by Vonda N. McIntyre
This story copyright 1979 by Vonda N. McIntyre. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.
Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.
* * *
Darting into a lighted spot in a dim pool-* * *
Being born-- well, Lais remembered it, a gentle transition from warm liquid to warm air, an abrupt rise in the pitch of sounds, the careful touch of hands, shock of the first breath. She had never told anyone that her easy passage had lacked some quality, perhaps a rite that would have made her truly human. Somewhere was a woman who had been spared the pain of Lais' birth, everywhere were people who had caused pain, and, causing, experienced it, paying a debt that Lais did not owe. Sleeping curled in fetal position in the dark gave her no comfort: the womb she was formed in had seemed a prison from the time she was aware of it. Yet the Institute refused to grow its fetuses in the light. The Institute administrators were normal and had been born normally. If they had ever been prenatally aware, the memory had been obliterated or forgotten. They could not understand the frustration of the Institute Fellows, or perhaps the thought of fishlike little creatures peering out, watching, learning, was too much even for them to bear.
Lais' quiet impatience with an increasingly cramped world was only relieved by her birth, and by light, which freed a sense she had felt was missing but could not quite imagine. Having reasoned that something like birth must occur, she was much calmer under restraint than she had been only a little earlier. When she first realized she was trapped, when she first grew large enough to touch both horizons of her sphere, she had been intelligent but wild, suspicious and easily angered. She had thrashed, seeking escape; nothing noticed her brief frenzy. The walls were spongy-surfaced, hard beneath; they yielded slightly, yet held her. They implied something beyond the darkness, and allowed her to imagine it. All her senses were inside the prison, so she imagined being turned inside out to be freed from her tether. She expected pain.
As she waited, she sometimes wished she were still a lower primate, small and stupid enough to accept the warm salty liquid as the universe. Even then, as she kicked and paddled with clumsy hands and feet, missing the strong propulsion of her vanished tail, she was changing. That was when she first thought that the spectrum of her senses might lack a vital part. Her environment was still more alien now than it had been when she was a lithe amphibian, barely conscious, long-tailed and free in an immense world. Earlier than that, her memories were kinetic impressions, of gills pumping, heart fluttering, the low, periodic vibration that never changed.
* * *
-- the silver-speckled black fish settled in a shadow at Lais' feet, motionless but seeming to ripple beneath the mist and the disturbed surface of the water. Lais hunched down in her thick coat. The layered branches of a gnarled tree protected her from the sleet, but not from the wind. She shivered. Overhead, the vapor rising from the pool condensed in huge drops on the undersides of dark green needles, and fell again. The tree smelled cool and tart. Beyond her shelter, the shapes of sculpture and small gardens rose and flowed between low buildings and sleet-cratered puddles that reflected
intermittent lights. Except for Lais and the fishes, the flagstone mall was deserted. People had left their marks, bits of paper not yet picked up, sodden; placards and posters the haranguers had abandoned in the rain, leaning against each other like dead trees. Lais let her gaze pass quickly over them, trying not to see the words; in the dim light, she could almost pretend she could not read them.
If she left this place she could walk downtown for perhaps half an hour in the warmed, well-lit night, before an agent saw her smoothing people and chased her out, or had her held and checked. That she could not afford. She stayed where she was. She pulled her coat over her knees and put her head down. Staying outside was her own choice. The dump nearby would give her one of the transients' beds, but out here the cold numbed her, a free anesthetic that otherwise she might be driven to buy in more destructive form.
A scuffing through slush on the flagstones roused her. Lais crawled stiffly from beneath the tree. Pain clamped on her spine before she could straighten. She leaned against the garden's retaining wall, breathing the thin air in shallow cut-off gasps. The man was almost opposite her when she moved into the mall. "Hey, you got any spare change?"
Startled, a little scared, he peered down at her through the rain. His face was smooth, without character, the set and seemingly plasticized face of a thousand betrayers, a face she would not live to share. He had nothing to be frightened of but mercifully rapid senility and a painless death that could be over a century away. His life span would be ten times hers.
"You're dressed well to want money."
She moved closer to him, so close that she had to conceal her own uneasiness. She needed, if anything, more distance around her than other people, but she understood the need and controlled it. The man succumbed to it, and moved away from her until gradually, as they talked, she backed him against the wall. He was odorless, a complete olfactory blank, firmly scrubbed and deodorized at mouth and armpits and feet and groin, as clean as his genes. Even his clothes had no smell. Lais hadn't bathed in days, and her clothes were filthy; her damp coat smelled familiarly of wool, and she herself smelled like a warm wet female animal with fur. She built up an image of herself preying on others. It amused her, because they had been preying on her all her life.
"Some people are more generous," she said, as if someone had given her the coat. Wisps of hair clung in damp streaks across her forehead and at her neck.
"Why don't you sign up for Aid?"
She laughed once, sharply, and didn't answer, turned her back on him and guessed two steps before he called her. It was one. "Do you need a place to sleep?"
She made her expression one of disdain. "I don't do that, man."
Cold rain beading on his face did not prevent his flush: embarrassment mixed with indignation. "Come now, I didn't mean-- "
She knew he didn't mean--
"Look, if you don't want to give me anything forget it." She stressed "give" just enough.
He blew out his breath and dug in his pockets. He held out a crumpled bill that she looked at with contempt, but she took it first. "Gods, a whole guilder. Thanks a lot." The insolence of her mock gratitude upset him more than derision. She walked away, thinking that she had the advantage, that she was leaving him speechless and confused.
"Do you like hurting people?"
She faced him. He had no expression, only that smooth, unlived-in look. She watched his eyes for a moment. They, at least, were still alive.
"How old are you?"
He frowned abruptly. "Fifty."
"Then you can't understand."
"And how old are you? Eighteen? It isn't that much difference."
No, she thought, the difference is the hundred years that you've got left, and the self-righteous hate you'd give me if you knew what I was. She almost answered him honestly, but she couldn't get the words out. "It is to me," she said, with bitterness. Only fifty. He was the right age to have had his life disrupted
by the revolt, and if he did not hate her kind, he would still fear them. Deep feelings were no longer so easily erased by the passage of time.
He seemed about to speak again, but he was too close; she had misjudged him and he had already stepped outside her estimation of him. Her mistakes disturbed her; there was no excuse for them, not this soon. She turned to flee and slipped to her hands and knees in the slush. She struggled to her feet and ran.