Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Page 15

  Skeins of wool she’d knit into afghans and children’s sweaters. A pet, maybe a golden retriever. They’d send her to South America to learn dousing. Oh, Lila—the Gridians would shake their heads—what a miracle that she found her way here!

  “WHAT’S THERE TO be nervous about? The camp’s perfectly safe. They’ll do crafts and campfires. They don’t even let them take percs. Howard begged me, he begged me. And Terleski says he can take Leon, too.”

  Chad lifted his eyes from the blue table. Howard did almost nothing lately. He got home from school and sat. “How many nights?”

  “Two nights, Friday and Saturday. They’ll use your tent.”

  “It’ll be freezing.”

  “So they’ll wear extra clothes!” Sharis burst out. “I don’t understand you. Who cares if Prem left? Did you ever agree about anything with Prem? Cub Scouts is normal life. You wanted normal life.” Lars this morning had danced around the kitchen entertaining his nephew, tossing a pancake so high in the air it went off the screen

  “I did.” Chad noticed his past tense. “I do.”

  She wasn’t going to get panicky—that wasn’t her way—but if Chad got any more gloomy Sharis could leave and take the boys. It would be no problem: all her clients, even George and Gentia, exclaimed about the quality of her work. She had a fantasy about showing up at Lars’s Norwegian door.

  “SEE THAT BARE patch in the leaves, with the marks in the dirt? That’s a deer scrape.”

  “Where a deer fell?” Diana asked.

  She knew nothing. “Mating season,” Charles said. “The rut.”

  “Rotten when mating’s a rut.”

  What was the word for that sense of humor? Brittle. Charles chose to ignore it. “The male deer, the buck, scrapes aside leaves with his hooves and then he urinates—sniff it, smell that musky odor?—and then he marks a tree nearby by rubbing his antlers on it.”

  “All the tricks to drive a girl deer crazy!”

  “It works,” Charles said. “Lots of Bambis.”

  They walked further down the path and into the prairie. Beads of dew hung on the grasses. Spider webs were scattered through the grasses like miniature clouds. “Look at those beautiful webs,” Charles said. “They’re called …”

  “Bowl and doily webs,” Diana said. “You’ve told me about fifty times.”

  “YOU AGAIN!” ALLYSSA stood, extending her hand.

  “See how you affected me?” Lila tried to laugh. They sat down across from each other at the walnut table. Lila had hoped for a meeting at Allyssa’s farmhouse, surrounded by clipped and flat fields, but Allyssa had arranged instead to come to Dayton.

  Allyssa was dressed elegantly, in a green suit with a high collar, and the brown line around her eyes was surely evidence of makeup. Lila wondered if it was a treat for her to be outside the Grid, sitting in a tenth floor of a downtown bank building wearing fancy clothes. “So,” Allyssa said, glancing at the holo-screen of her perc. She doesn’t have to go to a central computer like the average Gridian, Lila thought. “I understand you’re interested in a Grid position.”

  Lila felt a lurch of dread: Allyssa was too smooth, too polished, as if her fancy clothing were a sort of armor. “Yes,” Lila said.

  Allyssa’s eyes turned to her holo-screen again. “Give me a few minutes to run your résumé.”

  The résumé was a risk, Lila knew, but when she messaged it she’d had hope. But watching Allyssa watch it was excruciating. Lila talking at the viewer, segments of Lila’s old shower campaign including the jingles, old footage of Lila’s speech at the Needmore/Needless rally. It was even more desperate than the messages Michelle had sent her.

  Allyssa tapped her fingernail on the table. “Your specialty appears to be water conservation. I assure you we don’t have problems with that.”

  “I didn’t think you would, I …”

  “I understand how you made your reputation,” Allyssa went on, not seeming to hear her. She nodded at the holo-screen. “You advertised.”

  “You mean during the New Dawn Dayton days? Of course I advertised. I used the means available. I got the word out. That’s efficiency. I changed people’s minds.”

  “We’re not interested in changing people’s minds. Our people have made up their minds.”

  For a moment Lila was stymied. Then she said what she believed: “I would love the Grid, I know. I’d be devoted to it.”

  Allyssa looked up in surprise, her gaze softening. “Devotion, that’s an interesting word. Did you know its root means ‘to vow or pledge’? Vote and devout are word cousins. Jeff Germantz loved devote. He was interested in the origins of language because language and agriculture are the two oldest intentional human activities in the world. Have you seen pictures of Jeff? He had the most incredible eyes. Green as emeralds, green as the Grid. Photographs never did him justice. You couldn’t say a sentence without his talking about some word root. Do you know where the word word comes from?”

  “Pardon?” Lila, transfixed, was hardly listening. Allyssa had taken on the aspect of a queen, her green suit falling like royal raiment from her shoulders.

  “I’ll look it up for you,” Allyssa said, and in few taps she had it. “Word,” she read from her holo-screen. “It’s from a very old root, W-E-R. Jeff called wer a tree with huge and numerous branches. One of its definitions is ‘to speak,’ of course, so that’s word, verb, proverb, but there’s another definition that’s ‘to turn,’ and that’s verse and vice versa and introvert and universe, and then there’s the definition ‘to cover,’ which gives you warranty and garment and …” Allyssa looked up. “My husband wrote this program.”

  Lila was startled. “You were married to Germantz?”

  “Oh, no.” Pink flared on Allyssa’s beige face. “No, my husband just worked with Jeff. Jeff was older. Jeff never married. My husband’s name is Lincoln Hawley.” Allyssa smiled confidingly and dropped her voice. “I don’t usually tell anybody he wrote Origins of English.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s in Paris.”

  “No, no, you told me that before, when I was visiting. I mean Germantz. The one who headed up the Grid.” He was dead, Lila was sure, but where had he been buried?

  “He founded it. He didn’t head it. That would be very un-Jeff, to head something. In his way, he’s still alive. He’s on the Grid. He’s part of the Grid.” Allyssa’s face changed, slipped into a dreamy look. “People don’t realize: there are a million aspects to changing people’s thought.”

  A dim sensation moved through Lila’s mind, that there was something strange that she was missing, but the sensation was so vague—a shadow of an elephant, not an elephant—and so incongruous (the shadow of an elephant lumbering across a cornfield) that Lila dismissed it almost without realizing she’d done so. “Is there something else I could do besides water?” Lila asked. “Help with cooking? Serve drinks?”

  Allyssa stared at her, and Lila felt hopefulness surge inside her like a bounding dog.

  “I appreciate your enthusiasm, and I told Agro I’d do what I could, but it’s a very difficult time to bring someone on the Grid,” Allyssa said. “It’s not you in particular, it’s anyone. At this time.”

  “I’m adaptable, Allyssa.”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  “I’m tough.”

  “Tough’s not the issue.”

  “I feel like I’ve been called there, Allyssa. I’ve never felt this way. Do you think Nenonene will attack? Is that why you don’t want new people?”

  “We’re watched all the time, you know. Not by the Alliance. By the U.S.” Allyssa’s voice went hard. “By your people. They send up Hopi Hellions. Big white flying cockroaches.”

  “Allyssa”—and here Lila dropped her voice, thinking there could be a listening device planted somewhere—“I could fight. I’m a woman without children. I don’t have to worry about protecting anyone.” Lila could hardly believe she was saying this. “I could be useful,” she whispere
d.

  “I wish you could be,” Allyssa said out loud.

  “God, I’m sorry you have to worry at all,” Lila said. All the passion missing from her lovemaking had settled in her voice. “I know you set the thing up with such faith.”

  Allyssa frowned and clicked her holo-screen off. “I’ll tell the Agro people we spoke. You’re interesting, Lila de Becqueville. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not interesting.”

  Lila felt like a twenty-year-old again, a grievously young and rejected suitor. She barely made it to the elevator without crying. It was no consolation at all that the next week Michelle was returning for a visit.

  DIANA REMEMBERED OPENING the specialist’s private round freezer, waving away the billow of frosty air, peering down at the trays of frozen embryos stored in concentric circles on the shelves, each labeled with sex and race and hair color and three admirable characteristics—intelligent, tractable, outgoing—along with a price code. It bothered the specialist there weren’t more customers for his designer products. He had patented a gene obsession sequence derived from himself and placed it in each of the intentional embryos. “Athlete, scholar, parent—who doesn’t need a bit of obsession?” But the intentionals didn’t have the market appeal he’d expected. “People always want part of themselves,” he’d cluck, his mouth curling as it did when he discussed prematurely aged wine. “Even when their selves aren’t very interesting. Look at our patients: mediocrities making mediocrities.” With this, the specialist’s face was transformed by his beneficent, old-man smile, the smile that his patients talked about, that he posed with. If he’d been really smart, Diana thought, the specialist would have patented the genes for his own smile.

  She’d met an intentional once, accompanying a woman who came in for a consultation. The girl was three years old and beautiful, and as Diana talked to her mother the girl removed the hairs from her hairbrush and laid them one by one on the exam table. “I don’t want another one of these,” the mother said. “I mean, she’s great and all, but I want a kid that’s more ordinary. Maybe my own eggs with a little touch-up.”

  “Twelve, thirteen fourteen …” The little girl was counting the hairs.

  “Okay,” Diana said, clicking the box by “egg improvement.” “Will we be using your husband’s sperm?”

  The specialist almost convinced her that for humans to survive there must be improvement. But here, in the deep disarray of the woods, there was order, there was interdependence, there was survival. The seasons wheeled around independent of man; the vast weather experiments had failed—that is, they had been too successful, turning an already overwarming climate into a wildly cycling one with highs and lows well past historic baselines. “Why don’t we have a baby?” Charles had asked one night, nuzzling her in the bed under the stuffed owl. That he should want a child with her shocked her; she actually leapt from their bed and stood naked in the cold. “No!” She said. “Don’t you know the risks of an unimproved child?” They spent the rest of the night two inches from each other but miles distant, as if Diana were atop one mountain and Charles another, and since then they hadn’t had sex once. They still shared the mattress, but only for warmth.

  Charles told her, several days later, his theory of souls. Only a lonely, damaged soul, in his opinion, would pick a custom embryo, while the strongest souls would go where they could take their chances. The strange thing was, she knew exactly what he meant. Maybe this was why she laughed out loud when he told her his theory, why she made fun of the whole idea of souls, making reference to the souls of bugs and stones and trees. “It’s a soulfest out here!” she said, throwing her hands up around her. Charles left to fill the bird feeders, disappointment in his padding walk.

  She shouldn’t be mean to him. He was a kind man, and it was totally her choice (she still had her apartment in town) that they were stuck here together, with every night a little colder, the frost each morning thicker on the red leaves of the poison ivy. But at times Charles’s staggering array of wildlife facts felt like a net thrown over her head. She almost yearned for her old boyfriend, who made a point of being ignorant and mean. There were trees she didn’t know the names of, ones she wouldn’t mention to Charles. Her ignorance about them was the pocket of air inside the upturned boat. She didn’t go so far as to pull up the putty root lilies, but she made a point of stomping on their leaves.

  Why am I so cruel? Diana thought. What genes are bad in me? Which soul—unlucky or stupid—got stuck inside me? Get rid of it! the woman at the clinic had screamed, meaning: I hate me! Kill me! What had happened to the soul of that destroyed clone? That poor lost soul.

  Without their leaves the maples were very beautiful, their limbs like roots that reached into the sky.

  INTERESTING: MIDDLE ENGLISH from Norman French from Latin interesse: “to be in between,” to matter, to be of concern. From Indo-European es-, “to be.”

  “I’LL TELL YOU what started it,” Allyssa said to Tuuro as she paced. She was back and changed from her errand in Dayton, and Tuuro was at the stovetop sautéing onions, still bubbling with satisfaction that she’d trusted him alone. He had scrubbed out the bathtubs, cleaned the floors behind the toilets, changed and washed the sheets on both their beds. “We asked for three weeks of vacation for our people instead of two. It went all the way to President Baxter, and that moron turned it down. That was ’43. Can you imagine? He said the Gridians got to rest all January. Said another week of vacation would be”—Allyssa made quotation marks with her fingers—“‘disruptive.’ He thinks we’re nothing? He thinks we don’t matter? You watch. A month from now the Grid will be the most important place on earth. There won’t be a goatherd in Peru who doesn’t know us.”

  NELSON AND SOLGANIK, Computer Genies, their card read (a card! what an antiquated custom), and Lila wasn’t sure what was most intimidating, their bubble bottoms beneath their matching pink crop tops or their taut (tucked?) faces and enhanced eyelashes or their manicured nails. Whatever forces had pushed Lila into uto-hood must meet strenuous, daily resistance in Nelson and Solganik. They had to be, from what Kennedy had told her, at least twenty years older than Lila. Legendary broads from Cincinnati, Kennedy said.

  Sue Nelson was running through programs, images and pages flashing across Lila’s office computer screen, as her partner, Leslie Solganik, leaned over the back of her chair and watched. “Not bragging, but we’re the only people in Ohio could do this job for you,” Nelson said. “These kids, they don’t know the furniture. They know what’s on the tabletop, sure, but they forget about the table. Leslie and I know the insides of the drawers. We know where the glue dries up and shrivels. We were born before the mainframe!”

  Since her visit with Allyssa, Lila had been up the water tower two more times. The last time there’d been a slight movement—someone watching her?—at the top of the barrier on the Grid side, far right in her field of vision. Possible that she’d imagined this. She hadn’t mentioned it to Michelle, who seemed to no longer be serious about getting Lila onto the Grid. “When would I see you?” Michelle asked. “How could I visit?”

  “People nowadays can’t even get rid of things,” Solganik said in a irritated tone. “Think you can just sweep the tabletop. Ha! You heard of Kinsey Concrete? Makes those big pipes you can walk through? We cleared out a whole account for them. Made it disappear. Guy there didn’t believe you could do such a thing. You got any programs you want rid of? We could be trouble. Got a map of the whole water system? It’s gone.”

  Lila said, “No, it’s not. It’s in my head.”

  “Then you’re a valuable woman. Voila.” Nelson leaned back from the screen. “Wonderwater. I’ll write out the door so you can get in again. Memorize and eat.” She grinned. “Do the debit to Nelson and Solganik. Did I say debit? No way. We’re the girls you pay in cash.”

  Seymour appeared in the door to Lila’s office. This morning the doughnut shop Seymour frequented had been locked, its lights off and cabinets empty, and Seymour had b
een so distraught that Lila walked back with him to the shop to confirm what he’d seen. Seymour was worried about the clerk there, the one who called him Mister See.

  “Seymour, guess what,” Lila said, “Nelson and Solganik got us Wonderwater.”

  His mouth dropped open, his eyes taking in the beaming women. “Char,” he said. “Charmegaly.” He always knew the latest slang.

  “THAT BUSINESS WITH the colonel,” Allyssa admitted, “that was a nasty business.” She and Tuuro talked often at night, seated at the kitchen table—or rather, Allyssa talked and Tuuro listened, rubbing along together almost like little brother and big sister. Allyssa was sick of General Nenonene being so damn busy, but in the meantime what could they do? Tuuro shouldn’t leave the house. It wasn’t that anyone Gridian would see him, Allyssa said; she was hiding him from the good old U.S. of A.

  Allyssa had heard that the video was edited to show only the second shot, the gush of blood diminished, to make sure the whole scene was acceptable to be run on every channel. They didn’t show the colonel begging or the grazing of his ear. Afterwards Nenonene went to a sink and washed his hands. The rest of his workday went normally, and that evening he attended a state dinner in a room with chandeliers. The women wore beaded gowns and tiaras, the men tuxedos; Nenonene wore his same bloody uniform. People were afraid to look at him, even more afraid not to. By the time he went to bed he was a legend.

  A madman, a brute. A man whose instincts were tribal. (“I mean that in a good way,” Allyssa said.) A military man who believed in military justice, who gave his betrayer the chance to die an honorable death. A clever politician who had the courage—the guts—for a single brutal act, knowing blood spilled then meant less blood later on. A master publicist. He could be all these things—Allyssa thought he was—and yet the Gridians were willing to sign on with him, because even if the General was imperfect, he was still a man of hope. “He respects the Grid,” Allyssa said, her eyes narrowing. “The whole of it and each of us as individuals. And you don’t need to worry, Tuuro. He respects you.”