Sanctuary, page 2
“No, he wasn’t stupid,” she said slowly. “Actually, he was the smartest man I ever met. He just refused to do anything with those brains. To adapt. This is life now. Outside is over.”
She sighed, trying to put her memories of Peter into perspective. “He used to bring me things from outside, a rock or some weed still growing, like other women got holoflowers. He could talk for hours about where he found these things.”
He collected things she had no hand in building, things she didn’t know the backstory to, such as who invented it, how it got approved, how well it tested in the city. Things she didn’t have to analyze for flaws, as if they were a personal success or failure. Was that the attraction he’d held for her?
“He was an adventurer,” she finally said. “Someone who didn’t want to know the ending to things. He had the explorer gene, loved to visit other cities. When they started closing those off . . .”
He had saved his salary for magtrain trips, content to let her pay all their expenses. She remembered his last trip to City of the South. He was two days over schedule. She was trying to save his job, papering over his absence with stories of illness, juggling full-time childcare and a major assignment at work. When he finally showed up, he had a nasty gash on his cheek and an oozing, bandaged arm.
“Where’s your DP?” she asked.
“They turned it off,” he answered.
“Who is ‘they’?”
“The people who did this,” he answered. “Before I returned. They don’t want any records. They knew just what they were doing when they jumped me. First thing they did was jam the DP.”
For some reason, the DP loss horrified Miranda more than the oozing sore on his arm. Her own DP was moving forward with an antiseptic spray. Peter impatiently waved it aside. Her DP paused, waiting for Miranda’s instructions.
“Don’t be an idiot, Peter; you can’t afford an infection.”
“Fine,” he said shortly, letting the DP unwind the makeshift bandage. Miranda gasped at the red, swollen, oozing sore. The worst she had ever seen were ferrat or dog bites, from the feral offspring of pets smuggled into the city. Fortunately, most of those had been rounded up and dealt with humanely.
“People did that to you?”
He laughed shortly.
“What were you doing to place yourself in a situation like this?” she asked. “Where were their DPs?”
“In City of the South, the only DPs are spies and jailers. The first thing anyone learns to do is jam them up. Even the ruling families have turned theirs off.” He waved away the ministrations of her DP. “Enough. Get that thing away from me.”
She looked at her DP. “No record,” she said. The DP flattened into a line and disappeared.
“I don’t know how to react to this,” she said. “Two days without word. We’ve been going crazy here. You could have been killed, Peter. You have a son.”
“I know,” he said. “But it looks worse than it is. Listen, I have a plan.”
She looked at him and saw the familiar wild, excited look, the gap-toothed grin. The man had a plan. Again.
Miranda sighed and backed away. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Alex is fortunately asleep. He had nightmares every night you were gone. You have to be up early for work. I managed to lie convincingly to your boss—”
He grabbed both her arms. “Fuck the job,” he said. “Let’s move.”
“Move? You don’t like the flat?”
He shook his head at her obtuseness. One of the things she hated about him was how impatient he got when his brain was racing with ideas and her slower, more practical mind couldn’t keep up.
“To City of the South,” he said. “Let’s move there.”
“Are you joking?” she asked. “We have a four-year-old son. Are you planning to train him to win knife fights?”
“Eventually,” he said, “but not right away. Don’t believe all the stories you hear about City of the South. Sure, the rulers are absolute shits. But the kids have a great life there. Playing in gangs, studying in street schools, learning to evade the ruler spies. Living by their own wits, not their DPs.”
“Sounds lovely,” she said, her anger beginning to catch fire. “A great life for your son. What about the life expectancy numbers from City of the South? Are those just ‘stories we hear’?”
He was silent for a moment, marshalling his arguments. “Most kids don’t have two parents. With two adults, and his own brains, Alex will be at a tremendous advantage. And City of the South is much more porous. People go in and out of the city. They aren’t trapped in a city aquarium, dependent on digital babysitters. If you have skills, like we have, you are valuable there.
“We’re valuable here. At least I am.”
He shook her slightly. “What’s your endgame, here?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“This.” He waved his hand at their climate-controlled flat, with the lighting automatically calibrated for conversation rather than reading. “This can’t last forever, Randi. You know it can’t. The kids of City of the South, they know the score, they’re prepared.”
“Prepared to be slaves to the rulers, to work at jobs that crush their health, to have babies and die young,” she said bitterly. “Illiterate.”
He studied her. “They are literate in what matters,” he said. “Survival.”
“You and I have different ideas of survival,” she replied. “Do you think I don’t know Sanctuary? Of course I do. I make it. Yes, it may not last forever, but it will outlast you and me. It will outlast our son and his future children. None of us can ask for more than that.”
“When you lived outside,” he asked, “did you have a pet?”
She shook her head. It was late. She was tired and disappointed. She needed to get up in a few hours. The last thing she needed was to think about Fred.
“I’m going back to bed,” she said. “You better do the same if you want to make your shift.”
“I had an aquarium,” he said to her retreating back. “My parents wanted to have pets that didn’t have to suffer because of what was happening to the world. That didn’t have any idea. Last thing we did before moving to the city was throw the fish down a drain. They lived and they died never knowing what a fucked-up world they lived in.”
Miranda didn’t even turn around. “We’ll talk in the morning.”
“Night, Randi,” he said to her back. “Sweet dreams.”
She’d laughed shortly at that.
The next morning, he was gone. Whether outside to wander or back to City of the South, she didn’t know.
“Gone to find something better for my son” was all the note said. Nothing about her and their life together, not even a signature with an endearment.
“Love, Peter” she said aloud, finishing the letter for him. “Sorry I am such a complete and utter asshole. Sincerely yours, Peter.”
Another letter, sealed, was addressed “To Alex, when your mother feels you are old enough to read this.” She still had the letter, unopened. But Alex never seemed old enough. She rarely thought about it, but when she did, she would freeze in her tracks with guilt. Many times, she thought about throwing it away. But looking at his tense, bitter face, seeing how much he had suffered with just the two of them . . .
Alex downed a packfruit, squeezing the contents into his mouth in a single gulp. “Well, I’m off to bed.”
Miranda checked the time on her newsline. Seven thirty. She doubted he was off to bed. No doubt some role-playing story that made the outside seem better than it was. He was so like his father, who he barely remembered. How did that happen?
She decided on an early night herself. She turned on her DP, a misty blue square, just before bed, as she frequently did, to make sure she didn’t forget anything. DPs, or digital personas, were three-dimensional sentient support systems that managed most of the circumstances that got you through your day. If they also documented your daily history for the Sanctuary archivists to store and mine, you tried your best not to think about that.
“I want to get together with Tara tomorrow night after work.” A slight sharpening of its misty edges, visible only if you looked for it, showed that the invitation was issued, her calendar updated. Thank God, Tara was free. She rarely was these days. But Miranda needed advice about Alex. Before he committed to that ridiculous role. Story maker!
In his room, Alex turned on his story cube with a glance, just as his mother suspected. He jumped from story to story, barely staying long enough to leave a trail, moving past the newsline—the daily information feed calibrated to your age, needs, and personal interests—past the interactive stories he stored, drilling deeper into the unvisited places, the root of the newsline, with great blanks instead of data, until faint lines drifted out of the cube, shaping themselves into letters, images, musical notes. Alex hastily turned the volume down as his fingers played through the tangle of lines. There it was: a coyote moving furtively along a line. Small and gray, barely visible against the empty walls of his room. He arrested it with his finger, and it spoke.
“How are you doing?”
“Okay. I settled on a role today. With my role counselor. Story maker.”
“Story maker,” the coyote repeated. Alex frowned. Was he disappointed too?
The coyote chuckled. “Good choice, Alex. People need stories. They help them make sense of things. Adjust. Very good.” The two chatted in whispers awhile longer. Alex fell asleep with his father’s approbation in his ears.
CHAPTER TWO
Alex was lost. This wasn’t a reason for panic. Sanctuary was huge, and you needed your DP to tell you to turn left at the green glass building and then right at the large story parlor with the Grecian columns. The alternative was the magcart, where you said the address and it scooted along on a magnetic track below the level of the streetway, so all you saw were people’s legs striding past. Alex didn’t like the closed-in feeling that gave him. Sanctuary could be difficult for a person who got claustrophobic in tight places. He knew Sanctuary so well, had memorized the available maps, that he could turn off his newsline and his DP and still get from place to place, even places he had never been.
If you walked by yourself, without your DP, it was easy to get lost, so almost no one did. Everyone on the streetway was paired with a DP of their own design. You would see a man striding along, ignoring the beautiful woman loping easily by his side, or clutching the hand of a cherubic child who managed to look helpless and trusting but still keep an eye on traffic and other people. It could be difficult to tell the DP from the human, except with children. You would see a small child all alone accompanied by a watchful rainbow-haired nanny or a loping purple-spotted giraffe. The only person who provoked a stare was the one without a DP.
“The cheese stands alone,” he said aloud, causing a gleaming lion walking beside a small girl to twitch its tail and growl a warning. Alex dropped back. The lion didn’t scratch or bite, but it could summon a guardian, which was worse. Alex couldn’t afford a warning for scaring a child. Not when he had just signed up for a role.
Today he wasn’t trying to get lost, as he sometimes did when he was at loose ends or trying to think through a problem with school. He glanced periodically at directions on the newsline, on the cuff of his scaleskin. Most people had eye implants to project the newsline on the cornea, but Alex was squeamish about his eyes, squinting, splintered green behind thick lashes. His mother had dropped the crumb that his eyes were just like his father’s. All he saw of his dad was the coyote avatar he used to prowl the root, so he sometimes stared at his eyes in the mirror as if he could see his dad staring back. He hated looking into people’s eyes and seeing small letters and numbers flashing in the corners. He once walked out on a date, one of the few girls in school he hooked up with, when he realized she wasn’t staring meltingly into his eyes but was absorbed in a sordid story of sex slaves in City of the South.
He turned down a narrow street, which caused the lion to purr with satisfaction and rub its head against the little girl. “I’m a guy without a DP,” he muttered; “so what? That makes me scary?” He knew the answer. The city had very little crime. DPs were programmed to prevent illegal acts. Marginal people, those without roles who needed coins to survive, outsider groups intent on protest or other mischief, had to turn off their DPs to do anything dodgy. But even those couldn’t be sure that their DP wouldn’t show up to save them from themselves. Of course, people in the know—world builders, city managers—seldom if ever used DPs, and when they did, they were generally small and unassuming, geometric shapes rather than anything mammal.
He ran his fingers through his bristly brown hair and straightened his shoulders, trying to look like someone who didn’t have a DP because he didn’t need one, not because he was up to no good. He wasn’t in the mood to be stared or growled at. Without realizing, he had taken several turns that presented themselves, and now he was lost in what looked to be the crumpled edge of the city.
Almost as abruptly as a holo scene, the city changed from gleaming buildings with doors and window frames in a rainbow of colors to small gray buildings, shabby and hunched in the waning light. He realized he was the only person on the street except for a man in a nondescript scaleskin the color of the roadway who emerged from a door overhang and approached him, yellow teeth bared in what Alex hoped was a smile.
“Goo eve, suh. Spa coi or pafru?”
“What?” The man talked like a bowl of mush. Alex leaned forward to hear him better. A voice that managed to be both emotionless and sharp spoke behind him.
“Guest 3789. You have been disciplined and warned about begging on the street. I will summon a guardian in five seconds.”
Whatever language the man spoke, he understood Alex’s DP well enough. The DP he was convinced he had turned off except for the health and bodily danger override. Was this sad, hunched little man, now scurrying around the street corner, a bodily danger, or had his mother tinkered with his override? He suspected the latter.
“What language was that man speaking?” But the DP, true to its instructions, had already disappeared now that harm was averted.
Alex shrugged and focused on his plan for tonight. He was attending his first meeting of the Earth Firsters in a long time. He had quit going, in disgust, because all they did was talk; but tonight’s discussion, “Story Making as Rebellious Art,” might be something useful.
It felt good to be going someplace without his mother. When Alex went anywhere with her, Miranda was frequently recognized. People would nudge each other. Some would come up and shyly compliment her on a new foliage design or a curving streetway. Not all of those were Miranda’s invention, but enough were. She was everywhere at Festival time, introducing new fabrications to remind people of the outside before it soured. Which had happened so quickly. She told him once about attending a pumpkin fair when she was five, everyone joking that the pumpkins were bigger than she was. By the time she was eight, cultivated fields were gone, destroyed by blight and by windstorms that tore vegetation from the ground and blotted out blue sky, by torrential rains that flooded homes. He remembered her face as she described the flood alarm the grandparents he had never met had installed at the front door and how they would scurry upstairs to avoid the water first seeping, then rushing in, until the alarm itself rotted away from all the wet. He accused her of exaggerating. The stories of yesteryear had pumpkins, gleaming orange in the sunlight, but not muddy water flooding in.
“Yes, well, those are stories,” Miranda had replied, “of yesteryear. As in, no longer exists. If it ever did. Sometimes, I’m not sure myself. I was so young when it all fell apart, maybe I just imagined it.” She said this as she worked on the dog’s fur, black with white markings, thick in places and patchy in others. Like a real animal. You had to give her credit. Her creations weren’t romantic like the sappy stories he secretly watched over and over. Her designs may have been as fake as the fruits they drank every night, but she did her best to make them seem real.
Alex stumbled against a magcart track. In the better part of the city, the tracks were a dark gray that contrasted sharply with the silver streetway. In the outer district, near the city wall, the streetway looked bruised and tarnished, blending in with the magtrack, hiding the three-foot difference in elevation. Alex was lucky the lip prevented him from stumbling in and breaking something, luckier still that no magcart was whizzing past. He looked at his newsline, 7:05. He was already late. He looked around. There were no parks in this shadowy part of Sanctuary to orient himself with. He focused on the newsline directions.
The door looked like every other door in this part of the city. No complementary colors to amuse the eye as you drifted from building to building. He hesitated a minute. He knew Earth Firsters were considered harmless. His dad had steered him away from 2084, where real protests supposedly happened. But if there was any chance auditors were still watching Earth First . . .
The door opened before he could knock. Faces stared at him—young, old, male, female, yet all looking alike. “It’s Alex,” a voice said, and Alex picked out Noel, a student a few years behind him at school that he sometimes hung out with. The other voices murmured a welcome that sounded relieved.
He sat cross-legged on the floor. A man at the story cube was projecting stories they were seeding into the newsline, about survival on the outside.
“We need people to get used to the idea that it is possible to survive outside. That a city like Sanctuary can remain enclosed but still provide managed access to the outside.”
Alex raised his hand. The man nodded in his direction.
“What are the stories based on?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are they based on anything real? Have any of you been outside? I mean recently,” he added hastily as several older members who had come to Sanctuary from outside started to answer.
