Outcasts (12 page)

He seemed about to speak again, but he was too close; she
had misjudged him and he had already stepped outside her estimation of him. Her
mistakes disturbed her; there was no excuse for them, not this soon. She turned
to flee and slipped to her hands and knees in the slush. She struggled to her
feet and ran.

Around a corner she had to stop. Even a month earlier she
would not have noticed the minor exertion; now it exhausted her. The Institute
could at least have chosen a clean way to murder its Fellows. Except that clean
deaths would be quick, and too frequently embarrassing.

The wind at Lais’ back was rising. On a radial street
leading toward the central landing pad, it seemed much colder. Sleet melted on
her face and slid under her collar. Going to the terminal, she risked being
recognized, but she did not think the Institute could have traced her here yet.
At the terminal she would be able to smooth a few more people, and maybe they
would give her enough for her to buy a ticket off this mountain and off this
world. If she could hide herself well enough, take herself far enough, the
Institute would never be sure she was dead.

Halfway between the mall and the landing terminal, she had
to stop and rest. The cafe she entered was physically warm but spiritually
cold, utilitarian and mechanical. Its emotional sterility was familiar.
Recently she had come to recognize it, but she saw no chance of replacing the
void in herself with anything of greater meaning. She had changed a great deal
during the last few months, but she had very little time left for changes.

The faint scents of half a dozen kinds of smoke lingered
among the odors of automatic, packaged food. Lais slid into an empty booth.
Across the room three people sat together, obviously taking pleasure in each
other’s company. For a moment she considered going to their table and
insinuating herself into the group, acting pleasant at first but then
increasingly irrational.

She was disgusted by her fantasies. Briefly, she thought she
might be able to believe she was insane. Even the possibility would be
comforting. If she could believe what she had been taught, that Institute
geniuses were prone to instability, she could believe all the other lies. If
she could believe the lies, the Institute could remain a philanthropic
organization. If she could believe in the Institute, if she was mad, then she
was not dying.

She wondered what they would do if she walked over and told
them who and what she was. Lais had no experience with normal humans her own
age. They might not even care, they might grin and say “so what?”
and move over to make room for her. They might pull back, very subtly, of
course, and turn her away, if their people had taught them that the freaks
might revolt again. That was the usual reaction. Worst, they might stare at her
for a moment, look at each other, and decide silently among themselves to
forgive her and tolerate her. She had seen that reaction among the normals who
worked at the Institute, those who needed any shaky superiority they could
grasp, who made themselves the judges of deeds punished half a century before.

A lighted menu on the wall offered substantial meals, but
despite her hunger she was nauseated by the mixed smells of meat and sweet
syrup. The menu changed a guilder and offered up utensils and a covered bowl of
soup. She resented the necessity of spending even this little, because she had
almost enough to go one more hard-to-trace world-step away. The sum she had and
the sum she needed: they were such pitiful amounts, pocket money of other days.

For a moment she wished she were back at the Institute with
the rest of the freaks, being catered to by pleasant human beings. Only for a
moment. She would not be at the Institute but hidden in their isolated
hospital; those pleasant human beings would be pretending to cure her while
sucking up the last fruits of her mind and all the information her body could
give them. All they would really care about would be what error in procedure
had allowed such a mistake to be brought to term in their well-monitored
artificial wombs. Fellows were not supposed to begin to die until they were
thirty, though that would be denied. Nothing had warned the Institute that Lais
would die fifteen years too early; nothing but the explanation and perhaps not
even that, could tell them if any of her colleagues would die fifteen or fifty
years too late, given time by a faulty biologic clock to develop into something
the Institute could no longer control, let alone understand. Their days would
be terror and their sleep nightmare over that possibility.

And her people, the other Fellows, would hardly notice she
was gone: that brought a pang of guilt. People she had known had left abruptly,
and she had become so used to the excuses that she had ceased to ask about
them. Had she ever asked? There were so many worlds, such great distances, so
many possibilities: mobility seemed limitless. Lais had never spent as much as
a year in a single outpost, and seldom saw acquaintances after transient
project collaborations or casual sexual encounters. She had no emotional ties,
no one to go to for help and trust, no one who knew her well enough to judge
her sane against contrary evidence. Fellows were solitary specialists in fields
too esoteric to discuss without the inducement of certain intellectual
interaction. The lack of communication had never bothered Lais then, but now it
seemed barbarous, and almost inconceivable.

Clear soup took the chill away and let minor discomforts
intrude. The thick coat was too warm, but she wore it like a shield. Her hair
and clothes were damp, and the heavy material of her pants began to itch as it
grew warmer. Her face felt oily.

Trivialities disappeared. She had continued the research she
had started before she was forced to run. She was crippled and slowed by having
to do the scut-work in her mind. She needed a computer, but she could not
afford to line one. It was frustrating, of course, exhausting, certainly, but
necessary. It was what Lais did.

A hesitant touch on her shoulder awakened her. She did not
remember falling asleep — perhaps she had not slept: the data she had
been considering lay organized in her mind, a new synthesis — but she was
lying on her side on the padded bench with her head pillowed on her arms.

“I’m really sorry. Mr. Kiviat says you have to
leave.”

“Tell him to tell me himself,” she said.

“Please, miz.”

She opened her eyes. She had never seen an old person
before; she could not help but stare, she could not speak for a moment. His
face was deeply lined and what little hair he had was stringy, yellow-white,
shading at his cheeks into two days’ growth of gray stubble. He was
terrified, put in the middle with no directions, afraid to try anything he
might think of by himself. His pale, sunken eyes shifted back and forth,
seeking guidance. The thin chain around his throat carried a child’s
identity tag. Pity touched her and she smiled, without humor but with
understanding.

“Never mind,” she said. “It’s all
right. I’ll go.” His relief was a physical thing.

Groggy with sleep she stood up and started out. She
stumbled, and the malignant pain crawled up her spine where eroded edges of
bone ground together. She froze, knowing that was useless. The black windows
and the shiny beads of icy snow turned scarlet. She heard herself fall, but she
did not feel the impact.

She was unconscious for perhaps a second; she came to calmly
recording that this was the first time the pain had actually made her faint.

“You okay, miz?”

The old man knelt at her side, hands half extended as if to
help her, but trembling, afraid. Two months ago Lais would not have been able
to imagine what it would be like to exist in perpetual fear.

“I just — “ Even speaking hurt, and her
voice shocked her with its weakness. She finished in a whisper. “ —
have to rest for a little while.” She felt stupid lying on the floor,
observed by the machines, but the humiliation was less than that of the few
endless days at the hospital being poked and biopsied and sampled like an
experiment in the culture of a recalcitrant tissue. By then she had known that
the treatments were a charade, and that only the tests were important. She
pushed herself up on her elbows, and the old man helped her sit.

“I have... I mean... my room... I’m not supposed
to...” His seamed face was scarlet. It showed emotion much more readily
than the dead faces of sustained folk, perhaps because he aged and they did
not, perhaps because they were no longer capable of deep feeling.

“Thank you,” she said.

He had to support her. His room was in the same building,
reached by a web of dirty corridors. The room was white plastic and
scrupulously clean, almost bare. The bluish shimmering cube of a trid moved and
muttered in the corner.

The old man took her to a broken sandbed and stood
uncertainly by her. “Is there anything... do you need...?” Rusty
words learned by rote long before, never used. Lais shook her head. She took
off her coat, and he hurried to help her. She lay down. The bed was hard: air
was meant to flow through granules and give the illusion of floating, but the
jets had stopped and the tiny beads were packed down at the bottom, mobile and
slippery only beneath the cover. It was softer than the street. The light was
bright, but not intolerable. She threw her arm across her eyes.

o0o

Something awakened her: she lay taut, disoriented. The
illumination was like late twilight. She heard her name again and turned. Over
her shoulder she saw the old man crouched on a stool in front of the trid,
peering into the bluish space of it, staring at a silent miniature of Lais. She
did not have to listen to know what the voice was saying: they had traced her
to Highport; they were telling the residents that she was here and that she was
mad, a poor pitiful unstable genius, paranoid and frightened, needing
compassion and aid. But not dangerous. Certainly not dangerous. Soothing words
assured people that aggression had been eliminated from the chromosomes of the
freaks (that was a lie, and impossible, but as good as truth). The voice said
that there were only a few Fellows, who all confined themselves to research.
Lais stopped listening. She allowed early memories to seep out and affect her.
The old man crouched before his trid and stared at the picture. She pushed the
twisted blanket away. The old man did not move. At the foot of the bed, Lais reached
out until her fingers almost brushed his collar. Beneath it lay the strong thin
links of his identity necklace. She could reach out, twist it into his throat,
and remove him as a threat. No one would notice he was gone. No one would care.
A primitive anthropoid, poised between civilization and savagery, urged her on.

When he recognized her, he would straighten. His throat
would be exposed. Lais could feel tendons beneath her hands. She glanced down,
to those hands outstretched like claws, taut, trembling, alien. She drew them
back, still staring. She hesitated, then lay down on the bed again. Her hands
lay passive, hers once more, pale and blue-veined, with torn, dirty
fingernails.

The old man did not turn around.

They showed pictures of how she might look if she were
trying to disguise herself, in dark or medium skin tones, no hair, long hair,
curly hair, hair with color. The brown almost had it: anonymous. And she had
changed in ways more subtle than disguise. The arrogance was attenuated, and
the invincible assurance gone; the self-confidence remained — it was all
she had — but it was tempered, and more mature. She had learned to doubt,
rather than simply to question.

The estranged face in the trid, despite its arrogance, was
not cruel but gentle, and that quality she had not been able to change.

It had taken them two months to trace her. They could not
have followed her credit number, for she had stopped using it before they could
cancel it. They would have known only how far she could get before her cash ran
out. She had gotten farther, of course, but they had probably expected that.

Since they knew where she was, now was almost identical to
later, and now it was still light outside. As she allowed herself to sleep
again, she tried to imagine not recognizing a picture of someone she had met.
She failed.

o0o

Lais woke up struggling from a nightmare in which the blue
images of the trid attacked and overwhelmed her, and her computers would not
come to her aid. The old man pulled his hands from her shoulders abruptly and
guiltily when he realized she was awake. The windowless room was stuffy. Lais
was damp all over with feverish sweat. Her head ached, and her knees were sore.

“I’m sorry, miz, I was afraid you’d hurt
yourself.” He must have been rebuffed and denigrated all his life, to be
so afraid of touching another human being.

“It’s all right,” she said. She seemed
always to be saying that to him. Her mental clock buzzed and jumped to catch up
with reality: twelve hours since the trid woke her up.

The old man sat quietly, perhaps waiting for orders. He did
not take his gaze from her, but his surveillance was of a strange and anxious
childlike quality, without recognition. It seemed not to have occurred to him
that his stray might be the Institute fugitive. He seemed to live in two
spheres of reality. When she looked at his eyes, he put his head down and
hunched his shoulders. His hands lay limp and half-curled in his lap. “I
didn’t know what to do. They yell at me when I ask stupid questions.”
No bitterness, just acceptance of the judgment that any question he could ask
must be stupid.

She forced back her own useless flare of anger. To awaken
hate in him would be cruel. “You did the right thing,” she said.
She would have said the same words if he had innocently betrayed her. Two other
lines of possible reality converged in her mind: herself of two months or a
year before, somehow unchanged by exile and disillusionment, and an old man who
called Aid for the sick girl in his room. She would have told him exactly what
she thought without regard for his feelings; she would have looked on him not
with compassion but with the kind of impersonal pity that is almost disdain.
But they would have been more similar in one quality: neither of them would
have recognized the isolation of their lives.