Track of a legend - страница 2

The hill was treeless, acres of grass manicured by robots with great rotary blades in summer and smooth as a cue ball in winter. Perfect for sledding.

The only trouble with the hill was that Timothy’s aunt lived in the shiny tin-can-lying-on-its-side house at the top. I knew she was weird because Timothy said she never came outside or went anywhere, and my parents would shake their heads when they talked about her. But we had the cardboard sled in our hands, and he was pulling strongly; so I guess he didn’t care about his weird aunt.

The fence might keep clumsy Bigfoot out but delayed us only a few seconds when we snagged a ragged edge of the cardboard on it and had to stop to free it. Then we climbed what seemed to be fourteen thousand one hundred ten meters of elevation to a place a little below the odd house, where we finally rested, breathing as hard as ancient warriors who’d just dragged their elephant up the Alps.

Timothy’s aunt’s house whirred and clicked, and I looked up. There were no windows, but it had a thousand eyes hidden in the silver rivets that held the metal skin over tungsten bones.

In the white snow it looked desolate, save for a trickle of smoke.

“Hey, your aunt’s house is on fire,” I said. Timothy gave me a look that always made me feel stupid. “Her heat exchanger’s broken. She’s burning gas,” he said. “I know because she asked my dad to get her a new one before Christmas.”

“Does she come to your house for Christmas?”

“Nah. Sometimes she comes video, just like she used to when she lived up there.” He gestured skyward, where snowflakes were crystallizing and falling on us, but I knew he meant higher, one of the space stations or orbiting cities. “It’s better now because there’s no delay when we talk. It’s like she was in Portland or something.”

“What’s she like?” I said, suddenly wondering about this peculiar person who had been a fixture in my community since I was little, yet whom I’d never seen.

Timothy shrugged. “Like an aunt. always wanting to know if I ate my peas.” Warrior Timothy was patting the cardboard elephant sled, making ready to resume our journey in the Alps.

“Why doesn’t she come out of there?”

“My dad says she’s got a complex or something from when she lived up there.” He gestured skyward again.

“What’s a complex?”

For a moment Timothy looked blank, then he said, “It’s like what Joan-John and Lester-Linda Johnson have.”

“You mean she goes to the clinic and comes back something else?” I said, wondering if his aunt used to be his uncle.

“I mean she doesn’t go anywhere.”

“But like to the consumer showcases down in the mall and the restaurant. She goes there, doesn’t she?”

“Nope. Last year when her mux cable got cut and her video wasn’t working she practically starved to death.”

“But why? Is she crippled or something?” The teacher had said he knew a spacer who spent most of his time in a swimming pool, and when he did come out he had to use a wheelchair because he was too old to get used to gravity again.

“No, she’s not crippled.”

“What’s she look like?”

“My mother.”

Timothy’s mother was regular looking; so whatever a complex was, it had nothing to do with getting ugly. The Johnsons weren’t ugly either, but they went through what my dad called phases, which he said was all in their heads. Maybe Timothy’s aunt’s complex was like Lester Johnson’s Linda phase, but that didn’t seem right because Lester-Linda came outside all the time and Timothy’s aunt never did.

“What does she do inside all the time?”

“Works.”

I nodded, considerably wiser. The old public buildings were down in the woods with the school, mostly monuments to waste of space ever since we got our mux cable that fed into every building in the community. Most of the grown-ups stopped going to work, and they stopped coming to school on voting day, but we still had to go, and not just on voting day.

“Come on,” Timothy said.

But the smoke fascinated me. It puffed out of a silver pipe and skittered down the side of the house as if the fluffy falling snow was pushing it down. It smelled strange. I formed a snowball, a good solid one, took aim at the silver pipe, and let it fly.