Shelter (30 page)

    She glared at him. "You get three guesses."

    "Ah." He looked unhappy. "I think we have to get past this. I think it's time for you to meet Zephyr. Want to have dinner with us tomorrow night?"

    * * *

    Zephyr and Meredith loathed one another at first sight. Meredith told herself beforehand that it wasn't fair to assume that the woman would be a flake just because of her name and her concentration. She couldn't help her name, could she? Her parents had given it to her. And so what if all the performance art majors Meredith had ever met were pseudo-intellectual art snobs who used too many syllables to describe really silly work? Meredith's favorite example was the guy who'd smashed a bunch of eggs on-stage and then, afterward, explained solemnly to the audience that he'd been attacking the "polymorphously perverse homogeneity of the hubristic hegemony." No, Meredith had thought, you're just wasting food. But it wasn't fair to assume that all of them were like that; Goddess knew that Meredith hated it when people did the same thing to her, automatically placing her on the same level as the woman who'd baked ten different batches of chocolate chip cookies, dyed different colors to match different decors, for her senior project.

    So she went to the dinner determined to think the best of Zephyr, even though Raji had asked her to meet them at Cyberjus, a campus cafe and notorious artflake hangout with annoyingly retro nineties decor and monitors scattered every few feet. She immediately spotted Raji sitting at a table against the back wall, holding hands with a small, thin woman, her hair dyed midnight black and her nails painted to match, wearing black leggings and a tunic made of shimmering strips of black glitter fabric. Artchick artflake artichoke aaack, Meredith thought, and scolded herself. Be fair, Merry! You haven't even talked to her yet.

    "Hi," she said, walking up to the table. The nearest monitor, volume off, was broadcasting ScoopNet, some picture of a bag lady. It was probably another story about the latest CV casualties, the people who'd emerged from the illness with complete amnesia; some of them had wound up on the street. Yuck. She thought of Henry and the Martian, and shuddered, and leaned over to give Raji a peck on the cheek. Then she stuck out her hand in Zephyr's direction. "Nice to meet you, Zephyr. I'm Meredith Walford."

    "Yes," Zephyr said, without smiling, "I know." She let go of Raji's hand long enough to give Meredith a halfhearted, limp handshake. "Zephyr Expanding Cosmos."

    Meredith blinked and bit back the urge to laugh. Oh, the poor thing. Her parents must have been sadists. Meredith sat down next to Raji, already feeling achingly excluded from the cat's cradle of fingers in the middle of the table, and said cautiously, "Interesting name." Now Zephyr would rant and rave about how her parents had been fruitcakes and everybody had made fun of her when she was a kid, and the tension would be broken.

    "I chose it at menarche," Zephyr said, as if she were commenting on the menu. "It names my essence. My birth name was useless; it didn't say anything important about me at all."

    "Ah," Meredith said, and then, even more cautiously, "May I ask what it was?"

    Zephyr shrugged. "I told you, it's not important."

    "I don't even know that," Raji said, and Meredith watched Zephyr's face finally gain some animation as she gazed at him adoringly.

    "Oh, but you know nearly everything else," she said, and giggled. Raji beamed back, and Meredith felt her skin crawl, "So, Merry, did you notice the posters in here?"

    You do not have permission to call me Merry. Only my friends call me Merry. But she couldn't say that. She swallowed and looked around the room. Framed posters, all of them familiar, all of them her mother's work, reproductions from the latest show: "Constance Walford Retrospective, 2020-2040, Museum of Virtual Art."

    "I've seen them all over the place," she said quietly. "My mother isn't very happy with the quality of the reproductions, but the museum seems to be selling truckloads of them." Constance had been ecstatic about the show, a major installation in a major museum, the big time, the big tent. Meredith remembered her mother's glowing face the night of the opening.

    "Hmmmm," Zephyr said. "Does she really paint them herself?" Meredith squinted. "What? Of course she paints them herself! What gave you the idea she didn't?"

    "Well, you know, a lot of commercial artists have people working under them who actually paint the canvases. Or they have bots do it, not that I approve of that, of course. If we insist that machines copy our art, we'll never know what kind they can produce on their own."

    Soulfreak, Meredith thought savagely. She smiled politely and said, "Well, I don't think they can produce any art on their own. They need to be programmed."

    Zephyr smiled back, equally politely. "Yes, I suppose you would think that. "

    Raji cleared his throat. "Maybe we should discuss something other than politics. "

    "I'm sorry," Zephyr said, although she didn't sound sorry at all. "I'll change the subject. So, Merry, Raj tells me you're studying DE."

    Meredith bit her lip. Yes, Zeff, you're right: I am studying a completely useless, apolitical subject. Nothing controversial about DE, oh, no, of course not: controversy requires a brain. "Yes," Meredith said, "I am. I'm very interested in how private spaces interact and interconnect with public ones. Those boundaries have been becoming more and more permeable, but we still seem to believe that they're sacrosanct. I want to look at how our notions of private space affect our public experience, and vice versa."

    She was quoting her area declaration. Her adviser had read it and said drily, "Well, if anyone's an expert on public-private interfaces, it ought to be you."

    Raji grinned at her;. Zephyr raised an eyebrow, "Oh, I see, Like, if you sweep your own floors, are you less likely to litter on the sidewalk?"

    Raji's grin changed into a frown. "No," he said. "It's more complicated than that."

    "Of course it is," Zephyr said.

    "Actually, it's not," Meredith said. "That's a great example. That's exactly the kind of thing I want to find out. Do people take more responsibility for their environment when they care for it themselves, instead of building machines to do it for them?" She smiled sweetly at them and took a bite of her roll.

    Zephyr unexpectedly let go of Raji's hands and leaned forward, clearly interested. "Right," she said. "Right. We can't ask creatures, even manufactured ones, to do our dirty work for us. That's slavery. Right?"

    "Zephyr," Raji said warningly, but Meredith waved a hand to silence him.

    "It's okay. I don't mind, really. No, I don't think it's slavery, because I don't think machines have souls." There, She'd said it. "I mean, I don't think they're really conscious or alive or feeling or anything like that. But yes, I think we need to be more involved in maintaining our own habitat. I think we need to do more of our own dirty work, and clean work too, So we agree on that."

    Zephyr looked skeptical. "You don't think AIs feel? People used to think nonhuman animals couldn't feel."

    "Right. Because they were using the animals to do their dirty work and they didn't want to believe that the oxen minded pulling the plow. This is different. We didn't invent oxen; we did invent bots. And we invented them to work. I don't think that's right, because we should do the work ourselves; you don't think it's right because it's unfair to the machines. We're not going to resolve that difference. It's like arguing about religion. It is arguing about religion. So maybe we'd better change the subject again."

    Raji smiled at her, clearly relieved; Zephyr, looking bemused, said, "You know, I felt really sorry for you, when you were stuck in isolation like that. I cried when I saw you coming out. On TV."

    "Zephyr," Raji said.

    "It's okay, Raji. I'm used to it. All kinds of people who barely know me think they can talk to me about my medical history. Total strangers, even, on the street." Raji groaned. Meredith said coldly, "So Zephyr, what's your point about that particular media event?"

    Zephyr favored her with a thin smile. "That I felt sorry for the bots too. Because they'd been designed to stick needles into people who didn't enjoy it, and I wondered if they felt bad about that."

    "If they did," Meredith said, with a glance at Raji, "it sure didn't keep them from doing their job. They followed orders beautifully. If those machines had souls, they were reincarnated Nazis or something."

    "They saved your life," Zephyr said, frowning.

    "The people who invented them saved my life," Meredith said. She wondered if Raji would have the sense to dump this lunatic bitch. The way they'd been holding hands when she came in, she doubted it.

    Raji, sounding miserable, said, "So, um, Merry, this one here, this picture of your mother's—I really like this one."

    "What?" Merry said. He gestured at the poster hanging next to their table. She blinked at it, but saw only the endless traceries of watercolor lines, pastel circuit board, that characterized her mother's most boring work. ''I'll tell her you like it," she said with a shrug. "I can never tell that series apart, frankly. They just look like wallpaper to me."

    "This one's not like the others," Zephyr said, surveying it critically. "It's asymmetrical. It's got a missing corner, look, down there." They all looked at the missing corner; something nagged at Meredith's memory. Where had she seen that before? She hadn't noticed it in the museum installation, had skipped the watercolors entirely. "And the circuits," Zephyr said, "right in the middle there, look—in the very center the lines start getting rounded. That little tiny part there, see? It looks like a nut. An acorn, maybe?"

    Oh, Goddess. It was the picture Squeaky had chewed; that's why the corner was missing. That's why the acorn was there. Her mother could easily enough have repaired the canvas, but she hadn't. It was Constance's idea of a joke. Meredith felt her eyes filling with tears, and said, "I remember that one now. She painted it just before I got sick." She couldn't stand to tell them about Squeaky. All those years when she hadn't missed him, hadn't even thought about him, and now her sense of loss was like a stab wound in the chest.

    She gazed for a long moment at the poster, willing her tears not to spill over. They didn't. When her vision cleared, she saw that Raji and Zephyr had resumed holding hands, their fingers interlocked in the center of the table.

    * * *

    He didn't call her that evening, or the next day, either. She assumed he was spending all his time with Zephyr now; she told herself not to mind. On the third day, when the phone rang, she picked it up hoping it would be him, but telling herself that it wouldn't be, that it would be her mother or her adviser or a classmate who'd missed a lecture and needed notes.

    It wasn't any of those people. It was Dan, Raji's supervisor at the lab. ''I'm sorry to bother you," he said, sounding very apologetic, "but, um, I know you're good friends with Raji, and I was wondering if you'd seen him. He was supposed to work yesterday and today, and he hasn't shown up. He's not answering his phone or e-mail. Do you know where he might be?"

    With Zephyr, Meredith thought, but her spite couldn't erase her alarm. Raji never missed work. Never. Not for anybody. She looked down at her phone console: the priority override light was on. Her number wasn't published and her phone system screened out junk calls, but this guy had used his university security clearance to get through to her. Which meant he was scared too. "I haven't seen him for a few days myself," she said. "Maybe he's sick and went to the infirmary?"

    "No," Dan said. "That's the first place I called when I couldn't raise him at home. He's not there."

    Meredith's stomach did a panicky backflip. "Oh. Shit. Should we call the police?"

    "No, no, no—I'm sure he's fine. Took a few days' vacation and forgot to let me know, or something. Or there's some kind of family problem and he had to go home. Don't worry." Dan's voice sounded as if he knew how lame this was. "Just, uh, have him call me if you hear from him, okay?"

    "Give me your number," Meredith said. ''I'll call you if I hear anything."

    The first thing she did after she hung up the phone was log into the university directory. Shit. Shit. What was the lunatic bitch's last name again? Zephyr Sparkling Rainbow or Blooming Meadow ... Zephyr Atmospheric Pollution. Zephyr Insufferable Condescension. Zephyr Endangered Species, if Meredith had anything to say about it. Search on Zephyr: there couldn't be many of those. She noticed numbly that her fingers trembled as she keyed in the name.

    Zephyr Expanding Cosmos, here it was, phone and Net address, search on Net address, she's not logged on right now, back to the phone, key in the number, Merry what the hell's wrong with your fingers, anyhow? Ring. Two rings. C'mon, c'mon, a click, a voice, okay. It didn't sound like Zephyr. "May I speak to Zephyr, please?"

    "This is Zephyr," the voice said. It sounded wan and nasal, as if it had a cold.

    "This is Meredith Walford. I'm sorry to bother you. You sound like you're sick."

    "Um—no," the voice said, and trembled. "Just allergies."

    She's been crying, Meredith thought in a flash. Her dread deepened.

    "Listen, have you heard from Raji?'.'

    A gasp of indrawn breath, and then, "No! I mean, no, not since the night we had dinner. You haven't, either? I thought—"

    You thought he was mad at you for being a shit and that's why he didn't call, Merry thought. And I thought he was all wrapped up in you and that's why he didn't call. "No. Look, his supervisor at the lab just called me. He wasn't at work today or yesterday. He's not on the Net or at home or in the infirmary. When's the last time you saw him?" Pause. Long pause. "Hello? Zephyr, are you still there?"

    "Yeah, yeah, sorry, I—I haven't seen him since that night. He walked me back to my dorm and I wanted him to come up but he didn't and I thought he was mad at me but he said no, he just had to go to the lab to do some work, he'd call me tomorrow."