Outcasts by Vonda N. McIntyre Page B

awfully sorry. I can’t afford it, I need this
job...”
    Jannine felt betrayed. That made no sense. She didn’t
want Neko to quit. Hell, she didn’t want to quit, herself. She would’ve
felt awful, she would’ve felt guilty, if Neko had tried to leave with
her, and she would’ve tried to talk her out of going. No: she would have talked her out of going, no matter what she had to tell her. No matter how
much she had to tell her.
    The lights blinked: end of break. Everyone had to get back
to work. The temp would be in Jannine’s couch.
    “It doesn’t matter,” Jannine said. “I
have to leave.”
    “I’ll walk you to the door.”
    “Why?” No one was supposed to leave the floor
during work hours. “You’ll be late. You’ll lose points.”
    “I don’t care!”
    At the checkout, the barrier gave Jannine her i.d. It
refused to hand over Neko’s. Neko hesitated. She could come through the
barrier. But she’d have a hard time getting back to the floor: security,
explanations, maybe even counseling. A lot of lost points.
    “It doesn’t matter,” Jannine said,
disappointed despite herself. “Stay here.”
    “Well... okay, if you’re sure...”
    Jannine went through the barrier. It closed again behind
her.
    “We’ll get together,” Neko said. “For
a drink. Sometime. Okay?”
    Without turning back, Jannine raised her hand in a final
wave.
    The exit opened. She walked out onto the rain-wet street,
into the darkness.
    ~~~~~

The Genius Freaks
    Darting into a lighted spot in a dim pool —
    o0o
    Being born — well, Lais remembered it, a gentle
transition from warm liquid to warm air, an abrupt rise in the pitch of sounds,
the careful touch of hands, shock of the first breath. She had never told
anyone that her easy passage had lacked some quality, perhaps a rite that would
have made her truly human. Somewhere was a woman who had been spared the pain
of Lais’ birth, everywhere were people who had caused pain, and, causing,
experienced it, paying a debt that Lais did not owe. Sleeping curled in fetal
position in the dark gave her no comfort: the womb she was formed in had seemed
a prison from the time she was aware of it. Yet the Institute refused to grow
its fetuses in the light. The Institute administrators were normal and had been
born normally. If they had ever been prenatally aware, the memory had been
obliterated or forgotten. They could not understand the frustration of the
Institute Fellows, or perhaps the thought of fishlike little creatures peering
out, watching, learning, was too much even for them to bear.
    Lais’ quiet impatience with an increasingly cramped
world was only relieved by her birth, and by light, which freed a sense she had
felt was missing but could not quite imagine. Having reasoned that something
like birth must occur, she was much calmer under restraint than she had been
only a little earlier. When she first realized she was trapped, when she first
grew large enough to touch both horizons of her sphere, she had been
intelligent but wild, suspicious and easily angered. She had thrashed, seeking
escape; nothing noticed her brief frenzy. The walls were spongy-surfaced, hard
beneath; they yielded slightly, yet held her. They implied something beyond the
darkness, and allowed her to imagine it. All her senses were inside the prison,
so she imagined being turned inside out to be freed from her tether. She
expected pain.
    As she waited, she sometimes wished she were still a lower
primate, small and stupid enough to accept the warm salty liquid as the
universe. Even then, as she kicked and paddled with clumsy hands and feet,
missing the strong propulsion of her vanished tail, she was changing. That was
when she first thought that the spectrum of her senses might lack a vital part.
Her environment was still more alien now than it had been when she was a lithe
amphibian, barely conscious, long-tailed and free in an immense world. Earlier
than that, her memories were kinetic impressions,