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  “How about you?” Jenner asks. The bus is coming back, on its long circuit around the country roads. They can see it on the horizon.

  “Federal Army, honorable discharge, three years in extranational service.”

  “I’d like to do that sometime,” Jenner says. His Adam’s apple bobs. “Missed my chance to see the world.” Jenner’s scalp wrinkles slightly. He’s trying to find a comfortable way to behave around Giffey, a path between acting like an equal and an expert, or a conscript noncom. Jenner is twenty-two or twenty-three at most.

  Very young. That, however, is not Giffey’s concern.

  YOXIN’ ROX! Tonight on PRANCING PREMIERE FIRST TIMER! Gene is angry at Fred because he’s dropped some WHOOPEE on Marilyn, and the whole studio’s about to crumble! Will they ever dance together again? Will Marilyn tell Fred about (CLASPERS, GASPERS!) the BABY? And next street over, in PASSION FRUIT, you’re FREE (Hunh! KAH-Thunk!) to peek behind the PAISLEY CURTAIN and see what Billie and Johnnie C. are really FRYING UP in that WAYBACK ROOM! ALL PAY-UP THEATER and All Brought to you (40% off!) by Rememory, Longterm results for Short-term prices! ($$$, 3070 and 3080 Patches required.)

  MORE? (Y/N)

  >N

  9

  DARK BITS

  The household of Jonathan and Chloe Bristow flashes, screeches, roars with bright colors and jagged sounds. Their adolescent children, Hiram and Penelope, are up the stairs and down, shouting over a pretty stone one of them found in the garden. They have gone red in the face with their shouting and Chloe has stopped by the stairs to stand stiff as a tree prematurely aged by violent winds. She waits with some apprehension for Jonathan to come up from the basement and try to straighten things out; she knows that his intervention is not necessary, that all this will pass.

  Penelope is fifteen and Hiram thirteen. Dark-haired Hiram sometimes appears a little loutish even in his mother’s tolerant eyes; Penelope is white-blonde and lithe as an alder. Like alders, she tries to be a clone of the other girls in her part of the forest. Chloe waits for the storm to pass. She worries that Jonathan will only add to the din and the color with his very loud voice and dark hues.

  Chloe sees all situations in this household in colors; she has heard about that in the LitVids which arrive on her pad every morning, gathered from around the earth like fresh bouquets and generally just as wilted and worn within a week. Today is a loud orange and black day.

  “I did NOT give it to you, you swutt!” Penelope shouts. Hiram tries to hold the rock out of her reach but she is taller and grabs his clenching fist. They are on the landing and pushing against the railing. Chloe specks them toppling into the entryway like cowboys fighting in a saloon. “Watch out—” she begins; but she sees they are in no danger and draws her lips tight shut again. She wonders what a swutt is.

  “You promised I could have it,” Hiram claims, his voice high and loud and sad. Hiram is her Caliban; a slow and dark fellow with fine black hair covering the back of his neck. Soon he will need to shave. She never tells her children what she really thinks of them—certainly not the temporary down things that flit through her mind. It is easy to tell them about the permanent things—about her love and admiration for them—because these are so constant they hardly seem important enough to hide. It is the temporary observations, trenchant and of mixed truthfulness, the insights that make her laugh or question her fitness to be a mother, that she keeps inside, where they are soon buried and seldom recalled. “Give it to me, I swear I’ll—”

  “What is a swutt?” Chloe asks from the entryway.

  Penelope turns her blazing green eyes on her mother. Her hair is in disarray and she looks ready to kill. “Mother, he is goating that rock, and I found it!”

  Goating is what her grandparents would have called hogging. Chloe does not think the word is any improvement. “What’s so important about a rock?”

  Intuition tells her Jonathan will appear in about ten seconds and she would like the situation to be duller and quieter, for his sake but mostly for hers.

  “It’s rose quartz. I found it and I need it for school.”

  “She put it down in the yard,” Hiram says. He looks worried. Chloe wonders if her son can see in her face that she no longer thinks he is beautiful. When he was a baby he was beautiful. “She didn’t want it.”

  “Tro merde, that’s a lie! I put it down on another rock to save it.”

  Jonathan is coming up from the bedroom. His step is fast and his footfalls heavy. Their bedroom is on the bottom floor, below the entry level, with big bay windows facing rear gardens that are now rather dismal despite a few banks of Jonathan’s hardy year-rounds.

  “Give it to her, please,” Chloe says.

  “Mother!” Hiram appears genuinely shocked. “You believe her?”

  “If she needs it and she found it, why not let her keep it? Why do you need a piece of rose quartz?”

  Hiram stares down at her with the same expression Caliban must have worn when Ariel played a prank on him. Chloe feels a whirl of regenerating pique. “For God’s sake, Hiram, it’s just a rock!”

  Penelope grabs the rock from her brother’s hand and takes it upstairs. Hiram squats on the stairs. He is physically adept and he goes into a perfect lotus but his face is far from calm.

  Jonathan arrives and turns to look up the stairs at Hiram, then looks back at Chloe. Penelope is on the second floor and in her room. Jonathan’s mind is elsewhere.

  “What was that?” he asks.

  Chloe says, “What’s a swutt?”

  “It’s someone who tries to be offensive in a fibe social space,” Jonathan says.

  Chloe seldom ventures into the fibes. She uses her pad mostly for a calendar and phone, LitVid and mail. The direct projectors might as well be removed and she will not allow Yox players, much less patches, in her house.

  “Offensive, how?” she asks, heading into the kitchen. She knows she has saved Jonathan getting angry before he goes out into the night. And she has saved herself from another spike of irritation at her husband.

  “Blow-off, slumfacing,” Jonathan says, following. He is dressed in formal longsuit for his night with the Stoics, the local cadre of the John Adams Group, all well-to-do New Federalists. “A swutt is someone who’s rigged an untraceable face and goats it, you know, butt and run, cut touch. Thymic misfits.”

  Chloe looks at the kitchen. The lights have come on automatically at their entrance. The compound curves of the sink and food counter, the alcove hiding the dormant arbeiter, the stove pillar, and the air-curtain cooler are gray and black with yellow accents, really quite pretty; she is reminded of something from the nineteen thirties, a car, the Bugatti Royale, the one they only made a few of, that the famous Yox comedian Wilrude races on that track in Beverly Hills… On top of the comb reserved for stars…

  She turns to Jonathan and allows him to kiss her. His kissing is attentive. Jonathan, she thinks, has never delivered a bad kiss.

  “A little stiff, tonight,” Jonathan says. He is not apparently concerned if she is being stiff, but it’s the third time in as many days he’s made the comment. Chloe and Jonathan have been married long enough, she hopes, not to put too much significance into brief moods. Still, the irritation—a shadow on the edge of her thoughts—concerns her.

  In his longsuit and tails, Jonathan might be going to a nineteen thirties party. The nineteen thirties were big two years ago; now the Sour Decades are on the sly spin. Chloe really dislikes the nineties. They remind her of now, and now frankly leaves her cold.

  “What’s on for the meeting tonight?” Chloe asks.

  Hiram enters the kitchen at a gallop and asks if he can port dinner. Chloe allows that the family is fragmented anyway; he grins and takes his food from the cooler to the prep chef by the oven.

  “A scientist is giving a talk about neural somethings,” Jonathan explains. He watches Hiram tap his fingers on the counter, waiting for the tray of food to be processed and heated.

  Chloe wonders if
Jonathan actually loves his son; whether men have any capacity for the deep sort of love she feels so often, and for which she is given so little credit, and so little in return. But then—

  Where did that come from?

  Chloe says, “That sounds exciting.”

  Jonathan hums his bemused agreement. “High comb. Good connections.”

  Jonathan has been feeling stuck in a rut lately, but Chloe is not fond of high comb and is not particularly sympathetic toward his ambitions. Hiram almost drops his tray of hot food and Chloe catches her breath. Jonathan loudly tells him to watch it. “You twitch all the time!” he says to his son, who hangs his head to one side, clutching the tray at a dangerous angle. “My God, you’re not five years old.”

  Chloe hates the sound of Jonathan’s voice when he corrects the children. It scrapes her like broken glass. He seems such a hair-trigger around them, the slightest thing sets him off, and he carries the correction on for minutes longer than she thinks is necessary. She supposes she is being too sensitive—sometimes she sounds screechy and harsh in her own ears—but…

  Jonathan takes Hiram’s tray by the edge and straightens it.

  “Nothing dropped, nothing messed,” Hiram says with patient dignity. Chloe feels a sudden sadness for him, a wrenching prescience about the difficulties life will hold for Hiram. And nothing I can do. He carries the tray out of the kitchen.

  Jonathan makes a face, turns to her and says, “I’ll be back around twelve.”

  Men can turn off their loud voices so easily, switch from what sounds like wartime rage to calm in a flash. Chloe cannot. If she had yelled at Hiram, she would cycle for about half an hour, the deed generating the equivalent mood. And of course, Chloe realizes, she does yell at the children, at Hiram, too often. But it must be a matter of degrees; it is also a matter of perceptions.

  Women are simply better with children. Of this she is sure. If she had raised the children entirely without Jonathan’s help, they might have avoided some problems…

  “Good hunting,” she tells him. So many little resentments this evening, all building to a head, and she does not like it. She hopes Jonathan will leave and the kids, will hide in their accustomed nooks before she snaps out something regrettable.

  Just minutes will do the trick. Alone so that she can close her eyes and take a breath or two all her own, with nobody expecting anything from her. She barely has any space that is exclusively hers.

  In her family, the way she was raised, both spouses working is a tradition of generations, an example for the children of efforts and rewards, an expression of the equality of partners. Jonathan’s family, old-liners that make even the New Federalists seem clever and innovative, supported him every step of the way when he requested she stand down from her work before having children.

  But why does she think of this now?

  Because her husband is going off to hear a talk by a scientist that might actually be interesting? What does he care for her mind, her thoughts?

  “Set for your own dinner?” Jonathan asks solicitously.

  “I’m fine,” she says. “Don’t be late. So many gray longsuits to impress.”

  Jonathan gives her a wry look, lifts her hand, and kisses it. He leans back, examines her face, arches his eyebrows; he looks so much like a male lead in a history vid from the nineties. “Somebody has to sacrifice his soul, or there’s never going to be real progress,” he says in his deepest hero voice with a late New Received Broadcast accent, perfectly mocked. She laughs despite herself. “Go,” she says, and pushes on his chest.

  “You should lock them up and steal a couple of hours, all to yourself.”

  “I think they’ll stay away from me quite willingly,” she says. “I’ll have my time.”

  “Good.” Jonathan approaches the front door. “Save some energy for me later.” She gives him a steady, noncommittal look. Lately she has taken to responding only when he presses, and to showing him little or no reaction when they are intimate, other than what is strictly mandatory. It is a walling off that gives her some of the privacy she needs, and lets her keep her sense of dignity.

  The door opens, a puff of cold enters, and then he is gone, half running down the block. They gave up their car last year; it was costing them more than a hundred grand a year, just to hook it to the grid and park it. The taxes and fees pushed them over their, limit. Now Jonathan lets his pad coordinate with the autobuses. He professes to enjoy himself even more, sensing the social spin better while shuttling to the towers for his meetings.

  Her father, a space engineer, did not approve of the car; he thought working over the fibes was just fine, and that one could do any conceivable business remotely. Jonathan believes in handshakes and direct eye-to-eye contact. He has mentioned several times, lightly but not jokingly, that they should move to one of the towers to be less distant from real life. But she prefers this century-old house, and she would hate being stacked five hundred high.

  Where Jonathan is conservative, she is liberal, and where he is trendy, she pulls back. Together they are almost a whole human being, she thinks, and tells herself she means that as a joke.

  Chloe goes to the front sitting room and stares out over the next lower row of houses at the deep blue-gray of Lake Washington. The sky is clear and dimming nicely. A couple of ribbons of orange cloud make it seem properly balanced, garish sky brights against subdued Earth darks. This is the gloaming, she thinks; lovely word.

  She takes the big chair and feels it mold to her with little purring sighs. The house is silent. She hopes the children are involved in something worthwhile. They are too old for her to watch them every moment, too old to control. They are coasting into their own free-fall orbits now, and what’s holding them in place is the history of their launch phase and the gravity of culture. Father’s way of putting things.

  But then she hears them shouting and rolls her eyes up in her head.

  Penelope stomps down the stairs. Chloe turns to look at her, eternally attentive and patient but weary.

  “Mom, the toilet says somebody is sick, but I feel fine, and so does Hiram,” Penelope says.

  “Nobody’s sick. I wouldn’t worry about it,” Chloe says, looking back to the window.

  “But the toilet’s never wrong!”

  Chloe gets up from her chair. Her anger spikes with surprising speed, but she does not show it. “You know how to run the check,” she tells her daughter, but Penelope makes a face; that sort of thing is not one of her duties. Chloe smiles grimly and goes upstairs.

  The world is simply others. Not tonight, perhaps not ever again.

  10

  Mary Choy spends the hour before the end of her shift in the exterior patio of the tombed house, interviewing the caretaker of the vacant housing block: He is in his fifties, with mellow eyes but a slow, knowing smile. He does not appear nervous. “The houses were going to waste,” he says. “They’re just sitting here empty. Everybody’s losing money. I just made a little arrangement. So what’ll it cost me?” he asks.

  “First, your job,” Mary says. “You’ll probably be charged with felony collusion. And depending on what the others testify… You might become an accessory.” Everything is being transcribed on her police pad: voice, vid, and Mary’s observations typed in as they talk.

  The man still smiles. Mary knows this expression; he’s on permanent mood adjustment. No matter what happens in his life, he feels cheerful and capable. Guilt will not enter his thoughts. That kind of adjustment is illegal to do, for a therapist, but not illegal for a patient to have had done. Mary’s level of irritation rises.

  “Let’s go through it one more time. The doctor you rented the place to said it was for a party. He paid you in freewire dollars. Basically, you did this so you could dip into expensive, high-level Yox.”

  “What else is there?” the caretaker asks. “Better life than you’ll find on this Earth.”

  Mary takes a deep breath. She keeps seeing the psynthe transforms, a frightful comm
ent on how much stimulus the human audience demands. “Have you been inside the house to see?”

  “Of course not,” the caretaker says. “It’s tombed.”

  “Your assistant reported the bodies.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He knew nothing about your deal.”

  “No, he didn’t.” The caretaker seems to enjoy her questioning.

  “Our forensic team has found traces inside the house that match your boots. You entered the house after the victims died.”

  The caretaker’s eyes gleam. “How do you know that?” he challenges, like a man involved in a good game of chess. “I mean, they were cooked, weren’t they? How do you know when they died? Body temperature doesn’t do it—”

  “Trust me, we know,” Mary says.

  “Nano screws up everything. Not admissible in court.”

  “How can you be sure you’re not in trouble when you can’t get over being so happy?”

  The caretaker shakes his head. “I shucked a few high Yox credits. I didn’t know anything about what the guy was doing. I’ll testify when you catch him.”

  “He’s already been caught,” Mary says. “He was on an outbound swan to Hispaniola. They turned around and he’s back in Seattle, and from what I see on my pad, his story doesn’t match yours.” She taps her pad off. “I’m done with you for now.”

  She turns to the caretaker’s proxy attorney, an arbeiter from QuickLex, standing beside some potted tiger lilies in the comer of the patio like a garden ornament. “He’s going to Seattle Maximum. You can check his accommodations after induction. Do you have any immediate complaints with our procedures?”

  The small steel arbeiter resembles a bishop in chess. It is less than a meter high, and Mary knows that most of its bulk is for show “We reserve discussion of possible challenges.”