by Allen Steele
The moment simmered at the edge of memory, then was gone.
He winced, then hurriedly walked away from the mirror.
The kitchen, calm earlier, was now in a state of chaos: cooks preparing salads, stirring kettles of lentil soup and grilling skewers of lamb more precious than gold. Waiters hastened back and forth, carrying out trays filled with drinks and indescribable appetizers. The air was filled with smoke and succulent, untouchable aroma.
The majordomo handed him a pewter tray of champagne glasses. “Remember,” he murmured, “don’t offer any to the googles. They don’t drink anything alcoholic, and take offense if you even offer it to them. Okay?”
Okay. A word from his century. He felt a momentary feeling of reassurance. “Okay. Got it.”
The majordomo—whose face was familiar, but whose name escaped his memory for the instant—favored him with a quick nod with a pat on the shoulder. McLafferty backed through the swinging doors leading out of the kitchen.
The Great Hall was filled nearly to capacity. All the guests had finally arrived, and they mingled on the mosaic floor, the balcony, and the outside terrace overlooking the colony’s sweeping vista. They wore loose, brightly colored robes that changed hue with each movement, elegant strapless gowns that briefly turned translucent before becoming opaque again, military uniforms decked with insignia and medals, capes and codpieces and vests and knee boots and brassiere. Clothing that would have been considered outrageous, hideous, or downright bizarre in his time. In comparison, his tux was as drab and archaic as sackcloth.
Keeping a fixed smile on his face as he tried not to stare at the guests, balancing his tray on one hand at shoulder height, McLafferty maneuvered through the crowd, speaking as seldom as possible when he stopped to give someone a drink. It wasn’t hard to pick out the googles and avoid them; the bioengineered Superiors—as they preferred to be called, and as they were in polite company—generally stood a head taller than baseline humans. With thin, almost avian bodies, whose double-jointed legs ended in long, hand-shaped feet that wore glovelike shoes, they looked a little more like prehistoric raptors than homo sapiens. Proud and somewhat remote, their faces tattooed with intricate designs, they regarded McLafferty with oversized dark-blue eyes as he passed them by, their disdain for the barbarian in their midst evident from the pinched expressions on their narrow faces.
He caught a brief glimpse of the master of the house when he walked out onto the terrace. Pasquale Chicago was holding court by the wrought-iron balustrade, surrounded by a small cluster of friends, business associates, lovers, and those who wished to be one or more of the above. As he chatted easily with a beautiful woman whose outfit was gradually fading into invisibility, Mister Chicago’s right hand rose to casually toss back his braided, waist-length white hair from his albino face.
When he did so, his cool pink eyes happened to glance in McLafferty’s direction. The look he gave him was enough to make the waiter retreat back into the hall. In the six months he had been working here, McLafferty had talked with Mister Chicago no more than a couple of times, and then only briefly. Although he frequently observed them from afar, Mister Chicago seldom spoke directly to his servants, preferring instead to issue directives through message screens in their quarters.
The guests were thirsty tonight. His tray was empty in no time at all, and McLafferty returned to the kitchen in hopes of getting a moment of rest, only to be handed a platter of hors d’oeuvres that faintly resembled raw squid wrapped in blue spinach leaves and smelled like much the same. He nearly collided with Yeats on the way out.
“Having fun yet?” Yeats whispered.
“Please kill me.”
“Hey, check out the babe with the…”
The rest was lost behind the swinging doors. McLafferty grinned as he carried the tray into the Great Hall. When this was all over and done, at least they would have something else to discuss besides the floor.
Circulating through the party-goers, he found three people standing alone near the entrance to the dining hall, carrying on an animated conversation. Two men and a woman, each of them young and beautiful. He would have liked to have known what they were talking about, but they shut up as he approached them.
“May I offer you an hors d’oeuvre?”
One of the men gazed at the tray with arch disdain. “I’m not sure,” he said. “What is it?”
McLafferty smiled. “I’m not sure, m’lord, but I’m certain it’s quite good.”
“‘I’m not sure, m’lord, but I’m certain it’s quite good.’” The other man mimicked McLafferty’s voice as an effete whine, causing the woman to titter behind her gloved hand. “Oh, my word…”
“Then what are you doing offering one to me?” The first man’s haughty gaze traveled from the platter to the servant carrying it. “If you don’t know for yourself, then how can you be so certain?” He regarded the appetizers as if they were dog turds. “Have you sampled any yourself?”
McLafferty felt his face grow warm. “No, m’lord, I haven’t,” he confessed. “These are for the master’s guests, and I’ve eaten already, and…”
“Give up, Ronald.” The second man sipped his champagne glass. “This is one of Pasquale’s deadheads. He wouldn’t know the difference between macedoine and pomme de terre if you shoved it in his mouth.”
“A ’bot might,” the woman mused, “but they’re not as much fun, are they?”
“Pasquale doesn’t like ’bots, Clarity,” Ronald replied. “That’s why he has deadheads instead.”
If this was a joke, it must have been funny, because all three laughed out loud. Feeling uncomfortable, McLafferty put a plastic smile on his face and started to turn away, only to have his right arm snagged by the second man.
“Oh, so you’re one of Mister Chicago’s pets!” This was proclaimed with false astonishment, as if he had just learned some new and unique fact. “I don’t think I’ve ever met one of your kind before,” he went on as he forcibly dragged McLafferty back into the circle. “A man from the twentieth century!”
“Well, I…” McLafferty looked away, trying to find a reason to escape this unwanted attention. “Yes, well, that was when I was born, but…”
“But you must have witnessed so much history!” The second man circled his arm around McLafferty’s shoulders. “Please, tell us all! Did you…?”
“Did you ever meet the Beatles?” Clarity asked, as she cast a sly wink at Ronald. “I’ve been studying classic music recently. They were so adorable.”
“What about William Faulkner, or Hemingway? Vonnegut?” The second man snapped his fingers. “I know! Stephen King! He was around then! Did you ever meet him?”
“John F. Kennedy…”
“Jeffery Draper…no, I mean Jeffery Dahmer. Was he someone you…?”
“Charles Manson!” Clarity had a smoldering look in her eyes. “Were you a member of his group? They were so deliciously evil…”
“L. Ron Hubbard, perhaps? Now there was a maniac…”
“Who?”
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t know any of these people.” McLafferty felt suffocated. “I never met them. They were all…they were famous people. I heard of them, sure, but you never…”
“Certainly. We understand, don’t we?” Ronald cast a broad look at his companions. “It’s been so many years, and our friend here spent the last century with his poor, decapitated noggin floating in liquid nitrogen. No wonder he doesn’t remember anything.”
Clarity tsked with false sympathy. “Poor, dear deadhead.” She stepped forward to run the back of her hand across McLafferty’s face. Her breath was redolent with liquor. “I wonder if you even remember your name.”
“McLafferty…” he began.
“McLafferty,” she whispered, looking into his eyes. “That’s such a nice name.” Her fingertips trailed down from his face, across his throat and chest, down towards his stomach. “And such a fine new body Mister Chicago has cloned for you,” she sighed. “Tell
me, do your only duties for him include simply serving canapés to his dinner guests? Or do you also…?”
Startled by the touch of her fingers at his groin, McLafferty instinctively jumped back. The platter toppled from his hand; he lurched forward to catch it, but it crashed to the floor, the appetizers spilling as an oily mess across the orbit of Neptune.
“Oh, now, look what you’ve made him do!” Ronald cried out.
As the trio shrieked with laughter, McLafferty fell to his knees, trying to scoop up the slippery food with his hands. Only this morning he had slaved for hours to make this floor spotless, yet this wasn’t what made him hiss between his teeth.
He was the manacled primitive, the captured savage in loincloth, the barbarian put on parade. His humiliation was complete; as the first man had said, he was a pet…
With this, unbidden, another memory: a small boy, bigger than he was, pushing him down in a muddy playground, and pushing him down again when he tried to get up.
(c’mon, four-eyes, put down your stupid books and…!)
“Come now,” the second man said from behind him. “I’m sure he means no harm.”
(get up, you sissy…!)
Then he felt fingertips lightly caress his raised buttocks. “If we speak to Pasquale, perhaps he’ll lend him to us for a little sport…”
Without thinking, balancing himself on his hands, McLafferty blindly lashed back with his right foot. His sole connected with something soft and fleshy, and he heard a high-pitched shriek.
“Oh, my!” Clarity screamed. “He attacked Willie!”
Suddenly, conversation around the Great Hall fell away as all eyes turned toward him. Embarrassed, McLafferty started to rise. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I didn’t mean it, but he…”
“Animal!”
Ronald’s left hand sailed about, catching McLafferty in a savage backhand that knocked him off his feet.
The other guests cried out in fear and outrage, and the rest was lost in pandemonium.
Clarity’s face, captured in a moment of absolute terror as she backed away.
The second man curled up on the floor, moaning as his hands cupped his injured testicles.
Ronald standing above him, kicking McLafferty in the ribs. Then another guest joined him, and another, until there was a solid mob of Mister Chicago’s friends surrounding him, beating him with their shoes and fists, until he sank into a dark, jagged womb of pain.
His last conscious thought was the hope that he finally died, for once and for all.
But he didn’t die again.
When he awoke, he found himself in the infirmary.
He knew this place, located in another part of the palace, from an earlier visit for a sprained wrist.
The lights had been turned down low, but sunlight filtered through an open window; the fresh air carried with it the scent of Garcia’s perpetual summer. The sheets around his naked body were cool and crisp. The autodoc hovering near his bed—one of the very few ’bots in the colony—was withdrawing a syringe-gun from his bare right arm.
“Good morning,” a voice said from behind him. “I trust you’re feeling better.”
As McLafferty raised his head and looked around, Mister Chicago stepped from the shadows.
He was dressed differently from the last time McLafferty had seen him. Now he wore the white cotton robe he usually donned in the morning, when he was being served breakfast in the garden. In his thin, long-fingered hands he held a china coffee cup and saucer.
Although he felt exhausted, McLafferty started to sit up, but Mister Chicago shook his head. “Please, lie down,” he said, raising a hand. “You’ve suffered some severe injuries, I’m afraid. The nanites have healed most of the internal damage, but the nasty concussion you took will take a little longer to get over.”
“I’m…” His throat was parched; McLafferty swallowed what felt like a ball of lint and tried again. “I’m sorry, sir. I…I didn’t mean to cause a…”
“A scene?” The master shook his head again. “Think nothing of it. I witnessed the entire incident. Petersen is a rude chap, one who I should not have invited in the first place. He had what was coming to him, nothing more or less. I’m just sorry his companion got to you before I did.”
Stepping closer, Mister Chicago reached up to touch the keypad on the med-scanner above the bead. “Good,” he murmured absently, peering at the screen with his strange pink eyes. “The left kidney’s recovering quite nicely. You took a nasty kick there from Ronnie duBois…I doubt you recall it, but he’s hardly a gentleman in a fight…and I was worried that we might have to replace it.”
McLafferty remembered, but that was beside the point. “I thought…you would be angry,” he rasped.
“Throat dry?” He glanced at the autodoc. “A little water, please.” The ’bot floated away, and Mister Chicago laughed out loud. “Angry? I’m actually rather thankful. The party was becoming such a bore. If anything, it gave everyone something to talk about.”
Stepping away again, he located a carved wood stool beneath a counter. “Of course,” he said as he pulled it out and settled down on it, “we’ll have to keep you out of sight for next couple of days. I informed my guests that you have been taken down here to be lobotomized.”
Noting the expression on McLafferty’s face, he favored him with a droll wink. “If you want to play the part, of course, I could have you make a reappearance just before they leave. Just shamble around and drool a bit…I’m sure they’d enjoy it. But I have no intention of doing so, believe me.”
McLafferty managed a wan smile. The autodoc returned with a paper cup of water, and the bed flowed into a reclining position. McLafferty accepted the cup gratefully; the water was cool, and tasted vaguely of lemon.
“But we do have a few things to discuss, you and I,” Mister Chicago went on, turning more serious now. “Because this occurrence wasn’t your fault, I’m not going to discipline you…but you do need to be reminded of where you stand in the grand scheme of things.”
Mister Chicago paused to sip his coffee. “Please understand, though,” he said as he put the cup and saucer aside, “that whatever you were in your time, you are no longer now. I understand from your biographical records that you were once an astronautical engineer, employed by the…”
He frowned, trying to conjure a name. “NASA,” McLafferty whispered.
“That’s it.” Mister Chicago snapped his fingers. “National Aeronautics and Space Administration, correct?” McLafferty nodded, and the master shook his head. “Long since vanished. Decommissioned more than eighty years ago, if I recall my history tutelage.”
Surprised, McLafferty opened his mouth, but Mister Chicago waved him off. “It’s a long story. At any rate, your former position in life is null and void, yet before you deanimated…or died, if you prefer to call it that…you spent a considerable amount of money to have your brain preserved in neural biostasis.”
He paused. “In short, your head was decapitated and placed in a tank of liquid nitrogen by a private company that didn’t last very much longer than NASA. The Immortality Partnership, I believe it was called.”
McLafferty blinked hard. Shards of memory, recovered piecemeal over the last several months, were beginning to come together, as if they were parts of a broken seashell that were being painstaking glued back in place. Cold steel tanks…his wife shouting at him…the taste of a fast-food cheeseburger…
Mister Chicago intently searched his face. “You’re beginning to remember some of it now, aren’t you?” he said softly, less a question than a statement. “Your memory is incomplete, isn’t it?”
“Yes…”
The master nodded with great sympathy. “Cryonic biostasis was something that went in and out of vogue during the late twentieth century. About a hundred or so people signed up for it before the idea fell out of fashion.”
Obviously enjoying his role as lecturer, Mister Chicago leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You see,
the long-term problem with cryonic biostasis wasn’t reanimation. That was solved many years ago, by the same biotechnology that allowed tailoring the human genome, which in turn gave us humankind capable of living in null-gravity environments…the Superiors, of whom you met a few last night.” He sighed. “Of course, the practice isn’t completely widespread, so there’s a few random mutations still lurking about. If my parents had only chosen to…”
As if something had reminded him not to reveal too much about himself, Mister Chicago stopped short. “Never mind,” he said, quickly shaking his head. “The point is that nanotech repair of frozen brain tissue isn’t faultless to the point that someone can be revived with their mental facilities completely intact. Certainly, we’re capable of producing clones of their bodies…you, for instance, are a near-perfect duplicate the man you were at age twenty-one…but the mind is a far more delicate thing than a heart, a lung, or even a thyroid gland.”
He hesitated. “Are you following me so far?”
McLafferty slowly nodded.
“The Immortality Partnership possessed a little more than a hundred sleepers from the twentieth century,” Mister Chicago continued. “Their heads had been transferred from California to a space colony in Earth orbit before the company went bankrupt. Some of these sleepers had established trust funds in their name, and that’s what had kept the company marginally solvent until it finally went bust in the middle of the century. Now, what do you think happened to all those heads?”
“You…bought them?” McLafferty said hesitantly.
“Excellent.” Mister Chicago smiled with satisfaction. “I knew I made a wise decision when I purchased you, Mr. McLafferty.”
Standing up from the stool, Mister Chicago began to pace the infirmary, his hands clasped behind his back. “Have you met Kirkland?” he asked. “A tall gentleman who works in the kitchen?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. I have a couple of his books in my collection. Now he does well if he can follow the recipe for potage Rossini without help…and he doesn’t recognize his own verse even when I recite it to him.”