Mercy Read online

  Cam slipped back under the covers, smelling of mouthwash. He gathered her against his chest. "That was nice," he murmured into her hair.

  Tomorrow she would sleep in Jamie and Maggie MacDonald's bed. Allie wondered how firm it would be, what secrets would seep into her dreams. "Goodbye," she said.

  Just so you know," Maggie MacDonald had said, "I'm against this

  on principle.

  Jamie laughed and pushed her down into the chair that had been set up in the deserted lab. "You won't feel a thing."

  "It's not that. It's the very idea of it. I feel like a Barbie doll, and everyone knows that no living woman has her measurements."

  Jamie walked over to the device that could produce a design of a female body with lasers that would map a three-dimensional scan of Maggie's form. "You're not a Barbie doll," he said.

  Maggie lifted her eyebrows. "Is that supposed to be a compliment?"

  He walked to the chair and crouched in front of her, grasping her hands. "To me, you're the perfect image of a woman. So what's the matter with cloning you?"

  It was 1993, and Jamie was doing a body scan of his wife to use as the model for an architectural firm's VR program. Their contract to build an elementary school in a rich New York suburb led them to ask for this particular application: a walk-through in which a user could be made child-size, and thus see if there were sharp edges at eye level, or cubbies too high to reach. But they'd also asked for a grown-up prototype, so that teachers might be able to assess the best spots for storage and educational aids, as well as the potential for hazards. Since they hadn't specified the sex of the prototype, Jamie was giving them a male and a female model. The user would be able to texture-map his or her own face over the model's digitized one.

  "Who'd you use as the perfect man?" Maggie asked.

  "Rod."

  She laughed. "Rod? How come you didn't scan yourself?"

  Jamie grinned. "Flattering as that might seem, I'm too tall. Rod's just under six feet, which fits in more as average."

  "Ah," Maggie said. "So I'm not the perfect woman. I'm just average."

  "Your words. Not mine." He pushed several buttons on a keyboard, and the pale green lasers that would translate the physical points of Maggie's body to the computer shimmered and waved into a direct, striking line that ran down the center of her face. "Sit still," he said. "Here we go."

  He watched the beam of light pass over his wife's body, sliding over the curve of her breast and the valley of her stomach to her arm and the angle of her elbow. The laser rotated on its axis, glowing between her shoulder blades.

  Jamie turned his attention to the computer screen. As if it were a Polaroid, an image of Maggie was coming into focus by bits and pieces. Her eyes blinked blindly out from the inside of the screen, her hands materialized to rest at her sides. Her legs, eerily foreshortened at the knees for a few moments, sprang into view in a dotting of color. "Okay," he said, "now stand up."

  He wanted to make sure that the coordinates matched, while the lasers were still working. "Raise your right arm," Jamie ordered, and when Maggie did so, her computer image repeated the motion. "Touch your waist. Turn around." Every move she made, her prototype did as well. There was nothing missing.

  He watched on the screen as Maggie lifted her hands to her hair and skimmed them down her body. Jamie cupped his hand against the computer screen; she was small enough to stand in his palm, to carry around in his pocket, to set on a shelf like an object of rare and priceless beauty. "How is it?" she asked, her mute lips on the screen puckering with silent words, looking for all the world like a kiss.

  Jamie stared at Maggie's body on the screen, young and firm and healthy no matter how many times the program was switched on, no matter how old they all got in real life. "Perfect," he said.

  Glory in the Flower had been decorated to look like someone's living room on a rainy autumn afternoon. Instead of having tables spread with dried flower arrangements and herbal wreaths, Allie had set two enormous overstuffed sofas in the center of the shop. There was a coffee table sporting a fresh arrangement every day, as well as magazines and a small tea service. The only indication that one was in a flower shop came from the unexpected details: the ivy trailing over the fat arm and leg of the couch, the bowl of rose petals that stood beside the cream and sugar, the lampshade overhead, which was fashioned entirely out of dried primroses and statice in luxuriant jewel tones.

  In the back of the store, behind the sofas, was the cooler and the workbench where Allie did most of her arrangements, set under the spill of sun from a skylight. Behind a Chinese screen was the storeroom, as well as shelves stuffed with metallic foil and fabric, a palette of ribbons, birdcages, baskets, and brocade hatboxes that were all used as containers.

  Mia walked to the cooler first and placed her lunch--yogurt-- next to a large black bucket of persimmon roses. Then she shrugged out of her coat and set it on the desk chair in the storeroom. Absently, her eyes scanned the tools of the trade: rubber bands, green wire, scissors, Pokon leafshine, Floratape, and huge boxes of Spanish moss and Oasis.

  It had taken her until yesterday to figure out Allies system of organizing flowers. The cooler was not arranged by availability or popularity of flowers, or even by color, but by what the flowers were supposed to represent. She knew that once, bouquets had been sent as a message, not just as ornaments of beauty. When Mia had first become interested in floral arrangement, she'd been fascinated by this philosophy. Evidently, Allie was fascinated as well. She'd bunched the flowers with positive qualities on the left side of the cooler, those with negative connotations on the right. So jasmine and lilac and camellias and passionflowers--representing grace, first love, perfection, and faith--were gathered together in serviceable black florist's buckets. Acanthus, crocuses, thorn apples, and peonies were bunched in dishonor on the other side, signifying artifice, abuse, deceit, and shame.

  It almost made Mia afraid to open the right door of the cooler, for fear that all the evil would seep into the world, like it had from Pandora's box.

  She jumped as the phone rang. "Hi," she said, "Glory in the Flower." She expected it to be Allie, checking up to make sure that Mia had arrived on time and had opened the store without any catastrophes, but even as she thought this she realized it was not Allies way. Allie would give her the benefit of the doubt, whether Mia deserved it or not.

  "Oh, Antonio," she said, relaxing at the voice of one of her distributors. She scanned the nails stuck into the shelf above her eyes at even intervals, each marked with a day of the week and spearing various orders to be filled. "I need jacarandas and some tree fern." Allie had told her to order whatever she could from Antonio instead of from the other wholesalers; his prices were a little higher but his flowers were always fresh.

  She haggled with him over the price of alstroemeria, finally agreeing on $4.75 a bunch, and said that she would indeed like to see the Washington State purple tulips. Then she got off the phone and closed her eyes and listened.

  The quiet had a noise; it pulsed through the air vents in the flower shop. And if she cracked the cooler a little, she knew she would be able to hear the whistling silk of the roses as their pursed heads began to open.

  Mia turned toward the storefront. Allie had set her bonsai tree on a low table across the room, along with the seven other trees they had wired together in hopes of future sales. With a smile, she crossed the room and unwrapped the wire from Allies tree, keeping it from cutting too deeply into the bark and listening to the sigh of the roots and the cambium at this freedom. "Sorry," she said, carefully rewrapping the bronze wire. "I can't let you go just yet." She did the same to several other trees, snipping leaves and branches where she thought Allie might have underestimated the future tree. Then she sat down on the couch that faced the front of the shop.

  There were a hundred things to do; Allie had left her that god-awful list, after all, but Mia only wanted to close her eyes and think about Cam. She knew she had to send him word o