Solaris Rising (34 page)

Her eyebrows went up again. “Wow, thank you. I feel bad for asking for a bag.”

He fetched one from under the counter inside, one of the white plastic sacks he saved specifically for her. “I wish I hadn’t seen that,” he said, holding it open for her.

She looped the bag over her wrist. “It’s been there for quite some time, you must have seen it already.”

“Oh, sure. But then you came along and showed it to me.” His gaze drifted to the record store. The girl had finished the window and was now dumping the water carefully in the gutter. She straightened up to go back inside and then paused, her head cocked as though she were listening to something. Dov heard only the usual chorus of car and truck engines, the sigh and wheeze of buses, the jackhammers from a block over starting, stopping, starting again, a siren starting to wail and then cutting off abruptly, an alarm that sounded like a death-ray from a Sci-Fi movie, a passing car pumping out bass at a volume that suggested the driver was deaf.

The girl went inside and Dov saw that Kitty had been watching him watch her. “Something?” he asked. “Or did I already miss it?”

She made a see-saw motion with her free hand. “Sometimes you don’t notice what you’ve noticed until you notice that you didn’t notice at the time.”

An enigma wrapped in a puzzle with a hole in the bottom; he smiled. “You never know, I guess.”

“You never can tell,” she corrected him and checked the watch pinned to her flowery scrubs. “Damn, I’m late.”

Dov looked at his own watch. “Are you sure?”

“Excuse me, I
will have been
late. The domino effect.” Instead of hurrying away, however, she turned to look at the record store.

“She’ll come over, won’t she.” Dov cupped one elbow and rested his mouth briefly against his fist before he realised and propped his chin on it instead. “By herself, do you think?”

“That coin is still in the air, hon.” Kitty looked at her watch again. “Damn, now I really do have to run.”

Dov stared after her, allowing himself a few quiet moments in her wake before it subsided and the day resumed in whatever form it now had. That was as close as he came to getting his mind around the concept of wave functions collapsing. Kitty had actually tried to walk him through it once. He had understood each part in succession but all of it together, not so much.

A young mother pushing a stroller with a sleeping toddler paused to look in the window at something. Dov moved aside to let her ease the stroller over the threshold without waking the child. Boy? Girl? He hadn’t looked closely enough. Maybe, he thought as he went back inside, he could avoid doing so.

Which, in keeping with the apparent theme for the day, was
really
silly. Kitty would have laughed and told him
that
wave function had collapsed elsewhere some time ago with no help from him. Then he would have asked her – again – about the difference between wave functions that hadn’t collapsed and those he didn’t know already had, but he wouldn’t have understood the answer – again. He had been tempted to ask her if any of these wave functions, whatever they really were, could collapse if there was still someone somewhere who didn’t know it had but it sounded too silly even just in his mind.

Considering how full of silly things his head was today, this might have been the right time to ask. He started to pick up the newspaper and then grabbed the novel he’d left next to the register instead. The paper was full of collapsed wave functions but not as far as he was concerned. Today he wouldn’t collapse anything if he could possibly avoid it. At his age, the possibilities weren’t endless so he might as well hang onto as many as he could.

Of course, that might be more difficult after the cameras were installed.

Now that was Olympic-class silly. He decided to distract himself by changing the window display. He hoped Kitty might make it back before he went home at six; no such luck. This week, a tall, skinny guy named McTeer had the evening shift. McTeer was one of a handful of people the owners had hired just to plug personnel gaps in their various interests. More than that, Dov had no idea – none of the people who took over for him was given to chitchat and McTeer was practically mute.
Hi
or
hello
was his limit, occasionally
hey
; other than that, he either shrugged or grunted, and never at the same time. He wasn’t hostile, he simply wasn’t very responsive, like a stranger in an elevator or a waiting room. Maybe that was how he saw his job, or at least this particular assignment, Dov thought, and wondered where McTeer was really going and what he’d be like when he got there. If he ever did. As Kitty had said in the course of an explanation Dov otherwise no longer remembered, all take-offs were optional, all landings were mandatory, and all destinations were guaranteed because everybody had to be somewhere.

‘OnWatch – Security & Assurance’ read the large, royal-blue letters on the side of the white van, in the kind of dignified typeface Dov associated more with a stationer or a printer than a security company. The woman who climbed out of the cab was dressed in an immaculate sky blue coverall that seemed to have been made for her. Maybe it had – the name ‘Fabiola’ was embroidered rather beautifully in dark blue thread over her left breast pocket.

“Not a big space to cover,” she said in a light Spanish accent as she looked around. “But I’ll be here a while. I’ll have to run some wire, do a little drilling. But don’t worry, that won’t take long and I’ll put down drop cloths to keep the dust off your stock.”

“In this store, the dust is part of the purchase price,” Dov said.

“Well, at least there’s no food to worry about.” She moved to the centre of the store and looked around again, more slowly this time, as if she were measuring by eye. Then she turned to him with a slight frown. “Are you the owner?”

“No, but I can sign any work orders or receipts.”

Her frowned deepened as she gave him the same measuring look. “Funny, I could have sworn you were the owner.”

“If you need to speak to them, I can get their number –” He started toward the office. He actually knew all four phone numbers by heart and there was a longer, more detailed contact list in the register but he wanted to get away from that stare.

“Nah, don’t bother,” she said cheerfully. “I must be thinking of another job. I’m pretty busy these days. Suddenly everybody wants cameras. Orders are through the roof.”

“Really?” Dov was surprised. “And here’s me thinking Big Brother was still the black sheep of the family. So to speak.”

“That’s a good one.” The woman grinned at him. “It’s an insurance thing. Burglar alarms aren’t enough now for a lot of these carriers, they want a belt
and
suspenders. Besides, when’s the last time you heard one of those go off and you
didn’t
think it was a false alarm?”

“I should have known,” Dov said with a small laugh. “I mean, this is a pretty good space but it’s not ballroom size. There’s not much I can’t see from behind the counter.”

“Well, the cameras’ll catch all that and more, you included.” She leaned toward him, lowering her voice slightly. “I always remind all the good working people I meet on a job that the moment I flip the on switch, the only privacy’ll be in the facility. Word to the wise.” She tapped the side of her nose and winked.

Dov became aware that he had his index finger pressed to his upper lip, covering the scar that was all but invisible now. Irritated with the old habit, he jammed his hand in his pants pocket. “Thank you. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Not a thing,” she said. “I’ve done this so many times, I can sleep through it. Just pretend I’m not here.”

“Let me know if you change your mind,” he called after her as she went out to the truck. His hand was already out of his pocket, going for his face again. He put it in his pocket again and went back to his stool behind the register.

He seldom saw that look of appraisal any more, not like when he was a kid with all the grown-ups staring at him and exclaiming how
good
he looked, that surgeon was an
artist
, you’d almost
never know
. Some days, he’d spend every waking hour hiding his mouth behind a book or a piece of paper or his hand. Till he was thirteen, when pretty Ruth Shapiro had saved him by giving him his first kiss and declaring he was the best kisser in Hebrew school (maybe the best in public school, too, but she only kissed the boys in Hebrew school). After that, his self-consciousness had faded right along with the scar.

Still, once in a great while, he would suddenly become aware of his finger resting against the area under his nose, hiding not only what was there – a scar he could barely see himself any more – but also what wasn’t: the two little folds that ran vertically from the base of the nose to the flesh of the upper lip.

It was called the philtrum; he had looked it up. Most people didn’t seem to know the term or care what it was, but they all had philtrums. They didn’t seem to notice that he didn’t, not even Ruth Shapiro, whose full, pouty lips made hers look especially pronounced to him. Apparently it was one of those things you only missed if you’d never had it.

Someone made a polite, throat-clearing noise and Dov came out of his reverie to see a young woman standing at the counter with a few dull metal bracelets and a set of salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like dancing goldfish. He rang them up for her, automatically glancing toward the table outside. Still no Kitty; past where she usually stood, he could see the OnWatch woman taking boxes out of the back of the truck and stacking them on a dolly. As she wheeled it into the store, the prints seemed to catch her eye and, for a moment, Dov thought she was actually going to stop for a look but she didn’t.

Dov wondered what would have happened if she had and then Kitty had come along. He remembered something Kitty had told him about waves emphasising each other or cancelling each other out, depending on how they collided. Then there was another customer waiting to pay for something else and he put it out of his mind.

The afternoon stream of customers was a bit heavier than usual and just about all of them were in the mood to buy something, which kept him busy enough that he practically forgot about the OnWatch woman except when the sound of her drill reminded him. It was a small drill and the noise wasn’t as loud or as grating as the average power tool. A genteel drill, Dov thought, watching the woman attach a bracket high up on the wall in the far corner, just below the ceiling. She sat astride the top of her step-ladder with casual ease, untroubled by the height. A well-balanced individual, Dov thought. Not to mention tidy – true to her word, she had covered everything immediately below her, although any dust she’d raised was invisible. The white drop cloths looked as immaculate as her coverall.

The monitor took up a lot of space on the desk in the office but that didn’t bother him as much as the black computer tower on the floor underneath. It was just the right size and in the right place for him to bang his knee on it every time he sat down.

“Pretty clear picture, isn’t it?” the woman said, urging him to be as pleased as she was.

He made himself nod. The display rotated every five seconds among four separate feeds, three in the store and one on the back wall of the office, just above the door to the tiny employee lav. If he hadn’t known what he was seeing, he wouldn’t have recognised it. He barely recognised himself when the office came up on the screen, but then the camera was positioned above and behind him. The woman looked pretty much the same, though. Some people, the camera loved. They were photogenic, or telegenic, whatever. Him, not so much, but he still couldn’t see himself all that clearly –

He’d been staring at the screen for at least two minutes, he realised suddenly, maybe longer. Every time the display changed, it sort of blinked, like an eye. Store 1 2 3 4 5, store 2 2 3 4 5, store 3 2 3 4 5, office 1 2 3 4 5; store 1 2 3 4 5, store 2 2 3 4 5, store 3 2 3 4 5, office 1 2 3 4 5. The effect was both annoying and hypnotic.
Like real television – all it needs is a laugh-track,
he thought sourly.

“Is there something wrong?” the woman asked, concerned now.

“Oh, no, not at all,” he said quickly. He was hiding his lip in the curve between his index finger and his thumb, as if he were thinking something over. With an effort, he pulled his hand away from his face to point at the tower. “Why not put that… thing, whatever it is, on the desk with the monitor?”

“This is a very sophisticated system, not in general use yet. We tell clients to keep it out of sight. Don’t tempt fate, or individuals weak in character.”

Dov gave a short laugh. “Yeah, I guess it would be embarrassing to have to report your security system stolen.”

The woman’s sidelong glance suggested to Dov that the word
jejune
was in her vocabulary. “People don’t always steal. Sometimes they just smash stuff up.”

“True,” Dov admitted, trying not to feel chastened. “But that transmits everything to you, right?” The woman nodded. “So even if someone did smash it up, you’d have a record of everything up to the point where it stopped.”

“Yeah. But then there’s the cost of replacing the unit.” The woman grabbed a takeout menu Dov had left lying on the desk, wrote a figure in the margin and showed it to him. “Will that be Visa, MasterCard, or Amex?”

Dov blinked, aghast. “
That
much? But it’s just a computer. Isn’t it?”