Specimen Days

They went into the kitchen, where they found old packets of curried this and pickled that. All of it needed water to reconstitute, however, and there was of course no water.

Catareen held a foil packet in her hands and turned it over and over, as if she hoped to discover some secret instructions for converting the husks within into food without the introduction of moisture. Watching her like that, Simon was filled with a sense of her unknown life scrabbling whatever crops she could from the sloggy, dead soil of Nadia, coming to Earth on one of the Promise Ships and arriving, at the end of the seventeen-year trip, in a post-meltdown world where an alien was lucky to get work in sanitation or child minding. Now she was here, in the abandoned kitchen of a relocated family, holding a packet of inedible food, on her way to a place where she had no business, where she was going simply because she could no longer stay in the place she'd been.

Simon said, "We'll figure something out about food in the morning. Let's just go to sleep now."

"Yes," she said. She laid the packet on the countertop carefully, as if it were precious and fragile.

They ascended the stairs, past the wall shadows of holopix that had been taken down. Upstairs were three modest bedrooms, each of which contained a stripped bed and an empty bureau. By some unspoken accord they both chose the rooms that had belonged to the children, as opposed to the slightly larger parental room, with the bigger bed in it.

"Good night," Simon said. She gave him a brief, military nod and went into her room.

Simon stretched out on the modest child bed. The emptied room, with its single window that gave onto the window of the house next door, resembled a nun's cell, though its vanished occupant had overlooked a holopic cut from a magazine and fastened to the wall, as well as a single pale-pink sock, which coiled like a question mark at the foot of the bed. The holopic was Marty Mockington, early years, twirling with a doomed and childish grace though a field of singing poppies. Simon watched Marty Mockington dance by, over and over, young and alive, glowing. It could not have been one of the kid's favorite pictures, or it wouldn't have been left behind. It must have been a lesser image among the dozens that would have covered the wall. Simon could briefly imagine the kid a girl, judging by the sock lying here before her wall of singing and dancing icons. Would she have imagined herself in the future, getting somehow from this little room to the world of the holopix? Probably. Kids believed in extravagant destinies. Now she must be… who knew where? Doing something slavish in the Southern Assembly, most likely, or, if she was lucky, if her parents had managed the paperwork, being trained for something semislavish up in Canada. Eurasia would be out of the question for people like this. The girl was wherever she was, and Marty Mockington, a lesser star in her private constellation, twenty years dead by now, went on dancing on her bedroom wall and would keep doing so for one hundred years or more, until the photons broke down, until the poppies started to fade and his exuberant interlude of dance (heel, toe, leap) slowed and slowed and finally stopped.

Simon shut his eyes. Dream fragments arrived. A room that was somehow full of stars. A proud and happy man whose hands were flames.

He woke with a light shining hard and white in his eyes. For a moment he thought he might still be dreaming, dreaming of a terrible light.

A male voice said from behind the light, "Here's another one."

Another what, Simon wondered.

A second voice, female, said, "He's not a Nadian."

"Nope. He's not."

Simon got off the bed and stood blinking in the light. He said, "We just needed a place to sleep. We weren't going to steal anything."

"What are they doing here?" the female voice said. "Ask him what they're doing here."

Simon's eyes adapted. He could discern two figures standing behind the glare. One was tall and hooded, the other shorter, with a nimbus of crackly hair standing out around her head.

Simon said, "We're travelers. We don't mean any harm."

"People say that," the male voice answered. "Harm comes anyway."

A third voice sounded from down the hall. It said, "What did you find in there?"

It was a boy's voice. A boy speaking with unboyish authority.

"APossessionless," answered the man shape behind the lightglobe. "Looks crazy to me."

Simon was still wearing the filthy stolen sweaters and the stained pants over his black multizippered kit from work. Looks crazy. Right.

He was briefly, strangely embarrassed.

Other people entered the room. Simon said, "Could you maybe drop that light a little?"