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They looked at each other some more. Lore wondered what Ellen saw. She almost asked her. Instead, she nodded.
“The Polar Bear, then.”
“Who is it?” Spa
“One moment,” Lore said to Ellen, and turned off the video pickup. “It’s Ellen,” she told Spa
Spa
“You did.” Ellen gri
They both laughed, and Lore felt like a child left out of a grown-up joke.
“Ten tomorrow?”
“Fine.”
“We’ll expect both of you,” Ellen said, and the screen went gray.
“Who’s ‘we’?” Lore asked.
“Ellen and Ruth.”
“The PIDA picker?”
“The same. Maybe some others.”
“I feel like I’ll be presented for inspection.”
Spa
People, not friends. “Business?”
“Dilettantes. Ex-dilettantes at that.”
Later, in the Polar Bear, as she sat at a table with Ellen and Ruth, and Billy and A
Spa
Lore found herself being sucked in, despite herself; felt Spa
The late evening turned to midnight, then one. Ellen and Ruth made vague motions toward leaving, but Spa
It was a subtle thing: the raised eyebrows that had been full of concern and interest were now canted just differently enough for Lore to reread them as sardonic—contemptuous, even. She glanced around the table, caught Ruth’s face, and realized that Ruth knew: Spa
It was a bright, su
I knocked on Tom Wilson’s door. “I bought some Lapsang souchong.”
“You’d best come in, then.” His eyes were bright, but he walked stiffly. “Sit down, sit down. The kettle’s boiled.” I sat while he fussed with trays and teapots and cups. His slippers shuffled as he carried everything carefully to the window-side table. I poured. “Now, then. What’s on your mind?”
“I need your help.”
He smiled. “Well, that’s gratifying.”
“What I want you to do isn’t exactly legal. That is, what I want you to do, here, wouldn’t break any laws, technically, especially if you said you didn’t know what it was all about-”
“You’re pla
“No.” I wished he wouldn’t yank me to a standstill like that.
“Glad to hear it. Is what you want to do dangerous?”
“Not physically, no.”
“Who will it hurt?”
Not Will it hurt anyone? but Who. He wasn’t smiling, exactly, but his sandy-gray eyebrows were slightly raised, and the deep lines in his cheeks were deeper. “Some people’s pride. A few very rich people who get their kick out of patronizing the poor, and the executives in charge of net security.”
“And who will it benefit?”
For one wild moment I wanted to treat him like a father confessor, pour out my whole life—the kidnap, the years with Spa
“Then tell me more.”
“Spa
“Nice to be needed. But as you can see,” he gestured at his swollen knuckles, “I can’t always get out and about. Could you film it here?”
I nodded. “And I can doctor the disk, make it look as though I shot through a zoom—maybe through a window or something, without your knowledge. Just in case.”
“Good enough. What sort of things will I have to do?”
“The main thrust is going to be about how the elderly are feeling bemused by the world. I want to show how things have moved too fast for some.”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
“Um,” I said, noncommittally.
“You don’t agree?” His hand shook a little as he put down his teacup. “Rape, murder, torture, it’s all been done before. Loneliness, joy, love—been around for thousands of years. Clothes are different, but there’s always been fashion. Food is different, but there’s always been taste and fads. Oh, there may be new ways to read books these days, there’s the net instead of radio and these silly PIDAs instead of a good leather wallet, but people don’t change. Not really.” He laughed. “The expression on your face! Live a few more years and you’ll find out. Nothing really changes.”
“But how did you feel when your money no longer worked and you had to get a PIDA?”
He shrugged. “It was twelve years ago. I was a bit uncertain at first: What if something went wrong in a computer and my account got tied up? How would I pay the rent then? But after a month or two I liked it. No more rushing to the bank. No more filling out bills. Everything’s so easy.”
“For some,” I said. “I heard a story once about when the book reader first came out, a young man gave one to his grandfather. He turned it on, pulled up a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and showed grandfather how to change the pages. Granddad said, ‘Thank you very much.’ The younger man left him happily reading. A year later, when he went back to visit, the young man found his grandfather reading the same book. ‘Wonderful thing, this reader,’.the old man said, ‘but I wish they’d brought out some different stories.’ The old man had no idea that there were nearly twenty thousand different books on that disk. That he could have bought hundreds of other disks, or simply downloaded others—anything at all—from the net. He was used to a book being immutable. The fact that the words on each side of the ‘page’ changed didn’t make a difference: this was To Kill a Mockingbird, so how could it be anything else?”