|
28.
One of the programmers, a young man named Rory Crane, came to visit her one day. Rory was a slender, blond-haired man roughly her own age, almost a male version of Lindy in that he favored slightly too large sweaters, and slightly too small jeans that rode up around his ankles. Aside from the jeans, he dressed in ill-matching earth colors. His sweater, when he came to see her, was a faded ruby-red, with many fraying wool threads sticking out from complex linear-braided designs. "Hey."
She turned. "Rory." He stood with his hands in his pockets, sort of awkwardly hunched. His ink-blue eyes batted slightly, and he had a shy smile. "You almost scared me. What are you up to?"
"A couple of us miss you up there. I think we all do. Like Dominica." Dominica came a moment later, and gave Tedda a hug, but let Rory do most of the talking while she sat pleasantly nearby.
Tedda put her pen down on the large printout before her, and rolled her chair around to face him. Her mind was aswirl with calculations and theories, and she rubbed her hands across her face as if clearing away cobwebs. "Grab a seat, Rory. I think that's all there is." She pointed to a rickety old wooden chair with torn green leatherette seat.
"Thanks." He pulled it over to him with a scraping sound across the raw concrete floor, and sat straddling it with his arms crossed over the backrest. "So how are you doing here in your dungeon?"
"Ha!" She rose and went to the small canteen they'd brought her. It was little more than a cardboard box beside a hot water machine for making coffee or tea. She had a basket of cellophane-wrapped cookies and crackers. "Want some fattening junk food?"
"Sure. Toss me some of those chocolate cookie things." She did, and he caught them in a swift, sure motion. He said "These are some of those field rations that are so chemical, even the ants won't attack them."
Dominica blew Tedda a kiss and walked a way in a jangle of wrist bracelets.
Rory and Tedda made small talk, while she brewed tea. They took their steaming mugs of tea outside to a mezzanine overlooking warehouse space below them. Except for two men working distantly with a tow motor, unloading bales of cable and other heavy objects, the space was empty. It was a sort of lonely panorama. In fact, she felt glad for Rory's company, and pressed close to him, enjoying his body warmth as they chatted. She felt strangely affectionate toward him, as if they'd known each other for a long time. It wasn't a sexual tension, although they stood within the aura of one another's body heat, and she smelled the clean, soapy warmth in his sweater. "Would you like to really play the Monorail game?" he said at last, with a strange light in his eyes.
She stared at him probingly, examining the frank yet still veiled come-on, the dare-you insouciance, in his eyes. She realized he had no untoward intentions upon her, and the almost haughty tilt in his head, smile on his lips, shine to his face, were all about the fact that he knew she would not say no.
She laughed out loud into his face. "Okay, you've got me. I'm stuck down here like a rat in a hole, and I'm desperate for any kind of action."
"Okay," he said, stirring his tea and staring down into his cup with a mysterious look. "You need to be careful though. This is very dangerous."
"What, playing Monorail?"
"This isn't the old board game."
"Oh? You mean—?" It dawned on her what he meant, and she felt a rain of anxiety needles in her stomach.
"Yes, it's another Intereality."
"Too much!"
"No kidding!"
"I mean—."
"Yeah." They stood regarding each other with mutual awe at the thought. These crazy programmer kids had used, no stolen, the fatherland technology in some war-weary springtime of the soul, maybe before being drafted to die on some muddy battlefield, and they had created a game world using the Monorail concept.
"What do you call it?" she whispered.
"Monopol City."
"No, get out."
"For real." Suddenly he looked a bit spooked, hopping from one foot to the other and looking right and left while keeping his hands jammed in his jeans pockets. "You could get us all burned if you rat."
"I wouldn't tell a soul." She reassured him: "I'm in, okay? Trust me. I'm just glad to be part of something." She added some more reassurance: "Look, I'd be as burned as you, right? You know how the fatherland works. They take no chances. We'd all be scraped, maybe sent off to the front."
"Yeah." He relaxed a bit. "Sure." He relaxed some more. "Okay." He raised his palm, and they high-fived. "Cool," he said. "Okay."
"When do we go in or whatever it is?"
"I'll come back for you soon. In the meantime, don't tell Lindy. Will you promise that?"
Tedda felt a pang. "Why?"
He regarded her frankly, painfully. "She is very dangerous. That's the problem. That's one of the problems. It's for her own good, actually. Will you trust me and not say anything to her? Otherwise, we'll all be toast."
"I promise," Tedda said. She watched him put his half-finished tea aside and walk off with a final wave. So Lindy was not all that she might be. How to handle this, since they lived together and spent so much time together? Maybe it was a matter of putting things in compartments, and not mixing them together. She would simply shut part x of her mind partially off when she was in one place, and partially shut of part y when she was in the other. How else to handle this new, looming disconcertment? Why could the world not be simple and straightforward? Still, it hurt to think that her closest friend might somehow be untrustworthy, have an agenda, betray her.
|
