"Thank you," she said.
He had to support her. His room was in the same building, reached by a web of dirty corridors. The room was white plastic and scrupulously clean, almost bare. The bluish shimmering cube of a trid moved
and muttered in the corner.
The old man took her to a broken sandbed and stood uncertainly by her. "Is there anything... do you need... ?" Rusty words learned by rote long before, never used. Lais shook her head. She took off her coat, and he hurried to help her. She lay down. The bed was hard: air was meant to flow through granules and give the illusion of floating, but the jets had stopped and the tiny beads were packed down at the bottom, mobile and slippery only beneath the cover. It was softer than the street. The light was bright, but not intolerable. She threw her arm across her eyes.
* * *
Something awakened her: she lay taut, disoriented. The illumination was like late twilight. She heard her name again and turned. Over her shoulder she saw the old man crouched on a stool in front of the trid, peering into the bluish space of it, staring at a silent miniature of Lais. She did not have to listen to know what the voice was saying: they had traced her to Highport; they were telling the residents that she was here and that she was mad, a poor pitiful unstable genius, paranoid and frightened, needing compassion and aid. But not dangerous. Certainly not dangerous. Soothing words assured people that aggression had been eliminated from the chromosomes of the freaks (that was a lie, and impossible, but as good as truth). The voice said that there were only a few Fellows, who all confined themselves to research. Lais stopped listening. She allowed early memories to seep out and affect her. The old man crouched before his trid and stared at the picture. She pushed the twisted blanket away. The old man did not move. At the foot of the bed, Lais reached out until her fingers almost brushed his collar. Beneath it lay the strong thin links of his identity necklace. She could reach out, twist it into his throat, and remove him as a threat. No one would notice he was gone. No one would care. A primitive anthropoid, poised between civilization and savagery, urged her on.
When he recognized her, he would straighten. His throat would be exposed. Lais could feel tendons beneath her hands. She glanced down, to those hands outstretched like claws, taut, trembling, alien. She drew them back, still staring. She hesitated, then lay down on the bed again. Her hands lay passive, hers once more, pale and blue-veined, with torn, dirty fingernails.
The old man did not turn around.
They showed pictures of how she might look if she were trying to disguise herself, in dark or medium skin tones, no hair, long hair, curly hair, hair with color. The brown almost had it: anonymous. And she had changed in ways more subtle than disguise. The arrogance was attenuated, and the invincible assurance gone; the self-confidence remained-- it was all she had-- but it was tempered, and more mature. She had learned to doubt, rather than simply to question.
The estranged face in the trid, despite its arrogance, was not cruel but gentle, and that quality she had not been able to change.
It had taken them two months to trace her. They could not have followed her credit number, for she had stopped using it before they could cancel it. They would have known only how far she could get before her cash ran out. She had gotten farther, of course, but they had probably expected that.
Since they knew where she was, now was almost identical to later, and now it was still light outside.
As she allowed herself to sleep again, she tried to imagine not recognizing a picture of someone she had met. She failed.
* * *
Lais woke up struggling from a nightmare in which the blue images of the trid attacked and overwhelmed her, and her computers would not come to her aid. The old man pulled his hands from her shoulders abruptly and guiltily when he realized she was awake. The windowless room was stuffy. Lais was damp all over with feverish sweat. Her head ached, and her knees were sore.
"I'm sorry, miz, I was afraid you'd hurt yourself." He must have been rebuffed and denigrated all his life, to be so afraid of touching another human being.
"It's all right," she said. She seemed always to be saying that to him. Her mental clock buzzed and jumped to catch up with reality: twelve hours since the trid woke her up.
The old man sat quietly, perhaps waiting for orders. He did not take his gaze from her, but his surveillance was of a strange and anxious childlike quality, without recognition. It seemed not to have occurred to him that his stray might be the Institute fugitive. He seemed to live in two spheres of reality. When she looked at his eyes, he put his head down and hunched his shoulders. His hands lay limp and half-curled in his lap. "I didn't know what to do. They yell at me when I ask stupid questions." No bitterness, just acceptance of the judgment that any question he could ask must be stupid.
She forced back her own useless flare of anger. To awaken hate in him would be cruel. "You did the right thing," she said. She would have said the same words if he had innocently betrayed her. Two other lines of possible reality converged in her mind: herself of two months or a year before, somehow unchanged by exile and disillusionment, and an old man who called Aid for the sick girl in his room. She would have told him exactly what she thought without regard for his feelings; she would have looked on him not with compassion but with the kind of impersonal pity that is almost disdain. But they would have been more similar in one quality: neither of them would have recognized the isolation of their lives.
"Are you hungry?"
"No." That was easier than trying to explain why she was, but could not eat. He accepted it without question or surprise, and still seemed to wait for her orders. She realized that she could stay and he would never dare complain-- perhaps not wish to-- nor dare tell anyone she was here. If he had been one of the plastic people she might have used him, but he was not, and she could not: full circle.
His hands moved in his lap, nervous.
"What's wrong?" She was careful to say it gently.
As an apology, he said, "Miz, I have to work."
"You don't need my permission," she said, trying to keep her tone from sounding like a reprimand.
He got up, stood uncertainly in the center of his room, wanting to speak, not knowing the right words. "Maybe later you'll be hungry." He fled.
She unwrapped herself from the blanket and massaged her knees. She wandered uneasily around the room, feeling trapped and alien.
One station on the trid bounced down all news. She came on at the quarter hour. The hope that they had only traced her to this world evaporated as she listened to the bulletin: the broadcast was satellite-transmitted; unless they had known, they would not have said she was in Highport and risked missing her in another city. They kept saying she was crazy, in the politest possible terms. They could never say that the malignancy was not in her mind but in her body. No one got cancer anymore. People who related their birth dates to the skies of old Earth did not even call themselves Moon children if they were born under the Crab. All the normals had been clean-gened, to strip even the potential for cancer from their chromosomes. Only a few of them, and now Lais, knew that the potential had been put back into the Institute Fellows, as punishment and control.
They used even this announcement to remind the people how important the Fellows were, how many advances they had made, how many benefits they had provided.
Before, Lais had never known that that sort of constant persuasion was necessary. Perhaps, in fact, it wasn't. Perhaps they only thought it was, so they continued it, afraid to stop the constant reinforcement, probing, breaking old scars.