Outcasts (11 page)

The screen had stopped because she’d reached the end
of the test.

The
end
.

Amazing.

The exec looked at the screen over her shoulder, reached
down, pressed a key. The screen blinked and reformed. Jannine recognized the
pattern of the beginning of the test, and she thought, Oh, god, no, not
another
one.

“You’re allowed to go through and check your
answers,” the exec said. “Plenty of time before the next section.
Don’t you want to do that?”

One of the other test-takers, still working through the questions,
made a sharp “Shh!” sound, but never looked up.

“No,” Jannine said. “I’m done. I don’t
want to go through it again. Can I leave now?”

“I really think you should work on this some more. It’s
for your own good.”

“I don’t want to!” Jannine shouted. “Don’t
you understand me?”

“Hey.” The test-taker who’d shhed her sat
up, glared, saw the exec, shut up, and hunched down over the test.

The others continued to work, without a glance at Jannine or
at the exec.

“I understand
what
you’re saying,”
the exec said. “I don’t understand why. You do fine on the alert,
so it isn’t test anxiety, but your score on this is terrible.”

Jannine felt spied on. He’d been watching her answers
as she chose them.

Angrily, she rose. She was taller than the exec, and bigger.

“I’ll tell you why,” she said. “Why
is because I don’t want to take your stupid test.” She knew he was
about to tell her she’d failed, she couldn’t work here anymore, she
was fired. “I quit!”

She pushed past him, heading for the door. She was halfway
down the hall before he recovered from the shock and came after her. She’d
hoped he’d just write her off, let her go and be done with her. She hoped
he’d spare her more humiliation.

“Wait!”

He was mad, now, too, and wanting to take it out on her. She
could hear it in his voice.

“You’re a valuable employee,” he said. “We
think you have a lot of potential.”

He baffled her. “Can I go back to work?”

“What’s wrong with you?” His voice rose. “What
do you have against being promoted?”

So that was what this was all about. A management test. Not
a test to keep working on the substrate.

“Who asked you?” she said, furious. “Who
asked
you to promote me?”

He stopped short, confused.

“You can take the test again.”

“Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Will you talk to me about this?” The exec
rocked back on his heels and folded his arms and looked at her. “Do
you... Do you need help with something?”

Jannine hated the pity in his face, the pity that would turn
to contempt.

“I quit! I said I quit and I mean I quit!” She
fled into the elevator. When the doors closed, she was shaking.

The elevator halted at the production level. The doors
opened. Instead of the quiet, cold workspace, each person in a couch, no noise
but the pumps and the high-pitched hum of the electric fields, Jannine walked
into midmorning break. Everybody milled around, drinking coffee and eating junk
food, stretching and moving.

She crossed the floor without stopping. She hoped no one
would notice where she’d been, or notice she was leaving. The best she
could hope for now was to get away clean.

“Jannine!”

Jannine’s shoulders slumped. If she’d just
disappeared, she never would’ve had to tell Neko what had happened. But
she couldn’t keep walking, not when Neko called to her.

“Where have you been? Where are you going?” Neko
hurried to her side. “Are you okay? Was it the alert? You never fail the
alert! How late did you stay out this morning, anyway?” She grinned. “I’m
sorry I was so grumpy. Are you done with counseling? Can you come back to work?”
She lowered her voice, whispering, confidential. “The temp is really
good. I think he wants to work here. Permanently. He’s even got his own
equipment. Are you in trouble?”

Jannine wanted to explain, but she had no idea how. She
wanted desperately to get out of here.

“I quit,” she said.

“You — what?” Neko stared at her,
stricken, then awed. “You quit! Because of what I said? Is that why you
had to go to counseling? How did they find out? Jannine... Oh, you’re so
brave!”

“Brave?” Jannine said, baffled.

“I ought to walk right out the door with you!”

“No,” Jannine said. “No, you shouldn’t,
that’d be dumb.” Neko thought she was leaving because of the
company’s products. That was okay, because Jannine couldn’t explain
why she’d quit. It was too complicated and too embarrassing. But she couldn’t
let Neko quit, too. Not if she was going to quit because of what she thought
they might be building. Not if she was going to quit to be in solidarity with
Jannine. That would make everything, even their friendship, a lie.

“Do you mean it?” Neko said. “That’s
such a relief! You won’t be mad? Did they know I — ? I can’t
quit, Jannine, I’m awfully sorry. I can’t afford it, I need this
job...”

Jannine felt betrayed. That made no sense. She didn’t
want Neko to quit. Hell, she didn’t want to quit, herself. She would’ve
felt awful, she would’ve felt guilty, if Neko had tried to leave with
her, and she would’ve tried to talk her out of going. No: she
would
have talked her out of going, no matter what she had to tell her. No matter how
much she had to tell her.

The lights blinked: end of break. Everyone had to get back
to work. The temp would be in Jannine’s couch.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jannine said. “I
have to leave.”

“I’ll walk you to the door.”

“Why?” No one was supposed to leave the floor
during work hours. “You’ll be late. You’ll lose points.”

“I don’t care!”

At the checkout, the barrier gave Jannine her i.d. It
refused to hand over Neko’s. Neko hesitated. She could come through the
barrier. But she’d have a hard time getting back to the floor: security,
explanations, maybe even counseling. A lot of lost points.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jannine said,
disappointed despite herself. “Stay here.”

“Well... okay, if you’re sure...”

Jannine went through the barrier. It closed again behind
her.

“We’ll get together,” Neko said. “For
a drink. Sometime. Okay?”

Without turning back, Jannine raised her hand in a final
wave.

The exit opened. She walked out onto the rain-wet street,
into the darkness.

~~~~~

Darting into a lighted spot in a dim pool —

o0o

Being born — well, Lais remembered it, a gentle
transition from warm liquid to warm air, an abrupt rise in the pitch of sounds,
the careful touch of hands, shock of the first breath. She had never told
anyone that her easy passage had lacked some quality, perhaps a rite that would
have made her truly human. Somewhere was a woman who had been spared the pain
of Lais’ birth, everywhere were people who had caused pain, and, causing,
experienced it, paying a debt that Lais did not owe. Sleeping curled in fetal
position in the dark gave her no comfort: the womb she was formed in had seemed
a prison from the time she was aware of it. Yet the Institute refused to grow
its fetuses in the light. The Institute administrators were normal and had been
born normally. If they had ever been prenatally aware, the memory had been
obliterated or forgotten. They could not understand the frustration of the
Institute Fellows, or perhaps the thought of fishlike little creatures peering
out, watching, learning, was too much even for them to bear.

Lais’ quiet impatience with an increasingly cramped
world was only relieved by her birth, and by light, which freed a sense she had
felt was missing but could not quite imagine. Having reasoned that something
like birth must occur, she was much calmer under restraint than she had been
only a little earlier. When she first realized she was trapped, when she first
grew large enough to touch both horizons of her sphere, she had been
intelligent but wild, suspicious and easily angered. She had thrashed, seeking
escape; nothing noticed her brief frenzy. The walls were spongy-surfaced, hard
beneath; they yielded slightly, yet held her. They implied something beyond the
darkness, and allowed her to imagine it. All her senses were inside the prison,
so she imagined being turned inside out to be freed from her tether. She
expected pain.

As she waited, she sometimes wished she were still a lower
primate, small and stupid enough to accept the warm salty liquid as the
universe. Even then, as she kicked and paddled with clumsy hands and feet,
missing the strong propulsion of her vanished tail, she was changing. That was
when she first thought that the spectrum of her senses might lack a vital part.
Her environment was still more alien now than it had been when she was a lithe
amphibian, barely conscious, long-tailed and free in an immense world. Earlier
than that, her memories were kinetic impressions, of gills pumping, heart
fluttering, the low, periodic vibration that never changed.

o0o

—the silver-speckled black fish settled in a shadow at
Lais’ feet, motionless but seeming to ripple beneath the mist and the
disturbed surface of the water. Lais hunched down in her thick coat. The
layered branches of a gnarled tree protected her from the sleet, but not from
the wind. She shivered. Overhead, the vapor rising from the pool condensed in
huge drops on the undersides of dark green needles, and fell again. The tree
smelled cool and tart. Beyond her shelter, the shapes of sculpture and small
gardens rose and flowed between low buildings and sleet-cratered puddles that
reflected intermittent lights. Except for Lais and the fishes, the flagstone
mall was deserted. People had left their marks, bits of paper not yet picked
up, sodden; placards and posters the haranguers had abandoned in the rain,
leaning against each other like dead trees. Lais let her gaze pass quickly over
them, trying not to see the words; in the dim light, she could almost pretend
she could not read them.

If she left this place she could walk downtown for perhaps
half an hour in the warmed, well-lit night, before an agent saw her smoothing
people and chased her out, or had her held and checked. That she could not
afford. She stayed where she was. She pulled her coat over her knees and put
her head down. Staying outside was her own choice. The dump nearby would give
her one of the transients’ beds, but out here the cold numbed her, a free
anesthetic that otherwise she might be driven to buy in more destructive form.

A scuffing through slush on the flagstones roused her. Lais
crawled stiffly from beneath the tree. Pain clamped on her spine before she
could straighten. She leaned against the garden’s retaining wall, breathing
the thin air in shallow cut-off gasps. The man was almost opposite her when she
moved into the mall. “Hey, you got any spare change?”

Startled, a little scared, he peered down at her through the
rain. His face was smooth, without character, the set and seemingly plasticized
face of a thousand betrayers, a face she would not live to share. He had
nothing to be frightened of but mercifully rapid senility and a painless death
that could be over a century away. His life span would be ten times hers.

“You’re dressed well to want money.”

She moved closer to him, so close that she had to conceal
her own uneasiness. She needed, if anything, more distance around her than
other people, but she understood the need and controlled it. The man succumbed
to it, and moved away from her until gradually, as they talked, she backed him
against the wall. He was odorless, a complete olfactory blank, firmly scrubbed
and deodorized at mouth and armpits and feet and groin, as clean as his genes.
Even his clothes had no smell. Lais hadn’t bathed in days, and her
clothes were filthy; her damp coat smelled familiarly of wool, and she herself
smelled like a warm wet female animal with fur. She built up an image of
herself preying on others. It amused her, because they had been preying on her
all her life.

“Some people are more generous,” she said, as if
someone had given her the coat. Wisps of hair clung in damp streaks across her
forehead and at her neck.

“Why don’t you sign up for Aid?”

She laughed once, sharply, and didn’t answer, turned
her back on him and guessed two steps before he called her. It was one. “Do
you need a place to sleep?”

She made her expression one of disdain. “I don’t
do that, man.”

Cold rain beading on his face did not prevent his flush:
embarrassment mixed with indignation. “Come now, I didn’t mean —”

She knew he didn’t mean —

“Look, if you don’t want to give me anything
forget it.” She stressed “give” just enough.

He blew out his breath and dug in his pockets. He held out a
crumpled bill that she looked at with contempt, but she took it first. “Gods,
a whole guilder. Thanks a lot.” The insolence of her mock gratitude upset
him more than derision. She walked away, thinking that she had the advantage,
that she was leaving him speechless and confused.

“Do you like hurting people?”

She faced him. He had no expression, only that smooth,
unlived-in look. She watched his eyes for a moment. They, at least, were still
alive.

“How old are you?”

He frowned abruptly. “Fifty.”

“Then you can’t understand.”

“And how old are you? Eighteen? It isn’t that
much difference.”

No, she thought, the difference is the hundred years that
you’ve got left, and the self-righteous hate you’d give me if you
knew what I was. She almost answered him honestly, but she couldn’t get
the words out. “It is to me,” she said, with bitterness. Only
fifty. He was the right age to have had his life disrupted by the revolt, and
if he did not hate her kind, he would still fear them. Deep feelings were no
longer so easily erased by the passage of time.