A woman like a small, gray mouse touched Chelle’s arm. “You’re talking to yourself, darling. Did you know it? Talking out loud?”
“Bad, mad Chelle!” She nodded, smiling. “I’m psycho, that’s why the Army doesn’t want me anymore. Only I was really talking to somebody, to that major in dress blues. See him? He’s crossing the street now.”
“Yes. Yes, I do, darling. He can’t hear you.”
“That’s the good thing about it.” Chelle’s smile was still there. “If he could hear me, he’d come back and we’d be miserable all over again.”
She turned away from the mousy woman. “They think I’ve got part of Jane Sims’s brain, Skip. That’s the EU, because I think it was them, and the Os, because they sent poor Rick. Only I don’t. All I’ve really got is her left arm up to the shoulder, only I feel her in me sometimes just the same, so I’m psycho and the Army won’t take me back.”
He had vanished among hundreds of other pedestrians. She stood beside the mousy woman for a moment longer, and another moment after that, before she turned away and began to walk.
REFLECTION 20: Walking
The fat man who kept pushing past me was God, and Charlie. Or was Charlie, who was God. When you’re a little kid, you think your father is God. That’s wrong, but maybe I went too far the other way. Where the hell’s Charlie now? I have to tell him I want to go on his picnic.
Most of all I want to get out of this city, get away from the dirt and cold and these gray-faced people. I’m turning into one of them, and I’d rather be dead.
Maybe you go to the dream-world when you’re dead, maybe that’s what death feels like. Tell me, Jane? Can you hear me? You’re dead, so what’s it like? Do you see the white pigeons, white pigeons falling from the sky, all speckled over with their own blood? People are so damned cruel.
I didn’t run out on Skip because he tried to make me happy, I ran out because he thought that horrible thing he did would make me happy and after that I knew I could never trust him anymore, that when he gave me something there might be dead kids behind it, might be anything behind it, any kind of murder.
I killed Mort Pununto. I know I did. They were all saying afterward that they hadn’t aimed at him, that they’d made sure they missed. I’d aimed for the middle of his chest, and what I aim at, by God I hit.
So I looked in the truck where they’d put his body, and there he was, Master Sergeant Pununto, the best damn noncom I ever saw. And he didn’t look one fuckin’ bit like he was asleep. He looked dead and he was dead, and there was my bullet hole in the middle of his chest three buttons down and no other bullet holes at all. And I knew then why they had put me on the firing squad.
Goodbye, Mort! Sometimes I see you in my dreams. I guess I always will.
You and Skip.
Is the Army a kind of death? Or is death a kind of enlistment? If it is, we all enlist, even if we don’t want to.
We’re sick of this life. Was I sick of winning the fencing tournament, sick of being the star pitcher on the softball team? No, sick of being out of college and in a world where I couldn’t do any of that, sick of living with Skip in a studio apartment. Sick of waiting for him to come home so I’d have somebody to bitch at. We weren’t going to last a year, and I knew it.
So I joined, and then he wanted to contract and I said sure, darling, you wait for me.
The Army seemed so damned glamorous then. And damn it, up there it was glamorous! We were us. That was the big thing. We were us, and we could tell an officer to fuck off if we wanted to, because what was he going to do? Lock us up where the Os couldn’t get at us? Some fucking punishment! Not that we did it a lot. Our officers were fighters, or most of them were.
So was Mort Pununto and I killed him.
He enlisted. He was sick of whatever it was he’d been living in the EU, so he signed up for a job he must have known would get him killed within a year or two. He signed up for death.
Skip’s a fighter, too. I was surprised, on the boat. Skip with a subgun, jumping the rail with the gun in one hand; we used to call them rattlesnakes, those little short-barreled subguns.
I should’ve known. How many battles in court, risking disbarment, risking everything to set some scumbag free? Then blam! He came back to our stinking studio and he’s signed on with Chet Burton. God knows I didn’t know much, but I knew who Chet Burton was, the guy the celebrities went to when it was win or die and blood on the knife in their car.
So he was higher than Johanna, so I rained on his parade. But he was always a fighter.
Old and tired, in the penthouse he’d fixed up for me. Around the world next year, only no next year. So long, buddy. So long, Skip. The way I am now, you’re better off without me.
I’m going on Charlie’s picnic, out of the smoke and the dirt, away from Mick and the bottles behind the bar, and the all the gray faces. I’m going away, and I’m not coming back.
They’ll tell me when you do, and I’ll be there.
CHARACTERS
Note: The most important persons are listed here, with a few of lesser importance. Listings are by the name most often employed in the text. Thus SKIP Webster Grison will be found under “S,” and Captain Richard KAIN under “K.”
ACHILLE A beggar lacking hands.
BORIS The chief researcher at Burton, Grison, and Ibarra.
BRICE, Lt. Gerard Second mate of the Rani.
CHARLES C. Blue CHELLE’s biological father.
CHELLE Sea Blue SKIP’s college sweetheart and contracta. Note that her first name is pronounced “Shell.”
DIANNE Field SUSAN Clerkin’s assistant.
DON Miles, Cpl. A soldier on leave.
FEUER A vice president of Reanimation, Inc.
JANE Sims A physicist.
JOHNSON, Rick One of Mick TOOLEY’s volunteers.
KAIN, Capt. Richard Master of the Rani.
KENT-JERMYN, Sgt. Gerald A soldier on leave.
NAN Olivera Sgt. KENT-JERMYN’s contracta.
OBERDORF, Gary A mechanic on the Rani.
SKIP Webster Grison The managing partner at the law firm of Burton, Grison, and Ibarra.
SORIANO The soldier of fortune employed by Mick TOOLEY to retake the Rani.
SUSAN Clerkin SKIP’s confidential secretary.
TOOLEY, Mick A young attorney at Burton, Grison, and Ibarra.
TRINITY The masseuse on the Rani.
UEDA, Dr. The pediatrician who becomes the Rani’s doctor.
VANESSA Hennessey The woman who meets CHELLE when she returns to Earth. Aboard the Rani she is known as VIRGINIA Healy.
ZYGMUNT A private investigator often called “the Z man.”