Accidental Creatures (2 page)

“Claudia's having a house party,” said Val.

“That bitch?” said Coral, “I hate her fucking guts.”

“Oh yeah?” said Tashi with a smirk, “How come?”

“’Cause Coral's got it bad for Jerome,” taunted Vonda, “and she has since before Claudia nabbed him.” Coral's face turned red, and she glared at them, but she didn't deny it.

“Forget that anyway,” said Chango. “Josa's is giving free pitchers to graduates.”

“Yeah, and the Ply-Tones are playing,” said Val.

“Yes!” said Vonda.

“I am staying out all night, tonight,” said Chango.

“You'll do nothing of the kind, kiddo.” The voice came from the kitchen door. Chango turned to see her sister standing there, tall and strong, her blond hair short and neatly combed. Looking at her standing there in the late afternoon sunshine, Chango's jaw clenched unwittingly. She’d never seen anyone so fucking perfect in her life. Certainly she would never be like that, no matter what she did. For one thing, she wasn't tall, Ada had strength and weight on her, and she wasn't beyond using them to her advantage, even in front of Chango's friends.

Chango stood, “I'll see you guys later.”

“Uh-huh,” “Yeah,”, “Sure,” came the dubious replies. Chango followed Ada in through the back door of the restaurant, burning with rage. They went through the kitchen, and took a corner booth in the dining room. They sat down in silence, and Rita brought them coffee. Ada stirred cream in her cup and sipped at it. “You know you can’t go out tonight, Chango, you've got an examination tomorrow morning.”

Chango stared at the salt shakers for a long time. “Ada, I'm not going to do it,” she said, finally glancing at her sister's face.

Ada stared at her in anger and surprise. “What?”

She shook her head, “I'm not going to do it. You can't make me.”

“Why?” Ada shouted, and there was a momentary lull in the surrounding conversations as other patrons turned to look at them, and then returned to their own talk.

Chango took a careful breath. “Ada, I'm not doing it. I won't go be a suit for you, get it? I don't belong there, I'm not one of them.”

Ada stared at her, her jaw stiff, her eyes frozen with anger. “Oh yeah?” she said tightly, “what are you then, huh? You tell me.”

“I'm a vat-”

“A vat diver? Is that what you think you are? Let me tell you something, little sister. You won't last. Mom was in the vats for six years before you were born, Dad ten. You already show signs of gene damage. Your eyes, Chango, don't they tell you anything?”

Her eyes: one blue, one green. A genetic anomaly not present in any of her known ancestors, a mutation.

“If you dive,” Ada continued, “you won't make it past thirty. You won't even have a chance to start getting old.”

“Who says I want to get old?” asked Chango.

Ada shook her head, and gazed at the ceiling in exasperation. “I do, you fool, and you know it's true.” Chango licked her lips and studied the table top. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “But I can't go corporate, Ada. It's like joining the enemy.”

“Nonsense. You can be useful to us there. You can work to change management from within.”

“Sounds like a nice idea, Ada, only it's yours, not mine.” Ada sighed, “Then what do you want to do?”

Chango shrugged, “I don't know.”

“Well you’ve got to do something. You can’t just go on partying and hanging out with your friends. You’ve got to make a living somehow. Think of Mom and Dad. They worked so hard. They wanted something better for you. I owe it to them to make sure you take that exam.”

Despite all her protests, Ada took Chango home and locked her in her bedroom with the clerical exam study guide. That night Chango crawled out of her bedroom window and went to Josa’s, then to the party at Claudia’s, and finally ended up passing out at Coral’s house and sleeping until noon the next day, after the entrance exams were safely over.

Ada was furious. She tried to lock Chango in her room again, and even boarded up the window, but Chango kept finding ways to get out. They didn’t speak to each other for weeks. Then one day Ada came home from work early. Chango took one look at her face and knew something had happened. “Hargis is sick,” she said, setting her tanks in their spot by the door.

“But she’s only been diving five years,” Chango said, and wished she hadn’t. That was how long Ada had been diving too.

“Company inspection missed a hole in her suit. It’ll go quickly for her.” Ada sat down on the couch, her arms resting on her knees. “That seems to be about all I can hope for anyone anymore, that when the sickness comes it will take them quickly.” She shook her head. “It’s hopeless. I keep telling everyone we need to organize, but they don’t listen. I can’t save them,” she looked at Chango. “I can’t even save you.”

She almost retorted that she didn’t need Ada to save her, watch out for her, lecture her or do any of the other things which Ada saw as duties and Chango saw as infringements on her liberty. But she stopped herself, shocked to see her sister near tears. “That’s not true,” she said. “I’m not diving.”

“But you will!” Ada shouted, tears suddenly springing forth from her eyes. “Any day now, when my back is turned, you’ll put in an application, and make an appointment to be sterilized.”

“No. No I won’t, Ada. I won’t be a clerical worker like you wanted, but I promise you, I won’t dive either. I’ll find another way to get along.”

“Really?” Ada wiped her eyes and sniffed.

“Really.” Chango sat down next to her on the couch. “I promise.”

Ada nodded. “Well, that’s something,” she said, and managed to smile a little. “But I’m afraid the vatdivers are a lost cause. They’re so afraid of what GeneSys will do if we organize. They’ll never listen to me. I might as well give it up.”

“You can’t,” Chango stood up again, shocked. “You can’t give up. Sooner or later they’ll realize they have nothing to lose, and even if they don’t, you’ll know you did everything you could to change things. If you give up, you’ll never be able to live with yourself. You know its true.”

Ada stared at her a moment and then nodded in resignation. “I know. I guess today I just wish it weren’t,” she said, looking more tired than Chango had ever seen her before. oOo

But all of that was before Ada's death and the suspicion of negligence that darkened her name and discredited the union movement. Everything had changed since then. Now the question of whether or not to dive in the vats was a moot one. GeneSys wouldn’t hire sports anymore. It was one of the things Ada had fought for and gained in the movement’s first and last strike.

Chango never did decide what she wanted to do with herself, so she, like so many others, lead a marginal existence. Exploring old buildings, scavenging, repairing automobiles, cutting lawns, cleaning houses, scanning cash cards. She lived anyplace she could park her car or bum a floor for the night, but for the most part that was still Vattown, those gritty streets and weathered buildings where she remained, obscure in her sister’s shadow.

Rain hissed in the magnetic field of Woodward Avenue, rising to a shrill whine with the passing of every gleaming, beetle-shaped levcar. Helix picked her way along the neglected sidewalk, the pot-hole freckled motor lane a buffer of neglect between herself and the shiny, rain slick blackness of the levway. Like twin rivers, the maglev lanes flowed into Oz and out again, leaving the outmoded, the deadwood, in eddies along its banks.

Woodward was the first concrete highway in the United States. Automobiles weren’t invented here, but this was where they began changing the world. Now everyone who could afford it drove maglev. They were a big improvement; no pollution, no auto accidents.

Of course, not everyone could afford maglev. Rusting and battered automobiles stood parked along the side of the motor lane — Civics and Geos and Neons, their names fit for a world that had passed them by.

Although the bulk of her life had been spent in Hector Martin’s comfortable apartment in the GeneSys building, Helix had been a pedestrian before. At the orphanage every Saturday; released onto the sunbaked pavement to walk and run to the corner store to buy comic books. In her memory, the sun was always shining, but that could not have been the case. Was the sun shining the day Matt and Tina had waited for her outside the shop and taken her Super Neutrino Man number eighty-six from her? She didn't remember. All she remembered were their vicious faces, their laughter, and the brightly colored pages fluttering torn to the cracked pavement of the sidewalk. A sidewalk like this one, the metal screened shop fronts similar too. She was countless blocks from the tree-lined oasis of prosperity surrounding the GeneSys building, walking forgotten in a limboland of aging concrete.

Barricaded pawn-shops and living hair clinics gave way to a long stretch of defunct department store, its walls and windows coated with a thick layer of yellowish gray biopolymer paint. Plaint, as it was commonly known, was one of many materials based on matrices of organic cells which GeneSys produced.

The parked cars disappeared and maglev traffic thinned. An aged Ford Taurus rumbled down the pitted motor lane, sending up splashes of rain from numerous potholes. Its movement was labored compared to the occasional blurred whoosh of the levcars.

Helix watched the motorcar pass, lumbering into the distance at a pace still, despite its age, beyond her own. What's more, it was going someplace, which was more than she could say. She’d left on an impulse, hoping to discover why when she got there; wherever it was she wanted to go. She was continually aware of the foolishness of it, but apparently that didn’t matter, she could not get herself to go back. Whenever she thought of it a hand — an invisible hand that she did not know —

placed itself firmly on her heart and pushed her forward through the abandoned streets as it had pushed her out of Hector’s apartment door several hours ago.

Woodward led her down through the city, towards the river, past the university and the cultural center; beautiful, crumbling stone buildings shored up haphazardly, halfheartedly, with garish patches of purple and orange MasonBond.

A small group of people passed by, shaggy men and women in weather-faded greencoats and colorful knitted hats; students or squatters, or both. Helix drew in her shoulders and put her head down as they passed, but none of them seemed to pay her much mind.

She stopped in front of the Art Institute. Blank, boarded up windows stared back at her blindly, a line of polybond around each like heavy mascara, outlining their surprise at the theft of sight. There were supposed to be people living there now, artists. The front doors were padlocked and barred and padlocked again, as if someone wanted very much for you to know you could not go in there. Before this denial brooded The Thinker, too large, too solid and permanently heavy to steal, but convenient to deface. His full body tattoo of fluorescent spray-plaint gave testimony to years of flourishing artistic expression.

She walked on, Woodward leading her visibly closer to Oz, through a district of moderate prosperity which supported clothing shops, small offices and restaurants.

She pulled Hector Martin's faded overcoat around her protectively as she passed a group of office people, chatting unceasingly with one another, oblivious to her presence. On the next corner there was a stoplight, and more people, all the time more people, and Helix took extra care that her mouth was completely shut.

A little girl in a pink biopolymer raincoat with matching hat and umbrella passed her in the intersection. As her father tugged her along, she looked at Helix with bright black eyes and smiled. But Helix didn't dare smile back.

On the next corner the neon warmth of a diner beckoned, “Fine Food,” and her stomach growled on cue. It had been hours since she’d left GeneSys, aimless hours of walking. There'd be even more people inside, and in closer proximity, but she was hungry, her stomach as empty as her vacant and searching heart.

The diner smelled of coffee and frying eggs. Helix sat in a red bio-vinyl upholstered booth at the back of the restaurant, speedily demolishing a club sandwich and fries. It was warm inside, the windows fogged and sweating, but she kept the raincoat on. Nobody, including her waitress, had paid much attention to her. As she reached for her coke, the waitress reappeared, “Anything else?” Helix shook her head, and the waitress placed a swiper on the table and walked away again. Helix stared at it as if it were a cockroach that had just crawled out from beneath the napkin dispenser. Its screen showed a total for her meal, $12.67.

A chill went through her and settled in the pit of her stomach. She shivered, despite the muggy air. Sweat stood out on her arms and neck. Hector Martin's raincoat clung to her clammy skin. She'd forgotten about money.

Helix riffled through the pockets of Hector’s overcoat, searching for the cash card she knew she’d left behind in the apartment. All she found was a useless data card. She turned it thoughtfully between her fingers, then pantomimed passing it through the slot on the swiper, carefully shielding the card with her palm so an observer would not see that she hadn’t actually run it through. She stood up and walked down the aisle, passing her waitress on the way to the door.

Helix was almost past the cash register when the waitress called out, “Ma’am, you forgot to swipe your card!” Helix plunged for the door. “Ma’am! Ma’am!” the waitress cried again, running after her. Helix slammed her upper palms against the polyglass door, overcoming its resistance with her momentum. She plunged towards the outer door, only to be brought up short by a sudden jerk at her shoulder. She whirled around, expecting the waitress, but instead she saw the corner of her raincoat, jammed in the crack of the door behind her. Helix tugged frantically at the raincoat, but it was solidly wedged in the doorway.

The waitress barrelled towards her, a dishwasher waving his hands in her wake. She reached the door and pushed on it. Panicking, Helix pushed back and they stood there, separated by the polyglass, deadlocked. The woman scowled and shoved at the door again. It opened a crack, and Helix bent to free her coat. The bottom button had torn off, and as she stood again the coat gaped open. Turning for the outer door, she caught a glimpse of the waitress staring, her eyes wide. Helix fled blindly down the street, running at first and then, at the stares of passersby, slowing to a brisk walk. She turned a corner, and another, but heard no footsteps following her. They weren't chasing her. She'd seen that waitress' face. They were afraid of her.