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For a few days, nothing extraordinary happened, unless you count my handful of hallway encounters with Mr. Thorne. No, “encounters” has too many ill-fitting connotations. Mr. Thorne and I would pass each other in any one of the myriad hallways. He would never look at me until we were nearly shoulder to shoulder, and even then his distracted gaze would only graze me after I had greeted him with “Namaste, Mr. Thorne.”
Sometimes he would shake his head at my voice then drop a hurried nod at me. Other times he would frown, cutting his eyes my way then cutting them back to the path before him. On still other occasions, he would lower his head with what I would have called shyness had I imagined the man capable of timidity. I set little store by any of these expressions. For the surly faces, I recalled Mrs. Fairfacs's indication that such was her owner's usual manner during his brief visits to this place. And as for the perceived sheepishness, my life had taught me to recognize only warnings to fear in men's faces. I assumed that I was misreading him due to my own social ineptitude.
Each time I passed him he did look a little less stooped and wan. Finally, one afternoon while a reluctant Kirti and I were outside on a scavenger hunt for different local insect species, I heard that same eerie silence that had come over me right before I had found Mr. Thorne on that night.
“What is that?” I asked, shielding my eyes even as they were protected beneath the UV-blocking duppetta I'd draped over my face.
Kirti remained crouching, skeptically inspecting a centipede in the midmorning sun. Shielding her own eyes, she pointed at a sleek black bubble emerging from the far opposite end of Emhain Macha's. The bubble accelerated across the desert floor like an inverse shooting star.
“That's Thorne's Mesrour SR,” Kirti said, sounding dejected. “Thorne said the 'SR' stands for—” She scrunched up her face. “'Lilent Sunning.'“
“Oh,” I said, forcing a casual tone into my voice, to keep my correction from sounding like one. “So, 'SR' stands for 'silent running?'“
Kirti nodded. “Thorne says the Mesrour SR is the fastest motherfooker on two wheels.”
I could tell by her face, still wrinkled up in distaste at the centipede, that she did not know she'd said anything inappropriate. As I debated inwardly on how to enlighten her without giving her another tool for the extrusion of attention, that too-deep, all-pervading silence became palpably closer, then dopplered cleanly away. The Mesrour's brilliant hide was so black it looked silver, throwing sunlight from its reflection like a flurry of blades.
Kirti's eyes, drooping and sad, followed the Mesrour SR over a far outcropping and out of our sight. She sighed. “Will he come back soon?”
“I don't know,” I said. I heard disappointment in my own voice but could not imagine the source. I realized then that, since Mr. Thorne's arrival, even though we had interacted very little, I'd forgotten my earlier loneliness.
Trying to cheer both Kirti and myself, I brightened my voice. “Perhaps he went to get that present of yours that was delayed. Wouldn't that be nice?”
This guess was to prove right that evening. Near the end of dinner, Mrs. Fairfacs appeared and summoned us to the study on behalf of Mr. Thorne. With presents on the mind, Kirti could not have run faster if her ankles had been on fire. In her haste she knocked over her remaining milk.
I called ineffectually after her, waited, then surrendered and called for the housekeeper. “Mrs. Fairfacs, could you please have some towels sent here?” I asked.
“Do you mean rags, dear?”
Data entry strikes again. “Either would be fine,” I said. “I just need something to clean this up.”
“Oh, there's no need for that, dear. I've already summoned the mops. Besides, Mr. Thorne said you were to accompany Kirti this evening.”
“Did he?” An order again, not an invitation. On my way to the study, the mop-bots and I crossed paths.
I did not have time to greet Mr. Thorne with a “Namaste, Master-ji,” because I myself was too busy being greeted. No sooner had I stepped into the room than Chuck rushed over to me and began nuzzling my hand, panting with joy as if we were long-lost littermates. I cautiously scratched between his ears. Chuck pushed his head further into my hand.
I looked up. Mr. Thorne was lounging sideways on the couch again. Gone was the book with which he'd previously shielded himself. Again he was barefooted. The fabric of his shirt strained against his biceps. His hand held a glass tumbler filled with a clear liquid I would have liked to think was water, but the gloss in Mr. Thorne's eyes indicated otherwise.
A flurry of ripping sounds distracted my attention. On the chair behind which she had hidden at our last session with her guardian, Kirti sat, tearing into a large box wrapped in plain white packing paper, a shipping barcode label seared into its side. She tossed its epidermis floorward to Chuck's great joy. Inside was another box, and inside that was something that made Kirti exclaim, “Shavaa!” like a dancer at a bhangara party.
Just as quickly she was on her feet, arms wrapped around and barely meeting halfway at the middle of the box, running for her own room, shouting, “Deepali! Deepali!”
Mr. Thorne was shaking his head at her disappearance. “Not a word of thanks. Little ingrate.”
I bowed my head at him to take my leave. “I should go with her—”
“No,” he said, gesturing to the chair I had taken last time. “Sit. Stay. Speak.”
I took the chair, nevertheless pursing my lips before asking, “Are you talking to me, sir, or to Chuck?”
Mr. Thorne chuckled then looked to the ceiling, his lids half-closing—the look of a man about to quote something he'd not read in a long time. “'Courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of a man without his vices,'“ he said. He opened his eyes and used them to make a subtle gesture towards Chuck. “Lord Byron on the Newfoundland.”
“It sounds like Chuck is a member of a noble—”
“Forgive me,” he said, abruptly opening his eyes and speaking before I could finish my sentence. “I get so sick of talking to machines that I drop all the 'please' and 'thank you' and 'that will be all' pleasantry crap that humans don't need but some—like you, for instance—insist on. So, Miss Jane, please sit and please stay and please speak, thank you?”
Having no reason to do otherwise, I did take a seat on the same chair I'd used during my last visit with Mr. Thorne. It would be good to listen to someone other than Kirti for a change. “Speaking of 'sick,' sir—”
“Sick? Who's sick?”
“You said that you were sick of speaking to machines, sir, and it reminded me to ask you how you are feeling?”
“Feeling?” He squinted as if the word were foreign.
“Since your re-keying, sir.”
“Oh. That.” He nodded, retraining his eyes on his glass. “I've been down that road so many times now I just take the sickness for granted.”
“You've been re-keyed more than once?” I asked, examining his rugged face and robust frame for signs of recurring illness. I found none, but the resigned look stirred my pity. “I'm sorry to hear you have faced so many illnesses, sir.”
He smiled at my charity then looked into the swirling depths of his glass. The light was amber-warm on his stubbled cheeks. “Just different relapses of the same sickness, really.”
“Didn't the previous re-keyings take, sir?” I was surprised at how easy it was to slide into conversation with this man. Mr. Thorne seemed to find me equally easy to talk to, or at least alcohol made him think so.
“I suffer from a recurrent condition,” he admitted, shifting his eyes back to his glass, which he rested against his knee.
“I'm sorry to hear that, sir.”
“So am I.” A droll smile tweaked the corners of his carbon compound of a mouth. “It's called stupidity. Inflicts countless victims, stupidity does. I'm repeatedly stupid enough to give my latest infatuation my DNA sig, then when she uses me up like a tissue, I have to be re-keyed to keep her from spending the rest of the money attached to my bad name. I was hoping this recent trip to the doctor's would cure me for good.”
He refocused his eyes, training them on me like double crosshairs. “What do you think, JaneE? Am I healed?”
The way he said my name, Jane-E, all run together so that it sounded like “Janie,” disarmed me. No one had ever turned my name into the diminutive before. I could not tell if he were taunting or being kind. Before I could think further, I heard myself react with defense. “I recently pulled your butt from a doggie door, sir. Perhaps I'm not a fair judge.”
His black-gold eyes crinkled at the edges and he laughed. At me? At himself? I could not tell. “You're about as subtle as a kick to the crotch, aren't you?”
As he continued to chuckle, I began to regret my snap. I could practically hear the disapproving look Bhenji Nealingson would have given me had she been present. “I'm sorry, sir. That was completely inappropriate. I should not have—”
“Called me stupid?” he said, smiling still. “Why lie? Didn't you say—wait, let me see if I get this right. 'Lying hurts the liar more than the lied-to.'“
“Still, my response was entirely out of place.”
“So, you apologize for speaking your mind but don't retract the statement?” He raised his eyebrows. My discomfort was making him smile. “And how should you have responded?”
“I—I should have responded according to the rules of etiquette, sir,” I said, embarrassed, looking down at my hands folded in my lap.
“Yes, but etiquette makes us lie sometimes, and lying does not come naturally to you. To lie would pain you. I can see it in your eyes, how they open so wide and look so directly. I envy you. I lost my wide eyes when I was not much younger than yourself.”
A troubled frown shadowed his firm features for the briefest of moments, then he turned to me once more, a softer, more curious look in his eyes.
“You're an interesting study, Miss Jane,” he said, drawing out the “s” in “Miss,” which told me that he used the term mockingly. “You walk the etiquette tightrope like there's no net and you're afraid to fall off, when etiquette's just another set of well-meaning rules that exist to be broken.”
I bit my lip and thought, making him my own study. This indoor lighting did not reveal his angularity to be any more aesthetically pleasing than moonlight did at our first meeting. The way he stood, his fuel-log shoulders set back in such a way that his chest seemed impossibly broad, spoke of a self-deprecating confidence that could not be shaken by my verbal blunderings. Beyond the language spoken by his silhouette, the way he spoke of his “illness” implied in him an understanding of his own failings that bordered on arrogance.
“One minute she speaks her mind, the next she's a Sphinx,” he said, smirking again. “What rules are working on that brain of yours now?”
“Some rules exist for a reason, sir. I fail to see how breaking rules merely for the sake of breaking them is any more intelligent than following them blindly.”
He snorted in derision. “Hmnh. And what if—what if disobedience is the only escape from dangerous circumstances?”
“While there may be reason for the breach,” I declared, “there is no excuse.”
His troubled frown returned and settled in. He paused to down half of the remaining contents of his drink. Wincing at the aftereffects, he said, “That is the voice of inexperienced, idealistic youth. Again I envy you.”
He stood and slowly but steadily began pacing the perimeter of the room, scanning the bookcases as he went. “I envy you so much that I've come back here to become more like you—more like the self I was before this world burnt me and the blisters scarred over. Not that there is anything inherently wrong in a scar. Scars are the body's armor, aren't they?”
“They are,” I said, unsure as to whether or not he would hear me. He leaned on one of the bookcases, right elbow on a shelf, fist rolled with intense distraction. He rested his mouth against his fisted thumb, and his eyes glazed over in thought. His left arm hung at his side, fingers clamped around the lip of the glass.
“They are,” I repeated, “but scars feel nothing, sir. They dull the senses.”
His eyebrows raised and he closed his eyes on a sigh. Reopening his lids, he threw a glance at me from the corner of his eye before returning his gaze to his books. Finally, taking his elbow from the shelf and recommencing his circuit of the room, he said, “The human body is a wise thing. Skin does not scar without good reason, like those rules you love so much. To everything there is a purpose. Wouldn't you agree?”
“Academically,” I ventured.
“But?”
“But perhaps there would be no scar if the skin's owner paid more attention to the rules, avoiding such wounds.”
“Rules again,” he said on a low, derisive laugh. “What are those rules? You think you know them? You with your extensive social experience? I followed your advice, you know.”
“Advice, sir?”
“Suggestion. To read your resume.”
I said nothing, waiting for him to go on.
“Silent but still wide-eyed,” he said. It wasn't until he looked away that I realized I must have been staring. “So you have nothing to say about a life of slavery followed by solitary confinement?”
I was speechless, but I refused to avert my eyes from his challenge. Besides, what did he want me to say?
“No anger?” he prompted. He took another sip from his glass, wincing again. “No rage, no fury?”
I thought of how I had hurled myself at Clint VanDeer in a whirlwind of claws and kicks. “I tried anger, rage and fury a long time ago, sir.”
“And?”
A memory of Aidann stole over me, and I lowered my head with reverence. “I found they help no one, least of all me.”
He drank again, leaving in the glass only a coating that reflected the light, making the glass itself seem luminous. “So. Those are the rules. If I could have kept myself as safe from betrayal as you have been—” He held his free hand out to the light, braced by the alcohol, catching the room's glow as a bucket catches water. “—I could have avoided the scars that make me who I am?”
With the first part of his sentence, my spine had stiffened like setting ice. I tried to melt the frown hardening on my face. Apparently I was unsuccessful.
“There you go again, your mouth saying nothing but your face screaming,” said Mr. Thorne. He studied me closely. “What are you thinking, Miss Jane?”
Was that concern in his voice? I'd heard the tone so little in my life I couldn't have recognized it to save my soul. Besides, I did not know what to make of this switch from accusation to care.
“I'm thinking that if I told you my thoughts, you would fire me. Sir.”
I watched the smallest, most precise muscles around his mouth work into a grin. “Funny. You weren't worried about being fired last time we talked. Are you thinking that it's against the rules for an employee to talk back to her employer? Afraid of falling off of that tightrope?”
I sighed at his persistence. “I'm thinking that it's rather presumptuous of you, sir, to say that I've never known betrayal.”
He tilted his head at me in a nod of concession. “Will you at least agree that you are more innocent than I am?”
I'd never thought of myself as innocent, perhaps because I'd never been able to contrast myself with anyone who was so wholly the antithesis. The best thing I could think to say was, “Does one need to smell garbage to know one does not want to roll around in it?”
“Oh! So that's what I need to do? Stop surrounding myself with garbage? Stop tending garbage like a garden? Can people be garbage, Jane?”
I thought of Aidann and her escape from her mother's world. “We are what we choose to be.”
Thorne scowled, his eyes brilliant in contrast to his burnt ember brows. “Now you're being presumptuous. More often than not we are what our circumstances force us to be. We are born in one place. Outside forces push us along, like a baby abandoned, floating down river in a basket.”
It was not difficult to imagine how audiences worldwide might gather to hear this man speak. His voice like his appearance was powerful and exact; not artful with the contrived magic of a spell, but harsh and true, immediate and stark, like the beauty of the desert above us.
“The river pushes us,” he said, “and then the waves, the storms. Rocks kick at us, flip us over.”
As he spoke, I could see behind my lids, drifting closed, the trickle of water Aidann had poured down the well wall when explaining to me the difference between water and wind.
“And just when we're about to drown, we start to kick back, to fight the current. But by then...”
Fading like the tail of a fireball across an empty black sky, his words sank into the atmosphere. Something of what he had said had stirred empathy within me as well as doubt. I myself was an abandoned child, dashed about by the waves. To have someone else, even from the distance created by age and wealth, so communicate the experience of my life rendered me unable to speak for the clot in my throat. But still words riled behind that clot, begging for release.
He lifted the glass to his lips, thought better of it, and left it on the bookshelf, as unfinished as his sentence.
His voice pitched low, he said, “All my life, I've been like water, trying to find its level. Every time I look to a person and think, 'She's my level,' it never turns out. I just roll along. I've finally realized that all this time I've been looking to the wrong people. That's my problem. I need to stop with the garbage and start over. If I'm going to find a better level, I need to find a clearer river.”
I sensed my employer was speaking of making a decision that was little changed from those that had previously brought him to his current state of unhappiness. My concern for his safety loosened the lump in my throat.
I spoke up. “Maybe you shouldn't be looking to people at all, sir, to be your river.”
His scowl deepened. His voice crackled like papers burning in a fire. “What are you talking about?”
“A friend of mine—” I stopped, swallowed, gained my bearings. “A friend told me that people fail us, even the ones who are supposed to love us.”
Looking dead ahead of him, he nodded absently as if I were not in the room. His face smoothed over into marble passivity, the corners of his eyes tensing only slightly, ruefully. He shook his head again. “Smart friend. I like her already.”
“I have a feeling she would've liked you, too, sir.”
Then in a swift motion he took up the cup again and downed the last of his drink. “Invite her for a visit some time.”
“I would, sir, if she weren't dead.”
“Jaysis,” he said, turning to me with an incredulous gaze. “You could have said that from the start.”
His accent had slipped, piquing my interests, fatigued so far by this conversation and looking for diversion. Studying him, I tried to re-analyze his speech for something that would reveal a piece of his still elusive history, but I came up with nothing.
“Staring at me, eh?” Mr. Thorne pressed his mouth into a broad horizontal line. “What, you think I'm hot or something?”
I heard myself exclaim. “No, sir!”
He half-laughed, half-winced. “Damn. You don't mess about, do you? At least I know where I stand. Which I like.”
“Sir, wait, I didn't mean—”
“You didn't mean?” he parroted with mock gravity. “Oh, so what did you mean? Let's see. You've called me stupid. You've called me arse-ugly. Now you're thinking...” He pressed his index finger to his clefted chin in a parody of thoughtfulness. “...that I'm amoral? That I have halitosis? That I'm a fashion emergency and need to subscribe to a personal dressing service?”
How could one man be so moody? From distant and nearly growling one second to deliberately goofy the next. And, God help me, I was smiling. I lowered my eyes, even ducked my head.
“There,” he said, taking his finger from his chin and pointing it at me. “You're allowed to laugh, you know,” he said, bending down so he could get a better look at my reddening face. He continued. “Laugh, giggle, cry even. I want you to know you can go on being honest with me.”
Self-defense and suspicion returned, stilling my laughter. I just barely raised my eyes. “Why?”
“Because.” Leaving the empty glass on the bookshelf, he sauntered back towards his earlier seat. “Because, I like this sense that I can be honest with you. Besides, when you laugh, you finally take those Sumerian anime eyes of yours off of me and train them somewhere else.”
“My what eyes?”
“Sumerian eyes. Anime eyes,” he said. Then he placed his thumbs beneath his eyes, his forefingers above them, and pried them apart until the lids were pulled back so far that his eyes looked like two uncooked, hazel-yolked eggs sliding around the bottoms of two flesh woks. I clamped back another laugh.
Mr. Thorne ducked to see my expression. “Janee,” he said, keeping his gaze at me, thoughtful and direct, “have you ever seen the color of the sky right before a tornado hits?”
“Sort of. I used to watch DisasterNet when I was a little girl.”
“That was—what? Last week?” His smirk came and went as he waxed serious. “Once. Was at this bar out in Nebraska. Just before dusk fell, the sky went gray-green, and the manager ushered us all into the basement. It stank—mildew and all the dorfies crammed in there with us. But before we got downstairs I got a good look at that sky. Filled me with wonder.”
Again he examined me, nodding. “Your eyes are just the color that sky was.”
His voice and gaze made me look away again. Why was I blushing? “I really don't know what color my own eyes are, sir,” I heard myself admit. “I'm colorblind.”
His manner changed again, like an infected terminal blinking from one netsite to another. “Colorblind?” he barked. “In this day and age? You're kidding me.”
“Hardly, sir.”
I'd finally put him at a loss. He scowled in thought before arriving at what he thought was the solution. “Get re-keyed.”
“You haven't given me enough sick-days for a job like that, much less do I have enough money to pay for the job itself.”
“Doesn't your INGO membership provide your health insurance?”
“I can't afford to join any, and I have no parents from whom I could have inherited membership.”
“Any prospects of marrying someone in an INGO?”
“Didn't you say you'd read my resume, sir?”
He looked like he was about to say something, even leaned forward and gestured toward me with an open hand, but his gesture was interrupted by the impending footfalls of the smallest feet in the house. He pulled his hand back and folded his arms in front of his chest, forming a knot like one might have seen on ropes securing a wild bull to its stake.
He rolled his eyes as Kirti's approach grew louder. “Watch, Janee,” he said, pitching his voice to a wry hush. “I'm about to be reminded of my chronic condition.”
Not another second passed before Kirti barreled into the room like a well-heeled missile. She wore a new dress of a cut that I could not identify readily with any region of the world, worked in a fabric I could not have woven on a Naomi loom. Lavender and gold threads intertwined into iridescence, and about the waist was a “belt” of tiny silver, double-sided mirrors, each less than one-quarter the size of my pinky fingernail. The mirrors rotated on their axes, some north-to-south, some east-to-west. The same effect twirled around her small, graceful wrists and danced at the hem around her ankles. I did admire the crafting, but the overall effect was gaudy.
Kirti stopped and thrust her hands, cupped together, out at Mr. Thorne. In Punjabi she cried, “Where is the chain for this charm?”
Thorne raised his eyebrow at her with the coldest expression. I could not comprehend why at first, but then I noticed that his ears were unadorned. He could not understand a word she was saying.
“She wants to know where the chain is for that charm in her hands,” I translated.
His gaze angled away from her, and his lip curled with disgust. “Just like her mother. No gift is ever good enough,” he muttered, his words ammonia-bitter. “Sometimes I don't know why I keep her.”
The warm feeling I'd been engendering towards him iced over. I thought, “It's not her fault. She's only as she's learned to be.” I kept my words to myself, however, and examined the silver charm gleaming in my student's hands. Other than the metallic sparkle, it was rather unadorned, devoid of gems or filigree work. In fact, it was unevenly shaped, and a little larger than fashionable for neck jewelry. It looked like an overgrown three-dimensional, frozen-in-time molecule model with notched crustings globbed on where electrons might have kept their orbits.
Shaking his head, Mr. Thorne rumbled, “It's not a charm, girl. It's an SAB.”
Kirti just looked from the “charm” back to her guardian, clearly as uncomprehending as I was.
“An SAB—self-assembling bicycle.” Thorne hunkered down to Kirti's level and pinched the gift out of her hands. He motioned for us to back away from it and placed it on the lush pile of the carpet.
“SAB, open, please,” he said. Then he pulled himself out of its way.
The knotty blob blossomed. The structures within unfolded themselves with a sound as free and easy as the sigh of a sleeping baby. Within three seconds, it had shaped itself into two wheels joined together by a network of bars and gears, propped up by a tight coil of a kickstand at the side. Its translucent seat glistened with iridescent depth.
I hadn't noticed that I had pressed my hand to my collarbone in surprise. Kirti, however, was unimpressed. “What do I do with it?” she asked.
“What do you mean, 'what do I do with it'?” Thorne barked. “It's a bike! You ride it!”
Her eyes widened in disdain. “Like a poor person?”
Thorne flinched, his considerable pride clearly marred at this reaction. “Like a normal kid with a normal childhood!”
Then Kirti got a wicked look in her eyes. Her lower lip took its usual pout. “But I'm sooo busy with lessons.”
Mr. Thorne lifted his massive hand to his forehead, latched the thumb of his other hand into the pocket of his shorts, then turned his back to us. Stopping just before the couch he said, “I bought Kirti's mother a lot of gifts, and all of them went badly used. Pearls, swine, you know how it goes.”
At first I thought he was talking to himself, but then he turned three-quarters and directed himself at me. “In the interests of creating good karma against all the bad I've generated—with most of the bad here in Emhain Macha—I'm raising that kid to keep her from becoming like her mother was. This gift,” he said, pointing to the SAB, “won't be wasted.”
He turned to face me fully, and I found myself neither nervous nor forcing defensiveness. I looked back at Mr. Thorne as easily as I would have looked in a mirror. Still, when he kept staring at me so fixedly, so silently, I had to speak. “Sir?”
He shook himself and looked away. “Right. Kirti,” he declared with forced cheer, “you have the day off tomorrow. And you're not to spend that time in your terminal or moping around indoors because I won't let you use your terminal.”
Kirti's elation quickly dissipated.
“No, you're going to ride your bike outside tomorrow.”
Kirti considered this. “No lessons?”
“That's what 'day off' means,” he said very slowly and loudly, as if that would make her understand better. “And that means 'day off' for Miss Jane, too.”
