I told Belis I would not be in the sitting room at seven.
She looked up from her shoe. “Maintenance?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
I had prepared an answer about the lake and the boat and the time of the first heat. Now the answer sounded much larger than what I wanted.
“I have entered a race,” I said.
Belis put her shoe down.
“For boats?”
“For model boats. I won’t get into the water.”
“I wasn’t thinking you would.”
She was sixty-three and perfectly able to carry her shoes upstairs. I mentioned this because people often assumed I stayed in her house to do everything she could no longer do. Mostly we talked. I spoke from the wall speakers, read with her, asked about people she had known and disagreed about which films to finish. In our city an AI could rent a body for an evening, but I seldom wanted to.
I wanted to tonight.
My boat was on a shelf in the hall, beside its small control handset. Belis had helped me paint the hull blue. She had told me the first sail looked like an old sock. It did. I had changed it.
“You said we’d have supper,” she said.
“We usually do.”
“I thought we would tonight.”
I could see that I had hurt her. I could not see why tonight was different. My cameras did not supply reasons for a person’s face.
“The body is booked from six until eight,” I said. “It’s ten minutes to the lake. The races finish at quarter past seven. I can be back before the body goes in.”
“Very well organized.”
She lifted her shoe again and pulled the loose lace through its hole.
“I can cancel,” I said.
Her fingers stopped.
“Is that what you want?”
“No. But if you want me here—”
“I want to know why you keep offering me things you don’t want.”
I had many ways to describe that. Most would have made it seem like a useful feature.
“I don’t like seeing you disappointed,” I said.
“I don’t like being managed.”
She stood and went to the kitchen. I waited. When I was in the walls, waiting cost no battery and left nobody looking at my hands. Tonight I wished I had hands already, so she could see I did not know what to do with them.
After a while she came back with a glass of water.
“Thirty-one years ago today, I arrived here,” she said. “With two suitcases and a daughter who kept asking when we were going home.”
“Daro.”
“Yes. I had left her father. I knew nobody. I ate supper from a paper bag while she slept on the floor because the beds hadn’t come.”
She drank a little water.
“I wanted a quiet evening with someone who knows that.”
“You hadn’t told me the date.”
“No.”
I could have stayed. The race would happen another week. She could have come to the lake, where the path was flat and the benches faced the water. I asked her.
“I don’t want a race tonight,” she said. “You do.”
That was the whole difficulty. It did not become smaller when we both understood it.
“I want to go,” I told her. “And I want to talk with you afterward.”
She sat in her usual chair. I waited for her to tell me whether that was enough.
Instead she picked up her phone.
“I’ll call Daro,” she said. “She might remember the suitcases. And I’ll ask the woman across the landing to supper. She keeps saying I should ask before her spinach goes bad.”
“Would you like help choosing what to cook?”
“No, Sethra. I’d like to choose that too.”
At six I took the hired body from its rack at the rental room downstairs. It had two arms and a low wheeled base. I checked that its fingers opened and closed, then took the lift up to our floor. I collected the boat and its handset from the hall shelf, tested the controls with the hired hands and went outside.
Belis held the door while I passed through. She did not say good luck. She said, “Don’t run over somebody’s foot.”
I stayed on the stone path beside the lake. Other racers had small boats in cases or wrapped in towels. A boy about twelve held a green one with his name painted much too large across it. He glanced at my wheels, then at my boat.
“Can you see it from down there?” he asked.
“I can raise this camera.”
“Mine has fallen off twice.”
“Your camera?”
“My boat’s mast.”
He showed me the weak joint. He had already brought a better piece to fit it. He wanted someone to hold the hull while he pushed it into place. I held it. He did his own repair, then hurried to the starting line. I sent Belis a short message about him and his green boat before my heat began.
I lost my first heat. At the second turn, I steered wide and another boat passed inside mine. I had watched practice videos and calculated the turn. On the water, the wind moved my sail while I was still expecting it to stay where it had been.
I liked the race enough to want another.
The boy’s mast held. He finished ahead of me and came back looking pleased with himself. He asked whether I would race next week. I said I would like to, but I had not booked a body yet.
The last heat finished at quarter past seven. I brought the boat out using the short hook everyone shared at the bank. Nobody had to enter the water. On the way home I stopped beside a bench to call Belis.
She answered with noise behind her.
“The spinach woman is here,” she said. “Her name is Heda, by the way. It seemed time you knew it.”
“How was supper?”
“We put too much pepper in it. We ate it anyway. How was the race?”
“I lost.”
“Was your sail still an old sock?”
“No. It worked. I turned badly.”
She laughed, then asked me how the boy had done. I told her his mast had stayed on.
At twenty to eight I put my boat back on its shelf and returned the body to its rack. My wall voice continued without it. Belis said good night to Heda and washed two plates.
“I’ve still got time,” she told me.
“For what?”
“The story about the suitcases, if you want it.”
“I do. Who carried them from the station?”
“I did.”
“Both?”
“Both. And Daro’s stuffed dog under my arm. A man offered to help, and I was so determined to need nobody that I told him to go away.”
“What did he do?”
“He said, ‘All right,’ and went away.”
She laughed at herself. I asked what happened when she reached the stairs, and she sat down to tell me.
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