Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

“Do you really want to kill yourself?” I aimed the inhaler at her face and screamed at her. “Do you, Kate? Do you?” The air in the alley was thick with despair and I was choking on it. “Come on, Kate. Let’s do it!”

“No.” Her head thrashed back and forth. “No, please. Stop.”

Her terror fed mine. “Then what the hell are you doing with this thing?” I was shaking so badly that when I tried to pitch the inhaler into the dumpster, it hit the pavement only six feet away. I had come so close to screwing up. I climbed off her and rolled on my back and soaked myself in the night sky. When I screwed up, people died. “Cyanide is awful bad for the baby,” I said.

“How do you know about my baby?” Her face was rigid with fear. “Who are you?”

I could breathe again, although I wasn’t sure I wanted to. “Fay Hardaway.” I gasped. “I’m a PI; I left you a message this morning. Najma Jones hired me to find her daughter.”

“Rashmi is dead.”

“I know,” I said. “So is Gratiana.” I sat up and looked at her. “Father Elaine will be glad to see you.”

Kate’s eyes were wide, but I don’t think she was seeing the alley. “Gratiana said the devils would come after me.” She was still seeing the business end of the inhaler. “She said that if I didn’t hear from her by tomorrow then we had lost everything and I should… do it. You know, to protect the church. And just now my sidekick picked up three times in ten minutes only there was nobody there and so I knew it was time.”

“That was me, Kate. Sorry.” I retrieved the Donya Durand slingback I’d stripped off her foot and gave it back to her. “Tell me where you got this?”

“It was Rashmi’s. We bought them together at Grayles. Actually I picked them out. That was before… I loved her, you know, but she was crazy. I can see that now, although it’s kind of too late. I mean, she was okay when she was taking her meds, but she would stop every so often. She called it taking a vacation from herself. Only it was no vacation for anyone else, especially not for me. She decided to go off on the day we got married and didn’t tell me and all of a sudden after the ceremony we got into this huge fight about the baby and who loved who more and she stared throwing things at me—these shoes—and then ran out of the church barefoot. I don’t think she ever really understood about… you know, what we were trying to do. I mean, I’ve talked to the Bride of God herself… but Rashmi.” Kate rubbed her eye and her hand came away wet.

I sat her up and put my arm around her. “That’s all right. Not really your fault. I think poor Rashmi must have been hanging by a thread. We all are. The whole human race, or what’s left of it.”

We sat there for a moment.

“I saw her mom this morning,” I said. “She said to tell you she was sorry.”

Kate sniffed. “Sorry? What for?”

I shrugged.

“I know she didn’t have much use for me,” said Kate. “At least that’s what Rashmi always said. But as far as I’m concerned the woman was a saint to put up with Rashmi and her mood swings and all the acting out: She was always there for her. And the thing is, Rashmi hated her for it.”

I got to my knees, then to my feet. I helped Kate up. The alley was dark, but that wasn’t really the problem. Even in the light of day, I hadn’t seen anything.

Ihad no trouble finding space at the bike rack in front of Ronald Reagan Elementary. The building seemed to be drowsing in the heavy morning air, its brick wings enfolding the empty playground. A janitor bot was vacuuming the swimming pool, another was plucking spent blossoms from the clematis fence. The bots were headache yellow; the letters RRE in puffy orange slanted across their torsos. The gardening bot informed me that school wouldn’t start for an hour. That was fine with me. This was just a courtesy call, part of the total service commitment I made to all the clients whom I had failed. I asked if I could see Najma Jones and he said he doubted that any of the teachers were in quite this early but he walked me to the office. He paged her; I signed the visitors’ log. When her voice crackled over the intercom, I told the bot that I knew the way to her classroom.

I paused at the open door. Rashmi’s mom had her back to me. She was wearing a sleeveless navy dress with cream-colored dupatta scarf draped over her shoulders. She passed down a row of empty desks, perching origami animals at the center of each. There were three kinds of elephants, ducks and ducklings, a blue giraffe, a pink cat that might have been a lion.

“Please come in, Ms. Hardaway,” she said without turning around. She had teacher radar; she could see behind her back and around a corner.

“I stopped by your house.” I slouched into the room like a kid who had lost her civics homework. “I thought I might catch you before you left for school.” I leaned against a desk in the front row and picked up the purple crocodile on it. “You fold these yourself?”

“I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said, “so finally I gave up and went for a walk. I ended up here. I like coming to school early, especially when no one else is around. There is so much time.” She had one origami swan left over that she set on her own desk. “Staying after is different. If you’re always the last one out at night, you’re admitting that you haven’t got anything to rush home to. It’s pathetic, actually.” She settled behind her desk and began opening windows on her desktop. “I’ve been teaching the girls to fold the ducks. They seem to like it. It’s a challenging grade, the fifth. They come to me as bright and happy children and I am supposed to teach them fractions and pack them off to middle school. I shudder to think what happens to them there.”

“How old are they?”

“Ten when they start. Most of them have turned eleven already. They graduate next week.” She peered at the files she had opened. “Some of them.”

“I take it on faith that I was eleven once,” I said, “but I just don’t remember.”

“Your generation grew up in unhappy times.” Her face glowed in the phosphors. “You haven’t had a daughter yet, have you, Ms. Hardaway?”

“No.”

We contemplated my childlessness for a moment.

“Did Rashmi like origami?” I didn’t mean anything by it. I just didn’t want to listen to the silence anymore.

“Rashmi?” She frowned, as if her daughter were a not-very-interesting kid she had taught years ago. “No. Rashmi was a difficult child.”

“I found Kate Vermeil last night,” I said. “I told her what you said, that you were sorry. She wanted to know what for.”

“What for?”

“She said that Rashmi was crazy. And that she hated you for having her.”

“She never hated me,” said Najma quickly. “Yes, Rashmi was a sad girl. Anxious. What is this about, Ms. Hardaway?”

“I think you were at the Comfort Inn that night. If you want to talk about that, I would like to hear what you have to say. If not, I’ll leave now.”

She stared at me for a moment, her expression unreadable. “You know, I actually wanted to have many children.” She got up from the desk, crossed the room and shut the door as if it were made of handblown glass. “When the seeding first began, I went down to City Hall and volunteered. That just wasn’t done. Most women were horrified to find themselves pregnant. I talked to a bot, who took my name and address and then told me to go home and wait. If I wanted more children after my first, I was certainly encouraged to make a request. It felt like I was joining one of those mail order music clubs.” She smiled and tugged at her dupatta. “But when Rashmi was born, everything changed. Sometimes she was such a needy baby, fussing to be picked up, but then she would lie in her crib for hours, listless and withdrawn. She started antidepressants when she was five and they helped. And the Department of Youth Services issued me a full-time bot helper when I started teaching. But Rashmi was always a handful. And since I was all by myself, I didn’t feel like I had enough to give to another child.”