream had really
frightened her.
"If you have any more trouble,
baby," my husband said to her, "you come and get us, all
right?"
She nodded. He squeezed her
hands, then I picked her up and carried her to bed. My husband
pulled back the covers. Susan clung to me as I eased her down. "Will
I go back there if I close my eyes?" she asked.
"No," I said. "You’ll listen to
House and sleep deeply. And if you dream at all, it’ll be about nice
things, like sunshine on flowers, and the lake in
summertime."
"Promise?" she asked, her voice
quavering.
"Promise," I said. Then I
removed her hands from my neck and kissed each of them before
putting them on the coverlet. I kissed her forehead. My husband did
the same, and as we were leaving, she was ordering up the House
reading program.
As I pulled the door closed, I
saw the opening images of Green Eggs and Ham flicker across
the wall.
The next morning, everything
seemed fine. When I came down to breakfast, the chef had already
placed the food on the table, each dish on its own warming plate.
The scrambled eggs had the slightly runny look that indicated they
had sat more than an hour–not even the latest design in warming
plates could stop that. In addition, there was French toast, and
Susan’s favorites, waffles. The scent of fresh blueberry muffins
floated over it all, and made me smile. The household staff had gone
to great lengths to make Echea feel welcome.
My husband was already in his
usual spot, e-conferencing while he sipped his coffee and broke a
muffin apart with his fingers. His plate, showing the remains of
eggs and ham, was pushed off to the side.
"Morning," I said as I slipped
into my usual place on the other side of the table. It was made of
oak and had been in my family since 1851, when my mother’s people
brought it over from Europe as a wedding present for my many-great
grandparents. The housekeeper kept it polished to a shine, and she
only used linen placemats to protect it from the effects of food.
My husband acknowledged me with
a blueberry-stained hand as laughter made me look up. Kally came in,
her arm around Susan. Susan still didn’t look herself. She had deep
circles under her eyes, which meant that Green Eggs and Ham
hadn’t quite done the trick. She was too old to come get us–I had
known that when we left her last night–but I hoped she hadn’t spent
the rest of the night listening to House, trying to find comfort in
artificial voices and imagery.
The girls were still smiling
when they saw me.
"Something funny?" I
asked
"Echea," Kally said. "Did you
know someone owned her dress before she did?"
No, I hadn’t known that, but it
didn’t surprise me. My daughters, on the other hand, had owned only
the best. Sometimes their knowledge of life–or lack thereof–shocked
me.
"It’s not an unusual way for
people to save money," I said. "But it’ll be the last pre-owned
dress she’ll have."
Mom? It was Anne, e-mailing me directly. The
instant prompt appeared before my left eye. Can you come up
here?
I blinked the message away,
then sighed and pushed back my chair. I should have known the girls
would do something that first morning. And the laughter should have
prepared me.
"Remember," I said as I stood.
"Only one main course. No matter what your father says."
"Ma!" Kally said.
"I mean it," I said, then
hurried up the stairs. I didn’t have to check where Anne was. She
had sent me an image along with the e-mail–the door to Echea’s
room.
As I got closer, I heard Anne’s
voice.
"…didn’t mean it. They’re old
poops."
"Poop" was Anne’s worst word,
at least so far. And when she used it, she put all so much emphasis
on it the word became an epithet.
"It’s my dress," Echea said.
She sounded calm and contained, but I thought there was a raggedness
to her voice that hadn’t been there the day before. "It’s all I
have."
At that moment, I entered the
room. Anne was on the bed, which had been carefully made up. If I
hadn’t tucked Echea in the night before, I never would have thought
she had slept there.
Echea was standing near her
window seat, gazing at the lawn as if she didn’t dare let it out of
her sight.
"Actually," I said, keeping my
voice light. "You have an entire closet full of clothes."
Thanks, Mom, Anne sent me.
"Those clothes are yours,"
Echea said.
"We’ve adopted you," I said.
"What’s ours is yours."
"You don’t get it," she said.
"This dress is mine. It’s all I have."
She had her arms wrapped around
it, her hands gripping it as if we were going to take it
away.
"I know," I said softly. "I
know, sweetie-baby. You can keep it. We’re not trying to take it
away from you."
"They said you
would."
"Who?" I asked, with a sinking
feeling. I already knew who. My other two daughters. "Kally and
Susan?"
She nodded.
"Well, they’re wrong," I said.
"My husband and I make the rules in this house. I will never take
away something of yours. I promise."
"Promise?" she
whispered.
"Promise," I said. "Now how
about breakfast?"
She looked at Anne for
confirmation, and I wanted to hug my youngest daughter. She had
already decided to care for Echea, to ally with her, to make Echea’s
entrance into the household easier.
I was so proud of
her.
"Breakfast," Anne said, and I
heard a tone in her voice I’d never heard before. "It’s the first
meal of the day."
The government had fed the
children standard nutrition supplements, in beverage form. Echea
hadn’t taken a meal on Earth until she’d joined us.
"You name your meals?" she
asked Anne. "You have that many of them?" Then she put a hand over
her mouth, as if she were surprised she had let the questions
out.
"Three of them," I said, trying
to sound normal. Instead I felt defensive, as if we had too much.
"We only have three of them."
The second night, we had no
disturbances. By the third, we had developed a routine. I spent time
with my girls, and then I went into Echea’s room. She didn’t like
House or House’s stories. House’s voice, no matter how I programmed
it, scared her. It made me wonder how we were going to link her when
the time came. If she found House intrusive, imagine how she would
find the constant barrage of information services, of instant e-mail
scrolling across her eyes, or sudden images appearing inside her
head. She was almost past the age where a child adapted easily to a
link. We had to calm her quickly or risk her suffering a
disadvantage for the rest of her life.
Perhaps it was the voice that
upset her. The reason links made sound optional was because too many
people had had trouble distinguishing the voices inside their head.
Perhaps Echea would be one of them.
It was time to find
out.
I had yet to broach the topic
with my husband. He seemed to have cooled toward Echea immediately.
He thought Echea abnormal because she wasn’t like our girls. I
reminded him that Echea hadn’t had the advantages, to which he
responded that she had the advantages now. He felt that since
her life had changed, she should change.
Somehow I didn’t think it
worked like that.
It was on the second night that
I realized she was terrified of going to sleep. She kept me as long
as she could, and when I finally left, she asked to keep the lights
on.
House said she had them on all
night, although the computer clocked her even breathing starting at
2:47 a.m.
On the third night, she asked
me questions. Simple ones, like the one about breakfast, and I
answered them without my previous defensiveness. I held my emotions
back, my shock that a child would have to ask what that pleasant
ache was in her stomach after meals ("You’re full, Echea. That’s
your stomach telling you it’s happy.") or why we insisted on bathing
at least once a day ("People stink if they don’t bathe often, Echea.
Haven’t you noticed?"). She asked the questions with her eyes
averted, and her hands clenched against the coverlet. She knew that
she should know the answers, she knew better than to ask my older
two daughters or my husband, and she tried ever so hard to be
sophisticated.
Already, the girls had
humiliated her more than once. The dress incident had blossomed into
an obsession with them, and they taunted her about her unwillingness
to attach to anything. She wouldn’t even claim a place at the dining
room table. She seemed convinced that we would toss her out at the
first chance.
On the fourth night, she
addressed that fear. Her question came at me sideways, her body more
rigid than usual.
"If I break something," she
asked, "what will happen?"
I resisted the urge to ask what
she had broken. I knew she hadn’t broken anything. House would have
told me, even if the girls hadn’t.
"Echea," I said, sitting on the
edge of her bed, "are you afraid that you’ll do something which will
force us to get rid of you?"
She flinched as if I had struck
her, then she slid down against the coverlet. The material was
twisted in her hands, and her lower jaw was working even before she
spoke.
"Yes," she
whispered.
"Didn’t they explain this to
you before they brought you here?" I asked.
"They said nothing." That harsh
tone was back in her voice, the tone I hadn’t heard since that very
first day, her very first comment.
I leaned forward and, for the
first time, took one of those clenched fists into my hands. I felt
the sharp knuckles against my palms, and the softness of the fabric
brushing my skin.
"Echea," I said. "When we
adopted you, we made you our child by law. We cannot get rid of you.
No matter what. It is illegal for us to do so."
"People do illegal things," she
whispered.
"When it benefits them," I
said. "Losing you will not benefit us."
"You’re saying that to be
kind," she said.
I shook my head. The real
answer was harsh, harsher than I wanted to state, but I could not
leave it at this. She would not believe me. She would think I was
trying to ease her mind. I was, but not through polite
lies.
"No," I said. "The agreement we
signed is legally binding. If we treat you as anything less than a
member of our family, we not only lose you, we lose our other
daughters as well."
I was particularly proud of
adding the word "other." I suspected that, if my husband had been
having this conversation with her, that he would have forgotten to
add it.
"You would?" she
asked.
"Yes," I said.
"This is true?" she
asked.
"True," I said. "I can download
the agreement and its ramifications for you in the morning. House
can read you the standard agreement–the one everyone must
sign–tonight if you like."
She shook her head, and pushed
her hands harder into mine. "Could you–could you answer me one
thing?" she asked.
"Anything," I said.
"I don’t have to
leave?"
"Not ever," I said.
She frowned. "Even if you
die?"
"Even if we die," I said.
"You’ll inherit, just like the other girls."
My stomach knotted as I spoke.
I had never mentioned the money to our own children. I figured they
knew. And now I was telling Echea who was, for all intents and
purposes, still a stranger.
And an unknown one at
that.
I made myself smile, made the
next words come out lightly. "I suspect there are provisions against
killing us in our beds."
Her eyes widened, then
instantly filled with tears. "I would never do that," she said.
And I believed her.
As she grew more comfortable
with me, she told me about her previous life. She spoke of it only
in passing, as if the things that happened before no longer mattered
to her. But in the very flatness with which she told them, I could
sense deep emotions churning beneath the surface.
The stories she told were
hair-raising. She had not, as I had assumed, been orphaned as an
infant. She had spent most of her life with a family member who had
died, and then she had been brought to Earth. Somehow, I had
believed that she had grown up in an orphanage like the ones from
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ones Dickens wrote
about, and the famous pioneer filmmakers had made Flats about. I had
not realized that those places did not exist on the Moon. Either
children were chosen for adoption, or they were left to their own
devices, to survive on their own if they could.
Until she had moved in with us,
she had never slept in a bed. She did not know it was possible to
grow food by planting it, although she had heard rumors of such
miracles.
She did not know that people
could accept her for what she was, instead of what she could do for
them.
My husband said that she was
playing on my sympathies so that I would never let her
go.
But I wouldn’t have let her go
anyway. I had signed the documents and made the verbal promise. And
I cared for her. I would never let her go, any more than I would let
a child of my flesh go.
I hoped, at one point, that he
would feel the same.
As the weeks progressed, I was
able to focus on Echea’s less immediate needs. She was beginning to
use House–her initial objection to it had been based on something
that happened on the Moon, something she never fully explained–but
House could not teach her everything. Anne introduced her to
reading, and often Echea would read to herself. She caught on
quickly, and I was surprised that she had not learned in her school
on the Moon, until someone told me that most Moon colonies had no
schools. The children were home-taught, which worked only for
children with stable homes.
Anne also showed her how to
program House to read things Echea did not understand. Echea made
use of that as well. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would check
on the girls. Often I would have to open Echea’s door, and turn off
House myself. Echea would fall asleep to the drone of a deep male
voice. She never used the vids. She simply liked the words, she
said, and she would listen to them endlessly, as if she couldn’t get
enough.
I downloaded information on
child development and learning curves, and it was as I remembered. A
child who did not link before the age of ten was significantly
behind her peers in all things. If she did not link before the age
of twenty, she would never be able to function at an adult level in
modern society.
Echea’s link would be her first
step into the world that my daughters already knew, the Earth
culture denied so many who had fled to the Moon.
After a bit of hesitation, I
made an appointment with Ronald Caro, our Interface
Physician.
Through force of habit, I did
not tell my husband.
I had known my husband all my
life, and our match was assumed from the beginning. We had a warm
and comfortable relationship, much better than many among my peers.
I had always liked my husband, and had always admired the way he
worked his way around each obstacle life presented him.
One of those obstacles was
Ronald Caro. When he arrived in St. Paul, after getting all his
degrees and licenses and awards, Ronald Caro contacted me. He had
known that my daughter Kally was in need of a link, and he offered
to be the one to do it.
I would have turned him down,
but my husband, always practical, checked on his
credentials.
"How sad," my husband had said.
"He’s become one of the best Interface Physicians in the
country."
I hadn’t thought it sad. I
hadn’t thought it anything at all except inconvenient. My family had
forbidden me to see Ronald Caro when I was sixteen, and I had
disobeyed them.
All girls, particularly
home-schooled ones, have on-line romances. Some progress to vid
conferencing and virtual sex. Only a handful progress to actual
physical contact. And of those that do, only a small fraction
survive.
At sixteen, I ran away from
home to be with Ronald Caro. He had been sixteen too, and gorgeous,
if the remaining snapshot in my image memory were any indication. I
thought I loved him. My father, who had been monitoring my e-mail,
sent two police officers and his personal assistant to bring me
home.
The resulting disgrace made me
so ill that I could not get out of bed for six months. My
then-future husband visited me each and every day of those six
months, and it is from that period that most of my memories of him
were formed. I was glad to have him; my father, who had been quite
close to me, rarely spoke to me after I ran away with Ronald, and
treated me as a stranger.
When Ronald reappeared in the
Northland long after I had married, my husband showed his forgiving
nature. He knew Ronald Caro was no longer a threat to us. He proved
it by letting me take the short shuttle hop to the Twin Cities to
have Kally linked.
Ronald did not act improperly
toward me then or thereafter, although he often looked at me with a
sadness I did not reciprocate. My husband was relieved. He always
insisted on having the best, and because my husband was squeamish
about brain work, particularly that which required chips, lasers,
and remote placement devices, he preferred to let me handle the
children’s interface needs.
Even though I no longer wanted
it, I still had a personal relationship with Ronald Caro. He did not
treat me as a patient, or as the mother of his patients, but as a
friend.
Nothing more.
Even my husband knew
that.
Still, the afternoon I made the
appointment, I went into our bedroom, made certain my husband was in
his office, and closed the door. Then I used the link to send a
message to Ronald.
Instantly his response flashed
across my left eye.
Are you all
right? He sent, as he
always did, as if he expected something terrible to have happened to
me during our most recent silence.
Fine, I sent back, disliking the personal
questions.
And the
girls?
Fine also.
So, you linked to
chat? Again, as he
always did.
And I responded as I always
did. No. I need to make an appointment for Echea.
The Moon
Child?
I smiled. Ronald was the only
person I knew, besides my husband, who didn’t think we were insane
for taking on a child not our own. But I felt that we could, and
because we could, and because so many were suffering, we should.
My husband probably had his own
reasons. We never really discussed them, beyond that first
day.
The Moon
Child, I responded.
Echea.
Pretty name.
Pretty girl.
There was a silence, as if he
didn’t know how to respond to that. He had always been silent about
my children. They were links he could not form, links to my husband
that could not be broken, links that Ronald and I could never have.
She has no
interface, I sent into
that silence.
Not at all?
No.
Did they tell you anything
about her?
Only that she’d been
orphaned. You know, the standard stuff. I felt odd, sending that. I had asked
for information, of course, at every step. And my husband had. And
when we compared notes, I learned that each time we had been told
the same thing–that we had asked for a child, and we would get one,
and that child’s life would start fresh with us. The past did not
matter.
The present did.
How old is
she?
Seven.
Hmmm. The procedure won’t be
involved, but there might be some dislocation. She’s been alone in
her head all this time. Is she stable enough for the
change?
I was genuinely perplexed. I
had never encountered an unlinked child, let alone lived with one. I
didn’t know what "stable" meant in that context.
My silence had apparently been
answer enough.
I’ll do an
exam, he sent. Don’t
worry.
Good. I got ready to terminate the
conversation.
You sure everything’s all
right there? he
sent.
It’s as right as it always
is, I sent, and then
severed the connection.
That night, I dreamed. It was
an odd dream because it felt like a virtual reality vid, complete
with emotions and all the five senses. But it had the distance of VR
too–that strange sense that the experience was not mine.
I dreamed I was on a dirty,
dusty street. The air was thin and dry. I had never felt air like
this. It tasted recycled, and it seemed to suck the moisture from my
skin. It wasn’t hot, but it wasn’t cold either. I wore a ripped
shirt and ragged pants, and my shoes were boots made of a light
material I had never felt before. Walking was easy and precarious at
the same time. I felt lighter than ever, as if with one wrong
gesture I would float.
My body moved easily in this
strange atmosphere, as if it were used to it. I had felt something
like it before: when my husband and I had gone to the Museum of
Science and Technology in Chicago on our honeymoon. We explored the
Moon exhibit, and felt firsthand what it was like to be in a colony
environment.
Only that had been
clean.
This wasn’t.
The buildings were white
plastic, covered with a filmy grit and pockmarked with time and use.
The dirt on the ground seemed to get on everything, but I knew, as
well as I knew how to walk in this imperfect gravity, that there
wasn’t enough money to pave the roads.
The light above was artificial,
built into the dome itself. If I looked up, I could see the dome and
the light, and if I squinted, I could see beyond to the darkness
that was the unprotected atmosphere. It made me feel as if I were in
a lighted glass porch on a starless night. Open, and vulnerable, and
terrified, more because I couldn’t see what was beyond than because
I could.
People crowded the roadway and
huddled near the plastic buildings. The buildings were domed too.
Pre-fab, shipped up decades ago when Earth had hopes for the
colonies. Now there were no more shipments, at least not here. We
had heard that there were shipments coming to Colony Russia and
Colony Europe, but no one confirmed the rumors. I was in Colony
London, a bastard colony made by refugees and dissidents from Colony
Europe. For a while, we had stolen their supply ships. Now, it
seemed, they had stolen them back.
A man took my arm. I smiled up
at him. His face was my father’s face, a face I hadn’t seen since I
was twenty-five. Only something had altered it terribly. He was
younger than I had ever remembered him. He was too thin and his skin
filthy with dust. He smiled back at me, three teeth missing, lost to
malnutrition, the rest blackened and about to go. In the past few
days the whites of his eyes had turned yellow, and a strange mucus
came from his nose. I wanted him to see the colony’s medical
facility or at least pay for an autodoc, but we had no credit, no
means to pay at all.
It would have to wait until we
found something.
"I think I found us free
passage to Colony Latina," he said. His breath whistled through the
gaps in his teeth. I had learned long ago to be far away from his
mouth. The stench could be overpowering. "But you’ll have to do them
a job."
A job. I sighed. He had
promised no more. But that had been months ago. The credits had run
out, and he had gotten sicker.
"A big job?" I
asked.
He didn’t meet my gaze. "Might
be."
"Dad–"
"Honey, we gotta use what we
got."
It might have been his motto.
We gotta use what we got. I’d heard it all my life. He’d come
from Earth, he’d said, in one of the last free ships. Some of the
others we knew said there were no free ships except for parolees,
and I often wondered if he had come on one of those. His morals were
certainly slippery enough.
I don’t remember my mother. I’m
not even sure I had one. I’d seen more than one adult buy an infant,
and then proceed to exploit it for gain. It wouldn’t have been
beyond him.
But he loved me. That much was
clear.
And I adored him.
I’d have done the job just
because he’d asked it.
I’d done it before.
The last job was how we’d
gotten here. I’d been younger then and I hadn’t completely
understood.
But I’d understood when we were
done.
And I’d hated
myself.
"Isn’t there another way?" I
found myself asking.
He put his hand on the back of
my head, propelling me forward. "You know better," he said. "There’s
nothing here for us."
"There might not be anything in
Colony Latina, either."
"They’re getting shipments from
the U.N. Seems they vowed to negotiate a peace."
"Then everyone will want to
go."
"But not everyone can," he
said. "We can." He touched his pocket. I saw the bulge of his credit
slip. "If you do the job."
It had been easier when I
didn’t know. When doing a job meant just that. When I didn’t have
other things to consider. After the first job, my father asked where
I had gotten the morals. He said I hadn’t inherited them from him,
and I hadn’t. I knew that. I suggested maybe Mother, and he had
laughed, saying no mother who gave birth to me had morals
either.
"Don’t think about it, honey,"
he’d said. "Just do."
Just do. I opened my mouth–to
say what, I don’t know–and felt hot liquid splatter me. An exit
wound had opened in his chest, spraying his blood all around. People
screamed and backed away. I screamed. I didn’t see where the shot
had come from, only that it had come.
The blood moved slowly, more
slowly than I would have expected.
He fell forward and I knew I
wouldn’t be able to move him, I wouldn’t be able to grab the credit
slip, wouldn’t be able to get to Colony Latina, wouldn’t have to do
the job.
Faces, unbloodied faces,
appeared around me.
They hadn’t killed him for the
slip.
I turned and ran, as he once
told me to do, ran as fast as I could, blasting as I went, watching
people duck or cover their ears or wrap their arms around their
heads.
I ran until I saw the
sign.
The tiny prefab with the Red
Crescent painted on its door, the Red Cross on its windows. I
stopped blasting and tumbled inside, bloody, terrified, and
completely alone.
I woke up to find my husband’s
arms around me, my head buried in his shoulder. He was rocking me as
if I were one of the girls, murmuring in my ear, cradling me and
making me feel safe. I was crying and shaking, my throat raw with
tears or with the aftereffects of screams.
Our door was shut and locked,
something that we only did when we were amorous. He must have had
House do it, so no one would walk in on us.
He stroked my hair, wiped the
tears from my face. "You should leave your link on at night," he
said tenderly. "I could have manipulated the dream, made it into
something pleasant."
We used to do that for each
other when we were first married. It had been a way to mesh our
different sexual needs, a way to discover each other’s thoughts and
desires.
We hadn’t done it in a long,
long time.
"Do you want to tell me about
it?" he asked.
So I did.
He buried his face in my hair.
It had been a long time since he had done that, too, since he had
shown that kind of vulnerability with me.
"It’s Echea," he
said.
"I know," I said. That much was
obvious. I had been thinking about her so much that she had worked
her way into my dreams.
"No," he said. "It’s nothing to
be calm about." He sat up, kept his hand on me, and peered into my
face. "First Susan, then you. It’s like she’s a poison that’s
infecting my family."
The moment of closeness
shattered. I didn’t pull away from him, but it took great control
not to. "She’s our child."
"No," he said. "She’s someone
else’s child, and she’s disrupting our household."
"Babies disrupt
households. It took a while, but you accepted that."
"And if Echea had come to us as
a baby, I would have accepted her. But she didn’t. She has problems
that we did not expect."
"The documents we signed said
that we must treat those problems as our own."
His grip on my shoulder grew
tighter. He probably didn’t realize he was doing it. "They also said
that the child had been inspected and was guaranteed illness
free."
"You think some kind of illness
is causing these dreams? That they’re being passed from Echea to us
like a virus?"
"Aren’t they?" he asked. "Susan
dreamed of a man who died. Someone whom she didn’t want to go. Then
‘they’ pulled her away from him. You dream of your father’s
death–"
"They’re different," I said.
"Susan dreamed of a man’s face exploding, and being captured. I
dreamed of a man being shot, and of running away."
"But those are just
details."
"Dream details," I said.
"We’ve all been talking to Echea. I’m sure that some of her memories
have woven their way into our dreams, just as our daily experiences
do, or the vids we’ve seen. It’s not that unusual."
"There were no night terrors in
this household until she came," he said.
"And no one had gone through
any trauma until she arrived, either." I pulled away from him now.
"What we’ve gone through is small compared to her. Your parents’
deaths, mine, the birth of the girls, a few bad investments, these
things are all minor. We still live in the house you were born in.
We swim in the lake of our childhood. We have grown wealthier. We
have wonderful daughters. That’s why we took Echea."
"To learn trauma?"
"No," I said. "Because we
could take her, and so many others can’t."
He ran a hand through his
thinning hair. "But I don’t want trauma in this house. I don’t want
to be disturbed any more. She’s not our child. Let’s let her become
someone else’s problem."
I sighed. "If we do that, we’ll
still have trauma. The government will sue. We’ll have legal
bills up to our eyeballs. We did sign documents covering these
things."
"They said if the child was
defective, we could send her back."
I shook my head. "And we signed
even more documents that said she was fine. We waived that
right."
He bowed his head. Small
strands of gray circled his crown. I had never noticed them
before.
"I don’t want her here," he
said.
I put a hand on his. He had
felt that way about Kally, early on. He had hated the way an infant
disrupted our routine. He had hated the midnight feedings, had tried
to get me to hire a wet nurse, and then a nanny. He had wanted
someone else to raise our children because they inconvenienced
him.
And yet the pregnancies had
been his idea, just like Echea had been. He would get enthusiastic,
and then when reality settled in, he would forget the initial
impulse.
In the old days we had
compromised. No wet nurse, but a nanny. His sleep undisturbed, but
mine disrupted. My choice, not his. As the girls got older, he found
his own ways to delight in them.
"You haven’t spent any time
with her," I said. "Get to know her. See what she’s really like.
She’s a delightful child. You’ll see."
He shook his head. "I don’t
want nightmares," he said, but I heard capitulation in his
voice.
"I’ll leave my interface on at
night," I said. "We can even link when we sleep and manipulate each
other’s dreams."
He raised his head, smiling,
suddenly looking boyish, like the man who proposed to me, all those
years ago. "Like old times," he said.
I smiled back, irritation gone.
"Just like old times," I said.
The nanny had offered to take
Echea to Ronald’s, but I insisted, even though the thought of seeing
him so close to a comfortable intimacy with my husband made me
uneasy. Ronald’s main offices were over fifteen minutes away by
shuttle. He was in a decade-old office park near the Mississippi,
not too far from St. Paul’s new capitol building. Ronald’s building
was all glass on the river side. It stood on stilts–the Mississippi
had flooded abominably in ’45, and the city still hadn’t recovered
from the shock–and to get to the main entrance, visitors needed a
lift code. Ronald had given me one when I made the
appointment.
Echea had been silent during
the entire trip. The shuttle had terrified her, and it didn’t take
long to figure out why. Each time she had traveled by shuttle, she
had gone to a new home. I reassured her that would not happen this
time, but I could tell she thought I lied.
When she saw the building, she
grabbed my hand.
"I’ll be good," she
whispered.
"You’ve been fine so far," I
said, wishing my husband could see her now. For all his demonizing,
he failed to realize she was just a little girl.
"Don’t leave me here."
"I don’t plan to," I
said.
The lift was a small glass
enclosure with voice controls. When I spoke the code, it rose on air
jets to the fifth floor and docked, just like a shuttle. It was
designed to work no matter what the weather, no matter what the
conditions on the ground.
Echea was not amused. Her grip
on my hand grew so tight that it cut off the circulation to my
fingers.
We docked at the main entrance.
The building’s door was open, apparently on the theory that anyone
who knew the code was invited. A secretary sat behind an antique
wood desk that was dark and polished until it shone. He had a
blotter in the center of the desk, a pen and inkwell beside it, and
a single sheet of paper on top. I suspected that he did most of his
work through his link, but the illusion worked. It made me feel as
if I had slipped into a place wealthy enough to use paper, wealthy
enough to waste wood on a desk.
"We’re here to see Dr. Caro," I
said as Echea and I entered.
"The end of the hall to your
right," the secretary said, even though the directions were
unnecessary. I had been that way dozens of times.
Echea hadn’t, though. She moved
through the building as if it were a wonder, never letting go of my
hand. She seemed to remain convinced that I would leave her there,
but her fear did not diminish her curiosity. Everything was strange.
I suppose it had to be, compared to the Moon where space–with
oxygen–was always at a premium. To waste so much area on an entrance
wouldn’t merely be a luxury there. It would be criminal.
We walked across the wood
floors past several closed doors until we reached Ronald’s offices.
The secretary had warned someone because the doors swung open.
Usually I had to use the small bell to the side, another
old-fashioned affectation.
The interior of his offices was
comfortable. They were done in blue, the color of calm he once told
me, with thick easy chairs and pillowed couches. A children’s area
was off to the side, filled with blocks and soft toys and a few
dolls. The bulk of Ronald’s clients were toddlers, and the play area
reflected that.
A young man in a blue worksuit
appeared at one of the doors, and called my name. Echea clutched my
hand tighter. He noticed her and smiled.
"Room B," he said.
I liked Room B. It was
familiar. All three of my girls had done their post-interface work
in Room B. I had only been in the other rooms once, and had felt
less comfortable.
It was a good omen, to bring
Echea to such a safe place.
I made my way down the hall,
Echea in tow, without the man’s guidance. The door to Room B was
open. Ronald had not changed it. It still had the fainting couch,
the work unit recessed into the wall, the reclining rockers. I had
slept in one of those rockers as Kally had gone through her most
rigorous testing.
I had been pregnant with Susan
at the time.
I eased Echea inside and then
pulled the door closed behind us. Ronald came through the back
door–he must have been waiting for us–and Echea jumped. Her grip on
my hand grew so tight that I thought she might break one of my
fingers. I smiled at her and did not pull my hand away.
Ronald looked nice. He was too
slim, as always, and his blond hair flopped against his brow. It
needed a cut. He wore a silver silk shirt and matching pants, and
even though they were a few years out of style, they looked sharp
against his brown skin.
Ronald was good with children.
He smiled at her first, and then took a stool and wheeled it toward
us so that he would be at her eye level.
"Echea," he said. "Pretty
name."
And a pretty
child, he sent, just
for me.
She said nothing. The sullen
expression she had had when we met her had returned.
"Are you afraid of me?" he
asked.
"I don’t want to go with you,"
she said.
"Where do you think I’m taking
you?"
"Away from here. Away from–"
she held up my hand, clasped in her small one. At that moment it
became clear to me. She had no word for what we were to her. She
didn’t want to use the word "family," perhaps because she might lose
us.
"Your mother–" he said slowly
and as he did he sent Right? to me.
Right, I responded.
"–brought you here for a
check-up. Have you seen a doctor since you’ve come to
Earth?"
"At the center," she
said.
"And was everything all
right?"
"If it wasn’t, they’d have sent
me back."
He leaned his elbows on his
knees, clasping his hands and placing them under his chin. His eyes,
a silver that matched the suit, were soft.
"Are you afraid I’m going to
find something?" he asked.
"No," she said.
"But you’re afraid I’m going to
send you back."
"Not everybody likes me," she
said. "Not everybody wants me. They said, when they brought me to
Earth, that the whole family had to like me, that I had to behave or
I’d be sent back."
Is this
true? he asked
me.
I don’t know. I was shocked. I had known nothing of
this.
Does the family dislike
her?
She’s new. A disruption.
That’ll change.
He glanced at me over her head,
but sent nothing else. His look was enough. He didn’t believe they’d
change, any more than Echea would.
"Have you behaved?" he asked
softly.
She glanced at me. I nodded
almost imperceptibly. She looked back at him. "I’ve tried," she
said.
He touched her then, his long
delicate fingers tucking a strand of her pale hair behind her ear.
She leaned into his fingers as if she’d been longing for
touch.
She’s more like
you, he told me,
than any of your own girls.
I did not respond. Kally looked
just like me, and Susan and Anne both favored me as well. There was
nothing of me in Echea. Only a bond that had formed when I first saw
her, all those weeks before.
Reassure
her, he
sent.
I have been.
Do it again.
"Echea," I said, and she
started as if she had forgotten I was there. "Dr. Caro is telling
you the truth. You’re just here for an examination. No matter how it
turns out, you’ll still be coming home with me. Remember my
promise?"
She nodded, eyes
wide.
"I always keep my promises," I
said.
Do you? Ronald asked. He was staring at me over
Echea’s shoulder.
I shivered, wondering what
promise I had forgotten.
Always, I told him.
The edge of his lips turned up
in a smile, but there was no mirth in it.
"Echea," he said. "It’s my
normal practice to work alone with my patient, but I’ll bet you want
your mother to stay."
She nodded. I could almost feel
the desperation in the move.
"All right," he said. "You’ll
have to move to the couch."
He scooted his chair toward it.
"It’s called a fainting couch,"
he said. "Do you know why?"
She let go of my hand and
stood. When he asked the question, she looked at me as if I would
supply her with the answer. I shrugged.
"No," she whispered. She
followed him hesitantly, not the little girl I knew around the
house.
"Because almost two hundred
years ago when these were fashionable, women fainted a
lot."
"They did not," Echea
said.
"Oh, but they did," Ronald
said. "And do you know why?"
She shook her small head. With
this idle chatter he had managed to ease her passage toward the
couch.
"Because they wore
undergarments so tight that they often couldn’t breathe right. And
if a person can’t breathe right, she’ll faint."
"That’s silly."
"That’s right," he said, as he
patted the couch. "Ease yourself up there and see what it was like
on one of those things."
I knew his fainting couch
wasn’t an antique. His had all sorts of diagnostic equipment built
in. I wondered how many other peopl
Certainly not my daughters.
They had known the answers to his questions before coming to the
office.
"People do a lot of silly
things," he said. "Even now. Did you know most people on Earth are
linked?"
As he explained the net and its
uses, I ignored them. I did some leftover business, made my daily
chess move, and tuned into their conversation on
occasion.
"–and what’s really silly is
that so many people refuse a link. It prevents them from functioning
well in our society. From getting jobs, from
communicating–"
Echea listened intently while
she lay on the couch. And while he talked to her, I knew, he was
examining her, seeing what parts of her brain responded to his
questions.
"But doesn’t it hurt?" she
asked.
"No," he said. "Science makes
such things easy. It’s like touching a strand of hair."
And then I smiled. I understood
why he had made the tender move earlier. So that he wouldn’t alarm
her when he put in the first chip, the beginning of her own
link.
"What if it goes wrong?" she
asked. "Will everybody–die?"
He pulled back from her.
Probably not enough so that she would notice. But I did. There was a
slight frown between his eyes. At first, I thought he would shrug
off the question, but it took him too long to answer.
"No," he said as firmly as he
could. "No one will die."
Then I realized what he was
doing. He was dealing with a child’s fear realistically. Sometimes I
was too used to my husband’s rather casual attitude toward the
girls. And I was used to the girls themselves. They were much more
placid than my Echea.
With the flick of a finger, he
turned on the overhead light.
"Do you have dreams, honey?" he
asked as casually as he could.
She looked down at her hands.
They were slightly scarred from experiences I knew nothing about. I
had planned to ask her about each scar as I gained her trust. So
far, I had asked about none.
"Not any more," she
said.
This time, I moved back
slightly. Everyone dreamed, didn’t they? Or were dreams only the
product of a linked mind? That couldn’t be right. I’d seen the
babies dream before we brought them here.
"When was the last time you
dreamed?" he asked.
She shoved herself back on the
lounge. Its base squealed from the force of her contact. She looked
around, seemingly terrified. Then she looked at me. It seemed like
her eyes were appealing for help.
This was why I wanted a link
for her. I wanted her to be able to tell me, without speaking,
without Ronald knowing, what she needed. I didn’t want to
guess.
"It’s all right," I said to
her. "Dr. Caro won’t hurt you."
She jutted out her chin,
squeezed her eyes closed, as if she couldn’t face him when she
spoke, and took a deep breath. Ronald waited, breathless.
I thought, not for the first
time, that it was a shame he did not have children of his
own.
"They shut me off," she
said.
"Who?" His voice held infinite
patience.
Do you know what’s going
on? I sent
him.
He did not respond. His full
attention was on her.
"The Red Crescent," she said
softly.
"The Red Cross," I said. "On
the Moon. They were the ones in charge of the orphans–"
"Let Echea tell it," he said,
and I stopped, flushing. He had never rebuked me before. At least,
not verbally.
"Was it on the Moon?" he asked
her.
"They wouldn’t let me come
otherwise."
"Has anyone touched it since?"
he asked.
She shook her head slowly.
Somewhere in their discussion, her eyes had opened. She was watching
Ronald with that mixture of fear and longing that she had first used
with me.
"May I see?" he
asked.
She clapped a hand to the side
of her head. "If it comes on, they’ll make me leave."
"Did they tell you that?" he
asked.
She shook her head
again.
"Then there’s nothing to worry
about." He put a hand on her shoulder and eased her back on the
lounge. I watched, back stiff. It seemed like I had missed a part of
the conversation, but I knew I hadn’t. They were discussing
something I had never heard of, something the government had
neglected to tell us. My stomach turned. This was exactly the kind
of excuse my husband would use to get rid of her.
She was lying rigidly on the
lounge. Ronald was smiling at her, talking softly, his hand on the
lounge’s controls. He got the read-outs directly through his link.
Most everything in the office worked that way, with a back-up
download on the office’s equivalent of House. He would send us a
file copy later. It was something my husband insisted on, since he
did not like coming to these appointments. I doubted he read the
files, but he might this time. With Echea.
Ronald’s frown grew. "No more
dreams?" he asked.
"No," Echea said again. She
sounded terrified.
I could keep silent no longer.
Our family’s had night terrors since she arrived, I sent
him.
He glanced at me, whether with
irritation or speculation, I could not tell.
They’re
similar, I sent. The
dreams are all about a death on the Moon. My husband
thinks–
I don’t care what he
thinks. Ronald’s
message was intended as harsh. I had never seen him like this
before. At least, I didn’t think so. A dim memory rose and fell, a
sense memory. I had heard him use a harsh tone with me, but I could
not remember when.
"Have you tried to link with
her?" he asked me directly.
"How could I?" I asked. "She’s
not linked."
"Have your
daughters?"
"I don’t know," I
said.
"Do you know if anyone’s
tried?" he asked her.
Echea shook her
head.
"Has she been doing any
computer work at all?" he asked.
"Listening to House," I said.
"I insisted. I wanted to see if–"
"House," he said. "Your home
system."
"Yes." Something was very
wrong. I could feel it. It was in his tone, in his face, in his
casual movements, designed to disguise his worry from his patients.
"Did House bother you?" he
asked Echea.
"At first," she said. Then she
glanced at me. Again, the need for reassurance. "But now I like
it."
"Even though it’s painful," he
said.
"No, it’s not," she said, but
she averted her eyes from mine.
My mouth went dry. "It hurts
you to use House?" I asked. "And you didn’t say
anything?"
She didn’t want to risk
losing the first home she ever had, Ronald sent. Don’t be so
harsh.
I wasn’t the one being harsh.
He was. And I didn’t like it.
"It doesn’t really hurt," she
said.
Tell me what’s
happening, I sent him.
What’s wrong with her?
"Echea," he said, putting his
hand alongside her head one more time. "I’d like to talk with your
mother alone. Would it be all right if we sent you back to the play
area?"
She shook her head.
"How about if we leave the door
open? You’ll always be able to see her."
She bit her lower
lip.
Can’t you tell me this
way? I sent.
I need all the verbal
tools, he sent back.
Trust me.
I did trust him. And because I
did, a fear had settled in the pit of my stomach.
"That’s okay," she said. Then
she looked at me. "Can I come back in when I want?"
"If it looks like we’re done,"
I said.
"You won’t leave me here," she
said again. When would I gain her complete trust?
"Never," I said.
She stood then and walked out
the door without looking back. She seemed so much like the little
girl I’d first met that my heart went out to her. All that bravado
the first day had been just that, a cover for sheer
terror.
She went to the play area and
sat on a cushioned block. She folded her hands in her lap, and
stared at me. Ronald’s assistant tried to interest her in a doll,
but she shook him off.
"What is it?" I
asked.
Ronald sighed, and scooted his
stool closer to me. He stopped near the edge of the lounge, not
close enough to touch, but close enough that I could smell the scent
of him mingled with his specially blended soap.
"The children being sent down
from the Moon were rescued," he said softly.
"I know." I had read all the
literature they sent when we first applied for Echea.
"No, you don’t," he said. "They
weren’t just rescued from a miserable life like you and the other
adoptive parents believe. They were rescued from a program that was
started in Colony Europe about fifteen years ago. Most of the
children involved died."
"Are you saying she has some
horrible disease?"
"No," he said. "Hear me out.
She has an implant–"
"A link?"
"No," he said. "Sarah,
please."
Sarah. The name startled me. No
one called me that any more. Ronald had not used it in all the years
of our reacquaintance.
The name no longer felt like
mine.
"Remember how devastating the
Moon Wars were? They were using projectile weapons and shattering
the colonies themselves, opening them to space. A single bomb would
destroy generations of work. Then some of the colonists went
underground–"
"And started attacking from
there, yes, I know. But that was decades ago. What has that to do
with Echea?"
"Colony London, Colony Europe,
Colony Russia, and Colony New Delhi signed the peace
treaty–"
"–vowing not to use any more
destructive weapons. I remember this, Ronald–"
"Because if they did, no more
supply ships would be sent."
I nodded. "Colony New York and
Colony Armstrong refused to participate."
"And were eventually
obliterated." Ronald leaned toward me, like he had done with Echea.
I glanced at her. She was watching, as still as could be. "But the
fighting didn’t stop. Colonies used knives and secret assassins to
kill government officials–"
"And they found a way to divert
supply ships," I said.
He smiled sadly. "That’s
right," he said. "That’s Echea."
He had come around to the topic
of my child so quickly it made me dizzy.
"How could she divert supply
ships?"
He rubbed his nose with his
thumb and forefinger. Then he sighed again. "A scientist on Colony
Europe developed a technology that broadcast thoughts through the
subconscious. It was subtle, and it worked very well. A broadcast
about hunger at Colony Europe would get a supply captain to divert
his ship from Colony Russia and drop the supplies in Colony Europe.
It’s more sophisticated than I make it sound. The technology
actually made the captain believe that the rerouting was his
idea."
Dreams. Dreams came from the
subconscious. I shivered.
"The problem was that the
technology was inserted into the brain of the user, like a link, but
if the user had an existing link, it superseded the new technology.
So they installed it in children born on the Moon, born in Colony
Europe. Apparently Echea was."
"And they rerouted supply
ships?"
"By imagining themselves
hungry–or actually being starved. They would broadcast messages to
the supply ships. Sometimes they were about food. Sometimes they
were about clothing. Sometimes they were about weapons." He shook
his head. "Are. I should say are. They’re still doing
this."
"Can’t it be
stopped?"
He shook his head. "We’re
gathering data on it now. Echea is the third child I’ve seen with
this condition. It’s not enough to go to the World Congress yet.
Everyone knows though. The Red Crescent and the Red Cross are
alerted to this, and they remove children from the colonies,
sometimes on penalty of death, to send them here where they will no
longer be harmed. The technology is deactivated, and people like you
adopt them and give them full lives."
"Why are you telling me
this?"
"Perhaps your House reactivated
her device."
I shook my head. "The first
dream happened before she listened to House."
"Then some other technology
did. Perhaps the government didn’t shut her off properly. It
happens. The recommended procedure is to say nothing, and to simply
remove the device."
I frowned at him. "Then why are
you telling me this? Why didn’t you just remove it?"
"Because you want her to be
linked."
"Of course I do," I said. "You
know that. You told her yourself the benefits of linking. You know
what would happen to her if she isn’t. You know."
"I know that she would be fine
if you and your husband provided for her in your wills. If you gave
her one of the houses and enough money to have servants for the rest
of her life. She would be fine."
"But not
productive."
"Maybe she doesn’t need to be,"
he said.
It sounded so unlike the Ronald
who had been treating my children that I frowned. "What aren’t you
telling me?"
"Her technology and the link
are incompatible."
"I understand that," I said.
"But you can remove her technology."
"Her brain formed around it. If
I installed the link, it would wipe her mind clean."
"So?"
He swallowed so hard his Adam’s
apple bobbed up and down. "I’m not being clear," he said more to
himself than to me. "It would make her a blank slate. Like a baby.
She’d have to learn everything all over again. How to walk. How to
eat. It would go quicker this time, but she wouldn’t be a normal
seven-year-old girl for half a year."
"I think that’s worth the price
of the link," I said.
"But that’s not all," he said.
"She’d lose all her memories. Every last one of them. Life on the
Moon, arrival here, what she ate for breakfast the morning she
received the link." He started to scoot forward and then stopped.
"We are our memories, Sarah. She wouldn’t be Echea any
more."
"Are you so sure?" I asked.
"After all, the basic template would be the same. Her genetic makeup
wouldn’t alter."
"I’m sure," he said. "Trust me.
I’ve seen it."
"Can’t you do a memory store?
Back things up so that when she gets her link she’ll have access to
her life before?"
"Of course," he said. "But it’s
not the same. It’s like being told about a boat ride as
opposed to taking one yourself. You have the same basic knowledge,
but the experience is no longer part of you."
His eyes were bright. Too
bright.
"Surely it’s not that bad," I
said.
"This is my specialty," he
said, and his voice was shaking. He was obviously very passionate
about this work. "I study how wiped minds and memory stores
interact. I got into this profession hoping I could reverse the
effects."
I hadn’t known that. Or maybe I
had and forgotten it.
"How different would she be?" I
asked.
"I don’t know," he said.
"Considering the extent of her experience on the Moon, and the
traumatic nature of much of it, I’d bet she’ll be very different."
He glanced into the play area. "She’d probably play with that doll
beside her and not give a second thought to where you
are."
"But that’s good."
"That is, yes, but think how
good it feels to earn her trust. She doesn’t give it easily, and
when she does, it’s heartfelt."
I ran a hand through my hair.
My stomach churned.
I don’t like these choices,
Ronald.
"I know," he said. I started. I
hadn’t realized I had actually sent him that last
message.
"You’re telling me that either
I keep the same child and she can’t function in our society, or I
give her the same chances as everyone else and take away who she
is."
"Yes," he said.
"I can’t make that choice," I
said. "My husband will see this as a breach of contract. He’ll think
that they sent us a defective child."
"Read the fine print in your
agreement," Ronald said. "This one is covered. So are a few others.
It’s boilerplate. I’ll bet your lawyer didn’t even flinch when she
read them."
"I can’t make this choice," I
said again.
He scooted forward and put his
hands on mine. They were warm and strong and comfortable.
And familiar. Strangely
familiar.
"You have to make the choice,"
he said. "At some point. That’s part of your contract too. You’re to
provide for her, to prepare her for a life in the world. Either she
gets a link or she gets an inheritance that someone else
manages."
"And she won’t even be able to
check to see if she’s being cheated."
"That’s right," he said.
"You’ll have to provide for that too."
"It’s not fair,
Ronald!"
He closed his eyes, bowed his
head, and leaned it against my forehead. "It never was," he said
softly. "Dearest Sarah. It never was."
"Damn!" my husband said. We
were sitting in our bedroom. It was half an hour before supper, and
I had just told him about Echea’s condition. "The lawyer was
supposed to check for things like this!"
"Dr. Caro said they’re just
learning about the problem on Earth."
"Dr. Caro." My husband stood.
"Dr. Caro is wrong."
I frowned at him. My husband
was rarely this agitated.
"This is not a technology
developed on the Moon," my husband said. "It’s an Earth technology,
pre-neural net. Subject to international ban in ’24. The devices
disappeared when the link became the common currency among all of
us. He’s right that they’re incompatible."
I felt the muscles in my
shoulders tighten. I wondered how my husband knew of the technology
and wondered if I should ask. We never discussed each other’s
business.
"You’d think that Dr. Caro
would have known this," I said casually.
"His work is in current
technology, not the history of technology," my husband said
absently. He sat back down. "What a mess."
"It is that," I said softly.
"We have a little girl to think of."
"Who’s defective."
"Who has been used." I
shuddered. I had cradled her the whole way back and she had let me.
I had remembered what Ronald said, how precious it was to hold her
when I knew how hard it was for her to reach out. How each touch was
a victory, each moment of trust a celebration. "Think about it.
Imagine using something that keys into your most basic desires, uses
them for purposes other than–"
"Don’t do that," he
said.
"What?"
"Put a romantic spin on this.
The child is defective. We shouldn’t have to deal with
that."
"She’s not a durable good," I
said. "She’s a human being."
"How much money did we spend on
in-the-womb enhancement so that Anne’s substandard IQ was corrected?
How much would we have spent if the other girls had had similar
problems?"
"That’s not the same thing," I
said.
"Isn’t it?" he asked. "We have
a certain guarantee in this world. We are guaranteed excellent
children, with the best advantages. If I wanted to shoot craps with
my children’s lives I would–"
"What would you do?" I snapped.
"Go to the Moon?"
He stared at me as if he had
never seen me before. "What does your precious Dr. Caro want you to
do?"
"Leave Echea alone," I
said.
My husband snorted. "So that
she would be unlinked and dependent the rest of her life. A burden
on the girls, a sieve for our wealth. Oh, but Ronald Caro would like
that!"
"He didn’t want her to lose her
personality," I said. "He wanted her to remain
Echea."
My husband stared at me for a
moment, and the anger seemed to leave him. He had gone pale. He
reached out to touch me, then withdrew his hand. For a moment, I
thought that his eyes filled with tears.
I had never seen tears in his
eyes before.
Had I?
"There is that," he said
softly.
He turned away from me, and I
wondered if I had imagined his reaction. He hadn’t been close to
Echea. Why would he care if her personality had changed?
"We can’t think of the
legalities any more," I said. "She’s ours. We have to accept
that. Just like we accepted the expense when we conceived Anne. We
could have terminated the pregnancy. The cost would have been
significantly less."
"We could have," he said as if
the thought were unthinkable. People in our circle repaired their
mistakes. They did not obliterate them.
"You wanted her at first," I
said.
"Anne?" he asked.
"Echea. It was our idea,
much as you want to say it was mine."
He bowed his head. After a
moment, he ran his hands through his hair. "We can’t make this
decision alone," he said.
He had capitulated. I didn’t
know whether to be thrilled or saddened. Now we could stop fighting
about the legalities and get to the heart.
"She’s too young to make this
decision," I said. "You can’t ask a child to make a choice like
this."
"If she doesn’t–"
"It won’t matter," I said.
"She’ll never know. We won’t tell her either way."
He shook his head. "She’ll
wonder why she’s not linked, why she can only use parts of House.
She’ll wonder why she can’t leave here without escort when the other
girls will be able to."
"Or," I said, "she’ll be linked
and have no memory of this at all."
"And then she’ll wonder why she
can’t remember her early years."
"She’ll be able to remember
them," I said. "Ronald assured me."
"Yes." My husband’s smile was
bitter. "Like she remembers a question on a history
exam."
I had never seen him like this.
I didn’t know he had studied the history of neural development. I
didn’t know he had opinions about it.
"We can’t make this decision,"
he said again.
I understood. I had said the
same thing. "We can’t ask a child to make a choice of this
magnitude."
He raised his eyes to me. I had
never noticed the fine lines around them, the matching lines around
his nose and mouth. He was aging. We both were. We had been together
a long, long time.
"She has lived through more
than most on Earth ever do," he said. "She has lived through more
than our daughters will, if we raise them right."
"That’s not an excuse," I said.
"You just want us to expiate our guilt."
"No," he said. "It’s her
life. She’ll have to be the one to live it, not us."
"But she’s our child, and that
entails making choices for her," I said.
He sprawled flat on our bed.
"You know what I’ll chose," he said softly.
"Both choices will disturb the
household," I said. "Either we live with her as she is–"
"Or we train her to be what we
want." He put an arm over his eyes.
He was silent for a moment, and
then he sighed. "Do you ever regret the choices you made?" he
asked. "Marrying me, choosing this house over the other, deciding to
remain where we grew up?"
"Having the girls," I
said.
"Any of it. Do you regret
it?"
He wasn’t looking at me. It was
as if he couldn’t look at me, as if our whole lives rested on my
answer.
I put my hand in the one he had
dangling. His fingers closed over mine. His skin was
cold.
"Of course not," I said. And
then, because I was confused, because I was a bit scared of his
unusual intensity, I asked, "Do you regret the choices you
made?"
"No," he said. But his tone was
so flat I wondered if he lied.
In the end, he didn’t come with
Echea and me to St. Paul. He couldn’t face brain work, although I
wished he had made an exception this time. Echea was more confident
on this trip, more cheerful, and I watched her with a detachment I
hadn’t thought I was capable of.
It was as if she were already
gone.
This was what parenting was all
about: the difficult painful choices, the irreversible choices with
no easy answers, the second-guessing of the future with no help at
all from the past. I held her hand tightly this time while she
wandered ahead of me down the hallway.
I was the one with
fear.
Ronald greeted us at the door
to his office. His smile, when he bestowed it on Echea, was
sad.
He already knew our choice. I
had made my husband contact him. I wanted that much participation
from Echea’s other parent.
Surprised? I sent.
He shook his head. It is the
choice your family always makes.
He looked at me for a long
moment, as if he expected a response, and when I said nothing, he
crouched in front of Echea. "Your life will be different after
today," he said.
"Momma–" and the word was a
gift, a first, a never-to-be repeated blessing–"said it would be
better."
"And mothers are always right,"
he said. He put a hand on her shoulder. "I have to take you from her
this time."
"I know," Echea said brightly.
"But you’ll bring me back. It’s a procedure."
"That’s right," he said,
looking at me over her head. "It’s a procedure."
He waited just a moment, the
silence deep between us. I think he meant for me to change my mind.
But I did not. I could not.
It was for the best.
Then he nodded once, stood, and
took Echea’s hand. She gave it to him as willingly, as trustingly,
as she had given it to me.
He led her into the back room.
At the doorway, she stopped and
waved.
And I never saw her
again.
Oh, we have a child living with
us, and her name is Echea. She is a wonderful vibrant creature, as
worthy of our love and our heritage as our natural
daughters.
But she is not the child of my
heart.
My husband likes her better
now, and Ronald never mentions her. He has redoubled his efforts on
his research.
He is making no
progress.
And I’m not sure I want him
to.
She is a happy, healthy child
with a wonderful future.
We made the right
choice.
It was for the best.
Echea’s best.
My husband says she will grow
into the perfect woman.
Like me, he says.
She’ll be just like
me.
She is such a vibrant
child.
Why do I miss the wounded
sullen girl who rarely smiled?
Why was she the child of my
heart? |
