Shelter (19 page)

    Meredith took a step backward. "Uh-uh, No, I'm sorry. Being on the Net is not the same as being on the planet, eating and breathing. And you'd better not let Matt know about this stuff"

    Raji laughed. "Why not? I already did. Matt thought it was interesting. He's very open-minded, you know."

    "Well, okay, then you'd better not let your parents know."

    "Yeah, that's true. They'd have a fit. Matt had to talk them into letting me have my own computer here, even if I can only use it an hour a day. Well, listen, I'd better get back to work. See you later. Good luck with your dad."

    "Thanks," Merry said, and turned toward Matt's office. As always, it took longer to get there than the mere distance would have suggested: she had to dodge a Clowns of the Goddess troupe practicing a tumbling routine, a procession of small children carrying balloons and chanting a birthday blessing, a convoy of three wheelbarrows hauling bricks and gravel for the new labyrinth, and a pair of therapy-puppies-in-training, whose handlers were trying to teach them to heel off-leash. Neither pup was coping well with all the distractions; both of them, after chasing the wheelbarrows for a few feet, bounced over to Meredith and began ecstatically nuzzling her ankles, as the trainers called after them. "Demeter! Dmitri! No! HEEL!"

    The sheer vitality of the place never failed to cheer Merry up. She walked into Matt's office laughing, her feet covered with puppy spit. "Hello, Matt. Raji said you wanted to see me."

    Matt—tall and lanky, with unruly red hair—looked up from a sheaf of papers and said, "Blessings, Merry. How are you?"

    ''I'm okay. I'd be better if my father would stop stalking me. That's what this is about, right? He knew I was coming here and'"

    "He wants to talk to you, yes. You can sit in the conference room. You'll have privacy there."

    "I want privacy from him, not with him."

    Matt nodded, looking sympathetic. Matt always looked sympathetic. She wondered if they'd given classes on it in Temple training school. "Yes, I can imagine, but you're going to have to settle that with him. I'm just passing on the message."

    Merry scowled. "I don't want messages from him. Can you please tell him not to call here? He has to honor that if you say it: he made that rule himself, after he spooked all those people at the hospital."

    "He's your parent," Matt said gently, "and you're still a minor. I can't deny him access, Merry. Sorry."

    She felt like screaming. "Okay. So I'd better get this over with, right?" She went into the conference room, closed the door, and stared with loathing at her father's visage on the desktop monitor. "Daddy, I don't want you following me here, do you understand? That's why I come here."

    "I know it is, Meredith. But I wanted to ask you some questions, away from your mother."

    She cautiously sat down. "Questions?" That was a new one. Since she'd left isolation, since Preston had stopped nagging her about how she felt every ten minutes, he had foregone questions in favor of pronouncements. "You could have called me on the phone at home and asked me questions. Mommy doesn't listen in on my conversations."

    "That is true. I just thought this might be—more comfortable."

    She squinted at the desktop. "Why? What—"

    "Meredith, would you be upset if your mother remarried?"

    "Remarried?" She stared blankly at the monitor, thinking back over her mother's conversation with Brenda that morning. "Why? Is she going to—to divorce you or something?"

    "She has expressed no such intention, but if having an embodied husband would make her happier, I would like to give her that opportunity."

    Meredith shook her head. He'd never said anything about giving her the opportunity when he was still alive, away from home twenty-nine days out of every thirty. "I don't understand. Why ask me this? What difference does it make how I feel?"

    "I do not want to discuss it with her if it will upset you, so soon after coming home." He's planning something, Meredith thought uneasily. She stared at the monitor, keeping her face impassive, and Preston said, "I wanted to find out how you would feel."

    Meredith cocked her head. "I want whatever will make Mommy happy. But if you two aren't married anymore—"

    "You need not worry about the finances. You and your mother would still have everything you have now, Meredith."

    "I wasn't worried about that," she said, stung and ashamed, but she had been. So much for her fine Temple principles. She looked down at the conference table and said, "Look, it's between you and Mom. It's none of my business."

    "Of course it is your business. You are our child. But it would not bother you?"

    Meredith stood up. "This is crazy. I'm going outside now. Whatever you have to say to me, you can say to Mommy too, all right? Or just to her."

    Preston's image smiled. "Good. We will discuss it, all three of us, when you get home."

    "That won't be for a while," Meredith said, and headed back outside, toward the dog run.

    Raji was shoveling turds when Meredith got there. "Hey, Merry. So what'd your dad want?"

    "Nothing," she said. "Craziness. You need a hand with that?" She helped Raji shovel dogshit and haul kibble, but she couldn't keep her mind on her work; the conversation with her father kept nagging at her. When you get home, he'd said. Whatever he wanted to say to her and Constance was inevitable; she was only delaying it by staying here. "Nuts," she said finally, and dumped a bag of kibble into a trough, and said, "Listen, I've got to go home, okay?"

    Raji looked up, frowning, from a new litter of puppies. "You all right?"

    "Yeah. Don't worry. My dad's too good at jerking me around, that's all. See you tomorrow."

    * * *

    When she got home she found her mother in the solarium, working on an impressionist painting of an IBM XT. Retro-tech was extremely chic now, and her canvases of antique computers were flying out of tony galleries as quickly as she could produce them. "Hi," she said, without turning away from her easel, when she heard Meredith come in. "How was Temple?"

    Meredith wondered how long it would take her father to pipe into the conversation. Surely he'd been tracking her on GPS, and knew she was back home now. Her mother had the GPS cells too; it occurred to Meredith that Constance hadn't even looked up when she came in, hadn't been worried about who might be coming in the door. She hadn't even needed to look. Preston Walford's wife took her security for granted. "It sucked," she said.

    Constance put down her paintbrush and picked up a steaming mug of tea from the table next to her. "Why, honey? What happened?"

    "Oh, Daddy followed me on the GPS and knew I was there and told Matt he wanted to talk to me in the conference room, and then he started asking me all kinds of weird questions about you."

    Constance paled. "About me? Meredith, what did he want?"

    "I wanted to know if Meredith would mind if you remarried," Preston's voice said from the radio, and Constance jumped and spilled tea on herself "Ouch! Dammir! Preston—"

    "I'll go get paper towels," Meredith said.

    "No, honey, I'm fine. Stay here. Preston, you have to stop this! Just barging into conversations like this! I don't care if it is still your house, and I don't care how much you've contained yourself everywhere else! If anybody finds out how you're acting, translation will be a dead issue, all right? Dead! You won't be able to sell it to anyone if people think their friends and relatives will be able to spy on them this way! Not even MacroCorp can market that, believe me. And if it's not something they can sell, if it won't be profitable for them, they'll be much less interested in keeping you up and running, do you understand? People die, Preston, that's all. You have to start behaving yourself!"

    Smart, Meredith thought, looking at her mother with new respect. Very smart. She's getting him where he lives—literally. "Daddy, we have to set some ground rules. From now on, you don't watch me or listen to me or try to talk to me, even in the house, unless I give you permission, all right? And you don't follow me out of the house unless I invite you or unless you ask my permission first, is that clear?"

    "Double ditto to that," Constance said. "Come on, Preston. You wouldn't even be trying to get away with this nonsense if you were still in the flesh, and you know it."

    "But I want to make sure that you are safe, Constance and Meredith."

    Merry snorted. "That's why you followed me to Temple? What could possibly happen to me there? A dog bite? And what could you do about it even if it happened?"

    "I could call for an ambulance—"

    "So could Matt or Raji or anybody else there. Daddy, it's my life, not yours, and you can't have it. This is exactly why we don't want the rigs, you know."

    "There is nothing I could learn about either of you that would make me love you less," Preston said.

    "Love? You didn't love me before, Daddy. You didn't even know me. You weren't here enough. And now—now! You wouldn't know love if it ... if it what? Bit you on the leg? You don't have one. Hit you on the head? You don't have one. Stuck a stick up—"

    "Meredith," Constance said, "I think that's enough. We get the idea." But she was smiling.

    "Love is seeing all things connected as one," Preston said. "On the Net all things are connected and therefore all things are one. But I cannot be connected to you if—"

    "Maybe we don't want to be connected to you," Constance said pleasantly. "Have you thought of that, Preston? Maybe we want to be by ourselves. "

    "We cannot be by ourselves. None of us ever can. People at Temple know that, Meredith; they understand interconnection."

    "With things that are alive," Merry said. "That's why there's so little net-wiring there, Daddy. Temple is about connection with bodies. Remember bodies? That's what you don't have anymore."

    "My body is now the Net, which is also the world."

    Constance sighed. "Preston, I think you need a cyberpsychiatrist. You're developing delusions of grandeur."

    "I am sorry I have upset you. I did not mean to upset you. I wanted to tell you, Constance, that I know why you do not want the recording rig, and I want to tell you it is all right. And I want Meredith to hear me say it, so she will also know that it is all right with me. Because it is."

    "It's all right that we don't want the rigs?" Meredith said. "You changed your mind?"

    "No, that is not all right," Preston said. "It is all right that your mother has been having an affair with Jack Adam for the past five years. That is why she does not want the rig. She is afraid I will find out, but I already know."

    "What?" Meredith blinked, fighting an urge to break into laughter. "Mommy, is that true? Wait, never mind; don't answer that. It's none of my business."

    Constance had turned the darkest shade of red Meredith had ever seen. "No, it isn't your business. And it certainly isn't Preston's business. And—"

    The doorbell rang. "Jack is here," Preston said. "I called him and asked him to come."

    "Oh, sweet Mother," Constance said. "Preston!"

    ''I'm going upstairs now," Meredith said. ''I'm going to my room. No, wait, I'm going to take a ride downtown." Scratch that: vehicles were netwired. "No, I'm walking downtown. This is none of my business." But she heard footsteps, and turned to find Jack, looking as if he'd just eaten something extremely unpleasant, standing in the entrance to the room.

    "Your father opened the door for me," he said. "Hello, Constance."

    "Jack," Constance said. "I want this ... this thing offline. I want him erased. I want—"

    "Connie, you're talking about murder. He's legally a person, remember? We can't do that."

    "I knew about the affair before my translation. I did not care then, and I do not now. I love both of you. I have always wanted both of you to be happy. I—"

    "You've been following me for five years," Constance said. "Even when you were still—"

    "So it's true?" Meredith said. Jack cleared his throat, looking sheepish; her mother wouldn't look at her at all. So it was true. Meredith blinked. Well. Jack had always been kind to her; she could imagine plenty of worse stepfathers. "Daddy," she said, "I don't get it. If you've known for five years and you don't care, why bring it up now? If you didn't divorce Mommy so she could remarry Jack when you were still—before you were translated, why now?"

    "You're planning to divorce me?" Constance said.

    "No, Constance. Not unless you wish it. Meredith, I never mentioned it before because there was no reason to do so. Your mother and Jack were happy, and I loved them and I wanted them to be happy, and talking about it would only have upset them. If your mother had wanted to leave me, she would have said so. But now this is the reason she does not want to get a rig, so I needed to talk about it. And I would not have access to the recordings anyway."

    Constance pressed her hands to either side of her head. "Preston! You expect me to believe that? You're trying to reassure me about privacy by telling me you've already been spying on me for five years? What, you hired a detec—"

    "No, Constance. The GPS cells showed your position."

    "I don't have GPS cells," Jack said.

    "No, Jack, you do not. But during the neo-Luddite terrorism scare five years ago, the previous head of MacroCorp Security was keeping unusually close tabs on both of you, and discovered a pattern, and took it upon himelf to tell me about it."

    "Ah," Jack said. "So that's why you fired Benny. I always wondered. That line about how he needed to take early retirement to fmd himself didn't quite wash."

    "He is happier now, breeding horses. I am glad he is happy. But he had exceeded his authority."

    Constance let out a shrill laugh. "Look who's talking!"

    "Constance, I have no intention of depriving you of property. I—"