Connie Willis - Fire Watch

I wasn’t looking that good myself. I couldn’t sleep, and float gave me headaches that lasted a week. The alert band started a rash that had worked its way halfway up my arm. And Arabel was right. I was going edge. I couldn’t get the tessels off my mind. If you’d asked me last summer what I thought of beasties, I’d have said it was great fun for everyone, especially the animals. Now the thought of Brown with that hideous little brown and pink thing on his arm was enough to make me toss up. I keep thinking about your father. If it’s the trust thing you’re worried about, I can find out for you. He has your best interests at heart. Come to Papa.

My lawyers hadn’t succeeded in convincing the admin to let me go to Aspen for Christmas, or anywhere else. They’d managed to wangle full privileges as soon as everybody was gone, but not to get the alert band off. I figured if my dorm mother got a good look at what it was doing to my arm, though, she’d let me have it off for a few days and give it a chance to heal. The circulation system was working again, blowing winds of hurricane force all across Hell. Merry Christmas, everybody.

On the last day of class, I walked into our dark room, hit the wallplate, and froze. There sat Zibet in the dark. On my bed. With a tessel in her lap.

“Where did you get that?” I whispered.

“I stole it,” she said.

I locked the door behind me and pushed one of the desk chairs against it. “How?”

“They were all at a party in somebody else’s room.”

“You went in the boys’ dorm?”

She didn’t answer.

“You’re a freshman. They could send you home for that,” I said, disbelieving. This was the girl who had gone quite literally up the wall over the sheets, who had said, “I’m never going home again.”

“Nobody saw me,” she said calmly “They were all at a party.”

“You’re edge,” I said. “Whose is it, do you know?”

“It’s Daughter Ann.”

I grabbed the top sheet off my bunk and started lining my shuttle bag with it. Holy scut, this would be the first place Brown would look. I rifled through my desk drawer for a pair of scissors to cut some air slits with. Zibet still sat petting the horrid thing.

“We’ve got to hide it,” I said. “This time I’m not kidding. You really are in trouble.”

She didn’t hear me. “My sister Henra’s pretty. She has long braids like you. She’s good like you, too,” and then in an almost pleading voice, “she’s only fifteen.”

Brown demanded and got a room check that started, you guessed it, with our room. The tessel wasn’t there. I’d put it in the shuttle bag and hidden it in one of the spins down in the laundry room. I’d wadded the other slickspin sheet in front of it, which I felt was a fitting irony for Brown, only he was too enraged to see it.

“I want another check,” he said after the dorm mother had given him the grand tour. “I know it’s here.” He turned to me. “I know you’ve got it.”

“The last shuttle’s in ten minutes,” the dorm mother said. “There isn’t time for another check.”

“She’s got it. I can tell by the look on her face. She’s hidden it somewhere. Somewhere in this dorm.”

The dorm mother looked like she’d like to have him in her Skinner box for about an hour. She shook her head.

“You lose, Brown,” I said. “You stay and you’ll miss your shuttle and be stuck in Hell over Christmas. You leave and you lose your darling Daughter Ann. You lose either way, Brown.”

He grabbed my wrist. The rash was almost unbearable under the band. My wrist had started to swell, puffing out purplish-red over the metal. I tried to free myself with my other hand, but his grip was as hard and vengeful as his face. “Octavia here was at a samurai party in the boys’ dorm last week,” he said to the dorm mother.

“That’s not true,” I said. I could hardly talk. The pain from his grip was making me so nauseated I felt faint.

“I find that difficult to believe,” the dorm mother said, “since she is confined by an alert band.”

“This?” Brown said, and yanked my arm up. I cried out. “This thing?” He twisted it around my wrist. “She can take it off any time she wants. Didn’t you know that?” He dropped my wrist and looked at me contemptuously. “Tavvy’s too smart to let a little thing like an alert band stop her, aren’t you, Tavvy?”

I cradled my throbbing wrist against my body and tried not to black out. It isn’t beasties, I thought frantically. He would never do this to me just for beasties. It’s something worse. Worse. He must never, never get it back.

“There’s the call for the shuttle,” the dorm mother said. “Octavia, your break privileges are canceled.”

Brown shot a triumphant glance at me and followed her out. It took every bit of strength I had to wait till the last shuttle was gone before I went to get the tessel. I carried it back to the room with my good hand. The restricks hardly mattered. There was no place to go anyway. And the tessel was safe. “Everything will be all right,” I said to the tessel.

Only everything wasn’t all right. Henra, the pretty sister, wasn’t pretty. Her hair had been cut off, as short as scissors could make it. She was flushed bright red and crying. Zibet’s face had gone stony white and stayed that way. I didn’t think from the looks of her that she’d ever cry again. Isn’t it wonderful what a semester of college can do for you?

Restricks or no, I had to get out of there. I took my books and camped down in the laundry room. I wrote two term papers, read three textbooks, and like Zibet, recopied all my notes. He cut off my hair. He said I tempted men and that was why it happened. Your father was only trying to protect you. Come to Papa. I turned on all the spins at once so I couldn’t hear myself think and typed the term papers.

I made it to the last day of break, gritting my teeth to keep from thinking about Brown, about tessels, about everything. Zibet and her sister came down to the laundry room to tell me Henra was going back on the first shuttle. I said goodbye. “I hope you can come back,” I said, knowing I sounded stupid, knowing there was nothing in the world that could make me go back to Marylebone Weep if I were Henra.

“I am coming back. As soon as I graduate.”

“It’s only two years,” Zibet said. Two years ago Zibet had the same sweet face as her sister. Two years from now, Henra too would look like death warmed over. What fun to grow up in Marylebone Weep, where you’re a wreck at seventeen.

“Come back with me, Zibet,” Henra said.

“I can’t.”

Toss-up time. I went back to the room, propped myself on my bunk with a stack of books, and started reading. The tessel had been asleep on the foot of the bunk, its gaping pink vaj sticking up. It crawled onto my lap and lay there. I picked it up. It didn’t resist. Even with it living in the room, I’d never really looked at it closely. I saw now that it couldn’t resist if it tried. It had tiny little paws with soft pink underpads and no claws. It had no teeth, either, just the soft little rosebud mouth, only a quarter of the size of the opening at the other end. If it had been enhanced with pheromones, I sure couldn’t tell it. Maybe its attraction was simply that it had no defenses, that it couldn’t fight even if it wanted to.

I laid it over my lap and stuck an exploratory finger a little way into the vaj. I’d done enough lezzing when I was a freshman to know what a good vaj should feel like. I eased the finger farther in.

It screamed.

I yanked the hand free, balled it into a fist, and crammed it against my mouth hard to keep from screaming myself. Horrible, awful, pitiful sound. Helpless. Hopeless. The sound a woman must make when she’s being raped. No. Worse. The sound a child must make. I thought, I have never heard a sound like that in my whole life, and at the same instant, this is the sound I have been hearing all semester. Pheromones. Oh, no, a far greater attraction than some chemical. Or is fear a chemical, too?