Echea Read online

  She had her arms wrapped around it, her hands gripping it as if we were going to take it away.

  "I know," I said softly. "I know, sweetie-baby. You can keep it. We’re not trying to take it away from you."

  "They said you would."

  "Who?" I asked, with a sinking feeling. I already knew who. My other two daughters. "Kally and Susan?"

  She nodded.

  "Well, they’re wrong," I said. "My husband and I make the rules in this house. I will never take away something of yours. I promise."

  "Promise?" she whispered.

  "Promise," I said. "Now how about breakfast?"

  She looked at Anne for confirmation, and I wanted to hug my youngest daughter. She had already decided to care for Echea, to ally with her, to make Echea’s entrance into the household easier.

  I was so proud of her.

  "Breakfast," Anne said, and I heard a tone in her voice I’d never heard before. "It’s the first meal of the day."

  The government had fed the children standard nutrition supplements, in beverage form. Echea hadn’t taken a meal on Earth until she’d joined us.

  "You name your meals?" she asked Anne. "You have that many of them?" Then she put a hand over her mouth, as if she were surprised she had let the questions out.

  "Three of them," I said, trying to sound normal. Instead I felt defensive, as if we had too much. "We only have three of them."

  The second night, we had no disturbances. By the third, we had developed a routine. I spent time with my girls, and then I went into Echea’s room. She didn’t like House or House’s stories. House’s voice, no matter how I programmed it, scared her. It made me wonder how we were going to link her when the time came. If she found House intrusive, imagine how she would find the constant barrage of information services, of instant e-mail scrolling across her eyes, or sudden images appearing inside her head. She was almost past the age where a child adapted easily to a link. We had to calm her quickly or risk her suffering a disadvantage for the rest of her life.

  Perhaps it was the voice that upset her. The reason links made sound optional was because too many people had had trouble distinguishing the voices inside their head. Perhaps Echea would be one of them.

  It was time to find out.

  I had yet to broach the topic with my husband. He seemed to have cooled toward Echea immediately. He thought Echea abnormal because she wasn’t like our girls. I reminded him that Echea hadn’t had the advantages, to which he responded that she had the advantages now. He felt that since her life had changed, she should change.

  Somehow I didn’t think it worked like that.

  It was on the second night that I realized she was terrified of going to sleep. She kept me as long as she could, and when I finally left, she asked to keep the lights on.

  House said she had them on all night, although the computer clocked her even breathing starting at 2:47 a.m.

  On the third night, she asked me questions. Simple ones, like the one about breakfast, and I answered them without my previous defensiveness. I held my emotions back, my shock that a child would have to ask what that pleasant ache was in her stomach after meals ("You’re full, Echea. That’s your stomach telling you it’s happy.") or why we insisted on bathing at least once a day ("People stink if they don’t bathe often, Echea. Haven’t you noticed?"). She asked the questions with her eyes averted, and her hands clenched against the coverlet. She knew that she should know the answers, she knew better than to ask my older two daughters or my husband, and she tried ever so hard to be sophisticated.

  Already, the girls had humiliated her more than once. The dress incident had blossomed into an obsession with them, and they taunted her about her unwillingness to attach to anything. She wouldn’t even claim a place at the dining room table. She seemed convinced that we would toss her out at the first chance.

  On the fourth night, she addressed that fear. Her question came at me sideways, her body more rigid than usual.

  "If I break something," she asked, "what will happen?"

  I resisted the urge to ask what she had broken. I knew she hadn’t broken anything. House would have told me, even if the girls hadn’t.

  "Echea," I said, sitting on the edge of her bed, "are you afraid that you’ll do something which will force us to get rid of you?"

  She flinched as if I had struck her, then she slid down against the coverlet. The material was twisted in her hands, and her lower jaw was working even before she spoke.

  "Yes," she whispered.

  "Didn’t they explain this to you before they brought you here?" I asked.

  "They said nothing." That harsh tone was back in her voice, the tone I hadn’t heard since that very first day, her very first comment.

  I leaned forward and, for the first time, took one of those clenched fists into my hands. I felt the sharp knuckles against my palms, and the softness of the fabric brushing my skin.

  "Echea," I said. "When we adopted you, we made you our child by law. We cannot get rid of you. No matter what. It is illegal for us to do so."

  "People do illegal things," she whispered.

  "When it benefits them," I said. "Losing you will not benefit us."

  "You’re saying that to be kind," she said.

  I shook my head. The real answer was harsh, harsher than I wanted to state, but I could not leave it at this. She would not believe me. She would think I was trying to ease her mind. I was, but not through polite lies.

  "No," I said. "The agreement we signed is legally binding. If we treat you as anything less than a member of our family, we not only lose you, we lose our other daughters as well."

  I was particularly proud of adding the word "other." I suspected that, if my husband had been having this conversation with her, that he would have forgotten to add it.

  "You would?" she asked.

  "Yes," I said.

  "This is true?" she asked.

  "True," I said. "I can download the agreement and its ramifications for you in the morning. House can read you the standard agreement-the one everyone must sign-tonight if you like."

  She shook her head, and pushed her hands harder into mine. "Could you-could you answer me one thing?" she asked.

  "Anything," I said.

  "I don’t have to leave?"

  "Not ever," I said.

  She frowned. "Even if you die?"

  "Even if we die," I said. "You’ll inherit, just like the other girls."

  My stomach knotted as I spoke. I had never mentioned the money to our own children. I figured they knew. And now I was telling Echea who was, for all intents and purposes, still a stranger.

  And an unknown one at that.

  I made myself smile, made the next words come out lightly. "I suspect there are provisions against killing us in our beds."

  Her eyes widened, then instantly filled with tears. "I would never do that," she said.

  And I believed her.

  As she grew more comfortable with me, she told me about her previous life. She spoke of it only in passing, as if the things that happened before no longer mattered to her. But in the very flatness with which she told them, I could sense deep emotions churning beneath the surface.

  The stories she told were hair-raising. She had not, as I had assumed, been orphaned as an infant. She had spent most of her life with a family member who had died, and then she had been brought to Earth. Somehow, I had believed that she had grown up in an orphanage like the ones from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ones Dickens wrote about, and the famous pioneer filmmakers had made Flats about. I had not realized that those places did not exist on the Moon. Either children were chosen for adoption, or they were left to their own devices, to survive on their own if they could.

  Until she had moved in with us, she had never slept in a bed. She did not know it was possible to grow food by planting it, although she had heard rumors of such miracles.

  She did not know that people could accept her for what she was,
instead of what she could do for them.

  My husband said that she was playing on my sympathies so that I would never let her go.

  But I wouldn’t have let her go anyway. I had signed the documents and made the verbal promise. And I cared for her. I would never let her go, any more than I would let a child of my flesh go.

  I hoped, at one point, that he would feel the same.

  As the weeks progressed, I was able to focus on Echea’s less immediate needs. She was beginning to use House-her initial objection to it had been based on something that happened on the Moon, something she never fully explained-but House could not teach her everything. Anne introduced her to reading, and often Echea would read to herself. She caught on quickly, and I was surprised that she had not learned in her school on the Moon, until someone told me that most Moon colonies had no schools. The children were home-taught, which worked only for children with stable homes.

  Anne also showed her how to program House to read things Echea did not understand. Echea made use of that as well. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would check on the girls. Often I would have to open Echea’s door, and turn off House myself. Echea would fall asleep to the drone of a deep male voice. She never used the vids. She simply liked the words, she said, and she would listen to them endlessly, as if she couldn’t get enough.

  I downloaded information on child development and learning curves, and it was as I remembered. A child who did not link before the age of ten was significantly behind her peers in all things. If she did not link before the age of twenty, she would never be able to function at an adult level in modern society.

  Echea’s link would be her first step into the world that my daughters already knew, the Earth culture denied so many who had fled to the Moon.

  After a bit of hesitation, I made an appointment with Ronald Caro, our Interface Physician.

  Through force of habit, I did not tell my husband.

  I had known my husband all my life, and our match was assumed from the beginning. We had a warm and comfortable relationship, much better than many among my peers. I had always liked my husband, and had always admired the way he worked his way around each obstacle life presented him.

  One of those obstacles was Ronald Caro. When he arrived in St. Paul, after getting all his degrees and licenses and awards, Ronald Caro contacted me. He had known that my daughter Kally was in need of a link, and he offered to be the one to do it.

  I would have turned him down, but my husband, always practical, checked on his credentials.

  "How sad," my husband had said. "He’s become one of the best Interface Physicians in the country."

  I hadn’t thought it sad. I hadn’t thought it anything at all except inconvenient. My family had forbidden me to see Ronald Caro when I was sixteen, and I had disobeyed them.

  All girls, particularly home-schooled ones, have on-line romances. Some progress to vid conferencing and virtual sex. Only a handful progress to actual physical contact. And of those that do, only a small fraction survive.

  At sixteen, I ran away from home to be with Ronald Caro. He had been sixteen too, and gorgeous, if the remaining snapshot in my image memory were any indication. I thought I loved him. My father, who had been monitoring my e-mail, sent two police officers and his personal assistant to bring me home.

  The resulting disgrace made me so ill that I could not get out of bed for six months. My then-future husband visited me each and every day of those six months, and it is from that period that most of my memories of him were formed. I was glad to have him; my father, who had been quite close to me, rarely spoke to me after I ran away with Ronald, and treated me as a stranger.

  When Ronald reappeared in the Northland long after I had married, my husband showed his forgiving nature. He knew Ronald Caro was no longer a threat to us. He proved it by letting me take the short shuttle hop to the Twin Cities to have Kally linked.

  Ronald did not act improperly toward me then or thereafter, although he often looked at me with a sadness I did not reciprocate. My husband was relieved. He always insisted on having the best, and because my husband was squeamish about brain work, particularly that which required chips, lasers, and remote placement devices, he preferred to let me handle the children’s interface needs.

  Even though I no longer wanted it, I still had a personal relationship with Ronald Caro. He did not treat me as a patient, or as the mother of his patients, but as a friend.

  Nothing more.

  Even my husband knew that.

  Still, the afternoon I made the appointment, I went into our bedroom, made certain my husband was in his office, and closed the door. Then I used the link to send a message to Ronald.

  Instantly his response flashed across my left eye.

  Are you all right? He sent, as he always did, as if he expected something terrible to have happened to me during our most recent silence.

  Fine, I sent back, disliking the personal questions.

  And the girls?

  Fine also.

  So, you linked to chat? Again, as he always did.

  And I responded as I always did. No. I need to make an appointment for Echea.

  The Moon Child?

  I smiled. Ronald was the only person I knew, besides my husband, who didn’t think we were insane for taking on a child not our own. But I felt that we could, and because we could, and because so many were suffering, we should.

  My husband probably had his own reasons. We never really discussed them, beyond that first day.

  The Moon Child, I responded. Echea.

  Pretty name.

  Pretty girl.

  There was a silence, as if he didn’t know how to respond to that. He had always been silent about my children. They were links he could not form, links to my husband that could not be broken, links that Ronald and I could never have.

  She has no interface, I sent into that silence.

  Not at all?

  No.

  Did they tell you anything about her?

  Only that she’d been orphaned. You know, the standard stuff. I felt odd, sending that. I had asked for information, of course, at every step. And my husband had. And when we compared notes, I learned that each time we had been told the same thing-that we had asked for a child, and we would get one, and that child’s life would start fresh with us. The past did not matter.

  The present did.

  How old is she?

  Seven.

  Hmmm. The procedure won’t be involved, but there might be some dislocation. She’s been alone in her head all this time. Is she stable enough for the change?

  I was genuinely perplexed. I had never encountered an unlinked child, let alone lived with one. I didn’t know what "stable" meant in that context.

  My silence had apparently been answer enough.

  I’ll do an exam, he sent. Don’t worry.

  Good. I got ready to terminate the conversation.

  You sure everything’s all right there? he sent.

  It’s as right as it always is, I sent, and then severed the connection.

  That night, I dreamed. It was an odd dream because it felt like a virtual reality vid, complete with emotions and all the five senses. But it had the distance of VR too-that strange sense that the experience was not mine.

  I dreamed I was on a dirty, dusty street. The air was thin and dry. I had never felt air like this. It tasted recycled, and it seemed to suck the moisture from my skin. It wasn’t hot, but it wasn’t cold either. I wore a ripped shirt and ragged pants, and my shoes were boots made of a light material I had never felt before. Walking was easy and precarious at the same time. I felt lighter than ever, as if with one wrong gesture I would float.

  My body moved easily in this strange atmosphere, as if it were used to it. I had felt something like it before: when my husband and I had gone to the Museum of Science and Technology in Chicago on our honeymoon. We explored the Moon exhibit, and felt firsthand what it was like to be in a colony environment.
<
br />   Only that had been clean.

  This wasn’t.

  The buildings were white plastic, covered with a filmy grit and pockmarked with time and use. The dirt on the ground seemed to get on everything, but I knew, as well as I knew how to walk in this imperfect gravity, that there wasn’t enough money to pave the roads.

  The light above was artificial, built into the dome itself. If I looked up, I could see the dome and the light, and if I squinted, I could see beyond to the darkness that was the unprotected atmosphere. It made me feel as if I were in a lighted glass porch on a starless night. Open, and vulnerable, and terrified, more because I couldn’t see what was beyond than because I could.

  People crowded the roadway and huddled near the plastic buildings. The buildings were domed too. Pre-fab, shipped up decades ago when Earth had hopes for the colonies. Now there were no more shipments, at least not here. We had heard that there were shipments coming to Colony Russia and Colony Europe, but no one confirmed the rumors. I was in Colony London, a bastard colony made by refugees and dissidents from Colony Europe. For a while, we had stolen their supply ships. Now, it seemed, they had stolen them back.

  A man took my arm. I smiled up at him. His face was my father’s face, a face I hadn’t seen since I was twenty-five. Only something had altered it terribly. He was younger than I had ever remembered him. He was too thin and his skin filthy with dust. He smiled back at me, three teeth missing, lost to malnutrition, the rest blackened and about to go. In the past few days the whites of his eyes had turned yellow, and a strange mucus came from his nose. I wanted him to see the colony’s medical facility or at least pay for an autodoc, but we had no credit, no means to pay at all.

  It would have to wait until we found something.

  "I think I found us free passage to Colony Latina," he said. His breath whistled through the gaps in his teeth. I had learned long ago to be far away from his mouth. The stench could be overpowering. "But you’ll have to do them a job."

  A job. I sighed. He had promised no more. But that had been months ago. The credits had run out, and he had gotten sicker.

  "A big job?" I asked.

  He didn’t meet my gaze. "Might be."