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After more than an hour of flying over crackled desert, my sky taxi seemed to be coming in for a landing, cutting small circles like a fiberglass vulture. As we approached solid ground, I looked out of the window at the vast, barren landscape. I saw nothing that could be classified as an abode. I pursed my lips with worry.
As the taxi alighted upon a rocky perch, the pilot, a decrepit walnut of a man whose nametag read “John,” said, “These are the geeps coordinates you gave me, kid. End of the line.”
He mumbled something to the craft, and the passenger door opened in reply. A blast of furnace-dry air gushed in, mingling windily with the climate-controlled environment he and I had been enjoying.
Over his shoulder, John handed me a perks slate with my itemized bill. I noticed a space on the slate's bland gray pressure screen, to the left of which was a word in blinking, animated bold: TIP. Tip? Oh, yes, I reminded myself. Baksheesh. Gratuity. Palm grease. I took the stylus from the slate's side but paused over the empty space on the screen. I read the tripmeter clock in the bottom corner.
“Sir,” I said, “I thought the estimated trip time would be just under an half an hour.”
“So?”
“Sir, we left the skyport nearly two hours ago.”
“Can't rush perfection,” the pilot grumbled.
Sure, I was being used, but by this point, with my destination supposedly beneath my feet, I was willing to pay extra to be on my way. Still, stylus firmly in hand, next to the word “TIP,” I wrote, “Consider a profession that does not require people-skills.” I brushed my perks ring against the slate's receptor, closing the transaction.
John took the slate from me. “Thank you for choosing PetroSky Taxi Services. Have a nice day. Or not. Don’t care.”
I slung my mended blue nylon bag over my shoulder and slid from the taxi's cheaply upholstered back bench to the exit ramp. No sooner had I reached the rocky ground than the ramp pulled in behind me, and the craft sealed shut. The vehicle shot back up into the sky like a yellow-jacket: just as black and gold, just as noisy, and sharing certain round-bellied design elements. It was gone, and I was alone, looking for a sign.
The text from Mrs. Fairfacs had instructed me to get transportation to these GPS coordinates, from where I needed to look for a sign of weather-beaten wood on which was emblazoned the words “Emhain Macha.” These words, of course, purportedly were emblazoned on this sign in shades of green.
My duppetta-veil already dampening with sweat, I shielded my colorblind eyes from the searing sunlight and scanned the area. I gaped in wonder. The cliffs rose above me like windowless high-rises. Tall cacti pointed their arms to the blank blue canopy above, their shadows mellowed by those cast by the topography, all softened against numerous puffs of brush grass. Farther away, mountains like giant, broken cathedrals lifted the earth, spires striving heavenwards.
The air was perfumed with the scent of baking clay. The sun was like direct flame against my skin, even though dusk approached. Just being out here these two minutes was making me thirsty. I had no water. I needed shelter and soon. Given my congenitally defective eyesight, there was no way I would have been able to find a green sign when brown cliffs and boulders stretched out between all horizons and me. I reached into my Naomi purse and pulled out my glasses.
It wasn't until I flipped my duppetta and put them on that I realized my environment was actually built of rust-red rocks, as I could gather from all the dots drifting to the right, indicating that shade to my deficient vision. The amount of swimming dots, combined with jet lag and residual motion sickness from nearly twelve straight hours of travel, conspired together to fill my dry mouth with bile. I removed my glasses with one hand and wiped my forehead with a corner of my duppetta, composing myself with a musumegokoro-do meditation. I replaced my glasses and set to searching in earnest.
Thank God, I did not have to search long. With each step I took, grasshoppers bounced from the ground like flecks of hot oil from a street vendor's griddle. The sign I sought was mere meters behind me, sticking out of a tuft of silvery grasses. The green letters stood out against the rest of my glasses' dots, mostly wafting to the right in varying hues. The sign was about as broad as my shoulders, and seemed designed to be unobtrusive, its background nearly indiscernible in color from the surrounding geology. Only the texture was different. I looked around for a door or some other indication of a house, but found none. This struck me as beyond strange.
I remembered Mrs. Fairfacs's email, and looked for the perks receptor she said could be found on the bottom right corner of the sign. I pressed my ring top to it. As I waited, my eyes wandered to a flat spot on the ground at the foot of the sign. It had the obsidian sheen of hand geometry-recognition biometers found in some skyports, but it was only about twelve centimeters on each side—not large enough to measure a complete adult hand. Perhaps it was for my student?
I removed my glasses and waited some more. Still nothing happened. Gripped by a moment's panic, I cast my gaze all about, suddenly convinced that I had been fooled, that I had followed the emails of a stranger I'd never met, not even online, only to find myself in the desert, where who knew what calamities were about to fall upon me. I had no one to contact for help, even if I'd had a HandRight of my own. Biting my lip, I tried my ring on the receptor one last time.
The rock beneath my left foot shifted, throwing me off balance. Footing regained, I realized the rock was actually a cleverly designed entryway, now opening. Uncertain, arms out slightly, I peeked inside. A set of stairs dropped a short distance into a foyer walled in desert adobe whitewash. Leaning my left hand lightly against the wall, I descended, my sandals clicking softly against hazel-brown tiles. In a few more steps, I found myself at a proper door. Another perks receptor was wired through the frame, but there was no doorbell. There was no welcome here for unanticipated guests. My pulse in my eyes, I pressed my perks button into the receptor. I waited, fingers clutching nervously at the hem of my veil. The door opened.
“Mrs. Fair—” I stopped. The elderly woman standing behind the freshly opened door was, much to my surprise, translucent. Through her I could see a sparsely decorated hallway winding off into the unknown. The keeper of the door was a mere hologram.
Cupped mirrors at the baseboards projected a silver-haired holo dressed from neck to floor in a coffee-colored gown. A perfunctory matching veil had been designed upon her head for art's sake, as she was not subject to the same ultraviolet damage that we humans risk each time we step out of doors. Kindly laughlines and crow's feet had been etched into her ethnically ambiguous caramel skin tones, and reading glasses perched upon the end of her knobby nose.
“Excuse me,” I then said to open my query to the holo's database. “Excuse me, but I am looking for a Mrs. Fairfacs?”
“I am she,” she said, smiling at me. “You must be Miss Jane E, the homeschooler. Welcome, dear! Please, do come in.”
“But—I don't understand,” I stammered, slowly peeling my duppetta to my shoulders. “I received a text from a Mrs. Fairfacs offering me this job.”
“Oh,” the holo said, waving her hand as if shrugging off someone's etiquette faux pas. “That's just something I was assigned to do, dear, once the service found someone suitable. But I am Mrs. Hui Fair Facs, you see,” she said, pronouncing her last name as two very distinct words. “'Hui' as in Holographical User Interface. 'Fair Facs' as in, 'fair facsimile' of a human housekeeper.” She chuckled contentedly as if her clever designers caused her no end of proud amusement.
“Assigned by whom, please?” Naturally, I was eager to learn as much as possible about my human employers.
“Why, by my owner, of course. Please, follow me. You must be thirsty,” she chattered, turning from me and beckoning me down what seemed to be the main hallway, twisting away from us like an intestine. “And tired. Your body thinks it is oh-five hundred hours right now, no, dear?”
The way she kept calling me dear and her incongruous use of military time quickly endeared her to me. “Yes, Mrs. Fairfacs,” I admitted, seeing there was no harm in sharing one's vulnerability with such kindly artificial intelligence.
“Well, first a beverage—decaf iced tea?”
“Yes, please.”
“Very good. Then I'll show you to your room. Here,” she said, wafting her arm towards a doorway, which opened before me and illuminated in response. “Make yourself comfortable while I see to your luggage. Just that one bag?”
I nodded dumbly, but my eyes widened. Her object recognition had been programmed not only to differentiate but count such diverse, abstract object concepts as “bag” and “luggage.” So different from the VanDeer's Abot.
I took a sturdy, high-backed leather chair and looked around, trying to guess my employer’s nature by the decorating scheme. The two chairs and one couch were of matte wood and black leather, simple lines but sturdy, genuine materials. The walls were lined with black lacquered bookcases filled with a fading rainbow of paper books, the likes of which I'd only seen in Bhenji Nealingson's far smaller collection. They even had some of the same Western authors: Shakespeare, Yeats, Tennyson, Homer's Iliad, Dante. I inhaled deeply and caught the musk of crumbling wood pulp on the air. The ceiling was white stucco, and light was cast from behind the tops of the bookcases, giving the whole room a detached but warm glow.
The carpet could have been haggled for in the same alley market where I had purchased the fabric for my latest if meager wardrobe additions. This carpet was coated with the same horror vacuui designs, heavy at the edges, favored for centuries by the people of the fertile Punjab region. The room's overall decorating scheme was an echo of the desert surrounding us: sparse, intense, earnest. I liked it.
A small tray carrying a glass of iced tea wheeled into the room, fearlessly navigating the change between the hall's tiled floors and this room's carpeting. Mrs. Fairfacs was not far behind.
“Sorry I had to disappear there, dear,” she said, hovering over the carpet before being seated in the chair opposite mine. “I don't have enough memory to be two places at once. I was checking in on your pupil so I could introduce the two of you, but she's busy right now.”
“Busy?” I made sure to turn my voice up at the end so Mrs. Fairfacs could tell I was asking a question.
“Indeed. Since her arrival, she spends most of her time in the acties, I'm afraid. So many children do these days, I believe. No wonder so many guardians find it necessary to employ homeschoolers like yourself to keep children on task.”
I smiled, wondering how difficult it would be to reclaim the brain of this student once our classes commenced. I sipped at my tea, finding it shockingly cold, delightfully sweet, and devoid of milk. American sweet tea, with ice cubes!
“Perhaps, dear, it would be best for the two of you to meet tomorrow at any rate, to give you time to adjust. Ah! Here it is! Now, put your bag there, dear—”
Another cart had just wheeled itself into the room, this one a stockier version of the tea-bringer.
“Really, Mrs. Fairfacs, I can carry my bag myself—”
“Nonsense! We're here to serve. Just place it atop the cart, and off it goes.”
Afraid to confuse her with too much protest, I put my tea down on the lacquer end table at hand (the glass had a coaster attached to the bottom, mind you), and then lifted my bag onto the cart's top. From the cart's corners, straps unfolded themselves, wrapped around my bag and then met in the center above it, linking together for stability. Even living with the VanDeers, I hadn't seen enough to imagine such a wonder as this might wait in my future.
“Speaking of your room, dear,” Mrs. Fairfacs said, “I do hope you'll like it. It's a bit empty, I'm afraid.”
My own room. I took another sip of tea, nearly as sweet as the concept of having a room of my own, something I hadn't had in more than a decade, and that had been a closet.
“Indeed,” Mrs. Fairfacs continued, “Mr. Thorne tends not to pay too much attention to the empty rooms, especially since he's been away on tour for seven months now.”
So my employer's name was Mr. Thorne, and he was gone at the moment. “Is Mrs. Thorne at home, then?” I inquired.
“No one has informed me of any Mrs. Thorne.”
I nodded. Of course. An absent father with custody was far from unusual.
“How was your trip, dear?”
The question took me by surprise, considering its source. My bewilderment must have been evident by my expression, because Mrs. Fairfacs explained, “Please, could you indulge me with a little data entry? With so few visitors, I rarely get much chance to update my database.”
“Oh. Well,” I stalled, wondering where to begin. “My trip was fine, thank you. I must admit, though, I'm a bit overwhelmed by all I've seen between India and here. So many things have changed in the years since I was out last.”
“Such as?”
She did not express surprise at my lack of worldly knowledge. I supposed my resume must have been uploaded into her database at some point.
“Such as—well... the people I used to, uh, work with at the train station in town—they've all moved on.”
“Just like you have, I'm sure. But train station? Doesn't your town have a feeder skyport of its own by now?”
I felt myself blush as I confessed, “Well, it does, but I couldn't afford it.”
“Oh?”
“I also noticed that ear jewelry has become more ornate, wrapping around the entire ear and even dipping into the ear canal. Do you know what those are, please, Mrs. Fairfacs?”
Mrs. Fairfacs's face brightened, obscuring the bookshelf behind her. “Why, yes, dear. Those are personal translating devices. Anyone else would be surprised you didn't have one of your own, but, given all the languages your resume says you speak, why would you need one?”
Involuntarily, I dropped my head. “Even if I needed one, I probably couldn't have afforded one. They all were wrought in precious metals and set with jewels.”
“Cheaper plassein versions are available. Younger people wear the brightest shades. Wait until you see the one your charge uses. You must have encountered so much more noise than you're used to, with all the voice recognition proliferation during the past decade.”
I smiled, mostly to myself. “America is just noisier in general, I remember. I had expected the gadgetry—handhelds, personal translation devices, and the like—to be more advanced here, or at least flashier, but the people carried accoutrements much like the crowds in India had.”
“Really?”
“Yes, Mrs. Fairfacs.”
I took a few more sips of my tea, and Mrs. Fairfacs added my information to her database. Then, just as I finished my tea, she asked, “Do you have any questions, dear?”
The tray had just approached me, and I placed my empty glass on it, and it rolled away. Then, to Mrs. Fairfacs, “Why is this place called Em—Emm-haine—?”
“Emhain Macha?” she said, pronouncing it more like, “ow-ann mah-hcha.” “It's the name of an ancient Celtic holy place where, as part of religious rituals, people built large, round structures with thatched roofs, set them on fire, and then covered them with dirt.”
“Really?” And people thought Catholics were weird.
“When this residence's previous owner saw the organic architecture outside, he named it Emhain Macha.”
I nodded. Then, without even asking my permission, a yawn decided to steal upon me. I covered my mouth in an attempt to hide it. My eyes watered from exhaustion.
“Now, dear,” Mrs. Fairfacs said, “I won't keep you awake any longer. Are you ready to go to your room?”
I smiled at the holo, synthetic as it was, warmed by her care. “That would be fine, thank you.”
The holo stood and beckoned, and I followed her through labyrinthine ivory-buff Southwestern stucco hallways, lights coming on before us and shutting off behind us, leading the way just as much as Mrs. Fairfacs.
“How am I going to find my way back out in the morning?” I asked, laughing under my breath.
“When you wake and are ready to meet your student in the morning, call for me. Just say, 'Mrs. Fairfacs, please?' I'll appear—as soon as my memory allows, that is—and help you find your way. Here we are!”
She stopped before one of the unevenly distributed doorways. This door was a tawny beige, flat, with a perks receptor where a knob would have been. I tapped my ring, and the door opened on antique, squeaky hinges. The lights came on. I gasped.
“You'll have to give the door your perks again to lock it after you close—dear? Are you quite all right?”
“I'll be fine,” I said, barely recovering, “as soon as I put my eyes back in their sockets.”
This room was nearly half the size of the Naomi dojo. Its queen-size bed was covered with a fluffy comforter, white in contrast to the dark oak headboard, which was intricately carved with intertwined Celtic-style animals. A matching dresser, immense wardrobe, vanity table with mirror and an old-fashioned writing desk completed the furnishings. A screen took up the better part of the wall opposite the bed, and it seemed to display an image of the night's moonless sky, darkest velvet coated with crystal beading.
I turned to Mrs. Fairfacs and realized she was staring at me, uncertainty thickening her image. “You are having eye trouble? Do you need me to call a doctor?”
“No, no,” I said, smiling at our miscommunication. “It was just a figure of speech.”
“I see. Well, dear, the door to your left is the bathroom, and your personal access terminal booth is behind the door on your right.”
“Who else will be using the bathroom and the terminal?”
“Why, no one, dear.”
I clasped my hand to my mouth, giddy.
“Your things should have been put away, but if you have trouble finding anything, please ask for me. Will you be needing anything else?”
“I don't imagine I could!”
She smiled briefly, but then concern solidified her features once more. “Are you quite sure this room is to your liking, dear?”
“Mrs. Fairfacs, I assure you, it couldn't be more so.”
This answer seemed to satisfy her, because she smiled and said, “Then I'll leave you to get settled. Please call for me if you need anything.”
Mrs. Fairfacs disappeared. I shut the door, gave it my perks, and a bolt slid shut. Like walking through fog and cobwebs, I dreamily inched to the wardrobe. I opened it, and my clothes, such as they were, hung on a handful of hangers. My empty nylon scar-bag was folded neatly in a bottom corner. I turned and saw that my hairbrush, comb, hairclips and braid-securing elastic bands were placed side-by-side on the vanity.
I shut the wardrobe and opened a bureau drawer. My undergarments and pajamas were inside. Comically, so were the few Naomi scrolls I had packed in my duffel. I brought them over to the writing desk. I removed my battered Naomi-girl purse and placed it on the desk as well.
I began to undress, but something stopped me. I finally thought to wonder, how could Mrs. Fairfacs appear if I just called for her? This had to involve some kind of constant surveillance of the entire house. Most likely, nano-cameras and microphones infested this and every room, just like Mrs. Fairfacs's projection mirrors. Self-conscious, I carried my pajamas into the palatial beige and white porcelain bathroom, where a fresh toothbrush waited for me, still wrapped. There I finished preparing for bed, exposing as little flesh as possible in the changing of my clothes.
I still could not believe my senses as I climbed into the high bed, my short legs dangling from its edge as I pulled back the cover. No sooner had I snuggled into this lavender-scented nest than the lights began to dim. This house was totally smart, I realized. On one level, this, combined with Mrs. Fairfacs's warm if synthetic welcome, made me feel safer and more provided for than I ever had before in my life. On another level, however, this disturbed me: I would be under constant watch. The Naomi girl in me could not shake her unease.
Exhausted as I was, I tossed and turned for the better part of an hour, sleep remaining elusive. I needed soothing distraction. I stumbled through the dark, and the lights brightened again at my movement. When I reached the desk—my desk, I reminded myself—I took Aidann's Memorare scroll from my purse and returned to bed. By this time I didn't need to feel the binary variations in texture to read the contents with my fingers. Nonetheless, the routine was as soothing as the words.
“Never was it known,” I whispered into the darkness as my lids grew heavy, “that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help or sought your intercession was left unaided...”
I woke to sunlight, clear and crisp as a slice of cold apple, streaming into my room. As I rubbed my eyes, I remembered there was no window in this room beneath the desert floor, so how could sunlight reach me? I sat up and saw that the light was generated by the same screen that last night had been showing stars. Instead of a window, I had a PLED screen.
Showered, dressed, and ignoring the rumble in my stomach, I combed out my wavy waist-length, mud-colored hair and bound it into its customary braid. As I did so, I studied my reflection in the mirror with disappointment. I hadn't had such a clear, sustained opportunity to examine my features since the last time I had used the VanDeers' bathroom. My complexion was still sallow. My eyes still were too big and wide, and the eyebrows were too thin compared to the dramatic eyebrows of the fashionable ladies I had passed in my travels yesterday. My mouth was small, pale, and had too much pout in the lower lip.
Resigned, I bound the end of my braid, set aside my comb, and tried smoothing the folds of my sober charcoal salawar over my whip-thin figure. Travel had crushed the fabric. I would just have to prove to my student by my behavior alone that I was not a slovenly peasant. I reached for my duppetta, draped it as gracefully as I could around my shoulders, and went for the door. I unlocked it with my perks and stepped into the hallway.
The hall was filled with the same brand of sunlight I’d experienced in my bedroom. I looked up, and the high ceiling had blocks of that same sky-simulating PLED screen, tiled at even intervals between stretches of stucco. I also noticed that, fitted in between the screen blocks were small, spiky metal emergency sprinklers, like those installed at Naomi after the renovations.
I looked to my right and my left. The passage was empty. Rather than call Mrs. Fairfacs, I decided to see if I could find my own way back to the area close to the house's entrance. I turned right, took the next two lefts, and found myself helplessly lost. After five minutes of unsuccessful attempts to get myself un-lost, I surrendered.
“Mrs. Fairfacs, please.”
“Good afternoon, dear,” she said, appearing a few feet before me, paling with the daylight generated from above.
“Afternoon?” I asked timidly. “What time is it, please?”
“Twelve-fifteen,” she said. “Oh, you can ask me to wake you up at a certain time each morning, but I've been taught to let jet-lagged guests sleep in their first night here at least.”
“But I'm not a guest. I'm an employee.”
Mrs. Fairfacs shrugged. “I've not been taught the distinction. Would you like some lunch?”
My stomach spoke up loudly. “Yes,” I said, blushing, “please. Is young Miss Thorne at lunch as well?”
“Who, dear?”
“Miss Thorne.” When Mrs. Fairfacs blinked at me blankly, I clarified, “Is my student, Miss Thorne, at lunch? I was hoping to meet her.”
“There must be some miscommunication,” she said, beckoning me to follow her through the hall. “There is no Miss Thorne here. Your student's name is Kirti.”
“Kirti is his daughter's name?”
“Whose daughter?”
“Mr. Thorne's!” Sometimes voice rec was just maddening.
“Mr. Thorne has no daughter.”
Flustered, I rubbed at the corners of my tensing eyes. “Then who is this 'Kirti?'“
Before Mrs. Fairfacs had a chance to answer, she ushered me into an open doorway. This was a room about the size of my bedroom. At the opposite end was a set of faux French doors with more of that PLED sky-screen. A hulk of a rustic table took up much of the room's middle, and a fruit basket—apples, bananas, pears—adorned the table's center. A little girl sat at one of the chairs, joined by another girl who looked slightly younger than myself.
The older girl was dressed plainly, much like I was, but the child was dressed in a gold embroidery-encrusted choli top with matching lengha bottom. A stretch of her midriff showed between the two. Such finery was usually worn only by women of means, or by a middle-class girl at her own wedding ceremony, certainly not by an eight-year-old! Likewise, her hair had been skillfully teased into a halo around her petite, delicately featured face. Both girls had dark hair and eyes, tan skin... and their conversation had me taken quite aback—not the content, but the language. They were conversing in Punjabi!
As my sandals tapped against the glazed terra cotta tiles, announcing my entrance, both of them stopped and stared. The older girl looked away shyly, but the child—my student—stared at me open-mouthed and wide-eyed.
“Namaste,” I said, bowing over my folded hands. I then introduced myself in Punjabi.
The little girl's eyes grew even wider. “I don't have my earpiece. How do you know how to talk like us?”
“I don't need one, Miss,” I replied, leaning heavily on that last word in a subtle attempt to promote good manners. While I did not intend for us to have a formal relationship, much less for her to call me anything ending with “-ji,” neither did I want to start off accepting rudeness from her as a matter of course. One can be informal without being rude.
I continued, “I am going to teach you how you can be your own translator.”
“Pardon me, Miss E,” Mrs. Fairfacs interrupted, “but I've never been taught their language.”
Too surprised to be much bothered at being called something that sounded like “missy,” it now was my turn again to be wide-eyed. “Then how have these two gotten on in this house by themselves for seven months?”
“Kirti knows enough English to ask for me and to ask for food, but that's the end of it. Deepali knows none at all.”
I was too puzzled to speak, not knowing where to begin or what questions to ask.
“Please, Miss E—” Mrs. Fairfacs said.
“Mrs. Fairfacs, please, call me 'Jane,'“ I corrected, composed enough to request that she not address me by my lack of last name.
“Please, Miss Jane,” the holo continued without any sign of offense-taking, “have a seat, and your lunch will be brought.”
Obediently, I took the chair next to the precociously dressed child and did my best to smile at both of them. They stared back at me.
“So you're my teacher?” Kirti asked in Punjabi.
I answered likewise. “Yes, Kirti. You and I shall work together on your education. Have you been to school before?”
“No.”
“Perhaps an online scholars' service, then?”
“Mama said that I didn't need to because I'm an actress. Mama was an actress, too, before she got sick.”
“Where is your mama now, Kirti?”
“Her soul is with God now.” She said this with such nonchalance, as if she were telling me about something that happened on her way to the mirror. “Now I'm here living in Thorne's house, but he doesn't let me work the acties anymore, ever since he brought me and Deepali here.”
“Deepali?” I turned to the older girl.
She bobbled her head, still studying her sandwich.
“Deepali dresses me and does my hair, like she always did for me and Mama, especially when we were working. Even though the actie projected the right hairstyles for the parts no matter how we looked in real life, Mama always said a good actress looks her best, no matter who sees her. But,” and here she sighed dramatically, perching her cheek upon her outstretched hand, casting her gaze heavenwards, “now all I can do is be a regular customer, and not even in any of the good ones.”
“Why is that, Kirti?”
She pouted. “Thorne put fences in all my software. He hardly lets me go anywhere good.”
Not sure what exactly made an actie “good” to an eight year-old, I asked, “Why do you think Mr. Thorne set those fences, Kirti?”
Her pout deepened to the point of grotesqueness. “Because he says all the good acties are bad for me.”
“I see.” Perhaps this absent Mr. Thorne wasn't all bad.
A wheeled tray brought me a sandwich on a plate, a fabric napkin, and another glass of iced tea, and I placed them on the table before me. Ducking to peek at the sandwich's contents, I barely repressed a gasp. Peanut butter and grape jelly on squishy, bleached bread! I hadn't had that in ages! Barely taking the time to drop the napkin in my lap, I tucked right in, washing down the first bite with a sip of tea.
“Well, Kirti,” I said cheerfully after I finished chewing, “you must have been very bored all alone in this big house with no good acties to play.”
She rolled her eyes. “Have I ever!”
“Mrs. Fairfacs says Mr. Thorne has been on tour for seven months. Is that when he brought you here, seven months ago?”
Kirti nodded and took a bite of her own sandwich. Talking with her mouth full, she said, “He sends presents every couple of weeks, but he doesn't even bother to meet me anywhere to talk to me.”
“Meet you in an actie, you mean? Please finish chewing before you answer.”
She nodded and kept chewing.
“He really must care about you, if he wants to protect you, don't you think?”
She shrugged. “He sends presents.”
I decided to let the rest of our lunch progress in as leisurely a fashion as possible. I directed some questions at Deepali and received little more than one-word answers, with Kirti filling in the blanks. Deepali considered her job title to be “servant.” She was born and raised in a village a few kilometers away from where I'd been schooled. She could read a little Hindi, less English. Kirti's mother had hired her when Deepali was ten, after Deepali's parents had sent her to Bollywood to become a star.
“Bollywood?” I interrupted. “You mean Mumbai?”
Deepali only nodded. It was easy to extrapolate from there. Bombay had been officially renamed Mumbai eons ago, but that didn't keep its unofficial title from being Bollywood—Asia's entertainment capital. Dreams of becoming the most requested interactive artist in south central Asia drew countless souls to that city. Some, like Kirti's mother, made it big only to end tragically. Some, like Deepali, didn't make it but did survive.
While I wrenched what information I could from Kirti's servant, my student busied herself with finishing her lunch, helping herself to a plum from the fruit basket, then removing her earpiece from her pocket and fiddling with it right on the table. As I saw this out of the corner of my eye, another layer of my brain began cooking up pretexts with which I could distract her from this impolite, unsanitary activity. As my educational theory classes had taught me, a good teacher uses negative words as little as possible; rather than say, “Don't put your ear wax-encrusted translator on the table where we eat,” I said, “Kirti, I only arrived here yesterday and have seen so little of this house. I bet you could give me a better tour even than Mrs. Fairfacs could.”
Kirti's eyes brightened. Perhaps she sensed this tour guide gig as an opportunity to dust off her performance skills, for she sprung lightly to her slippered feet, straightened her shoulders, and shook her hair back from her face. “I would be delighted,” she said in such pristine British English that I found myself fighting to keep down a giggle. Deepali begged leave to go call her mother, which Kirti granted with the careless nonchalance of the spoiled child she was.
Kirti then led me out into the main hallway, taking us around corners, twists and turns, past closed doorways in a rainbow of colors. From the downward slant of our path, I perceived that with each step we descended further and further beneath the desert's surface. To myself, I wondered, What is this Mr. Thorne, some sort of hobbit?
“I'll show you all the rooms that anybody can get into,” my small guide said. Every handful of meters, Kirti would flick her cotton candy-pink perks ring against a doorway, and it would open. We would enter, and the door would close neatly behind us. Since we had not locked it shut with our perks rings, as soon as our feet would tap near the room's egress, the door would flick open before us to let us depart.
In this way, she showed me a door to the outside. “All the outside doors are brown rectangles, like this one,” she said. It opened with her ring, and I saw the ramp leading upwards into a sort of foyer, much like the main entrance I'd used yesterday. “But,” Kirti said, tugging on my sleeve, “I don't want to go outside.”
“Why not?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Outside is boring.”
I made a mental note to be doubly sure to incorporate some outdoor activity into my lesson plans.
Next, she pulled me just past my own bedroom (which I needed her to point out for me, I was so lost by this point) to another door, which opened on a larger bedroom.
Kirti announced, “This is Thorne's room.”
“Really?” I asked, unable to mask the surprise in my voice. “You're just allowed in here when Mr. Thorne is gone?”
“He didn't lock us out,” she said, indifferent.
I looked about some more, unwilling to take more than two steps past the door, out of respect for my absent employer's privacy. The plan echoed that of the room I'd been given, only larger. The bed had a very high headboard, tall posts at each corner, and was covered with black sheets. Though it was king-sized, it had only one pillow, black-cased. More bookcases lined the walls and gave this room the sweet perfume of crumbling paper. The ceiling was dotted with more safety sprinklers.
On the floor in the corner to my right was an oval pillow of heather-gray knit, with a lip like a bowl almost all the way around the edges. This lip had an opening cut in the front of it. A pet bed of some kind? I wondered, having only seen the likes of it on netcast novellas years before.
My gaze then was attracted by a black and white rack, as tall as I was and thrice my width, taking up the space where in my room the desk had been placed. It held an assortment of scratched metal bars the width of my arm span, the ends of which held thick, coal-black disks of varying diameters, most larger than the plates that had held our lunches.
“What on earth is that?” I asked, indicating the monstrosity with my chin.
Kirti giggled. “Mama always made fun of Thorne for wasting his time with weight-lifting.”
“Weight-lifting,” I repeated stupidly.
“Mama always said if he wanted muscles that bad he could just get the supplements from a doctor and save himself time.”
“And what did Mr. Thorne say to that?”
“That he never has time for doctors. But that's not true. He goes to the doctor a lot.”
Next we visited an old-fashioned conference room complete with two-dimensional projection screens and dusty black speakers the size and dimensions of bread loaves.
“The Senator's Room,” Kirti called it. “It's good for hide-and-seek.”
“I would imagine this whole home would be,” I muttered under my breath in English.
“The Senator's Room” had yellowing photographs in glazed frames on its walls. They all were of one Caucasian man, with silvering black hair, in a variety of situations. In one, he appeared to be fishing on a boat with whom I guessed were his wife and daughter. A second picture captured him shaking hands with another white-haired, white-skinned gentleman against an elegantly furnished background. In a third, he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with several men dressed in the most ridiculous, pointed brocade hats I'd ever seen. They looked like less-caricaturized version of “Pat,” the PetroPAT mascot.
Wafting my hand towards the rendering of this man in the center of this last picture, I asked Kirti, “I take it this is The Senator?” When she nodded, I asked, “Do you know why Mr. Thorne keeps pictures of him?”
“This used to be The Senator's house.”
“And Mr. Thorne bought it from The Senator?”
“Thorne says The Senator left it to him when he died.”
“Do you know why?”
Kirti shook her head and led on to another room, chattering as she went. “This used to be another boring study, but Thorne made it his studio.”
The door opened upon a room somewhat larger than that in which Mrs. Fairfacs had given me yesterday's iced tea, similarly furnished with sturdy leather-upholstered seating. Instead of bookcases, however, the room was dominated with a number of glass-walled booths of varying dimensions.
A coffee-table-sized contraption took up the middle of the floor of the room's main area. It was sleek black on the sides, but the top was a flat PLED screen, around which were inlaid levers and flat keypads, and other buttons the design of which seemed to suggest a controlling function for the output generated within the glass booths. The walls, where they weren't glass, were painted in splotchy grays and devoid of art.
“This is where Thorne records,” Kirti announced proudly.
“Do you know what he records, Kirti?”
Here, the little performer once again rolled her eyes. “He doesn't let me listen. He says it's for grown-ups.”
“Ah.”
Absently, Kirti began wandering over to the control table and began reaching out for the nearest lever. Afraid of what the result might be, I warned, “Perhaps you shouldn't play with that, Kirti.”
Pushing the lever upwards with no apparent result, she replied, “If Thorne didn't want me in here, he would have blocked me.”
Anxious nevertheless, I said, “Didn't you say you still had to show me the pool?”
Redirecting her now-captured attention to me once more, Kirti's eyes widened and brightened. “Oh, the pool!”
Kirti dashed off, leaving me to catch up with her. As the halls twisted and turned, I had a hard time keeping her in sight. Finally, I rounded a corner and could neither see her nor hear her eager, thoughtless footsteps. I stood in the arched stucco hall, looking in every available direction. Coming from behind the nearest doorway, I could hear a soft humming. Could that be the hum of pool filtering equipment? With care, I applied my perks ring to the doorpost just as I saw the blue biometric pad off to the side. I was supposed to give it my palm, but the door opened regardless.
All within was dark. No light rose at my arrival. Confused, I stepped over the threshold. All remained black and close as a tomb. Even the light that should have filtered in from the hall seemed to disappear once it passed the doorway. Realizing this could not be the entrance to any pool, I began to back out of the room. Just then, the door behind me shut.
I whirled 180 degrees, pressing my hands against the unyielding exit. The darkness persisted. Something about this place smelled too clean, like the sting of alcohol wipes. In fact, it smelled disturbingly like the insides of an at-home capsule. Memories made my heart rate gallop against my eardrums, and my fingers became icicles.
Doing all I could to master my breathing and distress, I slid my fingertips against the doorway's seams and face, searching for a perks receptor that might cause my release. I fumbled, reached, and found nothing. Nothing! My breath caught, and my lunch rose in my throat. I felt a wash of sweat dance along my spine. An involuntary cry escaped me, and I pressed my fists to my mouth, as if that would keep me from shattering like a ceramic figurine.
Then, my wits prevailed over anxiety. “Mrs. Fairfacs!” I cried, hearing the hysteria in my voice. I cried more loudly, “Mrs. Fairfacs, please!”
In an instant, I heard her voice outside the door. “Miss Jane? Is that you? I cannot see you.”
I tried to relax my breathing. “I'm in this—this closet and can't seem to find a way out.”
“Oh, dear, I'm so sorry!”
Three seconds of forever eked by. Then the locked door gave way to the hall's reproduced sunlight and the lightly rendered Mrs. Fairfacs.
“Are you quite all right, dear? You look even paler than the last time I saw you!”
Leaning one hand against the wall for support, I forced a smile. “I'm fine, thank you. I'm just mildly claustrophobic.”
“I am so sorry, dear,” she repeated, her lips pursing. “Sometimes the parts of this house that are out of my control seem to get a mind of their own. Lights go out, circuits burn up, doors lock for no apparent reason, even small fires—”
“No need to apologize.” I pressed a slip of my duppetta against my cold, damp brow. “These things happen.”
“There you are!” Kirti's voice startled me all the more, even though she was merely shouting at me playfully from the farthest curve of the hallway.
“Here I am,” I managed, still recovering. Then, I said, “Thank you, Mrs. Fairfacs. That will be all.”
As the holograph disappeared with a smile and a bow, Kirti skipped towards me, her gold-laced slippers peeking out from her skirts with each step, twinkling under the ceiling's glow.
“Did you get lost?” Kirti accused with good nature. She absently took my hand in hers and began dragging me away. “Your hand is cold and shaky! Did you get scared?”
I could see no harm in admitting the truth. “A little.”
Then I forced my fear to retreat further and my mouth to smile. Besides, here was ample, joyous, exuberant reason to smile: as easily as breathing, my new student had trusted me enough to take my hand. I allowed myself to rejoice in the idea that I was needed, even if only by a spoiled child.
For the moment, that was enough. Keeping up with her eager pace, I let myself be led away from the heart of Emhain Macha.
