by Tanith Lee
So we run away in turn. To escape. These efficient machines facilitate the flight to keep us always neatly in limbo, the chastisement of anomalous sliding time. But we’re happy to fly. We don’t want to know what has become of you.
And Shift no longer means the frame, the sight of Merah.
Tomorrow, never having written any of this, I may write it again, differently. Or I may decide sensibly not to write it. Or, come on it written, and destroy it peevishly. Or write instead a letter to Merah she will never read. By starlight through the window.
It was Robespierre, that arch-revolutionary, who jotted in his note-book, “A writer is the most dangerous enemy his country can have.”
And, I confess, in that age of dreaming, drowning ostriches I left (was dragged from), I found fiction the sharpest weapon. It makes a thin cut they can’t feel. And knowledge pours in like poison. By the time you know, it’s too late. Awareness is in your veins. You’re done for.
I had just written these words, when one of the hoveror machines came in at my door, and at the same second, light flowed over my window.
“A request has come to our attention, your desire for further coded-viewing of the female subject with whom you cohabited.”
I had made that request, you remember. It was denied. Or I would make it and it would be denied. But here, by some fluke of their always-suspect mercy, it is made, and it is acceptable.
I don’t want to see her any more. What’s their game?
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said.
“Your relationship with the woman was a close one. It is thought best you see.”
I got up. The Star, something, confused my vision. It could only be one thing, this.
One should armor oneself at such times. Why help them, why comply with their schemes by growing afraid? Why, in any case, fear? It must be over, or they couldn’t show me. Beyond this place, only past time was available. To enter the frame with it, it must be finished. Concluded, then. Whatever they had done to her, it was no longer happening. They would show me her death. It had to be.
Guided by the hoveror, I went up all the ramps, onto the shadowy platform, and stood under the top part of the egg-shell, waiting for the Shift. The machines threw their switches, and I fell down, weightless, warm, into a room somewhere on Earth.
It had the smell of Earth. (In the frame, scent, sometimes vagaries of touch — such as the effect of temperature — may be present, with the senses of sight and hearing.) A city. Traffic, and revitalized air, the dusts of streets unslaked, and neon breath. But stars stood in the night-time window. The room was high up in a tall building and looked mostly into the sky. It was very white, the room, and pristine. Antiseptic mingled with the smells of the city. It was a hospital room, and in the bed, an old woman was quietly dying all alone. She looked eighty years old. She might be much younger, or a great deal older, depending on how her life had mapped itself, what money she had had, and what drugs and vitrogens she had been given access to. The room was serviceable, but had no hints of opulence. Probably she was poor. Had she kept her convictions? Jettisoned them? Were they even hers. No one was in the room with her. No friends, no husband — no one, after me? Or just some accident of timing, they were outside or on their way —
They would not be quick enough.
Merah. Black hair, gold, and now grey and brittle. The white bed seems to suck your life away. Your eyes are closing. Merah I’m here, but useless to you. I can’t be such a fool any more as to call your name, or try to hold your hand. You can’t see me. Merah, I was miles away, hurrying back to you but never getting home. Merah, I brought you to this, but you let me. What happened to you, between that time of then, and this, all those years between?
She looks so old it makes her seem very young again, like the child on the beach. Her dancer’s hands twitch on the sheet. Thin hands, that show the marks of incipient arthritis the proper drugs have retarded. How clean she is, how sterilized. Her cool eyes are colorless. Is she afraid?
We were the dreamers, weren’t we, you and I? And here, our dreams have brought us. You to this white beached death alone. And I to the realization that if today I see your death, some fifty years after I left you — then somewhere today exists, the proof I will be their prisoner fifty years. Or more. For though I can travel forward, I can’t see Earth’s future, can I? I can only be shown what has already happened there….
Merah? Oh. She’s dead. She died, when my mind wandered. Only a moment of appalled self-pity, and in that moment —
Already the room’s fading. They’re taking me back from the frame.
Did I ever write to you? Did you see the letters? Letters heavily censored. Parts of them? How long did you remember me? The unborn child, or the bold marches, the sound of ice-cannon, Lion Square, the private press under the police ray, metal running like chocolate — any of it? No? Thank God, I think you had forgotten. Your face was so empty.
I have been their prisoner fifty years or more, yet it seems I have been here a year — less. She died in the past, for that is all they can show, with Earth. Where have I been, how many chess matches, how many thousands of walks, six-thousands of black miles? What have I forgotten? Christ, oh Christ.
“Why do you think about it?” Edvey says to me “You’ll never go back. Take me. A wife, two wives, five children. Three sisters. The horses, the coffee crop, the mansion, my films. My God, Calle, you can’t think about it.” He picks up the yellow bishop, and I think of taking it away from him, but what does it matter if he messes up the game?
I always believed insanity was a sudden thing, but it blossoms slowly. It’s in me now, I feel the bud, its pressure, ready to fold open.
Wyld is sitting smiling under the window. He looks at the Star, and he starts to cry, with no tears. At that minute, the Star begins to pulse, whiter and whiter, brighter and more bright.
“Shift.”
“You bet,” says Edvey. “Shift.”
So now I have written it, my poisoned fiction which is the truth, my story, my Realm of Darkness: A Final Siberia. For the historical time-videos will remind you that to that wide land, which had become a virtual acronym of such things, that long land of pines and birch trees, under its lemon-tinted and colossal sky, the rebels were sent long ago. They took their places in the cold country and underwent the programs that have since been banned, till their minds were wiped clean as porcelain tiles. Or so they say.
Siberia — was nothing to this.
In the next room, Merah is sleeping, with her black hair spread on the pillows. She said to me once that, as a child, she believed a dancer should have black hair. I could steal in and lie down on that hair, and sleep, too. But instead I’m going out, to creep through the restricted streets at two in the morning, to the printers in the alley.
I know, of course, that this is my warrant for arrest I have written out here. These papers. I speak of what I have only read about. But I shall know it, soon.
Tomorrow, or the day after, they’ll come for me. The trial will be minimal, but legal. And then I shall enter the realm of darkness, the umber formlessness under the sharp blades of light, the Star that will be the sun.
I am afraid of it. I’m afraid of what I have done. But I had to do it. Though we shall never win, we must fight. Only by fighting can we keep hold of our humanity. The fight is the victory.
It seems to me, though it isn’t quite yet, already I hear them on the stairs. And I hear the slammed door of the prison mobile, its siren. And I hear the echo as I fall downward into the crystal.
You, all of you out there on the smarting back of the Earth, remember sometimes we’re here, in that place, as you walk straight forward from day to day, from night to night, under your skies of many stars.
* The portion of poetry quoted at the beginning is from the book Rossya © Red Man, Oleander Press, 1978.
A Day in the Skin
(or, the century we were out of them)
And the first thing you more or l
ess think when you get Back is: God, where’s everything gone? (Just as, similarly, when you get Out you more or less think, Hey, where’s all this coming from?) Neither thought is rational, simply outraged instinct. The same as, coming Back, it seems for a moment stone silent, blind dark, and ice cold. It’s none of those. It’s nothing. In a joking mood, some of us have been known to refer to it, this — what shall I call it? this place — as Sens-D (sensory deprivation). It isn’t though, because when your Outward senses — vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch — when they go off, other things come on. The alter-senses. Hard to describe. For a time, you reckon them as compensation, stand-ins, like eating, out in the skin world, a cut of sausage when you hankered for a steak. Only, in a while it stops being that. It becomes steak. The equivalent senses are just fine, although the only nontechnical way I can come up with to express them is in terms of equivalents, alternatives. And time itself is a problem, in here, or down there, or where the hell ever. Yes, it passes. One can judge it. But one rarely does, after the first months. In the first months you’re constantly pacing, like some guy looking at his watch: Is it time yet? Is it time now? Then that cools off. Something happens, in here, down there.… So that when at last the impulse comes through Time to get up (or Out), you turn lazily, like a fish in a pool (equivalents), and you equivalently say, Oh really? Do I have to?
“Sure, Scay. You do have to. It’s in the Company contract. And if I let you lie, there’d be all hell and hereafter to pay HQ. Not to mention from you, when you finally get Out for keeps.”
So I alter-said, in the way the impulse can assimilate and send on, “How long, and what is it?”
“One day. One huge and perfect High Summer day. Forty-two hours. And you got a good one, Scay, listen, a real beauty.”
“Male or female?”
“A fee-male.”
“All right. I can about remember being female.”
“First female for you for ten years, ah? Exciting.”
“Go knit yourself a brain.”
Dydoo, who manages the machines, snuffled and whined, which I alter-heard now clearly, as he set up my ride. I tried to pull myself together for the Big Wrench. But you never manage it. Suddenly you are whirling down a tunnel full of fireworks, at the end of which you explode inside a mass of stiff jelly. And there I was, flailing and shrieking, just as we all flail and shriek, in the middle of a support couch in the middle of Transfer.
“Husha hush,” said the machines, and gentle firm mechanical arms held me and held me down.
Presently I relapsed panting — yes, panting. Air.
“Look up,” said Dydoo. I looked. Things flashed and tickered. “Everything’s fine. You can hear me? see me?”
“I can even smell you,” I gasped, tears streaming down my face, my heart crashing like surf on the rocks. There was a dull booming pain in my head I cared for about as much as Dydoo cared for my last remark. “Dydoo,” I continued, speech not coming easy, “who had this one last? I think they gave it a cranial fracture.”
“Nah, nah. ’S all right. Mike tied one on with the wine and brandy-pop. It’s pumped full of vitamins and de-tox. Should take about a hundred and fifteen seconds more, and you’ll feel just dandy, you rat.”
I lay there, waiting for Mike Plir’s hangover to go away, and watched, with my borrowed eyes, Dydoo bustling round the shiny bright room. He is either a saint or a masochist (or are they the same?). Since one of us has to oversee these particular machines, he agreed to be it, and so he took the only living quarters permanently available. The most highly developed local fauna is a kind of dog-like creature, spinally adapted for walking upright, like the Terran ape, and with articulated forepaws and jaw. With a little surgery, this nut-brown woolly beast, with its floppy ears and huge soulful eyes, was all ready for work, and thus for Dydoo.
“My, Dydoo,” I said, “you look real sweet today. Come on over, I’ll give you a bone.”
“Shurrup,” growled Dydoo. No doubt, these tired old jests get on his furry nerves.
Once my skull stopped booming, I got up and went to look at myself in the unlikely pier-glass at one end of the antiseptic room.
“Well, I remember this one. This used to be Miranda.”
There she stood, twenty-five, small, curvy, a little heavy but nice, creamy gold, with long fair hair down to her second cluster of dimples.
“Yeah. Good stuff,” said Dydoo, deciding yet again he doesn’t or can’t afford to hold a grudge more than a minute.
“How long, I wonder, before I get a go at my own —”
“Now you know it doesn’t work like that, Scay. Don’t you? Hah?”
“Yes, I know it doesn’t. Just lamenting, Dydoo. Tell me, who had me Out last time?”
“Vundar Cope. And he broke off a bit.”
“What? Hexos Christ! Which bit?”
“Just kidding,” said Dydoo. “If you’re worried, I’ll take you over to the Store and let yah look.”
“No thanks, for Chrissake. I don’t like seeing myself that way.”
“Okay. And try to talk like a lady, can’t you?”
“Walkies, Dydoo,” I snarled. “Fetch!”
“Ah, get salted.”
It took me a couple of quivery hours to grow accustomed to being in Miranda’s body — correction, Fem. Sub. 68. I bruised my hips a lot, trying to get between and by furniture that was no longer wide enough for me. The scented bath and the lingerie were exciting, all right. But not in the right way. I’d been male in the beginning and much of the time after, and I’d had a run of being male for every one of my fifty-one days a year Out, for ten, eleven years. That’s generally how it’s designated, unless an adventurous preference is stated. Stick with what you’re used to. But sometimes you must take what you can get. I allowed a while before I left Transfer, to see to a couple of things. The lingerie and the mirrors helped. It was a safe bet, I probably wouldn’t be up (to miscoin a phrase) to any straight sex this holiday. Besides, I didn’t know who else was Out, and Dydoo had gotten so grouchy in the end, I hadn’t bothered to ask. Normally there are around forty to fifty people in the skin on any given day. Amounts of time vary, depending on how the work programs pan out and the “holiday” schedules have built up. My day, I now recalled, was a free diurnal owing to me from last year, that the Company had never made up. Perfect to the letter, our Company. After all, who wants to get sued? Not that anyone who sues ever wins, but it’s messy.
I wondered, as the moving ramp carried me out into town, just what Dydoo was getting paid to keep him woofing along in there.
The first body I passed on Mainstreet was Fedalin’s, and it gave me the creeps, the way it still sometimes does, because naturally it wasn’t Fedalin inside. Whoever was, was giving it a heck of a time. Red-rimmed eyes, drug-smoked irises, shaking hands, and faltering feet. To make matters worse, the wreck blew a bleary whistle after Miranda’s stacking. I didn’t stop to belt him. My lady’s stature and her soft fists were of use only in one sort of brawl. I could see, I thought, nor for the first, why the Company rules keep your own personal body in the Store whenever you yourself are Out. It means you never get into your own skin, but then too, there are never any overlaps, during which you might meet yourself on the sidewalk with some other bastard driving. Pandemonium that would be, trying to throttle them, no doubt, for the lack of care they were taking with your precious goods — and only, of course, ending up throttling yourself. In a manner of speaking. Although I didn’t like looking at my own battered old (thirty-five) skin lying there, in ice, like a fish dummy, in the Store, I had once or twice gone over and compulsively peeked. The second occasion not only gave me the shivers, but I’d flown into a wow of a rage because someone had taken me Out for a week’s leave and put ten pounds on my gut. Obviously, the machines would get that off in a few days. (The same as lesions, black eyes, and stomach ulcers get got rid of. The worst I ever heard tell of was a cancerous lung that required one whole month of cancer-antibodies, which is twice as
long as it takes to cure it in a body that’s occupied.) But there, even so, you get upset, you can’t help it. So it’s on the whole better not to go and look, though HQ says it’s okay for you to go and look — to prove to us all our skins are still around in the public lending library. Goddamn it.
The contract says (and we all have a contract) that as soon as the Bank is open for Business (five years it’s supposed to be now, but five years ago they said that, too) we all go Back into our own bodies. Or into new improved bodies, or into new improved versions of our old bodies, or — you name it. A real party, and we all get a prize. When it all started, around eighty years ago, that is, once everybody had settled after the initial squalling matches, Violent Scenes, hysteria, etc., some of us got a wild thrill out of the novelty. Pebka-Sol, for example, has it on record always, where possible, to come Out as a lady. And when he finally gets a skin of his own again, that is due to be a lady, also. But Pebka-Sol lost his own skin, the true, masculine one, so he’s entitled. I guess we’re the lucky ones, me, Fedalin, Miranda, Christof, Haro — those of us that didn’t lose anything as a result of the Accident. Except, our rights…
I try to be conscientious myself, I really do. But handling Miranda was going to be a drag. She’s a lot littler than me, or than I’m used to, and her capacity is less. I’m used to drinking fairly hard, but hard was the word it was going to be on her, if I tried that; plus she’d already been doused by some jack, yesterday. I walked into the bar on Mainstreet, the bar we used to hit in gabbling droves long, long ago under the glitter-kissed green dusk, when we were our own men and women. No one was there now, though Fedalin’s haunt had just walked him out the door. I dialed a large pink Angel and put it, a sip at a time, into Miranda’s insides, to get her accustomed. “Here’s not looking at you, kid,” I toasted her.