Shelter (54 page)

    Hoo, boy. Roberta fought not to roll her eyes, and said only, "Well, they have to be good neighbors too, if they live here." She wasn't up for a religious argument, not tonight. She had enough on her hands with Doe. "When's your next performance?"

    Zephyr brightened, as she always did whenever Roberta appealed to her artistic ego, and gave Roberta two complimentary passes. It was a ritual, the accepted end to the hush-the-bot conversations, even though Doe and Roberta had never attended one of Zephyr's performances and didn't intend to. Zephyr gave Roberta the two passes, and Roberta accepted them with polite thanks before trudging back upstairs, where the passes inevitably wound up as notepaper for telephone messages or grocery lists. But this time, after Zephyr handed over the passes, she said, "Did you ever apply for that job?"

    "I did," Roberta said; instantly wary. Was Zephyr talking to Preston? Well, obviously not, or she'd have known that Roberta had the job. "Thanks for the tip. I, ah, I got it, even. I'm enjoying it."

    "That's great," Zephyr said, beaming. "Congratulations, I'm really happy for you. So what's the AI like?"

    "Um," Roberta said, "well, he's very nice, very good with the kids, you know. He's everything he's supposed to be. I don't know. I haven't known a lot of AIs."

    "You could have if you'd wanted to," Zephyr said cheerfully, waving her hand at the various bots scattered around her apartment. "You've just never been interested."

    "Ummm," said Roberta. Bots with full-fledged AI programming: now there was a waste of software. "Well, I suppose you're right. But Fred's very nice. Listen, Zephyr, I need to get back upstairs."

    "Yes, yes," Zephyr said. Her grin didn't look entirely friendly. "Go take care of your invalid. Oh, wait—here, this should cheer her up." She turned, snapped her fingers, and whistled a complicated series of notes, whereupon a small bronze bot appeared from the bedroom, scuttling along holding a drooping white rose and a slightly withered carnation. "Tell her they're from us. Tell her we all hope she feels better."

    "Ummm," Roberta said. "Thank you." She bent down to take the flowers, but the bot raced past her, up the stairs. Roberta turned and followed, wondering if the bot was part of the gift or just the flower bearer. Doe was not going to be amused.

    Doe, in fact, was repelled. "Ugh," she said, drawing her legs up onto the couch as the bot approached. "Make it go away. Why did you let it in here?"

    "It ran in the door before I could stop it, Doe." The bot had stopped in front of Doe and was waiting, clutching its wilted bouquet. "If you take the flowers, I think it will leave. I hope so, anyway."

    "Couldn't you have kicked it away from the door?"

    "No," Roberta said. "That would be like kicking somebody's cat, or somebody's kid, at least as far as Zephyr's concerned. Doe, she's trying to be nice. The flowers are a present."

    "They're half dead."

    "I know." Roberta was developing a migraine of her own, a real one. "Just take them, okay?"

    "I don't want them. Get that thing out of here!" Doe's voice had risen to a dangerous whine; Roberta, resigned, bent and gently tugged the drooping flowers away from the bot. She wondered if it knew that its gift, Zephyr's gift, was being rejected. Maybe it carried a tiny camera, and all of this was being taped?

    "Thank you for the flowers," she said, feeling foolish, and the bot turned and scuttled away again, pausing at the door for her to open it. Then it was gone, and she and Doe were alone again.

    "Bitch," Doe said. Roberta didn't know if the word was aimed at her, or at Zephyr, or at both of them. When Doe was in this kind of mood, it hardly mattered.

    ''I'm going to bed," Roberta said. "Enjoy your concert." But as she turned to walk into the bedroom, the TV clicked off, and she heard Doe pad in behind her. "You feeling better now, Doe?"

    ''I'm okay. Just tired."

    "Okay." Roberta weighed options and risks, and finally decided it would be better to clear the air now, or try to, than wait until tomorrow, when Doe would probably deny that anything had even happened. "So, ah, what was that about at the restaurant?" Afraid to seem too confrontational, she kept her voice carefully casual, and resisted the urge to turn to look at Doe directly.

    "What was what about at the restaurant?"

    "That dig at my job history in front of the whole family." It was harder to keep her voice casual now. "Was that really necessary?"

    "Was your dig at my dieting in front of the whole family really necessary?"

    Touche, Roberta thought grimly, and then, but yours was first. She took a cautious step closer to Doe, and finally said what she was really thinking. "Doe, I'm not willing to be miserable just because you find it comforting and familiar." There wasn't any answer. Roberta took a deep breath and went on. "We need to work on this, okay? I love you. I know you love me." I think. I hope. "But I need you to want the best for me. I need you to be happy that I'm happy. Do you understand?"

    Doe gave the barest shrug. Roberta, standing there, realized with a sudden chill that Doe was maintaining the balance of unhappiness. Doe had always been comforting and supportive when Roberta was working with the brainwipe clients, and before that when she was slinging burgers and hanging bad art and opening book cartons, but now that Roberta liked her job, Doe seemed determined to pick fights. She was making home the bad place, the unpleasant place: all so Roberta would stay the same, all so she wouldn't become some cheerful stranger. All so she'd stay off balance and dependent.

    I'm the strong one, Roberta thought. I always have been.

    She wondered if Doe consciously knew what she was doing. She didn't know if it mattered. She felt hopelessness descending on her like lead, and knew in some small portion of her brain that Doe had gotten exactly what she wanted.

    * * *

    Monday morning, Meredith Walford-Lindgren and her husband came to KinderkAIr. Roberta hadn't known that they were going to be there until the executive director showed up—she came only when parents visited—and told Roberta the news in a breathy stage whisper. She was clearly thrilled by their celebrity guests, and Roberta had to pretend to be too.

    So Meredith was coming: famous, CALM-activist, ecofreak Merry, with her CV-bleached hair and her coltish limbs and her artsy husband. As a child, Roberta had daydreamed about having Merry as a real sister, but of course it never would have happened. Preston had befriended Roberta in the first place only because Meredith had rejected him.

    And now Preston had befriended her again, but denied it. What did that mean?

    Roberta, jumpy, found herself scrutinizing Meredith for signs of recognition. Did Meredith even know who she was? Did Meredith know they'd been in the hospital together? If so, she didn't let on, and Roberta wasn't about to say anything. Hi. I'm the CV kid who didn't become famous. Roberta's case had only warranted a few mentions in newspapers, which dutifully withheld her name but made much of her adjustment problems. Yeah, you'd have adjustment problems too, if you were left with nobody. She and Meredith had nothing in common but Preston, and by all accounts, Meredith still wasn't close to her father, or fond of anything to do with the family business. Her reaction to Fred confirmed the gossip: Doesn't it bother you, being watched by a machine all day? She obviously loathed the idea of consigning her precious, pampered child to an AI. Why was she even here?

    Rationally, Roberta knew she had handled the situation well, pointing out how skillfully Fred finessed the Steven-Cindy Lego crisis. But she was still hugely relieved when Meredith and Kevin left, and she fully expected to hate their kid.

    She didn't. His first day at school, as she watched him sitting at a table by himself, neatly building a tower out of blocks, she immediately felt drawn to him. Nicholas had lost both of his parents to CV and then acquired new parents, rich and beautiful parents who loved him. He really was part of Preston's family. He'd gotten everything Roberta had thought she wanted. Then why did he act so sad, and why did he remind her so eerily of the people she'd fled, the brainwipe clients?

    She told herself she was exaggerating, romanticizing. She told herself she'd been watching too much ScoopNet, that she was actively seeking some tragedy at work as a way of stabilizing her relationship with Doe. And yet she wasn't the only person who seemed to think Nicholas was odd; the other children shunned him, never picking him for games, never asking him to share their snacks or toys or chatter.

    One afternoon, a week or two after Nick had joined KinderkAIr, Roberta asked Zillinth, the kindest and most placid of the children, "Why don't you go sit with Nicholas? He's all by himself."

    Zillinth, ordinarily an avatar of sweetness, wrinkled her nose. "He never talks to me. He never talks to anybody but you and Fred."

    It was true. Nicholas loved Fred and Roberta. He tagged along at Roberta's side whenever he could. To her frequent, gentle remonstrances that he needed to spend more time with the other kids, he'd say, "Okay," and go sit at a table with the others. But even when he sat with them, he kept apart somehow. He didn't talk to the other kids. He talked to Fred.

    He talked to Roberta too, but he liked Fred better. A few days after that conversation with Zillinth, after they'd watched a show about the twentieth-century television star who'd inspired Fred's programming, Roberta asked all the children to talk about why they liked their own Fred, KinderkAIr's Fred.

    Most of them had entirely predictable, age-appropriate answers. "Be- cause he's nice," said Zillinth.

    "Because he does fun stuff," Benjamin said. "Because he knows a lot," said Cindy.

    Steven pulled a booger out of his nose and said, "Because he never gets mad at me."

    Nicholas answered last. After pondering the question as gravely as if he were being asked to concoct a unified field theory, he said, "I love Fred because he's real. Nobody can see him, but he talks. And it's okay to hear him talk and it's okay to talk back to him, because everyone knows he's real. I don't have to keep him a secret."

    Steven became distracted halfway through this speech—Steven became distracted during anything that didn't involve food or mayhem—and began pulling Cindy's hair. Roberta sorted out that fray only to find that Benjamin had wet his pants; his mother hadn't packed any extra clothing for him, even though he wasn't reliably toilet trained yet, so Roberta had to scrounge some up from the back room while Fred kept the kids occupied with a story, and then when she emerged with the clean pants the phone rang—Zillinth's mother calling to say she'd be late—and on it went, until Nicholas's speech was quite lost under the weight of the rest of the day.

    Fred lost nothing, though. She asked him to replay the incident for her after the kids had left, and he did. "That's interesting," she said, careful not to use words like weird or creepy because anything she said to Fred went into his memory and became part of KinderkAIr's official record, subject to official scrutiny. The last thing she needed was to invoke the wrath of the Walfords, either virtual or embodied. She had to ask about Nicholas's strange speech to cover her ass, so she wouldn't be accused later of ignoring any odd incidents. If Fred dismissed it, so could she. If Fred was concerned, she'd have grounds to contact the parents, and she'd be able to blame the AI rather than facing the accusation of nosiness herself. AIs were handy that way; they let people off the hook. "Fred, what do you think Nicholas meant by all that?"

    "I suspect," Fred said in his gentle, soothing voice, "that Nicholas has an extremely active fantasy life, and that he's been criticized for it at home. Perhaps he's relieved to have an invisible friend everyone knows about."

    "That makes sense," Roberta said, but Nicholas's odd statement about secrets still nagged at her. She wondered if he knew that nothing he said here was a secret, that it was all recorded. Choosing her own words very carefully, she said, "That was a long speech for him, what he said today. At least, it was a long speech for him to make to the other children, and even to me. He talks to you more than to the rest of us."

    "Yes," Fred said. "That's true, Roberta. It makes me very happy that Nicholas trusts me so much."

    Roberta sighed. This wasn't going anywhere. Fred, the machine, could talk about his feelings—that was his job—but Nicholas, the child, couldn't. Roberta had noticed, and knew Fred had too, that Nick never directly answered Fred's daily greeting: "Good morning, Nicholas! And how are you today?" Instead of saying how he was, he'd tell Fred what he'd had for breakfast, or what he'd seen on the way to school. "I ate pancakes, Fred." "There was a rainbow." "We saw a dead bird under a bush."

    Fred talked about his feelings partly because he was an expert system designed to get children to talk about theirs, but Nicholas seemed equally expert at evading such conversation. If Fred said, "When I see a butterfly, I wish I could fly too," Nicholas would answer that the butterfly had been yellow. If Fred said, "Rainbows make me happy because they're so beautiful," Nicholas would answer that you couldn't hold a rainbow because it was made out of clouds. If Fred said, "It makes me sad when animals die," Nicholas would say that Mommy said animals don't hurt when they're dead. Nicholas was a master of avoidance.

    Roberta tried to talk to Doe about it; part of her hoped that if she sounded less satisfied in her job, if she fretted about Nicholas to her partner, Dorothea would relax and feel needed again. But Doe never seemed very interested, and finally—the evening Roberta tried to talk about Nick's odd reaction to the class discussion—Doe said, "Why are you talking about this? Doesn't it violate student confidentiality or something?"

    "What? Doe, I'm telling you about my day! It never bothered you when I talked about the brainwipe clients, did it?"

    "You didn't talk about them this much," Doe said. Roberta supposed that was true; after a while, there hadn't been much to say. "But then, they weren't famous, were they?"