And the Poor Get Children

Lisa Tuttle

Becky Valpariso was used to getting what she wanted. It came as an unpleasant shock to her to learn, at the age of one hundred and forty-seven, that there really were things money could not buy.

Like love. She could hire care - a nurse, a full-time nanny, and the most sophisticated interactive nursery on the market, but what had been good enough for her mother was, most emphatically, not good enough for her. Becky had grown up cared for by a series of hired nurses before being sent off to the best boarding school. Every luxury had been provided except the one she now considered more important than anything money could buy: the constant presence, devoted care and unselfish love of a full-time parent. Both her parents had been too busy earning money to take a few years off to raise their own child.

Not that she blamed them, not any more, not after nearly fifty years in analysis. Life had been so much shorter then, even for the very rich. Now it seemed perfectly possible to take a career-break for a decade or two, whether to raise a child or explore some other non-remunerative passion. She was convinced it would be worth doing. But could she convince her partner?

She waited until Steve was in a mellow mood, after a few rounds of VR sex-gaming, when they were lying on the living-room floor, back in real time, both of them with non-fattening, non-carcinogenic, mildly uplifting mood-enhancers on tap. In the background, providing a little subliminal encouragement, she hoped, were some dolls and other toys. She smiled at him and touched him on the arm and drew a deep breath to begin. But it was no good. Steve was already there. He had known her, after all, for nearly sixty years - he knew her better than anyone else alive. Maybe he couldn’t actually read her mind, but he had noticed the toys and he knew what the impulse binge in a toystore must mean. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said. ‘Don’t even ask.’

‘You could at least think about it.’

‘I already have. The answer is no.’

‘If you really—’

‘Of course I love you. I love you as you are. If you really loved me you wouldn’t ask. I love our life together and I don’t want anything to change. Our life is perfect as it is.’

‘Life is change. Perfection is death.’

‘What about, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I’ve been to just as many personal-life philosophy sessions as you have, my darling. I like our partnership just as it is; I’m not interested in being a parent.’

‘It would be an enriching experience.’

‘It would be hell.’

‘How do you know? There’d be rough times, but you might be surprised at how enjoyable raising a child could be. And it would bring us closer together.’

‘If we survived the first eighteen years.’

‘It doesn’t have to be eighteen; we could do it in nine. The clinic offers a special half-time option - birth to graduation in under nine years. So you see, it wouldn’t even be a decade out—’

‘Out of our real lives, were you going to say? Becky, this is crazy. You can’t argue me into this - there aren’t any sweeteners you can give me, the whole deal simply repulses me. If you’re so keen, get yourself a tailor-made VR programme, take a year off in the tank where they’ll look after you, and then come back to me.’

Tears of rage sprang to her eyes, fury at being balked and also at being so misunderstood by the person who mattered. ‘This is no game! I’ve been thinking about it a long time, and I want to do it, for real. Virtual isn’t going to get it out of my system. This isn’t like sex, this is something I need for the sake of my soul, like I need you. Steve, please, if you love me, let me do this!’ He rolled over and stood up, stretching his long, naked body, moving away from her. ‘Not with me. If it’s that important to you - more important than us - go ahead, find yourself another daddy.’

She read the hurt in his body language, the despair he didn’t want her to see, and knew with a thrill of certainty how much he loved her. He was frightened of losing her, fearful of the changes that were to come - but he loved her, that was the important thing. She felt guilty about going behind his back, without his permission, but she just knew that he wouldn’t let her down. She was sure, whatever he said, that he would be a wonderful father.

*

Renate heard the screaming as she came out of the market. It was a very old superstore surrounded by a huge and now largely unused parking lot, and among the few eccentric vehicles parked on the cracked and potholed paving was a big, old-fashioned black perambulator from which the screams were coming.

She didn’t realize just how big the pram actually was until she nearly ran into it. She had thought it still some distance away; its size warped normal perspective. It was necessarily large because it contained, not a baby, but a fully grown woman dressed in a long, white gown of Irish lace, smelling of pee and baby powder and sour milk, her face clenched and red with the effort of screaming.

‘Now, now,’ said Renate. ‘There, there, it’s all right.’ She bent over the side of the pram and searched until she found a bottle and plugged it into the screaming mouth. There was a startled little sound, the same noise her own daughter used to make, and then a greedy, contented sucking.

‘That’s better.’ Renate spotted a square of card pinned to one of the white blankets and read it aloud: ‘My name is Becky. I am only four days old. Please take care of me.’ Eyes closed, the woman in the pram was oblivious, sucking away as if all was well and nothing in the world existed except herself and the teat. ‘Oh, Becky, what a wicked world you’ve been born into. You didn’t choose your parents very wisely, did you? Well, I’ll find someone to help.’

There was a Crime Alert Post only steps away, and the button was working. A peacekeeper was with her in minutes, preceded by the blood-chilling sound of its siren. Renate gritted her teeth and fought all the instincts that urged her to run: everyone knew that the siren had been scientifically developed to arouse fear in the criminal brain while leaving the normal, law-abiding citizen completely unaffected. But although she did not believe she had criminal tendencies, both sound and sight of the approaching peacekeeper filled her with alarm, and she wished she’d turned elsewhere for help.

Unable to identify any known crime in progress, the peacekeeper issued Renate a caution against misuse and waste of public utilities.

‘But this baby has been abandoned - surely it was my duty to report that?’

‘There is no baby,’ droned the peacekeeper. ‘There is an adult woman, causing no offence. REM activity indicates she sleeps; no evidence of restricted drug or alcohol abuse.’

‘But she’s completely helpless! Surely you can see that? She can’t look after herself. She may be an adult physically, but she’s been reborn.’

‘She is a private citizen. What concern is she of yours?’

‘It’s a human concern. She’s helpless, she’s been abandoned - somebody has to help her or she’ll die. I just happened to find her. Look, take a cell sample, tell me who she is so I can contact her next-of-kin.’

‘This citizen is committing no crime. Sample cannot be taken without her permission.’

‘But she can’t give you her permission! That’s the point! We need to find out who she is—’

‘There is no need to uncover the identity of this private citizen. You are wasting the time of a valuable public utility. This is your second caution. If a third caution is issued, it will be entered on your record and you may be fined.’

‘I apologize. I didn’t mean to. It was a misunderstanding,’ Renate said as humbly as she could. She felt like screaming.

She decided to try the health centre. In the olden days foundlings had been left at hospital doors. No hospital in the city would allow Renate anywhere near their doors - her public health card permitted access only to one health centre. But at least there she could talk to a human being, and maybe one of the medics or carers would take pity on Becky.

It was a long walk to the health centre, but she had no choice. The pram was not collapsible, and would never be allowed on the peoplemover, and Becky was far too big for her to carry.

After inserting her card and being let through the doors into the waiting area, she waited for hours surrounded by ill, injured and slightly mad people, most of whom eyed her and the enormous black pram with unconcealed resentment. Not for the first time, she wished she had an IC. The idea of being able to touch her wrist and call up information from anywhere in the world, or even to be able to talk to a friend, made her almost faint with longing. Or maybe it was the air, heavy with sickness and despair, that brought her close to fainting. Eventually, inevitably, Becky woke up and started crying again. Rocking the pram didn’t help, so she refilled the baby bottle with milk from her bag of groceries. For a few minutes, as Becky gulped it down, there was blessed quiet. Then she turned her head and puked it all up.

‘Oh, dear… oh—’ As she was trying, fairly uselessly, to clean up the mess of curdled milk with the one crumpled tissue she’d found in her bag, a passing carer (with Limited Nursing Skills, according to her badge) took notice of her plight and brought her some disposable towels.

‘Oh, thank you, thank you so much.’

‘You’ve got your work cut out for you - I sure don’t envy you. First-time babies are bad enough, but at least they’re portable, and cute. Try picking up something this big, huh! But I guess you must love her a lot. They say knowing your lover as your mother or your child adds an extra dimension to your love. ‘

She’d heard that said on a soap opera, and was nodding in recognition of the sentiment before she realized what it implied. ‘Oh, no. I’m not her lover - I don’t even know her!’

‘Is that so? The money must be good, then. Husband hired you, I guess?’

‘No. I don’t know her - I don’t know who she is. I just found her outside my local mall—’

‘Whoa! Take her back!’

‘I can’t. She’d been abandoned. She was screaming her head off. There was a note pinned to her blanket—’

‘And you’re the lucky sucker who found her.’

‘I couldn’t just leave her.’

‘Why not? Her family did.’

‘She needs to be looked after. She can’t do anything for herself. I know she’s got the body of a grown woman, but her mind’s a blank slate. She might not look like one, but she is just a baby, really. Would you be able to walk past an abandoned baby?’

‘I sure wouldn’t take it home with me.’

‘I don’t want to take her home, I want to find out where she belongs. The police were no help. Do you think…?’

The carer’s sigh and rolled eyes told her she was wasting her time, but: ‘I’ll try to find somebody who can see you.’

But when she did finally achieve an interview with a member of the administrative staff, Ms Bogan, there was no help on offer. ‘Can’t you just keep her in the health centre for a few days, until you find out who she is? Or send her to a hospital or a nursery - you must have a contract with one of those places. Isn’t that what you’d do with an abandoned baby?’

‘That is not a baby.’

‘Mentally she is. There’s no difference, they’re both equally helpless.’

‘She didn’t have to make herself helpless.’

‘You could say the same thing about any addict, or someone who tried to commit suicide. Would you turn them away if they were at risk, or dying, because they’d done it to themselves?’

‘That depends,’ said Ms Bogan coolly. ‘Are we talking about an alcoholic with a decent insurance package, or a down-and-out? Surely you’re familiar with the concept of community care?’ Her smile was as disturbing as the grin on a bare skull; it flashed and was gone. ‘Unless the indigent are in need of heroic intervention to save their lives we invoke the concept of community care. Which is what I will do now, also pointing out to you that she is not a member of our community.’

Hostility towards the super-rich, the ‘immortals’, was common among the general public, more so than Renate’s awe, yet she was shocked to encounter it here. She had romantic notions about people who worked in health care, due to her addiction to the same dramatic serials that fed her fantasies about the super-rich.

‘Well, what do you suggest I do? Take her to a rich people’s hospital - if I could find one - and throw her on their mercy?’

‘There’s no point. She could be from anywhere, from an enclave in Switzerland or Colorado as likely as one around here. Anyway, I’m sure that by now her ex-husband has had her declared incompetent and taken all her assets in trust. If she lives to grow up, she’ll have her work cut out for her finding him again and fighting to get it back. If she dies, well, it’s not his fault and he’d probably inherit anyway.’

‘She could die? Isn’t she immortal?’

‘Just because the tabloids called them immortals, and they happen to like the name, doesn’t mean they are. She’ll live a long time if she’s lucky, but a lot of the things that could kill you could kill her - a gun or a knife or a fall from a high place, to mention only three.’

It was too late to go anywhere else by the time she left the health centre, even if she’d had anywhere else in mind to go. So she took Becky home. There was nothing else she could do.

*

Len didn’t agree, but he was basically an easy-going man, and as he’d never in all the years they’d been together won an argument with Renate, he didn’t put up much of a fight. He gave a leave-me-out-of-it shrug and plugged himself back into his sports programme and left his wife to the task of settling their uninvited visitor down for the night.

Not liking the idea of leaving Becky alone, Renate stayed home from work the next morning and phoned the Office of Public Health and Happiness, where someone who preferred to let herself be represented on the viewing screen as a hologrammatic Mickey Mouse, took Becky’s details.

‘I can see that’s a problem for you, and all of us here deeply sympathize, but I’m afraid this citizen doesn’t fall within our criteria of those truly in need.’

‘But how much more in need could she be? She’s completely helpless, she’s just a baby!’

‘It is certainly understandable that you would see her in that way, but the fact of the matter is she is not a baby but an adult who has made herself deliberately helpless. And as you probably know, in cases of deliberate failure to provide for the self, the body public is not morally required to provide assistance of any kind.’

‘But somebody has to help! However it happened, she is effectively helpless now.’

‘Her family has the moral and legal obligation to provide care.’

‘But I don’t know who her family is!’

‘You are her family.’

‘Me! I’m not related to her -1 never saw her before yesterday!’

‘If you’ll forgive me saying so, arguing on the basis of blood relationships is terribly outdated. And of course legal documents need not be drawn up to make a partnership valid - anyone who has ever fallen in love knows that! It is only necessary that you choose to live together and care about each other to be recognized as a family in the eyes of the public community.’

‘But we don’t live together!’

‘You have just been telling me how you took her home with you last night. You took on the role of care-giver, and however it came about you have entered into a meaningful, ongoing relationship with Becky, as you call her. She’s being cared for by you. There’s no problem.’

‘There certainly is a problem!’

At once Ms Mickey was all solicitousness. ‘There is? Are you finding it difficult to cope? Would you like a visit from a social worker?’

Argument was clearly useless. She declined the social worker - a phrase that had been a foul insult in her childhood but which had recently been rehabilitated - but one turned up at their flat a few days later. It was, like the peacekeeper, an Artificial, and just as understanding. It let them know, in no uncertain terms, that Becky was now their responsibility, and that any attempt to evade that responsibility, by abuse, neglect or abandonment, would be very harshly condemned. If necessary, Becky would be taken into care, but, in such an extreme case, both Renate and Len would be looking at prison sentences.

Len was wonderful in adversity. Never a word of blame, and he was with her all the way. In all the years they’d been together perhaps she’d come to take him a little for granted, but every now and again she realized how lucky she was to have him.

He helped out more with Becky than he had with their own daughter. He had only a part-time job now, whereas when Tamara had been small he’d been working full-time and more, while she had supplemented their income as best she could with piecework that could be done at home. Also, she had never needed his help with Tamara as desperately as she did with Becky, who she could barely lift off the floor.

She tried to find someone else to look after the baby, even part-time, but it was a job no one wanted. All the child-minders charged over the odds because she wasn’t a ‘normal’ baby and because they thought they scented money. In the end, Renate had to give up her job. The loss of her weekly wages was a hardship, otherwise she didn’t mind. Looking after a baby, even though it wasn’t her baby, even though it wasn’t really a baby, was lots more fun than production line work. She’d always wanted more than one child, and after it became clear there would be no more she’d pinned her hopes on her daughter producing some grandchildren before Renate was too old to enjoy them. Not that her daughter, now twenty-three, had yet shown any inclinations in that direction. Tamara, in fact, had turned into something of a disappointment all round. She’d been a wonderful child, an unmixed blessing as far as her parents were concerned, but now she’d joined a Christian cult and become a religious fanatic. Renate’s friends told her she should be glad her daughter hadn’t followed the path taken by 82 per cent of her schoolmates and become a criminal and/or drug addict, but she frankly couldn’t see that this was any improvement.

Despite all the problems Becky caused - poverty the chief among them - she did fill a gap. Although her great, ungainly adult body lacked the vulnerable charm of infancy, she was more like a real baby than the incontinent, mentally subnormal adult she resembled. Like all babies, she was growing and learning with astonishing speed, changing every day, gaining in ability and alertness with every passing hour. When her brown eyes locked on to Renate’s and she smiled that special, sweet smile of recognition, she couldn’t help responding. Their bonding took longer than it had with Tamara, but within four months she was every bit as helplessly in love with this second-timer as she’d been with her own baby.

Which was probably just as well, since her own baby denounced her for giving aid and comfort to an Evil One and declared she would have nothing more to do with her natural mother until such time as she renounced her past wickedness and joined the One True Church.

Renate had known that her daughter’s sect abhorred the immortals as going against nature, man and God, but ‘What about Christian charity? I could hardly leave her to die …’

‘Of course you could - and should! The sooner God reclaims each Evil One, the better for all of us. By their actions, by attempting to evade God’s will for them, they have attempted to become more than human, and so, by renouncing our common humanity, they must forfeit all human help. I shall pray for you, Mother.’

For once, Renate was glad that looking after Becky left her so little time to think about her own problems. The new baby’s development seemed uncannily quick, and although the more Becky could do the more trouble she was, Renate nevertheless felt a mother’s pride in watching her gigantic darling learn to crawl and then to stand. Unfortunately, when she used the bookcase to pull herself to her feet she also pulled the bookcase over on top of her, but no childhood is survived without some damage.

Damage to the furniture and the flat was the least of it. Renate was covered in bruises from her regular tussles to stop the baby from climbing out the window (they were on the eighth storey) or playing with the microwave. Once, as they grappled together, Becky got a stranglehold on her neck and didn’t let go until some time after Renate had passed out. She realized then that the baby could have killed her. Renate was always aware that she was dealing with a baby, and she restrained herself, fearful of doing Becky some injury, but Becky had no such fears, no such restraint. After the throttling Renate knew she had to be quite ruthless or she might end up dead. Harshness with children did not come easily to her, but she hardened her heart and worked on impressing Becky with the notion that she must never, ever fight against her mother or father, and must always obey them. She could so easily have killed herself, or all of them, during an unsupervised moment that Renate sometimes had to tie her down while she went to the toilet or got on with cooking their dinner. She did this only when it was absolutely necessary, and never for very long, but it was unfortunate that it was during one of those times that the social worker chose to pay a surprise call.

She should count herself lucky to be let off with a warning. The bruises on baby Becky were noted (‘What about my bruises?’ demanded Renate) and she was put on the ‘at risk’ register. There would be more visits. The prospect of having Becky taken away was by this time more chilling than the threat of a prison sentence, at least to Renate. She wasn’t sure how Len felt, he wasn’t in the habit of talking about his feelings, but she could see that he had grown fond of their foster-daughter.

There was one good result from having Becky on the ‘at risk’ register: Renate finally received a ‘carer’s allowance’. It wasn’t much, it nowhere near made up for her loss of wages, but it was something.

By seven months Becky was walking and saying a few words. By the end of her first year with them she was toilet trained and talking in sentences. Remembering how long it had taken Tamara to pass those particular milestones, Renate was impressed. She wondered if she could take any credit for the child’s quickness - had she really been too lenient, too easy-going with Tamara? But then someone told her that immortals seldom took their second childhoods in real time, they usually condensed eighteen years into nine. Even with all the time in the world, people were still obsessed with saving it.

Knowing that her one-year-old was ‘really’ two made Renate hopeful of getting back to work sooner than she’d thought. Most toddlers spent time apart from their mothers in playgroups - if not all day, then at least a few mornings a week. But when Renate began to enquire she found no one willing to take Becky. She was too big; she’d be disruptive, impossible to control, and she wasn’t really a toddler.

‘Of course she’s a toddler! She’s only been walking for six months! What else is she if she’s not a toddler?’

‘She’s a second-timer,’ said the playgroup leader. ‘She should be with her own kind.’

It was prejudice; it was class-hatred, pure and simple. There was a toddlers’ group for second-timers in a wealthy enclave across town, but even if she could have afforded the fees, without a private vehicle, travel between those two areas was practically impossible. She would just have to keep Becky at home with her until she was ready for school.

But when Renate began to enquire about schooling, she ran into a bureaucratic nightmare of double-talk and double-think. Becky was either far too young (two and a half) or far too old (it was anybody’s guess, since her birth identity was still a mystery, but the idea of living through a second childhood had no appeal for anyone under a hundred years old) for a place in a local school. A school for children with special needs might be indicated, but few had places and those that did (a school for the deaf, a school for the multiply handicapped) were inappropriate.

The present government had been making noises about its commitment to equal opportunities and education for everyone, so Renate wrote to her representative to enquire about the possibility of a state-funded place for her daughter in one of the private-sector second-timers’ schools. His reply was unhelpful.

After some waffling about his government’s commitment to equal opportunities he went on to say: ‘Note that word “equal”. Your foster-daughter has already been educated, and I would hazard a guess that she received an exceptionally fine and prolonged education. She has no need of another one, because the first is still there in her mind, waiting to be accessed when she’s eighteen. Now, when there are scarcely enough places in our schools for all the poor children who need them, where is the fairness in providing another one for your foster-daughter? She doesn’t need a second education; she doesn’t need training for anything - it’s not as if she’ll grow up to need a job!’

‘No,’ muttered Renate to herself, ‘but I do!’

Eventually, through a combination of psychological blackmail and luck, they managed to get Becky a place in a local primary school

Becky hated it. She was smarter than everybody else, she said, and didn’t like all those little people; she wanted to stay home with Mummy and Daddy. She’d throw a tantrum or make herself sick in the mornings to get her way.

Renate felt close to despair. She’d found herself a job, but wouldn’t have it long if she kept taking days off, and there was little point in having it just to pay the lion’s share of her wages to baby-sitters. At an age when most children were reaching out, becoming more interested in the wide world, turning away from their parents towards friends their own age, Becky was going through a clinging phase. At least, Renate hoped it was a phase. The demands of this child - who was physically a woman considerably taller and heavier than herself - to be picked up and carried were suffocating. Becky knew very well that Renate couldn’t pick her up but rather than accepting this physical fact as she had when she was younger and less reasonable, Becky would simply throw herself on her mother and let herself go limp, knocking them both to the floor.

Len was strong enough to lift Becky and often gave in to her babyish demands. ‘Oh, well, if it makes her happy,’ he’d say, and Renate didn’t argue. She felt guilty because she’d never been able to hold Becky as a baby should be held. She wondered what that lack would do to Becky psychologically. Probably that earlier deprivation was why she was being so difficult just now. ‘Just don’t put your back out,’ she’d say to Len, and then she’d get on with some housework while he cuddled their daughter.

It was during this phase, Becky’s fourth year as a child, that the company Len worked for went out of business and he was left without a job. He was still some years away from his pension, but he was effectively unemployable. He made a few token efforts to find work, but they both knew it wouldn’t come to anything, and so, when she was offered the chance to increase her hours of work, to go full-time, she took it. They needed the money, and Len didn’t mind looking after Becky. Despite his initial resistance, he had become very fond of their foster-child.

Life wasn’t too bad. Becky could be demanding, but she was a sweetheart, really, and Renate was glad to have her. She didn’t hate her new job, Len wasn’t really sorry to be in early retirement, they had just enough money to get by, they had each other, they were happy.

Then one day she took ill at work - the machines she had to work with sometimes made her queasy, but this was different, she was vomiting and feverish, probably she’d picked up some virus - and had to go home in the early afternoon. She was hoping that Becky would still be at school, she was in no mood to cope with the demands of a vivacious schoolgirl, but as soon as she entered the flat she could hear the girl’s voice, raised in a cry of delight. Obviously she was playing some game with her father, but what game came as a rude shock when she opened the bedroom door and saw them there together on the bed, both of them naked.

If she had not seen it with her own eyes, she would never have believed her Len capable of such an abomination.

When Renate started screaming, Becky ran out.

‘Your own daughter! How could you!’

‘She’s not my own daughter, she’s not even my adopted daughter. You just brought her home one day, and—’

‘But she’s a child!’

‘She’s not a child.’

‘She’s eight years old!’

‘Only to you,’ said Len. He’d started out looking guilty but now was grim and stubborn. ‘Face it, she’s a grown woman as everyone but you is well aware.’

‘That’s only her body! Inside her head she’s only eight years old - and you know that as well as I do. How could you abuse that child—’

‘It was not abuse! She wanted it! Christ, she’s been after me for weeks! I can’t believe you didn’t notice. All that kissing and cuddling and fondling, climbing on to my lap … I got tired of running away. I got tired of fighting it. She’s a very attractive woman and she got me aroused and … I’m sorry.’

Later she wished she had accepted his apology, had been willing to be reasonable, but in the heat of the moment she was all outraged maternal energy. Becky was her child, and Len was nothing more than the man who had wronged her. His thoughtless lust had destroyed their marriage.

Len did not recognize what she felt, any more than she understood what he had done. He went on trying to reason with her, pointing out that it was only once, stressing that he had been seduced, reminding her that once before, during a rocky patch in their marriage, they each had strayed, survived the experience, forgiven it—

‘That was different. We were all adults. This was a child you abused, a child in our care. My care. I won’t risk it happening again; I can’t. I won’t have her taken away from me, and I won’t have her destroyed by you.’

‘Destroyed by me? Are you kidding? Look, OK, it was wrong, I admit it, I’m sorry. We’ll explain to Becky that it was wrong, that she mustn’t try to seduce Daddy ever again, and that’ll be an end to it—’

‘I wish that could be an end to it. But what you’ve done to her - you’ve destroyed her childhood, don’t you realize that?’

‘What childhood? This is a grown woman we’re talking about - a woman considerably older than I am, chronologically. OK, so she’s having a second childhood, she got her memories erased and went back to a blank state - so they say. I’m not so sure. They think they’re immortal, they think they can do anything. And they play all kinds of perverse games. No, listen to me. You think you know Becky, but you’re fooling yourself. She’s not your daughter. She’s a sick old woman pretending to be an innocent child. Innocent! The things her body remembers … I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I didn’t destroy her childhood, I played right into her hands. Don’t you realize that at least half the reason those people go back for a second childhood in their own grownup bodies is so they can have sex with their new Mummy or Daddy? That’s what it’s all about.’

She refused to listen. Becky was her daughter now, her sweet little girl, and Len was only digging his grave deeper, trying to save his skin by pretending that it was all Becky’s fault. She wouldn’t have accepted such a line from anyone. It sickened her to hear it coming from Len, the man she’d thought she’d known, the man she’d thought she loved for so long. She threw him out.

She missed him dreadfully, almost immediately. So did Becky. Naturally blaming each other for his loss, they were of no comfort to each other. She tried not to blame the child, but after what had happened, after such knowledge, Becky had become sexualized, her woman’s body all too obvious, no longer something that could be seen past or through to the child within.

Becky had changed, not just in the eyes of her mother. Always a difficult child, she now became impossible. Instead of playing sick or begging to stay home, she would go off to school in the morning and simply never arrive. If Renate went with her or put her on the peoplemover in the care of another mother, her safe arrival could be counted on, but more often than not she would simply walk out of the school sometime during the morning. Where she went, how she spent her time, was something no one but Becky knew.

Renate was in despair. She quit her job and took on part-time work to fit in around her daughter’s school hours, but still could not control her. They were back in the old poverty trap, she was tired all the time and there was no money for treats, baby-sitters, or the child psychologist that Becky’s teacher had recommended.

Eventually she went to Len and asked him to come back. He spoke gently, he swore he loved her now and always, but he would not return unless she got rid of Becky. She could not consider it. Becky was now as much a part of her life as if she’d given birth to her. What mother ever gave up her natural child for the qualified love of a man?

But Becky was not her child, not a natural child at all in the eyes of anyone but Renate. Even her friends thought she was crazy to let a good man go so she could continue to care for an uncaring creature. But Renate knew that no matter how old Becky was physically, she was still just a child inside, out of control, needing all the love, guidance and protection her parents could give.

When Becky was arrested for soliciting, Renate blamed herself.

At first she couldn’t believe it, she was sure there’d been some misunderstanding. So a member of the Vice Squad - human, unlike the peacekeepers she’d previously encountered - showed her the tapes they had made of her girl in action. It was sickening, the things she did and the way she did them, with strangers. The incident with Len had been bad enough, but that had been informed by affection and innocence. This, though—

‘Why? Why would she do such things?’

‘For the money,’ said the officer. ‘She needed the money. She’s Becky Valpariso - she used to be fabulously wealthy - God only knows what happened to wipe her out.’

‘You know her name,’ said Renate, stunned. ‘Her old name - who she really was—’

‘Sure, we had to ID her - she was perpetrating a crime. Contacted her husband, but it turns out he’d divorced her for desertion a couple of years ago. All their property was jointly owned, and he had to sell off a lot of it to pay off her bad debts. She was a very rich woman. Now - doing the skinny lick street-side for donuts.’ He laughed, coarsely. Renate almost wished she’d been assigned to an ordinary Artificial peacekeeper.

‘So how - why - did you get in touch with me?’

‘Perp’s request.’ He played the rest of the tape. There was Becky in a holding cell, flanked by two peacekeepers and one human officer-in-charge. She was half-naked and red in the face with rage, screaming, ‘I’m not a grownup! I’m not! Liar, liar, house on fire! You’re making it all up! My name is Becky Jones, you call my mum and ask her who I am, she’ll tell you! Call her, go on, it’s Renate Jones, S-22-000-8974-8. Call her right now and tell her to come and get me out!’

‘Perps got rights, too,’ said the officer. ‘Besides, there was nobody else to pay the fine. So: you going to pay it, and spring her, or do we lock her up for three months?’

Renate paid, of course - she had spent years of her life paying for Becky and wasn’t ready to stop. As usual, her kindness awoke no gratitude in the child, who began shouting at her as soon as she saw her.

‘Why didn’t you tell me who I was? Why did you lie to me, let me think I was your daughter?’

‘I tried,’ said Renate, weakly, knowing she had never tried very hard. She had always intended to answer the child’s questions truthfully, as they arose, but the questions never came. Unlike a real child, she displayed no curiosity about where she had come from, and never seemed to find it odd that she was so much larger than the children she went to school with. She took her own size and shape so much for granted that she never asked about it, and assumed that the difference in other children meant there was something wrong with them. Renate had told her the story of finding her, but either Becky had not taken it in, or had assumed that was how parents always got their children.

They went home, and life went on, a nightmare. Becky seemed determined to punish Renate, who continued, helplessly, to care for her. There were more brushes with the law, and more fines, but somehow it was never enough to require that Becky should be taken into care. The girl ran away once, and when she turned up a few weeks later, hungry and bruised-looking, Renate was both relieved to see her still alive and appalled that the whole cycle would now begin again.

It went on like that, for what seemed an endless time, until Becky grew up.

*

She grew up all in a minute. One moment she was in a heavy fog of helpless rage and confusion, the next she was herself again. She remembered. Some memory blocks were still in place, and she knew she would need professional help to dissolve them, but she remembered the important things, like the numbers and identity codes for her secret bank accounts, and details of various properties and titles she’d kept hidden from Steve, just in case.

She was no longer a nobody, no longer a child, no longer helpless and, most importantly, no longer poor. She could do what she wanted.

She got up, got dressed, and went out without a word to the woman who had been her foster-mother for the duration of her second childhood. She didn’t speak because she couldn’t bring herself to be polite. Knowing that poor old Renate had done the best she could didn’t make her like her any better. Her best, quite frankly, had never been good enough. She had deserved a better mother, and Renate was going to have to pay for her shortcomings.

Not as much as Steve was going to have to pay, though. She had trusted Steve, who had claimed to love her, and he had betrayed her, taken her money, and dumped her out in the cold, cruel world to die. Steve was going to suffer as he’d made her suffer.

And as for Len—

Tears came to her eyes as she thought of Len, and she had to pause for a while until her vision cleared and she could cross the street. She had loved Len with all her childish heart and soul, truly loved him. It was the kind of love that, as a jaded adult, she had practically forgotten could exist, and that experience alone had made her second childhood worthwhile. If only Len had been worthy of her!

She’d been only eight years old, she’d had no defences, no understanding of men. He’d been not only her father but the first man she’d loved, her first lover. She had given herself to him completely - and he had rejected her. It was something she would never forgive, could never forget, how she had run away from home and managed to find him, and the cold, contemptuous look in his eyes as he met her on the doorstep and refused to let her in. How could he treat her like that, as if her love had meant nothing?

He’d soon know better. She decided there and then to take care of Len first. She began to feel happier just thinking about it. She didn’t mind that money couldn’t buy love; it wasn’t love she wanted now, and she had more than enough money to satisfy her hate.

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