IGMS - Issue 19

by IGMS

I closed the diary and held it in the dim light of the closet.

  I come down from the loft. My dress is muddy, and so is my face from my attempts to wipe my tears. Doctor Camille smiles at me, but the expression doesn't look quite right. She's glad I came down, but she doesn't feel any joy.

  I let her fuss over my appearance, wiping my tears with a bunched-up tissue and straightening my dress. I walk with Doctor Camille back to Sara's house, and I drag my feet in the fallen leaves. They smell of rotting alder. "Sara's dead," I say.

  "You're Sara," she says back, and she tightens her fingers on my hand. "Do you remember what it felt like to wake up? It'll be just like that, but you'll remember the rest of your life again."

  "That's not what Doctor Emory said," I tell her.

  I look up and watch Doctor Camille's face. The way she sets her jaw frightens me, but she doesn't rise to the bait. I think about pulling my hand from hers and running.

  On the fifth day, the skinny man from Grief Abatement Services, Incorporated, came out to Sara's house. He walked with quick, short steps and his hair scruffed out around his head. Unruly, long. I watched him come to the front door from Sara's window, curling my fingers around each other.

  "Sara," her father called to me from the door of her room. I looked back to him, but I didn't move. "There's someone here to see you."

  I followed him back down the hall and the stairway, down to the first floor of the house. The scruffy man sat on the least comfortable of all the chairs in the living room, his briefcase pulled up onto his lap. Sara's mother was not there. I hadn't seen her since I arrived.

  "Hello, Sara," he said. "I'm Doctor Emory Bieber." He smiled, and I could see one of his teeth was a silver replacement.

  "I'm not Sara," I said back, automatic. It seemed the only thing I ever said to anybody.

  The smile went out like a light after someone's hit the switch, and he looked over my head to Sara's father. "G.A.S. sent her home like this?"

  Sara's father's hand tightened on my right shoulder, squeezing as though that would bring me safety. "We were told she might regain access to her memory if she were in familiar surroundings."

  Doctor Emory looked back down to me. "Might I ask you some questions, Sara?"

  "I'm not Sara," I said again.

  "Well," he asked. "Who are you?"

  Cruel question, and he had to know that it was. I pressed my lips together. How could I have a name of my own if nobody would let me find out what it was?

  Doctor Emory's briefcase had a hole in it, white threads sticking out. There were papers inside, and a pen. He put the case down on the floor and leaned forward in the chair, hands clasped loosely together in front of his mouth. "Why do you say you aren't Sara?"

  I didn't want to tell him the same thing I'd said to everybody for the last few days. But there was that subtle hope I felt, that maybe he'd understand me, unlike all the others. Maybe he wouldn't put aside how I thought and how I felt as only being symptoms of something that should have already been fixed.

  And then again, how could I possibly explain something that I didn't know in words? I only knew it through feeling.

  I fidgeted, playing with my hands. "I'm not Sara," I said. "I would know if I was. How do you know that you're Doctor Emory?"

  I wasn't trying to be a pain. Some part of me wondered if there was a feeling or sense that other people had, the sense of who they are, and maybe that simply hadn't copied along with the rest of what Sara knew. Sara's father took his hand from my shoulder. I wondered if he would leave me with the doctor to talk about what it meant to be Sara.

  And Doctor Emory, for his part, was struggling to satisfactorily answer my question to himself, so he could share it with the rest of us. He frowned and pressed a finger against his lips. "I suppose I worded that badly," he said. "It's unusual to think you're someone other than who you are."

  "I just know," I said. "I just know I'm not Sara."

  "Do you want to be Sara?" he asked. Nobody, not in five days, had asked me that question even once.

  "No," I said, and Sara's father left without another word.

  "You don't?" Doctor Emory fiddled with one of the latches on his briefcase without looking away from me. "Why not?"

  "Because I'm me," I said, as though that were reason enough. And why couldn't it be? "I don't want to be rewritten. I don't want to go away."

  I walked past Emory and he turned on the chair to watch me. I sat on the couch and pulled my feet up, sinking into the cushion.

  "Do you mind that I'm recording our conversation?" he asked.

  "Okay," I said. I wondered what Sara's father would have thought, had he heard that. I wondered what else was in the beat-up case.

  "You're a standard G.A.S. replacement clone, and you left the Center five days ago, correct?"

  I couldn't think of why he wanted to know. "Yes," I answered.

  "And there was an error, wasn't there? But they sent you out anyway. How do you feel about that?"

  His look was too hungry, and it frightened me. For once, I didn't want to say what was expected of me. I didn't know what he wanted to hear, so I couldn't avoid the answer. Where was Sara's father?

  "I don't know," I said. I hugged my knees. I suddenly wanted to cry, but I couldn't say why. "I'm not the person they want me to be. This isn't my body; it belongs to Sara. But if she comes back, then where will I go? Will I be a ghost? Will I just go away?"

  "Do you think you're a person?" he asked.

  And I couldn't hold the tears back anymore, because how could I be anything else? "Of course I'm a person," I said. I cried.

  He smiled, a nice smile, and he played with the latch on his briefcase again. "Thank you," he said.

  When we get back to the house, we don't go inside. There's already a car waiting to take us to the Center. I don't want to get in. Doctor Camille pats my hand.

  Sara's mother and father are inside the house, or maybe they aren't home at all. I don't know. Why would they come to say goodbye to me, anyway? I'm not their daughter. I'm a ghost.

  Doctor Camille lets my hand go free long enough to open the door to the back of the car. I slide in over dark brown leather and let her buckle the seatbelt for me. I don't look up until she's closed the door, sealed me away from the rest of the world with steel and glass.

  In a window on the second floor, I think I see Benjamin. He doesn't wave and neither do I.

  On my last night, Sara's parents fought. I sat in her closet again with the diary. I leaned my head against the wall, and I could hear them clearly through their closet.

  Sara's mother sounded like a dying eagle. "You let him in? Do you know how bad this looks?"

  "He said he was a doc--"

  "He was a reporter!"

  I flipped through the pages of the diary. I didn't want to read them; I just wanted to feel the paper under my fingers. I wanted to feel something real.

  "I don't think we're being fair to her."

  "Fair? Fair? How is this fair to anybody? 'Clones are people too: a shocking investigative report into G.A.S -- what they don't want you to know about replacing your loved ones.'"

  The creaking sound of bedsprings. Sara's father's voice was low and even. "I would never have agreed if I'd known it would be like this."

  "Oh, sure," Sara's mother retorted. "You say that now. After you were the one who said we had to bring her home. 'Give her a chance,' you said."

  "This isn't right," he said.

  "That girl in there is not my daughter. That's not right. We should have made them bring her back right, not take the closest they could make. You tell me how getting G.A.S. sued is going to help anybody! If they get shut down, then we'll never get Sara back. Don't you care?"

  "I care more than you do." His voice went up in pitch, raising with his anger.

  I closed the diary and held it so tightly that I could feel the corners of the cover digging into my skin.

  "That's news to me! You just wanted to bury her and give up!"
<
br />   The bed creaked again. Someone standing? "We should have!"

  I heard their door slam, and heavy footsteps down the hall. A pause, and then the front door slammed, louder.

  And silence fell over the house. I crept out from the closet.

  I climbed into the bed and slid the diary under my pillow. I was about to turn the lights out when the doorknob turned and Sara's mother came in. Her eyes were red, probably from crying. I thought of what Benjamin had said, but I didn't care. I didn't want to make her happy.

  She crossed the room to me, bent to kiss me softly on my forehead. She smelled like sickly orange perfume. I wanted to wave her away from me, but I settled for clutching the blue and white comforter in my hands.

  "Goodnight, honey," she said. "Tomorrow we'll take you back to the Center and they'll put your memories back."

  She tried to pull the blankets up to my chin, but I held them down with tight fingers. She gave up and turned the light out, felt her way back to the door. I waited until she was silhouetted in the doorway and then I said, "Sara's dead, Mom."

  We reach the Center at mid-day, but we don't go through the front doors. I feel like a fugitive, hurried out of the car and into the back door. I ask why we're going that way, but Doctor Camille doesn't answer. She leaves me in a little room with plastic toys for children much younger than I am, and magazines that nobody likes enough to steal.

  I pick up an orange plastic block that says "B" on the side just to have something in my hands. I can feel the imperfect seam left by the mold it was made in. I worry at it, running my finger over the rough plastic edge over and over.

  After a long time, Doctor Camille comes back. She's changed her clothes and looks like a doctor again, and she waves for me to follow her through the double doors.

  "We're ready for you," she says.

  I woke in the morning, as soon as the sun hit my second floor window and filtered pink through the Venetian blinds. At first I didn't want to get out of bed.

  I flipped over onto my stomach, twisting around under the blankets. I pulled the diary out from under my pillow and turned it to the last page. I unclipped the pen and pulled the cap off. The end of the pen was warped with the indentations of Sara's teeth.

  I realized then that I didn't know what I wanted to write.

  "Dear Diary," I started, and I crossed it out. Sara never started her entries like that.She just started with a date, so I wrote that in underneath the crossed-out salutation.

  "Sara," I wrote. My handwriting looked nothing like hers. It was jagged in all the wrong places. "I was you for a week. I wasn't very good at it. I'm sorry."

  I looked at it for a while, watched the gel ink dry. I signed it, "Me."

  I snuck out the back door while the rest of the house still slept, tiptoeing through the yard. I ran when I got to the trees.

  I wait. I lie on clean sheets and a plastic mask covers my mouth and nose. The lights dim to a soft red glow, and Doctor Camille rests one cool gloved hand on my forehead. She starts to count down from ten.

  I close my eyes. I don't know who I'll be when I open them.

  I'm scared.

  Express to Paris by Dragon First Class

  by Tom Crosshill

  Artwork by Adam Peck

  Jima dreamt of flying to Paris. As a child she swooped on the updraft over the Willamette, wings outstretched, and boomed out call signs -- "Jima to De Gaulle, dragon incoming!"

  Weekends after school she prowled the PDX hangars and questioned the grizzly intercontinentals whose bellies bulged with oil. "Do they tickle, the humans in your harness?" They growled at her, and she learned better questions.

  For her exams, Jima flew to Chicago with congressmen on her back -- "So the loss is least if you fail," the union rep told her.

  A youth, a wife, then a single mother of green-tailed triplets, Jima flew regional out of O'Hare -- to Dayton, to Cleveland, to far-away New York. "One day mommy will fly to De Gaulle," she told the kids.

  Even after the strike of '81, when Jima's friends left for the Preserve of Nebraska, she didn't let go of her dream. Came the machines, lumbering brutes with hard-edged wings and no union cards; first New York, then Houston, then Paris went mechanical. Jima flew tourists, crop dusters, ad banners. With every paycheck she bought a jar of oil and stored it in a special place.

  "Come live with us," her children asked her. "You'll never save enough for Paris!" She shook her mane at them and laughed, and they stopped asking.

  Jima was a strong dragon, a proud dragon, a tired dragon, a dragon whose eyes clouded up at night, whose wings ached in the mornings. The company didn't want her anymore, but she didn't notice. There was enough sky above the old drakes' home to stretch her wings. The attendant, a red-tailed whippersnapper, watched her carefully, yet every day she snuck away to her special place and counted her jars of oil.

  When her children stopped visiting and the world grew altogether dark before her eyes, Jima went to that special place and drank all the oil she had hoarded. She turned her face toward the warmth of the sun and ran, and ran, and beat her withered wings, and took to the sky. Nothing left for her in the old country. Paris remained. Paris awaited.

  "De Gaulle! De Gaulle! Clear the runway!" she boomed. The hills of Illinois shook with her voice.

  Eye For Eye - Part 3

  by Orson Scott Card

  Artwork by Kevin Wasden

  Eye for Eye was published in 1990 as a Tor double novel, along with "Tunesmith" by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. It is currently out of print, although it is available as an audiobook.

  Part 3

  Continued from issue 18

  No, I better tell the truth here, cause I wasn't that smart. It wasn't till I was halfway to the house that I really wondered if he believed me, and it wasn't till Mama had me with a nice clean pair of pajamas up in a nice clean room, and she was about to take my jeans and shirt and underwear and make them nice and clean it occurred to me that maybe I was going to wish I had more clothes on than pajamas that night. I really got kind of mad before she finally gave me back my clothes -- she was scared that if she didn't do what I said, I'd do something to her. And then I got to thinking that maybe I'd made things even worse by not giving her the clothes, because that might make them think that I was planning to skip out, and so maybe they weren't planning to kill me before but now they would , and so I probably just made things worse. Except when it came down to it, I'd rather be wrong about the one thing and at least have my clothes, than be wrong about the other and have to gallivant all over the country in pajamas. You don't get much mileage on country roads barefoot in pajamas, even in the summer.

  As soon as Mama left and went on downstairs, I got dressed again, including my shoes, and climbed in under the covers. I'd slept out in the open, so I didn't mind sleeping in my clothes. What drove me crazy was getting my shoes on the sheets. They would've yelled at me so bad at the Children's Home.

  I laid there in the dark, trying to think what I was going to do. I pretty much knew how to get from this house out to the road, but what good would that do me? I didn't know where I was or where the road led or how far to go, and you don't cut cross country in North Carolina -- if you don't trip over something in the dark, you'll bump into some moonshine or marijuana operation and they'll blast your head off, not to mention the danger of getting your throat bit out by some tobacco farmer's mean old dog. So there I'd be running along a road that leads nowhere with them on my tail and if they wanted to run me down, I don't think fear of cancer would slow down your average four-wheeler.

  I thought about maybe stealing a car, but I don't have the first idea how to hotwire anything. It wasn't one of the skills you pick up at the Children's Home. I knew the idea of it, somewhat, because I'd done some reading on electricity with the books Mr. Kaiser lent me so I could maybe try getting ready for the GED, but there wasn't a chapter in there on how to get a Lincoln running without a key. Didn't know how to drive, either. All the stuff you pick up from your dad o
r from your friends at school, I just never picked up at all.

  Maybe I dozed off, maybe I didn't. But I suddenly noticed that I could see in the dark. Not see, of course. Feel the people moving around. Not far off at first, except like a blur, but I could feel the near ones, the other ones in the house. It was cause they was sparky, of course, but as I laid there feeling them drifting here and there, in the rhythms of sleep and dreams, or walking around, I began to realize that I'd been feeling people all along, only I didn't know it. They wasn't sparky, but I always knew where they were, like shadows drifting in the back of your mind, I didn't even know that I knew it, but they were there. It's like when Diz Riddle got him his glasses when he was ten years old and all of a sudden he just went around whooping and yelling about all the stuff he saw. He always used to see it before, but he didn't rightly know what half the stuff was. Like pictures on coins. He knew the coins was bumpy, but he didn't know they was pictures with writing and stuff. That's how it was.

  I laid there and I could make a map in my brain where I could see a whole bunch of different people, and the more I tried, the better I could see. Pretty soon it wasn't just in that house. I could feel them in other houses, dimmer and fainter. But in my mind I didn't see no walls so I didn't know whether somebody was in the kitchen or in the bathroom, I had to think it out, and it was hard, it took all my concentration. The only guide I had was that I could see electrical wires when the current was flowing through them, so wherever a light was on or a clock was running or something, I could feel this thin line, really thin, not like the shadows of people. It wasn't much, but it gave me some idea of where some of the walls might be.

  If I could've just told who was who I might have made some guesses about what they was doing. Who was asleep and who was awake. But I couldn't even tell who was a kid and who was a grown-up, cause I couldn't see sizes, just brightness. Brightness was the only way I knew who was close and who was far away.