Fools

by Pat Cadigan

  Anything else you want to know about the nature of hell?

  The question fluttered past me on a tattered rag caught in a minor whirlwind. The landscape that faded in was my own involuntary visualization. That would happen if nobody set the scene; sooner or later, you’d see something unless you forced yourself not to. This something was like the surface of the moon transplanted to the badlands, the morning after a mental costume orgy. Most of the debris littering the ground didn’t know what it had been before it had become debris.

  The only piece that interested me was the rag. I concentrated on locating the source. After a bit, a stone mountain flickered into existence on the wasted horizon. As I started toward it, all the debris turned into heads, as if someone had spilled the baskets after a full day at the guillotine.

  Except these heads were watching me. Something was wrong with their eyes, though—some of them didn’t even have eyes, some that did couldn’t open them, some had too many, and others had them in the wrong places—and none of them spoke language, only word salad.

  Getting dicey in here, I thought, tightening my concentration. He latched on to my visuals, not because he liked them but because they were there to latch on to. If I wasn’t careful, he was going to latch on to me, too, and every picture in my head would get sucked into the scenery.

  I wrapped myself in a shield, which meant I had to go slower toward the source of the ragged message, and I couldn’t see the location as clearly as before. But it relieved that besieged feeling.

  On the ground ahead of me, something sparked and flashed in a random sequence. I plodded right along, not stopping but taking a good look at it as I passed.

  A shard from a broken mirror. Uh-oh.

  At least the stone mountain was getting closer; in fact, it was getting closer faster than I was walking toward it, which just served to show how perception of progress differs from actual progress. If I stayed in here long enough, I thought to myself, I could probably qualify for certification as a reality affixer. Then the cacophony of voices shouting un-sense got louder, and I thought, maybe not.

  A cave opened up in the base of the mountain. Each plodding step I took was harder, like every bit of movement was separate from every other bit, components that would have made up one whole thing if they could have connected with each other. But they couldn’t. Had I been thinking I could qualify as a reality affixer? Any longer in here and there would be more heads lying around on that bad landscape, all of them mine.

  I stumbled over something, recovered, and then fell down a bolthole.

  You got my message, said Sovay. He was squatting naked in a space at the bottom of the bolthole, tending a small fire. It was his literal spark of life—as long as the fire lasted would be as long as he lived. If you could call this living.

  The mechanics were fascinating to watch—he kept the fire going by pulling off little pieces of himself and tossing them on the flames. The smoke that came up flowed back toward him and reconstituted his missing pieces … mostly. A fraction of the smoke went up the bolthole, where it was lost forever. Here and there, I could see small pits and dents in his skin, the little losses he couldn’t recover.

  Yah, I got your message I said. How the hell did you send it?

  Smoke signals. He smiled at me over the flames. I sent it up the chimney here—he pointed at the bolthole—and it attached itself to a carrier. I could spare that much. He looked at himself, touching a few of the dents in his skin. I figure there’s still enough of me left to last a long bad time. I wanted you to come here. I know who you are.

  You know who I used to be, I told him.

  Know of you, I should have said. He closed himself off when he was with Marva, I wasn’t invited. He broke off the top section of his left little finger and fed it to the fire. There was no blood and he didn’t wince until it started to burn. I was a good actor, but when it came to the Method, I didn’t have a clue.

  What do you mean? I asked him.

  I mean I wasn’t a real Method actor. If I had been, you’d be talking to Dionysius, not the me who pretended to be Dionysius. He examined his shortened finger and the other small deficits. Can I borrow a cup of anything?

  I didn’t understand right away. And then, when I did, I also understood the man wasn’t asking. This was what he’d had in mind when he had felt me make contact. When you wanted to live this bad, you’d do anything.

  Why don’t you straighten him out? I asked, pointing ‘ at the bolthole. Obviously, when Sovay didn’t take, he fell apart. You could fix him, make him over.

  Tried that. How do you think he got this way? I was lucky he didn’t fragment me as well.

  I remembered the shard of mirror I’d seen. Who hadn’t been able to live with the mirror—him? Or Sovay?

  Abruptly, the smoke suddenly blew into my face.

  Not fair! he screamed. You’ve got plenty and I’m getting all used up! Give it back! Give it—

  He reached through the fire for me and his hand borrowed mass from the rest of him, swelling to four times its size. I flung myself backward, thinking Exit!

  Nothing happened.

  He was hanging above me, bigger all over now, meaning to envelop me. He didn’t mean to take just what he thought I’d gotten in the smoke, but everything I had. I could see right through him—literally; he was bigger, but no more substantial.

  I pushed myself upward, aiming at the bolthole this time. Passing through him was more than passing through a holo, but not much more.

  “You’re not her,” he said accusingly. Coney Loe (that was his name; I could remember now) must have put his eyes back in for him. I couldn’t look at him; it was all I could do to put my own singleton back in without screaming. “And you’re not him.”

  “Brilliant, isn’t he?” said Coney.

  “Shut up,” I said, keeping my back to both of them. Things were still settling in my head. I started to get up and suddenly there was a flash of light from my blind side, bigger than the pinprick flash from Rowan’s bank-card.

  How much would you pay for your life?

  A lot more than I’d take to give it up …

  “Where are you going?” Coney said.

  I paused in the doorway, still with my back to them. “To call her. You keep him here, she can pick him up.”

  “This is him?” Coney sounded suspicious.

  “Hot strike on the first try,” I said. “Call it beginner’s luck, or something, huh?”

  If Coney said anything else, I didn’t hear it. My footsteps pounding down the aisle toward the exit sign echoed the pounding in my head. Not the mindless throbbing of a hypehead’s mindplay hangover but a chant, two words repeating over and over, like being slapped again and again without pause.

  She lied. She lied. She lied. She LIED. SHE LIED.

  I could see them in my head as plain as anything, Dionysius and Rowan lying on cots in a cubicle with a second man on the floor between them, all three of them hooked into a system together. Illegal three-way. People who would mouthkiss were capable of anything.

  SHE LIED. SHE LIED. SHE LIED.

  I hit the sidewalk and knew exactly where I was, where everything was, everything and everybody.

  “Heya, heya!”

  Reflexively I reached for a comb, but there was nothing in my hair. The figure in front of me changed from a neurosis peddler with bad leather armor to a malnourished rooster-boy with chapped skin. We stared at each other as I lowered my fist; after a moment, he pried my other hand off his throat.

  “No rough stuff,” he said. “Unless you pay extra.”

  I pushed him away and ran, almost knocking over another rooster-boy who was double-teaming a tourist with his pimp. The pimp’s fuzzy, lurid magenta suit stung my vision and left an afterimage floating ahead of me, but no matter how fast I ran, I couldn’t catch up to it. More than a pinprick.

  SHE LIED. SHE LIED. SHE LIED.

  Truth is cheap; information costs. How much for both, then?

 
Just as I reached the corner the light changed and four lanes of vehicles surged into the intersection. I turned away and something caught me right under the chin. My feet didn’t quite fly out from under me but I went down anyway into a tacky forest of legs in second-skins and jumpjohns and cheap, flaking paint.

  They all cleared away quickly and I found myself looking up at a pair of onionheads grinning over the chain they’d used to clothesline me.

  “So hot to violate our marital space,” said the one on the left nastily.

  I started to get up and they advanced on me so that I was forced either to stay down or half crawl backward to get away from them. “You forced it,” I said, trying to shift position to a crouch. “You know I didn’t even see you and everyone who saw it will say that’s true.”

  The one on the right bent forward, thrusting her ugly, hairless face at me. “Now find someone who’ll say they saw. Find someone who wants to be challenged as your accomplice right now, here.” The other one nodded, grinning, feeding slack into their marital chain. “Find someone, go on, ask any of them, ask them all, they’ll tell you they saw nothing, they had their backs turned, they all saw nothing, nothing, nothing at all!”

  They threw the chain back and whipped it over their heads and down. I had just enough time to squeeze into a tight ball. The chain missed my shins by a bare inch and smashed down on the pavement. The onionheads squawled like scalded badgers and pulled the chain back for another go. Just as it was arcing over their heads, I launched myself forward and under it. I hit open pavement and rolled with the fall so that my momentum took me back up onto my feet without a pause.

  The onionheads were screaming full-throat now; I really had violated their marital space this time, deliberately and flagrantly, in front of a crowd of witnesses. Every onionhead pair and multiple in the Downs was going to be hunting me within an hour. God, why? I thought, sprinting blindly. Why were onionheads allowed to terrorize people for no other reason than they were bored, why were they allowed to act out their pathological possessiveness by beating people into blood pudding for the crime of violating some imaginary boundary around them? And most of all, why did I have to have onionheads after me now?

  Unbidden, the words surfaced in my mind.

  … are you paranoid enough?

  I pounded across another street, staggered into the entryway of a cheesy fetishizer joint, and squeezed into a corner near the door, trying to catch my breath. The door opened almost immediately, but it was only a couple of garbageheads, wearing silly wrapcoats and even sillier grins. They didn’t even look at me on their way to wherever to enjoy their latest fixation, while it lasted.

  My knees got shaky. I half slid, half fell down onto the grimy tiles. My breath was coming back but my heart wouldn’t slow down and my legs were burning. If the onionheads found me now, I wouldn’t be able to do a thing except bleed. I closed my eyes and tried to listen for the sound of running footsteps and the clink of a chain over the traffic noise.

  Nobody came, not even another customer. After a while, I pushed myself up on my hands and knees, and then to my feet. My legs wanted to collapse more than anything but I made myself move to the edge of the entryway and peek around the side of the building. No onionheads; almost no one at all on the sidewalk, except for a gofer walking back and forth half a block down with an envelope under her arm, squinting at the street numbers.

  Of course they hadn’t chased me; why waste time chasing me when they could round up reinforcements?

  Onionheads loved to hunt a violator en masse. If I could get out of the Downs, I’d keep my skin. They rarely left the Downs for any reason—better areas of town weren’t terribly hospitable to them and they tended to end up being arrested for disturbing the peace before they could actually get around to disturbing it much. Whereas in the Downs, I reflected sourly, you could disturb all you wanted as long as you didn’t overnight in a parking space …

  I leaned against the building, trying to think while I scanned the street. Something was chipping at my memory, trying to get in … or get out?

  … she lied …

  Yah, we know she lied about never having gone mind-to-mind with Sovay, I thought. We’re doing something else now.

  she lied.

  Something …

  A flash of light, a pinprick in the brain. A scatter of heads, a shard of mirror, a continuously rewinding black hole. A man who stayed alive by consuming himself …

  Forgive and forget. If you forget first, there’s nothing to forgive.

  His image was there in my mind, like a splinter, like a thorn, like a hook—but not enough. More than a holo, but not much more; more used up than he realized. Or maybe he did realize, but didn’t want to admit it. Who would?

  But there had been enough of him to tell me—

  … she lied about why she wanted you to find him.

  I stepped out onto the sidewalk. A battalion of onionheads didn’t pour out of the nearby doorways, screaming for my blood. Still too early. Maybe I could get off the street before everyone had been notified and I could slip back to midtown during the deadest part of the night.

  If I was right, I’d have a place to hide out until then.

  The door was open a crack. I stood back and gave it a light push with my fingertips. It swung inward to reveal the empty living room, much the same as it appeared in the memory that contact with Sovay’s ghost had activated. I took a tentative step inside, looking around. He couldn’t have been expecting me; the security entrance was out of commission, so I hadn’t had to buzz him to let me in.

  Or had he been expecting me every day for the last six months?

  “I didn’t know what I’d do when this finally happened. If it ever did. And now I still don’t know.”

  He was standing in the kitchenette holding a cup, either just emptied or not yet filled. I couldn’t tell. The bad dye-job had been left to fade without renewal; except for some very faint orange shadows in the lines around his eyes and mouth, it was all gone now.

  “What do I call you?” I said, pushing the door closed behind me.

  “I’ve been using Anwar, still. For simplicity’s sake. Though I’m still neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring. Bad red herring, perhaps. For a while, orange herring.”

  I had a sudden flash of myself as a fish; ridiculous. I shook the thought away.

  He gestured at the futon across the living room. “Make yourself comfortable. We should have a talk, just the four of us. Or, well, I don’t know how many you are now, but I’d like it if you’d limit yourself to two while you’re here. I’ll make you some vile coffee.” The brief laugh seemed to escape him without his wanting it. “I know I said that last time would be the last time. I lied. I’d have helped you if you’d come to me every night with our pimp snapping at your heels, I—” He reached for his waist and then stared wonderingly at his empty hand. “Oh. I forgot. Can you buy that? I really forgot.”

  I went to the futon, hoping the movement would shut off his babbling. He grabbed another cup, filled them both with water, and dropped in a couple of cubes.

  “Very vile coffee,” he said, coming over to sit down next to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, accepting a cup from him. “You’re true. The truest one I ever knew.”

  He laughed again, blinking at me incredulously. “Where’d you get an idea like that?”

  “Where do we get any of our ideas?”

  He tilted his head to one side and something happened. The set of his face changed, the lines suddenly not quite what they’d been, not quite right. “No,” he said faintly, “it was Marva I loved, not … the other. The big husky one, she was … not Marva. Non-Marva. But Marva was the one I wanted, and when she, when she—” He looked puzzled. “She was in Bateau’s office, she was in the lateral and I had to save her—but it wasn’t Marva and it wasn’t me. Not at the time. But it is now.”

  I put the cup down on the floor. “I can help you with that,” I said.

  He was
going over it again when I led him into the bedroom, where he kept his system.

  * * *

  He was slow to manifest; he kept putting some obscuring element between us, a waterfall, a fog bank, a dark pane of glass. But he would have had to have been in much better shape to maintain such a thing within the system. Like the unforgiving light in a dressing room, being mind-to-mind showed no mercy.

  Actually, it wasn’t so bad. It gave me time to get accustomed to what I was going to see.

  They were melting into each other, Sovay and Anwar; as if they were mirror images instead of two different sides, the mirrors making a V-shape and slowly moving so that the images were being sucked into each other. Except Anwar was losing.

  All his characters became him.

  She lied, but not about that.

  The Anwar part looked disappointed. Where is she?

  An environment was forming around us, something vague and semidark, like the inside of a cave or a grotto. There was no sign of anyone else besides us. I don’t know, I said. She didn’t leave a forwarding address.

  You’re not quite her, either, Sovay said.

  I lost a lot of memory, I told him. If that’s what makes any of us what we are, then I’m really not Marva at all. Not the original fake and not the original fake fake. A new fake.

  Dark patches in the space around us began to swirl lazily like oil floating on the surface of water, as if a relaxation exercise had leaked through, except it wasn’t completely abstract. Here and there, there were hints of pictures—faces, mostly, but they didn’t last long enough to identify.

  She was right, Sovay said suddenly. It is more intimate than a married couple should be. Than lovers should be. Than we ever should have been.

  The portrait of Rowan floating over his head looked as if it had been done in dark smoke and could blow apart at any moment. Somehow, it didn’t.

  But she wasn’t lying, he added. It wasn’t really me she was mind-to-mind with. Just two Downs hypeheads who wanted to be me. She wanted them to be me, too, you see. She was trying to fix them, focus them on her. But it didn’t work. It couldn’t have. They needed you for that, not her.