by Sharon Shinn
He stopped again, as if to compose himself, though his voice still sounded absolutely steady to me. “During what period of time did this transpire?” I asked.
“The events I am about to relate occurred within two weeks of our arrival in the city of Hyverg Major.”
“So it was a rapid deterioration.”
“Very. Clearly, things could not be permitted to continue as they were. One afternoon while she slept, I made arrangements for a prominent local doctor to come to us at the hotel. He warned me that, without his neurological equipment, there would not be much he could tell me about her condition, but he agreed that her behavior might be explained by some kind of tumor of the brain. He arrived, with a satchel full of tools, and I admitted him to the sitting room that I shared with my wife. The minute I introduced him, she began shrieking like a disordered child, hurling objects at him from across the room, and trying to escape out to the hallway. I grabbed her from behind and exerted all my force to keep her in check—and she nearly flung me across the room with one furious gesture of her arm. I had never felt such strength in anyone before—woman or man—and I was shaken in spirit and body when I scrambled to my feet. The doctor was busy readying some chemical compound, and when I dove for her again, wrestling her to the ground and rendering her momentarily still, he administered it. After a few moments of thrashing, she lay quiet.
“The doctor commenced his investigation while I hovered nearby, dreading to learn what news he might have to impart. He pulled apart her lids to examine her eyes, he dug out various instruments that he held over her pulse points, he touched her skin with some strange pad and drew out a few droplets of blood. And then he looked at me and said, ‘I am sorry, Mr. Ravenbeck, I don’t believe I can help you. I was under the impression that your wife was a human, which is all that I am qualified to treat.’ ”
Again, Everett stopped speaking, but this time I had been able to detect the tremor in his voice—and this time, despite all my resolution not to be melted by his recitation, my heart nearly unraveled itself in its desire to slip from my body and wrap itself protectively around his.
“I said, ‘Excuse me? But my wife is human.’ The doctor was putting his tools away. ‘Half human. If that much,’ he corrected. ‘The android quotient is high in her. Though the reconstruction job was superb. I would not have suspected anything merely by looking at her, and I normally have a good eye for a cyborg.’ I was too stunned to think of pretending ignorance and so preserving some of my own dignity. I cried, ‘Cyborg! My wife is not a cyborg!’ And the doctor looked at me very gravely and said, ‘Indeed she is. And a malfunctioning cyborg at that. If you do not get yourself immediately to a robotics center, she will no doubt experience complete meltdown. She will—well, I don’t know what she’ll do. Things much worse than those you have already described to me.’
“Once he finished speaking, we stared at each other a moment in silence. He realized—he had to realize—that I had not, until this moment, known the truth of my wife’s condition. Which he no doubt found incredible in the extreme! Yet his face was compassionate, and he looked as though he sincerely pitied me. I finally spoke. I said, ‘Doctor, I do not know what to do or where to take her. Is there a place you can recommend?’ And he wrote down the name of a nearby clinic, and wished me luck, and refused to be paid for his services. And he left.”
Everett was now staring down at his folded hands, or at the carpet visible beneath them, but I was sure he was seeing instead that bridal hotel room, that sleeping girl, and the ruination of all his dreams.
“I could have contacted my father at this point,” he said slowly. “I could have contacted her father, and demanded—well, at some point demanded explanations, but first demanded what it was I should be doing for her, for clearly there were ways to keep her imbalances in check or she would never have appeared as an ordinary woman. But I was too proud. I understood now, completely, how they had betrayed me—deliberately, maliciously, even gleefully. Old man Merrick had wanted his troublesome half-human daughter taken off his hands, and my father had known I would be fool enough to sell my liberty for a few plots of land. But I was not the only victim in their trap. They had treated Beatrice just as cruelly, for they had given an unstable creature over into the hands of a man who did not know how to care for her, and they had risked her utter destruction.
“I was not willing to be as cruel as they. I called the number the doctor had given me, and I had Beatrice taken to a local robotics center, and I had her stabilized. It was the saddest thing I had ever seen, Jenna, the morning I arrived to check on her and found the girl I had thought I loved lying in her hospital bed, strapped in place. For days she had not known me or anybody else, but finally they had discovered the flawed circuit, and repaired it, and the neurons in her brain were again firing in the patterns of recognition. I came in to see her, and her face lit up, and she exclaimed, ‘Everett! Where have you been? I woke this morning and you were nowhere in sight, and there were only strangers here. I was so afraid.’ ”
“She did not remember the preceding days?”
“No. Not only that, she did not remember her own history—in fact, she did not know her own history. I had had time to do a little research, and I found the old news accounts of Fordyce Merrick’s daughter and the spectacular aeromobile crash that nearly killed her when she was eleven years old. She had been saved, though it required a high percentage of robotic reconstruction to make her whole. But Beatrice refused to believe me when I repeated that tale to her. She started weeping so hysterically that I had to call in the technicians, who sent me from the room and sedated her. Later, one of the technicians told me it was a wonder she could remember anything at all—even her own name—let alone any of her bizarre behavior. For it was his theory that the human portion of her brain was rejecting some of its electronic implants, and the implants were damaging the brain. There was no way to reverse the process, he said, and no way to stop it, and over time her mind would totally degrade. So I was told by the specialists on Hyverg Major, and so I have found to be true.”
He paused again and seemed to review the following months and years of his life, editing them down into a concise few paragraphs with which to conclude his story. “I did what I could for her, even so,” he said. “The head of this institution recommended that I take Beatrice to Dorser, where they have the most advanced cyborg research facility in the universe. And so we went, though I had to conceal from her the precise nature of the institution we were visiting and our reasons for visiting it. And they did manage to—to upgrade the implant—some such thing—to make her more stable for a relatively long period of time. By that, I mean nearly two years, during which time she seemed an almost normal human being who was gradually deteriorating into a form of madness. She had happy, lucid days, and she had days of raging panic, and I never knew from day to day or hour to hour whether I would be dealing with the rational or the manic Beatrice. I just did my best for her as long as I could.”
“It sounds—it must have been completely dreadful,” I stammered, the words sounding so inadequate I almost wished them unsaid.
He nodded. “And the worst of it—truly the worst—was the fact that Beatrice herself did not understand what was happening to her or why I had ceased to love her. On her good days—and, at the beginning, there were many of those—she thought we were still lovers, honeymooners, ready to fall affectionately into each other’s arms at a moment’s notice. But I . . . I could not do it. I was so repulsed and horrified by what she actually was that I could not bring myself to love her, or even to pretend to love her. It broke her heart—and her heart, at least, was quite human. I can still recall the hopefulness with which she would approach me, in those early days, and the hurt and rejection on her face when I would turn away from her. But I could not love her. I could only be kind to her, and care for her, and wait for the moment of her absolute disintegration.”
Now a peculiar feeling came over me—a selfish, unworthy emotio
n at such a place and such a time!—and yet it suffused me and made me speak when I should not have. “There are many people who cannot love synthetics,” I said in a hollow voice. “My aunt, for one. I believe it is the reason she could not love me. And I wonder how—feeling as you do about created life and knowing my history—I wonder how you could have brought yourself to love someone such as myself. For I am in many ways as artificial as your wife.”
He looked up at me quickly and keenly. “Yes, but you are the exception to the rule, Jenna,” he said. “Manufactured—synthetic—even virtual, if that is what you turned out to be—I would love you. There is about you, at your core, such a bright fire of will and passion that I would want to warm myself at it no matter how that blaze had been ignited. It is you I love, your habits of thought and your strictness of soul and your serious face, and it is you I would love if all your systems were to turn out to be metal and rubber, and all those systems were in turn to malfunction. I would guard you close on your bad days, and on your rational days, I would walk with you through the grounds and delight in the observations you would make. Generated human—halfcit—cyborg—whatever you were would be precious to me, because it would be you in the heart of your body, and it is you I love.”
I turned away, because such an avowal made me want to weep, and I could show no such weakness during this interview. “I am sure you would care for me, in such a situation,” I said in rather choked tones. “For I see how you have tried to care for Beatrice.”
“Yes—you do see that, do you not, Jenna?” he asked eagerly. “Because Merrick believes I use her cruelly, but I do not. I cannot leave her unwatched, and I cannot allow her to roam freely, and I have done everything in my power to assure both her comfort and her safety. But Merrick thinks I abuse her.”
I composed myself and shifted face-forward again. “I think you treat her much more kindly than would most men in your situation,” I said. “But I do wonder one thing. Why remain married to her? I would not have expected you to abandon her—I would condemn you if you had—but could you not have continued to care for her while freeing yourself from your matrimonial bond?”
He shook his head. “I looked into that very circumstance and no, I could not. At the center on Dorser, I learned that her robotic compound was so high that, were she to come to the attention of the legal community through such action as a divorce, she would immediately be declared nonhuman and devoid of rights. And you know as well as I do that malfunctioning androids are destroyed and recycled. And though there have been days—many, many days!—that I wished her circuits would overload and destroy her, I could not bear to be the agent that led to her dissolution. I could not do it. I had promised, during that fateful bridal ceremony, to give her my name and cover her with my honor, and I could not, because of its great inconvenience to me, renege on that promise.
“So once she deteriorated to the point that she seemed to have no humanity left, I installed her at Thorrastone Park, in the remotest of my properties,” he continued. “I found a watcher for her, and a place she could be comfortable, and a setting where she could cause very little damage. I was not particularly well-known here, and my employees and the society people I met on Fieldstar would only know my history if I chose to tell it—which I did not.”
“But any man’s history can be discovered on the StellarNet!” I cried. “Even my own, insignificant as it is, can be looked up by anybody with an interest.”
He nodded. “Yes, and I am sure the Ingersolls and the Taffs and the others did check me out in that electronic Debrett’s,” he said sardonically. “But there I am listed as a widower, though my machinations to achieve that status are not something I want to go into now. I consider it ironic, however, that although I could not divorce Beatrice Merrick, I could kill her.”
“And yet she is not dead—and you have a wife—and thus you are not free to marry,” I said in a low voice.
He made a brushing motion with his hand. “Until today, only two living souls knew that fact—myself and Merrick—for his father is dead, and the rest of the world believes her to be as well. Now a handful of my employees know the truth, but their interests lie with me and they would not repeat the story—and who would believe them if they did? We have a safe secret, Jenna. We can proceed in confidence.”
“A truth that no one knows is still the truth,” I said quietly. “You cannot eliminate it merely because you do not publish it.”
He seemed, all of a sudden, irritable and sulky. “Well, this one I do not intend to publish,” he said. “I do not wish to proclaim to the world that Everett Ravenbeck has chosen to live in sin—or attempt bigamy!—with a young half-cit girl who is supposed to be under his protection. The world will see us cleanly wed, and that is all that anyone needs to know or understand.”
“But, Mr. Ravenbeck—”
“Everett, my love. You have called me that so sweetly for days!”
“But, Mr. Ravenbeck,” I said steadily, for so I would address him aloud though I continued to call him more familiarly in my heart, “I cannot pretend to marry you. I cannot live with you as your simulated bride. I must leave Thorrastone Park—I must travel as far from here as my resources will allow.”
He seemed not to have heard me—or, at any rate, not to have understood. “Yes, both of us must leave Fieldstar, and the sooner the better,” he said. “It has always been, for me, a place of grim responsibility and despair, and for you it has become a place of betrayal and horror. I do not wonder at your desire to flee! My cruiser is still in the spaceport. We need only wait until it is light, and we will return to the city. We will be gone tomorrow, and we need never return here.”
“Mr. Ravenbeck,” I said as gently as I could, “I cannot travel with you. I cannot live with you, or be with you, under any circumstances. I love you too much to stay beside you, tempted always by the mere fact of your presence to do what is wrong. Unlike your wife, I am only human, and I am not strong enough to resist loving you. And I will not love you unless I am your wife.”
“My wife!” He leaped to his feet and began pacing the room. “But you would be my wife, in every sense except the most formal! You would have all my affection—every dime that I owned would be lavished upon you—every society in the civilized universe would accept you with courtesy and honor—”
“Legally I would not be your wife, sir.”
He rounded on me, rather menacingly standing over me where I sat in my straight-backed chair. “What! All you care about is your legal status? All you want from me is full citizenship—a chance to vote in meaningless elections and have your name recorded in a fancy registrar? I mean nothing more to you than the title I can give you? My love is not enough for you unless it comes with accoutrements?”
Now I was as stirred as he was and I too came to my feet, forcing him to back away a step by the warning in my expression. “Titles—status—money—none of these mean anything to me, and you know it,” I said hotly. “What matters to me is my honor and my integrity and my very survival. If I let you take me with you now, who knows how long it would be before you tired of me, a half-cit girl who has no claim on you, whom you could abandon with impunity in any port on any planet across the settled galaxy? Who would care for me then? Or if you died? If I had no legal status as your wife, and I had lost all reputation by running away with you, how would I work? How would I live? Where do you suppose Janet Ayerson is at this moment, a young woman who eloped with a man who said he loved her? How can I give up the few things I have—and they are so few!—my unblemished reputation and my ability to care for myself, for a man who risks nothing for me? I do not care about your money. I do not care about your position in society. I would love you as well, or even better, if you did not have these things. But I cannot be your mistress, because I cannot throw away my life. I am too valuable for that. I am worth more than a rich man’s whim.”
“Jenna—no—you are wrong—” he exclaimed, coming forward with arms outstretched as if to take
me into his arms. “How could you think I would tire of you or abandon you—”
I evaded him and stepped away. “I do not think it! I do not wish to believe it! But I cannot risk it.”
“I will write a document, then! I will legally give over my property to you, avaricious and suspicious girl that you are—”
Again he reached for me, and again I sidestepped. “I do not want your property! I want to be able to rely upon myself, to know that I am still as good as my word, that I have not been compromised—”
“But you have not been compromised! You will not be! Jenna, I will love you till the suns burn down and the stars rotate out of their positions! With my heart, my mind, my body, and my soul, I love you. You can trust me to the limits of your life—as I trust you to the limits of mine—”
He had moved more quickly than I had; he had caught me around the waist and brought me, none too gently, into his embrace. I struggled, but in vain. He drew me closer, he crushed me against his chest. He bent over me with all the madness of a man who has been momentarily thwarted in his desire and is determined to achieve it or die.
“Say you love me, Jenna,” he said, and his voice was both pleading and threatening. “Say you will come with me tomorrow—or even tonight—we could fly into the spaceport this instant. Say, ‘Everett, I love you, and I will be yours—’ ”
“I will not.”
He shook me, hard, and his face grew even more desperate. “Say, ‘Everett, I understand all and forgive all. I love you and will live with you forever as your wife.’ ”