Shelter (76 page)

    Meredith laughed, a short, unhappy sound. "That would have made me happier than anything in the world. I used to dream about it, dream about being able to hold him again, to watch him relearning how things worked, to teach him kindness .... "

    You needed retraining in that subject yourself, Roberta thought. "Yeah, I had dreams like that too."

    ''I'm sure you did," Meredith said with a sigh. "The happiest times I had with him were when he was a baby, learning the simple stuff. The basic stuff. Eating with a spoon, opening a door. I loved watching him learn those things. I'd have done anything to get that back. But it didn't work that way."

    "Not even for you," Roberta said. "Not even for Preston's daughter."

    "Not even for me," Meredith said steadily. "I never knew where he was, Roberta. I still don't know. I no longer believe that I have any hope of finding out."

    "I know. You said that before. So where were you? ScoopNet thinks you've been hanging out in the Caribbean for the past five years, drinking piña coladas and getting a tan. They've had Merry sightings at least every two weeks. You're the new Elvis."

    Meredith grimaced. "I know. I saw some of those stories. They were never right about anything. I was—a lot of places. Most of them were awful."

    "You don't want to talk about it," Roberta said.

    "No. Not yet. I've already told you more than most people know. Roberta, did anything I said change your mind at all? About anything?"

    "I don't know," Roberta said after a long pause. "I truly don't. I don't know what I would have done in your place. I hope I wouldn't have sacrificed so many other people to try to save Nicholas, but you were in a terrible position. I'm not sure how much I really appreciated that before." She remembered all the children she'd beaten up in grade school, the bullies she'd pummeled to try to protect the pale, wormlike child she hadn't liked any more than she liked anyone else. "Maybe we all do terrible things. Maybe what you did was more terrible because you had so much more power. Because of who you were. I don't know."

    Meredith looked away. "Thank you. That's generous of you."

    Anger flared in Roberta's gut. "That doesn't mean I'm absolving you of anything. "

    "No," Meredith said drily. "No more than you'd absolve yourself if you'd done what I've done. But I'm not absolving myself, either, Roberta."

    "All right." Suddenly Roberta felt as weary as she had during the storm, before the second tab hit. They'd been sitting here talking for hours, pausing only to stretch and use the phone. Roberta had checked in with Sergei; Meredith had repeatedly tried to call Kevin, whose line, blessedly, was still down. Roberta couldn't deal with giving Meredith the bad news, not tonight. "I'm tired. I'm going back upstairs now. You can sleep on my couch again, if you want to."

    "Thank you. Yes, I'll do that. Let me just try Kevin one more time, and then I'll come back upstairs." Meredith stood up and folded her chair.

    "It's late, Meredith. Why don't you just call him tomorrow?"

    "It's not that late. I just want to try one more time."

    Roberta shrugged. "Okay. I'll see you up there."

    She turned and left, and Meredith, glad to be alone for a moment, dialed Kevin's number and got the same out-of-service message. She couldn't remember if, in her delirium, she'd told Kevin exactly where she was. It seemed to her that he should have come here by now, should have done more to try to find her.

    She put the phone down and trudged back upstairs, wondering if Roberta, carrying her up the stairs during the storm, had been as tired as Meredith herself was now. Roberta's bedroom door was closed; Meredith heard the bedsprings creak. She had the rest of the apartment to herself, then.

    She stood in Roberta's living room, thinking about everything that had happened to her. She should sleep, she knew. That was why she was here, because she was past pride and Roberta's couch was dry and warm. If she wasn't going to sleep, she should go downstairs and start cleaning. But her mind was in that state of exhaustion transcending fatigue, and she knew that for hours now, she would neither sleep nor accomplish anything useful.

    Kevin would probably come tomorrow, when the streets were clearer. She wished she hadn't called him. She didn't think she was strong enough to see him yet, or to see his reaction at what she looked like. Unlike Roberta, he'd demand to know where she'd been and what she'd done to herself She wondered if he'd called Constance; surely not, or her mother would have swooped down on the building in a nanosecond, storm or no. Meredith had made Preston promise not to tell Constance she was back home. Not yet: not until Meredith felt up to seeing her. He must have kept his word.

    She knew what they'd say when she contacted them; she'd known for months, and dreaded having to hear it. How could you do this? You, so worried about your child, the child you've always loved despite his wrongdoing; you, so frantic because you don't know where he is. How could you inflict the same thing on your own family? How could you be so cruel?

    She hugged herself and moved silently to the window, staring out through darkness at the wreckage of the storm. She could only hope that joy at finding her again would neutralize some of Constance's anger, and maybe even some of Kevin's. She didn't blame him for divorcing her, but Constance couldn't divorce her, and wouldn't, even had it been possible. At least Constance had Theo; at least one child was solid, dependable, obedient.

    It occurred to her that she had been removed from her mother twice, taken someplace Constance couldn't reach: once by the CV and once by her self-imposed exile. These last five years had been an illness too, no less than the virus, a terrible, raging sickness; and like the virus, they had had to run their course. She knew that, but she still didn't know how she'd be able to answer the accusations Constance was sure to level at her. How could you do this? The real answer—that her need to punish herself had made her deaf and blind and dumb to the punishment she inflicted on others—made her want to go back into hiding. In her anger at her own cruelty, she'd become crueler still, and she hadn't even been able to see it.

    Not until she was slapped in the face with it. Shame flooded her; she rested her furrowed forehead against the cool glass of the window, wishing she could forget, wishing that the fever dream of the last five years would just go away. Mr. Clean rolled by, intent on some errand of sanitation, and she forced herself not to jump, forced herself to turn and look at him, this harmless metal box. If Sergei hadn't been listening, she'd have spoken. Your mother misses you, even though she knows you're safe.

    Mr. Clean turned toward her, even though she hadn't spoken—he must be responding to her movement—and waited for a command. She found herself smiling. The only obedient children were the ones you built. She knew that if she told him to go downstairs and clean Zephyr's flooded apartment, he'd actually try to do it, and wreck himself in the process. But it wasn't his job; it was hers, one she wouldn't be able to put off for much longer, and one she could no longer perform from the platform of lofty principles. What drove her now was necessity.

    * * *

    She had, indeed, gone to Switzerland for the bloodcleaning. She hadn't wanted to be safe anymore; it hadn't seemed fair or right to her that she should be safe in a world where Nicholas had been wiped, where Raji had been killed. AIs; Raji had been killed by AIs, the beings he'd loved. And Nicholas had fled to an AI when he had his breakdown. Rationally, she knew that there wasn't any connection, but the Veilasty horror had made that difficult to remember. She'd begun to feel as if AIs had taken away everyone she loved. Even so, she'd taken no joy in the Veilasty execution, which had filled her with an old, complicated grief. People killing monsters: it never worked. Monsters always came from your own head, and that was where you had to fix them. Raji had been killed by a competitive mind-set that couldn't have been programmed into those AIs if it hadn't existed in the programmers first. Nicholas had fled to the kindness of a man who hadn't been alive for decades, who survived somehow in a machine. Dirty work, clean work; machines did the work you gave them. Why couldn't people do their own work? That was what she'd asked in college. That's what she'd believed in, still wanted to believe in. But she no longer believed that there was any work she could do without tainting it. Maybe people couldn't touch anything without ruining it; maybe that was why they made machines, so there would be something else to blame. Had Nicholas's monsters really been his own, or had she programmed them into him somehow?

    The questions crowded her head, kept her from sleeping, often made her forget to eat. She didn't even have the energy to fight with Kevin; when she moved back into her mother's house, he didn't follow her. After Nicholas was wiped, she stayed in bed for a week, the shades drawn.

    She'd known as she boarded the private MacroCorp jet for Geneva that she was going there for a complete bloodchange, one that would leave the GPS cells behind. She'd forced herself to get out of bed for several weeks before she left, to eat and drink and try to be merry. She'd forced herself to say sensible things to the therapists her mother had hired, to pretend to take the antidepressants they gave her. Her parents, she knew, were still worried about her when she left, but they thought she was merely going for a vacation, to get away from the wreckage of her marriage, to get away from her horror at what had happened to Nicholas, to Raji.

    Meredith knew from the beginning that the trip was more than that, although she wasn't sure quite what. Bloodchange first, and then cosmetic surgery so she'd be less recognizable. She paid a tidy sum to have her old blood shipped off to Morocco, so that perhaps her parents would think she'd gone there too; instead, she flew to Australia for the cosmetic surgery. She knew the ruse wouldn't fool her parents for long, knew that the bloodchange had taken long enough that Preston, at least, must have had a fix on her position and had her under some kind of visual surveillance. He'd find a way to track her, if he wanted to. There wasn't much she could do about it.

    The bloodchange left her feeling sick for several weeks, a queasiness she imagined must be like morning sickness. She hated that part, but she found, to her surprise, that she liked the surgery, loved the utter anonymity of the face-change clinics, where for an appalling sum you could sit in front of a computer screen and choose a new nose, new cheekbones, new ears, and where that same day you would receive them, all at the hands of bots bearing powerful local anesthetics and tiny, precise lasers. She'd hated bots when she was in isolation as a child, because then she'd craved human contact; but now, when she had no wish whatsoever to deal with other people, when all she wanted to do was escape them, the humming white medibots soothed her. A few stabbing moments reminded her overwhelmingly of what had happened to Raji, but that was all right. She deserved to be frightened, because knowing her was what had exposed Raji to his own final terror. In an odd way, she wished that the bots frightened her more. And while healing even from laser surgery, often hurt, she discovered that the pain cut through her numbness and made her feel alive. Feeling alive hurt too, hurt more, but that was all right. She deserved to hurt. How could she not hurt, in the world that had killed Raji and wiped Nicholas?

    She left Sydney convinced that no one who'd known her in America would have recognized her. Her retinal scan and voiceprint were the same, of course, as immutable as gravity or her need for air, and her height also remained unchanged. But she was thin, thinner even than she'd been after the CV, utterly gaunt, and dark circles ringed her eyes, and the eyes themselves were a different shape, more slanted, and a different color, deep purple. Her lips were thicker, her nose shorter, her chin uncleft now, her cheeks flattened. Her hair was black and curly rather than white and straight, and she wore it short, almost shaven. She no longer had freckles.

    She had cleaned her blood in Switzerland; she had also laundered her money. With a fraction of her now untraceable funds, she purchased a new identity, a new name and passport. Had she been willing to spend more, she could have bought an entire life history, complete with forged medical records, consumer transactions, education and employment, but she'd come on this journey precisely to shed her past, and so she merely accepted the blank slate of her new name. When she left Sydney, she flew to London and began touring Europe.

    Looking for Nicholas. She just wanted to see him, just once; an hour would be enough, under the right circumstances. She just wanted to find out if he was all right, if he was coping, if he seemed happy. She knew there was no hope that he'd recognize her, and that was fine. It wouldn't matter ifhe knew her or not; she'd know him anywhere, even if he'd undergone cosmetic surgery as thorough as hers. If she could find him, perhaps she could begin to forgive herself Perhaps she could imagine a way to remain in the world.

    But she had to find him. She knew that brainwiped children, if placeable at all, were placed with families who looked like genetic matches, people who could have been the biological parents. Such children were also placed as far away from their original homes, or from any source of original disturbance, as possible. Usually they stayed in their home country, but given Nicholas's fair coloring and his unwanted fame in the United States, she suspected that he might have been relocated to Northern Europe or Canada. Those places, at any rate, had the best computer networks, and networks were the fastest way to find what she needed.

    In Amsterdam she hired a hacker to teach her his trade. He charged a great deal of money for the service; she didn't care. He wanted to do the work for her; she wouldn't let him, because she didn't want him to figure out who she was. He decided, near the end, that he wanted to sleep with her—this uninteresting child ten years her junior, with his adolescent hormones and his delusions of grandeur—and she rebuffed him entirely. She left the Netherlands. She knew as much as she needed to know: she didn't need the hackhead anymore. She wasn't particularly talented at the work, but she was as good as she had to be. She had worked very hard; some part of her knew that she was indeed in the grip of OCD now, at the mercy of her damaged caudate nucleus, but she welcomed the condition. It made the work she had to do to find Nicholas much easier.