by Ellen Datlow
The food, I noticed, had been completely forgotten. Or maybe not so much forgotten as dropped, like any other pretense.
All right, NN, three quick choruses of What’s It All About? and if you haven’t figured it out by then, you’re a candidate for brain salad.
Yah, well, what do you think I did after that? I got the hell out of there and went off to my room, my luxuriously appointed room with the singing, vibrating bed and custom-built lavabo and tried to compose a message which would convey beautifully and inarguably why the Entourage had to leave as soon as they could pack themselves up. Halfway through the start of the sixth draft, I plugged into a memory boost and relived the scene for myself, for reinforcement, so I could make it more—I don’t know, urgent? Real? Immediate? So he could see it as I saw it. And then I realized he couldn’t see it as I saw it and not be too alienated to work with me. I was already separating him and Mad-a-LAYNE. Madeleine. But I kept thinking of her in that exaggerated way. Mad-a-LAYNE. Mad-a-LAYNE. Mad-a-LAYNE in PAIN falls MAINly in your BRAIN.
I’d started yawning midway through the second holo. By the start of the third, I had to ask Caverty for coffee. He roused himself from the stupor I’d nearly fallen into and dialed some up from the bar near the projection booth.
“Am I supposed to ask you what you think?” he said as we perched on antique stools together.
“I really don’t know what you’re supposed to do.”
Caverty laughed a little. “Neither do I, most of the time. As you can probably guess. Actually, I don’t have to ask. I was comatose from boredom myself.”
“Your own boredom with your work isn’t much of a barometer. However you feel about your work is tied up in the difficulties you’re having right now, so you’re not a terribly reliable judge.”
He glanced over his shoulder briefly and I squelched the urge to tell him Madeleine wasn’t there. Today he was a bit less uncomfortable in her absence but he was still looking around for her. “Maybe not, but I used to know when the work was good. At least, I thought I did. Now I’m beginning to think I spent close to two decades fooling myself.” He stared gloomily into his coffee cup.
We’d watched one holo from his beginning phase and one from his experimental. Both had been narrative pieces, the stories simple while the embellishment was complex, especially in the experimental work. He’d been very young when he’d done that one, though it had come after the previous piece. He’d just been discovering how much fun it was to break the rules and from time to time, ghost images of himself with his holocam had drifted through the piece, recording other ghost images as well as the central scene in progress. It was the sort of thing most artists do sooner or later and usually it’s a bad choice but somehow, Caverty had made it work, either through luck or sheer talent, or perhaps a combination of the two. It left an aftertaste in the brain; your memory kept returning to it, going over the core story—boy meets self, boy gets self, boy loses self, boy buys new self—while the trimmings drifted around as vividly in memory as they’d been in the holo itself.
The interesting part was that Caverty had used minimal sound—no dialog, no musical scoring, few sound effects except as a kind of punctuation here and there, and yet you tended to remember more sound than he’d used. While I wasn’t sure that I really liked it, it did seem to summarize all of Caverty’s strong points as an artist. I didn’t want to ask him how autobiographical it was; artists never really know exactly how autobiographical any of their work is. I could find out later if I really wanted to know.
“You’re very quiet,” Caverty said. “That, uh, well… scares me.”
“I’m not a critic. You have to stop thinking of me as some kind of master evaluator.”
“But you are, aren’t you? Evaluating my talent, how you can help me. If you can help me.” Pause while he drained his coffee. “Can you help me? How bad off is this patient, doctor?”
“How bad off do you feel?”
“If you’re going to tell me it’s all up to me—”
“Not exactly. It’s a matter of how much help you’re willing to accept; then it’s a matter of how much help you’ll be able to accept. Plus a lot of other things.” I pushed my coffee aside. “This isn’t something I discuss in detail with my clients, as it tends to make them far too self-conscious. I don’t want you getting in your own way.”
He nodded absently, glancing over his shoulder again. “Well. How many more holos did you want to see?”
“One representative piece from each stage of your career would be fine. And if there are any others you want me to look at, that’s fine, too.”
He nodded again but his gaze was on some point off to my right, as though he were daydreaming or suddenly remembering something very pleasant, or perhaps getting a new idea for a holo. For a moment, I was uncertain as to whether it was any of those things but then I realized, and just as I did, it touched me.
It was a very light touch, a brush that might have been accidental. A pathosfinder’s mind isn’t at all receptive to casual telepathy or an empath just cruising; it’s all that self-definition and controlled concentration we engage in during the course of mindplay. After a while, it becomes second nature. It’s going on all the time somewhere in your mind, an engine on idle. Madeleine brushed up against me and passed on, like someone who’d accidentally knocked on the wrong door and didn’t wait for an answer. She was gone before I could sense how close she was.
Caverty sighed cheerfully and then looked down at his hands resting on his thighs. “It’s just good to know she’s there.”
“I can’t have that.”
“Pardon?” He didn’t look up.
“I can’t have her coming in like that. Especially when we’re hooked in together.”
“Oh, she knows that, I asked her to look in on me, as it were. Just so I’d know she was there.”
“You’ll have to ask her not to do it.”
“She knows that, too.” His hands came together, gripping each other tightly and I realized she hadn’t quite left yet. I let him be until he raised his head and I could see that the faraway look on his face was gone. “She understands, she really does. I know she does.”
“Good. I’m glad. We can look at the next holo.”
We looked at six more—a couple of display pieces normally presented on loop for continuous exhibition, a juvenile piece that had been badly received, and a thematic trilogy having to do with growing older. The juvenile piece was negligible in terms of his work as a whole—he no longer had any idea what it was like to be a child. The trilogy was interesting as a precursor of his present state; after viewing it, you might have thought he was having difficulty accepting the fact that he himself was growing older. But while he’d alluded to that earlier, I didn’t think that was the bulk of his problem.
It was close to suppertime when we finished, so I let him go, pleaded fatigue for myself and headed for my room so I could review/relive everything on boost.
The last thing I had expected her to do was to come to me. How could Caverty possibly cope with his Entourage without her somewhere in the room doing whatever it was she did—I still hadn’t figured out exactly what her function was, but whatever it was, she was good at it.
She didn’t even knock. Knocking wasn’t customary in this house, apparently. I was taking a semimeditative breather from boosted reviewing and she slipped into the room like a bit of cloth blown in by an errant draft.
“Hi,” she said shyly, standing with her back against the door.
I gestured at one of the pudgy spot chairs. Not the closest one. She sank into it gingerly, keeping her hands on the sides of the cushions as though she might have to launch herself out of it on short notice.
“I know you must be wondering why I’m not at dinner,” she said. “I don’t always go. Sometimes I take a night off, eat in my room. But Caverty loves his public.”
“Do you think a private Entourage qualifies as a ‘public’?”
“In Caverty�
�s case, yes, I think so. Public as opposed to the privacy of his mind.”
I didn’t feel like arguing it with her so I let it go.
“We live a very balanced life here. You may not think so but it is. Every element is carefully balanced against every other element. The Entourage population stabilized a little while ago and it provides Caverty with the security he needs to be able to work.”
“But he isn’t able to work.”
“Well, no, not now but before he hit this rough patch in his creativity, he was able to work very well.”
“You’re the second person, I think, who’s told me that the Entourage has ‘stabilized.’”
She nodded. “And?”
“I wouldn’t call it stabilization.”
“What, then?”
“I’d call it entropy.”
She drew back slightly, as though I’d taken a swipe at her.
“Or stagnation. I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings.”
Mad-a-LAYNE laughed. “My feelings?”
“Or whomever’s you’ve got.”
Still smiling, she leaned forward. “I could have anybody’s. Everybody’s. You know us empaths. Especially those of us with a stronger telepathic bent than most.”
I felt that brush against my mind again; she didn’t persist.
“You’re resistant, though. I guess most mindplayers are. All that holding yourself together that you do when you’re in contact with someone else’s mind. Holding your identity together. Holding tight to what you are. Isn’t that the way they put it in mindplayer school, or wherever it is you go to learn how to handle those machines? Hold tight to what you are, am I right?”
I had the sensation of the room rearranging itself around us so that we were squared off against each other. Beside me, my system was assembled, the optic nerve connections capped but primed and ready for use.
“Am I right? Hold tight to what you are?”
“Generally the client isn’t trying to get at what you are. So it isn’t really necessary to go around clenched like a fist.”
“Then why do you?”
“I’m sure it must seem that way to you, having such free access to all the people around here. But I’m really quite normal.”
“Normal in whose terms? Them, out there in the world, where you use that can opener to break into people’s minds?”
I shook my head. “I think I’d better go.”
“What?” A look of panic, now. “Wait—why?”
Half out of my own chair, I paused. “Why? You must know.”
“No, I don’t. I would, know if you didn’t shut me out.”
I saved my laugh for later, on the trip home. “It’s not the sort of thing you need empathic powers to know.”
“For me, it is.”
I started to disassemble the system. “He’s going to know. Caverty, I mean. He’ll know what’s happened between us just now and he won’t be able to work with me.”
She got up and came over to me, intending to put her hand on my arm; I stepped away from the system quickly. “Sorry,” she said, putting the hand behind her back. “I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted you to stop that. You mustn’t leave.”
“I don’t think there’s much choice any more.”
“I really didn’t mean to do this, to try to force you out of here. I was just—” She blew out a frustrated breath. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know how to begin to try to explain it to you, I’m so used to just letting people know how I feel. Especially when the feeling is so complex. Do you know how that is, to feel so many different things at one moment?” She paused. “Or is that not being properly deadpan?”
She wiped both hands over her face and through her hair, turning away from me. “So many misunderstandings because words get in the way. People unable to imagine how other people feel because you can’t explain to someone with just words a feeling of jealousy and gladness mixed up with the desire to see a loved one succeed.”
I refrained from pointing out that she just had. “Just because you don’t have emotional access to me doesn’t mean that I have no understanding. I don’t have to feel exactly what you feel to know what it is.” I shrugged. “In any case, I still have to leave.”
“No. Please don’t. Caverty would never forgive me.”
“Sure he would.”
She allowed herself a tremulous, momentary smile. “Yes, he would. But I don’t want to put him through the effort. I would never forgive myself, and the effect of that on Caverty would be horrible. I agreed to your conditions voluntarily, I urged Caverty to go along with them. If I sabotage everything, Caverty won’t have a chance.”
“Of course he will,” I said quietly, though I tended to doubt it.
She looked over at me sharply. “I meant he won’t have a chance to find out whether this could have worked for him or not.”
“Oh. Yes, that is different.”
“You see? Another misunderstanding because of words. If you’d been open to me, you would have understood what I meant instantly.”
I did not tell her I didn’t see why that was necessarily a better arrangement than the usual conversational mode of imparting information, emotional or otherwise. Not to mention the fact that there wouldn’t have been a misunderstanding had there been enough words. NN, I thought, was going to give me a medal for self-control when he reviewed my report.
“Anyway,” she said, softening, “you mustn’t leave. Please. I promise I won’t interfere any more.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s that Caverty’s going to know what happened between us.”
“You’d tell him?”
“No. But you would. You couldn’t help yourself.”
She drew herself up. “Yes, I can. I can hold as tight to my own as you can to yours. I can keep feelings from him or allow them out as I choose. And I promised not to touch him while you’re working with him, so I won’t even have to make the effort. I will keep from touching him. And you. I will.” She paused. “Stay?”
I nodded, without words.
I could tell he’d slept well and it surprised me. I’d have thought the prospect of meeting me in his studio/sanctorum shortly after dawn without Mad-a-LAYNE would have kept him on the thin edge of wakefulness for most of the night. It must have been a terrific dinner for him, the whole Entourage love-bombing him with lots of acclaim and reassurance. Either that or Mad-a-LAYNE had been with him after all, in spite of her protests to me. As I worked at reassembling the system, I found myself hoping she had. I would hook in with Caverty, discover she’d lied, disconnect, and go home. End of story.
The way I was wanting forever to get out of there, you’d have thought I’d have done just that, said to hell with it all and risked whatever NN’s professional wrath would have brought. If anything. I’d turned down jobs before and NN hadn’t sued me. I’d even cut some short and NN had seen the correctness of my action. But I’d never backed out of one and I just wasn’t sure how the old bastard would take that. Of course, I hadn’t wanted it in the first place but I’d allowed myself to be talked into it—my own fault, really. Which I guess was why I kept reassembling the system in Caverty’s studio, and primed the optic nerve connections and got him all settled and comfortable on a chaise and removed his beautiful biogem eyes and hooked him into a building-colors relaxation exercise. It had been my own idea to skip the real-time outside exercises. Somehow a round of What Would You Do? or What Do You Hear In These Pictures? just didn’t seem right for him. There were a couple of others I might have tried with him, including Finish the Following, which NN himself had invented for visual artists, involving real-time completion of a partial image but no doubt that would have made him feel as though I were forcing his hand. As it were. Besides, I felt the more time he could spend getting accustomed to being inward without Mad-a-LAYNE, the easier it would be to work with him.
I had the system run continuous checks on his vitals while I prepared myself to meet him mind-to-mind. He showed no sig
ns of panicking or disintegrating so I took my time. I had to; there were a lot of feelings to put away.
He’d been in the relaxation exercise for nearly half an hour before I felt prepared enough to remove my own eyes and slip them into solution and a little longer after I hooked myself up to the system before I allowed it to bring my consciousness and his together.
The contact was gradual. I chose a new color as a vehicle and slipped in among the others he had been forming. He sensed me immediately and accepted the contact just as quickly. The colors cleared out, leaving us in a visualization not of his studio but of the banquet hall where dinner were celebrated every night.
Well, he said, here we are.
Is this where you keep your holos?
No. It’s where 1 keep myself. My self, I mean.
What do you do here?
He looked around and looked with him. The room seemed pretty much as it was in real life, down to the buffet tables, except he had not visualized food on them. I saw the area where I had sat with the domestic actor the first night I’d been there; it too was empty. I was about to repeat my question when the room began to darken, first in the corners and then spreading out in waves of shadows.
This is what I do here, he said. I don’t be alone here.
I don’t be alone is an awkward verbalization of what it was and not quite what he said but that was the way I received it. Before I could get meaning around it, the shadows had formed themselves into images of the Entourage, ghostly and nowhere near as substantial as our own representations but somehow no less present. Immediately they were cluttering up everything, hanging all over us as though we were underwater with a lot of rags and scarves.
Come on now, I coaxed, holding my patience. You can clear them all out.
A ghost of the umbrella woman flowed over his face. Yes, I can, he said.
I waited and he waited to see what I was waiting for. I felt the warm brush of someone’s presence and for a moment I was nose to nose with the woman who’d had a cage on her head. Admiration, envy, a sense of accomplishment … the emotions belonged to several different people. I brushed her away.