Specimen Days

He said, "There are old roads all over Pennsylvania. This looks like a turnoff coming up."

"Yes."

"I should probably drive."

"I drive."

"I only had a problem because we hurt that kid. I thought I'd explained that to you."

"I drive," she said.

He decided not to argue with her. She seemed to be a good enough driver. Stopping to change places would take time.

She took the road that led off the podway. A battered sign said HARRISBURG. They hove through the remnants of a settlement. The Council-administered states had begun tearing such places down, or so you heard. According to rumor, Magicom was trying to sell Pennsylvania but could find no buyers.

Catareen piloted the pod competently over the cracked and buckled road. Abandoned houses and storefronts rattled by, McDonald'ses and Wendy Kentuckys and Health-4-Evers, all weed and dark, shattered glass.

Most were empty. Some had been taken over by Nadians, who had put up their sun-blasted awnings. Who tended their young ones, their scraps of drying laundry, their little fires.

Catareen and Simon hove for hours unimpeded. They kept the pod headed west. The landscape was unchanging, empty houses and franchises and random shops and every so often a derelict shopping mall, all so similar that Simon worried they might have doubled back on themselves unwittingly. When these places were operating, they must have been more individualized. He worried that he and Catareen might be headed back to New Jersey. They might end up at the complex where they had stolen the deliverypod.

They could only trust the pod's directional. They could only drive on.

Night fell. They had each had two boxes of soymilk. They needed food. They hove silent and hungry across the dark nothing. The pod's lights showed mile after mile of broken road that led toward nothing more than the hope of Emory Lowell. They were pursuing a date and place Lowell had implanted in Simon five years ago.

If the Nadian was concerned, she made no sign. She merely drove with her incessant, reptile-eyed concentration.

Finally he said, "We should stop for the night." "Hour more," she answered. "No. We should stop now."

He saw her lipless mouth tighten. She was a lizard woman who wanted her own way. She was imperious andunempathic.

Then she said, "If you want."

She pulled to the side of the road. She deactivated the pod, which sighed and settled. Its headglobes faded. A pure darkness arrived, alive with the rasp and chirping of insects.

"We can get rid of some of the soymilk and sleep in the back," he said.

"Or house."

She indicated with her small, ovoid head a row of houses on the road's far side, sharply gabled against the stars, like a child's drawing of a mountain range.

"Technically they're still private property," he said.

She waggled her fingers in the air a Nadian gesture of dismissal, he supposed.

"Hey," he said. "We're criminals, right? What's a little breaking and entering?"

They got out of the pod. Simon stood for a moment on the weedy dirt, stretching his spine. They were in a vast black house-filled emptiness. An immensity of constellations hung overhead. This far from city lights, they were countless.

Nadia's sun was one of the stars just above the black roof silhouettes. That shitty little star over there.

He realized Catareen was standing beside him. They could move very quietly, these people. These lizards.

She said, "Nadia."

"Mm-hm."

"We say Nourthea."

"I know."

The name "Nadia" had always been an ironic approximation. One of the right-wing papers had started calling it Planet Nada, Spanish for "nothing," as its riches and wisdom kept failing to materialize. The name had stuck.

She said, "You have go?"

"Me, personally? No. I'm new. I was manufactured about five years ago. I'm actually one of the very last ones they made."

"Why not legal?"

"You mean, why do they bother chasing after a poor, harmless, old artificial like me?"

"Yes."