I had trouble getting to sleep that night. Even beating the pillow, imagining it a male body, didn’t help.
The next day, I banged my head, for the thousandth time since getting out of the hospital, on a damn open cabinet door in the kitchen. I’d always had the bad habit of leaving them open, unless Court or another adult taller than me was in the room.
Lizzie looked smug. “Served you right.”
I rubbed my forehead, then went around slamming them all shut.
The boys were enjoying one last computer game on the kitchen table consoles before the school courses started coming in via the net.
“You shouldn’t have come here. We don’t want you,” Lizzie added smugly.
At the moment, love her as I did, it was hard not to smack her. Something Court didn’t approve of, and I had never done. Before.
Her lips turned down in a sneer. “I saw what you did, last night. I saw Daddy coming out of your room.”
Twelve is a hellish age. Time mercifully dulls the memories, once we reach adulthood. The last thing I needed was a daughter jealous of her father’s feelings toward me. But with a throbbing head distracting me, all I could come up with was a stupid, “So what.”
“You think I’m dumb. You think I don’t know why you’re here. You came to take Mommy’s place.”
“I am—” I stopped. She didn’t believe. Her mother was dead. The slowly dying body she had lived in, buried. Lizzie, all of them, had attended the funeral. That was it. Period. Finis. Yet her mother’s brain—me—had been given a new lease on life in a donated body. Body transplants were such a new medical technique, and the chances for abuse were so very huge, that congress, for once, had gotten ahead of the game. Almost as soon as the first brain transplant proposal, the first full body donor suggestion, they had passed a law.
The person who donated the body had to be legally brain dead, and after the transplant, was legally dead.
The person who accepted the body donation, who was only a brain in a new body, that person was legally dead, too.
Her children orphans, or half orphans. Her husband a widower.
Both the husbands. The man married to the brain that went into a new body. The man married to a body that got a new owner via the brain transplant.
They even ruled that as soon as she (or he, of course) was released from the hospital, that they go through a version of the protected witness routine. Another name, another city. There was even conditioning against ever coming back. Voluntarily. By oneself.
What they hadn’t counted on was someone like Court, who played the information nets like his children rescued princesses and treasures. Who could trace what little was left of his wife. And bring her home. Even if she was legally dead. Even if she looked totally different.
The trouble was, I didn’t feel dead. Living Inside the new body, everything seemed the same to me, until I looked in a mirror. The first thing I did when I got back, was take every mirror out except the ones in the bathrooms.
I watched Lizzie glaring at me as if looks could kill, and decided this couldn’t go on.
Two days later, I knew that Something had to be done. Harley followed me into the kitchen, and, with a groan, grabbed me and kissed me.
The real trouble was, I liked it. A lot.
Lizzie had followed us. “Good,” she said. Harley almost leaped away from me, blushing bright red. Lizzie sneered at us. “Now maybe you’ll both go.” She folded her arms, and watched. As though we’d march out together, that very second.
“Oh, lord.” Harley didn’t look happy.
I only smiled. Maybe if she told Court?
I think she did. Nonetheless, he continued to Not.
The spit hit the rotating propellers four days after Harley kissed me. We were all in the den. Harley and the boys were “beta testing” one of his programs. From the hisses and snarls intermixed with cries of glee, I was sure all three were enjoying themselves.
Lizzie was on Court’s lap. Using a portable computer, he was helping her with some subject she claimed to be having problems with. It was a put up job, but if she needed the reassurance of love from her father, then she needed it.
I was sitting at a small table, using its terminal to make payments. Muttering. “Third child tax. Idiot government. Inverse incentives.”
Gaze still fixed on the screen in his lap, Court finished it. “Encouraging producers not to have kids, and paying the nonproducers for as many as they want.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “You always say the same thing, Mary.”
Lizzie was glaring at me, but there was an odd horror mixed in.
The doorbell went off, sweet wind chimes.
I was the only one close to unencumbered. “I’ll get it.”
Court frowned. “Who’d be calling at this hour?”
“A salesperson.” I shrugged. “I’ll get rid of them.”
It wasn’t a salesperson, though that was the general impression. She seemed mid- to late twenties, bland and innocuous looking, dressed in an anonymous powersuit. No one feature, from neat page boy brown hair to hazel eyes, stood out. If I turned away, I’d have difficulty describing her.
She flashed a badge. “This is official. Is Mr. Winthrop here?”
Oh, oh! I decided truth is always better, and nodded.
She took a step in, and I back pedaled. “May I speak to him?”
“The taxes are paid,” I said firmly. Even if it was only authorized five minutes ago, electrons move fast.
She awarded me A Look. “This isn’t about taxes. Where is Mr. Winthrop?”
I tried another line of defense. “We have company.”
A shrug. “Get rid of them. This is going to take a while.”
I chewed my knuckle. Then, “Shall I bring him into his home office?”
She folded the badge holder closed. Somehow, in that action, its outer edge brushed against my bare arm. “Your choice, ma’am. But your company will have a long wait.”
I went into the den. “Court, there’s some woman here, says she has Official business with you. You want to use the office? Harley, do you mind?”
Harley answered first. “Course not.” He grinned at the boys. “Now, if I was the one who was leaving, so far ahead—”
“You’re not neither,” Link asserted.
Court was frowning. “I can’t think which of my clients would feel it urgent enough—”
I had left the door only partly shut. Now it opened fully and the woman with the badge stood framed in the doorway. Only she wasn’t holding the badge out, she was staring at its box with the glee of Arnie Jacoby when he signed that new half billion contract with the Chicago Natives. “I thought so,” she was saying. “I thought so!”
She looked up, we were all staring at her. She held out the case, it had a tiny screen opposite the badge. “I took a sample from you when we were talking at the door.” Her gaze skewered me like a butterfly impaled on a board. “I know who you are.”
“Oh, God!” Court soared up, dumping Lizzie and the computer. Lizzie squalled, and the computer wheeeeped.
“Dad-dy!” Lizzie protested.
Immediately, he knelt and hugged her. “I’m sorry, honey. I was so startled, I just reacted without thinking. Are you OK?”
“I guess. Daddy?”
He hugged her desperately. “I love you, muffin.”
“Too bad. This is going to make my career. You’ve broken the law, you and her, and I’m going to take care of you both. These kids will never see you again, not even when they’re grown and gray.”
All three children stared at her in horror.
I swallowed. “You can’t. Court had nothing to do with it. You can do what you like to me, but he’s out of the loop. It was all me.”