David Marusek: Getting to Know You

“It’s all she ever wanted to do.”

“Tough!” she said. “We’ve all paid the price of longevity. How can you teach elementary school when there’re no more children? You can’t. So you retrain. You move on. What’s wrong with working for a living? You join an outfit like this,” she gestured to take in the whole tower above her, “you’re guaranteed your livelihood for life! The only thing not handed you on a silver platter is longevity. You have to earn that yourself. And if you can’t, what good are you?” When she remembered that two dozen people lay dying in the next room because they couldn’t do just that, she lowered her voice. “Must society cany your dead weight through the centuries?”

Victor laughed and placed his large hand on hers. “I see you are a true freebooter, Zoe. I wish eveiyone had your initiative, your drive! But sadly, we don’t. We yearn for simple lives, and so we trim people’s hair all day. When we tire of that, they retrain us to pare their toenails. When we tire of that, we die. For we lack the souls of servants. A natural servant is a rare and precious person. How lucky our masters are to have discovered cloning! Now they need find but one servile person among us and clone him repeatedly. As for the rest of us, we can all go to hell!’’ He removed his hand from hers to pour the tea. Her hand immediately missed his. “But such morbid talk on such a festive occasion!” he roared. “How wonderful to finally meet the famous Zoe. Nancy speaks only of you. She says you are an important person, modern and successful. That you are an investigator.” He peered at her over his teacup.

“Missing persons, actually, for the National Police.” she said. “But I quit that years ago. When we found everybody.”

“You found everybody?” Victor laughed and gazed at her steadily, then turned to watch Nancy making her rounds in the living room.

“What about you, Mr. Vole?” Zoranna said. “What do you do for a living?”

“What’s this Mr.? I’m not Mr. I’m Victor! We are practically related, you and I. What do I do for a living? For a living I live, of course. For groceries, I teach ballroom dance lessons.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Why should I kid? I teach the waltz, the fox trot, the cha-cha.” He mimed holding a partner and swaying in three-quarters time. “I teach the merletz and my specialty, the Cuban tango.”

“I’m amazed,” said Zoranna. “There’s enough interest in that for Applied People to keep instructors?”

Victor recoiled in mock affront. “I am not AP. I’m a freebooter, like you, Zoe.”

“Oh,” she said and paused to sip her tea. If he wasn’t AP, what was he doing obviously living in an APRT? Had Nancy respoused? Applied People tended to be proprietary about living arrangements in its towers. Bug, she tongued, find Victor Vole’s status in the tower directory. Out loud she said, “It pays well, dance instruction?”

“It pays execrably.” He threw his hands into the air. “As do all the arts. But some things are more important than money. You make a point, however. A man must eat, so I do other things as well. I consult with gentlemen on the contents of their wardrobes. This pays more handsomely, for gentlemen detest appearing in public in outmoded attire.”

Zoranna had a pleasing mental image of this tall, elegant man in a starched white shirt and black tux floating across a shiny hardwood floor in the arms of an equally elegant partner. She could even imagine herself as that partner. But Nancy?

The tower link is unavailable, said Bug, due to overextension of the houseputer processors.

Zoranna was surprised. A mere three dozen interactive holos would hardly burden her home system. But then, everything on Sub40 seemed substandard.

Nancy ambulated to the kitchen balancing a small, flat carton on her walker and placed it next to the teapot.

“Now, now,” said Victor. “What did autodoc say about lifting things? Come, join us and have your tea.”

“In a minute, Victor. There’s another box.”

“Show me,” he said and went to help her.

Zoranna tasted the dark cake. It was moist to the point of wet, too sweet, and laden with spice. She recalled her father buying cakes like this at a tiny shop on Paderszewski Boulevard in Chicago. She took another bite and examined Nancy’s carton. It was a home archivist box that could be evacuated of air, but the seal was open and the lid unlatched. She lifted the lid and saw an assortment of httle notebooks, no two of the same style or size, and bundles of envelopes with colorful paper postal stamps. The envelope on top was addressed in hand script to a Pani Beata Smolenska—Zoranna’s great-grandmother.

Victor dropped a second carton on the counter and helped Nancy sit in her armchair recliner in the living room.

“Nancy,” said Zoranna, “what’s all this?”

“It’s all yours,” said her sister. Victor fussed over Nancy’s pillows and covers and brought her tea and cake.

Zoranna looked inside the larger carton. There was a rondophone and several inactive holocubes on top, but underneath were objects from earlier centuries. Not antiques, exactly, but worn-out everyday objects: a sterhng salt cellar with brass showing through its silver plating, a collection of military bullet casings childishly glued to an oak panel, a rosary with corn kernel beads, a mustache trimmer. “What’s all this junk?” she said, but of course she knew, for she recognized the pair of terra-cotta robins that had belonged to her mother. This was the collection of what her family regarded as heirlooms. Nancy, the youngest and most steadfast of seven children, had apparently been designated its conservator. But why had she brought it out for airing just now? Zoranna knew the answer to that, too. She looked at her sister who now lay among the hospice patients. Victor was scolding her for not wearing her vascular support stockings. Her ankles were grotesquely edematous, swollen like sausages and bruised an angry purple.

Damn you, Zoranna thought. Bug, she tongued, call up the medical records of Nancy Brim, nee Smolenska. I’ll help munch the passwords.

The net is unavailable, replied Bug.

Bypass the houseputer. Log directly onto public access.

Public access is unavailable.

She wondered how that was possible. There had been no problem in the elevator. Why should this apartment be in shadow? She looked around and tried to decide where the utilidor spar would enter the apartment. Probably the bathroom with the plumbing, since there were no service panels in the kitchen. She stepped through the living room to the bathroom and slid the door closed. The bathroom was a tiny ceramic vault that Nancy had tried to domesticate with baskets of sea shells and scented soaps. The medicine cabinet was dedicated to a man’s toiletries.

Zoranna found the service panel artlessly hidden behind a towel. Its tamper-proof latch had been defeated with a sophisticated-looking gizmo that Zoranna was careful not to disturb.

“Do you find Victor Vole alarming or arousing?” said Bug.

Zoranna was startled. “Why do you ask?”

“Your blood level of adrenaline spiked when he touched your hand.”

“My what? So now you’re monitoring my biometrics?”

“Bug is getting—”

“I know,” she said, “Bug is getting to know me. You’re a persistent little snoop, aren’t you.”

Zoranna searched the belt’s utility pouch for a terminus relay, found a UDIN, and plugged it into the panel’s keptel jack. “There,” she said, “now we should have access.”

“Affirmative,” said Bug. “Autodoc is requesting passwords for Nancy’s medical records.”