Fools

by Pat Cadigan

  “You didn’t ask, you just came in and sucked him!” Yah, it’s Fourth-of-July time.

  “I meant just now,” Fur Underwear says grimly. “Well, we’re not out of options yet.”

  I’m starting to panic, because I know she’s talking about flush-and-purge, and just when I think I might lose it all in a screaming fit, I feel like someone’s holding my hand, but from inside. God—

  “Guess again,” I said. It was a long reach to her; I had to use Marceline to stretch and she didn’t like it. Well, she’d just have to suffer. She wasn’t loaded with choices. None of us were.

  The cop. As soon as we make contact, I understand it all, and I’d be bugfuck, except I got more serious problems even than that. This is no time to get fussy about who I am, anyway. This is time to wonder if she’s got that backup the Brain Police are supposed to have. For once, I want to see the goddam cavalry coming through the door.

  Something in my limited field of outer vision moves, somewhere behind Rowan. It’s Hercules, and shit, he looks like a sore loser—

  Dionysius is not a good sport, Sovay said. Rowan shouldn’t have crossed him. He was doing the equivalent of looking over my shoulder out the window of my eye to the outside.

  * * *

  Fur Underwear goes down hard. Hercules lifts her up again by her hair, but she’s offline. “Take her out!” he barks, gesturing at me.

  Sovay started to tell me something and then

  he flies backward with a funny little dart in his bare chest and Rowan screams.

  “Shut up,” says Purple Tuxedo, tucking a tiny gun away in his cummerbund. “Now, do you want this or not?”

  Does that piece of shit mean me?

  Sovay’s face filled my vision again, crowding out everything else. I was afraid of this, he said. Flush-and-purge. Not me. You.

  You’re the box, I said. Can’t you stop it?

  Not for you. You ‘re not the box.

  There’s this pressure in my head, like a fist squeezing inside. Purple Tuxedo looks into my face and nods, satisfied. I’d like to wonder which Sovay he is that could just take this up so easy, but I can’t do much besides panic.

  “Standard suck mode,” he says to Rowan, who looks like she isn’t so sure about anything anymore. “If I force her in there on flush-and-purge, it could force him out into the available receptacle.” He pats my head. Jesus.

  And then Mersine tells me how it’s going to be and there’s no time to argue, because we’re going, we’re all going, and there’s a lot of noise somewhere, someone’s banging on the doors, they’re coming in the windows, they’re falling from the ceiling and the ceiling is falling on me, on us all, but they’re too late, I don’t have another second, nobody does.

  Sovay started to slide past me, toward the opening I felt more than saw. I wanted to go after him, but the polarity was wrong. An invisible hammer hit me dead center, sent me flying against the mirrored wall of his rehearsal room. The mirror splintered and began to unravel in a spiral, like a cyclone picking up speed.

  I spread my arms, reaching for the rest of me, imps or real multiple personalities, made no difference now.

  You should have told me, Flaxie, it’s against the rules but you should have told me anyway, you should have told me it wasn’t an imp but a catalyst to wake her, instead of letting me be the fool to believe in what I thought I was, in what I thought any of us were.

  But I was the only one who had believed. The rest of me, they’d all known differently, and I couldn’t know. Because if I had, it would have completed the circuit, it would have been the thing that linked us all and mindwipe could have taken us all out. Instead of just me. Karma-gram, yes. The karma-gram has finally been delivered. It’s my turn, now. The bill has come due for what I had to do to Marceline. I took her life, and now I have to give it back. It’s the only just

  reach up with my right hand and rip the connection out of my eye.

  Somebody screams. It sounds like Rowan, but maybe it’s me.

  Good lucky, he said. I hope you make it.

  feels like a boulder packed into the side of my face. I can see the paramed hovering over me. Bald, blue skin, very folksy. Makes me want to pop him one, but I couldn’t pop a bubble.

  “… mess,” he’s saying. “Dirty shame. Dirty shame. Optic nerve’s shredded, must hurt like a son of a bitch. Gonna need a graft on that.”

  Rowan comes into sight behind him, and it’s like I’m seeing her through the wrong end of a telescope, she looks so far away. And so familiar.

  And they come and gather around her, Purple Tuxedo, Stringy Hair, Hercules, Super Carrot. And more, that I hadn’t seen before. Are they Sovays who found their way to the source, like swimming upstream to unspawn?

  “Goddamnedest things occur to you at the god-damnedest times, hey, Mersine?” says the blue paramed, and I realize I’ve been talking away and not even hearing it. Or maybe someone else is doing the talking and I’m just the lookout here.

  Someone pushes through the Sovay gang. Fly Eyes. She looks at me and shakes her head. Someone else moves in next to her, some guy in bad leather body armor and twinkly things stuck here and there around his mouth, and he looks purely disgusted.

  “Salazar’s going to spit,” he says.

  “Salazar’s going to spit anyway,” says Fly Eyes. “It’s what she does.” She moves in a little closer, hovering over the paramed’s shoulder. “Can you hear me in there?”

  “I hear you,” somebody says. Not this me, whoever’s got the vocal cords. Marya, I think. Ersatz-me, me from a slightly different context.

  “You were supposed to leave the fetishizer’s with me. We had her staked out after Bateau but we couldn’t get a warrant to search her. When you wouldn’t come with me, I thought that meant you’d found out somebody else had sucked Sovay and you wanted to wait. But then you didn’t respond to the trigger word.”

  “Trigger word?” I hear myself ask.

  “Frigid. The second time I called you frigid, you were supposed to come with me. Marya would have gotten the wet dream while the cop was telling me what you’d found out.”

  “I didn’t know anything except the name ‘Monkey Shock,’“ I say.

  “It would have been all we’d needed,” says the guy in bad imitation leather. “We had a chain of backups we could have activated, to keep an eye on you in turns.”

  “That don’t make shitsense,” I say—I say. “You shoulda just triggered the cop and had her tell you right out.”

  Fly Eyes shakes her head. “We never let our cops know exactly who’s backing them up. Brain Police policy.”

  “In case I got sucked.”

  “Oh, we were expecting you to get sucked,” she says. “Marya, that is, not Mersine. Marya came up as a variant of you, Marceline. Since you were the original dump, we couldn’t risk losing you and your testimony. This certainly does screw things up. Marya has Mersine’s spot in the brain now, and it’s going to take ages to build another cop and put her in there—”

  I go frantic, pushing to get up and pop her fucking chocks but the folksy blue paramed’s got me tied down or something and he keeps pushing on my shoulders and going, “Sh, now, gotta stay calm, dirty, dirty shame,” and he looks up at Fly Eyes and says, “I don’t think you were talkin’ to who you thought you were talkin’ to, maybe you thought go think out loud someplace else before you bring on a seiz—”

  They say it was sixteen hours in the hospital, but I don’t remember most of it. It would have been longer, but I wouldn’t stay. I told them no thanks to their graft. Fuck it, I can live without an eye, especially a Brain Police eye. And there isn’t a damned thing they could do about it with my contract up and everything, except get petty and demand their clothes back. Which is what they did.

  Little Blondie in the wardrobe department made a big deal out of that, having me exchange piece by piece for the cop’s old clothes. Those were in better condition than what they took back, so I came out with the better end on someth
ing. But I couldn’t figure out why he was taking so long and making a big fucking ceremony out of it until She showed up.

  Skinny? I seen fatter people that starved to death. I couldn’t believe I’d ever known this woman, but I knew I had. There was this old garbled memory lying around in my mind, the woman behind a desk chewing and spitting, sometimes into a desk suckhole, sometimes kneeling on a floor in an office full of fat furniture. That made me think about mouthkissing and it just turned my stomach inside out practically, seeing her and having to think about that.

  “You are legally entitled to leave, since your contract’s up,” she goes, all official. “But I wish you’d reconsider. Or at least let us give you a new optic nerve and an eye. We owe you that much.”

  I touch the eyepatch and think about the cop I used to

  be, or who used to be me, and I get the feeling she’d have wanted this way. I mean, I don’t know, because I never really knew her, and it’s not like cops are my favorite people even when they’re me, but I feel bad for her, wherever she is. I was supposed to get sucked, not her. So I owe her a big one, and maybe I’m a fool to believe that, because maybe if she’d known all along that she was the imp, she might have changed places with me and let me go down the drain again anyway. But she never had the chance to make that choice.

  “Rowan ’ll be doing time for that,” says Skinny, nodding at my eyepatch. “And some of the Sovays. The others’ll be waiting for them when they get out. I’m not sure what they’ll do after that. Most of the original people have been rewritten so thoroughly they’re past the point of restoration, either as themselves or as Sovay.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

  “I thought you’d be interested.”

  “I’m not. I been a dump long enough, I don’t need what you’re spitting out.”

  She looks offended, but what is she gonna do, fire me? I never worked here, and I’m driving now. If that’s not fair to the rest of me, well, nothing’s ever really fair. Not that I remember, anyway.

  I finish the Big Clothing Exchange and ignore the pained look Little Blondie is giving me. I got this other memory lying around, just a tiny one, him looking at me and saying, Come back when you want it taken off, and I can’t forgive him for that. He lied like a goddam rug and I don’t care if it was his job to do it. Maybe she ‘d have just gone ahead and let him suck me out, her not knowing what I really was to her, but she should have been told so she could have made that choice, too, whether to get rid of me or let me live.

  Ah, fuck her, too. She was Brain Police, as bad as any of them. If I can live with one less eye, the world can live with one less cop.

  And besides, I know something they don’t know. For once. And it’s this: She’s coming back. Not today, not even next month, but sometime soon, she’ll be filling back in. All those little memories she left laying around, the associations are already starting to reconnect, and she won’t be able to help it. Maybe I could get her sucked out before that happens, but I’m not going to do that. Not this time. One of these days, she’ll pop up and take a look around and wonder what the hell happened. And I’ll tell her all about it, what they did to her and what they did to me and to all of us, and we’ll see if she wants to be a cop again.

  And if she does, well, this time she’ll know more, enough that she can make the choice to give us all a chance. Maybe? I mean, I would. Wouldn’t she? Don’t know. Don’t know. Just don’t know

  what the hell is going on here now?

  PART III

  NOBODY’S FOOL

  “Your arrogance has always been your least attractive feature,” Em-Cate said. She had to tilt her head back to look down her nose at me, but, migod, she did it.

  “At least I have something to be arrogant about,” I replied. The soft background music I’d been talking over stopped suddenly and my too loud voice hung in the air. All party conversation ceased.

  Em-Cate didn’t deign to notice that everyone was staring at us. “What, quickie head-jobs? Haven’t you heard it isn’t their brains that are supposed to be stiff?” Several feet behind her, a woman in one of those animated feather creations put a hand over her mouth, scandalized and loving it.

  “You would know, you’re the one with the monogrammed knee pads.”

  Em-Cate surprised me by throwing her wine in my face. For a long moment I could only stand there dripping pinot noir, wincing over my soggy eyepatch, and wondering if the stains would come out of the white secondskins I was wearing while she gave me her patented Em-Cate triumphant I-got-you blazing-eyed stare. Quite a tableau, if you liked cheap melodrama.

  Apparently, this crowd did. The applause was loud, enthusiastic, and spontaneous, surprising me even more than Em-Cate’s little improvisation. I was still goggling at the room when Em-Cate grabbed my hand, raised it, and then pulled us both down in a low bow. She tossed me a napkin as she stepped forward to take another bow separately, and then held out one arm to me so I could do the same. Hurry up, she mouthed at me through her too bright smile. I bowed, dabbing the pinot out of my eyes and retreated to the buffet table while Em-Cate made a big show out of beckoning the director out of the guests he’d been mingling with.

  Jasper stood in front of us and bobbed up and down from the waist, fanning a breeze with the wings of hair sticking out from either side of his head. In the box-suit, he looked like a trophy wearing a shipping carton. He acknowledged Em-Cate and then me before he thought to grab the hostess and shove her in front of him. She took her bows while applauding herself, her suit of lights twinkling giddily.

  “Well, that’s our formal entertainment,” she said, waving a hand at Jasper. “They even had me fooled for a while and I hired them. The Home-Brew Players—aren’t they great, everybody?”

  Everybody applauded again to show agreement. I had to force myself not to flee back to the guest room and lock the door behind me. Em-Cate slipped over to my side of the buffet table to pour herself another glass of wine. “Smile, dammit,” she whispered, beaming at the crowd. “You look like you’re at a funeral.”

  Smile. Migod, I thought, stretching my mouth in something I hoped was at least vaguely grinlike.

  “Tonight’s domestic drama was improvised from an outline by one of our own guests,” the hostess went on cheerily. Everyone oohed and aahed. “And I hope she’s ready to take credit for her part in this.”

  I hoped so, too. As usual, Em-Cate and I hadn’t been given any details beyond the basic scenario. I wanted to get a look at the prodigy who thought a cat-fight was the height of party entertainment. But nobody stepped forward.

  “Oh, come on,” said the hostess, “she didn’t leave, did she? Rowan, are you still here?”

  Migod. At first, I didn’t think I’d heard correctly. Then the people directly in front of the hostess moved aside and there she was, looking as brown and round and bland as ever. The hostess was saying something else but I wasn’t listening and didn’t want to. I headed for the guest bedroom that was our dressing room, shaking off Em-Cate’s restraining hand, ignoring Jasper’s whispered command to wait, we weren’t finished.

  Obviously, we weren’t, but as far as I was concerned, the party was over.

  “What did you do that for,” Jasper said, glaring at me as I slathered cream over my face. He’d insisted on glittering my cheekbones and it felt like sandpaper coming off.

  “I quit.”

  “You can’t quit. We’re hired for the night, we’ve got a contract.”

  I shrugged. “Sue me.”

  He turned to Em-Cate. “Talk to her.”

  Em-Cate stared at him for a moment and then burst out laughing.

  He plumped down on the bed, making the top half of the box-suit slide up around his ears. Fashion-victim, thy name is Jasper. I thought, watching him in the mirror, too disgusted to laugh. “Ah, Christ, why do I get all the temperamental ones,” he whined, pulling his chin up out of his neckline. “Look, I realize you artistes would rather be emoting Shakespeare
and Tennessee Ernie Ford from a real proscenium, but live theatre’s dead. You want to work live, you do the soaps. You want to hear yourself talk, mount Hamlet.”

  “You mount him. I’d pay to see that.” I turned away from the mirror and moved to the doorway of the bathroom, using one of the animated towels to wipe off the rest of the cream. The continuously moving patterns in the fabric flowed over the smears of color, incorporated them, and began some new fluctuations. “And it’s Williams, not Ernie Ford.”

  “Apparently you haven’t seen Jasper’s libretto for Twenty-Seven Wagonsful of Peapickers,” Em-Cate said. “ ‘Ah have always depended upon the kahndness of peapickers.’ He’s adapting it for three rooms with bath.”

  I didn’t laugh. Em-Cate probably had it right, even down to the mishmash. But I wasn’t fooled by her; she was ganging up on Jasper with me because she was feeling mean and it pleased her to do so, not out of any sense of actor’s solidarity, least of all with me. That she was working with me was a reflection of her desperation for any work at all since the demise of Sir Larry’s.

  Jasper started one of his diatribes about the validity of the soap opera as classic tragedy, citing references that were about as accurate as his dramaturgy. I tuned him out, trying to recall which companies I’d heard were holding auditions. Door-To-Door was always auditioning, but that was because they were so vile, few actors could stand more than one production—migod, they’d play a toilet if there was money in the bowl. The Domestiks had a few openings … so did HomeShow …

  There was a knock at the door. “Must be the bouquets you sent yourself,” Em-Cate said, to me or to Jasper, I didn’t know which and it didn’t matter, because I was pretty sure I knew who it really was. Who it had to be, rather. I didn’t remember that much about her, but somehow I’d known she couldn’t have let the evening slip away without approaching me. God only knew why.

  Em-Cate opened the door and stared at Rowan expectantly. “Author, author. Come to thank us?”