[Shadowrun 05] - Changeling Read online

  “I’m not saying it’s brilliantly insightful. Just one way of looking at it. Now come on, you’re not going to live out your life clinging to the floor.”

  “Why not? I can’t fall if I don’t get up.”

  “Your logic’s impeccable. But you can’t do anything if you don’t get back up.”

  Peter remained motionless, uncertain of what to do. He didn’t really want to get up, but knew that his demand to stay on the floor was ridiculous. Pulling his arms in and bending his elbows, he began to lift himself from the floor. Thomas straddled Peter from the back and helped lift him. Then Peter made his way to the wheelchair.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” said Thomas.

  Peter gave him a look. “I want to be able to move like I used to.”

  Thomas got behind the chair and wheeled it around toward the door. “That’s impossible,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Peter, you don’t have the same body anymore. How can you move the same way?”

  They left the room and the sounds of the hall assaulted Peter.

  In the privacy of his hospital room he’d forgotten how loud the world was. Out here doctors walked down the corridor talking to and listening to their clipboards. Automated stretchers beeped as they slid along color-coded tracks. At the nurse’s station, staff members spoke into little microphones to record patient-data. Everyone was talking into voice-activated machinery, and, from practice, no one was listening to anyone else.

  He saw three other trolls, four orks, and three elves also variously being wheeled down the corridor. Some had arms or legs in casts, others were on stretchers. “Did they transform, like me?”

  “No. They’ve been in the metahuman wing. They came in for more mundane healing.”

  “But it looks like everyone is leaving.”

  “That’s right. They are. The rioting has spread out of Seattle. Right now there are riots all over UCAS, the Confederate states, California. Even in some of the Indian nations. I even heard about riots in London just this morning. There have been a lot of bomb threats demanding that all the metahumans be cleared out of the hospital. And it’s the same story all over the continent.”

  “Why?”

  “Stupidity? I don’t know. Some people still think you can become a metahuman simply by being around them, like catching a disease. They remember all the problems with AIDS and the VITAS plagues…. I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  “So the hospital is sending us all out? Is that why I’m being sent home?”

  “No. You were scheduled to go home before the riots last night. Everyone else is being moved out to secret locations. They’ll be cared for. Or so I’ve been told. But the administration believed they couldn’t put the other patients at risk of being killed by fanatics.”

  “So they’re dumping us out into the street.”

  “Not quite. But your anger is valid.”

  “I’m not angry,” Peter said reflexively, though he knew he was.

  “Whatever you say.”

  Thomas’ reply made him angrier. “I’m not.”

  “And the orderly you kidney-punched yesterday isn’t going to be on disability for the next three weeks.”

  “What?”

  “Relax,” Thomas said with a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “I mention him only to illustrate that something is going on inside you. And you’re not doing anyone any favors by denying it. As for the orderly, he’ll be fine. Things like that happen in this ward. It’s part of the job.”

  They came up to the elevator bank. Arrows on the buttons pointed up and down. A map hanging on the wall next to the elevators showed each floor of the hospital, with small icons for the various wards. The third floor was highlighted, so Peter assumed they were on that floor.

  He saw four small faces at one end of the map. Two broad faces with big teeth for an ork and a troll, respectively, a narrow face with long, pointed ears, representing an elf, and a face with a beard, meaning a dwarf. The pictures looked ridiculous, simplistic to the point of childishness, but without the energy a child would bring to the enterprise.

  The elevator door opened. Standing inside was an attractive woman with a little boy in her arms. She eyed Peter with suspicion as Thomas wheeled him in, but tried to conceal her fear. Then just as the door was about to shut, she rushed off the elevator still carrying her son. Peter’s chest tightened.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Thomas. “It’s just fear.”

  3

  Thomas wheeled Peter out across the parking lot up to a large black Volkswagen Superkombi III van. When they reached the door on the passenger side, Thomas stepped around and opened it. Peter stood up carefully, but he still didn’t have his balance and fell forward. Grabbing frantically for the heavy door jamb, he managed to steady himself.

  Then he turned his head suddenly, catching his reflection in the door window. No one at the hospital had shown him a mirror, and now he knew why.

  His teeth were huge—two massive canines protruded from his lower gums and overlapped his upper lip. He had enormous yellow eyes and a monstrous head with large, pointed ears. Peter’s mind could not accept that he was looking at himself. Try as he might, he couldn’t get past the notion that the glass was some sort of optical trick.

  “Well,” said Thomas, beside him. “There it is. You ready? Let’s get going.” They worked together for several minutes, and soon Peter was inside the van. It immediately struck him that few cars were spacious enough to comfortably seat someone like him.

  Thomas loaded the wheelchair into the back of the van, then climbed into the driver’s seat and started up the engine. He said nothing, and Peter was content to remain transfixed by his reflection in the glass. He was pulled out of his thoughts only twice, when groups of people spotted him and threw bottles and plasticans at the van.

  “I think I was safer in the hospital.”

  “Well, this is why nature gave you such a thick hide. So you can take it.”

  “Why should I have to take it?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have to take it. But you will. You’re in this world, you play by the world’s rules. World says there are stupid people. There it is.”

  “Don’t we make our own rules?” A word came back to him: laws. “I thought that was the point of laws.”

  “Well… First, who makes the laws, Peter? People. People make the laws. So you don’t escape the world hiding behind the laws of men. Nature’s still there. She said, ‘I’ll let there be stupid people,’ and the stupid people can make a law just as well as a kind person.

  “Second, even good laws can be ignored. You can’t legislate intelligence. You can’t legislate kindness. There have always been stupid people, and I think there will always be stupid people.”

  “My doctor said he thinks people will get smarter.”

  “He may be right. I might believe the same thing someday. I’m only as old as I am. I’ll change, I’ll learn more. Who knows?”

  The van pulled into a driveway, which led up to a small, old-fashioned house, built of wood and ornate metal. Peter didn’t recognize it. “Is this where I live?”

  “I think so…” Thomas pulled out a book whose many worn pages were covered with notes written in a tiny scrawl. “This is the address they gave me. It doesn’t look right?”

  “No, I’m sorry. This is where I live. I forgot. We only moved here three weeks ago. Or, I guess, seven weeks ago. For my father’s job at the U. of C.” He raised his hand to his head. “I’m so stupid now. It’s like thinking through cotton.”

  Thomas turned to Peter and narrowed his eyes. “You don’t sound stupid to me. What makes you say that?”

  “Well, I’m a troll. I’m stupider than I was before.”

  “Peter, your brain rebuilt itself along with your body. It’s different. And yes, to put it bluntly, trolls do tend to be mentally slower than pure humans. But when you were a human, you”—he flipped open the book again—“you p
ulled an IQ score of 184 and a GPH of 18. We don’t know what you’re like yet. You won’t be as smart as you were, but we still don’t know the whole story.”

  Thomas’ words disturbed Peter. He had begun to take comfort in the notion of his stupid mind; he wouldn’t have to expect much from his life or his future, and this matched his father’s outlook. Unpleasant, perhaps, but certain.

  “Now, you’ve got two choices. You can think you know everything there is to know about yourself. Or you can live, observe, and discover.” Peter remained silent. “It’s not a decision you have to make right now. It’s one of those life things.” Thomas winked.

  As Thomas helped Peter up to the house, a few of the neighbors came out to stare in awe at the troll walking up the front path.

  Once inside, Peter looked around while Thomas went back out to the van. He noticed some new furniture—heavy stuff with sturdy metal frames. Cold and hard. Furniture just for him.

  Thomas returned with a stack of clothing Peter’s father had bought—shirts and pants and shoes all tailored for a troll. Peter guessed that such clothes cost a lot of money. He felt bad that his father had to pay out such expenses, but also wondered what trolls who had little money did for clothes. He asked Thomas.

  “Good question. There’s not a huge market for clothes the size of orks and trolls, so manufacturers don’t produce it. The bigger metahumans end up having to stitch lots of clothes together. The colors and fabrics don’t always match. Looks sloppy.” Peter cocked his head to one side, surprised by the comment. It seemed uncharacteristically critical. “Hey, I’m not saying they are sloppy,” Thomas told him. “Most of them are doing the best they can to survive. But in a country like UCAS, where the average citizen does pretty well, someone who looks like he’s just barely surviving appears sloppy.”

  After Peter and Thomas had stowed the clothes away, Thomas said, “So, do you want to rest or do you want to get to work?”

  “Work,” said Peter.

  They worked. Peter walked and walked and walked. He walked from the front of the house to the back of the house. He walked up the stairs and down the stairs. He found Thomas kind, but disturbing, as if he expected a great deal from Peter. More than Peter had expected from himself before he became a troll. The sooner Peter could walk without Thomas’ help, the sooner Thomas would leave, and the sooner Peter could relax.

  They continued until late into the night. The walking tired Peter, but every time he thought he couldn’t go on, he discovered still more strength than he thought he had, and went on.

  After the fourth hour he realized he wanted his father to come home from the university to find him putting enormous effort into his rehabilitation. But when his father had not returned by midnight, Peter guessed that he wouldn’t come home anymore that night. He remembered that it was commonplace for William Clarris to work late on his researches.

  “I’m tired, Thomas,” Peter said, his face revealing the disappointment over his father. “I’m ready for bed.” Thomas looked into Peter’s face, searching. “Sure,” he said, amiably. After helping Peter into bed, Thomas began to massage him again.

  Outside Peter heard sirens and glass breaking, but the sounds came only sporadically. The citizens of Hyde Park paid well for tight security, and they got it. The riots barely touched the borders of their neighborhood.

  But it wasn’t the security guards outside that made Peter feel so safe. It was Thomas, whose touch somehow made it all right to have the skin of a troll.

  When Peter opened his eyes, he was greeted by the sight of shelves full of optical chips facing him across the room. It took a moment to recognize them and remember they were his. Chips about cells and DNA and literature and history. But he couldn’t remember in detail what they were about. He couldn’t remember reading any of them.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” Peter said expectantly, thinking it must be his father.

  It was Thomas who entered. “Good morning,” he said.

  “Morning.” Again Peter didn’t hide his disappointment.

  “What is it?” asked Thomas.

  “Where’s my father?”

  “He left very early. He said he didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Hmmm.” Peter glanced at the shelf.

  “You read a lot.”

  “I guess. I can’t remember any of it, though.”

  Thomas nodded, but apparently decided to let the matter drop. “Most people don’t read much at all these days.”

  Yes, Peter remembered that now. Kids had made fun of him in elementary school because his father wanted him to be literate, not just functionally literate, or “iconerate,” the new term for those who went through life using only symbols and key words for written communication.

  “I wonder if I liked reading?”

  “From the number of opticals, I’d say you did.”

  “I might have been doing it just to please my father.”

  “Oh.” Thomas stepped over to the shelf and looked at the titles printed on the plastic casings. “Well, I bet you liked some of these… Treasure Island… The Wizard of Oz.”

  “Kids called me a lit-dip for reading so much. They said flats and trid were better.”

  “Different.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Think you’ll try reading again?”

  Peter hesitated, afraid to say the words. Then, “Thomas. I don’t think I can read. I think I forgot how.” As soon as the words left his mouth, his chin began to tremble. He didn’t remember much about his reading, but he knew it had set him apart from most other people, from other kids, who were content to be consumers of information, not makers of it. It was bad to be so different, but it had also made him special. It was something that he knew was his.

  “You can learn again if you want.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “I know you can learn to read. Any troll can do that, and I suspect you’re brighter than most trolls because you were a genius as a pure human.”

  “But what if I can’t?”

  “If it’ll make you feel better, you don’t have to. You can learn a few key words, a few symbols. Few people choose to read these days. They watch the trid and flat for news and entertainment. They use icon and voice-based computers to move data around for their employers. Programmers are literate in the comp language, but not much else. The only people who have to worry about reading are the ones who make it all work. They have to know how to read to keep things going, to improve the tech. But it’s rare. You can get by without reading if you want. You’ll learn a few words, like STOP, and you’ll see them just like icons, and that’ll be that.”

  “You’re tricky.”

  Thomas smiled. “What do you mean?”

  “Your words are… reassuring, but there’s something in… the way you speak, underneath it all… that’s saying I shouldn’t simply become iconerate.”

  “True, true, true. I’m a firm believer in everyone reading. Years ago, when the corps took over primary support of the public school system, all the reading programs—well, the entire curriculum—was changed to a more ‘vocational’ approach. To get a return on their money, the corps decided they wanted people to learn only as much as they needed to carry out a job.

  “But what the corps didn’t know, or didn’t care about, is that perspective only comes from knowing more than you need to know. People are taught a word these days, and that’s it. No context. ‘Why do pure humans throw rocks at orks and trolls?’ and the answer is, ‘Racism.’ A single-word definition like ‘Racism’ might as well be an icon. Icons give brief, quick, incomplete ideas. They pack a punch—but that’s all. That’s what you see on the news. They just flash nouns on the screen. ‘Racism’ says the sign, and then the footage rolls, showing people attacking one another. But no one knows anymore than they did before.”

  “But some people read. I did. You do.”

  “Both our parents are from the upper class, Peter.
They could afford the better schools, and because of that we were singled out for broader educations. Society still needs some people who are active readers. We’re it.”

  Peter became lost in thought, and Thomas said, “Sorry, for the lecture. I have this thing about the importance of education.” He stepped up to the bed. “Ready for the tensions to be rolled away?”

  Peter settled deeper into the bed, the memory of yesterday’s massage already calming him.

  Peter sighed deeply as Thomas rubbed his back. When he reached Peter’s feet, Thomas said, “Roll over.”

  Peter did so, this time by himself, his eyes comfortably closed. He opened them briefly when Thomas’ hands began to knead his shoulders, and what he saw stunned Peter. Thomas’ eyes were a deep yellow, the pupils vertical and black. His face was expressionless, but his skin had a cool green pallor, looking more like scales than flesh. Peter experienced an instant repulsion and gasped, then slid away from Thomas.

  Thomas remained in his dazed state for a moment, then the green faded from his flesh and his eyes returned to normal.

  “Peter? What is it, Peter?”

  “What are you?”

  Thomas blinked twice. “I’m a shaman,” he said. “Of the Snake totem. Didn’t your father or the doctor tell you?”

  Peter was still breathing fast, but not so much as a moment ago. He remembered something about that—shamans taking on the characteristics of their totem when using magic. “My father. I haven’t spoken with him for days.”

  Thomas closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I would have told you. When he called me to say he wouldn’t be able to pick you up, he said you knew all the details.”

  “I only knew you were coming to get me.”

  Thomas studied Peter carefully with the same curious look he’d given him the day before. “Did he tell you he wouldn’t be there?”

  “Sure. Yes.”

  “Hmmm. Well, I’m sorry for frightening you. I can see why you’d be spooked.”

  “I wasn’t spooked.”

  Thomas smiled. “You don’t let much out, do you?”