Valentine's Exile (41 page)

“I imagine you're supposed to turn me in,” Valentine said.

“If it comes to protecting my position, don't think I won't. You and the Grog are nothing to me. Nothing.”

“Except someone you can be honest around.”

“You want honest? I don't like people. That's why I'm a vet. Now get out, I've got some cows to inseminate.”

Valentine got out and went over to greet the dogs. He nodded to Pepsa, busy cleaning out the kennels. Dr. Boothe stared at him for a moment, then drove away.

Michiver seemed to know more than he was willing to say as he greeted Valentine at the farm office. “Heard you had a good time after—err, at, the dance, buck.” Out back a feed truck clattered as the winter's stores were transferred to the silo. A group of hands ate sack lunches on the porch.

“A lively night,” Valentine agreed. “Where do you want me today?”

“You can have the afternoon off. Be back for evening milking. Let the machines do the titty-pulling for a change.”

“I give him a month,” one of the other hands said to his lunch mates.

“He's colored,” a big piledriver of a man named Ski said as Valentine left. He didn't bother to lower his voice; Valentine hardly had to harden his ears at all to pick up the commentary. “And a Grogfucker to boot. She'll keep him around to show off to the other doctors at the holiday parties. He'll get his dismissal papers right before New Year's.”

Valentine seethed. He took a walk to let the anger bleed off. Watching cows had a magical soothing quality to it, something about the tail swishing and contemplative chewing always put him in a better mood.

The cows of Xanadu were rather scrawny specimens. Compared to the fat milkers in Wisconsin or the small mountains of beef he'd seen in Nebraska they looked flesh-less and apathetic—despite the good grass and plentiful water.

Of course, with characters like Ski taking care of them, anything was possible. He probably left nails or bits of wire lying around. Cows aren't overly bright in their grazing, and they're never right again once a wire is lodged in one of their stomachs.

Valentine found Ahn-Kha scooping grain. The Golden One was alone, and the cascade of grain going onto the conveyor as it went up to the silo gave a lot of covering noise. He hopped up onto the side of the truck.

“I met a doctor last night and got inside the towers. I saw Gail.”

To his credit, Ahn-Kha didn't miss a stroke with the shovel. “I knew this would be the end of the trail. I am surprised she is still alive.”

“Give me that. You shouldn't be pushing.”

Ahn-Kha passed him the shovel. It felt good to move the mix of corn and feed grain. “This is some kind of baby factory. I've heard stories of women otherwise unemployable just being warehoused while they gestate. Once they recover they go through it all over again.”

“Then why all the security?”

“Remember the Ranch? The Kurians might be tinkering with the fetuses. I've wondered why they don't make their own versions of Bears.”

“Too hard to control, perhaps. My David, where were you born?”

“The lakes in the Northwoods. You know that.”

“But do you? You've told me before it was a strange childhood. Never seriously ill. Never a broken bone. Healing from cuts overnight.”

Valentine shoveled harder. “Bear blood, passed down. Like Styachowski. If someone was breeding a more pliable human, it didn't take.”

Fran Paoli continued to see him on her strange schedule as the weather turned sharply colder.

Valentine loved autumn up north, the bannerlike colors of the trees, the wet, earthy smell of leaves falling and rotting. He found excuses to work near the wire where he could see the trees, smell the woods.

They saw each other strictly on her terms. Her duties sometimes left her with as much as a whole day free, and she would tear up the roads in her big Lincoln to get them to a show in Cleveland and then back down again. Once she brought him to the south Grand and they made love in an empty conference room on the top floor where a few spare mattresses were stored, for medical staff working long shifts to take breaks.

Valentine never asked her about putting him to work in the towers. He never asked her for so much as a ham sandwich. She bought him two sets of clothes, a fine-material suit with a double-breasted jacket—he feigned ignorance with the necktie knot, since the only one he really knew how to make was the tight Southern Command military style—and some casual, slate-colored pants with a taupe turtleneck made of an incredibly soft and lightweight material she called cashmere.

“You need more than cash to get that these days,” she said, observing the results when he put it on and stood in front of the framed floor-length mirror in the corner of her bedroom. “You need connections.”

“My whole life I've never had a connection.”

“Which is why you're milking cows. I'm not even that great of a doctor, but I'm running a whole department here thanks to connections I've made. Why haven't you asked me for a better job? Every guy I've dated wants me to set him up in an office.”

Preguilt flooded Valentine before he even said the words. “You're not like any woman I've ever known, Fran. I didn't want you to think I was . . . what did Oriana call it . . . ‘after your status.' ”

“You're so young.”

Valentine let that rest.

“A brass ring won't just fall into your lap, you know. You're smart. Haven't you figured out that you need to be angling for job security?”

“If I don't like it in the Ordnance I'll just go back into Kentucky, or sign on as an officer in a Grog unit.”

“That's a waste. Any stump-tooth can fill out requisition forms for Grog infantry. You need to get yourself into a field Kur needs here. Something not just anyone can do. That's why I chose obstetrics. Kur looks ten thousand years into the future, and about the only certainty is that you need babies to get there.”

“The kind of education I have doesn't lend itself to medical school,” Valentine said. The bitterness came of its own accord, surprising him.

“There's nursing. You could put in a year here, then go off to Cleveland or Pittsburg for classroom work.”

“You could arrange that?” Valentine said.

“I'll speak to the director. Be right back.” She turned her back to him, then turned around again and sat on the bed.

“She said you might fit an opening,” Fran Paoli said, patting the spot next to her. “Let's do a follow-up interview to be sure.”

Valentine managed to wheedle a job for Ahn-Kha out of it as well. Ahn-Kha went to work in the laundry of the main hospital building—the amount of clothing and linen generated by the hospital and the four Grands was formidable. Ahn-Kha discovered two other well-trained Grogs, the simpler Grey Ones, working in the bowels of the hospital, also filling and emptying the washers.

They left the grotty little hand housing and moved into the cleaner, but smaller, apartments for the service workers.

“Less than two weeks in Xanadu and already you're improved,” the housing warden said. He carried an assortment of tools at his belt and a long-hosed can of bug spray in a hip holster. “I want your Grog to shower outside, though, or you're outta here. He can use the hose. First sign of fleas and you're outta here.”

The room had a phone, and even more amazingly, it functioned. Valentine couldn't remember the last time he'd stayed in a room with a working phone.

They put Valentine to work in the South Grand to begin. His “nursing” duties involved bringing food and emptying the occasional urine bottle, and endless tubes of breast milk.

He learned a little more of the “baby factory” routine. The women had their children at an appointed date and time, always by caesarian. Up until that time they were two to a room, with high cubicle walls in between giving the illusion of individual apartments. After giving birth, they were “rotated” to a new building and given a new room. If they hadn't had a window before, they got one the next time.

Each room had a single television.

A modicum of deal-making took place having to do with television choice and the window side of the room. The television had four channels; channel three exhibited a parade of tawdry dramas including the staple
Noonside Passions.
Would Ted turn Holly in to gain the brass ring he'd so long wanted, though he did not yet know she was carrying his child, and would her sister Nichelle ever get out of the handsome-yet-despicable black marketeer Brick's webs? Channel six showed a mixture of quiz shows, courtroom contests where curt, black-robed Reapers impassively heard evidence and assigned monetary damages, divorces, or inheritances, then self-help or skill-improvement sessions in the evening; channel nine broadcast children's programming in the day and then music, either with the musicians or with relaxing imagery at night; channel eleven was the only station that broadcast twenty-four hours a day, providing nothing but propagandistic Ordnance newscasts and bombastic documentaries about mankind's past follies.

Valentine worked four floors in his new blue scrubs, madly during mealtimes, slowly at other hours. Two days of twelve-hour shifts, then a day off, then two more days of twelve-hour shifts, then a day off and a half day—though the half day usually consisted of either training or NUC lectures or some kind of team-building make-work project. His charges were all in their second trimester. Though the women looked wan and drawn thanks to their pregnancies, they were cheerful and talkative, or spent long hours on sewing projects for Ordance soldiers (rumor had it the semen that fertilized them came from decorated combat veterans). He wondered if Malita Carrasca had been this upbeat during her pregnancy. He wondered at the weight loss; the mothers to be he'd met over the years had mostly put on weight.

“It's the quick succession of pregnancies,” another nurse, an older woman with years of experience, told him as she lit up in the emergency exit stairway, the unofficial smoking lounge. Valentine had taken to carrying cigarettes, and even smoking one now and again—it was the easiest excuse to get away from his duties for a few minutes. “They have six and then they retire to the Ontario lakeshore and run a sewing circle or a craft workshop. Nice little payoff. But hell on the body while you're cranking them out.”

“Diet, Tar,” the hefty nurse who counted off meals as they went on Valentine's cart said. She was his immediate supervisor for mealtime duties. “These doctors are all protein-happy. Throwing pregnant women into ketosis. Protein, fats, fiber, and more protein is all they get. And enough iron for a suit of armor. Liver, onions, supplements. ”

“It gets results,” Valentine said. “They're happy enough.”

“That's the medication talking. Every woman here's buzzier than a beehive.”

Valentine got a chance to test his supervisor's opinion the next day. Every time Valentine got a chance, he looked out one of the windows facing the patio area and the greenhouse below, trying to get a feel for the rhythm of Gail Foster's schedule. Other than a trip to the pool every other day, she never seemed to join the other groups of pink mothers-to-be.

He wondered if there was a reason for that.

Then one day, as he served lunch, he saw her again, sitting at a table with a book open before her. She had one of the thick, white robes around her body and a towel around her neck.

Valentine finished passing out his meals to the women who ordered food delivered to their rooms—most ate on the second floor, in the cafeteria—and then hurried to the elevator and went outside, ostensibly for a smoke.

Gail Foster sat wrapped up in her book and white terrycloth. He tried to read the title, but it was in a cursive script hard to see at a distance. He walked up at an angle, getting out of the mild fall breeze so he could strike a match.

The smell of the match lighting reminded him of that long-ago escape from Chicago's Zoo.

It looked like the elaborate cursive script of her book read
A Dinner of Onions,
but Valentine couldn't be sure. Gail studied the pages before turning, as though she had to learn the first chapter for a test.

“Good book?” he asked.

She didn't respond. Valentine watched her eyes. When she got to the bottom of the right-facing page, instead of turning it she went back up to the top of the left-side page again. Was she memorizing the novel?

“Not many patients here like to read,” Valentine tried again. He took another step forward, blocking her light. “What's it about?”

She turned, looked up at him. “I'm sorry?”

“Your book. What's it about?”

“Some people. I don't know.”

“You feeling alright?” Valentine asked. She seemed distant.

“Very well. Doctor says I'm doing very well. But I need some sun, you see?”

Valentine took that to mean he should get out of her light. “Your accent, where are you from?”

“Down south.”

Nothing to be gained by waiting,
though he felt as though he were having a conversation with a child. “Do you ever want to go back?”

The words slid off her like the water in the pool. “Back where?”

“Down south?”

“No. I have to stay here so the baby can come. It's part of being a healthy mom. There are four parts to being a healthy mom, did you know? Diet, Exercise, Care, and Attitude. I had to work on my attitude most of all, but it's much better now.”

“Obviously,” Valentine said, giving up. “Do you ever wish you could be with your child after it's born?”