Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

But I had already bent to stow my guitar in its case. That was a mercy. It gave me hope, even though I dropped the guitar right on top of the money, since Scott hadn’t told me to take the money out first. At least he was letting me put away my instrument instead of ordering me to abandon it. I thumbed the clasps closed.

  “Let’s go,” said Scott.

  “Hey! Male chauvinist pig. Stop bossing her around!” Local grabbed my arm.

  “Drop him,” Scott said.

  I tapped the back of Local’s hand with my defense nail, letting him have a little shot of sleep. His grip on my arm relaxed, and he fell slowly to the ground.

  “Good work. Come on.” Scott turned away and headed up the walk.

  I followed, but glanced back at Local. I hoped he would be all right. I didn’t always find such nice people on these trips.

  At the car, Scott made me give him the keys, made me sit in the passenger seat while he drove. Right there I had a clear demonstration of the fact that no matter how much time you spent on a simulator, real life worked differently. Since cars were Scott’s big itch, I had thought he’d be really good at them. But even in a camo-car, he couldn’t drive well. He stalled and stalled again. He didn’t understand 1979 traffic controls. He ran red lights and stop signs, and brought us close to death time and again.

  He made me navigate with a map he had tom from a telephone book. Destination? The nearest Cadillac dealership.

  Gradually I relaxed.

  Maybe this wouldn’t be such a bad mission.

  “See that Eldorado?” Scott said, his voice alive with excitement as he pulled into the lot. “See that one? Omyglot, see that one over there? Front-wheel drive, four-wheel independent suspension, and an electronic fuel-injected V8 engine. Cadillac pioneered those features in American cars! Sweet!” He parked our camo-car across two parking spaces and jumped out, leaving the key in the car and the engine running. And me, in the passenger seat, disabled by a stupid word that didn’t even mean anything except “You will now obey my every command.”

  A young salesman in a suit just like the one Scott wore came out of the showroom, smiling. “Hello, sir,” he said, shaking hands with Scott. “I’m Bert James. How may I help you?”

  “I’d like a test drive,” Scott said, his voice breaking.

  “Excellent. While you’re enjoying a ride in one of our automobiles, though, don’t you think your own fine car should be shut down?” The salesman leaned in and fished around for the key, which wasn’t on the steering column the way a person from 1979 might expect. Let alone the car was keyed to Scott’s and my geneprints, and wouldn’t respond to anyone else. The salesman noticed me. “Hello, miss. Wouldn’t you like to ride in one of our magnificent machines?”

  I looked at him. On the drive over, Scott had given me permission to look around, but not to talk. In fact, he had said “shut up” a few more times, even though I hadn’t said a word. Probably to get back at me for all the talking I did right before we tressed.

  “I don’t recognize your car,” the salesman said over his shoulder to Scott.

  “It’s not in general production. It’s a prototype.”

  “Oh. Interesting! Could you please turn it off, sir? And what about your girlfriend? Maybe she’d like a test drive, too?”

  Scott let his breath out in a whoosh. “Oh. Yes. Probably. I guess.”

  The salesman straightened, and Scott leaned in and turned off the car. “Get out and come with us,” he said.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon in the back seat of various Cadillacs, listening to Scott and the salesman enthuse about the virtues of Cadillacs. I did find out for a fact that they had really comfortable backs seats, good shocks, smooth engines, and quiet rides.

  Sometimes I thought about all the carbon monoxide we were pumping into the air. Mostly, though, I thought about all the missions I’d gone on in the recent past where some ijit smoghead tongueflapping powerpusher had flipped my switch had made me dance. I thought long and hard about it. Who could have slipped me the wire? Why?

  I had a half-memory of some mission before all the bad ones started. I had stepped into the tresser. The usual lights had flashed. My ears popped, the blurs washed out my surroundings, my stomach hurt, and then, floosh! Everything turned back into Now. I wondered why the mission had aborted. I’d never had one abort before—in fact, I had a reputation for luck. One of the project scientists was studying me and my luck to see if it was something they could induce in other tressers.

  Able, one of the tresser programmers, had opened the booth door. “Drink this, Sissy,” he said. My stomach was still spinning and glogging. I glanced at the telltales in the tresser room and noticed there was something weird about the permachrono. Before I could figure it out, though, I drank what Able gave me. Then everything blurred.

  Later I woke up in my own cubicle. My boss said I’d gotten sick before I could even go on a mission and that they’d sedated me while the sickness ran its course. That was why I lost two days.

  I couldn’t even remember what I was supposed to find and fetch on the aborted mission.

  It had to be Able who had done this to me. Scuzzed the mission, made me lose two days while I was undergoing illegal bioengineering that turned me into a slavebot.

  “Sissy,” said Scott.

  Able. But why? Did he hate me?

  “Get out of the car, Sissy,” Scott said.

  After that nonmission, time after time, me and ijits, sweeping through different periods in the past so they could pet dinosaurs or gamble on a Mississippi riverboat or digi-photo gladiator games at the Coliseum. Time after time I performed for them and they told me to forget all about it, and then I got them home in perfect condition, even though I myself got a little skewed and couldn’t remember how. Time after time I didn’t understand the nasty smiles my partners gave me before they walked out of my life, good riddance.

  How lucky was I, really?

  I got out of the car.

  “Straighten up and look pretty, Sissy,” Scott said.

  Well, that was easier said than done. Not a very tangible order, and what exactly did he have in mind? I stood tall, hunched my shoulders, relaxed them, ran my fingers through my short limp pink hair. Bert the salesman watched me. Damn. I should have listened to their conversation while I was riding around in I the back seat, but I had been too busy going down nightmare memory alley. What was happening now?

  “Would you like to get to know Sissy better, Bert?” Scott asked the salesman. “She’ll do whatever you want. Anything you ask. Won’t you, Sissy? You’ll do anything Bert wants.”

  I nodded.

  Rage ran through my body like blood, and I couldn’t respond to it. I couldn’t walk away. I couldn’t ziss damned Scott with my defense nail, and I couldn’t scream my anger. Scott hadn’t give me permission.

  Bert took a couple steps toward me.

  “I’ll just take this Eldorado out for a little spin. Back in half an hour,” Scott said. He jingled keys in his hand, then climbed into the big car we had just been riding around in.

  Bert came slowly to me. He stared at my lips. Then down at my breasts. His tongue darted out to lick his upper lip.

  Scott started the car, put it into reverse, and almost ran over us. Bert shoved me out of the way, grabbed me before I crashed. “Hey!” Bert yelled after Scott.

  Scott burned rubber on his way out of the parking lot.

  One of the other salesmen came out of the showroom then, looked after Scott’s taillights, glanced at Bert. “It’s all under control,” Bert said. His voice shook. “Come on, Sissy. I’ll get you some coffee.”

  I followed him through the showroom into a warren of offices. He actually got me a cup of coffee from a big pot, and added cream and sugar. “You okay?”

  I would do anything Bert wanted; Scott had instructed my wired self to follow Bert’s orders. Obviously, Bert wanted me to answer his question. Maybe he even wanted to have a conversation with me.

  Yeah. That co
uld work.

  I gulped some coffee. It was really good coffee, made with real beans, unlike anything we could mimic in the future. “Sorta,” I said at last.

  “Come on back to my office. We can discuss sales details.”

  Bert led me past a couple of receptionist stations and the dealership’s auto repair shop to a small windowless office with a desk and two chairs, one behind the desk and one in front of it. The office was twice the size of my home cubicle, and the furniture was permanent instead of zipout. I knew he wouldn’t have comforts like self-adjusting lights, self-styling color schemes for the fabrics—well, actually, he didn’t even have fabrics—or self-adjusting hardness on the surfaces. Still, I liked the office.

  The room smelled deliciously of cigarette smoke.

  Bert locked the door and went around to the big chair behind the desk. I sat in the other chair and finished my coffee, sipping slow to delay whatever came next. Bert watched me. Finally I put my Styrofoam cup down on his desk.

  “Will you really—” Bert coughed and stared at the surface of his desk, which had a scatter of paperwork across it.

  I sighed. Scott’s instructions hadn’t been particularly lucid. “What do you want, Bert?”

  His gaze flashed up. His eyes looked hungry. “You are one top-of-the-line babe,” he said. “I’ve never made it with a punk chick before.”

  I felt weird shifting and swirling inside. Scott had told me to do whatever Bert wanted. Bert wasn’t very clear on what he wanted, but if I could jump the gun and give him what he was going to want before he even got around to saying it, maybe I could introduce a little free will into the equation.

  I rose. I perched on the edge of his desk, then swung my legs up and slithered across the desk toward him, scattering papers. He sat back in his chair, his eyes growing wider. I ran my tongue across my lips.

  “Okay,” Bert said. “But—”

  I leaned forward, and he backed up. The chair was on wheels. It slammed into the wall behind him.

  “I don’t—” Bert’s face glowed bright red.

  Hey. Maybe he didn’t want me after all. I pulled back, sat cross-legged on his desk, and studied him.

  “I mean,” Bert said. He inched the chair forward again with his toes. “You’re beautiful. Sleek and stylish. Great features. But I, uh—” Then he whispered, “This is just like those letters to Penthouse. What’s wrong with me?”

  “You’re nice,” I said.

  Bert turned even brighter red. He coughed. “Well, uh, you don’t, uh.”

  I waited. I wondered if I could have some more coffee. I was liking this situation a lot. It was so much more benign than a lot of the unwelcome memories that had crowded into my brain when Scott said “sniggle” to me.

  Bert struggled. “You’re not going to tell, uh, Scott, uh—”

  “I’ll tell him whatever you want me to.”

  “You’ll tell him I was a giant stud?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  Bert turned to stare at a calendar on the wall. It showed a scenic view of the Grand Canyon. I had seen lots of pictures of that. The real thing was just another underwater feature in my time.

  “Say, Sissy?” Bert said after a little while.

  “Yes?”

  “Is Scott ever bringing my car back?”

  I blinked. “I don’t know. I never worked with him before.”

  “Oh, God.” Bert got to his feet. “I should never have handed him those keys. I never even looked at his driver’s license. I wonder if I should call the cops.”

  I checked my wristwatch. “He said he’d be back in half an hour.” We had forty-eight hours to complete our mission before the autoreturn kicked in; we could also end early, so long as we did enough planning. Either way, Scott and I needed to get us and our car back to that parking place in Venice. Autoreturn would work if you weren’t in exactly the right place, but you couldn’t count on it working well.

  Bert unlocked the door and opened it. “I wonder if he will,” he said.

  I wondered, too. I’d had partners decide to decay on me before, I now knew, with my new access to all the forbidden memories. Guys who had scratched their itches and only made them stronger, guys who wanted to stay in the past. They had been confident that they could make me leave them there, knowing how I was wired. And yet, somehow, I’d never lost a partner. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how rare a record like that was. Everybody I knew at CollectorCorps had lost something except me.

  Bert got me some more coffee and then we went out into the lot and watched cars speeding by on the four-lane roadway with the big stoplights next to the dealership. After we’d stood outside watching traffic for a while, one of the other salesmen approached us. He looked just as suited and restrained as Bert did. “So, how do you like our new line?” Bert asked me as the other man came over.

  “Awesome,” I said.

  “We make the best cars in the world.”

  “I totally believe you.”

  “Miss, are you interested in purchasing a Cadillac?” asked the second salesman.

  “I’d like a whole fleet.”

  The salesman stared at me as though I was insane, then looked toward the L.A. skyline and shrugged.

  I tried to look important and famous, as though I could afford a whole fleet of Cadillacs. Camo can do that for you.

  “I’ll cut you in on the commission, Hector,” Bert said. “I’m going to talk options with Sissy now.”

  Hector smiled and headed back to the showroom.

  The green Cadillac Eldorado pulled into the parking lot and stalled, which you’d think no one could make a Cadillac do. It shuddered, shook, and stopped. Scott got out.

  “Bert,” I said.

  “Sissy.”

  “Do me a favor?” Scott was coming toward us. He smiled and smiled.

  “For a favor,” Bert said.

  “Tell me: ‘Whatever happens, Sissy, don’t forget, this time.’ ”

  “Huh?”

  “Please. Just say it.”

  “Okay. Whatever happens, Sissy, don’t forget, this time.”

  Something fast as fire and sour-sweet shocked its way through me. Take that, wire!

  “Sissy?” Bert said.

  “Thanks.” I put all my heart into it.

  “Will you tongue-kiss me?”

  “Sure.”

  In full view of Scott and everybody in the showroom, I gave Bert a tongue-kiss of a lifetime. We both tasted of coffee and desperation. In that moment I loved Bert more than anyone I’d ever known.

  “Sniggle!” said Scott from behind us.

  I brushed Bert’s tongue with mine one last time before I let him go.

  “Give it up, Sissy. You’re back on my time. Let’s go. We have work to do!” Scott sounded mad.

  Meanwhile, Bert was excited. “Will you marry me?”

  “No, honey. But thanks for asking.” Wait. How could I say no to Bert when Scott had told me to do whatever Bert wanted? I guessed the new orders canceled the old ones.

  Bert gave me a really sweet smile and turned to Scott. “So, Mr. Madrone, have you decided on a color for your Cadillac?”

  “Why don’t you give me a brochure that outlines all my options, and I’ll get back to you?”

  Bert went inside and got a full-color brochure. “This explains all our options and has color chips,” he said.

  “Thanks, Bert.” Scott took the brochure, grabbed my arm, and dragged me back to our car, where he handed me the keys. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Scott yelled over his shoulder. I took one more look at Bert. Bert blushed and waved his fingers. I waved mine.

  “Get in and drive,” Scott said.

  Night had drifted in while Scott was off battling traffic and I was teasing Bert. I climbed into our car’s driver’s seat. I glanced at Scott, wondering why he was letting me drive.

  “After a while, it was too much,” Scott said. “They’re crazy out there.”

  I starte
d the car, flicked on the headlights, and pulled out onto the road. I wondered where Scott wanted to go, but I didn’t want to ask him, in case he told me to shut up again. I liked being able to converse.

  Scott slumped in his seat.

  Since he didn’t give me any directions, I drove us back to Venice and parked in the very spot where we had arrived that morning. Then I sat there staring at people through the windshield. In the night, the music from bars with open doors was louder, and there were more tourists and locals wandering the street.

  Scott sat silent for a long time. Then he said, “I now return control of this mission to you, except stop bossing me around all the time, and forget everything that’s happened today. When I say the word, you’ll think we’ve just arrived. No, that won’t work. You already got the money. You’ll remember the part about singing on the sidewalk, only you’ll think it happened at night, and that we can go into the next phase right now. Forget everything that happened since I said sniggle this morning. Ready? Three . . . two . . . one . . . sniggle.”

  I felt extremely odd. Little clicks pinged my brain. I clung to Bert’s command. No matter what happened, I wouldn’t forget this time. And I didn’t forget; but the knowledge kind of dropped away. I sat up and said, “What are we doing in the car? We have a comic book to buy.” I went to the back of the car, opened it, opened my guitar case, and fished money out from under my guitar. “Come on.”

  Scott got out and followed me. We went to a head shop and found five copies of Minus Men #121, all in mint condition. I bought them and slipped them into protective sleeves I had brought with me, along with the receipt for authentication, and then Scott and I went to supper.

  How strange, I thought, how strange, as I sleepwalked through the rest of the mission, on the surface my usual self, and underneath turning over all my new and horrible knowledge. We slept in the car and washed up at a public rest room on the beach the next morning. I got us into the convention hotel where the SciFi con was being held. I managed to sneak us into the bar when the author and artist went there; we didn’t have to pay a membership fee to the convention or go to any of the programming; I had memorized target faces before we tressed, the way I always did. The boys were flattered to be asked for autographs.