Outcasts (9 page)

“I promise.”

Kylis clasped Miria’s hands for an instant and let her
go. Miria went inside the enclosure and boarded the plane. The engines
screamed, and the aircraft rose, sliding forward like a hovercraft through the
gateway. Clear of the fence, it rose higher until it had cleared the height of
the marsh plants. It accelerated straight north.

Kylis watched it until he was out of sight. She wished she
had seen Gryf, but now she believed Miria; she could believe he was alive.

In the eerie gentle light of dawn, as Kylis started away,
the harsh spotlights dimmed one by one.

~~~~~

The enormous fuzzy balloon bounced from Jannine’s
fingertips, rose in an eerie, slow curve, and touched its destination. The
viddydub forces took over, sucking the squashed ball into place with a loud,
satisfied slurp.

“Work always reminds me of that Charlie Chan movie,”
Jannine said.

Neko, farther along on the substrate, pitched an identical
elemental balloon into the helical structure. She had an elegant, overhand
throw; she had played ball before she left school, but she was too small to get
a scholarship.

“What Charlie Chan movie?” she asked. “Not
that I go out of my way to see Charlie Chan movies.”

“The one where he’s dancing with the globe?”
Jannine checked the blueprint hovering nearby, freed an element from the substrate,
and moved it into place.

“Do you maybe mean Charlie Chaplin?” Neko said. “
The
Great Dictator
?”

“Chaplin, right.” Jannine picked up a third
element, tossed it, caught it again, danced on one toe.

Neko tossed an element through the helix. A perfect curve
ball, it arced, touched, settled, like a basketball into quicksand. Its fuzzy
outlines blurred as it melted into the main structure, still a discrete entity,
but pouring its outer layers into the common pool.

“I don’t think you’d go too far as a dictator,”
Neko said.

“I don’t want to be the dictator. I want to be
the guy who pretends to be the dictator.”

She leaped again, twisting as she left the ground. But the
system wouldn’t let her spin. It caught her and stopped her with hard
invisible fingers. She found herself on the ground, with no sensation of
falling between leap and sprawl.

“Are you all right? I wish you wouldn’t
do
that. Jeez, it makes me nauseous just to watch you.”

Jannine picked herself up. Smiling, she glanced toward Neko,
but Neko’s blurry face showed no expression.

“I’m okay,” Jannine said to reassure her
co-worker. Neko couldn’t see her expression any more than Jannine could
see Neko’s. “Someday the system will handle a spin. How’ll I
know if I don’t try?”

Neko picked up one more of the furry elemental balls and
dropped it into place. The elementals scattered at her feet, bumping and
quivering, sticking briefly to the substrate or bouncing off. Once in a while,
two melded into dumbbell-shapes, then parted again.

“The system will handle a spin when you grow a
ball-joint in your wrist,” Neko said, exasperated. “You
could
read the documentation when there’s an upgrade.”

“Oh, when all else fails, read the instructions.”
Jannine laughed. “I don’t have time to read the instructions.”
She wished the company would let her take the manual home, but that was against
the rules. You were only allowed to read the manual in the company library.

Jannine and Neko walked down the helix, positioning the
elementals, now and again prying one out and replacing it.

A herd of elementals quivered toward Jannine, like bowling
balls under a gray blanket. Several escaped and flew off into the sky.

“Warm fuzzies today,” Neko said.

“Yeah.” Jannine went to the system and asked for
cooling. The elementals calmed, settled to the ground, and re-absorbed their
covering blanket. Once in a while, an elemental emitted a smear.

The helix extended out of sight in both directions. Jannine
and Neko had been working on this section for a week. Jannine loved watching
the helix evolve under her hands. The details of substrate, helix, and
elementals changed so fast that a human could alter the helix better than a
robot, even better than enzymes.

A flicker in Jannine’s vision: the helix and the
substrate and Neko vanished.

Jannine found herself in the real world. The couch held her
among water-filled cushions, cradling her body.

Quitting time.

The screen of her helmet reflected her face, an image as
unreal and distorted against the smoky plastic as Neko’s face had been,
back inside the system. The screen’s color faded. The audio fuzz cut out.

The clamor and bustle of the factory surrounded her: the
electronic whine of the system, the subsonic drumming of coolant pumps, the
voices and shapes of her co-workers as they got out of their couches and tidied
up for the day shift.

With her free left hand, Jannine opened the padded collar
that secured her helmet. She raised the mechanism from her head. The noise
level rose.

She shivered. The factory was always chilly. Her awareness
of her body faded when she worked. She never felt cold till she came out of her
workspace and back into real life. On the substrate, the temperature hovered
just above absolute zero. Down there, she always felt warm. Up here, where the
laboring pumps only incidentally lowered the temperature a few degrees, she
always felt cold.

She unbuckled the cuff around her right wrist and freed her
hand from the magnetic control.

Wiggling her fingers, clenching her fist, shaking her arm,
she slid out of the couch. All around her, her co-workers stood and stretched
and groaned in the cold. She unplugged her helmet and wiped it down and stowed
it. She wished she owned one, a helmet she could impress her own settings in
and paint with her own design.

Neko crossed the aisle and joined her.

“Brownie points tonight,” Neko said.

She moved smoothly, easily, with none of the stiffness
everyone else was feeling. She moved like her nickname, Neko, cat.

“A bonus, huh?” Jannine said. “Great. We
make a good team.”

They’d fallen into the habit of chatting for a few
minutes after work while they waited for the crush at the exit to ease.

But instead of replying, Neko stared at Jannine’s
control couch, at the manipulator that reduced the motions of Jannine’s
hand to movements in the angstrom range.

“Did you notice what it is we’re making?”
Neko said.

Up on her toes, Jannine shifted her weight from one foot to
the other, bouncing in place, trying to get warm. The day shift people came
into the factory, moving between the hulking shapes of the couches.

“Yeah, I guess,” Jannine said. “I wasn’t
paying attention. Just following the blueprint. Some vaccine, same as usual.”

“Let’s go.” Neko strode away, her hands
shoved in her pockets. She moved as gracefully as she did down on the
substrate, where gravity could be tuned and made a variable.

Jannine hurried after her. She waved across the factory at
Evan, the day-shift worker who co-habited her couch. But this morning, she didn’t
wait to talk.

She followed Neko through the security checkout. They were
nearly the last ones out, but waiting had saved them standing in the crowd.
Jannine’s life gave her plenty of lines to stand in.

Jannine thought the security system was stupid, a waste of
time. No one on the production floor had access to anything that they could
carry away. Except the helmets. You’d have to be awfully stupid to try to
walk out with a helmet, however tempting it would be to take one for your own.

Jannine shoved her i.d. into the slot. She waited. The
computer checked her and passed her and rolled her i.d. back. At the same time
it emitted a slip of paper, thrusting it out like a slow insolent tongue. It
beeped to draw her attention.

Ignore it, she told herself. She wanted to, but Neko had
seen it. If Jannine left the note, Neko would wonder why, or, worse, retrieve
it for her and give it to her and expect Jannine to tell her what it was. Neko
might even read it herself. Jannine grabbed it, glanced at it, and shoved it
into her pocket.

“What’s up?” Neko asked.

Jannine shrugged. “Nothing. Busybody stuff. ‘Eat
your vegetables.’”

“Sorry.” Neko’s voice turned cool. “Didn’t
mean to be nosy.” She turned and walked out of the factory and into the
new day.

Damn! Jannine thought. She wanted to try to explain, but
couldn’t think of the right words.

She hurried to catch up, blinking and squinting in the
bright sunlight. When she’d arrived at work at midnight, rain had slicked
the streets. Now the air and the sky were clean and clear.

“Want to get a beer? I’m buying.”

For a second she was afraid Neko would turn her down, keep
on walking into the morning, and never talk to her again. Neko strode on,
shoulders hunched and hands shoved in her pockets.

Then she stopped and turned and waited.

“Yeah. Sure.”

Finding a place that served beer at eight o’clock in
the morning was no big deal near the factory. A lot of the workers, like
Jannine, came off the substrate with nerves tight, muscles tense. In reality,
she’d spent the last eight hours lying almost perfectly still. But she’d
felt like she was in action all the time. Her work felt like motion, like
physical labor. Somewhere, somehow, she had to blow off the tension. Beer
helped. If she drank no more than a couple, she’d be able to pass the
alert at midnight, no problem.

She slid her hand into her pocket and crumpled up the note.
A couple of beers would let her stop worrying about that, too.

“Jannine!”

“Huh? What?”

Neko shook her head. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve
said.” She pushed open the tavern door. Jannine followed her out of the
sunlight and into the warm, loud gloom. They submerged in the dark, the talk,
the music.

Neko slipped through the crowd toward the bar. Jannine, head
and shoulders taller than her friend, had to press and sidle past people.

Jannine joined Neko by the wall, put her i.d. into the order
slot, grabbed a couple of glasses, and drew two beers. The tavern charged her
and returned her i.d. Neko retrieved it for her and traded it to her for one of
the beers.

“Thanks!” Neko shouted above the racket. Four or
five people were even trying to dance, there in the middle of the room where
hardly anyone could move.

Jannine looked around for a table. Stupid even to hope for
one. After work she preferred standing or walking to sitting, but Neko
obviously wanted to talk. They weren’t supposed to talk about work outside
the factory.

Somebody jostled her, nearly spilling her beer.

“Hey,” she said, “spill the cheap stuff,
okay?”

“Hey yourself, watch it.”

She recognized the guy: two couches over and one down.
Jannine didn’t know his name. Heading back to the order wall, he emptied
his glass in a gulp. She felt envious. He could drink like that all morning.
She’d watched him do it more than once. He always passed the alert when
midnight rolled around.

“Neko!” She caught Neko’s gaze and
gestured. Neko nodded and followed her.

Jannine pushed her way farther inside, holding her glass
high. She passed the bouncer. She knew one was there, out of sight in the small
balcony above eye level. She’d come in here four or five times before
noticing any of the people who kept an eye on the place. The balcony,
upholstered in the same hose-down dark fabric as the walls, blended into the
dimness, unobtrusive. The bouncer let the artificials take care of everything
but trouble.

Jannine reached the hallway.

“Wait —” Neko said as Jannine slid her
i.d. into the credit slot of a private room.

The door ate the i.d. and opened.

“What for?” Jannine crossed between the
equipment and set her glass down on the small table in the corner. “Hardly
spilled a drop,” she said.

Neko hesitated on the threshold.

“Come on, it’s paid for,” Jannine said.

Neko shrugged and entered. “Yeah, okay. This is kind
of extravagant, but thanks.” She shut the door, cutting out the din,
somebody yelling at somebody else, a fight about to start. After work, your
body was geared up for action, and your brain was too tired to hold it back.

Jannine drank a long swallow of her beer, then made herself
stop and sip it slowly. She was hungry. She ordered from the picture menu on
the back wall.

“Want anything?”

“Sure, okay.” Neko sounded distracted. She
pushed a couple of pictures, barely glancing at them, then sat at the table and
leaned on her elbows.

Jannine swung up on the stationary bicycle and started to
pedal. It felt good to get rid of the physical energy she had been holding in
all day. Sweat broke out on her forehead, under her arms.

“Did you see what we were making?” Neko said
again.

“If I’d stopped to think about it, we wouldn’t
have done such a long stretch and we wouldn’t have gotten any brownie
points.” Jannine tried not to sound defensive. “Besides, I was
worried about the warm fuzzies.”

“It wasn’t natural,” Neko said. She
drained her glass, put it down, and raked her fingers through her
shoulder-length black hair.

Jannine laughed, relieved. “I noticed
that
,”
she said. “I thought you meant something important. Jeez. Nothing we
build is natural. If it was natural, we wouldn’t need to build it.”

“But we weren’t using the regular base pairs. We
were using analogs.”

“Yeah. So?” Jannine wondered if Neko, too, had
been set up to test her. “I build what they tell me. It isn’t my
job to design it.”

Continuing to pedal the bike, she wiped sweat from her face
with the clean towel hanging from the handlebars.

“It must be something dangerous,” Neko said
stubbornly. “Something they don’t want out in the world. Yet. So
they make it with synthetic nucleics. So it can’t reproduce.”