Cat in Glass (17 page)

But the rest of me, which was the bigger part, said, “If a fellow can’t trust his own eyes, just what can he trust?” That bigger part of me didn’t give a hoot about whether I was brave or a man or not. It just believed what I was seeing and hearing. That’s when I dropped the basket and hightailed it for the house.

By the time I came through the front door, I couldn’t even talk. I just stood there shaking and sweating, with my mouth going open and shut. I was peeing my pants. I could feel it washing the mud off my feet onto Momma’s clean floor, and I didn’t even care. She let out a little cry. Pa got up and stared at me. I don’t know what he saw in my face, but it must have convinced him of something, because I have never seen him look like that before. He was scared, and I know it isn’t right, but for just one second I was glad.

Pa grabbed his shotgun from the corner, and he said, “All right, Lemmy. We’re gonna go find out what the hell is down there.” Then him and Lemmy took off for the root cellar.

Momma got her quilt, and she wrapped me up in it and made me sit down on the bench by the fire. She sat beside me, and rocked me and sang to me like she used to do
before I got so big. That’s all I wanted, just to bury my face in the good clean smells of Momma and forget there was ever anything else.

We sat like that for a long time, waiting for Pa and Lemmy to come back, watching the sun creep past noon into afternoon and the clouds begin to sweep across the sky again. But Pa and Lemmy never came. And we never heard anything for sure, no roar of the shotgun going off, no terrible screams nor cries for help. Once I fancied I heard a kind of long moan, way off across the straw grass. It could have been the wind, or an owl. But somehow, it made me wonder what we’d do if we had to get away. The only gun in the house besides Pa’s 10-gauge was Grampa’s Colt pistol, which Pa always kept locked in his trunk. I was pretty sure I could break that lock with a hammer. I was pretty sure I could do a lot of things if it came to saving Momma.

After a time, Momma fell asleep, and I did, too, still thinking about that lock. I was just too bone weary to hold my eyes open anymore. I had a dream, a fine warm dream about fishing down by the river on a summer’s day, and when I woke up it took me a minute to remember where I was.

The first thing I noticed was that Momma had left the bench. She was standing beside the front door with a butcher knife in her hands, whispering over and over again, “The Lord helps them that helps themselves. The Lord helps them that helps themselves.” All at once, it came to me that there was a funny noise outside, like bees swarming in a tree.

I jumped up, tipping over the bench, and yelled, “Momma! Don’t, Momma!”

She turned around, and there was a crazy look in her eyes, like I saw once in the eyes of a neighbor woman who stood in the road and watched her house burn down. Momma’s face was all shiny with sweat, and that lock of hair had come loose. Oh, how I wanted to tuck it back and make everything all right. “I won’t let it in here, Ruben,” she said. “I swear I won’t.” Before I could get to her, she held up the knife and opened the door.

I stood at the window and screamed. I screamed for a long, long time, even after there was nothing left of Momma but skin and clothes and the butcher knife. No matter how she struck and slashed, the tuckahoe got her anyway. And when it was done, it disappeared under the porch, leaving patches of slime on the wood.

Twilight fell before I came to myself enough to get up and light the lamps. I went in and broke Pa’s trunk to pieces with Momma’s kitchen hatchet and got out the Colt and figured out how to load it.

I have been waiting for Pa and Lemmy to come and tell me it was just a mean trick. But now the rain has started in again.

I
stand in the hatchway, watching the quartermaster hunt through boxes of shore leave blacks. There’s a tingle in my spine, the irritating buzz that means the most recent hit of bliss is about to wear off. I remember that tomorrow is the last Sunday of August—the traditional day of the family reunion—and anxiety begins to nibble at my stomach again. In another minute or two, the aching exhaustion of a week’s insomnia will return. All I can do is try to ignore it. How I wish I hadn’t left my blissbox in my cabin.

“Take it easy, Moffat,” the quartermaster says as he gives me the blacks. “Your kid’ll be fine.

You’ll see.”

My hands shake as I hold up the strange uniform. It’s a matte black coverall with silver piping on the sleeves and collar. The idea is to set us apart in a crowd so people will recognize us as lightbuckers and not just ordinary crazies. It looks like plastic, but it feels too soft and slippery for that. It’s all one piece. No zippers, no Velcro. I can’t even find any meldseams, the sleekest new style when we left. So this is what they’re wearing in San Francisco now.

“Maybe I ought to just forget this, Lucky,” I say. “Maybe I should just …” In the middle of the sentence, I have to clamp my jaw shut to keep my teeth from chattering.

The quartermaster’s smile fades till there’s only a little of it left. “Maybe you should just do what? Back out and spend your leave on the orbital station?” He shakes his head, but his voice softens. “I hear you signed on for the next Vega run. That’s another fifty years, Annie. Think about it. You’re never gonna get a second chance to see him.”

Lucky’s been a lightbucker for two and a half years—six months or a lifetime longer than me, depending on how you look at it. He knows what he’s talking about. If I’m ever going to make peace with myself, I must do it now, before my son dies of old age. I squeeze my eyes shut. When I open them again, purple stars float across the shiny alloy of the ship’s bulkheads.

Lucky touches my shoulder with a cool, firm hand. “Don’t worry so much. You’ll be O.K.,” he says.

I can’t reply. I’m too tired, too afraid that if I speak I’ll lose my last shreds of composure. The urge for another hit of bliss has become a maddening itch in my brain.

I nod and try to smile. After a moment, I wad up the blacks, tuck them under my arm, and start down the passageway toward my cabin.

Behind me Lucky calls, “Attagirl.”

Lightbuckers always stick together.

Alone in the crew cubicle, I scrabble in my footlocker till I find my blissbox—a lovely thing, intricately inlaid with Eridani gems. I remember the first moment I saw it, in the hands of a bucker named Forrest, in a desert town called Pactolus, a time and place at once beloved and lost. Beside the box lies a snapshot, cracked and dog-eared with handling: the blue sky, the sagebrush plain, the adobe ranch house at the base of the mountains where I grew up.

In the foreground stands a middle-aged woman, smiling, her tan face just beginning to show the effects of a life in the desert sun. Ah, Eugenia Miller, it’s easy to imagine you as my mother, perhaps because I knew you better than my real one, who died when I was a child. It’s hard to think of you as what you were—the lower-grade teacher in the two-room school where I learned to read.

In the picture, Eugenia holds my baby, Adam, swaddled in a faded patchwork quilt. The infant’s face is hidden. All that shows is the top of his silky head. I cannot look at this picture without thinking of my father and my brother, Tim, who haunt it like sullen ghosts. They refused to be in it. Angry because I joined the Light Corps, angry because I came home from my first mission pregnant, angry because I chose to go again and leave them to rear my child. Angrier still at Eugenia Miller because they believed she started it all.

Part of me insists it’s only been a year since she posed for this snapshot; Adam must be taking his first few tottery steps by now. But another part of me knows that’s a lie. For every minute of my life, almost an hour of theirs has gone by. My father is long since dead; Eugenia and Tim are old, or dead themselves. And Adam? For the barest instant I wonder if, when he reached the age of thirty, he looked anything like Forrest.

I take a blissrock from the box, break it open, and inhale till it hurts.

I emerge from the gleaming orbital shuttle into a world so foreign that I have no idea whether it is better or worse than the one I left. The San Francisco Superterm is a squat, mazelike growth of gray cinder block. Like all such terminals, it stinks of stale food and human sweat. There the familiarity ends. Greenish lights flicker in the darker corners. There are rows of small windows. Through them I glimpse a surreal landscape of hills crowded with windmills, dilapidated shacks, needle-clean office towers, and everything in between.

The windmills have come a long way since I left. They bear little resemblance to the battered steel one that groaned in the dry breeze above my father’s ranch. These are gigantic—ten or fifteen meters tall, with long parabolic blades and what must be supercool bearings. They turn though there seems to be no wind at all. I wipe sweat from my forehead. Clearly they don’t produce enough electricity for luxuries like air conditioning. I think of the cargo of nuclear fuels we have just brought back from Fomalhaut.
The Light Corps was to have been the lifeline for this energy-hungry world. But looking at these bleak surroundings, I wonder how much difference we have really made.

In the briefing course, they told us all about ground-slicks, the frictionless magnetic trains that are now the most common form of transportation on Earth. But after fifteen minutes of trying to find a ground-slick schedule, I wonder if they made it all up. Outlandishly accoutered people buzz around me like bees, some hurrying past on clear-cut if mysterious errands, others milling in general confusion. Nobody pays the slightest attention to my inquiries. Maybe I’m being too polite.

Finally I grab the sleeve of an efficient-looking middle-aged man as he rushes by. “Do you know where the ground-slick schedules are posted?” I ask.

He frowns, indicates a tiny keyboard on the back of his hand, and says, “Get yourself a wristnet,” then hurries on.

I stand there blinking and feeling stupid for a moment. The briefers told us there had been changes in the language. Mostly vocabulary, they said, and they went over a list of new words. But “wristnet” was not among them. I tighten my grip on the handle of my small, black duffel and continue wandering. The briefers also told us the easiest way to deal with time dislocation is to think of Earth as just another alien planet. At the time, I laughed aloud. Now I wish I could take their advice. My powers of self-deception are notoriously good, but even in this stinking terminal I have a terrible case of déjà vu and I can’t make myself believe the lie. Earth is not just another alien planet. It’s my home. And
the people at the end of my journey are not just simple strangers. Once upon a time, they trusted me, and I deserted them.

I sneak into a corner and break open another blissrock, glancing over my shoulder to make sure no one is watching. The briefers were careful to warn us about the various penalties for consumption of illegal substances Earthside. No one approves of blissbreathing; yet everybody does it. Especially lightbuckers.

Eventually, I spy a set of small, deserted LCD screens with a list of ground-slick departures flashing across them in chartreuse letters. The next southbound slick leaves in an hour.

I find a bench and rest on the edge of it for a minute or two, rubbing my thumb across the inlays of the Eridani bliss-box in my hip pocket. I take out the photograph and hold it in my hands like a talisman. I study Eugenia’s face. If Adam is still alive, he probably left the ranch long ago. Perhaps the adobe house has fallen to dust. Perhaps there is no one left who cares what I’ve done, or who remembers that we used to have family reunions on the last Sunday of each August. The thought at once encourages and saddens me.

With a shiver, I get up to look for a ticket window. It takes less time to find than the schedule did. While I wait in line, a teenage girl with a small blue trapezoid painted on her forehead watches me curiously. At first I wonder why. Then I remember the shore leave blacks.

After a while, she says, “Lightbucker, huh? How old are you?”

“Twenty-five,” I say.

“No. I mean in real actualness,” she says. She sticks something long and purple into her mouth and chews it loudly. It smells like garlic and artificial fruit.

“I’m really twenty-five.” I stifle an urge to pull the smelly thing out of her mouth and throw it on the floor. The briefers tried to prepare us for as many changes in customs and styles as they could. But I can already see it was an impossible task.

“No. I mean what is the truest longness of time since you were born?” she says, smacking her lips.

I wrap my fingers around the blissbox in my pocket. I should be a good sport, laugh and tell her exactly what she wants to hear—that I was born eighty years ago, when people still hoped the Light Corps might turn things around for Earth, a long time before blue forehead trapezoids and purple garlic confections came into vogue. But I can’t seem to manage it.

“Twenty-five years,” I repeat with a broad, stiff grin and turn to the ticket agent.

I hand him my bioprotein card—a small, flat piece of transparent material which contains every bit of information known about me, or so the briefer said. The agent slips it into a slot in the counter, and when it pops out again, he hands it back to me.

“Where’s my ticket?” I say.

“You’re holding it,” he replies. “Next.” And he beckons to the girl with the blue trapezoid.

“Uh … wait a minute. Where can I buy a newspaper?” It slips out before I remember how foolish it will sound.

He steps back and squints at me. I watch his face change as my blacks register. “Peeeeesuz!” he says; it’s almost a whistle. “Maddleford, come here. Alwaysful wanting to see a lightbucker …”

Maddleford is a man in his forties whose hair stands up like the fur on an angry dog’s back. He has on a jacket that looks like it’s made of gold spider webs.

“Newspaper?” says the ticket agent. He is practically screaming with laughter.

“See this?” says Maddleford, pointing to my card. “Take your biopro to an infodist and have it codified in the news slot. Then all you need to do is beam it on your reader.”