she did not think the Institute could have traced her here yet. At the terminal she would be able to smooth a few more people, and maybe they would give her enough for her to buy a ticket off this mountain and off this world. If she could hide herself well enough, take herself far enough, the Institute would never be sure she was dead.
Halfway between the mall and the landing terminal, she had to stop and rest. The cafe she entered was physically warm but spiritually cold, utilitarian and mechanical. Its emotional sterility was familiar.
Recently she had come to recognize it, but she saw no chance of replacing the void in herself with anything of greater meaning. She had changed a great deal during the last few months, but she had very little time left for changes.
The faint scents of half a dozen kinds of smoke lingered among the odors of automatic, packaged food. Lais slid into an empty booth. Across the room three people sat together, obviously taking pleasure in each other's company. For a moment she considered going to their table and insinuating herself into the group, acting pleasant at first but then increasingly irrational.
She was disgusted by her fantasies. Briefly, she thought she might be able to believe she was insane. Even the possibility would be comforting. If she could believe what she had been taught, that Institute geniuses were prone to instability, she could believe all the other lies. If she could believe the lies, the Institute could remain a philanthropic organization. If she could believe in the Institute, if she was mad, then she was not dying.
She wondered what they would do if she walked over and told them who and what she was. Lais had no experience with normal humans her own age. They might not even care, they might grin and say 'so what?' and move over to make room for her. They might pull back, very subtly, of course, and turn her away, if their people had taught them that the freaks might revolt again. That was the usual reaction. Worst, they might stare at her for a moment, look at each other, and decide silently among themselves to forgive her and tolerate her. She had seen that reaction among the normals who worked at the Institute, those who needed any shaky superiority they could grasp, who made themselves the judges of deeds punished half a century before.
A lighted menu on the wall offered substantial meals, but despite her hunger she was nauseated by the mixed smells of meat and sweet syrup. The menu changed a guilder and offered up utensils and a covered bowl of soup. She resented the necessity of spending even this little, because she had almost enough to go one more hard- to-trace world-step away. The sum she had and the sum she needed: they were such pitiful amounts, pocket money of other days.
For a moment she wished she were back at the Institute with the rest of the freaks, being catered to by pleasant human beings. Only for a moment. She would not be at the Institute but hidden in their isolated hospital; those pleasant human beings would be pretending to cure her while sucking up the last fruits of her mind and all the information her body could give them. All they would really care about would be what error in procedure had allowed such a mistake to be brought to term in their well-monitored artificial wombs. Fellows were not supposed to begin to die until they were thirty, though that would be denied. Nothing had warned the Institute that Lais would die fifteen years too early; nothing but the explanation and perhaps not even that, could tell them if any of her colleagues would die fifteen or fifty years too late, given time by a faulty biologic clock to develop into something the Institute could no longer
control, let alone understand. Their days would be terror and their sleep nightmare over that possibility.
And her people, the other Fellows, would hardly notice she was gone: that brought a pang of guilt. People she had known had left abruptly, and she had become so used to the excuses that she had ceased to ask about them. Had she ever asked? There were so many worlds, such great distances, so many possibilities: mobility seemed limitless. Lais had never spent as much as a year in a single outpost, and seldom saw acquaintances after transient project collaborations or casual sexual encounters. She had no emotional ties, no one to go to for help and trust, no one who knew her well enough to judge her sane against contrary evidence. Fellows were solitary specialists in fields too esoteric to discuss without the inducement of certain intellectual interaction. The lack of communication had never bothered Lais then, but now it seemed barbarous, and almost inconceivable.
Clear soup took the chill away and let minor discomforts intrude. The thick coat was too warm, but she wore it like a shield. Her hair and clothes were damp, and the heavy material of her pants began to itch as it grew warmer. Her face felt oily.
Trivialities disappeared. She had continued the research she had started before she was forced to run. She was crippled and slowed by having to do the scut-work in her mind. She needed a computer, but she could not afford to line one. It was frustrating, of course, exhausting, certainly, but necessary. It was what Lais did.
A hesitant touch on her shoulder awakened her. She did not remember falling asleep-- perhaps she had not slept: the data she had been considering lay organized in her mind, a new synthesis-- but she was lying on her side on the padded bench with her head pillowed on her arms.
'I'm really sorry. Mr. Kiviat says you have to leave.'
'Tell him to tell me himself,' she said.
'Please, miz.'
She opened her eyes. She had never seen an old person before; she could not help but stare, she could not speak for a moment. His face was deeply lined and what little hair he had was stringy, yellow-white, shading at his cheeks into two days' growth of gray stubble. He was terrified, put in the middle with no directions, afraid to try anything he might think of by himself. His pale, sunken eyes shifted back and forth, seeking guidance. The thin chain around his throat carried a child's identity tag. Pity touched her and she smiled, without humor but with understanding.
'Never mind,' she said. 'It's all right. I'll go.' His relief was a physical thing.
Groggy with sleep she stood up and started out. She stumbled, and the malignant pain crawled up her spine where eroded edges of bone ground together. She froze, knowing that was useless. The black windows and the shiny beads of icy snow turned scarlet. She heard herself fall, but she did not feel the impact.
She was unconscious for perhaps a second; she came to calmly recording that this was the first time the pain had actually made her faint.
'You okay, miz?'
The old man knelt at her side, hands half extended as if to help her, but trembling, afraid. Two months ago Lais would not have been able to imagine what it would be like to exist in perpetual fear.
'I just-- ' Even speaking hurt, and her voice shocked her with its weakness. She finished in a whisper. '-- have to rest for a little while.' She felt stupid lying on the floor, observed by the machines, but the humiliation was less than that of the few endless days at the hospital being poked and biopsied and sampled like an experiment in the culture of a recalcitrant tissue. By then she had known that the treatments were a charade, and that only the tests were important. She pushed herself up on her elbows, and the old man helped her sit.
'I have... I mean... my room... I'm not supposed to ...' His seamed face was scarlet. It showed emotion much more readily than the dead faces of sustained folk, perhaps because he aged and they did not, perhaps because they were no longer capable of deep feeling.
'Thank you,' she said.
He had to support her. His room was in the same building, reached by a web of dirty corridors. The room was white plastic and scrupulously clean, almost bare. The bluish shimmering cube of a trid moved
and muttered in the corner.
The old man took her to a broken sandbed and stood uncertainly by her. 'Is there anything... do you need... ?' Rusty words learned by rote long before, never used. Lais shook her head. She took off her coat, and he hurried to help her. She lay down. The bed was hard: air was meant to flow through granules and give the illusion of floating, but the jets had stopped and the tiny beads were packed down at the bottom, mobile and slippery only beneath the cover. It was softer than the street. The light was bright, but not intolerable. She threw her arm across her eyes.
* * *
Something awakened her: she lay taut, disoriented. The illumination was like late twilight. She heard her name again and turned. Over her shoulder she saw the old man crouched on a stool in front of the trid, peering into the bluish space of it, staring at a silent miniature of Lais. She did not have to listen to know what the voice was saying: they had traced her to Highport; they were telling the residents that she was here and that she was mad, a poor pitiful unstable genius, paranoid and frightened, needing compassion and aid. But not dangerous. Certainly not dangerous. Soothing words assured people that aggression had been eliminated from the chromosomes of the freaks (that was a lie, and impossible, but as good as truth). The voice said that there were only a few Fellows,
