The woman on the screen had dark brown hair cut in a sharp, shoulder-length line. “Spanner? Ellen. Sorry we missed your birthday. Thought you might like-”
A woman who knew when Spanner’s birthday was. With brown hair. Lore hesitated, then sat before the video pickup and touched a button. The woman on the screen frowned.
“Who are you?”
“Lore.” She remembered to make the word slippery, in her new accent. They stared at each other a minute. Dyed brown hair, dyed red hair.
“No wonder we haven’t heard from her for a while.” Ellen smiled. It was an open smile, genuine, and Lore immediately liked her. “I was calling to invite Spanner for a drink. A belated celebration. You’ll both come?”
They looked at each other some more. Lore wondered what Ellen saw. She almost asked her. Instead, she nodded.
“The Polar Bear, then.”
“Who is it?” Spanner came through from the shower, drinking coffee, no towel.
“One moment,” Lore said to Ellen, and turned off the video pickup. “It’s Ellen,” she told Spanner.
Spanner motioned Lore aside, slid into the chair. Lore was not surprised when she turned the video back on. “Hey. Did I hear something about a drinks”
“You did.” Ellen grinned, looked Spanner up and down. “You seem in the pink.”
They both laughed, and Lore felt like a child left out of a grown-up joke.
“Ten tomorrow?”
“Fine.”
“We’ll expect both of you,” Ellen said, and the screen went gray.
“Who’s ‘we’?” Lore asked.
“Ellen and Ruth.”
“The PIDA picker?”
“The same. Maybe some others.”
“I feel like I’ll be presented for inspection.”
Spanner shrugged. “You know how it is. People always want to check out who you’re with.”
People, not friends. “Business?”
“Dilettantes. Ex-dilettantes at that.”
Later, in the Polar Bear, as she sat at a table with Ellen and Ruth, and Billy and Ann, Lore thought she must have imagined the edge of disdain in Spanner’s words.
Spanner was in high gear, drinking hard and dragging the others along in her slipstream. She smiled at Ellen and Ruth, bought them drinks until their cheeks were red and their eyes sparkled, until. they laughed out loud and their bodies moved more freely. She drew the normally surly Billy into the circle until his pinched face relaxed and he stopped looking at everyone sideways; she listened attentively until Ann stopped punctuating all her sentences with a nervous laugh. Spanner’s energy pulled them all together, made them relax and feel good.
Lore found herself being sucked in, despite herself; felt Spanner’s attention like a small sun. She wanted to turn her face to that warmth, bask in it.
The late evening turned to midnight, then one. Ellen and Ruth made vague motions toward leaving, but Spanner waved them to sit down again and ordered another round. She made some joke about enjoying life while you can, even when you had joined the ranks of the faceless employed, and everyone laughed. And in that unguarded moment Lore saw Spanner’s expression change.
It was a subtle thing: the raised eyebrows that had been full of concern and interest were now canted just differently enough for Lore to reread them as sardonic—contemptuous, even. She glanced around the table, caught Ruth’s face, and realized that Ruth knew: Spanner was scoring at them for joining the sheep; for no longer living on their wits; for being soft. She looked away, studied her beer.
It was a bright, sunny morning, cold in the metallic-tasting breeze but warm where the sun bounced off sandstone and pavement. I stopped in one of those sun traps on the way back from the shops and enjoyed the warmth while I could. It felt like a moment, a bubble stolen from the summer, as though maybe while someone had been away for July and August with their windows closed, the sun had heated their room, made it warm and round and smelling of dust and hot carpet, and then the flat owner had returned from a long holiday and opened the window and let out this last, little bit of sunshine. I didn’t want to go back to my flat and be alone all day.
I knocked on Tom Wilson’s door. “I bought some Lapsang souchong.”
“You’d best come in, then.” His eyes were bright, but he walked stiffly. “Sit down, sit down. The kettle’s boiled.” I sat while he fussed with trays and teapots and cups. His slippers shuffled as he carried everything carefully to the window-side table. I poured. “Now, then. What’s on your mind?”
“I need your help.”
He smiled. “Well, that’s gratifying.”
“What I want you to do isn’t exactly legal. That is, what I want you to do, here, wouldn’t break any laws, technically, especially if you said you didn’t know what it was all about-”
“You’re planning to get caught?”
“No.” I wished he wouldn’t yank me to a standstill like that.
“Glad to hear it. Is what you want to do dangerous?”
“Not physically, no.”
“Who will it hurt?”
Not Will it hurt anyone? but Who. He wasn’t smiling, exactly, but his sandy-gray eyebrows were slightly raised, and the deep lines in his cheeks were deeper. “Some people’s pride. A few very rich people who get their kick out of patronizing the poor, and the executives in charge of net security.”
“And who will it benefit?”
For one wild moment I wanted to treat him like a father confessor, pour out my whole life—the kidnap, the years with Spanner, the trouble I was in and how this might, once and for all, get me out, but then I realized I was looking for forgiveness, absolution. “Me. It will benefit me, and a friend, and you. If you decide to help.”
“Then tell me more.”
“Spanner and I are going to piggyback the net signal with a thirty-second commercial of our own. No one will know that it’s not genuine.” I told him about Stella, the fashions of the rich Almsgivers. “So we put our signal out there and these ghouls send money, which gets electronically shunted up, down, and sideways and pops out in the form of anonymous debits which we then take and spend. End of story, except that we need some footage we can’t get from the library. We… I need to film you.”
“Nice to be needed. But as you can see,” he gestured at his swollen knuckles, “I can’t always get out and about. Could you film it here?”
I nodded. “And I can doctor the disk, make it look as though I shot through a zoom—maybe through a window or something, without your knowledge. Just in case.”
“Good enough. What sort of things will I have to do?”
“The main thrust is going to be about how the elderly are feeling bemused by the world. I want to show how things have moved too fast for some.”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
“Um,” I said, noncommittally.
“You don’t agree?” His hand shook a little as he put down his teacup. “Rape, murder, torture, it’s all been done before. Loneliness, joy, love—been around for thousands of years. Clothes are different, but there’s always been fashion. Food is different, but there’s always been taste and fads. Oh, there may be new ways to read books these days, there’s the net instead of radio and these silly PIDAs instead of a good leather wallet, but people don’t change. Not really.” He laughed. “The expression on your face! Live a few more years and you’ll find out. Nothing really changes.”
“But how did you feel when your money no longer worked and you had to get a PIDA?”
He shrugged. “It was twelve years ago. I was a bit uncertain at first: What if something went wrong in a computer and my account got tied up? How would I pay the rent then? But after a month or two I liked it. No more rushing to the bank. No more filling out bills. Everything’s so easy.”
“For some,” I said. “I heard a story once about when the book reader first came out, a young man gave one to his grandfather. He turned it on, pulled up a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and showed grandfather how to change the pages. Granddad said, ‘Thank you very much.’ The younger man left him happily reading. A year later, when he went back to visit, the young man found his grandfather reading the same book. ‘Wonderful thing, this reader,’.the old man said, ‘but I wish they’d brought out some different stories.’ The old man had no idea that there were nearly twenty thousand different books on that disk. That he could have bought hundreds of other disks, or simply downloaded others—anything at all—from the net. He was used to a book being immutable. The fact that the words on each side of the ‘page’ changed didn’t make a difference: this was To Kill a Mockingbird, so how could it be anything else?”