The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg

by Barry N. Malzberg

  Luke goes over to the window, looks down upon the grounds surrounding, listens to the sounds of the milling crowd in the distance. Certainly a lot of people in this place, more than you would think just looking at it. Doing simulation therapy of their own. Luke thinks about this and that, thinks of all the good and bad points about simulation therapy, waiting for Williams to come back. Where is Williams? He has promised to be back soon. But the gray-bearded, twinkly-eyed, undependable little fuck simply won’t show and the sounds of the crowd in the distance are unpleasantly louder. It’s the damndest thing. Luke has the intimation that in just a few minutes he’ll be hearing gunfire. How about that, gunfire? It’s remarkable the ends to which they’ll sometimes take this kind of thing to provide realism. Luke waits and waits for Williams to come back, to tell him what the next thing to do will be, but there’s no sign of him and after a time, Luke feels a sudden certainty that the guy isn’t going to come back after all. What the hell is with him? What is going on in this place anyway? There are sounds in the dayroom, suddenly, which he does not like.

  Here is Luke Christmas. He is President of the United States today. He wants to turn and tell them that this was not so yesterday and it will not be so tomorrow, simulation therapy will pass the baton to someone else, but as they come through the door, they do not seem inclined to listen. They do not seem to be interested in any aspect of Luke’s intelligence. Here they are. “I think that I will skip lunch. I don’t want to go to the Rose Garden. I think I need a lot more medicine now,” Luke says very quietly in a bleak and mouselike little tone, barely audible to the hulking forms, some of them from Montana, who lay enormous hands on his wrists, seem to have enormous plans for him. Uncontrolled chain reaction, Luke Christmas thinks. There goes Luke now. He is gone. They are definitely taking him away and there is no Cabinet to help him out. There is nothing to help him out, as Luke in his secret heart has always feared.

  Most Politely, Most Politely

  DEAR Courtesy & Advisement Person:

  Have you ever felt that your clone was running your life rather than existing (as advertised) on a parallel plane?

  Everything was working out beautifully, I was in a class 10 relationship and was taking an option to renew, my cyborg and I were tracking whole levels of intenification and on the professional level I was no longer suffering from Saturnian Dread as we moved closer to Titan in transit … and then peculiar reports began filtering back from the extrinsic provinces. I had been seen dancing in Castor’s Way Station. I was humping the asteroid belt in a most disheveled condition. Ecstatic and mysterious declarations of fertility ‘were emerging from my communications path. All of the reports had credibility; some were accompanied by holographic recycling of the most specific sort. None of them was to be denied.

  It was my clone, of course.

  Nanotechnologically refined from my deepest impulses and sent sprinting into the system on Newday 2030, the initially complaisant but ultimately treacherous self-representation had been inadvertently programmed to enact some of the deepest and darkest insistences of my inner life and there was nothing to be done. Denials were fruitless, depositions of irresponsibility or separation were dismissed as legally inviolable under the various Cloning Acts of Origination. Soon enough, sooner in fact the debiting commenced along with various denunciations from advisers and my deceased father who warned me in his stubbornly unregenerated fashion that he had always known that cloning was up to no good; that one life had been enough for him and for most of his generation and should serve for me. I must admit that I found his taunts most unseemly and overreacted, causing my cyborg to disconnect for several cycles, claiming the necessity to rethink every aspect of our class 10.

  I am in short in a perilous situation. I need to have a stern confrontation with my clone of course and will do so at the earliest opportunity but that is all predictable and I need no advisement on how firm and threatening to be. The question is: how can I convince my friends and advisers as well as the Titanian research squad on which I am so dependent that none of this can really be ascribed to me, that I am wholly victimized?

  Raymond Q-Quasi Cyborg

  Dear Raymond:

  Courtesy & Advisement Person does not know where to begin; your communication is so wrongheaded, shows such delusions fancy and unfancy as to make Courtesy & Advisement Person despair. First things first, however: do not threaten or humiliate your clone in any way. Such tactics, such a breviary of emotion will lead to a dismal and watery end. (Or gaseous end I should have said since you are so associated with that perilous, misguided Titanian project.) Of course you are responsible; nanotechnics merely permit the amplification of desire just as the old megaphone amplified speech and your clone, created out of your own necessity, is doing that which clones are meant to do: enacting your underside. Become pedantic or threatening, ascribe blame to the hapless and doubtless victimized creature and you will bring terrible consequences to you both. The clone will, responding to your false repression, simply excavate more of your needs, attempt to hump not diminutive asteroids but perhaps the bleaker and more testing surfaces of Ganymede and you will find yourself the target and specter of ever more evil gossip.

  Speak as gently to your clone as you would to yourself.

  Better yet, do not speak with your clone at all. Abandon pursuit. Cancel all appointments. Cultivate silence, exile, cunning through this difficult period. Greater repression and projection of denial upon your clone will lead to ever greater disgraces. Who, after all, is responsible for the nanotechnics in the first place? No one dragged you to the implantation crew or farced you to swaddle your germ tissue in blue liniment for a closer spermatazoic fix. Who do you think did this? Your dead father? (Whose lectures are, we suspect, imaginary; more of your experience is hallucinatory than you think. )

  That leaves us with the question of your cyborg.

  Class ten is running for safety; more perceptive to your neurosis than you have been, class ten cyborg is sending you a dread warning in the least provocative fashion by putting a hold on the relationship and sliding into absence. You would best do everything within your power to placate your cyborg and let the clone fend as best as can be, something which nanotechnics if properly applied will make possible.

  Actually, we think that you do not want your cyborg, you want your father regenerated and the clone’s pitiful efforts to have a good time are all reaction-formation of a most pathetic sort. But this leads Courtesy & Advisement Person into whole areas of commentary and analysis which fall outside the purview of this exchange and would probably lead you to another disastrous expedition to blue liniment and germ plasma; better to let it be.

  Under certain circumstances, brutalized clones can become wistful, then violent, finally aggrieved out of all proportion to your ability at self-protection. After humping asteroids, not only does Ganymede seem possible but an original source of germ plasma looks easy. Now you have been warned.

  Dear Courtesy & Advisement Person:

  Feedback from the extradimensionality threshold informs me that in New Era 2046 one of my alternate selves apparently assassinated a head of state, thereby leading to uncontrollable effects in at least four other alternates. Militia with baleful expressions appear at the periphery of my rooms and consciousness and point weaponry at me and during sleep period, even under strong hypnotic, I encounter surges of panic and guilt.

  As far as I know, this is the first time that an alternate self has ever had a misadventure and extradimensionality has been no problem to me up until now. Realizing that in this continuum I am no criminal and that there is no possibility ·of alternate bleed (I have asked some expert friends about this) of that murderous character, what am I to do? I want to take strong action, demand of the state that the militia be removed, but I understand that we are in a perilous state of adjustment and that confrontation might affect certain small paradoxical elements. Or am I full of information of the wrong side, clogged by stupidity? I didn’t assassinat
e anyone. I have never had a murderous thought in my life. Now and then I see myself in a reflector however and there is a distinctly aggressive tilt to my head. This couldn’t be alternate bleed, could it?

  Boston 14

  Dear Boston:

  If you say that your friends (unidentified) deny alternate bleed, why do you ask me fifty words later if you’re suffering from it? What precisely do you expect to gain from this situation? And if you have all the answers, why are you asking Courtesy & Advisement Person any questions?

  There is a certain astonishing and not too subterranean aspect to your communication, in short.

  But this is not really a courtesy & advisement question you are asking, is it? You do not seem to be seeking advice on conduct but rather justification for inaction. You say that you did not kill the state head yet in effect ask for absolution on the murder of that unfortunate figure. You say that your friends deny any kind of alternate bleed, yet ask me if you are suffering from it. You see militia “with baleful expressions” at the corner of your eye and want them removed but are concerned with “certain small paradoxical elements” which I suspect you find not so small at all. In short, you seem to be in a position of massive confusion and it is not courtesy & advisement you seek so much as it is some kind of encompassing answer.

  I have no answer.

  I have some suspicions and intimations, of course, but they fall outside the purview of this service. However, since you have taken the time and trouble to query I will, in similar spirit, respond. (After all, we are in the same reality and must do what we can to defend it, n’est-ce pas?) I intimate that alternate bleed (which has been well established as you know by certain pioneering studies) is operating here. I believe that you are the very gent who might have undone the head of state and have found yourself in this reality as alternate to your own. I think that those militia you see in the “corner” are in pursuit and trying to duplicate your own felicity with alternate bleed. I think that you are in a state of rigorous denial and are closer to being trapped, perhaps, than you might know. I think it is possible that you might be entrapped even before this communication reaches you. I recommend that you go quietly and that you cooperate with your blue-eyed militia. (I envision them somehow as having come from a world of blue uniforms, blue eyes, blue moods.)

  So this does turn out to be a courtesy & advisement matter after all. I recommend that you show all the courtesy possible under the circumstances and in turn the paradoxical gulf between your old world and this will close and your captors, certainly grateful at the ease of this accomplishment, may be more merciful than otherwise.

  Maybe the head of state needed assassinating. Cheer up, you haven’t after all heard the reports. You may be a heroic figure. They may be coming to take you back to a grand reception. They may want to celebrate your accomplishment in a courtesy & advisement fashion.

  Dear Courtesy & Advisement Person:

  Perhaps you have heard of a problem like this and perhaps you have not. In my life I have set few precedents, hovering somewhere between median and mode, a kind of Maginot Line of circumstance, a demilitarized zone of possibility, but this is not duplicated, at least among my circle of friends. My implantation menu coil is seeking to have a relationship with me.

  “No,” my menu coil has been saying in early shift when I have ordered fritters & eggs, “this is bad for your protein levels and will clog your immortality circuits. Also, the fritters are particularly inferior right now. Try the meat & synthetic frogs, and you won’t regret it.” The menu coil, a sinister device, perches deep within my medulla oblongata and whispers such confidential possibilities and suggestions, ignoring my frantic shrugs and gestures of dismissal, continuing to wheedle, sometimes becoming threatening. “Fritters will destroy you,” the menu coil has been known to say, “and eggs will drive you to a horrid and anonymous destiny. Stick with the meat.” Of course I am giving you only random exempla, so to speak, sometimes it is the herbaceous which the coil recommends. Also it has been known to suggest that after mealtimes, on downshift, we spend some private time together, time not to be measured in heartbeats and brain waves. The suggestions seem to be ominously sexual although of course, common sense and the rhetoric of disjunction would suggest otherwise.

  Under the Devices Liberation Act penultimately passed before the Year of Jubilation so recently concluded, I am aware that I have no official recourse, short of surgical removal, but this seems utterly drastic. It will curl my medulla from cell to cell for one thing and for another I have come to appreciate my coil’s advice. The fritters are terrible more often than not and my pores seem to be cleansing. But I wish to make no plans for downshift activities; my time is fully booked by a non-cellular being.

  All Soul’s Day on Titan

  Dear ASDT:

  Courtesy & Advisement Person detects shades of reactionformation in your complaint. Are you sure that a cellular rendezvous does not inflame the blood, that the uncongealed and racing physique which your menu coil is conferring upon you does not seek forbidden outlet? To the very degree that so many of my correspondents express rejection, Courtesy & Advisement Person has noted, they seem to be signaling an unadmitted but powerful need. Just asking, of course.

  In any event, ASDT (I assume that this is a pseudonomic which nonetheless can be tied to a perilous role undertaken in the Titanian Revolt of some cycles back, you might even be one of the Forbidden Generation, Courtesy & Advisement Person is not devoid of historical knowledge after all) the Devices Liberation Act, so recently and joyfully ratified by the full Congregation leaves you without a possibility of official suppression, legal devices are unavailable, your coil has as much a right to counsel against fritters, heckle your abominable taste for eggs as I do to applaud the good sense and goodwill of your medullian (medullic?) companion. Learn and live, ASDT, accept the equality of devices: cyborgs, clones, robots, and the Andromeda Group are as possessed of freedom, as certain of willful purpose as yourself. We live in an age of equality and you for one should be thankful for it. But even in an age of equality, fritters do not equal meat.

  Dear Courtesy & Advisement Person:

  In my new communal arrangement, a blessed septology, one of my wives — I have learned only a few moments ago and still reel from shock — is my ex-husband from a powerful and sonorous arrangement of my earlier years. Quelle dommage! as they once said on the streets of Laredo. What do I do now?

  Masha

  Dear Masha:

  We live in the age of the Liberation of Devices, of transport and glee; we live in an age of the miraculous. Freeze down and enjoy it, Masha. I think it’s London you have in mind, not Laredo.

  Dear Courtesy & Advisement Person:

  Vaguely heartened by the wisdom and good common sense of your responses to a whole heterogeneity of problems, ennobled by the possibility that practicality, humor, and goodwill still exist even in this technological trap which seems to have seized us, I ask only an abstract or perhaps it is a metaphysical question, as relevant now as it was all those unimaginable cycles past, knowing that if you cannot answer this, no one can. I have anguished over it to no particular outcome. Is life real? Is it earnest? Where are we slouching and what if anything will be born?

  Poet

  Dear Poet:

  That is not one question, it is four. Or at least it is two if you factor in the question of quotation. All through professional life, from the very beginning, Courtesy & Advisement Person has been hounded (follow the reference) by those who in the guise of asking one question have actually posed four or six or eight and sometimes one hundred questions, all of them variants of what might be called the True Cosmic question which in this or any era is of such grandiose dimensions that it cannot be paraphrased or intimated but applies to issues of difference, inferiority, terror of mortality (even in the Regenerate Era), and so on.

  Courtesy & Advisement Person must add you to this voluminous and ever-increasing list of jaunters, threateners, cranks, freel
oaders and the like but does so without ill will or hostility of any sort, understanding as one does the question of cultural lag, astronomical in our time, and the fact that there are many billions such as yourself & clones who are trying to cope with the horrific and variegate present with the pathetic and clumsy tools of a long-departed and unavailable past. This can lead to terrible depression and sometimes consequence of the worst sort.

  Read these queries for a while, if you don’t already agree.

  I bear you no malice, then, only concern and a soupçon of pity.

  In any event, and to answer your four questions, forswearing any technicalities or quibbles over greed: life is no longer real but merely a matter of selection today. It is only as earnest as one or one’s clone or successors wish it to be, a slouch is a habit of bad posture which must be discarded and you are in the process of being born, just as Courtesy & Advisement Person is born with every query and dies a little with every answer, but sinks like someone’s lost clone only to be revivified again with the next.

  Is that too technical?

  Well, it is a technophiliac time. One does the best one can with what one has been given. Having been given nothing (as Courtesy & Advisement Person often complains and with every right) it therefore follows that anything divulged must be seen or granted as a gift. The last gift Courtesy & Advisement person was given was an alternate bleed several cycles ago, allowing a somewhat wiser person to take over these chronicles, so the goods given back must be pretty seedy as well.