Metamorphosis by mosylu

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Days until Moon Cross: 14

At the shuffling footsteps, Rita looked up from her notes. "Ryan? I was beginning to get concerned." Also exasperated and annoyed, but her training ensured that none of it showed in her voice.

Ryan slouched against her office wall, fully aware he was half an hour late for a forty-five minute session. "I was doing something," he said.

"Oh?"

"Something none of your business."

He was trying to bait her. She didn't rise to it, but nodded and gestured toward the chair opposite her own. "Well, since you’re here now, we can get started."

He didn't take it. "Okay." He held up a hand and ticked off statements on his fingers. "I feel sad because my sister is dying. I feel frustrated because my mom is always on my case. I feel angry because my dad bailed on us. I also feel angry because we had to come all the way out here to the edge of nowhere for nothing." He spread his hands wide. "Well, that about does it. Very successful session. Bye-bye."

Rita got to her feet, shifting to block his exit. "Wait. Please. We're not done."

"I think we are."

"Well, I don't," she almost snarled. "So sit."

He sat, with a thud. But a satisfied little smile crossed his face.

She settled herself again. Calm, calm, calm. Don't give him what he wants again. "Do you feel that our sessions are--predictable, Ryan?"

"Predictable?" The sneer was back. "There’s practically a script. I could tell you everything you’re going to say before you say it. 'I’m sorry you feel that way, Ryan. And why is that, Ryan? Is there something else you would like to talk about, Ryan? I’m full of shit, Ryan.' Am I close?"

She rolled her stylus in between her fingers. "All except for the last part."

"You sure about that?"

"Very sure. You seem especially angry today. Did something happen?"

"You mean besides my mom dragging me away from the stations and all my friends to a dirt ball full of assholes, and it didn’t work anyway?" He looked contemptuously out the window. "No, nothing really."

Rita debated within herself, then decided to try it. The session couldn't be much worse than it already was. "The nurses tell me you visited the hospital this morning. To see your sister."

One shoulder jerked up and down. "Yeah, so? My mom’s always on my case to visit her."

"At three AM?"

"I couldn’t sleep. And she’s in a coma again, so it doesn’t matter to her."

"They said you started screaming at her."

"I was trying to wake her up."

"You certainly woke everyone else up."

"But not her. So what does it matter?" He checked his gear. "Oh look. Time’s up."

Before she could jump up again, he was gone.

Rita let out a long sigh and stared at the empty chair. After a moment, she reached for her datapad and started to write. A very unsatisfying session. I think--

"Dr. Rita."

Her head jerked up. "Yes, Ryan? Did you forget something?"

His face was taut. "You want some dirt, don’t you? Something to write down on your datapad and make hmmm noises at? Something real meaty?"

She set the pad aside. "I’m here to listen, Ryan. If you need to tell me something--"

"It’s good. It’s real good. It’s about Lynnie. That’s what you always wanna know about, right?"

"Your sister’s situation has always had an enormous effect on your life--"

"I wish she would die," he snarled. "I wish she would just die and get it over with."

Rita's mouth went dry. "Ryan. Why don’t you sit down. We can talk about this--"

"Don’t forget to write that down so you can tell my mom all about it."

After the miserable and frustrating session with Ryan--her last of a long day--Rita couldn’t stay in her cubicle. His last-minute admission, flung at her in order to provoke and shock, was a breakthrough of a sort, but not an exciting one. His sister was dying. He knew it, but acceptance didn’t come alongside knowledge. When she did die, what would happen to him?

Rita had spent her life counseling children like Ryan, who railed at God or fate or the universe, and she’d never been able to answer the one question they all asked.

Why?

Why am I so sick? I never did anything to anybody. Why did my brother die? He was just six years old. Why couldn’t we do anything? We gave our patient the best of medical science. Why did my mother kill herself? I still needed her, even if my sister died. Why am I so lacking that my husband turns to other women? I’ve done everything I could to keep him.

Sometimes Rita wished she hadn’t drifted away from the faith of her childhood, which just said, Because. It was absurdly comforting. God had a plan, and while it looked horrible from where you were, it must make sense from where He was. Just because.

But even when she was a child, God was an primitive, outmoded idea, fit only for earth-rezes and ignorant drones. People with so much power over their own world didn’t need God any longer.

She made for the databanks in one corner of the gathering space. The stacks of hard drives held station records, VR games, works of literature and poetry, all kinds of escapes. But it wasn’t to those that she turned. Instead, she opened the files on G889, pressing her thumb on each icon without bothering to read the whole list. She’d done this so often in the past week she knew exactly where each folder was.

Records of G889.

Campsites.

Month One.

Snapshots.

Here she paused, looking over her choices. Every day was a little different, but any day in that first month would do. Finally, she chose one at random, and a box popped up.

Please enter gear ID.

031281, she typed, and fitted the VR attachment into her gear’s eyepiece. There was a burst of fuzz as the data downloaded from the main banks, and then she stood at the edge of a cliff.

She jolted backward, then stood still, remembering that she was still in the gathering place in New Pacifica, not on a precipice two thousand miles from the sea.

The sky soared above her, the purest blue she’d ever seen. A few faint wisps of cloud hung high in the atmosphere, but other than that, there was nothing but emptiness. The sun’s rays poured down, and the ground bounced it back, so she was surrounded by blazing heat, pressing on every inch of her skin. She took in a breath, and could almost feel her mouth and throat crackle with dryness. The smell and taste of hot dust filled her head.

She took a few tentative steps, grit and pebbles crunching under her shoes. There was a faint rattle, and she looked down in time to see a sinuous body slither away across the hard-packed ground. From the shadows under a wide, flat rock, a lizard looked up at her for a moment with tiny, glittering eyes before it, too, darted away.

She put her hand down on the rock and pulled it away almost at once. Too hot to sit. If she hadn’t had shoes on, she would have burned the bottoms of her feet.

She wandered a few steps more, brushing up against a scrawny thornbush almost the same color as the baked ground. A long thorn left a thin, stinging line on her arm. She took another dust-laden breath, holding it until the tension in her neck and back had been baked away by the oven heat.

Several feet away, a tiny rodent zipped across the ground. A snake darted out of the shade and swallowed it within seconds, then disappeared. In this harsh, wild place, there were no feelings, no ambiguities, no shades of grey, no children with broken hearts. Just life and death, separated by the thinnest of lines.

"What are you doing?"

Rita jolted. The words boomed around her, echoing off the cliffs and the canyon like the voice of God. After a moment, she realized that it was only someone outside her VR. After another moment, she realized who it was.

"Alonzo? I’m just exploring."

"The desert?"

"Well--yes."

"Why?"

Because I needed to, she thought, and found herself saying it. "I needed to."

There was a silence, then a flare of blue light and Alonzo appeared next to her. "You needed to come here?"

"I’ve never been to the desert," she said. "Not a real one."

"This isn’t a real one, either. It’s VR."

"It’s still a better facsimile than the historical records from Earth." She should know. She’d spent hours in those grainy, jerky, static VRs once upon a time, trying to understand where she came from and failing.

Alonzo squinted at her. "Why didn’t you go to the mountains?" He jerked his chin at the shadowy humps on the horizon.

"I’ve been in most of the places you crossed through to get to New Pacifica." Rita looked around, shading her eyes from the blazing sun. "I just had to come here today."

"You keep saying that. You had to. You needed it." He put a hand in his pocket and found a pair of sunshades.

She tilted her head. "Was it really like this?"

He slid them over his eyes. The sun bounced off the flat, dark lenses. "Yeah, of course. We didn’t have time to make any of this up."

"Not this desert," she said. "The Sonoran. Was it like this?"

The shielding sunglasses turned in her direction for several silent moments. Rita held her breath.

Alonzo hadn’t sought her out since the night of the all-town meeting. She had made a few tentative overtures, which he allowed only so far as she didn’t acknowledge their relationship. The instant she referred to the family or to the history he’d been a part of, he shut down and walked away. The Sonoran Desert was a part of him, but maybe it was a part he could speak about comfortably. A step.

"What makes you think I know?" he said finally.

"You were born there," she said. "Not on the stations, not in the Barrio Tucson, but in the real Tucson. On Earth." She was pushing it, Rita knew. She was reminding him that he hadn’t always been a sleepjumper, that he’d once had roots that stretched deep into the hot, baked ground.

"I was born in the city," he said. "What was left of it. We didn’t live in the open desert."

She let out her breath. "Did you ever go there?"

He started walking, but it wasn’t the deliberate getaway stride she’d seen before. He wandered aimlessly, scuffing up puffs of dust that hung for a moment before a hot breeze swept them away.

"No," he said. "Well--I mean. My nana took me a couple of times. When I was little." He looked around. "But it wasn't like this."

Rita looked around too, realizing why she’d wanted to come here. The dried-out scrub, the tough little rodents and lizards and snakes--they all battled the scorching sun and each other for one more breath. It was the most ferociously alive place she’d ever been. "What was the Sonoran Desert like?"

His shoulders moved unevenly. "Dead."

She flinched.

He’d made his way to a patch of what looked like blossoms of tan-green ping-pong paddles with long, pink spines. "What are those?" she asked, to distract herself.

"These?" He glanced down as if surprised.

"Yes."

He shrugged. "We never gave them a name. They were all over, in this place. Just grew wild, anywhere they could take hold." He crouched down and reached between the spines to brush his finger along the wrinkled green skin. "Saved Danziger’s life once."

She clasped her hands behind her back. "I’ve seen records. There was a plant something like them in the Sonoran desert. They were called--prickly pear?"

"Yeah," he said. "I guess they used to grow everywhere. In the backyard, by the side of the road, up against your building. In some places in Tucson, you could still see the dead ones."

"They died out?"

He ran his finger up one of the spines, lightly tapping the wicked point with his fingertip as if daring it to pierce the skin. "Of course not," he said. "They had them on the stations. In museums and DNA banks."

"I meant in the desert. They didn’t grow wild anymore?"

"The ground was poisoned," he said. "The rain--what rain we got--was acid."

"Oh."

"My nana had one, in a pot," he said softly. "The soil was treated. She saved part of her weekly water ration for it. Didn’t need much, really, but she was old, and we didn’t get much. But she wanted to keep one alive. Just one."

"What happened to it?"

He looked at her. "We left it, when we skylifted. After she died. We had to. There was no room." He stood, and his sunshades slid down his nose, revealing his eyes for the first time. He didn’t bother to push them up. "Why did you come here?"

She looked around her, at the seeming emptiness that stretched out into a life-filled infinity. "Our family lived in the desert for generations, on both sides of the border. Maybe some part of me remembers this. Maybe some part of me needed to be here, even in VR." She let out a humorless laugh. "Or maybe I’m just being fanciful. Making things up."

"You’re not making anything up," he said.

She looked back at him. "Why do you say that?"

He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

She pushed. "Is that the way you felt, when you came here?"

His eyes darkened. Then, without answering, he reached up, touched the side of his head where his gear sat in real life, and disappeared.

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