Читать книгу A philosopher, a psychologist, and an extraterrestrial walk into a chocolate bar … - Jass Richards - Страница 10

They pulled into a parking space near the hotel’s front office and got out of the car. In the space next to them, some guy was saying goodbye to, presumably, his wife and young son. A taxi had pulled up behind a parked SUV.

“Now, you be a good boy and look after your mom until I get back.” The man had bent down to look eye-to-eye at his son. The little boy nodded. Satisfied, the man stood up, tousled the boy’s hair, and started tossing his luggage from the SUV into the taxi. The woman, clearly Good Housekeeping meets Cosmopolitan—an ironic, if not downright disturbing, combination—held onto her son’s hand.

Spike stopped, one hand lazing on the knapsack strap on her shoulder, the other resting in her pocket. Jane and X stopped with her, Jane holding her travel bag and laptop, X holding two pizza boxes with two bags perched on top.

“Are you retarded?” Spike asked the woman.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m just wondering why you need a child to look after you.”

“I don’t.” She tightened her grip on her son’s hand. In case the crazy lady made a grab for him.

Spike turned to the man. “Then why did you tell your son to do just that?” She knew damn well he wouldn’t’ve told his daughter to do just that.

“What?” He didn’t have time for this.

“Do you think your wife is retarded?”

X looked sharply at Spike, then at the man and then at the woman. And then at Jane. All to no avail.

“No, of course not!” The man didth protest too much.

“The problem is,” Jane began to articulate Spike’s concern—one of Spike’s concerns—“the boy will over-generalize. He’ll grow up to think that every woman needs to be looked after by a man.”

The two of them stared at her blankly. X had given up. Staring.

“Which word didn’t you understand? ‘Over-generalize’?” Jane asked. “ ‘Problem’?”

The woman pointedly ignored her. She gave her husband a quick peck on the cheek, then tugged her son away, back toward the safety of their hotel room. The man got into the taxi, and it drove off.

“Is it any wonder,” Spike said as they continued on their way to the office, articulating her other concern, “that somewhere between five and fifteen, when a boy realizes, when it registers, that his mom is female, and retarded, she becomes subject to contempt or dismissal?”

X opened her mouth. Then closed it.

The three of them entered the hotel lobby, which was dotted with guests coming, going, perusing the tourist pamphlet display. X looked on with curiosity as Jane and Spike checked them in. Once the process was completed, the young man hurried around the counter to take—he stopped, confused. None of them had a suitcase he could carry. Especially not a suitcase that only he, a slight man who had never worked out in his life, could carry.

“Down the hallway, on your right,” he said, then put his hand on the small of Spike’s back, applying a bit of pressure.

She stopped. And spun around to glare at him. “Are you steering me?” she asked loudly.

Everyone within hearing distance turned to look. Which meant everyone in the lobby.

“What?”

“Do you think I’m a frickin’ car?”

“What? No!”

“Then what’s your hand doing on my back?”

He couldn’t say.

“I’m not blind.”

He stared at her with a look of dull incomprehension.

“I don’t need you to guide me to the hallway.”

“Actually, even if she were blind, she probably wouldn’t need you to guide her to the hallway,” Jane added helpfully.

“But—”

“I don’t need you,” Spike stated. Baldly.

But he still didn’t get it.

Once they were in the room, which they’d managed to find all by themselves, Jane announced wearily, and unnecessarily, “Shower, pizza, chocolate. Not necessarily in that order,” she added, grabbing a chocolate bar out of one of the bags on her way to the bathroom. Spike set the two pizza boxes beside the tv, opened the top box, took out a slice, grabbed one of the cartons of chocolate milk out of the other bag, then claimed the bed Jane hadn’t dumped her stuff onto. X helped herself to the bag of chocolate bars and flopped awkwardly into the armchair in the corner.

When Jane came out of the bathroom, she took another chocolate bar from the bag. The last chocolate bar. Wait, what? She saw then that X had helped herself. Okay, so they knew something about alien physiology. That is, if—

“So,” Spike said to X conversationally, “if you’re not from around here”—Jane groaned, Spike grinned—“why can you speak English?”

“It came with the brain.”

That stopped them both in mid-bite.

Spike eventually queried, carefully, “What else came with the brain?”

“Neural access, sensory inputs, motor control.” X got up to get a piece of pizza and fell flat on her face. “Not very much motor control.”

They waited until she’d gotten back up.

“And where did you get the brain?” Jane played along.

“It came with the body.”

Of course it did. Jane got up to get a slice of pizza. And one of the cartons of chocolate milk. She handed the third carton to X. Then she asked, not sure she wanted to know, “Are you using someone else’s body?”

“No. Not exactly. Sort of. Yes.”

“Okaaaay …” Jane said, thinking maybe X lived in some sort of quantum reality. Well, if—

“If I merged when the other person was alive, that’d be wrong. And if I merged when they were dead, that’d be”—she seemed to search for the word—“yucky.”

“So … what else is there?” Spike asked.

“The time–space between. Duh.”

“Oh yeah. The time–space between.” She took a big bite of her pizza. As did Jane. They chewed slowly.

“And the oxygen thing?” Jane asked, still trying to establish evidence for or against believing X.

“A byproduct of the merge.”

“Ah.”

She drank some of her chocolate milk, thinking, thinking …

“Okay, so if you’re using—merging with—someone else’s body, and brain,” Jane said, “what makes you think you’ll be able to figure out our time–space coordinates. Chances are, you haven’t got a genius in there.”

“You’re definitely right about that.” X grimaced. “But it’s got a lot of unused RAM.”

That took a couple of seconds. “Gray matter?” Spike asked with some excitement. “You can access the gray matter?”

X turned toward her, a look of horror slowly spreading across her face. “You … can’t? This”—she flipped a finger at her head—“this is all there is?”

“Duh.” That was Jane.

X set down her slice of pizza. “Oh.”

X reached for the bag of chocolate bars. It was empty. She reached for her carton of chocolate milk. It too was empty. Wordlessly, both Jane and Spike passed her what was left of their own cartons. She drained them. By drinking them. The chocolate milk, not the cartons. A moment later, she got up and went into the bathroom.

“Good thing we met her on this side,” Jane said.

Spike had the same thought. “Would’ve been impossible to get an illegal alien across the border.” They both started to giggle.

“Hey, where’s your ship?” Jane called out. “Isn’t it a ‘smart ship’? Can’t you just set the GPS or whatever—”

“It doesn’t work anymore,” X called back. “At first I thought I’d entered a quarantined area …”

“We’re quarantined?” Jane called out, then turned to Spike. “That’s why no one’s visited us yet!”

“Maybe Earth is a penal colony,” Spike mused.

“Or a mental asylum. Maybe the human species originated somewhere else, or is at least flourishing somewhere else, and they shipped their defectives here. Its stupid, its morally-challenged, its beauty-blind …”

“But what about evolution?” Spike said. “We developed here.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Plus, it doesn’t explain us.”

“Maybe we were supposed to be the guards,” Jane suggested. “Or the doctors.”

“Maybe it’s an experiment, and we’re the researchers.”

“Or the control group.”

“But then I realized,” X continued, coming back out of the bathroom, “that I dinged a chunk of garbage coming in. You’ve got a lot of shit floating around your planet—what’s that all about?”