She turned off the wall screen, poured herself a glass of Harrison’s scotch, and picked up his tablet to read the article in Nature. She couldn’t concentrate. After a while she lay down on the sofa, put her hand between her legs, and tried to not think about Tim Saunders.
CHAPTER 13
S plus 2.6 years
Some people had more smarts than sense. Not that Sissy Tate hadn’t known that before she went to work for Marianne.
Look at Marianne now, bent over her messy desk, reading yet again that printout about the kids that cried all the time. Sissy had tried to read it because her sister Jasmine had just had another kid. Not that Sissy wanted to ever see Jasmine again, but word about the baby had reached Sissy through Mama. The article had been full of statistics and equations and terms that Sissy didn’t understand—she’d only gone through a secretarial course—but she’d gotten the gist, which was that everybody was fucked all over again by the spore cloud. Babies cried, sure, but they only started crying all the time and never smiling if they’d been buns in the oven since the spore cloud hit.
Marianne understood the article, though. She typed some numbers from it into her computer, whose screen was already full of different numbers, and started running some program on them. The back of Marianne’s head showed gray hair along the roots—Sissy would need to nag her into another appointment at Subtle Beauty. Some people didn’t make the most of what they had without somebody else nagging at them all the time. Marianne was bat-shit lucky to have Sissy taking care of her.
Not that Sissy didn’t know that she herself was the lucky one. She had this job, which paid about as much as flipping burgers at McDonald’s but which actually accomplished something important in the world, something she could believe in. She had gotten out of the Bronx and got some education, even if (she knew this now, after visiting real colleges with Marianne) it wasn’t a very good education. She had sweet, sexy Tim. And she had Marianne, who’d turned out to feel more like family than her own family ever did. And fuck anybody who said different.
Sissy sat at her own desk, whose polished surface had on it one laptop and one piece of paper, and finished making the online travel arrangements for the next speech. They’d fly, and the sponsor was even paying for three round-trip airline tickets. Tim didn’t like the venue, a high-school football stadium, because it would be hard to keep Marianne safe. They expected a really big crowd. The sponsor wasn’t a college this time but a pro-spaceship lobbying organization, Going to the Stars. Sissy had investigated it online. It looked legit, and not too crazy.
Not that “crazy” would stop Marianne. She was going to give her speeches no matter what. She spent three days a week in this tiny office, writing and reading science. Ecology, mostly. Which was another thing that was fucked, pretty much everywhere, and not just because of the mice. Sissy’d been reading about all the droughts in the Midwest because everybody had mismanaged all the crops.
“Damn!” Marianne said.
“What?”
“Here’s an article—an autopsy report, actually—on a two-year-old who died in a car crash. The father donated the brain to—”
“He let somebody cut out his kid’s brain?”
Marianne turned in her chair to look at Sissy and said gently, “The child was dead.”
“I don’t care! I wouldn’t let anybody cut up my dead kid!”
“Sissy, you’re a mass of contradictions. You admire science; this is how science advances. That father did a wonderful thing.”
Did he? Maybe. Sometimes Sissy couldn’t tell how the ideas from her old world and the ideas from her new world should line up in her mind. But the important thing was to learn all she could. Sometimes since she’d come to work for the Star Brotherhood Foundation, she felt like a flower opening up to the sun for the first time. Other days, new things felt like cold rain. She said belligerently, knowing that her belligerence was a cover for confusion, “What did the autopsy show?”
“Well, it’s more what it seems to show, which is either enlarged or deformed primary auditory cortex, with unusually dense neural connections to the midbrain and brain stem.”
Sissy seized on the part of this she could understand. “What do you mean, either that thing is enlarged or it’s deformed? Can’t they tell which?”
“Not really.” Marianne swiveled her computer chair to face Sissy. “We don’t know much about the parts of the brain that process sound. It’s really complex, and to make it more complex, no two human cortices are the same. This might mean nothing. But Harrison’s mice…”
“What about Harrison’s mice?”
“I don’t know yet. I just don’t—I need to do a lot more reading. What else is on my schedule for today?”
“Fund-raising dinner in Tribeca.”
“Damn. Can’t I—”
“No. You have to go. This lady has money and she’s willing to give us some.”
Marianne glanced at her computer screen, back at Sissy, back at the screen. “How much money?”
Sissy decided to be honest. Not that she wasn’t usually honest with Marianne. “Probably not that much, but—”
“Tell them I’m sick and reschedule.”
“But Tim says it’s important you show up so nobody thinks you’re scared off because of that attack at Notre Dame.”
“I am scared.”
“I said ‘scared off.’ Anyway, it’s too late to reschedule.”
“You’re a hard taskmaster, Sissy Tate.”
“Tim is going to pick you up in an hour at your place so you better go home and get ready. You aren’t going to wear that, are you?”
“No. I’m going to wear sackcloth and ashes and mourn my reading time.”
“Little lady, you’d look good even in that rig-out and that’s just the God honest truth,” said a voice behind them. Sissy whirled. How had anybody gotten in here and was he armed and— But Tim stood beside the intruder, and Tim was grinning.
Sissy felt her insides draw up and back, like a rat getting ready to fight. She knew who this was. She’d seen him just yesterday on the news.
Jonah Stubbins was even taller than Tim, and about 150 pounds heavier. He was dressed in what Marianne had once called Full Sunbelt: yellow shirt, khakis, white belt and shoes, bolo tie. He seized Marianne’s hand. “Dr. Jenner, I’m real glad to meet y’all!”
Sissy saw that Marianne was holding her breath. Stubbins saw it, too. He laughed. “Aw, I ain’t wearing none of my product, Doc. Y’all are perfectly safe from… whatever. Unless a’course you don’t wanna be!”
Marianne freed her hand and said icily, “I don’t understand why you are here, Mr. Stubbins. Tim—”
“Sure you understand. You and me, little lady—may I call you Marianne?”
“No.”
“All right. But we got interests in common. You already knew that, din’t you?”
“I—”
“Don’t say nothing till you hear me out. You Eastern types allus too quick to get to jawin’. I’m here to make y’all a donation. A real big one, that you don’t expect. That’s why your bodyguard showed me up here.”
A donation. From Jonah Stubbins. Sissy looked at Marianne, who said, “I don’t think so.”
“Then think again. Just hear me out, little lady, that’s all I ask. Right now, anyways!”
“I am not a ‘little lady.’ And you are not a viable donor to the foundation, however much you might think our interests align. Lastly, I’m not fooled, not amused, and not charmed by your folksy presentation. You have an MBA from Harvard, for God’s sake, which you have misused to criminal levels.”