Lizard People (10 page)

What's Mom been eating? I felt like she lived on another planet. I couldn't picture her daily routine, any more than I could picture the inside of her mind. She probably slept or watched TV or did whatever Vinnie suggested when he visited.

Putting the stuff in the fridge, I saw the phone message light was blinking.

“Call me.” Betty Lou's voice.

When I called, she picked up on the first ring.

“His last name's Rupert.”

“Vinnie?”

“It's Elvin Rupert. Vinnie, Elvin. He's out on parole. Dullborne's going to pay him a visit. You stay out of his way. Rupert's, that is. Completely away from him. Got me?”

Around noon I was back at Marco's. He was in his room on his bed fast-forwarding through what looked like a new
Time
magazine.

“Where's your mom?”

He raised his shoulders, like, Why ask me?

He closed the mag and pushed himself back against the wall. Assumed the zenny position. “Next installment?” he asked.

I had brought the dining room chair in with me.

4000?

Marco
stumbled out onto the grass into the sunshine of a warm afternoon. The projected cedar was missing but there were a variety of other trees. He touched the nearest one. Real! He grabbed a low limb and climbed to survey the situation. There was no sign of Anole. Still, this could be the same park as before. The paths were different, cobblestone with flowers bordering. Marco saw people were walking instead of gliding. No tubes were visible.

“Why always the third person?” I interrupted. Watching Marco's face.

He stopped speaking for a minute. Looked up at me. “It's how it comes to me,” he said.

“Comes to you? Like in a trance or like channeling?”

“It's how I go back and forth,” he said. “Otherwise I can't make it real.”

Yeah, it's not real. It couldn't be.

He took a couple of deep breaths, closed his eyes, and started speaking again.

Marco climbed down and approached the nearest walker, a slender person with very short brown hair. No swimsuits anymore. Some kind of opaque gossamer robe, loose fitting.

The walker turned as he approached, and raised her eyebrows. “Marco?” she asked. “How remarkable that I should be the one to see you!”

Marco couldn't think of anything to say. How did this person know his name?

“Of course, you must be surprised,” the walker filled in, “but we've been expecting you for years. Who is it you wish to speak with first? The Venerable Gila? The Venerable Monitor? I'm Sauria, and I'm a follower of Inspector Anole, but I don't believe you knew her as well.”

“Inspector Anole?” Marco repeated, struggling to catch up.

“Anole, founder of the new technocracy. Aren't the differences wonderful? Miniaturization? No need for those wires or the tubes or any of the old equipment. Haven't had them for years.”

Marco realized he was able to understand the walker's speech without the translator wires.

“As soon as I recognized you, I alerted the grid. I'll show you. Try to back up.”

Marco attempted to step away but was unable to move in any direction.

“Please don't be upset. The Venerable Gila knew it would take time for you to adjust, no matter when you returned, so plans for your reception have been in place for years.”

“What year is it?” Marco asked, growing increasingly alarmed.

“4030. Please don't worry.” The walker put the middle two fingers of her left hand to the center of her forehead, like Gila had done earlier. “We are at your service, and you will be free to move about at your discretion, as soon as the Venerable Ones have spoken with you.

“Look.” The walker made a sweeping gesture with her hand. “Isn't it beautiful? All these trees, the stone glide paths, the flowers. All these are the work of the Venerable Monitor, the founder of naturalism. So much has changed, thanks to you!”

Marco was again at a loss for words.

“Do you notice the excitement in my voice? A broad range of expression is now encouraged in our culture. For hundreds of years, emotionalism was biochemically dampened to discourage the furtherance of classism, nationalism, and war. Now we are free to bloom again, like our flowers.”

“What happened?”

“That is not really mine to tell you,” the girl said, blushing. “I have probably already spoiled some of their surprises. But I don't think Venerable Gila will mind, Though she is not my primary, I thank her daily for my liberation. Her founding of Emofirst has given us all richer lives.”

Marco was feeling a pressure to move to his right. He found himself resisting, not only because he didn't know what was causing this pressure, but also because he was interested in this girl and her explanations, and he was reluctant to leave her.

The pressure was not painful, but it was strong enough to push him into a step and then another and another to keep himself from falling.

“Will you come with me?” he asked, looking over his shoulder as he moved away. “Can you?” he yelled back at her.

He could see her smile as he was herded by the constant pressure toward the boulevard at the edge of the park. Did she even hear him?

The pressure stopped at an access to the stone path. A stone at the edge lifted to hip height. The top half opened like a lid and showed a blue LED screen and a keypad. Something, possibly a remote from some other location, typed onto the screen. The writing was similar to before, lines, dashes, and dots. No translation was provided. The lid closed and the stone returned to the ground, nestling unobtrusively among the others.

Marco felt a pressure to move forward onto the path. As he did, he found himself flowing—was that the right word?—to the right, toward buildings that looked like those he had seen before. When he reached the street, he felt himself gently turned and propelled along the street in the direction he remembered. He wasn't moving his feet but he was … gliding along without standing on anything he could see. Was this part of Inspector Anole's new technocracy?

At a rose-tinted building shaped like an enormous stylized teardrop, he was gently edged off the street and moved to the entrance, where a panel opened and he continued to be guided inside. When the panel closed behind him, an opaque shield in front of him lifted. Standing only a few feet beyond it was a group of people in glittering metallic-colored clothes: coppery blues, bronzes, subtle greens. In front of the group stood three people Marco recognized. Monitor, Gila, and Inspector Anole. They were smiling and posed in that fingers-to-middle-forehead salute position. When the shield was fully opened, they released their salute and stepped forward.

Marco tried to step back, instinctively wanting more space until he could figure out what was happening. Whatever it was wouldn't let him.

“Let us welcome you appropriately this time.” Gila was the first to speak.

Marco wondered if this was some kind of elaborate trick.

“Your bravery has brought forth a renaissance.” Monitor said.

Anole stepped forward, closing the small distance, and reached toward him.

Marco flinched but could not retreat or duck to avoid her touch.

Using one of her finger rings, she gently extracted the stabilizer from his shoulder.

He had totally forgotten about it! But he quickly found he still couldn't move. Miniaturization, he remembered.

She stepped back to stand with the others.

“There is so much to tell you,” Gila said, “so much gratitude to convey, so much to share with you. Please come with us and let us start.”

The lobby, or whatever it was, was filled with humming and clicking.

It was a pleasant sound. Maybe it was applause.

There was a very brief ceremony right there in front of the small crowd of people who wore stripes and medals and looked like officials of some kind. Marco smiled to cover his confusion. After he had been thoroughly greeted, Anole, Gila, and Monitor escorted him in a glass elevator to the second level, an open area that looked like a pie cut into thirds. There was a central desk or reception area, and a broad hall going off in each direction. A mercury-colored symbol hung above each entrance.

Inspector Anole stepped forward again. Took Marco's arm. Gently. “Why don't you come with me first?” she asked him, but she was looking at the other two.

He could see they agreed.

“Whenever you're ready, I'll be in my office,” Monitor said.

“Likewise,” Gila said, “and I'll wait as late as necessary.” She smiled.

Inspector Anole led him down the leftmost of the three corridors.

Her corner office was huge, the outdoor walls all windows. A big woman needed a big office, Marco guessed. In the middle was a thick, many-colored carpet with cushioned chairs around the edge. When Anole pointed, two of the chairs moved to the center of the carpet, facing the windows, talking-distance apart. Every gesture seemed theatrical, grand, as if the constable had grown an ego to match her height and girth.

“As you can see,” she said, “everything now follows the discovery you facilitated. Every design is subservient to natural beauty and the state of Flow that it engenders. Transportation, security devices, communication aids are all either invisible or cloaked. In daily living, we wish to have our observations be informed by aesthetics, not distracted by machinery. Form follows nature, or vanishes! Is our world not a great deal more beautiful in just thirty years?”

Of course, it was still the very same week to Marco, but he didn't tell her that. He wondered if she had already planted more invisible controllers on him when she touched him earlier.

“All is possible, young man,” she said, smiling. “With Fusion, all is possible.”

Deep Ancestral DNA

“Marco,
Marco, Marco,” Monitor was smiling broadly, expansive, but he remained seated behind a console that actually seemed to be growing its own leaves. “The man of the century,” he said, clasping his hands and smiling. “It may be hard for you to believe that we had completely eschewed nature by the year 4000. By 2800, of course, we, mankind, had not only conquered nature, but eliminated most of it. Natural gas, petroleum, even aquifers had been gone for at least two hundred years. The greenhouse effect and global warming had made weather hopelessly chaotic and completely unmanageable. After the ozone disintegration, we had to keep our heads down, so to speak, until we were able to artificially reconstitute a UV absorption screen. Even so, everyone's skin darkened. The remaining bits of nature, plants and the like, seemed troublesome since we manufactured our own oxygen and no longer needed their contribution. We had a holographic record of pretty much every living thing since the twenty-fifth century, so we simply projected the nature we wanted, clouds, trees, and so on. Never have to prune a hologram,” he said, chuckling.

“It took our trip to your time to show me what we were missing. The smell, the textures, the variation, the entire living process. Inspiring really.”

Dr. Gila was standing in her familiar pose, hands together in front of her. Her office, like the other two, was very large and full of sunlight. Is it really sunlight? Marco wondered. Along with the two walls of glass, there was a wall of cacti, many in bloom, blood-orange knobs and deep red fluted stalks leaning out over the spines.

“Now, the least we can do is answer your questions,” Gila said, “and I believe the first had to do with a cure for mental illness?”

“Yeah,” Marco said, “and the University. What's the University? And the Lizard thing. What is going on with the Lizard thing?”

“Actually your last question is the easiest,” Gila said, looking out the window, as if the answer were inscribed on a cloud. “Emotions are primary. They override cognition and reason. In 4000, we were all taking supplements that assisted in the suppression of feelings. When we had to use extrasensory communication, that particular neural configuration brought a flood of emotions to the surface, different than, but similar in effect to, adrenaline. Fight or flight. The emotional brain, the reptilian brain, the primitive brain, would break through. The unfortunate side effect of reengineering and suppressant use was that, with the emotional breakthrough, inevitably came a momentary swelling, plus pigmentation and skin configuration disruption. As you saw, for seconds at a time, we began reverting to very deep ancestral DNA.”

I got up so fast my chair went over backward. I wanted to throw something. Why was he laying this on me? Maybe I'd been wrong. Maybe he was cruel. Crazy. Into some ugly mind game. I couldn't figure out what to do. Marco stayed as still as a rock. After a minute, Mrs. Onabi flashed in my mind.
Get back to class.

I righted my chair and sat.

“As to the University, the University is the governing body that controls the supplements, provides the genetic engineering, and conducts the experiments that inform future decisions regarding our species' psycho-physiological structuring. Thanks to you, as the creator of Emofirst, I am now president of that University.

“And your last question … sadly, I can give you very little to cure mental illness in 2007. You do not yet have the neuropsychological inventions to change the nature of illness, and your epoch's government lacks compassion for social support. Families in your time are left to fend for themselves.”

I didn't realize the yelling was mine. I knew the rage was. I stomped out to the dining room.

When I pulled myself together, Marco was gone.

I walked through his house looking for him. Like before, no furniture, no people. But I realized something else. No parents' bedroom. No bed. No dressers. His mom's a decorator? No way. No tools, no books, no … I went to every small room and checked every closet. No clothes. Kitchen? Cabinets empty.

Nobody's living here. Marco sleeps here.