At the cabin door, he said resignedly, “Don’t treat her badly.” My blood went cold, and I pressed my forearm to my mouth to stifle an involuntary sob.
I kicked open the door, and saw nothing but shadows. I called out “Lights!” and two responded, in the ceiling and by the bed. Helen was naked, chained by the wrists and ankles. She looked up and saw me, then began to emit a horrified keening noise.
I pressed the blade against Holder’s throat. “Open those things!”
“The shackles?”
“Yes!”
“I can’t. They’re not smart; they’re just welded shut.”
“Where are your tools?”
He hesitated. “I’ve got some wrenches in the truck. All the rest is back in town.”
I looked around the cabin, then I led him into a corner and told him to stand there, facing the wall. I knelt by the bed.
“Ssh. We’ll get you out of here.” Helen fell silent. I touched her cheek with the back of my hand; she didn’t flinch, but she stared back at me, disbelieving. “We’ll get you out.” The timber bedposts were thicker than my arms, the links of the chains wide as my thumb. I wasn’t going to snap any part of this with my bare hands.
Helen’s expression changed: I was real, she was not hallucinating. She said dully, “I thought you’d given up on me. Woke one of the backups. Started again.”
I said, “I’d never give up on you.”
“Are you sure?” She searched my face. “Is this the edge of what’s possible? Is this the worst it can get?”
I didn’t have an answer to that.
I said, “You remember how to go numb, for a shedding?”
She gave me a faint, triumphant smile. “Absolutely.” She’d had to endure imprisonment and humiliation, but she’d always had the power to cut herself off from her body’s senses.
“Do you want to do it now? Leave all this behind?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be safe soon. I promise you.”
“I believe you.” Her eyes rolled up.
I cut open her chest and took out the Qusp.
Francine and I had both carried spare bodies, and clothes, in the trunks of our cars. Adai were banned from domestic flights, so Helen and I drove along the interstate, up towards Washington D.C., where Francine would meet us. We could claim asylum at the Swiss embassy; Isabelle had already set the machinery in motion.
Helen was quiet at first, almost shy with me as if with a stranger, but on the second day, as we crossed from Alabama into Georgia, she began to open up. She told me a little of how she’d hitchhiked from state to state, finding casual jobs that paid e-cash and needed no social security number, let alone biometric ID. “Fruit picking was the best.”
She’d made friends along the way, and confided her nature to those she thought she could trust. She still wasn’t sure whether or not she’d been betrayed. Holder had found her in a transient’s camp under a bridge, and someone must have told him exactly where to look, but it was always possible that she’d been recognized by a casual acquaintance who’d seen her face in the media years before. Francine and I had never publicized her disappearance, never put up flyers or web pages, out of fear that it would only make the danger worse.
On the third day, as we crossed the Carolinas, we drove in near silence again. The landscape was stunning, the fields strewn with flowers, and Helen seemed calm. Maybe this was what she needed the most: just safety, and peace.
As dusk approached, though, I felt I had to speak.
“There’s something I’ve never told you,” I said. “Something that happened to me when I was young.”
Helen smiled. “Don’t tell me you ran away from the farm? Got tired of milking, and joined the circus?”
I shook my head. “I was never adventurous. It was just a little thing.” I told her about the kitchen hand.
She pondered the story for a while. “And that’s why you built the Qusp? That’s why you made me? In the end, it all comes down to that man in the alley?” She sounded more bewildered than angry.
I bowed my head. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” she demanded. “Are you sorry that I was ever born?”
“No, but-”
“You didn’t put me on that boat. Holder did that.”
I said, “I brought you into a world with people like him. What I made you, made you a target.”
“And if I’d been flesh and blood?” she said. “Do you think there aren’t people like him, for flesh and blood? Or do you honestly believe that if you’d had an organic child, there would have been no chance at all that she’d have run away?”
I started weeping. “I don’t know. I’m just sorry I hurt you.”
Helen said, “I don’t blame you for what you did. And I understand it better now. You saw a spark of good in yourself, and you wanted to cup your hands around it, protect it, make it stronger. I understand that. I’m not that spark, but that doesn’t matter. I know who I am, I know what my choices are, and I’m glad of that. I’m glad you gave me that.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. “Do you think I’d feel better, here and now, just because some other version of me handled the same situations better?” She smiled. “Knowing that other people are having a good time isn’t much of a consolation to anyone.”
I composed myself. The car beeped to bring my attention to a booking it had made in a motel a few kilometres ahead.
Helen said, “I’ve had time to think about a lot of things. Whatever the laws say, whatever the bigots say, all adai are part of the human race. And what I have is something almost every person who’s ever lived thought they possessed. Human psychology, human culture, human morality, all evolved with the illusion that we lived in a single history. But we don’t-so in the long run, something has to give. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather we tinker with our physical nature than abandon our whole identities.”
I was silent for a while. “So what are your plans, now?”
“I need an education.”
“What do you want to study?”
“I’m not sure yet. A million different things. But in the long run, I know what I want to do.”
“Yeah?” The car turned off the highway, heading for the motel.
“You made a start,” she said, “but it’s not enough. There are people in billions of other branches where the Qusp hasn’t been invented yet-and the way things stand, there’ll always be branches without it. What’s the point in us having this thing, if we don’t share it? All those people deserve to have the power to make their own choices.”
“Travel between the branches isn’t a simple problem,” I explained gently. “That would be orders of magnitude harder than the Qusp.”
Helen smiled, conceding this, but the corners of her mouth took on the stubborn set I recognized as the precursor to a thousand smaller victories.
She said, “Give me time, Dad. Give me time.”
Slow Life - MICHAEL SWANWICK
Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and in the twenty-two years that followed established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has several times been a finalist for the Nebula Award, as well as for the World Fantasy Award and for the John W. Campbell Award, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov’s Readers
