Beyond Flesh

by Gardner Dozois

  Every time Earl and Rebecca go back into operation, they find that Earl, no matter what his last programmed position, has returned to the crevasse where Element Rebecca chews through the ice. “I think it might be a case of love at first bite,” Rebecca tells Earl one night, as they walk along the dock, hand in hand.

  Earl’s response is to kiss her, though he stops a bit sooner than she would like. “I won’t break,” she tells him, playfully.

  “I might, though.” Earl feels frail, or dishonest. He has told Rebecca everything the doctors told him, that the growth is malignant, but that chemo and radiation and even some experimental genetic treatments might knock it down. For the first few days after being slammed with the news, he almost laughed it off, knowing he could fight and win. But the first rounds of chemo left him shaken. The horizon of his life has drawn closer, like that of an ice plain on Europa compared to the Pacific.

  “I’ll be gentle,” she says, kissing him again. Rebecca’s intensity has helped. It’s as if she is offering her own strength as another form of treatment.

  This is an evening in winter, with the marine layer already rolling in from the west, shrouding the hills of Point Loma across the bay. Earl is lost in them. “Still plowing snow on Europa?” she says, fishing for a connection.

  “No. Thinking about a trip I’ve wanted to make.” He nods out to sea. “Catalina Island’s out there, a hundred miles away. I’ve always wanted to sail up and never have.”

  “Doesn’t AGC give vacations?”

  “Sure. But nobody wants to take one with an op in progress.”

  “This one will end.”

  “For you,” he says, meaning Element Rebecca, who only has so much drilling to accomplish before she is shunted off to the side, to a secondary mapping mission for which she is ill-equipped. “Sorry,” he adds, realizing how shitty and snappish he sounds. “I just—”

  She touches a finger to his lips. “Sssh. I know exactly what you mean. I knew the ops plan when I signed up.”

  Within a few steps they reach the Atropos, and the sight of it bobbing in the twilight raises Earl’s spirits. By the time he has finished rigging it for an evening sail, he feels strong enough to face anything, and slightly ashamed of his earlier weakness. “Love at first byte,” he says, laughing. “I just now got it.”

  ###

  As the drilling proceeds, Element Earl is relegated to geological surveys of the area further to the north and east of the site. He finds it smoother, icier, and flatter than the terrain around Hoppa Station, and Earl himself wonders again why that location was chosen, only to be told by Haas that it provided easier access to the crevasse. Or so it seemed.

  In any case, the flight control team and the science support group are completely consumed by the descent of the submersible element through the ice and “the beginnings of the first real search for life in the history of human exploration of the solar system”—at least, according to the AGC Website.

  The cargo unit has replaced Element Rebecca at the drillhead, and she has been moved off to her secondary mission as well, mapping to the south and east of the hole in the ice, her data combined with Element Earl’s to give a multidimensional picture of the terrain. They amuse themselves by giving completely inappropriate southern California names to Europan landmarks: Point Loma for an ice lake, the Beach and Tennis Club for a jumble of ice boulders, Angeles Crest for a jagged crevasse, Catalina Island for a passageway visible on the far end of Point Loma.

  Neither element can venture too far away, of course, since they need to be in line-of-sight comm every few hours. Whenever Earl suits up, he finds himself strangely comforted by the sight of Element Rebecca—shiny, boxlike, asymmetrical, and small—through Element Earl’s sensors.

  ###

  In between shifts, Earl deals with ex-wives Kerry and Jilliane. The old bitterness toward and from Kerry still garbles communications between them, the way a solar flare degrades the SLIPPER link. The fact of Earl’s new condition only means that Kerry will allow some sympathy and tenderness to leak into encounters that have been frosty for years. The same applies to the children Ben and Marcy.

  Jilliane, who ultimately left Earl four years ago, is consumed by guilt, and offers herself as everything from nurse to sexual partner, until Earl’s work schedule and general moodiness cause her to remember why she ran off in the first place. Rebecca’s presence makes her feel superfluous.

  Then there is Jordan, who takes time from her family and flies to La Jolla for a visit. She meets Rebecca, and offers her approval, and will be present whenever Earl needs her. At the moment, that’s not often. He believes he will beat the disease—at least postponing his inevitable doom by five years.

  A month to the day after meeting Rebecca, after his diagnosis, Earl shows up at AGC mission control with his head shaved. Concerned about his privacy, and surprised, Rebecca can’t ask him why until hours later.

  “I start chemo on Monday,” Earl says, tentatively rubbing his shiny dome. “The hair is going to be the first casualty.”

  “Not right away!” she says, protesting.

  “No. But everyone will be able to see it coming out in clumps, and I’d rather not display my deterioration so soon.”

  Rebecca’s despair over Earl’s change in looks—the pale, naked skull is not an improvement—and Earl’s own ambivalence over what may have been a self-destructive impulse are lost in the broad spectrum noise emerging from the science support room at AGC mission control. The submersible element, after three weeks of increasingly frustrating dives in the lightless freezing slurry that is Europa-under-the-crust, has picked up motion at the very limited of its sonar system.

  Is it some sort of animal or plant life? Or is it a spurious signal? The science team and its journalistic symbionts spread the news anyway.

  When Earl and Rebecca return to AGC early the next day for their shifts, they are forced to park off the site and walk through the crowd that has gathered.

  Earl, just out of a chemo session, is weakened by the walk and the wait to a degree he finds astonishing. He barely has the strength to zip up his SLIPPER suit, alarming the medical support team, who know by now that he has a “problem.”

  Even Rebecca finds herself distracted and jittery when she finally dons her SLIPPER suit to resume the mapping operation.

  It is Element Rebecca and Element Earl who find themselves together on the Europan ice plain. “Just imagine,” Rebecca says, thumping one of her manipulators on the surface, “something is swimming around down there.”

  “Yeah, the submersible.”

  “Come on! I mean some Europan jellyfish! Doesn’t that excite you?”

  “Only because it means we accomplished the mission.”

  “That’s not very romantic.”

  “Who said I was romantic?”

  “You did. You and your blue eyes and your goddamned boat and sailing to Catalina—”

  “Well, I’m not feeling very romantic these days. Unless dying of the same disease that killed U.S. Grant and Babe Ruth is romantic.”

  In La Jolla, Rebecca forms an answer, but even at three hundred-plus times light speed, there is not enough time to relay it, because Element Rebecca has rolled across a thin sheet of ice insufficient to support even a mass of twenty kilograms.

  The ice cracks, separates. As Element Earl helplessly records the scene from a distance of sixty-five meters, Element Rebecca teeters on the fissure, antenna slewing one way, the drilling arm swinging forward in what can only be a desperate search for traction, then silently disappears into a crevasse.

  ###

  The aftermath of the event is prolonged and messy. There is only momentary loss of comm between Rebecca and her element, because Element Earl moves into position at the rim of the crevasse and provides line-of-sight.

  Rebecca herself experiences the loss of support and the beginning of a terrifying plunge just as surely as if she’d been standing on the Europan ice in person.

  Then the
re is nothing.

  Then there comes a rattle of almost randomly scattered data bits, quickly telling Rebecca that her element is wedged on its side in a fissure of ice, that her drilling arm and camera have been torn off. She is blind, broken, beyond reach.

  But alive. Her radiothermal power source ensures that Element Rebecca will continue to send data for the next several years.

  Nauseous from his medication and the horrifying accident, Earl can do nothing but wait, though not silently. Even while operating Element Earl, he has grown irritated with the mission control team’s obvious distraction, as the ghost sonar squiggle of a theoretical Europan life form is played over and over again. “Haas,” he snaps on the open loop, “drop the Ahab routine and pay some fucking attention here.”

  “No need to get nasty, Earl,” Haas says. “We’re on top of things.”

  “If you were on top of things, she wouldn’t have fallen.”

  “Earl,” Rebecca says. “It’s okay.”

  Hearing her voice quiets him, as does the false serenity of the Europan landscape. Jupiter is at the edge of his field of vision. The sight angers him. Big fat useless ball of ice—

  Then he sees nothing at all. The link between Element Earl and La Jolla still functions, but the La Jolla end has failed.

  ###

  Earl Tolan is taken to UC-SD Medical Center, where he dies four hours later. The cause of death is listed as a heart attack; the real cause is almost certainly complications from throat cancer and related treatment.

  Once over her shock at the double loss of a single day—Element Rebecca and Earl himself—Rebecca sees the unexpected heart attack as a blessing, saving Earl and Rebecca and Jordan the horror of the almost certain laryngectomy and talking through a stoma and more radiation and the swelling and the pain and the horror of knowing that it will never get better, only worse.

  Rebecca helps Jordan dispose of Earl’s possessions. The Atropos is the trickiest of them, ultimately sold for a pittance in a depressed boating market.

  The submersible element records more ghost blips before falling silent, a victim of cold, several weeks past its design life. Rebecca resigns from the operator program and is reassigned to AGC’s “advanced planning” unit, helping with the design of a new set of elements for another Europan mission.

  One day three months after that awful day she returns to mission control, dons a SLIPPER suit, and spends a few moments on the icy plains of Europa with Element Earl.

  Her last command aims him across Point Loma toward distant Catalina.

  NEVERMORE

  Ian R. MacLeod

  British writer Ian R. MacLeod was one of the hottest new writers of the ’90s, and, as the new century begins, his work continues to grow in power and deepen in maturity. MacLeod has published a slew of strong stories in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Amazing, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, among other markets. Several of these stories made the cut for one or another of the various “Best of the Year” anthologies; in 1990, in fact, he appeared in three different Best of the Year anthologies with three different stories, certainly a rare distinction. His first novel, The Great Wheel, was published to critical acclaim in 1997, followed by a major collection of his short work, Voyages by Starlight. In 1999, he won the World Fantasy Award with his brilliant novella “The Summer Isles,” and followed it up in 2000 by winning another World Fantasy Award for his novelette “The Chop Girl.” MacLeod lives with his wife and young daughter in the West Midlands of England, and is at work on several new novels.

  In the stylish and compelling story that follows, he shows us that Passion can persist beyond flesh . . . but that you always have to worry about drifting apart in a relationship—even when one of you is dead.

  ###

  Now that he couldn’t afford to buy enough reality, Gustav had no option but to paint what he saw in his dreams. With no sketchpad to bring back, no palette or cursor, his head rolling up from the pillow and his mouth dry and his jaw aching from the booze he’d drunk the evening before—which was the cheapest means he’d yet found of getting to sleep—he was left with just that one chance, and a few trailing wisps of something that might once have been beautiful before he had to face the void of the day.

  It hadn’t started like this, but he could see by now that this was how it had probably ended. Representational art had had its heyday, and for a while he’d been feted like the bright new talent he’d once been sure he was. And big lumpy actuality that you could smell and taste and get under your fingernails would probably come back into style again—long after it had ceased to matter to him.

  So that was it. Load upon load of self-pity falling down upon him this morning from the damp-stained ceiling. What had he been dreaming? Something—surely something. Otherwise being here and being Gustav wouldn’t come as this big a jolt. He should’ve gotten more used to it than this by now. . . Gustav scratched himself, and discovered that he also had an erection, which was another sign—hadn’t he read once, somewhere?—that you’d been dreaming dreams of the old-fashioned kind, unsimulated, unaided. A sign, anyway, of a kind of biological optimism. The hope that there might just be a hope.

  Arthritic, Cro-Magnon, he wandered out from his bed. Knobbled legs, knobbled veins, knobbled toes. He still missed the habit of fiddling with the controls of his window in the pockmarked far wall, changing the perspectives and the light in the dim hope that he might stumble across something better. The sun and the moon were blazing down over Paris from their respective quadrants, pouring like mercury through the nanosmog. He pressed his hand to the glass, feeling the watery wheeze of the crack that now snaked across it. Five stories up in these scrawny empty tenements, and a long, long way down. He laid his forehead against its coolness as the sour thought that he might try to paint this scene speeded through him. He’d finished at least twenty paintings of foreal Paris; all reality engines and cabled ruins in gray, black, and white. Probably done, oh, at least several hundred studies in inkwash, pencil, charcoal. No one would ever buy them, and for once they were right. The things were passionless, ugly—he pitied the potentially lovely canvases he’d ruined to make them. He pulled back from the window and looked down at himself. His erection had faded from sight beneath his belly.

  Gustav shuffled through food wrappers and scrunched-up bits of cartridge paper. Leaning drifts of canvas frames turned their backs from him toward the walls, whispering on breaths of turpentine of things that might once have been. But that was okay, because he didn’t have any paint right now. Maybe later, he’d get the daft feeling that, today, something might work out, and he’d sell himself for a few credits in some stupid trick or other—what had it been last time; painting roses red dressed as a playing card?—and the supply ducts would bear him a few precious tubes of oils. And a few hours after that he’d be—But what was that noise?

  A thin white droning like a plastic insect. In fact, it had been there all along—had probably woken him at this ridiculous hour—but had seemed so much a part of everything else that he hadn’t noticed. Gustav looked around, tilting his head until his better ear located the source. He slid a sticky avalanche of canvas board and cotton paper off an old chair, and burrowed in the cushions until his hand closed on a telephone. He’d only kept the thing because it was so cheap that the phone company hadn’t bothered to disconnect the line when he’d stopped paying. That was, if the telephone company still existed. The telephone was chipped from the time he’d thrown it across the room after his last conversation with his agent. But he touched the activate pad anyway, not expecting anything more than a blip in the system, white machine noise.

  “Gustav, you’re still there, are you?”

  He stared at the mouthpiece. It was his dead ex-wife Elanore’s voice.

  “What do you want?”

  “Don’t be like that, Gus. Well, I won’t be anyway. Time’s passed, you know, things have changed.”

  “Sure, and you’re going to tell me
next that you—”

  “Yes, would like to meet up. We’re arranging this party. I ran into Marcel in Venice—he’s currently Doge there, you know—and we got talking about old times and all the old gang. And so we decided we were due for a reunion. You’ve been one of the hardest ones to find, Gus. And then I remembered that old tenement . . .”

  “Like you say, I’m still here.”

  “Still painting?”

  “Of course I’m still painting! It’s what I do.”

  “That’s great. Well—sorry to give you so little time, but the whole thing’s fixed for this evening. You won’t believe what everyone’s up to now! But then, I suppose you’ve seen Francine across the sky.”

  “Look, I’m not sure that I—”

  “And we’re going for Paris, 1890. Should be right up your street. I’ve splashed out on all-senses. And the food and the drink’ll be foreal. So you’ll come, won’t you? The past is the past, and I’ve honestly forgotten about much of it since I passed on. Put it into context, anyway. I really don’t bear a grudge. So you will come? Remember how it was, Gus? Just smile for me the way you used to. And remember . . .”

  ###

  Of course he remembered. But he still didn’t know what the hell to expect that evening as he waited—too early, despite the fact that he’d done his best to be pointedly late—in the virtual glow of a pavement café off the Rue St-Jacques beneath a sky fuzzy with Van Gogh stars.

  Searching the daubed figures strolling along the cobbles, Gustav spotted Elanore coming along before she saw him. He raised a hand, and she came over, sitting down on a wobbly chair at the uneven whirl of the table. Doing his best to maintain a grumpy pose, Gustav called the waiter for wine, and raised his glass to her with trembling fingers. He swallowed it all down. Just as she’d promised, the stuff was foreal.