head. She’d been saying that for more than a year; something always came up. She had a busy life, admittedly, still teaching full-time at a junior college in Pittsburgh. But that obviously wasn’t it. She really didn’t want to lose her little boy at all, and to lose him to a woman old enough to be her sister was grotesque.
He’d talked to Amelia about their going up to Pittsburgh, but she said she didn’t want to force the issue. There was something less simple at work with her, as well.
The two women had opposite attitudes toward his being a mechanic, too. Amelia was plainly worried sick all the time he was in Portobello—much worse now, since the massacre—but his mother treated it as a kind of brainless second job that he had to do, even though it got in the way of his actual work. She never seemed to have any curiosity about what went on down there. Amelia followed his unit’s actions with the single-minded intensity of a warboy. (She’d never admitted this, which Julian supposed was to spare him anxiety, but she often slipped and asked questions about things that nobody could have found out if they simply followed the news.)
It suddenly, belatedly, occurred to Julian that Hayes, and probably everybody else in the department, knew or suspected there was something going on because of the way Amelia acted when he was away. They worked hard at (but also had fun) playing the role of “just friends” when they came together at work. Maybe their audience knew the script.
All part of the past now. He was impatient to get to the club and see how people had reacted to the news. But he still had a couple of hours if he was going to give Marty ample time to set them up. He didn’t really feel like working, even answering mail, so he flopped down on the couch and asked the cube to search.
The cube had a built-in learning routine that analyzed every selection he made, and from the content of what he liked, constructed a preference profile that it used to search through the eighteen hundred available channels. One problem with that was that you couldn’t communicate with the routine; its only input was your choices. The first year or so after he was drafted, Julian had obsessively watched century-old movies, perhaps to escape into a world where people and events were simply good or bad. So now when the thing searched, it dutifully came up with lots of Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, and Julian had found through objective observation that it did no good to yell at it.
Humphrey Bogart at Rick’s. Reset. Jimmy Stewart headed for Washington. Reset. A tour of the lunar south pole, through the eyes of the robot landers. He’d seen most of it a couple of years before, but it was interesting enough to see again. It also helped deprogram the machine.
* * *
everyone looked up when I walked into the room, but I suppose they would do that under any circumstances. Perhaps they kept looking a little longer than usual.
There was an empty chair at a table with Marty, Reza, and Franklin.
“You get her safely ensconced?” Marty asked.
I nodded. “She’ll be out of that place as soon as they let her walk. The three women she’s sharing the room with are straight out of Hamlet.”
“Macbeth,” Reza corrected me, “if you mean crones. Or are they sweet young lunatics about to commit suicide?”
“Crones. She seems okay. The ride up from Guadalajara wasn’t bad, just long.” The sullen waiter in the artfully stained T-shirt slouched over. “Coffee,” I said, then caught Reza’s look of mock horror. “And a pitcher of Rioja.” It was getting on toward the end of the month again. The guy started to ask for my ration card, then recognized me and slumped away.
“Hope you re-enlist,” Reza said. He took my number and punched in the price of the whole pitcher.
“When Portobello freezes over.”
“Did they say when she’d be released?” Marty asked.
“No. Neurologist sees her in the morning. She’ll call me.”
“Better have her call Hayes, too. I told him everything was going to be all right, but he’s nervous.”
“He’s nervous.”
“He’s known her longer than you have,” Franklin said quietly. So had he and Marty.
“So did you see any Guadalajara?” Reza asked. “Fleshpots?”
“No. Just wandered around a little. Didn’t get into the old city or out to T-town, what do they call it?”
“Tlaquepaque,” Reza said. “I spent an eventful week