Sarai shook her head. “And have her wonder every day where all of her favorite clothes have gone? No. I’ve saved some things. They’re here somewhere.”
“Do it later.”
“Damn it, there is no later!” shouted Sarai and then turned away from Sol and raised her hands to her face. “I’m sorry.”
Sol put his arms around her. Despite the limited Poulsen treatments, her bare arms were much thinner than he remembered. Knots and cords under rough skin. He hugged her tightly.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, sobbing openly now. “It’s just not fair.”
“No,” agreed Sol. “It’s not fair.” The sunlight coming through the dusty attic panes had a sad, cathedral quality to it. Sol had always’ loved the smell of an attic—the hot and stale promise of a place so underused and filled with future treasures. Today it was ruined.
He crouched next to a box. “Come, dear,” he said, “we’ll look together.”
Rachel continued to be happy, involved with life, only slightly confused by the incongruities which faced her each morning when she awoke. As she grew younger it became easier to explain away the changes that appeared to have occurred overnight—the old elm out front gone, the new apartment building on the corner where M. Nesbitt used to live in a colonial-era home, the absence of her friends—and Sol began to see as never before the flexibility of children. He now imagined Rachel living on the breaking crest of the wave of time, not seeing the murky depths of the sea beyond, keeping her balance with her small store of memories and a total commitment to the twelve to fifteen hours of now allowed her each day.
Neither Sol nor Sarai wanted their daughter isolated from other children and it was difficult to find ways to make contact. Rachel was delighted to play with the “new girl” or “new boy” in the neighborhood—children of other instructors, the grandchildren of friends, for a while with Niki’s daughter—but the other children had to grow accustomed to Rachel greeting them anew each day, remembering nothing of their common past, and only a few had the sensitivity to continue such a charade for the sake of a playmate.
The story of Rachel’s unique illness was no secret in Crawford, of course. The fact of it had spread through the college the first year of Rachel’s return and the entire town knew soon after. Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial—some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else’s misfortune out of their voices and gazes—but mostly the community folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young.
Still, they were allowed to live their lives, and even when Sol had to cut back classes and then take an early retirement because of trips seeking medical treatment for Rachel, the real reason was mentioned by no one.
But it could not last, of course, and on the spring day when Sol stepped onto the porch and saw his weeping seven-year-old daughter coming back from the park surrounded and followed by a pack of newsteeps, their camera implants gleaming and comlogs extended, he knew that a phase of their life was over forever. Sol jumped from the porch and ran to Rachel’s side.
“M. Weintraub, is it true that your daughter contracted a terminal time illness? What’s going to happen in seven years? Will it just disappear?”
“M. Weintraub! M. Weintraub! Rachel says that she thinks Raben Dowell is Senate CEO and this is the year A.D. 2711. Has she lost those thirty-four years completely or is this a delusion caused by the Merlin sickness?”
“Rachel! Do you remember being a grown woman? What’s it feel like to be a kid again?”
“M. Weintraub! M. Weintraub! Just one still image, please. How about you get a picture of Rachel when she was older and you and the kid stand looking at it?”
“M. Weintraub! Is it true that this is the curse of the Time Tombs? Did Rachel see the Shrike monster?”
“Hey, Weintraub! Sol! Hey, Solly! What’re you and the little woman going to do when the kid’s gone?”
There was a newsteep blocking Sol’s way to the front door. The man leaned forward, the stereo lenses of his eyes elongating as they zoomed in for a close-up of Rachel. Sol grabbed the man’s long hair—which was conveniently tied in a queue—and flung him aside.
The pack brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven weeks. Sol realized what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called “public’s right to know.”
The Web did. Rather than have his family become permanent prisoners to the besieging reporters, Sol went on the offensive. He arranged interviews on the most pervasive farcaster cable news programs, participated in All Thing discussions, and personally attended the Concourse Medical Research Conclave. In ten standard months he asked for help for his daughter on eighty worlds.
Offers poured in from ten thousand sources but the bulk of the communications were from faith healers, project promoters, institutes and free-lance researchers offering their services in exchange for the publicity, Shrike cultists and other religious zealots pointing out that Rachel deserved the punishment, requests from various advertising agencies for product endorsements, offers from media agents to “handle” Rachel for such endorsements, offers of sympathy from common people—frequently enclosing credit chips, expressions of disbelief from scientists, offers from holie producers and book publishers for exclusive rights to Rachel’s life, and a barrage of real estate offers.
Reichs University paid for a team of evaluators to sort the offers and see if anything might benefit Rachel. Most of the communications were discarded. A few medical or research offers were seriously considered. In the end, none seemed to offer any avenue of research or experimental therapy which Reichs had not already tried.
One fatline flimsy came to Sol’s attention. It was from the Chairman of Kibbutz K’far Shalom on Hebron and read simply:
IF IT BECOMES TOO MUCH, COME.
* * *
It soon became too much. After the first Few months of publicity the siege seemed to lift, but this was only the prelude to the second act. Faxsimmed tabloids referred to Sol as the “Wandering Jew,” the desperate father wandering afar in search of a cure for his child’s bizarre illness—an ironic title given Sol’s lifelong dislike of travel. Sarai inevitably was “the grieving mother.” Rachel was “the doomed child” or, in one inspired headline, “Virgin Victim of the Time Tombs’ Curse.” None of the family could go outside without finding a newsteep or imager hiding behind a tree.
Crawford discovered that there was money to be found in the Weintraubs’ misfortune. At first the town held the line, but when entrepreneurs from Bussard City moved in with gift shops, T-shirt concessions, tours, and datachip booths for the tourists who were coming in larger and larger numbers, the local business people first dithered, then wavered, then decided unanimously that, if there was commerce to be carried on, the profits should not go to outsiders.
After four hundred and thirty-eight standard years of comparative solitude, the town of Crawford received a farcaster terminex. No longer did visitors have to suffer the twenty-minute flight from Bussard City. The crowds grew.
On the day they moved it rained heavily and the streets were empty. Rachel did not cry, but her eyes were very wide all day and she spoke in subdued tones. It was ten days before her sixth birthday. “But, Daddy, why do we have to move?”
“We just do, honey.”
“But why?”