Shelter (35 page)

    "No. Get out. You—"

    "Do it for Raji, Meredith. He wanted you to have coffee with me, right? Zephyr told me that. Let me buy you a Raji memorial coffee, and, then you can crawl back into isolation if you want to and go back to scrubing floors."

    Her legs had begun to shake, a fine tremor she could feel ascending through her spine. How dare he mention Raji, to her of all people! '' Zephyr told you Raji wanted me to have coffee with you? And how the hell did Zephyr know that?"

    "Because he told her, presumably." Kevin finally stood up so that they were eye-to-eye. "Go on: get mad at him. He told her things he shouldn't have, right? Get good and pissed off. Then maybe you'll be able to break out of this Lady Macbeth complex and stop trying to scrub Raji's bloodstains out of the parquet. The entire city knows you're holed up in here, you know. Maybe the entire country. ScoopNet's having a field day with it."

    Meredith shuddered. Did ScoopNet know about her caudate nucleus? No, they couldn't possibly have access to her medical records. She wondered if they'd ever leave her alone. Raji had told her that they hounded her because she represented cultural obsessions; now that Raji's death was such an obsession, she supposed she was stuck with them, at least until she managed to live a boring life for at least five years. In the meantime, she had to get rid of Kevin.

    "You have no right to tell me how to feel," she said coldly. "And you have no right to criticize my spiritual discipline."

    "Scrubbing floors? That's right, I forgot: you're DE."

    She froze him out, retreating into her familiar numbness. "You have to leave now."

    "Can't. Have to get more dirt for ScoopNet first." She gaped at him, and, astonishingly, he grinned. "Relax. I'm not wired. But they'd pay me a lot of money if I were, you know."

    He was insane. "Leave. Now. Go have coffee with Zephyr."

    "Don't waste your anger on Zephyr. She's not worth it."

    ''I'm not angry at Zephyr. You have to leave."

    "Relax. I told you I'm not wired; your mother's security system would have caught it if I were. Meredith, getting mad at Zephyr is a waste of time. Get mad at Raji for talking to her, or get mad at me for talking about her. That's a lot more productive."

    She looked around for the panic button that would summon the police. "If you don't leave—"

    "If you really wanted me to leave, you'd have done something more decisive by now." His voice was as reasonable and matter-of-fact as if they were discussing class schedules. "You're mad at me because I'm telling you things you don't want to hear. Fine. You won't be as worried about being seen with me in public if you're mad at me, right? That should make it easier for you to come out for coffee. Shall I wear a sign, 'Terrorists, snatch this one'?"

    She felt her shell begin to crack. "How can you—"

    "How can I laugh about it?" She wondered if he ever let other people finish sentences. "There aren't a lot of other options, are there? Meredith, my family isn't famous and I'm not working on anything controversial. I'm just an architect, okay? I just draw houses. I don't think the Luds or anybody else are in the slightest bit interested in me, but if they are I hereby absolve you of responsibility. I'll put that in writing if you want me to."

    "I don't care what—"

    "What happens to me? Good. Then you'll have coffee with—"

    "Are you ever going to let me finish a sentence?"

    "I just did," he said briskly. "I'll let you finish more, if you have coffee with me."

    "No. I'm not going to do that. Give up, Kevin Lindgren. I don't like you."

    ''I'm not asking you to like me," he said. "That's the last thing I'd expect. If you liked me, I'd think you really were crazy."

    "You—"

    "He's abrading you back to life," Constance said from the doorway. How long had she been there? "I don't like him either. That's all right. Merry, go have coffee with him. And change out of those filthy sweats first. "

    "No! I don't want to."

    "It wasn't a question: I'm telling you. Meredith, go! Get out of the house for an hour, would you? I live here. I'd like some private time with my husband and my son."

    "I live here too!" She heard how brittle her voice was; she couldn't help it. "It's a huge house! I can be at the other end and you won't even know—"

    "Yes, I will. We will. You've been haunting this house for months; I swear the place gets darker the more you clean it. Go: go for an hour. One hour. That's all I ask. But first you have to go change. I put out clean clothing on your bed."

    "You what? I'm not five years old!"

    "Then stop acting like it! Go change. Go have coffee. Kevin, if you can tolerate her company, you're a better person than I am."

    * * *

    "Bitch," Meredith said. She huddled in the front seat of Kevin's car, as far from him and as close to the door as she could manage. It was a very old car, with ripped upholstery and odd, discolored splotches on the plastic dash. Kevin had moved an amazing amount of junk from the front seat to the back to make room for her; she wondered if he'd really expected her to come with him at all.

    It was all Constance's fault. Damn Constance! Meredith found herself crying, although she didn't want to. She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. At least her mother had put out comfortable clothing: the sweatshirt, a soft pair of old jeans. "I can't believe she kicked me out of my own house! I live there!" She didn't even care if this Kevin person heard her ranting about her mother. He was background noise, nothing but a nuisance.

    "It was shock therapy," he said. "Come on, you know that." And then, with a glance at her, "Don't worry. I'm still not going to sell the conversation to ScoopNet."

    She sniffied furiously. Was he after her money? Was that it? Why be so obnoxious, then? "Why are you doing this?" They'd been driving for a long time through crowded city streets, away from the nicer parts of town. It was a ridiculous distance just for coffee. Where was he taking her? Did he think he could kidnap her the way Raji had been kidnapped? Her mother knew his name, and Merry had GPS cells. It wouldn't work.

    "My car's messy, Meredith. My office isn't. Your drawings were taking up space."

    "That's a crock, and you know it. You could have just thrown them out."

    "I didn't want to do that. They're very good. I've already told you that. "

    "You're either stupid or crazy." And then, trying to sound threatening, ''I'm really not safe to be around, you know."

    "You're fine," he said. "I'm fine too. The Luds are the ones who aren't safe to be around. They've moved on to other targets. They won't be bothering you again."

    She said, heard herself say, "I keep thinking that it should have been me who was kidnapped. I would have been, if it hadn't been for my blood." Why had she told him that? It was none of his business.

    "So it's your own blood you're trying to scrub out of your mother's floors," he said pleasantly. "Nice detail. Maybe I will sell that one to ScoopNet. I should think I'd get a cool quarter of a million, wouldn't you?"

    "At least," she said bitterly. "You could always have an auction. You'd probably get more."

    "Good idea. That means I can afford lunch and coffee, even on a grad stipend. Okay, we're here."

    She looked around. They were in a singularly scuzzy area on Mission, broken glass littering the sidewalks in front of shuttered, guarded storefronts. "Where—"

    "There's a little Cambodian place. Right there, see? Hole in the wall. Very inexpensive. Good food, good coffee. I didn't say it was American coffee. Come on."

    * * *

    It really was a hole in the wall; there were only four tables. The walls of the tiny room were covered in mirrors, making the place feel like a carnival fun house. Taped to the mirrors were yellowing pictures cut from calendars: landscapes, seascapes, puppies and kittens. Dusty solstice lights hung from the ceiling, and in a corner, a forlorn goldfish swam around and around in a tank. Meredith thought of Raji's goldfish, the AI, and looked away, her throat tight.

    The waitress greeted Kevin with effusive affection, nodding perfunctorily in Meredith's direction when Kevin introduced her. A little girl around Theo's age, with long black pigtails, ran out of the kitchen and threw her arms around Kevin's leg. She babbled incomprehensibly at him until her mother chased her back into the kitchen.

    "You eat here a lot," Meredith said. She felt like she'd fallen into a bad movie. "They know you."

    "I told you: it's good food. You like fish?"

    "Sure." She wondered if they'd be having the goldfish for lunch.

    "Okay. Mind if I order?"

    She shrugged. "It's your place. I'm not hungry, anyway." How could anyone eat here? It was disgusting. "How'd you find this dive?"

    "I t's not a dive. I came here with friends. Liked it. Came back." The waitress returned with water, and Kevin began reeling off a long list of dishes, the waitress nodding and jotting notes. Food began appearing almost immediately: spring rolls and soup and pickled cucumber salad, followed by a shrimp curry and some kind of fish pate flavored with cilantro and lemongrass. Meredith, to her surprise, discovered that she was ravenous. She kept her head down and ate so she wouldn't have to look at Kevin.

    "Cleaning's hungry work," he said drily, when she finally resurfaced. "You didn't say grace, did you? Don't Gaia people do that?"

    "It's all grace," she said. She was oddly embarrassed at having eaten so much, as if he'd seen her naked. "It's all blessing."

    "Well, that's a nice idea. You have a piece of cilantro stuck in your teeth, by the way."

    She wanted to retract her head through the neck of her sweater, as if she were a turtle. "Oh."

    "Hang on a sec." Kevin pantomimed something at the waitress, who bustled over with a small holder of toothpicks. "There you go. One of the joys of having a body. Your father doesn't have to worry about these things. Of course, he can't taste cilantro, either."

    She stared at him. "Raji said you don't like AIs. That you don't— believe in them."

    "They're clever programs."

    "That's what I think too."

    The green eyes met hers, eyebrows arching slightly. "Even about your father?"

    "I—I don't know. It's hard to say. I barely knew him when he was translated. I know him better now. I like him better now than I did then. He seems—kinder. But I don't know what it is I like; I don't know if it's really related to whatever inhabited his body once." She didn't know why she was telling him this, either.

    Kevin's mouth twitched. "Easy to be kind when you've got a nearly unlimited ability to multitask."

    "Yeah."

    "Not to mention excellent corporate incentive. He can't have a badbyte day, or MacroCorp stock will go down, and then they might turn him off."

    Meredith looked away. She wasn't sure how she felt about him criticizing her father, although she'd thought the same things often enough herself.

    The coffee came, thick and sweet and bitter, in tiny cups. Merry watched Kevin sip his, as neatly as a cat. "You aren't rigged," she said.

    "Can't afford it. Wouldn't want it even if I could. It's a gimmick. And you aren't rigged, either; anybody who watches ScoopNet knows that much."

    "No," she said. "My mother still wants me to be. Now more than ever. But lately there hasn't been much I'd want to remember." She shouldn't have told him that, either. He seemed to act on her like some kind of truth serum, but she supposed it didn't matter. The ScoopNet vultures certainly would have already figured it out.

    Kevin bowed his head at her, an oddly formal gesture, and took a last sip from the tiny cup. "You need to work on that, rigged or not. On finding things you want to remember. What's your favorite view in the city?"

    The view of the Bay from the Temple clearing. The view of the Bay from her mother's solarium. But either of those would be too painful right now. Anger at Constance twisted in her stomach, but less stabbingly than it had an hour before. "Telegraph Hill, facing the Bay."

    He gave her a narrow, surprised glance. "Good choice. Perfect. We'll go there."

    They didn't talk much during the drive. Kevin parked at the top of Telegraph, near an area of private houses. "I didn't think you'd want Coit Tower," he said. "Too touristy."

    "Yeah."

    "Okay, come on. I know a place where we can sit on the steps and no one will bother us."

    Why was she letting him lead her around? She should have demanded that he take her home. But she followed him, because it was simpler. He led her down the Filbert steps, past terraced gardens, the Bay a blue blur below, and stopped when they reached a crannied, overgrown patio with a mossy picnic table. "Isn't this trespassing?" Meredith said.

    "Yeah, but I know the guy who owns the house—one of my professors—and I happen to know he's away in Europe."

    "What if his house sitter finds us here?"

    "I'm his house sitter."

    "Oh." She tensed. "That's very convenient. I named just the right place, didn't I?"

    "Yes, you did. Relax, Meredith. I don't even have the key with me right now, and I wouldn't try to seduce you if I did. I don't need a neurotic celebrity lover. I have enough neuroses of my own. Are you going to sit down?"

    She sat, unsure whether to be reassured or enraged, and 1ooked around: leaves, leaves, flowers, water, the blue of the sky above the Bay. She began to relax, despite herself. "I still don't understand why you're doing this."

    "I like challenges. And I really didn't want to throw out the drawings. And maybe I wanted to talk to someone who really knew Raji. Everyone's saying they did, now, and I don't believe many of them."

    "Even Zephyr?"

    He snorted. "Especially Zephyr. You and Raji hadn't really been—an item—for a while, had you?"

    "Not for three years. Zephyr was his girlfriend when he died."

    "What, after knowing him for five minutes? I don't think so, not even if she is playing the bereaved widow routine for all it's worth."

    "Is she?" Meredith asked, and then, "How well do you know her?"

    "Not well. She talked to me a little right after the second news clip"—he grimaced—"because she was trying to track down everybody who'd known you because she thought Raji would want her to, or something. And since then she's been doing all these performance pieces about her grand grief."

    ''I'm sure she was really upset," Meredith said, out of an obscure sense of duty.

    "Of course she was! Everybody was, even people who'd never known him. But you and his parents—and his coworkers at the lab, for that matter—lost a hell of a lot more than she did, and she's become obsessive about it. Either that or she's faking being obsessive about it, which is worse. Faking being obsessive for credit, since I gather that all of her work has been about AI one way or the other."

    "Well, to be fair, I think she was obsessed with AI before she met Raji. I think that's what drew them together." Meredith wondered if Zephyr had a damaged caudate nucleus.

    "Maybe. But you'd think she was the only person who'd been traumatized, or that everybody else had appointed her to act out their own trauma, like she's some kind of mourner laureate. Personally, I think it's obscene."

    "That's what artists do," Meredith said wearily. "They mirror cultural obsessions. She's doing her job, that's all."

    "I wouldn't call her an artist."

    "Most people wouldn't call my mother an artist, either. We'll just have to wait and see what people say in fifty years, won't we?" She squinted out at the Bay, counting sails, and said, "I don't want to talk about Raji anymore."

    "I'm sorry."

    She noted that he was capable of apology, and filed the fact. "So what are your obsessions?"

    "Architecture, of course. Shelter. How people take a dream of comfort and turn it into a building, someplace they can live, someplace they'll be happy. Not that it ever works. You design your dream house, and then once you build it you realize that the roof leaks and there isn't enough closet space, and anyhow the shape of your dreams has changed, but you'll just have to settle for what you have, because you don't have the money to build another house and may not even have the money to remodel. Plus the taxes keep going up."

    "Utopia's a journey, not a destination," Meredith said, quoting her Psychology of Social Movements professor. "Well, I don't know. I like my parents' house. I can't think of any particular ways to improve it."

    "Other than scrubbing the parquet, of course. Tell me this; if you'd designed the house yourself, would parts of the floor plan look like something by Escher?"

    She shrugged. "Not if I were doing it from scratch, but it's fine the way it is, really. It's comfortable. It's safe. I don't feel any need to change it."

    "I don't buy that," he said, and took a pencil and a small sketchpad out of his pocket. "Change is life, Meredith. From scratch now: What does your dream house look like?"

    Fourteen

    IT was open and airy, composed of curves rather than corners. A staircase hugging one gently rounded wall of the vaulted living room led onto a balcony from which opened bedrooms, a bath, a study, all with skylights. On the ground floor, high arched doorways led to a manywindowod kitchen, a cozy library, a dining area from which one could look into the greenhouse and aviary. A lower level held a lap pool. The backyard featured a large garden, a compost heap, a sundial, and an outdoor contemplation area with a shrine to the Goddess. Solar panels covered the roof. The house had a rudimentary security and environmental system to monitor trespass, temperature, fire, and flood, but it wasn't weblinked. Housekeeping chores would be done by the human inhabitants, not by machines.

    In the three months that she and Kevin spent designing the house, Meredith learned many things. She learned that the angularity of her parents' house had oppressed her without her realizing it. She learned, all over again, how much she treasured the privacy she'd been denied in the Temple dorm. She learned how pleasant it was to spend time with someone who genuinely seemed to have no interest in her family, especially her father. Kevin was perfectly pleasant to Jack and Constance, and to Preston whenever he manifested on one of the monitors, but there was never any question that he wouldn't have had two words for any of them—except perhaps Theo, since he seemed fond of children—if it hadn't been for Merry.

    They, in turn, evinced remarkably little interest in Kevin; they never asked Meredith any questions about him, or about her feelings for him. Sometimes Merry suspected that both sides were playing a careful game designed to keep from spooking her. Raji had been dead less than a year, after all, and she still woke screaming from nightmares, still found herself humming "The Ones You Miss" when she felt overwhelmed. There were still times when waxing floors was the only way she could suppress images of Raji's death, and she hadn't yet gone back to school, because every square inch of campus still seemed overlaid with agony.

    And she, herself, wasn't sure how she felt about Kevin. He was a diversion, but often an irritant. After the insistence of his first visit, he had retreated into scholarly detachment, both about the work they were doing and, seemingly, about her. Sometimes she thought he spent time with her only for the pleasure he got from helping her design the house; he showed remarkably little interest in her feelings, although he could be considerate enough, and he had never even tried to touch her hand. She alternated between gratitude that he wasn't trying to get her into bed and annoyance that he gave no sign of finding her even remotely attractive.

    She wasn't sure if she found him attractive. Certainly there was nothing physically wrong with him, but he had never sparked desire in her. But then, her desire seemed to have died, a wellspring plugged at the source. She dreamed of Raji's death, but no longer of his embrace. She no longer even masturbated. She didn't know if her body would begin to respond again if Kevin or someone else coaxed it; she had tried to imagine such a scenario, as an intellectual exercise, and discovered that she could summon no emotional response to the images. The effort seemed simply irrelevant, like trying to picture seaweed on the surface of the moon.

    She did find herself wondering, in an academic way, if Kevin was sleeping with anyone. He never mentioned any lovers, past or present; occasionally he had to cancel one of their thrice-weekly meetings—as scheduled and formal as therapy appointments, which she supposed in a way they were—but he always cited work conflicts. But then, they met during the day. She had no idea what he did during the evenings, or on weekends.

    As they reached the end of the design project he began to nitpick, began to question her choices: Was the lap pool really oriented properly? Shouldn't it be rotated ninety degrees for proper feng shui? Maybe the living room stairs should wind around a longer portion of the wall? Wouldn't they be more elegant that way? Maybe—

    "No," Meredith said. "Come on, Kevin, those are my original choices you're suggesting, the ones you convinced me to reconsider. Why are you bringing them up again now?"

    They were sitting in a coffeehouse, a trendy one this time, in the Marina. Meredith was buying. She had become less shy about being seen with Kevin in public; for some reason, ScoopNet didn't seem to have picked up on her outings with him. For that matter, ScoopNet seemed to have forgotten about her entirely. They'd moved on to the latest hot topics.

    The monitor in the coffeehouse, perpetually Scoop-tuned but without sound, was showing a montage of drooling people in hospital gowns, followed by footage of the same drooling people being laboriously trained to use spoons and tie their shoelaces. Meredith knew what those images were about: the controversy over using brainwiping—deliberate infection with the strain of CV that caused amnesia—as a therapeutic approach for the criminal and mentally ill. Early experiments with willing volunteers had proven remarkably successful in reshaping personality, although the patients required long periods of intense retraining afterward. Critics compared the procedure to the barbaric twentieth-century practice of lobotomy; advocates pointed out that brainwiped patients could be, and had been, totally rehabilitated. The entire business seemed both gruesome and improbable to Meredith; only a handful of people had chosen the technique—people incarcerated for life, severe schizophrenics—and she doubted that much would come of it. It was too extreme, and would undoubtedly go the way of trephination and electroshock.

    She looked away from the monitor, which showed a burly man, with great effort, placing a round peg in a round hole. She'd rather have seen his image up there than her own or Kevin's, but she still wondered why ScoopNet had lost interest in her so totally and so suddenly. She suspected that someone-probably Constance—was paying dearly for ScoopNet's silence. "You're not answering my question," she told Kevin. "Come on, 'fess up. Why this haggling now?"

    "I'm a perfectionist," Kevin said. "It's an occupational hazard."

    "I could slap a diagnosis of excessive altruism on you," Meredith said lightly. That was another trend: the claim that those who consistently endangered their own welfare to help others were suffering from a psychiatric disorder. The subject had been getting airplay ever since a former Peace Corps volunteer, a psychologist who had watched her idealistic colleagues brave disease, malnutrition, guerrilla warfare, and racial violence, had published a paper questioning the line between benevolence and insanity. The derisive term "exalted" had been current for roughly a decade, but no one had suggested medicating it before. "I mean, you're not getting academic credit for all this work. Unless you plan to enter the design in a competition or something."

    Kevin stiffened, the green eyes unreadable above his latte. "I hadn't planned on anything like that. I certainly wouldn't send the plans anywhere without your permission. I just want to make sure you're sure about the details. Before I draw up final blueprints."

    "Sure, I'm sure. And they're only blueprints, anyway. They can always be changed." Kevin looked away with a faint grimace, and Meredith said impatiently, "You're trying to delay finishing this, aren't you? Why? We could have coffee together even if we weren't drawing a house, and it's not like you even seem to enjoy my company that much."

    "I do," he said, and stood up. "I do enjoy your company. Meredith, I have to go now."

    "Yeah, you've got that meeting with your adviser, I know. Bring me the blueprints, okay? We'll have coffee anyway."