pockets with cylinders until they wouldn't hold any more. He walked out the door into the rain and the lightning of a world that, until a quarter hour ago, had been happy and promising him everything he could ever want.
He walked down the puddled gravel path toward the river, and no one stopped him.
If they caught him he could still lie and say he'd left the saw and only then remembered it and didn't want to leave the Base with a black mark on his record. He still had an escape. He always left himself one way to maneuver.
But he was scared this time, more than all the other times he'd been snatched up by the system. He'd usually had enough of whatever home they'd put him into, and it was certain by the time he'd heard it taken apart and analyzed and argued pro and con in court, that he was ready to be put elsewhere. You couldn't maintain an illusion that you were normal when your foster-family got up in front of a judge and answered questions about their private lives and your private life, and lied right in front of you to make them sound better and you sound worse.
And you'd say, in a high childish voice, That's a lie! And sometimes the court believed you, but by then you knew it wasn't better, and wouldn't ever be better, and things that hadn't been broken before the lawyers got into it would be broken by the time they got through hashing it up in public. Or if there was anything left of ties to that family he'd break it up in his own stupid actions—he'd go immediately and get in trouble of some kind, just to hit back, maybe, because it hurt. He could see that from where he was now, and after Melody had told him that truth about himself. He'd always come out of the hearings worse than he went in, usually with a family in ruins—and this time—
This time it wasn't anything so ephemeral as one more human family that he'd lose. This time it was everything he'd ever worked for. It was Melody and Patch themselves.
Just
Melody, just Patch. Just a couple of downers. Quasi-humans. Just the only living beings that had ever really loved him. And Bianca, who made him stupid and excited and set him tripping over his own tongue and still for some reason liked him. Bianca was the first ever of anybody who fit that category of 'people' the psychs were so set on him making relationships with, but when he thought about it, it wasn't a seamless relationship, even so. Nothing was seamless when the courts made you hold a microscope to it and asked you if it was valid.
Bianca
was what he'd say to the psychs when they got around to arguing about his motives for making trouble. He'd say,
I've been working on developing relationships
. That was one of their own phrases. They'd like that. You couldn't use words like
transference
and
displacement
, because they knew you were psyching them when you did that, but
relationships
was a word that you could use. He'd say he was just working things out about relationships—
The dicing-up had in that sense already begun—as if he knew the track things had to take now and couldn't help himself. He couldn't bear for the court psychs to get their hands on him, so he ripped himself up and handed them the pieces in the order
he
controlled. But, hell, it still meant that nothing stayed whole. If they found out about Melody and Patch they'd dice
that
up, too, until, like his foster-families, there wasn't any clean feeling left.
And he'd told Bianca.
She
knew. She'd talk. People always did, when the psychs wanted to know. They betrayed you to help you.
"You!" someone shouted, thin and far away. It was a male voice, and angry. Somebody
had
seen him. And he ran. He knew that he'd made a choice the moment he'd started running, and it felt like freedom, and he didn't stop.
"Come back here!" the staffer shouted. Desperate.
So was he. He ran for the path by the river, where the trees and the rocks hid him and he kept running and running, while the breathing mask failed to keep up with the need for oxygen
He walked down the puddled gravel path toward the river, and no one stopped him.
If they caught him he could still lie and say he'd left the saw and only then remembered it and didn't want to leave the Base with a black mark on his record. He still had an escape. He always left himself one way to maneuver.
But he was scared this time, more than all the other times he'd been snatched up by the system. He'd usually had enough of whatever home they'd put him into, and it was certain by the time he'd heard it taken apart and analyzed and argued pro and con in court, that he was ready to be put elsewhere. You couldn't maintain an illusion that you were normal when your foster-family got up in front of a judge and answered questions about their private lives and your private life, and lied right in front of you to make them sound better and you sound worse.
And you'd say, in a high childish voice, That's a lie! And sometimes the court believed you, but by then you knew it wasn't better, and wouldn't ever be better, and things that hadn't been broken before the lawyers got into it would be broken by the time they got through hashing it up in public. Or if there was anything left of ties to that family he'd break it up in his own stupid actions—he'd go immediately and get in trouble of some kind, just to hit back, maybe, because it hurt. He could see that from where he was now, and after Melody had told him that truth about himself. He'd always come out of the hearings worse than he went in, usually with a family in ruins—and this time—
This time it wasn't anything so ephemeral as one more human family that he'd lose. This time it was everything he'd ever worked for. It was Melody and Patch themselves.
Just
Melody, just Patch. Just a couple of downers. Quasi-humans. Just the only living beings that had ever really loved him. And Bianca, who made him stupid and excited and set him tripping over his own tongue and still for some reason liked him. Bianca was the first ever of anybody who fit that category of 'people' the psychs were so set on him making relationships with, but when he thought about it, it wasn't a seamless relationship, even so. Nothing was seamless when the courts made you hold a microscope to it and asked you if it was valid.
Bianca
was what he'd say to the psychs when they got around to arguing about his motives for making trouble. He'd say,
I've been working on developing relationships
. That was one of their own phrases. They'd like that. You couldn't use words like
transference
and
displacement
, because they knew you were psyching them when you did that, but
relationships
was a word that you could use. He'd say he was just working things out about relationships—
The dicing-up had in that sense already begun—as if he knew the track things had to take now and couldn't help himself. He couldn't bear for the court psychs to get their hands on him, so he ripped himself up and handed them the pieces in the order
he
controlled. But, hell, it still meant that nothing stayed whole. If they found out about Melody and Patch they'd dice
that
up, too, until, like his foster-families, there wasn't any clean feeling left.
And he'd told Bianca.
She
knew. She'd talk. People always did, when the psychs wanted to know. They betrayed you to help you.
"You!" someone shouted, thin and far away. It was a male voice, and angry. Somebody
had
seen him. And he ran. He knew that he'd made a choice the moment he'd started running, and it felt like freedom, and he didn't stop.
"Come back here!" the staffer shouted. Desperate.
So was he. He ran for the path by the river, where the trees and the rocks hid him and he kept running and running, while the breathing mask failed to keep up with the need for oxygen
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