Reluctantly, I said: "The thing is, I'm thirteen now. So don't really want to wait much longer, because, I guess it won't be long before I'm too old. To learn how to use the new technology. You know?"
She was quiet for a while, and then she said: "I Hua… we were talking about the old days just now. I can't help feeling that things were better then. Maybe I just don't understand this new technology of yours. I trained with machines, you see? Chips and neural nets and A-life, but things moved on so quickly. Two years after I graduated, Genreng Pharmaceuticals started to develop neuroviral interfacing— the bioweb, the Hsing-tao, whatever they call it these days— and I found out I was obsolete. I was too old to be put through the new program. Past it, you see. I was nineteen. And in the old days, at least you had the hope of another job when your technician career was over. I don't like this modern technology, Li Hua. I don't trust it, and I don't want you hanging round Tony Tang and his cut-price under-the-counter deals."
I said: "Okay. Look, I'm going to bed. I'll see you in the morning," and I left her staring at the blankness of the screen. I hate arguing with Grandma. It always makes me feel guilty, because I know she paid a lot of money for Tso and me. She wanted a child so badly, but she couldn't even have that. There was something wrong with her ova, some genetic thing, and they had to terminate her pregnancy. But fortunately, when they checked the fetus, they found its ova were fine, so they just fertilized two of them and transplanted them into a breeder and Grandma got Tso and me. That's all my poor mother was, a scrap of meat in a jar, and my father maybe less than that. I sometimes wonder if that's why I seem to be seeing ghosts all the time, being a child of the dead; but I know that isn't the real reason.
4
I went to see Tang again this afternoon in his shop at the back of the herbalist's. He was bent over the desk, doing something with a culture dish. He had one of those dried snakes that they make pills out of sitting on the desk and when he saw me, he rattled it at me, hissing.
"Cute," I said. I pulled up a stool and watched him as he worked. I drew a finger down the snake's skeletal spine; it felt as light and dry as air.
"So, did you speak to your grandma?" Tony asked.
"Yeah. Well, I tried. She wasn't very keen, to be honest. She's old-fashioned, Tony, you know?"
"Sure. She's an old lady. When she was your age, they just didn't do this kind of thing. Times change. Your grandma knows that." He paused, concentrating on the contents of the dish beneath the microscope.
"Do you still want to go ahead with our deal?" he asked.
I said: "If I decided to back out now, could I? I mean, is it too late?"
"No. No, it's not too late." He looked up, and his round face was earnest. "And you should know something, Li Hua; I wouldn't charge you for the equipment you've already used. I mean, I wouldn't do that."
"I know," I said. "It's okay; don't be silly. I want to carry on with it. Can I have a look at this?" I squinted down the scope while he held the microdermic. I could see the little blob, and the tip of the dermic penetrating it.
"That's all it is," Tony said.
"So how long will it take?"
"Ten minutes."
"Oh, okay, not so long, then. So I could go in on my way to work?"
"Whenever. I've made an appointment for you at the doctor's in Xiang Road. She's a woman; I thought you might prefer that." That's one of the things I like about Tony Tang; he's thoughtful.
"Thanks," I said. "What about tomorrow?"
"If you like. Stop in here on your way back, let me know how it went. You'll need more of the equipment then, anyway."
"Okay, see you then," I said, picking up my bag. I didn't want to tell him about the hallucinations, I was scared that he might think it was a bad omen and get cold feet. I left without saying anything.
"Keep the snake," he said, on my way out the door.
5
The session at the doctor's wasn't as bad as I'd thought. The doctor was really nice, and afterward she gave me a can of paracola, which she needn't have done.
"Do I have to do anything else?" I asked her.
"No, that's it. You shouldn't have any complications, but if you do, you come right back and let me know. You said your periods haven't started yet?"
"No, that's right." I said.
"Okay. It might have a slight effect, but there shouldn't be any problems." She helped me down from the couch. "There you are. You're all done."
6
I guess Tony might have felt a little sorry for me, because as well as the equipment, he gave me twenty dollars. Then at the weekend, it was New Year's and I made nearly 300 in trips. It was more money than I'd ever seen before. Grandma and I counted it up today, before we stashed it under the bed, and Tso watched us from the bunk bed, smiling. I'm so relieved. Now we can pay off the hospital fees and in a month or so, Tso can start work. I suppose I'm sorry, in a way, because we won't see much of him once he's got a job. Tso's doctor has been helpful; he says that he might be able to get Tso a place at an institute in Harbin. It's a long way away, but it's worth it.
I took my grandmother out this evening. Mrs. Eng came in to look after Tso, and Grandma and I went out to dinner. I told her to order anything she liked, no matter how much it cost.
"You're a good girl, Li Hua," she said.
"Isn't it great? Tso's treatment, I mean." I couldn't stop talking about it.
"Yes," she said, but she still looked sad. I reached across the table and squeezed her hand.
"Don't worry," I told her.
"Oh, I suppose I'm pleased for Tso, if that's what he wants, but it just seems— I'm sorry, Li. I know I'm old-fashioned, but things were just different in the past, you see." Suddenly, I could see, she was angry. I knew that she wasn't mad at me, but I kept quiet anyway. It was as though she was talking to herself. "All those machines, Li Hua, all those wonderful machines. Then Genreng invents the bioweb, and computers aren't any use anymore. Machine obsolescence. Suddenly there's the bioweb, and how do you access it? You've got to be part of it, your whole body, through a neuroviral interface. And you can't do that unless you get dosed up with one of their synthetic viruses, and you've got to be young." She snorted. "You can't tell me that there's nothing wrong with that making yourself ill so that you can be part of the global communications network."
She fell silent and I stared at the table. I couldn't quite see what the problem was. I thought of Tso, in a month's time; lying in a cot in Harbin, sailing the viral pathways, able to reach out to everyone else who was infected. A disease is a system, I understood, and I thought it was a great mark of progress that we no longer needed to invent machines, computers, for the resources had been with us all along. Tso would be another link in the great chain of the neuroviral web, and it in turn would convey all the information he needed; the world as one great mind, unified.
"And then what happens?" my grandmother murmured. "He'll work for a few years, and then what? How do we know he's even got a future after that?"
"It's not like that, Grandma! The doctors told me. They just give you a cure, it's all perfectly straightforward."
"Maybe." She did not sound very sure. She reached out and patted my hand. "At least you'll still be here, Li Hua."
I didn't want to tell her, then, that she was wrong. Even with the low-grade viral equipment that Tang's given me in exchange for the ova, I should be able to get a job in some webshop somewhere, and then I'll be able to reach out across the thousand miles to Harbin, and beyond, and my brother will be there. Grandma doesn't understand, you see, that you have to accommodate yourself to life, to Tao. It's like water, you have to go wherever it takes you, and you can't stop it for long. She always wanted to leave the body behind, soar out into the electronic sunlight, but you can't do that. You have to go the other way, into darkness, into the body itself. But I didn't want to argue with her, and this was something we could talk about later.
I reached out and poured more tea into her cup. I smiled
at my grandmother and I could tell from the side effects that Tang's virus was working, for outside the window, the faces of the dead clustered in the shadows, beneath the unknown stars.
Nevermore
IAN R. MACLEOD
British writer Ian R. MacLeod was one of the hottest new writers of the nineties, 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 and 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.
Here, in a stylish and compelling look at a decadent posthuman world that ought to be Utopia, he proves once again that Art— like Passion— is in the eye of the beholder.
*
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 sketch pad 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 got 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, old Vincent had loved his cadmiums and chromes! And never sold one single fucking painting in his entire life.
"What— what I told you was true," Elanore said, stumbling slightly over these little words, sounding almost un-Elanore-like for a moment; nearly uneasy. "I mean, about Marcel in Venice and Francine across the sky. And, yes, we did talk about a reunion. But you know how these things are. Time's precious, and, at the end of the day it's been so long that these things really do take a lot of nerve. So it didn't come off. It was just a few promises that no one really imagined they'd keep. But I thought— well, I thought that it would be nice to see you anyway. At least one more time."
"So all of this is just for me. Jesus, Elanore, I knew you were rich, but…"
"Don't be like that, Gustav. I'm not trying to impress you or depress you or whatever. It was just the way it came out."
He poured more of the wine, wondering as he did so exactly what trick it was that allowed them to share it.
"So, you're still painting?"
"Yep."
"I haven't seen much of your work about."
"I do it for private clients," Gustav said. "Mostly."
He glared at Elanore, daring her to challenge his statement. Of course, if he really was painting and selling, he'd have some credit. And if he had credit, he wouldn't be living in that dreadful tenement she'd tracked him down to. He'd have paid for all the necessary treatments to stop himself becoming the frail old man he so nearly was. I can help, you know, Gustav could hear Elanore saying because he'd heard her say it so many times before. I don't need all this wealth. So let me give you just a little help. Give me that chance… But what she actually said was even worse.
"Are you recording yourself, Gus?" Elanore asked. "Do you have a librarian?"
Now, he thought, now is the time to walk out. Pull this whole thing down and go back into the street— the foreal street. And forget.
"Did you know," he said instead, "that the word reality once actually meant foreal— not the projections and the simulations, but proper actuality. But then along came virtual reality, and of course, when the next generation of products was developed, the illusion was so much better that you could walk right into it instead of having to put on goggles and a suit. So they had to think of an improved phrase, a super-word for the purposes of marketing. And someone must have said, Why don't we just call it reality?"
"You don't have to be hurtful, Gus. There's no rule written down that says we can't get on."
"I thought that that was exactly the problem. It's in my head, and it was probably there in yours before you died. Now it's…" He'd have said more. But he was suddenly, stupidly, near to tears.
"What exactly are you doing these days, Gus?" she asked as he cleared his throat and pretended it was the wine that he'd choked on. "What are you painting at the moment?"
"I'm working on a series," he was surprised to hear himself saying. "It's a sort of a journey-piece. A sequence of paintings which begin here in Paris and then…" He swallowed. "…Bright, dark colors…" A nerve began to leap beside his eye. Something seemed to touch him, but was too faint to be heard or felt or seen.
"Sounds good, Gus," Elanore said, leaning toward him across the table. And Elanore smelled of Elanore, the way she always did. Her pale skin was freckled from the sunlight of whatever warm and virtual place she was living. Across her cheeks and her upper lip, threaded gold, lay the down that he'd brushed so many times with the tips of his fingers. "I can tell from that look in your eyes that you're into a really good phase…"
After that, things went better. They shared a second bottle of vin ordinaire. They made a little mountain of the butts of her Disc Bleu in the ashtray. This ghost— she really was like Elanore. Gustav didn't even object to her taking his hand across the table. There was a kind of abandon in all of this— new ideas mixed with old memories. And he understood more clearly now what van Gogh had meant about this café being a place where you could ruin yourself, or go mad, or commit a crime.
The few other diners faded. The virtual waiters, their aprons a single assured gray-white stroke of the palette knife, started to tip the chairs against the tables. The aromas of the Left Bank's ever-unreliable sewers began to override those of cigarettes and people and horse dung and wine. At least, Gustav thought, that was still foreal…
"I suppose quite a lot of the others have died by now," Gustav said. "All that facile gang you seem to so fondly remember."
"People still change, you know. Just because we've passed on, doesn't mean we can't change."
By now, he was in a mellow enough mood just to nod at that. And how have you changed, Elanore? he wondered. After so long, what flicker of the electrons made you decide to come to me now?
"You're obviously doing well."
"I am…" She nodded, as if the idea surprised her. "I mean, I didn't expect—"
"—And you look—"
"—And you, Gus, what I said about you being—"
"—That project of mine—"
"—I know, I—"
They stopped and gazed at each other. Then they both smiled, and the moment seemed to hold, warm and frozen, as if from a scene within a painting. It was almost…
"Well…" Elanore broke the illusion first as she began to fumble in the small sequined purse she had on her lap. Eventually, she produced a handkerchief and blew delicately on her nose. Gustav tried not to grind his teeth— although this was exactly the kind of affectation he detested about ghosts. He guessed, anyway, from the changed look on her face, that she knew what he was thinking. "I suppose that's it, then, isn't it, Gus? We've met— we've spent the evening together without arguing. Almost like old times."
"Nothing will ever be like old times."
"No…" Her eyes glinted, and he thought for a moment that she was going to become angry— goaded at last into something like the Elanore of old. But she just smiled. "Nothing ever will be like old times. That's the problem, isn't it? Nothing ever was, or ever will be…"
Elanore clipped her purse shut again. Elanore stood up. Gustav saw her hesitate as she considered bending down to kiss him farewell, then decide that he would just regard that as another affront, another slap in the face.
Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future Page 37