The Possession of Paavo Deshin Read online

  The Possession of Paavo Deshin

  A Retrieval Artist Short Novel

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Copyright Information

  The Possession of Paavo Deshin

  Copyright © 2012 Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  First published in Analog SF, January/February, 2010

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover and Layout copyright © 2012 by WMG Publishing

  Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Philcold/Dreamstime

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  The Possession of Paavo Deshin

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Paavo saw them in a corner of the playground, standing together like they always did, their backs to the Dome. Through the Dome, he could see the Earth, misty white, green, and blue, like a beacon to the great beyond. He believed in the great beyond, Paavo did.

  People Disappeared there.

  He was sitting alone on the fake grass that covered this section of the ground. He usually sat alone: the other children thought him strange. His vocabulary was big for a seven-year-old, and he thought about a lot of things no one else his age did.

  Paavo’s private school held both a recess in the middle of morning classes and an outside athletic instruction in the middle of afternoon classes. Most of the kids from his class were on the black part of the playground, jumping on some diagram, playing an ancient game the teacher was trying to make them learn. It required balance and coordination—tossing a stone on designated parts of the diagram, hopping toward it in a pattern, then bending over and picking it up without touching any of the diagram’s lines.

  That was the afternoon’s exercise. The teacher had left the diagram up so they could practice in the morning and during lunch.

  Paavo didn’t want to practice. He didn’t like running and jumping and trying to keep his balance. He liked thinking and watching and studying. He liked sitting because he could handle surprises better when he sat.

  Surprises like seeing the Ghosts.

  He glanced toward them without moving his head. They seemed unusually solid today. Usually when they appeared, they flickered or a part of them was clear, a part that shouldn’t be.

  Standing with their backs so close to the Dome, the Earth framed behind them, the Ghosts should have had blackness where their stomachs were or a bit of blue, white, and green behind their faces.

  Instead, they looked almost real. They stood side by side. They held hands. The man was a little taller than the woman. He had black hair. Hers was red, like Paavo’s.

  Usually they wore pretty clothes. His were shiny black like his hair; hers were green to match her eyes.

  But this afternoon, the man’s clothes were gray, shapeless, making him look fatter than he had looked before. The woman’s were brown and loose. The brown leached the color from her hair—or maybe that was the whiteness from the Earth, reflecting through the Daylight Dome, diminishing the red.

  The woman smiled at him, and Paavo shivered.

  She had never smiled at him before.

  He made himself look away. The kids were laughing. Anya had fallen, her hands splayed behind her, her feet straight ahead, the stone only a centimeter or so away from her shoes.

  “Stupid game,” she said and rolled off the diagram.

  Paavo glanced at the Ghosts again. They seemed closer. Their expressions had changed again, which was unsettling. In the past, when he saw them, they’d appear suddenly. Usually they’d be on the edge of his vision. But sometimes they loomed right in front of him, their faces as big as his was when he pressed it against the bathroom mirror.

  When they appeared like that, they’d say something familiar. Like the man speaking softly: You’ll be fine, child. If you remain resolute, no one can harm you. Or the woman, her eyes glinting with tears: Remember how much I love you. That’s all that matters, in the end. Just the love.

  He tried to tell his mom and dad about the Ghosts when he was really little. They didn’t understand. First his mom and dad thought he had imaginary friends. Then they thought he was getting messages through his links. He had had links since he was a baby, even though children weren’t supposed to get links until they were school age.

  His parents had blocked his links so that he wouldn’t get “contaminated” by adult knowledge. But his links worked better than his mom and dad thought they did; they always had. That was one reason his vocabulary was so big—he could scan the public nets if he wanted to. He just couldn’t send and receive messages.

  The fake grass rustled. He turned. The Ghosts were right beside him. They stank of sweat.

  The woman crouched.

  Tears leaked out of her eyes. There were lines on her face he’d never seen before.

  “Enrique,” she said, her voice trembling.

  He froze, like he always did when they were too close. He waited for them to go away. But they weren’t going away.

  Instead, she grabbed his shoulders, pulling him toward her. Her fingers dug into his shirt; her nails brushed against his skin.

  She crushed him against the softness of her coat, and he shoved away from her so hard he tumbled backwards, like Anya had done.

  “You’re scaring him,” the man said.

  “No,” she said. “He shouldn’t be scared. Not Enrique.”

  She reached for him again. Paavo pulled himself backwards, away from her, then rolled and got to his feet. The man grabbed at him, fingers brushing Paavo’s arm.

  Paavo shrieked and ran toward the pavement. The kids had stopped laughing. They were watching him.

  They were watching him run.

  He felt wobbly and out of shape, terrified that the Ghosts had touched him. They had never touched him before.

  He got to the diagram, but the kids were still staring behind him. Not watching him after all.

  He turned.

  The Ghosts were still there. Only they weren’t standing hand in hand. The woman was leaning on the man. He had his arm around her. Her body was shaking.

  Paavo could hear her sobbing from here.

  “Do you see them?” he asked Anya.

  “Those people?” she said. “Yeah. They’re not supposed to be here.”

  “I know,” he said, and this time his voice shook. “I know.”

  ***

  “It’s a startling breach of security,” said Selah Rutledge, the Headmistress of the Armstrong Wing of the Aristotle Academy. She bustled through the corridors of the school, the cape she had slung around her shoulders flapping behind her.

  Gerda Deshin struggled to keep up. She was a tiny woman with short legs. She could never walk as fast as the others around her, and it seemed worse somehow, as she followed Selah Rutledge.

  Or maybe it was the panic in Gerda’s belly. Someone had tried to attack Paavo. Her boy was supposed to be safe here. She and Luc had paid a premium to get Paavo the best education and the best security in the entire City of Armstrong.

  And still, someone had broken into the school, come onto the playground, and touched her child.

  Selah Rutledge flowed around children standing in the corridors. The classroom doors were open, but no one was inside. The classes ran in fifty minute segments, with ten minute breaks, so that the children could relax, play, laugh or take care of personal needs like going to the bathroom.

  That h
ad been one of the features Gerda had liked about the Aristotle Academy when she toured it two years ago. Right now, she hated it.

  She didn’t want any of the children to stare at her.

  Just like she knew they stared at her son.

  Paavo was special. He had one of the highest IQs ever recorded by the Armstrong School District. Like so many geniuses, he couldn’t quite understand why others didn’t learn the same way he did. He talked about things too advanced for other children to grasp.

  Sometimes he talked about things too advanced for her to grasp.

  Her husband Luc had stopped trying. He loved the boy, but Luc knew he would never be as smart as his son. Paavo intimidated him. Sometimes Luc would say, Explain it for Daddy, Paavo. Put in extra sentences.

  Gerda understood Paavo. She had since she first saw him, waving his chubby fingers and making goo-goo noises as he looked into her face.

  Her heart twisted at the memory. She had thought she could make him such a happy child. Instead, he was lonely and a little strange. It had been the heartbreak of her life to realize that loving him wasn’t enough.

  Selah Rutledge turned down a final corridor, this one devoid of children. Gerda finally recognized an area. This was the administration section of the building. It also housed finance and some of the most sophisticated large computer systems she had ever seen.

  Each of the Aristotle Academies throughout the Earth Alliance was linked to the other Aristotle Academies. The academies were designed with three types of students in mind: the very wealthy who could afford the best education for their child, no matter what the IQ; the very paranoid who felt their child was under constant threat and needed a full panel of security; and the extremely brilliant whose child needed more than upscale tutoring—he needed an individual program tailored to his particular needs.

  Luc had found the Aristotle Academy. Luc was the paranoid one. But Gerda had known from the moment she held Paavo that he was brilliant. She had held a lot of babies, and never had one under four months looked at her with such intelligence and focus. He had to go through a large battery of tests, which were repeated each year until his third birthday, and each time, he tested higher than the administrators had ever seen.

  Selah Rutledge opened the door to her office and there, sitting among the desks, chairs, and real potted plants, was Paavo. He looked tiny and frightened, his cheeks tear-streaked. He had his shoes on the chair, his arms wrapped around his knees, and Gerda knew without even being told that he had been rocking back and forth, trying to comfort himself.

  “Baby,” she said, opening her arms. He ran into them and held her so tight that she couldn’t catch her breath.

  “The Ghosts,” he said against her stomach. “The Ghosts were here.”

  Selah Rutledge had pushed the door closed. She walked to her desk.

  Gerda tried to extricate herself from her son, just so that she could breathe. Finally, she pried his arms off her mid-section and crouched, trying to create some privacy for herself and her son.

  “The Ghosts?” she said, trying to keep the alarm from her own voice. She hoped she hadn’t heard him right.

  He nodded, then wiped tears from his face with the back of his hand. “They touched me.”

  She frowned. He hadn’t spoken of the Ghosts since he was four. He used to shriek in fear at the oddest times, staring ahead at nothing. The shrieks had started when he was just a year old.

  Finally, she got Paavo to tell her what he saw. He saw people he said. Ghosts. As he got older, he could tell her why he thought they were ghosts. They were like the creatures in stories. Fake. He could put his hand through them. They would vanish. Sometimes they flickered in and out.

  Luc called them imaginary friends. Gerda said friends would not make a child scream. Luc said seeing things was normal for children; so was making things up.

  While Gerda agreed, she also knew that children with exceptionally high IQs were vulnerable to a host of mental illnesses. So she had him tested. The doctors found nothing, but suggested that he might be experiencing ghost images from those links that had been installed when he was much too young.

  The doctors had judged her as they said it, assuming she had put in the links. She didn’t argue. It was too complicated—everything about Paavo was complicated—but it had worried her all the same.

  “The Ghosts touched you,” she repeated, hoping she had misunderstood him.

  He snuffled and wiped at his face again. “They smelled. They called me Enrique.”

  A shiver ran down her back. She kept one hand on her son’s shoulder, and stood.

  Selah Rutledge was watching them with great concern.

  “Did anyone else see these Ghosts?” Gerda asked.

  “All of the children did,” Rutledge said. “Some of the older kids ran for security. When security arrived, the couple was gone.”

  That shiver ran down Gerda’s spine again. “It was a couple?”

  “A man and a woman,” Rutledge said. “Here. We have it on our security monitors.”

  Before Gerda could warn her off, Rutledge pressed something on her desk. A life-sized image of the couple appeared in front of one of the giant potted plants.

  Paavo screamed and clutched at Gerda.

  “Shut it off,” Gerda said. “Shut it off.”

  Rutledge did. Her face had gone gray. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I hadn’t realized.”

  “Clearly,” Gerda said. She held Paavo against her legs. He was trembling.

  “They never would have gotten off the grounds with him,” Rutledge said. “We have protections—”

  “Those failed.” Gerda stroked Paavo’s hair. She would have preferred to have this conversation without him here, but she couldn’t leave him alone.

  “I’m sure we can find some kind of satisfaction,” Rutledge said. “This is a one-time thing—”

  “It had better be,” Gerda said, her voice so cold that it chilled her. She didn’t realize she had such a voice inside herself.

  But Rutledge’s excuses angered her. The headmistress was afraid of a lawsuit and terrible publicity, not the effect this was having on Paavo. In fact, since they had come into the room, she hadn’t addressed Paavo once.

  “I want copies of those security recordings now,” Gerda said. “I want to know exactly how those people got onto this campus and what your school is doing to track them.”

  “We’re investigating,” Rutledge said in a tone that implied they were in no great hurry.

  But Gerda was. “I want you to solve this in the next few hours, or so help me, I’ll go to InterDome Media and tell them that my child was assaulted on the playground of the Aristotle Academy.”

  “There’s no reason to go to InterDome,” Rutledge said, her voice shaking. Gerda hated that wobbly sound. It meant that her assumptions about Rutledge were true; the woman cared only about the school’s reputation, not what had nearly happened to Gerda’s son.

  Gerda held out her free hand. “Give me copies of the security footage.”

  Rutledge nodded, looking trapped. She touched a white area on the side of the desk, then removed several very small chips.

  Gerda took the chips and pocketed them. Then she crouched, picked up her son, and cradled him against her as if he were three instead of seven. He was so long his feet hit her calves. But she held him anyway.

  “Here’s what I expect,” Gerda said. “I expect the people who attacked my son to be arrested by the end of the day. I expect a detailed plan from the Academy on how you’ll beef up security. And I expect compensation for my son’s trauma.”

  “I can’t guarantee an arrest,” Rutledge said, her voice small.

  “Then I can’t guarantee that I’ll keep this quiet,” Gerda said. Her back ached. Her son was too heavy to hold like this.

  She let herself out of the room, not because the conversation was done—it wasn’t, not quite—but because she didn’t want to set Paavo down again, not in that place.

&
nbsp; She carried him most of the way down the administrative corridor before she had to set him down. Then she wiped off his face, smoothed his hair back, and kissed him on his cheeks. They were chapped. He had been crying hard.

  “The Ghosts,” she said. “Tell me everything you know about these Ghosts.”

  ***

  Selah Rutledge sat at her desk, her face buried in her hands. Never, in all of her years as an administrator, had anyone shaken her up this badly. It wasn’t just that Gerda Deshin and, more importantly, her husband Luc Deshin were among the most powerful people in the City of Armstrong.

  It was also the fact that somehow people unknown had breached the academy’s security. If it got out that two people—whoever they were; whatever they wanted—had somehow entered the academy’s grounds and tried to grab one of the children, the academy had no future in Armstrong. And she would have no future in academia.

  But what bothered her the most was that the child seemed to know who these people were. Paavo Deshin wasn’t the most stable creature: He burst into tears at the slightest problem. But he was—by the numbers, at least—the most brilliant child this academy had seen, one of the most brilliant children to ever go through any Aristotle Academy anywhere in the Alliance.

  The brilliant could be eccentric; she had preached that to her staff for years. She wanted to give children the freedom to think and to be. But she didn’t want them terrified.

  And that was the underlying emotion for her.

  Terror.

  Selah Rutledge took a deep breath, then smoothed her hands over her face. She sat up. She had already reprimanded her head of security. Others within the academy were trying to find out what went wrong.

  She would consult with them shortly.

  In the meantime, she would find out who these intruders were.

  She used the academy’s extensive computer networks, opening links and lines she usually only opened during the rare admissions process. She took the images of the intruders and ran them through an Alliance-wide recognition system.