Bright's Light (6 page)

The citizens didn’t seem to notice that their lifespans were abbreviated. According to the fragments of information Grassly had found hiding in nooks of the feed, when the Store first opened, after the Great Corporate Retreat, the ancestors had lived to be between sixty and one hundred years old. That was found to be less than ideal from an economic perspective. Now, the problem of inefficiently long lives had been solved and the problem of inefficiently short ones was becoming critical.

Still, it was one thing to understand that releasing was an accepted part of this society and another thing entirely to find oneself directed to end another being’s life prematurely.

Grassly swallowed and felt his attitude shift back off-kilter.

“Me?” he said. He immediately regretted it. A real PS officer would never say that. He’d made a point of hardly speaking when he was among the other PS staff, or with any ancestors, really. In truth, he’d spent most of the past two years in his workshop, dancing and watching, and so was not practised at fitting in.

Now the other three PS officers stared at him. Grassly forced himself to keep his face still and unafraid. He yearned for his Mother like he never had before. She always knew what to say to make him feel less afraid and more whole.

“Of course,” he said. “Right away.”

He reached for his releaser, only to find that it was not on his belt. He’d used the casing to hold one of the test versions of his light, and he’d forgotten to order a new one.

“I seem to have lost my releaser,” he said, after a long, awkward pause, during which his colleagues stared at him, three very similar faces covered by three identical sets of mirrored wraparound dataglasses. “I mean, it was broken during a releasing I took part in earlier.”

The other PS officers didn’t reply. The commander pulled his own releaser from his belt. “Her too,” he said, pointing to the lure, who stood slight and rigid in the doorway, like a blade of grass trying to stay upright in a wind. She clearly didn’t understand what was happening. She wasn’t rated for independent client care, much less for dealing with a situation in which a client was behaving unproductively and was surrounded by PS staff with releasers drawn.

Grassly only barely stopped himself from blurting out a protest. The productive was near the end of his lifespan—he was twenty if he was a day. But the lure was little more than a child and seemed uniquely vulnerable, perhaps because she was standing right in front of him. Before Grassly could figure out what to do, one of the PS officers strode over and jammed a releaser under the girl’s arm. Her cry was cut short by the PS officer’s hand, which clamped over her mouth as she fell.

Grassly felt his own knees buckle. This was much worse close up. The girl’s fear filled the room, palpable as dust down his throat.

As the girl’s body sagged, the PS officer who held her by the head recited the standard words: “By order of the Deciders, you have been released from your contract. We thank you for your service and congratulate you in advance for coming back better than ever at some point in the future.”

Grassly’s lungs strained, and he realized he’d been holding his breath.

He was responsible for this.

“I’m just going to get a new releaser,” he muttered, backing out of the room.

No one followed him out. The chip he’d implanted in his neck streamed rotating sets of false data, so if anyone came looking, they wouldn’t be able to locate him. He had to find the favour with the light helmet. Things were not at all optimal from a success perspective.

Bright hurried toward the nearest privator, which would take her to the seventh floor. As she neared it, her footsteps slowed.

What if there was nothing wrong with her client except doofishness? He’d paid good credits and she’d given him to a barely trained lure. He’d end up watching the girl do double dream hands for fifteen minutes! Or worse, maybe there
was
something wrong with him and she’d left the curly-haired lure to deal with it. That wasn’t nice to contemplate, either.

As a highly trained party favour, it was her duty to figure out what was wrong with the client. If he was sick, she’d report him. No matter how it looked on her record.

Bright was tempted to take the helmet off and throw it down a long hallway, but she didn’t. She had only one first-release product in her arsenal and she couldn’t afford to waste it, not if she was going to get herself promoted to the House of It.

She turned a corner and saw a PS officer rushing away down another hallway. It was a good thing she hadn’t thrown her helmet. PS staff tended to notice things like that.

She sparked up a big smile. No problem. Nothing was a problem. She swayed and strutted back to the Stimu Room. She stood in the hallway and peered tentatively through the open door into the room. She saw three PS officers standing around her slump-shouldered client. One held a releaser to the man’s hunched back. Over the bass thump of the music, she could hear his words: “By order of the Deciders, you have been released from your contract. We thank you for your service and congratulate you in advance on coming back better than ever at some point in the future.”

The officer must have pressed the button, because the client’s body leapt into the air and then slumped to the floor. The other two officers stepped back quickly, as though afraid to be contaminated by the man’s body.

Bright couldn’t see the lure. With any luck, the girl had gotten lost on her way to the Stimu Room. Then Bright spotted a pair of small feet clad in adorable yellow work boots lying just inside the door frame. The feet within the boots were a bad kind of still.

Bright backed away, hoping the PS staff hadn’t noticed her lurking at the doorway, and began to walk quickly back the way she’d come. When thoughts about the client and the little yellow boots rose in Bright’s head, she pushed them away, as she’d been trained to do with all negative thoughts. She searched through various rooms until she found Fon and her client partying in the Bounceteria.

Fon looked up at Bright’s head through the glow of her halo, and Bright knew her dressing-mate was coveting the helmet.

“Here,” said Bright, taking it off. “I’ve had an amazing time with it. You can borrow it now.”

“Awesome!” cried Fon. She struggled to remove her halo with one hand and jam the helmet on with the other.

“Let me help,” said Bright.

Grassly looked around the Bounceteria for clients, those sad figures who spent all their hard-earned credits just so they could dance and mingle with more beautiful people. If the 51s weren’t opposed to prejudice of all kinds, he’d have thought them pathetic. The Bounceteria had slides that culminated in bounce landings so that the people who went down them pinged from platform to platform. Bouncing balls lay in small groups like round huddled creatures. One purple wall billowed, waiting for people to be flung against it by a slingshot attached to a TeeterBouncer. He saw only one client. The tall woman was inside an IndieBounce tube and she was, predictably, bouncing. When she landed on the floor of the tube, it propelled her at least ten feet into the air. The stretchy see-through plastic sides kept her on a more or less straight trajectory up and down. An elasticized plastic top stopped her, just barely, from bumping the ceiling with her head.

The expression on the woman’s face was somewhere between exultation and worry.

Grassly knew from long observation that favours used the IndieBouncer when they needed a moment to themselves and
wanted to keep a client busy. Clients couldn’t get themselves out of the device or even stop bouncing. A favour needed to change the tension on the tube to dampen the bounce.

How long had this particular client had been ricocheting between the ceiling and the floor? The woman was still making happy noises, but with some effort.

In another corner of the room, one of the favours sat on a spongy padded stool. She wore the pink helmet shoved down low on her head, and was doubled over so the brim of the helmet nearly touched her bare knees. The other favour was trying, without success, to force a wire semicircle covered with little light bulbs over top of the helmet.

“It’s not going to fit, Fon. If you want to wear it, you’re going to have to leave the halo off.”

“But Bright, the halo is totally my trademark!” said the one called Fon.

“Only for like three months.”

“It’ll fit!” said Fon. “Just push harder.”

Bright was slightly rounder than the one called Fon, and her skin wasn’t as glowy. She had on a bikini top with a pair of baggy suspender pants that managed to be both revealing and capacious. She also wore a heavy pair of work gloves, sturdy boots, and a belt that sagged with the weight of many tools.

Grassly knocked on the doorway.

Bright looked up. She froze, as though caught in the act of doing something wrong.

He wanted to tell her to relax, but that would make her even more concerned. PS staff didn’t say things like “relax.”

They stood around making people feel secure and special. Until the day they didn’t.

“Lot of options for bouncing in here,” he said, finally.

Both favours were looking at him now, glossed lips slightly open.

The one called Fon had twisted her head at an uncomfortable angle so that she could see him. Bright’s expression was still one of polite alarm.

Grassly nodded, as though in answer to a comment. He hadn’t been socially gifted on H51, where the influence of the Mothers made the population one of the kindest, friendliest, and most overpoweringly helpful in existence. He was even less skilled at being social in the Store. PS staff weren’t big talkers. Nor, he realized, were they big on knocking. That knock had been a mistake. His lack of ease wasn’t helping the mission. No, he thought. Don’t be too hard on yourself. A Sending was a learning process. He wasn’t expected to be perfect.

He realized they were staring at him and forced himself to continue. From behind him came the repetitive
wheeze-thump
of the client surging up and down in the IndieBouncer.

“You changed the wearer of the light,” he said.

“I, uh …” said Bright.

“She
said
I could …” said Fon.

“It’s fine,” Grassly assured them.

He saw their shoulders relax infinitesimally. Their breathing became more regular. He’d succeeded in calming them. How satisfying.

“And the light,” he said. “You have turned it on?”

This time, only the one called Bright stiffened.

“No,” she said. With his highly attuned senses, common to all 51s, Grassly could hear her heart hammering in her chest. Was she …
lying
? He had observed favours lying to clients and sometimes to each other when they were throwing around false compliments, but they didn’t lie about substantive issues.

He knew she’d turned on the light. He’d seen the effects on the client. He’d also seen her accidentally use it on the male favour who’d come to her dressing room, though in that instance she might not have realized what she’d done.

“Have you looked at the light?”

The two favours exchanged a glance. Though he was supremely confident in his interpretive abilities, he found it difficult to decipher the favours’ reactions under all the makeup and surgical alterations.

Bright nodded. Her face was somewhat less regular than Fon’s. He could see why she was forty-second in the credit standings rather than first. But there was something compelling about her small anomalies, such as the way her hair wasn’t quite perfect and her right eyebrow was slightly and permanently higher than the left. It made her look as though she was listening intently to a good joke.

“What happened when you turned the light on?”

“Nothing,” said Bright, quickly.

“Well, not nothing,” said Fon.

“Mostly nothing.” Bright stared at Fon. If favours weren’t so obviously limited in the areas of empathy and
community, he would have thought all this glancing and staring was a means of communicating telepathically. Instead, it was plain to Grassly that Bright was simply trying to tell her dressing-mate to be quiet. And Fon wasn’t getting the message.

Ancestors. So sad.

“We pretty much passed out. After it flickered,” Fon said. Flickered. As he’d suspected, the flicker was the significant variable.

Grassly remembered that, when the previous version had been in the flickering phase, nothing had happened when he passed his hand through the uncertain beam. When the beam became steady, it had burned him.

“Have you looked at the beam since?”

“Only like ten times, practically,” said Fon. “It’s so pretty!”

To demonstrate, she turned the light on. She pulled the helmet off and stared into the light. She shone it into Bright’s face. Then she pointed it abruptly at Grassly.

The beam slid over his black uniform, and he jerked away as it moved up his body.

“Enough!” he shouted before she could burn the exposed part of his face.

She turned it off.

Grassly exhaled. Collected himself. Told himself to remember what Sally Lancaster had said about enlightenment in her book: “Light is the key to bringing all beings into harmony with nature.” She better be right about that. He reminded himself, in a supportive way, of what he was doing here and why. All creatures were worth saving, and
any species that could dance like the ancestors deserved a second chance in a new, more hospitable environment. Once Earth had had time to recover, perhaps in five hundred or a thousand years, it too would be rehabbed and some new, deserving species would find a home here.

But in the meantime, the light required more testing before anything else went wrong.

There was another long pause as he considered what to say.

“Have you shone it on anyone else? Besides yourselves?” At this, Bright cleared her throat.

“No,” she lied. Again.

She was definitely afraid. She knew the light was doing something to people. That’s why she was trying to give the helmet to her dressing-mate. That was most decidedly not enlightened behaviour.

“Please give me the helmet,” he said, reaching out a hand to take it.