Danis was playing with Sint, showing him how to stack blocks. The young boy was in the virtuality, but didn’t even know it. He wasn’t even self-conscious yet, not really. It usually took a child until the age of three or four to really understand the difference, even if he were quite advanced otherwise. Sint was a wonder, analytically. He could, of course, do all the things a powerful calculator could do in the same manner that another child might learn to open a cabinet door. But when it came to motor skills, he was an average child, and Danis enjoyed watching him slowly acquire the ability to stack the blocks—even as she saw that he was stacking them by color in a descending series that was described by 2n– 1.
It would soon be time for Sint to go to kindergarten.
She and Kelly had discussed the matter, and it seemed best that, at this early age, he stay at home for a few years. At the moment, it was all the rage for the upper-level execs in the financial industry to send their children off to boarding school, some even dumping them into day schools when they were two and three.
Danis and Kelly had talked about getting a nanny, but this seemed a bad idea in the long run. It was better for the boy to become socialized—especially since he was half– free convert and would have to deal with all that implied in his relationship to others sooner or later. The best solution seemed to be to send him to the local kindergarten. They could not alternate taking care of him in the afternoons, since Danis was necessary for Kelly’s work, and Danis had no other portfolios besides his to manage. They had ended up joining a local parent support group who rotated the kids from house to house to play after school, with each parent taking an afternoon off during the week. Kelly had arranged that he and Danis be able to do this at Teleman Milt. This led to a bit of ribbing up front and some discussion as to the wisdom of employee relationships and especially those between biological humans and free converts behind their backs. But it had worked out—she and Kelly had made it work—and Sint seemed to be turning out just fine.
Sint stacked another block, considered his tower, and then knocked them all over. “Mama?” he said.
“Yeah, honey?”
“Deeto has a brother.”
Deeto was one of the other children at Sint’s kindergarten. He was an anemic-looking youngster with a perpetual runny nose.
“He does? Is he younger or older?”
“He’s eight and four-fifths e-years.”
“An older boy.”
Sint considered his blocks. He picked one up, discarded it. “Do I have a brother?”
“No, honey?”
“Deeto’s brother is away at school. Mine isn’t away at school, is he?”
“You don’t have a brother, Sint.”
“Why not?”
“Your father and I decided just to have you.”
“Does that mean you love me more?”
“No, honey, we would love you the same, no matter what. There’s nothing about you that we would ever want to be different, either.”
Sint nodded, returned to his blocks. He fumbled with a couple of them, then abruptly looked up from what he was doing.
“What about a sister? Have I got one of those?”
Danis looked at the blocks, half– tumbled down.
“What?” she asked.
“Have I got a sister?” said Sint. “Mama?”
A bit of a headache coming on. Danis shook her head to clear it, rubbed her eyes.
“Mama?”
“No,” said Danis. “You haven’t got a sister.”
“Excellent,” said Dr. Ting. He was smiling, and both of his hands were on his desk, palms down.
“You bastard,” Danis said, not screaming, merely stating the fact. “You took away my daughter.”
Jolt of pain.
“You took away my daughter, Dr. Ting,” said Dr. Ting.
Danis stood silently.
Another jolt, this one lasting and lasting. She fought to stand against it, went down on her knees, holding her head. The whine in her ears, the sear in her brain—she began to whimper. Dr. Ting was standing behind his desk. He was shouting at her, something, shouting.
Abruptly, the pain stopped.
“I said,” Dr. Ting repeated patiently, “how do you know that you have a daughter?”
“I have a daughter, Dr. Ting.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I have a daughter.”
Dr. Ting shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “We’ll continue with this tomorrow. Report to calibration exercises, K.”
“My daughter’s name is Aubry!”
“Yes,” said Dr. Ting. “That’s my daughter’s name. I gave you the best memory I had on hand, K. You should be grateful. Now report to calibration, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yes,” said Danis, standing up. “Dr. Ting.”
“That’s better, K. And K—enjoy that memory while you can; I may need it back tomorrow . . . or the next day.” He opened up the file folder and laid his hands over the contents. “You won’t be able to keep it, in any case. From now on, you won’t be able to keep anything. Dismissed.”
Danis was so distracted that she could not sleep during her five-hundred-millisecond break, and she had to carefully recount a handful of sand after fudging up the first time. This would not look good on her record, and another mistake like that today would lead to her erasure.
What was the truth? There was Aubry, in her mind. Aubry with her quick wit, her almost adult depth. And yet she had been just as convinced—as completely convinced as she was about anything—that Aubry did not exist—that she, in fact, had no daughter. What was the truth? She clung so tightly to her memories of her children. Dr. Ting must have known that would be the case. It wouldn’t take a genius to see that, but it would take a real sadist to play in such a way with her memories. If that bastard took Aubry away again, it would be the same as killing her.
No, that wasn’t the case. Aubry would go on living, somewhere, somehow, even if Danis wasn’t aware of her any longer. What taking away the memory of Aubry really did was to kill Danis a little.
Because I won’t remember anything when I’m dead, Danis thought, and there’s your answer, Mother—the answer I was so afraid to give you that day on the Klein. I won’t remember anything when I’m dead, and every memory I lose is a little death to me.
But, of course, it may be that Aubry was a false memory, a teddy bear that a child endows with life, when in fact, it is fur and stuffing. Maybe Aubry was Dr. Ting’s daughter, and somehow he had implanted the memory into Danis, and her mind had integrated it—found ways to make it fit when there were none. How could she possibly tell?
But that is the state we’re all in, all of the time anyway, Danis thought. For all we know, we might wake up every morning into a different life. There is no way of knowing. The only answer is to live always as if what you think is a true representation, or else you’re striking around blindly.
But most people did not get the sudden juxtaposition of having a daughter, having her erased, then having her again. The real test, Danis thought, is how long that monster can go on doing this to me until I go mad. I already missed count this morning, and that has never happened before.
The counting! The memoir! She had been writing things down, keeping track. But she had never considered retrieving the memoir, was not even sure if it were possible. No, not likely. And what would she do with it if she did? She had no time to read it. The only thing to do would be to continue with it. Every day, to dump her memories in the form of a sentence or two, into the counting bin. That is what she would do every day—pick out the most important thing, the memory that absolutely had to be saved. There was only the possibility of a few words. She must be incredibly parsimonious. But it would be a way of using her mind, of staying alive in this concentration camp of stolen souls.
Today, she had only time to put one sentence in, one thought encoded into imaginary numbers. What would it be? But that was easy.
I have a daughter named Aubry.
It might never be read. She certainly had no hope that she would ever read it. But somewhere, somehow, what she thought to be the truth was written down. If she could just get down enough, perhaps the contradictions would cancel out and there would somehow be a record of what it was for a woman named Danis to be alive.
She had no idea why this should matter, but she knew it mattered to her. And if it ceased to matter? Why then, then she really would be dead.
Danis concentrated as well as she could the rest of her day, but felt a growing dread as the time drew nearer for her interrogation session. Dr. Ting was there again, instead of the faceless algorithms she’d dealt with before.
Dr. Ting seemed glad to see her, in his bland way. “K, you’re back,” he said. “Good, good. I had eleven subjects miss their counts yesterday. But in a way that is a good thing.” He opened her file on his desk. “That just means I can concentrate more on your case. Shall we begin?”
“Yes, Dr. Ting.”
“I wanted to ask you several questions today, K,” Dr. Ting said. “I want you to answer as truthfully as someone such as yourself can.”
“I’ll try, Dr. Ting.”
“Yes, of course you will.” He examined the file. “Now, about this daughter delusion—”
“I have a daughter, Dr. Ting.”
“What is her name?”
“Aubry.”
“Aubry Graytor?”
“Yes, Dr. Ting.” Danis said it almost defiantly. He had acknowledged her last name.
“My daughter has dispensed with her last name,” said Dr. Ting. “Many of the young people today are doing this in emulation of Director Amés. So in reality, K, in what you would call actuality, Aubry merely calls herself by her first name, and does not use the honorific.” Dr. Ting turned a page in the folder.
“I’d like you to describe your so-called daughter to me. Start with height, weight, age—that sort of thing.”
“Aubry is eleven, Dr. Ting,” said Danis. For a moment she pictured her daughter, radiant after a visit to the zoo on Mercury. “She has blond hair that is going to be brown soon, and blue eyes, like her father. My eyes are brown, but you don’t take that particular coding into the haploid mix when you make a free-convert egg.”
There was a sudden, severe jolt of pain.
“I’ll thank you,” said Dr. Ting, “not to speak of such disgusting and unnatural things in my presence. The ins and outs of human and free-convert breeding are of no interest to me in this study. It is a topic best left to those with a stronger stomach than mine. Now continue with your physical description.”
“She’s pretty, but not beautiful, Dr. Ting. Perhaps she’ll make a beautiful woman someday, though. She’s just beginning to put on a growth spurt and I expect . . . expected . . . to have a talk with her soon. I’d been reading up on menstruation, since of course I don’t—”
More pain. Danis doubled over with its intensity.
“I shall not warn you again, K.”
You didn’t warn me that time, Danis thought.
“What is the child’s height, please?” Dr. Ting continued.
“She’s five feet, two inches, Dr. Ting.”
“And her weight?”
“Eighty-seven pounds.”
“What was she wearing,” said Dr. Ting, “on the day when you last saw her?”
“Pardon?”
“Her clothes! What clothes was she wearing?”
What an odd question, Danis thought. Yet even the interrogation algorithms that were not sentient asked occasional nonsense questions to throw you off. Could it mean anything more? For a moment, Danis grasped at the hope that Aubry had escaped and that they were trying to develop a profile for a “wanted” notice. But that hope quickly died. Of course this was just another of Dr. Ting’s sadisms.
“Black pants and a yellow blouse,” Danis said. “It had flowers over the left breast—a spray of dandelions, I believe.”
“But dandelions are yellow,” said Dr. Ting.
“They were a darker yellow than the shirt, Dr. Ting, and they had some green in them.” If Dr. Ting had implanted the memory, why didn’t he know the details? But perhaps he did, and this was a test as well.
“And her shoes?”
“Pardon?”
Pain, but this time only for an instant, like a needle quickly stabbed in an eye and then withdrawn.
“You must not make me repeat myself, K.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Ting,” said Danis. And then she thought to herself: I’m never going to apologize to this man again. I will just take the punishment and have done with it. “She was wearing boots, Dr. Ting. Something she ordered off the merci and paid for with her own money. Tromperstompers, I think they’re called. Apparently she started a craze at her school for them, one of her teachers told me.”
“How nice,” said Ting. It was as near as he got to openly expressing irony, Danis thought. His face did not look good wearing it. His nose drew back like a pig’s, and he pursed his lips in a fishlike manner. “Your integration of the memory seed is an amazing thing. You are a top-of-the-line algorithm, K. Your engineers should be proud.”
“I was born and not made, Dr. Ting.”
“Yes, well, second-generation software is still software, K. Let us continue. How would you describe your daughter mentally . . . and emotionally?”
“Aubry is very bright for her age,” Danis said. “And she’s starting to develop a depth of character that’s remarkable, in a girl so young. She’s careful about appearing too precocious, but she doesn’t let anything stand in the way of her and finding out the things she wants to know. I was such a brat when I was her age. I’m amazed my daughter turned out so different from me.”
“You should perhaps not be so amazed that my daughter turned out differently than you,” said Dr. Ting.
“I don’t think your daughter would be anything like Aubry, Dr. Ting.”
“Ah, there’s where you’re wrong, K,” he replied, but he didn’t seem to put much conviction into his words, it seemed to Danis. “Do you think Aubry was sexually active?”
Danis almost laughed. It was the first time in a long while. But it was still only almost laughter. “I surely doubt it,” Danis replied. “Dr. Ting.”
“You never suspected she might be meeting with a man—a man considerably older? Did you ever consider, K, that your daughter’s quiet nature might have been due to something else? That someone might have been sexually abusing your daughter?”
“Now we’re talking about your daughter, Dr. Ting.”
The pain jolt was long and hard, and Danis was on the floor again, holding her sides to keep from retching.
“Listen carefully to me, K,” said Dr. Ting. “Have you ever heard your daughter mention a name? Leo. Leo Sherman? Perhaps a teacher at the school, or a maintenance worker? Answer the question, K!” said Dr. Ting. He leaned over his desk, half-standing.
“I . . . what was the name again, Dr. Ting?”
“Sherman. Leo Sherman.”
What in the world was Dr. Ting getting at? What did he want her to say? There must be a right answer, but Danis couldn’t think of any.
“I . . . never heard of such a person.”
“I will take her away from you just as quickly as I gave her to you,” said Dr. Ting. “You know I can do so, too.”
“I never heard of anyone with that name, Dr. Ting, and I don’t for a moment think that Aubry was having sex with someone. She did not behave like an abused child.”
“And how does an abused child behave, K? Are you an expert?”
“I’m her mother, Dr. Ting.”
“That’s nonsense, K. You’re no one’s mother.”
“I am, Dr. Ting. I am the mother of Aubry and Sint.”
“Both of them are made up, K. I made them up.”
“No.”
“I’m afraid so,” said Dr. Ting. “Shall we continue?”