Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (28 page)

“Hmmph!  You mean the noble
members of the Board of Education were afraid the Earth-Firsters
would make good on their promise to destroy any elected official
who’s ‘weak’ on colonial policy. That’s what it was all about,
wasn’t it, Bob?”

The principal bowed his head and
looked up at Rayna from under bushy gray eyebrows. “I’m afraid
you’re right. That’s why I want you to think very carefully about
this field trip thing. If anything goes wrong, it could mean your
job, and you’re just too valuable a teacher to lose.”

Rayna patted Carlson’s hand. “You’re a
good man, Bob. I appreciate the warning. But if I back down under
this kind of pressure, then I’m not such a good teacher after all.
Unless you order me otherwise, the field trip is on. And, Bob, I
have to tell you:  If you order me to cancel the trip, I’ll
quit.”

 
Carlson nodded, his mouth
stretched into a taut smile. “That’s just what I thought you’d say.
I’m not sure I’d have your courage, Rayna, but I won’t stop
you.”

“Thanks, Bob,” she said, turning to
check the message terminal near the office door. Finding nothing
designated for her, she walked to the faculty Trans-Mat pod. “I’ll
see you on Monday, then,” she said with a wave just before
activating the mechanism.

Back in her apartment, Rayna continued
to think about the exchange with Bob Carlson and the news about her
fellow teachers. Frank and Esther were no more subversive than she
was. Why would people send their children to a full-service school
like the Brandemar Learning Center if all they wanted was
programmed material that they could get from the CDN and
educational software on their home terminals? 

She knew what all the studies had
concluded for the last 30 years:  Most people learn best in an
atmosphere that blends social interaction, instruction and ample
opportunities for development of critical thinking skills. Now a
few small-minded simpletons were trying to deny those opportunities
to others. Or was it only a few?  Rayna didn’t really want to
know the figures. The number sympathetic to the extremist
Earth-Firsters may still be small, but she feared it was
growing.

An overwhelming sadness enveloped her.
Maybe it would be better if everyone just learned at home after
all, she  thought bitterly.
No!
she quickly admonished
herself. She knew better. She’d known better for a long
time.

It was Al Frederick who first showed
her the advantages of learning centers. She was very young then
maybe 5 or 6. A quick, independent student, she had suffered from a
painful shyness, and she had objected strenuously to attending
classes with other children.

“Why can’t I just use our terminal
here at home?” she remembered asking her mother. “I’ll be real
good. I’ll do all the work. You’ll see, Mommy. I don’t hafta go to
the learning center, do I?”

She appealed to Al, too, but he
refused to intervene on her behalf. Instead, he listened politely
as she recited her objections, then took her to the local center so
that she could meet some of the teachers and see the facilities for
herself. He patiently explained that learning about people was as
important as learning about the arts and sciences. At last,
reluctantly, she accepted the inevitable. By the time she had
completed high school and then earned her university degree, she
had grown as much socially as intellectually, and, in the end, it
was her skills with people, not just her keen intellect, that
marked her as an outstanding teacher.

Rayna choked back a tear. It was Al
who had made the secret arrangements for her adoption. Arthur
Judson’s investigation finally revealed Frederick’s name on some
key documents. “Aunt” Vickie wasn’t involved and probably never
knew the truth herself. Maybe Al felt guilty over what happened to
Ariana (
my mother!
, Rayna thought with a pang). Apparently,
he wanted to ensure that no such tragedy befell his granddaughter.
Fate took a hand in the matter when Vickie’s brother and
sister-in-law encountered problems trying to adopt a baby. Al was
able to arrange for the Kingmans to adopt Rayna, while hiding his
own involvement in an intricate web of paperwork.

It must have been Al who sent those
letters to Mother and Dad warning them not to tell me I was
adopted.... Damn it!  Somebody should have told me!  I
had the right to know!

She closed her eyes and swiveled her
head clockwise and counterclockwise, back and forth, trying to ease
the tension in her neck and shoulders. She was furious with Al for
hiding her identity from her, all the more so because he was dead,
and she couldn’t confront him, couldn’t tell him how he had hurt
her or how much he had meant to her. For Al had been there when she
needed him here with a new idea, a comforting touch, an encouraging
word. Despite the deception, their relationship had been unusually
close. But, oh, how she wished she could have told him, just once,
“Grandfather, I love you!”

Drawing a mental curtain to shield
herself from such painful thoughts, she began preparing for an
evening with Keith. She had seen him much less frequently since he
began what he liked to call his “espionage escapade,” but the plan
seemed to be working. Tauber had come to regard Keith as something
of a confidant. Even so, however, the former Merchant Fleet officer
had revealed little of his overall plans.

“Safer that way,” he had told
Keith.

In her bedroom, Rayna removed her work
clothes and deposited them in a closetron bin. Moments later, she
opened the bin’s lid to verify that the mechanism had done its job.
The bin was empty, of course. She had no reason to doubt the
closetron’s efficiency. As usual, it had broken the discarded
clothing into its component elements, which it then stored for
future use. Whenever you wanted something to wear, you’d pick
something from the memory banks, and the closetron would construct
it for you clean and ready to wear. And, of course, since you
stored your measurements in the data banks, everything always fit
perfectly. In all the years she’d been using closetrons, they had
never failed, yet she habitually checked the bin each time. Maybe
it was her old childhood fantasy that drove her. Maybe she was
still hoping to catch a glimpse of myriad tiny elves making off
with microscopic components of her old clothes and hiding them from
the prying eyes of more trusting folk.

Calculating that she had time for a
shower, she headed for the bathroom. Like Keith, she much preferred
a true shower over the newest technological marvel, a body cleanser
that operated on static electricity. Fortunately, her building,
like Keith’s, was equipped with water recirculators. Otherwise,
they would have no choice in the  matter, in view of the
ongoing need for water conservation in Southern
California.

Quickly, she showered, dried herself,
and selected her outfit for the evening:  a bright blue
jumpdress made of a soft, silky material. The garment had a
flowing, ankle-length skirt and long, puffy sleeves secured at the
wrist by tight-fitting cuffs.

Rayna examined herself in the
full-length glass in her bedroom.
Much too dressy for
tonight,
she thought.
Better switch to pants
mode.

She pressed a button-sized control
device set into her left cuff. Released from its molecular prison
by the activation of a pre-programmed valence shifter, the fabric
of the skirt separated along the center front and back, from crotch
to hem. Rayna rotated the controller a quarter turn and pressed
again. The raw edges of the fabric, seeking a new molecular
equilibrium, formed the lower half of the garment into fashionable
trouser-legs and sealed themselves into a new molecular
bond.

Rayna’s door alarm interrupted her
self-evaluation to announce Keith’s arrival.

“I brought back Frederick’s tapes and
papers,” he said, brushing past her to set the permastore container
on the floor against the wall. “I have a lot to tell you. Tauber
really has some—”  He stopped in mid-sentence as Rayna finally
caught his eye. “Wow!” he said appreciatively. “I like!”

“Well, thank you, sir,” Rayna replied
with an exaggerated curtsy. “I thought the dress mode might be a
little too much for an art exhibit, even for the opening of Rafe’s
one-man show. What do you think?”

She executed a slow turn, enjoying
Keith’s attentions.

He rubbed his chin and considered the
question with much more seriousness than it had been
posed.

“You look fine to me just the way you
are.”  He kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Come on. We’d
better get going.”

***

The exhibition was an ordeal for
Keith. He managed to cope with the space settings. He knew that,
like the one Rafe had given Aurora for use in the dining room at
Eduardo’s, such scenes were securely anchored to reality. As the
exhibition brochure pointed out, Rafe had been a navigator in the
Merchant Fleet before taking retraining to become an artist.
Somehow, Keith told Rayna, that knowledge helped him keep his
bearings.

The abstract environments were an
entirely different matter.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” he
whispered desperately after they’d made their way through one
particularly vivid abstract, a geometric treatment featuring
overlapping, multicolored, solid-looking shapes among and through
which Keith and Rayna were expected to walk. The cubes, spheres and
other holographic constructs of the work were supposed to lift
observers into a surreal plane of consciousness, but  all
Rafe’s creation did for Keith was induce acute disorientation and
budding nausea. A short time later, they said their farewells to
Rafe and Aurora.

“Thank God!” Keith groaned as he
flopped onto the couch back in Rayna’s apartment. “Finally, there’s
something as solid as it looks!”

“How’s the stomach?”

Keith waved a hand in disgust. “I was
fine as soon as we left the exhibition. What makes those idiots in
the art world go wild over stuff like that?”

Rayna joined him on the sofa and took
his hand. “Well, it wasn’t
all
so bad. Even you liked that
portrait of Aurora against the background of
stars.” 

Keith rolled his eyes. “That doesn’t
make up for—”

“Poor darling,” she crooned. “Shall I
kiss it and make it all better?”  With a gentle touch, she
kissed his forehead, then his chin, then his nose.

“That’s not exactly the sort of
kissing I need,” he said, pulling her to him and forcefully
exploring her mouth with his lips and tongue. Despite her surprise
over Keith’s unexpected aggressiveness, Rayna began to respond. Not
quickly enough to suit Keith, however. He dragged her down onto the
floor, his fingers groping for the garment release at the back of
her neck. In rapid succession, he activated the release and yanked
the top of the jumpdress down over her breasts to the sound of
ripping fabric.

Rayna was appalled and frightened by
this stranger who looked like Keith Daniels. Still, the look, the
smell, the feel of him told her it
was
Keith. And, despite
her horror at his behavior, a part of her wanted him as much as he
wanted her.

But not like this, she realized. Not
like this! 

Somehow, she succeeded in pushing him
off of her. “Stop it!” she shouted, rolling away and gathering the
tattered remains of her jumpdress around her. “When did you start
getting off on rape!”

Keith’s eyes blazed. “Maybe when you
became a whoring tease!”

Rayna stared at him in shock as his
reddened face suddenly went white. In the slowly lengthening
silence, he shielded his eyes. “Oh jeez, Ray!  I’m sorry. I
don’t know why I said that.”

Without a word, Rayna rose, pulled the
remnants of her jumpdress more tightly around her and headed for
the bedroom. A moment later, Keith followed.

“I said I’m sorry,” he insisted,
grabbing her arm and twisting her around to face him. “You’re
hurting me,” she said quietly, gazing deep into his
eyes.

With a start, he released her. He
stared, shamefaced, at the deep red impressions his fingers had
left on her arm.

“My God,” he whispered. He reached
slowly toward the marks but then jerked his trembling hand away and
looked desperately around the room.

“I need a shower,” he finally said. He
was already in the bathroom before Rayna could respond. The steady
sound of the water helped relax her as she slipped into a robe, but
she couldn’t rid herself of the knot in her stomach.

She wandered back into the living room
and placed the returned permastore box on the coffee table. She was
shifting the contents about aimlessly, trying not to think too much
about what had happened when the rush of the shower spray suddenly
fell silent. She pretended not to notice the opening and closing of
doors, and she resolutely refused to react when Keith came up
behind her and kissed the back of her neck.

“I really am sorry for all that, Ray,”
he said. “I don’t know why it happened.”

She turned to look at him, examining
his face as if it were a treasure map, concealing some hidden clue
to a mystery she couldn’t even guess. Seeing no answers, she looked
away.