A Different Flesh (37 page)

“Good.” Lloyd yawned till the hinge of his jaw cracked like a knuckle. His eyes shifted from the monitors to a coffeepot on a hot plate. “I need another cup of that.”

“I'll join you.” Edward got up and poured for both of them.

“Thanks.” The guard sipped. He made a face. “Give me some sugar, will you? It's bitter tonight—tastes like it's been sitting in the pot for a week.”

“It is viler than usual, isn't it?” The technician added cream and sugar to his own brew.

Lloyd finished, tossed his cup at a trash can under the coffeepot. He missed, muttered to himself, and bent to pick up the cup. Then he ambled down the hall.

He yawned again, even wider than before. He glared back toward the technician's station. The coffee hadn't done him much good, had it?

He put a hand on the wall of the corridor. For some reason, he did not feel very steady on his feet. Before he knew what was happening, he found himself sliding to the tile floor. He opened his mouth to call for help. Only a snore came out.

In front of the monitors, the technician lolled in his chair, his head thrown back bonelessly. The paperback lay under the swivel chair's wheels, where it had fallen. Its cover was bent.

Terminus night was as hot as Terminus day, with the added pleasure of mosquitoes. Crouched on the wide lawn outside the DRC complex, Dixon was trying to keep his swearing to whispers as he slapped at bugs. “When do we go?” he asked for the fourth time, like a small child impatient to set out on a trip.

One of the lighted windows in the big building went dark for a moment, then lit again. “Now,” Melody said at last. “Good luck to all of us.”

People rose and ran forward, their feet scuffling softly on the grass. Automatic doors hissed open, leading into a passage that bent sharply. Out of sight from outside was a guard station. A guard slept in the chair; a cup of coffee had spilled on the desk in front of him.

The fluorescent lights overhead made Stephen's teeth gleam whitely as he grinned. “Food services,” he said. Also grinning, Dixon nodded and gave him a thumbs-up.

“We split here,” Melody declared, refusing to be distracted even for a moment. “Stephen, your group goes that way, toward elevator B. Bring back as much HIVI and as many syringes and needles as you can get your hands on.”

“Right.” He and two other young men dashed away.

“Out of here in fifteen minutes, or you get left behind,” Melody called after them. Then she turned to Dixon and the young woman with him, whom they knew only as Dee. “Now we head up ourselves and get Matt.”

The elevators right across from the guard station went up to the sim ward. Dixon thumbed the UP button. A door whooshed open. The three raiders—no, liberators, Dixon thought—crowded in.

He hit
14
a moment before Melody got it on the other panel. The door closed. Acceleration pressed against the soles of his shoes.

The door opened again. “How convenient,” Melody said as they tumbled out; the bank of monitor screens was in the same position on floor 14 as the guard station on the ground floor. The man in the chair in front of them was as solidly out as the guard down below.

“Good—the screens have room numbers on them. That's the one thing I wasn't sure of,” Dixon said. “Is that Matt?”

“Let's see,” Melody said, coming up beside him and following his pointing finger. “Yes, that's him. Room—1427B, is it? Let's go.”

NO ENTRY WITHOUT AUTHORIZED ACCOMPANIMENT
, read a large sign above closed double doors. Dixon tried them. They were locked. “Figured as much,” he said. He stepped aside. “All yours, Dee.”

She didn't speak; she never said much, as far as Dixon could tell. She was a locksmith by trade, though, and carried a set of picks on her belt. Her motions were quick and sure. In less than a minute, she had the doors open. “Come on,” she said.

They went quietly, not wanting to disturb any of the sleeping sims but Matt. “1427B,” Melody said, stopping. Dee took a step toward the door, but Melody was already trying it. Melody raised a hand in triumph, like a cricketeer after a century.

Matt woke to the sound of the opening door. His wide mouth fell open in surprise when he saw three strange humans coming in.
Who
? he signed.
What
?

“Henry Quick was my great-great-grandfather,” Melody said, voice hardly above a whisper. Her fingers echoed the words.

“Hoo!”
It was the sound sims made when they were impressed or interested. Dixon shook his head in wonder; he had lost track of how many times he had seen that reaction when Melody said who she was. Somehow all sims everywhere knew that Henry Quick had been the first man who worked to give them justice.

What
? Matt signed again.
Why you here
?

“To make you free,” Dixon said. As Melody had—as anyone did who communicated with sims—he repeated his spoken words with sign-talk. “Come with us. Do you want to spend the rest of your life cooped up in here?”

Matt shrugged.
Food good. Females here. Feel good now. Not sick
.

Dixon scowled. That wasn't the answer he was looking for. Melody asked quietly, “Do you want to be sick again? You probably will, if you stay here. Do you remember what it was like when you were sick?”

The question was not quite theoretical; like very young children, sims often let the past recede quickly. But Dixon saw that what Matt had undergone was not something he would easily forget. The sim's nostrils flared in alarm; under his brow-ridges, his eyes went wide.
No!
he signed, and vehemently shook his head. He climbed off the bed.
I come with you
.

“Good,” Dee said. She turned and started down the hall. Melody and Matt followed. Dixon came with them a moment later, after leaving a souvenir on the bed to give Dr. Howard something to think about.

They hurried out through the double doors. Dee locked them again. This time, riding the elevator made Dixon feel briefly light.

“Hoo!”
Matt said again when they were in the lobby. He pointed at the unconscious guard there, signed,
Not to be asleep
.

“That's what he thought,” Dixon said. Matt looked at him in confusion. “Never mind. Come on.”

They dashed out of the DRC and ran toward one of the two horselesses parked on the roadway close to the edge of the lawn. It was not, strictly speaking, a legal place to park, but traffic regulations were not likely to be enforced in the wee small hours.

One of the horselesses sped off. As it passed under a street lamp, Dixon saw it was crowded with people. Triumph flared in him. “They must have got the HIVI! And we've got Matt!”

The driver of the remaining horseless threw open the door across from him.
In
, Melody signed to Matt. She, Dixon, and Dee came piling after the sim. No sooner had Dee slammed the door than the driver roared away from the curb.

Dixon started to say something to the sim, but before he could, Melody leaned over and kissed him for a long time. When she finally let Dixon go, by some miracle he remembered what he had been about to tell Matt: “Free! You're free at last!”

That got him kissed again, which was, he thought dizzily, a long way from bad.

“‘Free,'” Dr. Peter Howard read. It was the last word of the pamphlet on Matt's bed, printed twice as big and black as any of the others. In Howard's mouth, it sounded obscene. Normally among the most self-controlled of men, he savagely crumpled the pamphlet and flung it to the floor.

The security officer who picked it up gave him a reproachful look. “There might have been useful evidence there, doctor.”

“Oh, shut up,” Howard snarled. “Where the hell were you people when this sim was stolen? Asleep on the job, that's where!”

“The guards were drugged, Dr. Howard,” the security man corrected stiffly. “Our investigation into that part of the affair is just beginning.”

“Wonderful.” Howard turned away. Slowly, clumsily, he made his way down the hall. Getting out of the way for other people seemed more trouble than it was worth. It's as if I were one of the walking wounded, he thought—and then realized, a moment later, I am.

He sat behind his desk, but could not pretend, not today, that the broad expanse of walnut was a fortress wall to hold the outside world outside. In a bigger sense, he had used the whole DRC the same way. Well, the outside world had invaded with a vengeance.

And with such stupidity, he thought, filled with rage that was all the more consuming for having no outlet. He had only skimmed the pamphlet the thieves left behind to explain their handiwork, but he had seen and heard the phrases there often enough over the years.

His fists clenched till nails bit into flesh. At the pain, he opened them again; no matter how furious he was, he stayed careful about his hands. But it was not, was not, was
not
his fault that sims were as they were. In earlier days, he knew, people had thought other races of people to be inferior breeds. Sims did that much, at least, to stop man's inhumanity to man, by showing what an inferior breed really was like.

The security man stuck his head into the office, breaking Howard's chain of thought. “Outside greencoats are here to see you, sir,” he said.

“Send them in,” Howard sighed. Normally, Terminus's regular constabulary stayed away from the DRC. Normally, Howard thought—he would not get to use that word again any time soon.

No sooner had the greencoat—actually, the fellow was in ordinary clothes, blue breeches and a yellow tunic—come in than the phone chimed. “Excuse me,” Howard said, thinking, everything happens at once. The greencoat nodded.

Howard picked up the phone. An excited voice said in his ear, “This is Butler, at the Terminus
Constitution
. We've had a report that a sim with AIDS has been taken from the Disease Research Center—Hello? Is that you, Dr. Howard? Are you there?”

“I'm here,” Howard said. No point in breaking the connection. Like the greencoat in his office, this Butler was only the first of many.

Matt was confused. Dealing with people often left him feeling that way, but he had lived in his old home in the tower for a long time, and mostly knew what to expect. With these new people, he had no idea what was coming next.

Shaking his head, he got out of bed—the third new, strange, not quite comfortable bed he'd had in as many nights—and used the toilet. He had to strain to make the urine go through his penis, which was stiff with a morning erection. Stiffer than usual, even; he missed the females with whom he'd been living.

He flushed the toilet, sat down on it to comb his red-brown hair. That was another reason he missed the females: there was a big patch on his back that he could not reach. In the towers, sims by twos and threes would spend a lot of time combing each other all over. It was something to do.

He sniffed, and felt his broad nostrils expand with pleasure. Breakfast was cooking—sausages today, from the smell. He liked sausages.

He went out to the kitchen. The man and woman who had taken him from the tower were there, along with the strange man and woman whose house this was. They were all drinking coffee. They looked up as he came in.

Good morning
, he signed.

“Good morning,” the people replied, with mouths and hands. “Help yourself,” added the woman who lived here. Emily was her name, Matt remembered.

He nodded his thanks. Along with the sausages were sweet rolls and slices of apple. He filled his plate, took a glass of water (he did not care for coffee).

Behind him, Emily's mate Isaac whistled and said, “Certainly nothing wrong with his appetite now.”

“We've noticed that,” replied Ken, one of the ones who had taken him away. “Hope it won't put you to too much trouble.”

“Don't worry,” Isaac said.

Matt sat down at the table and started to eat. Emily said, “We're proud to help keep him out of the DRC, folks, and taking him was a grand gesture. But do you know what you'll do with him in the end?”

“We were thinking of getting him to one of the preserves and setting him loose there,” Ken said, “but—” His voice trailed away.

“With the AIDS virus still in him, we can't do that,” Melody finished for him. “Not without spreading AIDS among the wild sims.”

People often talked around sims as if they could not understand spoken words because they could not say them. Matt put down his fork so he could sign,
Feel good
.

“We know you do, Matt,” Melody said gently, touching his hand for a moment with her small hairless one. “But no matter how good you feel, you
aren't
well. The sickness is still inside you.”

She and Ken had said that before. It made no sense to Matt. If he did not feel sick, how could he be sick?
Feel good
, he repeated. He watched the humans roll their eyes and shrug. He shrugged too.

“There's another problem,” Ken added. “He'll feel well only as long as we have HIVI for him.” He looked down at his hands. “Maybe we should have thought a little longer about that, for his sake.”

“We did the best we could,” Melody said. “He's out now. They can't do any more experimenting on him. He's free, for as long as we can keep him that way.”

Matt had heard almost identical talk every day since he left the towers. It was about him, he knew, but it did not seem to connect to him.

Then Isaac said something new: “I don't think we can keep him free. We can keep him away from the doctors, sure, but only he can make himself free.”

Dixon scowled; Melody rose abruptly from the table. “We'll be taking off soon, I think.” Even Matt, who did not use speech himself, could hear the anger in her voice.

He ate another sausage.
Free
was one of the many words people used that gave him trouble. Ideas like
bread
or
cat
or
green
or
jump
or
sideways
were easy enough to deal with. He could even count, though sometimes he had trouble remembering which number went with how many things or whether he had attached a number to each of the things in the group he happened to be counting.