"Maybe we started off on the wrong foot."
"Which foot would that be?"
The little girl just kept staring at her. Her expression was not amused, not hostile, not really argumentative. Then why was the conversation suddenly so maddening?
"Could I make a statement?" Bach tried.
"I don't know. Can you?"
Bach's fingers didn't tap this time; they were balled up in a fist.
"I shall, anyway. My name is Anna-Louise Bach. I'm talking to you from New Dresden, Luna. That's a city on the moon, which you can probably see—"
"I know where it is."
"Fine. I've been trying to contact you for many hours, but your computer has been fighting me all the time."
"That's right. He said so."
"Now, I can't explain why he's been fighting me, but—"
"I know why. He thinks you're nosy."
"I won't deny that. But we're trying to help you."
"Why?"
"Because... it's what we do. Now if you could—"
"Hey. Shut up, will you?"
Bach did so. With forty-five other people at their scattered screens. Bach watched the little girl—the horrible little girl, as she was beginning to think of her—take a long pull from the green glass bottle of Scotch whiskey. She belched, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and scratched between her legs. When she was done, she smelled her fingers.
She seemed about to say something, then cocked her head, listening to something Bach couldn't hear.
"That's a good idea," she said, then got up and ran away. She was just vanishing around the curve of the deck when Hoeffer burst into the room, trailed by six members of his advisory team. Bach leaned back in her chair, and tried to fend off thoughts of homicide.
"I was told you'd established contact," Hoeffer said, leaning over Bach's shoulder in a way she absolutely detested. He peered at the lifeless scene. "What happened to her?"
"I don't know. She said, 'That's a good idea,' got up, and ran off."
"I told you to keep her here until I got a chance to talk to her."
"I tried," Bach said.
"You should have—"
"I have her on camera nineteen," Steiner called out.
Everyone watched as the technicians followed the girl's progress on the working cameras. They saw her enter a room to emerge in a moment with a big-screen monitor. Bach tried to call her each time she passed a camera, but it seemed only the first one was working for incoming calls. She passed through the range of four cameras before coming back to the original, where she carefully unrolled the monitor and tacked it to a wall, then payed out the cord and plugged it in very close to the wall camera Bach's team had been using. She unshipped this camera from its mount. The picture jerked around for awhile, and finally steadied. The girl had set it on the floor.
"Stabilize that," Bach told her team, and the picture on her monitor righted itself. She now had a worm's-eye view of the corridor. The girl sat down in front of the camera, and grinned.
"Now I can see you," she said. Then she frowned. "If you send me a picture."
"Bring a camera over here," Bach ordered.
While it was being set up, Hoeffer shouldered her out of the way and sat in her chair.
"There you are," the girl said. And again, she frowned. "That's funny. I was sure you were a girl. Did somebody cut your balls off?"
Now it was Hoeffer's turn to be speechless. There were a few badly suppressed giggles; Bach quickly silenced them with her most ferocious glare, while giving thanks no one would ever know how close she had come to bursting into laughter.
"Never mind that," Hoeffer said. "My name is Hoeffer. Would you go get your parents? We need to talk to them."
"No," said the girl. "And no."
"What's that?"
"No, I won't get them," the girl clarified, "and no, you don't need to talk to them."
Hoeffer had little experience dealing with children.
"Now, please be reasonable," he began, in a wheedling tone. "We're trying to help you, after all. We have to talk to your parents, to find out more about your situation. After that, we're going to help get you out of there."
"I want to talk to the lady," the girl said.
"She's not here."
"I think you're lying. She talked to me just a minute ago."
"I'm in charge."
"In charge of what?"
"Just in charge. Now, go get your parents!"
They all watched as she got up and moved closer to the camera. All they could see at first was her feet. Then water began to splash on the lens.
Nothing could stop the laughter this time, as Charlie urinated on the camera.
For three hours Bach watched the screens. Every time the girl passed the prime camera Bach called out to her. She had thought about it carefully. Bach, like Hoeffer, did not know a lot about children.
She consulted briefly with the child psychologist on Hoeffer's team and the two of them outlined a tentative game plan. The guy seemed to know what he was talking about and, even better, his suggestions agreed with what Bach's common sense told her should work.
So she never said anything that might sound like an order. While Hoeffer seethed in the background, Bach spoke quietly and reasonably every time the child showed up. "I'm still here," she would say.
"We could talk," was a gentle suggestion. "You want to play?"
She longed to use one line the psychologist suggested, one that would put Bach and the child on the same team, so to speak. The line was "The idiot's gone. You want to talk now?"
Eventually the girl began glancing at the camera. She had a different dog every time she came by. At first Bach didn't realize this, as they were almost completely identical. Then she noticed they came in slightly different sizes.
"That's a beautiful dog," she said. The girl looked up, then started away. "I'd like to have a dog like that. What's its name?"
"This is Madam's Sweet Brown Sideburns. Say hi, Brownie." The dog yipped. "Sit up for mommy, Brownie. Now roll over. Stand tall. Now go in a circle, Brownie, that's a good doggy, walk on your hind legs. Now jump, Brownie. Jump, jump, jump!" The dog did exactly as he was told, leaping into the air and turning a flip each time the girl commanded it. Then he sat down, pink tongue hanging out, eyes riveted on his master.
"I'm impressed," Bach said, and it was the literal truth. Like other citizens of Luna, Bach had never seen a wild animal, had never owned a pet, knew animals only from the municipal zoo, where care was taken not to interfere with natural behaviors. She had had no idea animals could be so smart, and no inkling of how much work had gone into the exhibition she had just seen.
"It's nothing," the girl said. "You should see his father. Is this Anna-Louise again?"
"Yes, it is. What's your name?"
"Charlie. You ask a lot of questions."
"I guess I do. I just want to—"
"I'd like to ask some questions, too."
"All right. Go ahead."
"I have six of them, to start off with. One, why should I call you Anna-Louise? Two, why should I excuse you? Three, what is the wrong foot? Four... but that's not a question, really, since you already proved you can make a statement, if you wish, by doing so. Four, why are you trying to help me?
Five, why do you want to see my parents?"
It took Bach a moment to realize that these were the questions Charlie had asked in their first, maddening conversation, questions she had not gotten answers for. And they were in their original order.
And they didn't make a hell of a lot of sense.
But the child psychologist was making motions with his hands, and nodding his encouragement to Bach, so she started in.
"You should call me Anna-Louise because... it's my first name, and friends call each other by their first names."
"Are we friends?"
"Well, I'd like to be your friend."
"Why?"
"Look, you don't have to call me Anna-Louise if you don't want to."
"I don't mind. Do I have to be your friend?"