But that was all far in the past now. Now Chloe and Suhaery were a middle-aged couple in their sixties. Sleek and rich and completely at ease with one another. They came from the richest country on Earth and they looked as though they were very proud about that.
“How did you manage to find me?” Maya said.
“Oh, it was terribly hard, Mom. We tried the net, the police, everything. Finally we thought to ask Mercedes. Your housekeeper.”
“Oh, I guess Mercedes would know.”
“She had some good guesses. Mercedes says to tell you that she’s sorry she scolded you so much. She still thinks what you did was totally immoral, but so many people have asked her for interviews now … well, you know how it is. Celebrity.”
Maya shrugged. “No, I’m afraid I don’t. How is my celebrity these days?”
“Mom,” said Chloe, and sighed, “you’ve really done it this time. Haven’t you? I always knew you were never as quiet as you looked. I could always tell you were faking it. I always knew someday you’d lose your grip and blow sky-high. That was your problem, Mom: you were never in touch with genuine spirituality.”
Maya looked at Suhaery. Her daughter’s husband was a stout and practical Asian businessman. He was in pillar-of-strength mode, playing the stellar role of psychic anchor. Suhaery was strolling along in his clean and pressed walking shorts on a weedy roadside in an alien country. Maya realized suddenly that Suhaery was finding this all very funny. He thought his wife’s relations were amusingly peculiar. He was right.
“What do you think about all this, Harry?” she asked.
“Mia, you look lovely. You’re like a blossoming rose. You look like Chloe on the first day I met her.”
“You shouldn’t tell her that,” Chloe scolded. “That sounds really strange and bad in about five different ways.”
Suhaery said something wicked in Malay and chuckled heartily.
“We tried to find you in San Francisco,” Chloe said, “but the people in the clinic weren’t helpful at all.”
“Yeah, I, uh, pretty much had it with all the clinic people.”
“It would have been smarter to go back under controlled care, Mom. I mean, obviously you’ve blown most of your value as an experimental subject. But still.”
“I thought about doing that, I really did,” Maya said. “I mean, if I’d run back to those meatheads and humbled myself and lived under medically defined circumstances, I probably could have repaired my medical ratings a lot, but you know something? I got no use for ’em. They’re the bourgeoisie, they’re philistines. I’m sick of ’em. It’s not that I blame them for what happened to me, but … well … I’m busy now. I have better things to do.”
“Such as?”
“I just like to walk around. Earth, sky, stars, sun. You know.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Well, I do photography.… The Amish, they’re such good material and they’re so good about it.… I mean, Amish children look incredibly like normal children, they are normal children, but then you can trace them decade by decade. Amish people around seventy … The natural human aging process … It’s amazing and terrifying! And yet there’s this strange organic quality to it.… The Amish are wonderful. They can tell I’m some kind of impossible monster by their standards, but they’re so sweet and good about it. They just put up with us posthumans. Like they are doing the rest of us a favor.”
Chloe thought about it. “What are you really doing with all this photography of Amish people?”
“Nothing much. My pictures still stink. I’m a lousy apprentice photographer and I got a lousy camera. But that’s okay; I need a lot of practice. Especially in framing shots properly …”
Suhaery and Chloe exchanged knowing glances. Then Chloe spoke up. “Mom, Harry and I think it would be a good idea if you came back with us to Djakarta for a while.”
“Why on earth would I want to do that?”
“There’s plenty of room in the condo, and in Asia they’re better about these things. They’re more understanding.”
“If only you had run to Indonesia,” said Suhaery indulgently. “In Europe, they’re all crazy. They never know how to rest, even when they’re rich. There is something very wrong with Europeans. They just don’t know how to live.”
“You really want your weird mother-in-law to live under your roof, Harry?”
“You’re a harmless little thing,” said Suhaery kindly. “I always liked you, Mia, even when you were very afraid of me.”
“Well, I can’t do that. No way. Sorry.”
“Mom, you need looking after. Let us look after you a little. You deserve it, you know. You sacrificed a lot for me. Years and years.”
“Forget it.”
Chloe sighed. “Mom, you’re almost a hundred years old. And they’ve cut off your treatment!”
“Do I look feeble to you? I can pass for twenty. Sure, I might live even longer if I went back to the lab and kissed up to them, but I’m okay, I’m not doing anything stupid. I eat right, I sleep like a top, and I get plenty of exercise. You see my legs now? Look at these legs! I could kick a hole right through the side of that hex barn over there.”
“Mom, stop that and listen. You’re living like a bum, like some kind of tramp. All right? You’re acting weird, you’re not acting responsibly. These other people that went through your same treatment, they all act pretty oddly, too. I think you people have got a serious legal case. You should stand up for your rights as abused patients. You should go through proper channels. What happened to you, it’s not your fault at all, and it never was. You should organize.”
“Darling, if we could organize, we wouldn’t be acting oddly in the first place.”
“You should talk to the others. Network with them.”
“I don’t have net access. And I bet they don’t, either.”
“Mom, why not? You should be calling us. Really, Harry and I, we’ve both been worried sick about you. Haven’t we, Harry?”
“It’s true, Mia,” said Suhaery loyally. “We are concerned.”
Chloe drew a breath. “I can see that you’re not human any longer, and I can accept that. It’s fine, it happens. But you are my mother. You can’t run off and do this to us. It’s unconscionable.”
“Your father did it.”
“No, he didn’t. Dad left you, but he never left me. Dad talks to me whenever I ask Dad to talk to me. And at least I always know where Dad is. I never know where you are anymore. Nobody knows. You know how long we’ve been searching for you on these back roads?”
“No. How long?”
“Long enough,” Suhaery said, smiling. “Maybe too long. Your daughter and I are very patient people.”
“Can’t you just call us, at least? So we won’t fret so much. Please, Mom. I don’t mind if you want to walk around, but Mom, you can’t ever walk away from your dharma and karma.”
“Look, I don’t have any money.”
Suhaery slipped his brown hands neatly into his creased trouser pockets. “That’s no problem. Twenty marks a week? Would that be too much?”
“Twenty marks? …” said Maya. “Wow.”
Suhaery nodded happily. “Take a little money. What’s wrong with that? It’s not enough money to make any trouble for any of us. A little allowance, Mia. A family remittance. We are your family, you know. It would make us so happy.”