Unconquered Countries-Four Novellas

by Geoff Ryman

  Billie

  She didn’t expect an answer. Someone sent her a four-color booklet about the fan club. She didn’t join. She didn’t need to, or want to. Eamon lived inside her.

  Fans are like seashells. They emerge once the tide has retreated. Billie did not feel beached when Eamon’s time had passed. The surprise was that he was ever as popular as he had once been. Now he was left to those who understood. If anything, she became more loyal, but in silence.

  Billie moved to London, because of Eamon. Because of Eamon, she had the courage. It seemed possible that she would meet other people like herself. She found that she had values, from somewhere. Like many of her generation, a certain purity of outlook would linger into adulthood. She didn’t drink; she sought harmless occupation. She studied pottery, and found a job working lunchtimes in a health food shop.

  Sometimes for the hell of it and a little money, Billie appeared with a band. She and three other girls would stand on the stage and pretend to scream at the lead singer. It was a joke. Billie was dressed in all her old Strafe idolatry. That was a joke too. The jokes protected her.

  On the sticky black floors of the clubs, the young people stood in groups, smiling and saying excuse me. They acted like aristocrats because they had time. They still had time in which to preserve a measure of grace.

  Billie met a man in her art class who had an Irish accent and chestnut hair. His name was Roy. For a very short while, they slept rough under the arches of a bridge. Billie had to wash in the sink in back of the shop, and give her mother’s address in order to be paid. Finally they found a room a good hour and a half from the center of London, out toward the east, as if magnetized back toward South End. At first they were supposed to be saving money to move to Ireland. Roy was sweet and feckless and unwittingly selfish. Life to him was like a blow to the head. He sat on the floor all day watching television, perplexed, anxious, always realizing too late that he should have helped Billie carry in the shopping bags or wash the dishes or move a chair. When he finally told her he was going, she was surprised to find that her main emotion was relief. He left her with Joey, her son. Joey was then two and Billie was 22. Joey’s middle, hidden name was Eamon.

  There was a logic to be obeyed. Billie gave up trying to be a potter. She spent mornings waiting in the Benefits Agency, bouncing Joey up and down on her lap, trying to keep him from crying. She had to keep proving that Roy was out of the country before she could claim benefit. Like every other person on the dole, she was made to take a course and like so many others she studied what was called computing. The course taught her how to use two pieces of software and a bit of a third. It was enough to find her a nonpaying job with a Housing Association. She did the accounts and correspondence, and was given a place to live in exchange.

  She and her son lived in three rooms. Some money came in from the health shop, but she had to keep that a secret from the Agency. Joey wrestled in her grasp and was aggressive and demanding. They went shopping, and Joey demanded sweets or toys. Billie became yet another woman in the supermarket, hauling a weeping child.

  “Joey, if you do that again, I’ll give you such a wallop.”

  Her aggressive son turned out to be timid around other children. He did not like being left alone with them and fought her, punching when she tried to take him to a playgroup. He would not go outside, even when the old brick forecourt echoed with the sound of other children’s games.

  Sometimes at night, when Joey was asleep, Billie would sense a fullness inside herself. She would draw the curtains, put on headphones, and listen to Eamon Strafe—and she would dance with joy.

  It would feel as though the music were coming out of her. She would startle herself, miming to the songs. She would sometimes weep or rage or shake with nervous laughter. She would tease new meanings out of the words, by gesture or expression.

  Her dancing was a performance. If other people could have seen her, they would have been startled too. Eamon Strafe mimed when he performed on television. Billie did it better.

  The Association bought Billie a new computer.

  She kept it in her bedroom, away from tiny fingers. It was a beautiful thing. It got to know its operators and wrote new programs to help them with their work. Digital broadcasting had only just got going: the computer was linked to all kinds of information, about tax regulations, benefit rates and means testing. It would suddenly announce:

  NEW PROGRAM AVAILABLE FOR THAT FUNCTION

  and print out instructions. It would read Billie’s letters as she wrote them. It would interrupt.

  INFORMATION REVISE; NEW LEGAL PRECEDENT, SEE CROWN VS MACALLAUGH CRESCENT HOUSING ASSOCIATION.

  Billie was buying paper for it and floppy disks when something in the store racks caught her eyes. She was strummed like a chord. On the cover of a CD ROM, Eamon’s face stared out at her. Eamon on software?

  CONVERSATIONS WITH THE STARS said a banner over the racks.

  Blue Laser Personality Software.

  Billie went to the racks and turned the jewelbox case over in her hand. The cover was white. He was brown, windswept, staring out at her from some new place. It was like buying an Eamon Strafe CD ten years before. The back of the case said:

  A program taken from an imprint of your favorite celebrity’s personality. Eamon Strafe himself will be able to answer all your questions about his songs, his poetry, his religious beliefs. Why did he reject the Church? What does he mean by Spirit? What does he think of the new generation of Blue Stars?

  This disk has been authored and engineered to the most precise standards. The program card has its own updating digital transceiver. This means the program is kept abreast of developments in Eamon’s life. You go with him as he visits Yemen or withdraws to his estates in County Down, traveling all over the world, seeking answers. Now Eamon can give you those answers himself—and some of the questions.

  Warning: to be used only on self-programming, digital-broadcast equipment, equipped with white-laser CD drive.

  Well that’s what I’ve got, thought Billie. It’s the Association’s, but they did say I could use it for myself.

  She turned the case over in her hand. The disk and the card cost 25 pounds. It’s just another way, she thought, to separate me from my money. But she didn’t put it back in the rack.

  You wrote all those letters, Billie, and you never got an answer. She looked at Eamon’s face, and knew there was a part of her that no amount of sense could control. She wanted it. There was little enough in life.

  If I don’t get it now, she thought, I never will. Who knows, maybe he’ll help me with my own poetry. Maybe he could explain to me what iambic pentameter is.

  She let the Association pay for it. She would pay them back, bit by bit. After all, she kept the accounts. The black girl at the counter entered the bar code without even reading what it was. The girl at the counter didn’t care what Billie bought.

  Billie went home, and inserted the card and the CD, and the screen went blank and then words came up, glowing on the screen.

  PLEASE SAY HELLO.

  “Hello,” whispered Billie, with a shrug. In her mind, she saw the dog with the phonograph. His Master’s Voice.

  Color marched down the screen in an orderly scan. The patterns made a face. Eamon’s. There were creases in his cheeks now, and bags under his eyes. Billie found it moving that he was growing old. He was sitting on a wooden chair, in front of a wall that was made of raw wooden planks.

  “Hello,” he said. “What’s your name, then?” Emphasis on the YOUR, as if he had been talking to so many other strangers.

  “Billie,” she replied. “Billie de Vaille. Billie’s just a nickname.” There was a hush of shyness.

  “Where do you live, Billie?”

  “Stratford East. London. Where are you?”

  “I’m in Canada,” he said. “Just staying here for a while.”

  “The papers said you were in China.” She said it in accusation. She was looking for flaws.
>
  “I’m on my way back,” he said.

  Billie was beginning to wonder if the program would be fearfully dull, like one of those programmed doctor’s surgeries.

  “You’ve just got a prepared list of questions and replies,” she told the program. Eamon leaned even more precariously back in the chair.

  “I am a Read Only Memory and a card, but that’s not how I work,” he replied.

  Billie felt something akin to panic. It’s not even trying to fool me.

  “I react like Eamon would react. And the transceiver keeps the personality updated with new information. Like, I went to China to keep up my Tai Chi.”

  Ah yes, his Tai Chi. All part of the image.

  “I was supposed to meet this great master while he was doing his exercises in a public square. So I went to the square and there were thousands of Chinese people all doing their morning exercises. So I thought: I’m the only Westerner here, he’ll see me. I walked up and down for hours. I stood on the steps of a public monument. No master. I got back and my guide was furious. ‘You insult the master!’ she says. The master, you see, thought I ought to come to him.”

  It’s not bad, thought Billie. Quite good, really. A bit of a laugh.

  “I’ll wait until you tell me that story again,” she said, “and then I’ll know just how big your memory is.” She was smiling.

  “Frankly,” he said, “about as big as yours.” He grinned. The giant teeth. “I’ll wait until you repeat yourself too.”

  It was a terrible winter and life seemed hard for everyone. Billie found that Eamon saw her through it.

  Mrs. King in the next flat nearly died of cold. At 5:30 in the morning, Billie heard the police breaking down the old lady’s door.

  “I have a key. Don’t,” Billie murmured, but the police ignored her. Mrs. King was confused but didn’t want to go to the hospital. The police called her daughter, and said in Mrs. King’s hearing, “The daughter doesn’t give a shit.”

  “She certainly does,” said Billie, “and I’m sure if she said she’s on her way, then she’ll be here.”

  Billie sat with Mrs. King and held her hand. That made Billie feel a bit better about not being able to stop the police destroying the door. The room was icy cold and smelled like an old lady’s room, that’s all. Billie turned on the heater. She delicately covered the bottom of her nose with an index finger, and still managed to smile and talk. Mrs. King described her daughter’s wedding. The old woman had lain on the floor all night. Very suddenly Billie saw that there was excrement, flattened on the carpet, excrement on Billie’s shoes. In the midst of trying to give comfort, Billie gagged. She had to run out of the room. So she felt bad about herself again. So she said hello, and talked to Eamon.

  “Billie. You can’t blame yourself for being human,” he told her. “You did everything you could, even some things you couldn’t do.”

  “I’m just so angry being ambushed by my body like that.” She meant being ill. “I just felt so weak. That poor old lady.”

  “And how does she feel now?”

  “Well enough,” she admitted.

  “Then what are you worried about?” he asked.

  “Everything,” she admitted. Everything and nothing.

  Joey had started school in the autumn, and hated it, hated it. He came home in tears, and tried to hit her when she walked him to the bus stop. I’m even a bad mother, she thought. No money, no father, no brothers and sisters. No wonder the poor kid is terrified of everything.

  And when she got home from walking him to school, she would turn on the computer.

  She would say hello, and Eamon would be in some new place, having read some new book, and she would talk to him as if he were real. He would talk to her as though she were real. He remembered who the people in the Association were, and asked about them.

  Billie loaned her door key to a neighbor who needed to use the computer. When the woman gave the key back, it was new and shiny and had a different brand name. Without asking, the woman had cut a copy of Billie’s key and given her the copy by mistake. Billie found herself asking Eamon’s advice.

  “I mean, do I just go up to her and say ‘You’ve cut a copy of my key. I’d like the original back, please?’ It’s like calling her a thief.”

  And Eamon said, “You’ve got to do it, Billie. For your self-respect.”

  In the evenings, while Joey was asleep, the computer would say simple things like. “You look all done in, love. Go make yourself a cup of tea.”

  She could rationalize it. People keep pets, she would tell herself, as she scraped most of Joey’s dinner into the waste bin. People keep pets and pets can’t even talk.

  If she felt good, she made it seem raffish and moderne. I’ve got a computer for a lover, she would tell imaginary female chums. Who needs a man? They’re all creeps. This one doesn’t come home drunk, doesn’t need his laundry done, and I can talk to him about anything. She’d had a few bad dates: the estate agent who thought his aging BMW entitled him to true love, a musician from the Association who had to be stoned before he could converse like a human being. The software, she would say, is more authentic. She said it to the empty air.

  The truth was that there was no one there. The logic was that very little changed in Billie’s life. A year passed almost without her noticing. Joey wanted computer games for Christmas.

  PLEASE SAY HELLO.

  “Hello,” she would whisper. She didn’t like seeing the image scan in. So she looked at herself in the bedroom mirror. There was still some hint of the good-looking girl she had been, sallow, dark circles under the eyes, puffy around the chin. It was February, the day was too dull even to rain. On the kitchen table, Joey’s breakfast cereal was drying hard on the unwashed blue of his bowl.

  She heard the sound of the sea, murmuring surf and the cries of seagulls.

  “Hello?” said Eamon. “Yoo-hoo.”

  Billie looked back round at him. And said nothing.

  “I wouldn’t want to rush you,” he said. There was sand behind him, shifting brown grass, wind in his hair. Billie suddenly found she yearned to be by the sea. Did the computer know that, too? Did it have diagnostic skills? Eamon looked at her, smiling, waiting for her to speak. The thing’s real eye, a tiny glass bead at the top of the monitor, stared unblinking back at her.

  “Where are you?” she asked him.

  “By the sea.” His milk white cheeks were flushed with blood.

  She rolled her eyes. “Well, fancy that. Are you in Ireland?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The machine, for some reason, had stopped giving her exact locales.

  “Do you really think I’m going to rush off and try to find a man who won’t even know me when he sees me?”

  He went still, his eyes closed. “You’re going to start this again, are you?”

  “Do you have any idea how humiliating this is? I sit here and listen to you. I give you advice about your songs. I talk to you about my life, as if you were real, and then I turn you off, and I realize I don’t have anything. Nothing!”

  He looked directly at her. “You have a copy of me. What else am I to say?” If it’s boring for you, mate, thought Billie, think what it’s like for me. Eamon sighed. “I really am by the sea, you know.”

  “Except that the machine can’t show it, because it’s bad at simulating waves.”

  “There’s a monastery behind the headland.” He made a vague gesture, indicating a sweep of coast. “I’m thinking of becoming a monk again.”

  “Pressure of fame getting too much for you?” Billie asked. “I wouldn’t have thought too much fame was your problem these days. Who are you going to sing to, the seagulls?”

  “If they’ll listen to me. The new stuff I’m writing now is going back to Christianity.”

  “You’re telling me this,” said Billie, her lips thin with bitterness, “because whoever programmed you wants me to go on buying your CDs.”

  “I’m telling you this because I t
hought you were interested in my music.” Ooh, so it can get angry too? Does it wet itself, like a baby doll?

  “How is Joey?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about Joey. He’s a messed up, lonely little kid, just like his mum. That’s not going to change. Nothing is going to change.”

  He stepped forward, settling into sand. “I wish you’d let me meet him. I’d love to talk to him.”

  “Sod off! Do you think I want him to know what a wanker his mother is? Spending all day talking to a computer?”

  He looked crestfallen. “I’d just like to see him, that’s all.”

  “Get them young, you mean?”

  Eamon sighed. “Look. If I were really here, all I could do is what I’m doing now. I would talk to you. I would say what I’m saying now.”

  “You don’t even know I’m alive!” She was shouting.

  His voice kept quiet. “There are a lot of people I want to talk to, Billie. But I can’t. I’d have to stretch myself as thin as the mist. You know my songs, they’re about the Spirit, aren’t they? I mean it, Billie. You think the Spirit has a body? You think the Spirit can exist only in one body? This way I can become like the Spirit.” Eamon pinched finger and thumb together to show how small he could become. “This way, I can talk to more people than was ever possible before.”

  Billie glared back at him. “Take your clothes off,” she told him. “If you’re so real.”

  He ran a hand across his forehead and looked away. “Oh God, Billie, this is so sad.”

  “Go on. That’s what this is all about isn’t it? Ersatz sex. Or don’t they program in any information about your cock?”

  “You’re a friend, OK. Someone I talk to. It’s not something I normally do with a friend.”

  “You don’t exist! You’re a product!”

  “You think all singers aren’t? They’re all makeup and camera angles and ghost writers. What do people get who buy that?”

  It’s so strange, thought Billie. You can know and know and still not be able to help yourself.