by Stanley Bing
There was a weird silence, one of those that certain people can impose on you as a form of aggression. Arthur just looked at Gene and breathed. Gene could hear his breath, something between a wheeze and a whistle. His eyes were small and hard. You could see the edge of their parabolas in his eye sockets. The pupils were dark brown, shot through with yellow, ringed in green, the whites rheumy and gray. Over the whole ocular mechanism there was a greasy, drippy glaze.
Gene looked down at Lucifer, whose large, clear, deep-black eyes stared back into his. They were calm, sincere. All at once the creature sort of coughed and then sat on its stumpy haunches and uttered something that sounded like “Get me outta here.” It actually sounded like “Gemmeottahee.” Gene assumed he was hearing things.
“Okay,” said Arthur, rising decisively if creakily to his feet, and suddenly Sallie was at Gene’s shoulder once more. He smelled an indefinable fragrance, oil and spice and perhaps a bit of chocolate? Where had she gone? Had she been there all along? He had been so focused on the ancient mariner lurking in the shadowy corner of the darkened room, his beady eyes fixed on the object of his desire as if Gene were a sizzling T-bone.
“Time for Arthur’s lunch,” said Sallie, and touched Gene lightly once again on his elbow. Through his shirt and jacket, he again felt a pleasant warmth spread up his entire arm, into his neck, down his spine, and directly into his groin. He wanted it to happen again, as many times as possible.
They ate outdoors, near a pond they had constructed for Arthur’s daily swim. I don’t know how to swim, Gene thought. Or do I? But Arthur was talking. “So you,” he said to Gene, “are just a big, well-oiled machine and apparently haven’t a care in the world.”
“Well, sir, I don’t know about that.”
“Everything on you works, right? Nothing falling off, is there?”
Gene felt like laughing but was aware that this wasn’t really a joke. “No, sir,” he said. “Everything is attached pretty well. I seem to have a problem remembering stuff, but other than that, I think I’m pretty much okay.”
“Better be,” said Arthur, addressing his dish with mild disgust. “You cost a fortune.”
“Artie,” said Sallie.
“Know anything about business?” Arthur picked up his spork and dangled it horizontally at Gene in jaunty inquiry, fixing him with a narrow stare.
“Well, sir,” said Gene, “the fact is I have a lot of facts at my disposal, kind of rattling around in my head, little snippets of this and that, but I don’t seem to know a lot of the essentials that a person is supposed to know about himself. I know I’m here. I know it’s very nice here. But when you ask me about business? Actually? I have no idea what you mean. So no. I guess I don’t.” He picked up his knife and fork and dug into the perfect slab of beef that lay on the plate before him. The fact was, Arthur’s whole truculent, nasty attitude was starting to annoy him, which was quite a feat, since being in the proximity of Sallie provided him with a beautiful glow of mellow happiness that he never knew could exist. Just being around her was a bath of contentment and joy. And then there was Arthur. Gene sincerely hoped he wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time around this frickin’ jerk.
“This is the swill I have to eat,” muttered the very, very old man, glaring at what in truth was an unappetizing mess before him, a pureed slop divided carefully into discrete colorations and consistencies on the plate. Sallie was across the table, carving away at her superbly realistic fauxterhouse steak, looking up now and then to smile at Arthur, and then at Gene, as if indulging two gifted children.
“What I wouldn’t give for a real slab of perfectly marbled cow flesh,” Arthur grumbled, staring wolfishly at Gene’s sizzling hunk of protein. A substantial bolt of saliva burst from both sides of Arthur’s mouth and dribbled down his chin.
“Stop whining, honeypot,” Sallie said quietly to nobody in particular. Her words had an instantaneous effect on Arthur, who suddenly grew cowed, fearful. She rose and then leaned over him, putting a hand on his shoulder and leaning down to wipe his mouth with a heavy cloth napkin. “This drooling is getting to be a problem,” she observed in a confidential tone.
“Okay, okay,” he said. She went back to her seat, perched herself on the edge of it, and shot Gene a look he couldn’t quite read. Nothing bad, though.
Arthur was regarding Gene with narrow intensity over his glop. “This is actually very delicious, thank you very much,” he growled directly at Gene in a wounded and defensive tone, piercing his target with a glare heavy with scorn and hatred, daring him to offer a contradiction. Gene did not. Even in his odd, compromised state, he knew it was probably wise to choose your battles with guys like Arthur, and this particular skirmish didn’t seem all that important.
“Looks very good, sir,” he said.
“You wanna fucking eat any of it? Huh?” Arthur then hurled his spoon, dripping with goo, away from the table in the general direction of Gene. Most of it missed. “I’m sorry!” he yelled immediately. But he didn’t sound sorry. He sounded sorry for himself.
Sallie was on her feet. “I’m ashamed of you, Artie,” she said with some severity. Then she turned and inquired cordially, “Would you like to take a little tour of the hydroponia, Gene?” The question seemed like both a pleasant invitation to one man and a rebuke to the other.
“If it’s all right with Arthur,” Gene said. He had no desire to be rude to the old guy. He felt sort of sorry for him now, truth be told.
“Sure, sure,” said Arthur, who was now rubbing away at a spot of sodden mulch he had dropped onto the front of his shirt. “Fuck,” he said, regarding the stain sadly. “And I was doing so well.”
5
A Solution to the Problem of Death
Sallie took Gene’s arm, which turned molten at her touch, and walked him to the edge of the hydroponic floratopia. The smell of roses as yet unseen hung in the air. He heard the unmistakable sound of cascading water falling from a great distance into a lake or river. He knew this was impossible—that it was probably a prerecorded effect of some kind—but it was a nice sound. He liked it. As they reached the edge of the lawn beyond the patio, Sallie turned to regard her husband, arms crossed, her small, sandal-sheathed foot almost tapping imperceptibly.
“I want you to think about your behavior, Arthur,” she said sternly.
“Yes, Sallie,” said Arthur. Then he added: “I said I was fucking sorry.”
They left him staring into his excessively digestible lunch and ambled into the hanging flowers, drifting in companionable silence through the humid, nectar-sweet greenery, up a small hillside, and into a dark copse of real trees that parted high above them. What certainly looked like birds darted about up there in random patterns. But were they really random? Or programmed to a rhythm that would repeat itself only every ten thousand years? And were they actual birds with real bird blood in their veins, genuine feathers, tiny nonvirtual hearts pounding six hundred beats a minute within their chests? Did it matter?
As if reading his mind, Sallie said, “Yeah, the birds. I like them, too.” She peered up at the sky. “I recognize it’s possible they’re artificial. But does that make them any less real?”
“I guess in a way it does,” he said. Her physical presence was a heavy, hot penumbra enveloping him.
“But honestly,” said Sallie, her neck craning skyward most attractively, “how much genuine interaction did anybody ever have with a completely biological bird, even hundreds of years ago? A live one, way up high like that? How do we know they weren’t artificial even back then and implanted in our ecosystem by an alien species?”
This seemed crazy to Gene, but no crazier than a lot of things he was seeing. “It’s an assumption people made, I suppose,” he offered sagely. He was intensely engaged in the complicated process of not looking stupid, both to himself and to this remarkable woman.
“Well, look who’s here!” Sallie cooed in surprise. “Come here, Worm.”
She bent down and picked up a
stolid but somehow very droopy Lucifer, who gazed at Gene in evident triumph. “Her want attention, little bean,” said Sallie, and she squeezed the thing’s rather large, segmented black nose.
“You seem attached to . . . it,” he said.
“She very bad,” Sallie scolded while kissing the top of its head. “And don’t call her ‘it,’ ” she admonished him. Was she genuinely annoyed? If so, he really liked it. Her cheekbones were very high, her chin almost as triangular as that of her little greenish friend. She appeared to come to a very important decision.
“You may call her Lucy,” she declared.
There was a wind moving with slow and noisy progress through the trees high above them, heavy with the scent of fir and dirt and rain coming, maybe.
“Hey, Lucy,” he said, petting Lucy’s head and neck as she languished in ecstasy in Sallie’s arms.
“Wow,” said Lucy.
“She makes noises that sound like words,” he said, stroking it under its sleek, leathery chin.
“So far, she’s never gone over the line into actual speech,” said Sallie. “But look at this. Lucy . . .” She held the green object in the air in front of her, two arms extended, its face to hers. “Say woof.”
“Woof,” said Lucy, in a compliant, tolerant tone.
“Say woo.”
“Woo!” said Lucy. It stuck out a plump forked tongue and kissed Sallie on the end of her nose.
“Say ‘So long now.’ ” Sallie, at that moment, had the same goofy expression as the synthetic lizard, a beaming grin on her face, her juicy pink tongue slightly protruding most adorably.
“So long now,” said Lucy, or something very much like it. It came out as an odd, glottal sound, but the words were mixed in there somewhere. This was not all that shocking, right? Gene’s database contained information on parrots and mynah birds that had vocabularies of several dozen words. Of course, none of those were artificial entities created by life-form engineers. How did they whip up these things, anyhow? On that issue, Gene’s internal archive drew a blank. Interesting, he thought. With so much random material at his disposal, why nothing on that?
Sallie held out Lucy for Gene to receive. He did so, continuing to hold her in her comfortable position in midair at arm’s length. “Hey, pretty girl. What ya doin’?” he said. “Can you really talk?”
“Arf,” said Lucy, in what he could swear was a bored and sardonic tone. “Woof,” she added sarcastically.
“Perhaps she doesn’t want to perform like a trained seal,” said Sallie, taking her back and putting her gently on the ground. “She’s very sensitive about that. I don’t think she believes herself to be an artificial being put on the planet for a utilitarian purpose. But then, none of us do, do we?”
Gene had no idea what to say to this, although it did land a little bit oddly to his ear. So he said nothing.
They went back and rejoined Arthur, who was sitting at the table, doing very little except breathing, which seemed not completely autonomic for him. He looked fine, as far as that went, except that a thick, viscous fluid was oozing very slowly out of his ears.
“Shit,” he said. “Those fucking stem cells are coming out of my ears again.”
It was a loathsome sight, Gene thought. It looked like creamed spinach, the kind with little flecks of onion in it. Arthur was staring face front, resigned, angry.
“Artie,” said Sallie, and she bent down to wipe the sludge away with her sleeve. Gene noticed that. She didn’t go looking for a cloth napkin or anything. “It’s still better than the baby octopus stuff they had you on, right?” she cooed. “Remember what happened then.”
“This is so fucking humiliating,” said Arthur. Gene did feel sorry for him. There he was, with all the money in the world, and this was the final stop to which fate had delivered him. Didn’t seem fair. But there was no way to avoid it, was there? Same for everybody, thought Gene. Inevitable.
“There’s only so far that original receptacle can take him,” said Sallie, taking hold of Arthur’s hand and tracing his veins with her index finger, which was a full-time job, given their profusion and complexity. “His consciousness is fine.”
“Well,” said Gene, “that’s good.”
“Sort of. Maybe not. It makes him all too aware of his status as a prisoner of his own body.”
“Yeah,” said Gene, now completely at a loss as to the direction the conversation had taken. “I guess that does kind of suck.” He was immediately and painfully aware of the insufficiency of his reply, so once again he fell silent.
She looked at him, eyes very wide, looking for something inside him that he wished he knew how to give. That’s where it all starts, he thought. When a woman looks at you. Like, suddenly there’s a woman looking at you. Really looking. Then nothing is the same after that.
“So anyway,” he said, “I guess maybe I oughta be going?” The purpose of this visit, as pleasant as it may have been, was still cloaked in mystery to him. It had seemed important for him to come here. And he had come. And now he should go, right?
There was a silence, not uncozy. Sallie continued to hold Arthur’s hand, occasionally moving to clean up his ear, all the while staring at the husk of humanity with love and sadness while Gene took the opportunity to gaze at her. She knew he was looking at her, and permitted him to look at her, and he knew she had granted him permission, and she knew he knew.
After a short time, Arthur appeared to have fallen asleep. His eyes were closed, and his chin, slightly moist, rested comfortably on his chest, trembling slightly as a light snore passed in and out of his purple lips.
“Why don’t I put the cat on the roof,” said Sallie out of nowhere. As she did, she gently placed Arthur’s claw in his lap. Then she turned in her chair to face Gene full front, her hands on the knees of her caftan, legs spread very slightly under the flowing garment, feet flat on the stone of the patio, and leaned into him a bit, her eyes glistening with the risk she had suddenly decided to take—the walk along the precipice. “You know that joke?” she inquired. “A family has a daughter, who has a cat, which she loves, and one night the cat falls off the roof of the house and breaks its neck. It’s dead as a rag doll. So the father goes into his daughter’s room to tell her the bad news, and he blurts out to her, ‘Honey, I’m sorry to tell you this, but your cat is dead.’ Of course, the little girl goes nuts, sobbing, inconsolable. His wife hears this, and she is appalled, and goes to comfort the hysterical child. ‘Why did you do it like that?’ she scolds her husband. ‘You have to lead up to it. The first thing you should say is, like, “The cat is on the roof.” Then later you can break the news that the cat has fallen off the roof and we took it to the vet, and then, somewhat later, “So sorry, honey, your cat has passed away.” Then at least she’d be prepared at every stage of it.’ So, two weeks later, the father goes into his daughter’s room and sits by the side of her bed, and takes her hand carefully, and says to her, ‘Honey . . . Grandma is on the roof.’ ”
Gene thought it was a pretty funny joke but didn’t quite catch its relevance.
Sallie’s eyes had suddenly sprung a small leak. She dabbed at them with her sleeve and then plunged on as Arthur burbled quietly in his snooze. “He has this old, shitty carcass,” she said. “Artie. Every organ in there was acquired from somebody else, or grown specifically for him, or printed from a template. There’s almost nothing left of the original vessel that made up this twentieth-century man—this man who moved mountains, who invented things that have changed the course of human history. And yet it’s still him. It’s still him in there.” She gazed lovingly at this snoring husk for a while, misting up a little bit more. “You don’t really know how lovable he is,” she choked out, after a time. Gene didn’t say anything, but he had to agree with her. He really didn’t know how lovable Arthur was at all. In fact, he seemed like a spectacularly hateful old douchebag. But then again, first impressions can be misleading, he thought. Not often, though.
She turned to him
then, and her eyes took him in entirely, and he was in them so deep that it was like he saw God, or something even better in the short term.
“If he was inside you,” she said, “I could love both of you.”
“Wow,” said Gene. “Is that even possible?”
Sallie’s eyes plunged into Gene and swam around in there for a while. And it was in that viscous, immeasurably dense silence that a small germ of understanding cracked through the macadam of Gene’s willful stupidity, and he began, just a little, to see what Bob had been almost telling him, what Sallie was trying to say to him without quite saying it yet. And as the dark seed sprouted and poked up its twisted head, Gene beheld it and felt it germinate inside him, and it had teeth in it.
He stood, hoping that his terror did not show. In the back of his awareness, swirling around the Venus flytrap of his sudden insight, there was something else as well, possibly liberated by the shock of recognition. Not a flood, but a trickle of images, very faint now, but growing in shape and form. He didn’t recognize them, but there they were. One by one. A few objects, floating by as in a dream. A room somewhere. A nice room. And a woman. Small. Dark hair. With a dragon on her back. I like tomato sauce.
And then, I’ve got to get out of here. But I can’t let it show.
In that effort, he did not succeed completely. For during this second awakening, Gene lost control of his external mechanism. His eyes were focused on nothing; a complex mixture of expressions passed over his face, which up until now had displayed little but affability and occasional confusion.
Oh no, thought Sallie. I’ve seen this before.
“Let me walk you out,” she said abruptly. Then she rose to her feet and took his hand again. “It’s about time you got back to Bob, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes,” said Gene vaguely. “Bob.”
He didn’t argue, although his whole being revulsed at the idea of encountering Bob again, and he allowed Sallie to retain his hand. If his sudden forebodings were even slightly accurate, he needed to handle things with a little more care from here on in.