Challenging Destiny #25 Read online

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  Dave Switzer has been a university lecturer, high school teacher, technical writer, and document composition specialist. But he still hasn't figured out what he wants to be when he grows up. He recently read A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge—both were imaginative and enthralling. The two best movies he saw on the big screen this summer were Ratatouille and Stardust. Dave has been playing some board games lately—his favourites are Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride. His web site is www.davidmswitzer.com.

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  Cover artist Les Edwards is a multi-award winning British artist known for creating pictures with immediate eye-catching impact. He has worked for major UK and US publishers over a 35-year career. His work is seen on books, magazines, advertising, gaming, CD covers and movie posters. He works in oil but also paints in acrylics under his pseudonym, Edward Miller. You can find him on the web at www.lesedwards.com and www.edwardmiller.co.uk.

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  Death and Taxes by Suzette Haden Elgin

  Bill was a practical man, and not ordinarily a queasy one; at 89, he'd had plenty of time to outgrow any tendencies to a nervous stomach. Even so, the part of it that was really hard for him, the part that gave him serious trouble, was putting Vanessa's body in the refrigerator. He kept getting it almost done and then taking her out and starting over. He kept trying different ways to fold her up, and not liking any of them.

  He knew it was ridiculous—obviously, dead people can't be uncomfortable—but it bothered him, the way she looked with her arms and legs folded up tight against her, and her neck bent way over like that. He didn't like the way her eyes seemed to stare at him while it was going on, either, or the way her skin felt under his fingers as it cooled. If the rest of his life hadn't depended on it, he would not have been able to do it at all.

  He'd been married to Vanessa for more than half a century, and he felt as if knew her as well as one human being could possibly know another. He was positive that she would have been on his side in this thing. If she hadn't been dead, she would have been doing her usual best to help him get it done, giving him nonstop instructions while he was putting her in the fridge, telling him all the ways he was doing it wrong and all the ways he should be doing it better. He could just hear her now: “Bill! Will you please be careful! Will you please pay attention to what you're doing? Do you have the right glasses on or not?” It made his heart ache, the way he could hear her voice clear as a bell in his head, saying those things.

  But knowing that she would have both approved and supervised didn't make the task any easier. Knowing that she would have driven him nuts with her chatter while he was doing it didn't make it any easier. She was his wife; she had been his constant companion for sixty-four years, and he loved her still. He was used to seeing her sitting beside him in the cab of the RV or across from him in the diningbooth or lying beside him in their bed. Fitting her into a refrigerator—even the reasonably spacious one they'd been lucky enough to be able to afford—was definitely a brand new experience, something it had never crossed his mind that he might have to do, and it was hard. He was shaking, and nauseated, and he could feel his heart pounding around in his chest like a small trapped animal trying desperately to escape.

  Fortunately Vanessa had been a small woman always, and in her old age she had gotten even smaller; he was able to manage it, finally, and able to close the refrigerator door and punch all the necessary buttons in the RV and get ready to head on down the road.

  Bill would not have tried to make a case that what he was doing was right, if anybody had been around to question him about it. It wasn't right. He knew and accepted that. Somewhere in these United States there was a nice old woman who'd just become a greatgrandmother and was now legally entitled to the StarSpangly motorhome that he and Vanessa had been living in. That woman had put in her decades of looking after other people and their needs, without pay and without benefits and without perks. And now, like every other greatgrandmother, she was entitled to her very own StarSpangly as a gesture of gratitude from her government and its taxpayers. It was now Bill's personal duty as an American citizen to go straight to the nearest federal building and turn the rig in to be refurbished and redecorated and passed along, good as new, to that nice old woman, wherever she might be. Supposing she had a husband, it was now that man's turn to enjoy the benefits that came with being married to a greatgrandmother. Keeping the RV was both immoral and illegal, it was unpatriotic, it was pure wicked greed, and Bill didn't pretend otherwise even to himself.

  But he was going to do it anyway, if he could get away with it.

  It wasn't his fault that Vanessa had died and left him this mess to deal with. It wasn't her fault either, exactly; it had just happened. She was 88. People who are 88 do die, in the natural way of things; the fancy medical care that the 2090s had brought hadn't changed that, although it had made death before you were at least a hundred years old a good deal more rare. He was doing his best not to be angry with her, because that anger would have been irrational. It was a matter of considerable pride to him that he was still as rational as he'd been at fifty, and a good deal more rational than most of the young men he knew. And his mind—his good sturdy rational 89-year-old mind—was made up. He was not going to be one of those pathetic old men who sits around all day in his bathrobe in front of the comset, living in one grubby dreary room for the rest of his life. And he knew that if he did what the law said he had to do, if he turned the RV back in to the government to be spruced up and passed along to that nice old woman, that was what he would be. That was what would happen to him. It would be all that he could afford to do, and he couldn't stand to even think about it.

  The StarSpangly was a nice little RV. It was comfortable and convenient—everything automatic, like all the government-issue rigs—and he and Vanessa had made all kinds of improvements to it over the years that had made it even better. Like putting in the larger refrigerator, for which he was very grateful at this moment; he wouldn't have been able to get Vanessa into the one that had come with the rig originally. The StarSpangly had a living area and a nice diningbooth and a bed that suited him. The appliances and gizmos all worked perfectly, and were programmed to give him his food and drink, even his margaritas, exactly the way he wanted them. The rig had shining silver wheels, top of the line, hiding the maglev parts that actually moved it along the road. Watching those wheels go around, you could tell yourself that life was still good, that there was still an open road to follow; you could ignore the fact that the wheels didn't actually touch that open road. And as for the rig's cyberdriver ... well, that was one splendid machine. Bill had always marveled at the cyberdriver. Some of their friends had had all kinds of trouble with their cy-Ds, but the unit he and Vanessa got had always worked flawlessly. You'd have sworn that thing was alive, the way it drove the RV.

  He wasn't going to give it all up. No way was he going to give it all up. He was crazy about the StarSpangly, it was where he'd lived most of the happiest years of his life and where he wanted to go on living, and it was his.

  Well, technically speaking, it was Vanessa's; but it had always been his too because it was Vanessa's, and she wouldn't have wanted him to be thrown out of it onto the street. He was going to keep it for himself, and that's all there was to it.

  Vanessa had been fine when they went to bed the night before. She hadn't said there was anything hurting her, or that she felt sick; nothing like that, not one thing. And he hadn't heard a sound from her during the night, not so much as a whimper. Bill was a light sleeper; if she'd made any noise, even just a surprised noise, he would have heard her. She must have died peacefully in her sleep, just slipped away without feeling a thing. It was yet another example of Vanessa's amazing good luck, which he had profited by lo these many years. He had awakened early—he always did wake up early now, usually around five—and he'd understood right away what had happened, the minute he saw her face. It was a shock
, sure, her dying like that all of a sudden, and it was hard on him, but he was happy for Vanessa all the same. No long illness. No hospital. No narrow bed in a nursing home, parked out there in orbit, going around and around the Earth eternally with all the space debris keeping it company. No medpod putting things into her and taking things out of her and making her miserable day and night. Just going to sleep in her own bed, happy and comfortable, and slipping away in the night without even knowing it was happening. He hoped with all his heart that it would be like that for him when his time came to die, may that time be many years in the future.

  * * * *

  First thing he did when he realized what the situation was, he just got up and had a cup of strong black coffee and set about getting ready to leave the park, the way they always did. Well, no, the first thing he did, he pulled the blanket up over Vanessa's face, because he couldn't deal with the way she seemed to be staring at him, and he couldn't make himself close her eyes so that would stop. But then he got up right away and dressed, and he pressed all the switches that unhooked the RV from the water and lights and threedyvision and so on, and he punched the buttons for paying his bill and checking out of the park, and he headed out onto the road with Vanessa lying there dead in the bed. He had a terrifying minute or two when he was turning on the cyberdriver, because he couldn't help wondering if the government had bugged it somehow, maybe equipped it with a dead-female-human-body-detector or some such thing. He couldn't help wondering if he was going to get caught—maybe everything in the RV freezing on him, nothing working any more, and the doors locking shut on him and not letting him out, and an alarm going off that would bring some fedcop to haul him away—before it even got to be six o'clock in the morning.

  But none of that, or anything like that, had happened. No alarms, no warning sirens, no flashing lights, no sudden message on the comset telling him the feds were coming for him. Just the usual almost silent hum the cy-D made while he told it where he wanted to go, and the three soft clicks that meant it had no questions.

  He had kept going down the road till he got to a wooded area where he could pull over and think things through without having to worry about suddenly hearing Vanessa's gang of friends—all of them grandmothers or greatgrandmothers, all of them vigorous and energetic and fiendishly devoted to one another—knocking at the RV's door and expecting to join Vanessa for after-breakfast coffee. He didn't think he would have been able to come up with a plausible story to explain Vanessa's absence. And he knew that if he'd just said she was sick the whole gang would have insisted on charging right on in to see what they could do to make her better. It had been clear to him that he had to get out of the RV park fast, before that could happen, and he'd done that as quickly as he could. And then he'd sat under the trees out of sight of the road, drinking another cup of coffee and thinking. Trying not to panic. Trying to work out a plan that had a reasonable chance of succeeding.

  He was grateful that Vanessa's idea of staying in touch with her relatives in her old age had been to send each one a Christmas card, with a small check only in the one card that went to her greatgranddaughter. He could do that. He could pick out cards Vanessa would have chosen, he could fake her signature on the cards, and he had always been the one who wrote that single check. He had that much going for him, and it was a comfort. It could have been a lot worse. She could have had dozens of relatives instead of a handful. She could have been one of those greatgrandmothers who visited family members regularly or took them along on trips in the RV. Thank you, Vanessa, he thought, for not being that kind of greatgrandmother.

  And of course he knew where he wanted to go. He'd heard the rumors; any husband his age who was living in a StarSpangly had heard them. Hasty words said in near whispers, one old man passing the hint along to another old man as it had been passed along to him. The place was called Tall Pines, and Bill knew roughly where to look for it. You head south, over the border into Mexico; you watch for the signs, the little graffiti icons along the road. Tall Pines icons—tiny symbols, just two straight lines, each with an upside-down V at the top—scribbled on bridge railings, and on the sides of buildings, and on boulders and cliffs beside the road, maybe cut into a tree trunk. Just follow the graffiti, the whispers went. If you can make it to Tall Pines without getting caught you'll be okay.

  As soon as he thought he had the plan straight in his head, he had gotten up and done what he had to do. Stripping his wife and putting her in the Batholator, then dressing her in a fresh gown and robe. He chose a set in the daffodil yellow that she had favored, and put a pair of shoes in the same bright shade on her feet. That was Step One, and it was hard. Folding her up and putting her in the fridge was Step Two, and it was terrible. Horrible.

  Step Three, later in the day—buying the big freezer with the 35-year battery and the foolproof alarm system, renting the storage unit to keep it in, driving inside the storage unit to transfer the body—had been a little easier. Even moving Vanessa from the refrigerator to the freezer had been easier, because this time he was able to lay her out almost full length, bending her knees only the least bit, so she didn't look uncomfortable any more. She looked relaxed and easy, as if she were just lying there resting, and that did him a lot of good. He felt better when that was done—not good, mind you, but better.

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  It took him two days then, riding the length of Texas, to get to the border. Not because it was all that far, but because he was taking such pains not to look like somebody in a hurry. Both days, he had the cy-D pull the rig into an oasis in mid-afternoon and he went inside and found a salesperson and acted out a careful script.

  "I'm looking for something,” he would say, “just some little thing, you know? Some little thing that might make my wife feel better. Cheer her up, at least. She's down with a cold again."

  "That's a shame, sir. Seems as if a country that can put a military base on Mars ought to be able to find a cure for the common cold, doesn't it?"

  "Well. You know how women are."

  He could still remember a time when that line would have gotten a chuckle and a knowing glance. Now it got him only a carefully blank expression and “About how much did you want to spend, sir?” Which made sense. There was no way the salespeople could know whether he was a ringer ... some fedcop out looking for gender-bias violations. They had to be careful; he understood that. He'd have done the same in their place.

  He'd gone back to the RV each time with a thirty-credit trinket for Vanessa under his arm, leaving behind an impression of a tolerant and indulgent husband anxious to make the day a little brighter for a wife he doted on. An ailing wife, who was still in the StarSpangly he was taking south. The playacting took quite a lot of time and effort—he'd thought it best to discuss each item suggested to him and make a show of having a hard time choosing just the right one—but he thought it was a wise strategy.

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  And then suddenly there was a Tall Pines icon right ahead of him, the first one he'd spotted, scribbled on the white surface of the automatic tollbooth at the border, down so low that he almost missed it: Two straight lines topped with little inverted Vs, and an arrow, and the number 13. Next icon, thirteen miles straight ahead? He stared at it, wondering if it was really going to be this easy. He thought about telling the cyberdriver to start watching for the icons, and then decided against it. It was all too possible that that was the command that would trigger some watching sensor in the government computers.

  It turned out not to be that easy, actually, as he went along, and that reassured him. Sometimes there wasn't any miles number with the icon; sometimes there wasn't an arrow. Sometimes he drove the number of miles indicated and then had to get out and walk around and hunt for the next icon, and it would be on the back of a roadsign, or hidden behind the leaves of a vine growing over the big rock it was painted on. Sometimes he took a wrong fork in the road and had to double back. But it all made sense. The glitches were the kind of thing that you could expect to
see happen, and after a while he started letting himself think that it might all work out.

  He spent his first night in Mexico in a big modern campground at the edge of a town, worn out—partly from always trying to be so damn careful, and partly from missing Vanessa—but still too nervous and distracted to fall asleep. He lay there thinking about what it was going to be like at Tall Pines when he got there. Not having Vanessa around any more—not having any women around. Just a bunch of old guys, maybe sitting outside at night in their lawnchairs around a campfire trading stories, talking about their dead wives and their dead businesses, maybe playing cards or playing their gamepods. Stuff like that. The park hidden away in the pine forest; all the StarSpanglys scattered in among the trees. And of course a few rigs that a man had bought on his own, without benefit of a greatgrandmother; there'd be some of those too. Maybe there'd be a little creek. Maybe a waterfall. He would be really pleased if there was a waterfall, even just a small one. And you could lie in your bed at night and listen to the music of the water outside, instead of the steady hiss of traffic that he was hearing now. Peace, that's what it would be. Peace for his old age, with other men whose memories were like his memories, who also wanted peace.

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  When he got up the next morning he felt almost optimistic, and by mid-afternoon he had come to the last of the icons and he was there. Safe. Home free! Bill wasn't a religious man, but before he told the cy-D to head down into the entrance tunnel he took a minute or two to thank whatever God there might be, and he did it sincerely.

  It was a long enough tunnel that several minutes went by before he started to get uneasy. Before he started to have a funny feeling, started wondering if maybe he'd been too hasty giving those thanks. “Look here,” he said to the youngster manning what looked like a check-in booth, “is this really Tall Pines? I mean ... the Tall Pines?"