by Pat Cadigan
The neighborhood looked familiar, and the building was the same as the one in my memory, and the access code worked on the first try, but as soon as I walked into the apartment, I was lost. That damned famine fancier in the memory lane had probably eaten all my at-home memories; the thought of her turned my stomach.
By the smell of the overprocessed air, the place hadn’t been opened for over a week. It took me fifteen minutes to find the controls to adjust the ventilation. Then I explored the three rooms, trying to get a feel for my own life.
I didn’t live quite as simply as Sovay—I liked furniture, though not too much of it and nothing too expensive. Of course, I thought, looking at the faded upholstery on the couch and the mismatched flea-market table and chairs in the kitchen, most stage actors didn’t make salaries that would cover genuine cherry wood credenzas and solid oak bedroom suites.
At least the clothing in the closet was better than this ragpicker ratatat I had on. I grabbed a silk pullover and green trousers, tore off the rags, and took a quick turn in the lavabo. I came out feeling like myself again until I discovered the clothes wouldn’t fit.
Migod, I thought, and burst into tears.
Now, that was the damnedest thing. After everything I’d been through, I was going to pieces over a shirt.
Did anything in this life make sense?
Well, it’s always the little things that’ll break you down. After a bit, I pulled myself together and found a roomy set of jump Johns that were only a little bit short. Then I scrolled through the online directory looking for an overnight body carving clinic. There were plenty of them in the listings—in by nine, under by ten, up by dawn, out by eight—but I was looking for any notes I’d stored about vanity work. There were none.
Must be in my personal directory, I thought, and punched in the request for it.
The directory came up empty. I frowned at the screen. That had to be a mistake, I thought, and tried again. Still empty.
Screwy system; probably some kind of network glitch had wiped the record. It happened from time to time. I punched for the household records to see if anything else had been lost.
According to the utility and banking files, I had moved in six months before. Was that right? Migod, I couldn’t remember; I couldn’t even remember my previous address. Damn that famine fancier—I was going to sue her so hard, it would turn her inside out.
The request for a previous address turned up another blank. That must have been some bad old glitch, I thought uneasily, and asked for my communications records. Even if everything else about me had been lost, the record of dataline use was eternal, etched into the system itself.
There was nothing older than six months.
I tried again and got more nothing, and still more nothing on the third try. Either there had been a nationwide dataline meltdown that I didn’t remember, or … I was six months old?
I felt the same kind of damped-down panic from when Some Very Nice People had had me under and the bodysnatcher had tried to imprint me with the Escort’s persona—I wanted to get hysterical, but something was holding me back. Maybe it was all really a mistake, I just hadn’t entered my identifying codes right. Maybe these were substitute codes I’d entered during a previous bout of characterization amnesia and that starving fool in the memory lane had restored those instead of my real access codes. Maybe I was just the victim of a terrible incident of misfiling.
I had a good laugh over that one. I laughed while I scrolled through the directory looking for a reputable mindplayer who specialized in reorganizing fragmented memories. I was still laughing when the lock popped off the front door and the tint came barreling into the living room with Anwar. At that point, I could see no reason to stop.
The last thing I used to remember is throwing someone off a cliff.
Now I remember standing in the bottom of a swimming pool filled with holo water and fancy holo fish and a couple hundred souls who are getting a lot more out of the experience than I am. Hot-halle-damn-lujah, I finally got one, a memory of somebody’s visit to Davy Jones’ Locker, so ex-elusive, strictly uptown privs or visiting royalty, if they know somebody. My memory jones goes into overdrive; I think what I’ll do with this one is, I’ll remember it to death and then I’ll pawn it, and when dry season hits, I’ll buy it back and knock myself out again. Ofrah’ll do that for me, she’s holding plenty-all-else against those sudden droughts us memory junkies all hate so much.
So, let’s see, what have we got here … yah, we got the holo water and the holo fish, yah, hell of a thing to find coming after your bait, uh-huh, we been through all that, and now dodge to the left, dodge to the right, sashay round and wave at our friend in the lighter-than-air sacsuit. Doesn’t look like much of a party boy.
But the dancing boy in the barely there loincloth, he looks like quite a lot of party boy. Except now that I think of it, he’s at the wrong party.
Obligingly, he vanishes while he’s tugging on his waist-band. Nobody noticed he was here and now nobody notices that he’s gone. Well, you can’t have one reality getting mixed up with another. If that were supposed to happen, we wouldn’t have to be all different people, ha, and ha—
I’m trying to fast forward to the part where I find the funhouse mirror, but something is keeping everything moving at a real-time pace. I don’t appreciate that, these are my memories, I ought to be able to enjoy them in whatever sequence or speed I want. But okay; plod-plod-plod and here’s the mirror—
And here it goes again, screwing up the realities. I’m supposed to be seeing fish—tube worms, sharks, all that stuff. But instead, what I see is an audience in a theatre.
What the hell, I take a bow.
But when I turn around, I’m still in Davy Jones’ Locker. I’m still in over my head, for an audience. Sounds like a karma-gram—
* * *
You know you’re having a bad day when you come to in a rerun.
How good an actor are you?
Migod, that was the one thing I was never going to get over: the monotony of repeated rehearsals.
You want to check the line?
And then everything went rewind and then to fast forward and I understood that it wasn’t real, not a bit. Pajamas—Bateau—had me in the box. How long had I been here, I wondered, and how long was I going to last?
She’s playing for time is what she’s doing. They all try that near the end, the tricks. Excuse me, clients. So, they’ll say, hanging back, fidgeting with some old favorite memory they don’t want to let go of, so how did you happen to become an Escort? Do tell, it must be fascinating.
Fascinating like a tracheotomy. One day I woke up with so many bad debts that I got a visit from a collector who told me I had two choices—column A was where I got taken to a chop shop and parted out any old way they could manage, and column B was where I got to kill off people who wanted to die anyway and raid their minds for valuables. So which column would you have picked? Do tell, it must be fascinating.
Actually, what I tell them is a lot of stuff about believing in freedom of choice and how when you want what you want, you ought to be able to get it no matter what it is. And all the while nudging them a little closer to the edge.
Well, I do believe in freedom of choice. I sure wish I had some. An Escort doesn’t choose. The clients choose. Whatever way they want to go, however they want to shuffle off this mortal coil, depart this plane of existence, check out, kick the bad old bucket, that’s what I do for them.
And if you thought people could get kinky about sex, that’s nothing compared to the way they’re kinky about death. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they can’t make it and I have to give them the final nudge over the line. Kicking and screaming into that good night. Their words, that good night, not mine.
But that actor, she was the kinkiest one I ever had. Multiple personalities—jee-zuz, what kind of a job was that? I didn’t want to take it, but Bateau said a job was a job was a job, was I an Escort for him or not, and I shou
ld hurry up and decide because the chop shop had an open bay and I had plenty of debt left to pay off. The worst thing I ever did in my life was ask for credit to feed the beast, and the second worst was agreeing to Escort for Bateau to work off the debt.
I thought it was good enough at first. You get plenty of memories when you’re Escorting. That’s what people are when they’re dying, one big bundle of memories, their lives passing before their eyes. Of course, I don’t get to keep it all—I have to pass it all on to Bateau afterward. What he’s got a use for he keeps, sells it if nothing else. The dregs are mine, though he charges me for them. And that’s the way it goes: the work chips away at the debt, but I still got this habit and the fix still isn’t free.
When I die, everybody else’s life will pass before my eyes, one last big rise before blackout. Bateau’ll be in on that, too. Likely, he’ll be the cause of it. When I cease to serve, he’ll part me out. The debt we run up lives after us and the good—I mean, goods—are for sale in the pawnshops.
Bateau, if you’re listening, I didn’t meant to tell her all that.
Something stirs. It’s just like that, like I’m underwater (karma-gram) and somewhere else, there’s a giant spoon stirring the depths. To see what comes up.
I found the exit once, I can do that again. But when I turn to the mirror, the reflection is crooking a finger at me. I’ve seen the image of this woman before, it’s not supposed to be me … is it? I don’t want to go over there.
The woman in the mirror points to a spot over her head and the sign snaps into existence: EXIT.
Why the hell didn’t she say so? I go over to the mirror and touch it with my fingertips. It ripples like silvered water. My hands sink into it and I know I’ve been had again. This isn’t the exit, not the one I want, but it’s too late. Something grabs me and pulls me through, and I have a fast flash of someone else being shoved out to where I was.
For half a thought-beat, they exist in the same state, halfway in and halfway out of the barrier. That ought to be enough. The mirror is the complete record; looking into it from one side, they can only see what they’ve already seen. In simultaneous transition, one to dormant, one to awareness, they’ll see everything the mirror recorded, including my near-death. The mirror will tell them everything. Except, of course, what to do, now that Bateau has all of us.
Even I don’t know what to do about that, and I’ve been with the Brain Police for close to ten-years.
But then, the transmigration of a soul before death is unprecedented. Assuming I can continue to avoid the death part, I have no idea how I’m going to explain it convincingly enough to be believed rather than dry-cleaned.
… as if I had seen them with her own eyes:
Sally’s chewing.
Sally’s not eating, just chewing. We all have one Thing we Do, each one of us, and this is Sally’s: she chews.
You want to check the line?
No, Sovay, I want to know what play this is, and what character. What about it?
I’d have my memory wiped and hope I wouldn’t be fool enough to want it back again.
I killed somebody … I’ve killed before … that’s okay, he was asking for it.
I’ve have my memory wiped—
Migod. I didn’t kill anybody. Somebody killed me.
—and hope I wouldn’t befool enough—
to come to and find Bateau’s holding my hand.
This is never good, being touched by Bateau. I can face plenty: the fact that I’m going to be an Escort for as long as I live, a period of time that isn’t as long as it used to be; the fact that the man knows the inside of my head better than I do, that the mind I have is the mind he suffers me to have, that he is, as far as I’m concerned, God. I can face all this and more as long as I don’t have to actually, physically touch him.
He sits there next to the cot with my hand sandwiched between his and that face a mask of concern.
“Well,” he says, “you’ve had quite an adventure, haven’t you. My poor Marceline, getting so turned around that it overrode the order to always turn to me first for guidance and help.” He shakes his head. “And to find you’ve been tricked—” He looks at the ceiling. “I’m shocked, to say the least. That anyone would even consider screwing up one of my people this way. An example will be made.”
He looks to his right and I see her lying on another cot a little ways away. She’s still hooked into a system and that’s real normal-looking, except the tank for the eyes is missing. Because she’s not going to need any after this.
I don’t know who I feel sorrier for, her or me. It’s pretty much chiseled in stone, what’s coming next for her. For me, who knows. Bateau’s not just a bad old bastard, he’s a bad old whimsical bastard. Poor, pitiful me, I’m occupying the position of broken toy in the Bateau food chain. No-body knows what’s going to happen to me except Bateau, and he could change his mind several times before he gets around to doing anything.
“But before we get to that,” he says cheerfully, “I do need to know a few things. What did you do with the fee she paid you?”
I feel for my pockets where the wads were and remember I’ve had a change or two of clothes. Not to mention wads.
“Don’t know,” I say finally, wincing at the lousy rag passing as my shirt. It used to be some kind of windowpane plaid but most of the lines have scuffed off. Vending machine stuff, and not from an uptown vending machine, either. “I went into a memory lane with different clothes on, woke up just now like this.”
Bateau makes a thinking-hard face. An androgyne comes in carrying a tray with an old-fashioned silver coffee service on it. I remember seeing one a lot like it when I was waiting for an air-cab at the Royale about a hundred years ago. S/he sets the tray down on a nightstand next to the bed and starts fussing with two cups. That smell; if it’s not the Royale’s private blend, it’s something just as good.
“Take a deep breath now,” Bateau says, “and then tell me where you were for a week.”
He had me under, he could have just fished all this information out of my brain any old way he could get at it. Why didn’t he?
Maybe because he wants me to survive this, I think, going on a hope trip. All I have to do is tell him everything I know, and he’ll only dig for whatever I can’t remember. Which will leave me more or less in operating condition.
I’m so relieved, I almost start laughing, but this is not the time to get hysterical. The androgyne passes Bateau a cup that looks delicate enough to be made out of flower petals. He takes it, holds it under his nose and breathes in the coffee aroma, and then offers the cup to me. I sit up in a hurry and take it.
“How are we doing on that missing week?” he says brightly, taking a cup for himself from the androgyne, who makes an unnoticed bow and marches out of the room. Good help, Bateau always said, was the kind you could ignore completely.
“Don’t have it yet,” I say, sipping the coffee. It’s definitely better than the uptown vending-machine Brazilian.
“I gave you a little spin in the box to see what that poor, overworked mind of yours would come up with.” He rolled his eyes. “All I can say is, you’re one very confused little hypehead, Marceline. You don’t even remember coming to visit me, do you? But then, you weren’t really yourself at the time. Were you.”
That smile’s got knives in it, but they only last a second. Which is long enough to tell me everything isn’t quite as okay as I thought it was a minute ago.
Long enough to tell me … something. Something that happened to me while I was in the box, something I remembered—
“Marceline?” Bateau’s still smiling. The knives are put away, but I know he can pull them out again anytime.
He must have tried to get it from me and he couldn’t even find me, I realize. So he unhooked me from the system to make me sit here and consciously organize my thoughts for him. Then hell go back in and turn me inside out.
Only, how come I can read him so well, all of a sudden? And if
he couldn’t find me in my own head, who the hell did he find?
The image of a funhouse mirror pops into my mind. That must have confused the hell out of him, I think to myself. It was confusing the hell out of me. What did he see in it?
It’s like the answer clicks into place. He saw the party at Davy Jones’ Locker and nothing else. Some sharks and a squid and a few sponges and tube-fish.
“Marceline?” he says again. “Are you still with us?”
“I sort of remember coming to see you,” I tell him, just to be saying anything at all. “I was, I dunno, fugued out or something.”
“Or something.” He nods. “Or somebody. Do you remember trying to tell me about the cop?”
I feel like I’ve been hit between the eyes. The cop. The actor and the cop. Just getting rid of an aberrant personality for a Method actor, that was the job. The actor had a personality she didn’t want anymore, a Brain Police officer. I was supposed to go in and kill it off for her. Except it wasn’t an aberrant personality. It was the real person. And the real person didn’t want to die, so she—
The coffee starts to come back up and I swallow it down. What does this make me now, I wonder, a Method actor or a Brain Police officer in deep undercover? Do I even get a say anymore?
I look over at her, lying there with the wires coming out from under her flattened eyelids. Yah, who could blame her for doing what she did, trying to get rid of the cop? I don’t want to be a cop, either.
And then I realize that while I’ve been sitting here thinking all this handy stuff, it must have been playing on my face like a holo in a foreign language.
Bateau is sitting back in his chair, enjoying his coffee and enjoying the show. I get real tired all of a sudden, and it’s not just because Bateau is a real exhausting type of person. Got to keep up with the man all the time or you might miss something important, like your death sentence.
He has sure as hell been keeping up with me just now. He puts down his cup and takes mine from me. I haven’t really been holding it, it’s just been resting between my hands, could have toppled out and shattered at any moment.