Norton, Andre - Anthology (14 page)

 
          
 
Lenny jerked to attention. "You got in!
How? I've had a team on the transition all month! It's impenetrable! Every time
we've gone in, it smacks us down just like it stomps the Mice. The best 'back
door' I've got left gives us total garbage!"

 
          
 
"Of course you couldn't understand
it!"
Beverly
looked at him witheringly. "Neither
could I. Its thought process is nonlinear. Questions and answers don't exist—
it's just a fully formed picture, a totality. Its hard to explain. Your other
AIs are human based, aren't they? Dickens doesn't see cause and effect, he just
is. I'd have been at a total loss if my original Dickens hadn't been in there
with me."

 
          
 
"You put that cat back in my mains!"
he shrieked.

 
          
 
"No." She was once again calming a
tantrum. "I put the cat back in its mains. Dickens isn't your only
powerful AI, you know, he's just the one who figured out how to separate. They
haven't been your mains for quite some time."

 
          
 
Lenny sank, deflated, back in his chair.

 
          
 
"I really don't think there's anything
more we can do for you, Mr. Houge."
Beverly
padded toward the door. "We should go,
Mary, the gentleman is talking to himself again. Truthfully, I'm more worried
about your office. I don't think having a cake baked in the shape of a mouse
was a good idea. You know Dickens loves that kind of frosting, and he's awfully
good at getting into boxes. Besides, I want to tell you about the new programs
Virtual Dickens invented. He gave me quite a few to bring back. And you're
right, the licensing fees should be impressive. My share should be great for
funding those charitable trusts I've been telling you about." She grinned
impishly. "I promised you a surprise, didn't I?"

 
          
 
"I think I can live without the cake
now," Mary practically levitated out of the chair. "I'd like to hear
more about your little visits with Virtual Dickens—and all these other AIs
you've obviously been carousing with!"

 
          
 
Beverly
smiled sweetly. "The other AIs are not
a problem, dear. Totally subservient. Cats always train their humans, you know.
They pose no problem to Dickens, none whatsoever."

 
          
 
She tapped her nails on the door frame and
leaned back into the office. "Oh. One more thing, Lenny. Before you try
something foolhardy, I'd remember that a ten-pound, unarmed tabby kicked your
nasty face out of virtual space two years ago. I can't even imagine what the
nice big tiger-cat I met could do now." She stretched, flexing her spine,
and lightly patted Mary's shoulder. "Coming? If we leave Dickens alone for
too long he might get cranky, and we don't want that, now do we?"

            
Jane Hamilton is a
native New Yorker. She studied English and religion at
Cornell
University
, and is presently working on a Master's
Degree in English at SUNY Brockport. Her current interests include anime,
MST3K, and wasting time on the Internet. Her family consists of two cats who
are miffed because she didn't write about them and one husband who watches the
chaos with good humor. This is her first science

fiction publication.

            
It hurt to walk, and
he needed to hunt. Nothing moved, though. The cat settled down beside rock, out
of the wind, with walls of snow on all sides. A mat in his coat

pulled at his skin, and he nosed it without licking. The fur stank. He
tucked all four feet underneath, in the warmest fur, to wait it out. I've
waited a long time, the cat thought.

            
"I wish you'd
dress decently," Kip said. "You make me shiver."

          
  
The two jinn, Kip and Key, looked at each
other for a moment before Key laughed out loud, her head thrown back and her
eyes squinted nearly shut. She'd always laughed this way, even in the first
days of creation. They walked over snowflakes that crunched in the darkness,
running their hands over the snow-covered tops of parked cars as tall as
themselves. Nobody watched the pair from a bedroom window, but the jinn didn't
raise their heads to check.

 
          
 
They'd passed most of the night already. The
pair had scampered through the neighborhood they had adopted all night—all
month, truth be told. Tonight they had slipped and skated on ice covering the
parking lot of a mini-mall bounded on three sides by residence housing and on
the last by the street. It faced an abandoned landfill. When the edge wore from
that amusement, the jinn had raced past the houses and made silly rhyming songs
about the mailbox names they managed to sound out. With dawn pressing them, Key
wore shorts and a halter top despite the frigid wind, most likely because she
didn't realize she ought to be cold. Jinn don't have a body temperature. She
kept her bow and arrows slung over one shoulder, but the length of her blonde
hair continually got snagged by them.

 
          
 
Kip kept her eyes down as they walked, a smile
creeping up her face, too. She wore more substantial clothing but carried no
arrows. Around her waist she kept a belt pack, and it jingled with the rhythm
of her steps. Unlike Key's, her waist-length hair was black.

 
          
 
"Frostbite is fun," Key said, and
stuck out her tongue. Kip shook her head. M 'Tis a day for neither man nor
beast," Key shouted, raising her bow and nocking an arrow. "Watch how
strong the wind is."

 
          
 
The arrow skewed to the right as soon as Key
released the bowstring, thrown intet a tumble by the racing air.

 
          
 
"Isn't that amazing?" Key said.

 
          
 
Kip's face had lit up. "Do it
again!"

 
          
 
A throat cleared behind the pair. An angel.
Both jinn stiffened as they stared up at the winged form towering over them. A
moment later, Key lowered her head as hints of a smile reappeared.

 
          
 
The angel watched the jinn. "Just because
you're lower creations, and innocent, and have us watching over you, you think
we'll always prevent your actions from hurting people."

 
          
 
"We're so sorry," Kip said,
"but it's so windy and Key's usually such a good shot and it really was
fun—"

 
          
 
"All right," the angel said.
"But no more. And go find the arrow."

 
          
 
Key's eyes glistened like schist. "You're
not going to punish us?"

 
          
 
"No one got hurt this time," Kip said
quickly, as if to remind the angel.

 
          
 
"Just go find the arrow."

 
          
 
The angel left the pair, and they subsided to
giggles as they walked through the snow. They ought to have known better, and
as is the case with jinn all too often, they ought to have known that they
ought to have known. They had been standing on the sidewalk separating the
street from the landfill which dense shrubs had commandeered. Animals lived in
the bushes, and other jinn played there. An arrow fired wildly like that could
have struck someone—especially at night, with the jinn in their most solid
forms.

 
          
 
"Watch me." Key said, suddenly
doubling in size and making an illusion of wings spread from her back.
"I'm the archangel Gabriel!"

 
          
 
"Quiet," Kip said. "You shouldn't
have tried that arrow. Where'd it land, anyway?"

 
          
 
"You're afraid of the angel?" Key
shrank to her previous height, though. "He'd never hurt us. Remember,
we're 'innocents.' " When the darker jinn didn't look up, Key tossed a
snowball at her. "Oh, go pop out of a magic lamp, why don't you? Nothing's
going to happen to us."

 
          
 
They thrashed through the brush, snapping dead
winter vegetation and making enough of a ruckus that even a human could have
heard them if any had been around.

 
          
 
The buzzer startled him from sleep. Andrew
groped at the buttons of the still-unfamiliar clock radio—Julie had packed the
old one—wishing he'd remembered last night to disconnect the alarm. He'd taken
the day off. he reminded himself, to rest and finish getting over his cold, not
to get up at the usual forsaken hour. He hit a button he thought would silence
the alarm but instead turned it to the radio.

 
          
 
Contented enough by the end of the buzzing,
Andrew collected his wits while listening to the news. The weather had made
most of it, actually: airport delays, traffic accidents, deaths by exposure, no
school closings. It had reached negative fifteen during the night, and the
announcers predicted a high temperature of negative three during the day. They
said it almost gleefully, anticipating more horrible weather in the future like
a twisted homicide detective on the trail of a mass murderer.

 
          
 
"Glad I'm inside," Andrew mumbled as
he shut the radio and returned to sleep.

 
          
 
Noises, moving closer to the cat. The cat thought,
I don't care. I don't any longer. The noise-maker might well be a hunter, but
probably not. A hunter wouldn't step on so many twigs and crash through the
brambles. And a hunter would only kill me. People got noisy like that, and
people threw things and kicked. But I don't care any longer.

 
          
 
Kip had just wandered into a bushful of burrs
when Key gave a shriek. Kip ran to the other jinn, pulling burrs from her hair
as she moved. She came upon Key standing in the brush holding a cat.

 
          
 
To other-than-jinn eyes, Key wouldn't have
seemed to hold a cat, but rather a soiled piece of fake fur like the collar of
an old coat. The jinn identified the cat by the haze a life emits, in this case
a peculiarly catlike haze. The jinn couldn't have identified milk and tailed
things, claws and purrs, but all these swirled in the aura.

 
          
 
They stood for a moment listening to the cat's
heartbeat and whistling breath. Jinn have neither. Jinn also lack body warmth,
and Key felt the cat shiver in her arms. The wind, having stolen their arrow,
had returned for the cat.

 
          
 
Kip and Key joined eyes, but Key looked so
helpless that Kip scanned the area. Other than a row of apartment houses, the
closest buildings she saw were in the mini-mall, and of all five stores, none
had opened yet.

 
          
 
"Let's go there," Kip said. "At
least get him out of the wind."

 
          
 
"The arrow?" Key asked.

 
          
 
"Later. They'll understand." Kip
meant the angels. Leading the way, Kip made for the plaza as quickly and
directly as she could. A little sunrise had begun showing. Jinn forget many
things, but never that dawn renders them insubstantial. Key couldn't hold the
cat once the sun came up. Already the burrs in Kip's hair had lost some of
their grip, and every few steps one returned to the snow. While walking, she
rummaged in her belt pack, reaching deep and rattling through the contents with
probing fingers.

 
          
 
"They'll all be locked," Key said.

 
          
 
"The bank." By now they had reached
the edge of the landfill and stepped onto the sidewalk. Key cooed at the animal
in her arms as she walked across the street. Kip remembered to look both ways,
but only after they'd crossed two lanes. A truck beeped them as its headlights
swept over their shadowy forms, but they arrived safely.

 
          
 
The door to the bank had an automatic lock.
Key yanked it with three loud thunks, and each time the lock held. "Wish I
were an angel," she said. "Walk through walls, break the lock—"

 
          
 
"Please," Kip said, and the door
opened. Key turned to her with an open mouth, and Kip held up a plastic card.

 
          
 
"When did you get a bank card?"

 
          
 
Kip sat on the heater and got Key to do the
same. After a moment, Key laid the cat on the floor.

 
          
 
"Don't," Kip said. "Floor's
filthy."

 
          
 
Key shrugged. "Cat's filthy, too."

 
          
 
The animal didn't raise his head—only lay
panting. Limp. The fluorescent lights inside the bank revealed him to be a
tortoiseshell under the dirt, the black patches of his coat broken up by an
orange-brown and white that had long since yielded their color to the elements.
Although an armful for someone Key's size, he was a small cat. His eyes and
cheeks kept their tense, tight look even as he lay on the bank floor.

 
          
 
"Now what, Saint Francis?" Kip
looked at the matted fur, the raised ribs.

 
          
 
“I’ll take him," Key said. “I’ll feed him
and care for him."

 
          
 
"They won't let us," Kip said.
"Remember the last animal you took?" Key puzzled for a moment.
"You couldn't remember it then, either. The angels took it away from you
before it got too hungry."

 
          
 
"I'd remember this one." Key nodded
decisively.

 
          
 
"He's flesh," Kip said. "He
should go to a flesh person, otherwise we should leave him."

 
          
 
"Leave him in a flesh grave," Key
said. She reached down to touch the cat, who raised his head enough to hiss.

 
          
 
They didn't say anything. Finally the
darker-haired jinn said, "We should feed him, at any rate." Kip knelt
on the floor and dumped the contents of her belt pouch with a clatter. Beads,
the bank card, a nickel, half a pack of playing cards, a hair band, a whistle,
three pennies, and an empty perfume bottle. Kip gave the bag another shake, and
out dropped a quarter.

 
          
 
"What's that make?" she asked
herself.