by Eric Brown
I knew the woman. I’d seen her many, many times before.
That same face...
Her poise, the way she had of making her every movement a unique performance.
Stephanie Etteridge.
But that was impossible, of course.
* * * *
Dan was out when I got back. I left the lights off, swung the Batan II terminal from the ceiling and dialled the catalogue of classic Etteridge movies. I sent out for a meal, sat back in the flickering luminescence of the screen and tried not to feel sorry for myself.
For the next hour I ate dim sum and noodles and stared at a soporific succession of dated entertainments. Even in the better films the acting was stylised, the form limited. At the end of every scene I found myself reaching for the participation-bar on the keyboard, only to be flashed the message that I was watching a pre-modern film and that viewer participation was impossible. So I sat back and fumed and watched the storyline go its unalterable way, like a familiar nightmare.
There was no doubting that, despite the limitations of the form, Stephanie Etteridge had something special. If I could suspend comparison between her movies and the holographic, computerised participation dramas of today, I had to admit that Etteridge had a certain star quality, a charismatic presence.
When I’d seen enough, I returned to the main menu and called up The Life of Stephanie Etteridge, a eulogistic documentary made only two years ago.
It was the usual life of a movie star; there was the regular quota of marriages and affairs, drug addictions and suicide attempts; low points when her performances were below standard and the fickle public switched allegiance for a time to some parvenu starlet with good looks and better publicity—and high points when she fought back from slash addiction, the death of a husband and universal unpopularity to carry off three successive Oscars in films the critics came to hail as classics.
And then the final tragedy.
The film industry died a death. In Geneva, a cartel of computer-wizards developed Inter-Active computer-simulated holographies, and actors, directors, scriptwriters were a thing of the past, superseded by the all-powerful Programmer. In one month the studios in Hollywood, Bombay, Rio and Sydney shut up shop and the stars found themselves redundant. A dozen or so mega-stars were paid retainers so that their personas could be used to give Joe Public familiar, reassuring faces to see them through the period of transition—until a whole new pantheon of computer-generated screen Gods was invented for mass worship. Etteridge was one of these tide-over stars, which was how I recognised her face; I’d seen many ‘Etteridge’ Inter-Active dramas as a kid. But it didn’t take a degree in psychology to read between the lines of the documentary and realise that lending your face to a virtual character was no compensation for the denial of real stardom.
The documentary didn’t dwell on the personal tragedy, of course; the last scene showed her marriage to an Italian surgeon, and while the credits rolled a voice-over reported that Stephanie Etteridge had made her last film in ten years ago and thereafter retired to a secluded villa in the South of France.
I was re-running that last film when Dan came back.
He’d washed and changed; he wore a smart, side-fastening blue suit with a high collar. I preferred him in casuals—but perhaps that was because I knew where he was going.
“You dining with that woman, Dan?” I asked.
He nodded. “The Gastrodome at twelve.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” I whispered, and I was unable to tell whether I was jealous, or scared at what the woman might want Dan to do.
“Like you said earlier, we need the dollars.” He mussed my hair. “Did you find out who she is?”
I told him that I’d followed her to a mansion on the left bank, but I said nothing about my capture.
“There were tons of blown-up stills on the walls,” I said, “all of the old film actress Stephanie Etteridge. I know you’re going to call me dumb, but the resemblance is remarkable. Not only her face, but the way she moves. Look...”
I turned the screen to him while Etteridge played the spurned lover with a bravura performance of venom and spite. “Recognise?”
He leaned close and whispered in my ear. “You’re dumb.”
“I know, I know. But you must admit, the resemblance...”
Dan nodded. “Okay, the woman does look like Etteridge. But that film’s what...? Thirty years old? I’d say that Etteridge was about forty there. That’d make her seventy now... Are you trying to tell me that the woman we saw here today was that old?”
“But why all the pictures?”
He shrugged. “Beats me. Perhaps she’s the daughter of the actress. Or a fan. Or some fruit-cake who thinks she’s Etteridge. Have you accessed her? A hundred to one you’ll find her dead.”
So I turned back to the Batan and called up the information on Stephanie Katerina Etteridge. We scanned her life story in cold, documentary fact. Date of birth, education, professional status, the four marriages, her involvement with an American businessman jailed for an unspecified misdemeanour a matter of days before they were due to marry—though the documentary had said nothing about this. And her death...?
I threw the nearest thing to hand—a tape cartridge—at Dan. “You owe me!”
He fielded the cartridge and waved it. “Okay, so she’s still alive—a crotchety old dame somewhere living on caviar and memories. She’s over seventy, Phuong.”
I turned away in a huff.
Dan readied the tape on the desk. He slipped a small mic into his pocket so that I’d be able to monitor his conversation with the woman over dinner.
“Catch you later.”
I came out of my sulk. “Dan, take care. Okay?”
I ran to the door and tried to pull him to me, but he stiffened and kissed the top of my head as if I were a kid. Despite all the Zen he’d been pumping into his skull, he still could not accept me. From needing to show affection, my feelings polarised and I wanted suddenly to hit him, to hurt him as much as he hurt me. He murmured goodbye and took the downchute to the boulevard.
* * * *
Two years ago Dan had been an Engineman with the Canterbury Line, a spacer who mind-pushed bigships through the nada-continuum. Then the Keilor-Vincicoff Organisation developed the interfaces, and the bigships Lines went out of business, leaving thousands of Engineman and -women strung out and in need of the flux. Denied union with the bliss of the nada-continuum, Dan drank too much and got into Buddhism and to feed himself started a third rate investigative Agency based in Bondy. He advertised for an assistant to do the leg-work, and I got the job.
We got along fine for weeks, even though I was evasive and distant and didn’t let him get too close. Then as I got to know him better I began to believe that we were both disabled, and that if I could accept the state of his head, then perhaps he could come to some acceptance of my body.
Then one night he asked me back to his place, and like a fool I nodded yes. The usual scene, as far as I could gather from the films I’d watched: soft light, music, wine... And after a bottle of chianti I found myself close to him. His fingers mimed the shape of my face, centimetres away; it was as if he had difficulty believing my beauty and was afraid to let his fingertips discover a lie. But it was no lie, just reconstructed osseous underlay and synthi-flesh done with the touch of an artist. We kissed. He fumbled my buttons and I went for his zip, meaning to get him with my mouth before he discovered my secret. I didn’t make it. He touched me where my right breast should have been, then ripped open my bodice. He gagged and tipped me to the floor, strode to the window and stared out while I gathered my stuff and ran.
I stayed away for weeks, until he came for me and apologised. I returned to the office and we began again from the beginning, and it was as if we were closer, having shared our secrets—though never, of course, close enough.
* * * *
Soon after that night at his place he began experimenting. He claimed that he was doing it for me
. By embracing illegal skull-tapes, second-hand Buddhism and the Bardo Thodol rewritten for the modern era, he said he was attempting to come to some acceptance of my disfigurement—but I knew he was also doing it for himself.
Now I stared at the mystical junk that littered the desk and the chesterfield: the pamphlets, the mandalas, the meditation pins and bootleg tapes. In a rage I picked up a great drift of the stuff and threw it the length of the room. When the desk and chesterfield were cleared, and my anger was still not exhausted, I ran across the office, fell to my knees and pitched tankas and pins, magazines and effigies of Gautama through the window. I leaned out and laughed like a fool, then rushed down into the street and stomped on the useless relics and idols of mysticism, ground them into the sidewalk and kicked the debris into the storm drain. Then, as the rain poured down around me, I sat on the kerb and cried.
Hell, real love rarely lasted; so what chance had our corrupted version of attraction, what chance had the relationship between a screwed up Engineman attempting to rewire his head with bogus Buddhist tracts so that he could, in theory, ignore the physical, and someone whose body was no more than a puckered mass of raddled meat? It was unfair to both of us; it was unfair of myself to expect love and affection after so many years without hope, and it was unfair of me to keep Dan from other women who could offer him more than just companionship and a pretty face.
* * * *
The tape was running when I returned to the office.
I lay on the chesterfield in the darkness and listened to the clink of glasses, the murmur of polite conversation. The Gastrodome was the de-commissioned astrodome of an old French bigship, amputated and welded atop the Eiffel tower. I’d been up there once, but the view, had given me vertigo. Now I lay half asleep and listened to the dialogue that filled the room.
All I wanted was for Dan to refuse to work for the woman, so that he would be free from the danger of whatever it was she wanted him to do. Then, when he returned, I could tell him that I was leaving, and that this time there was nothing he could say to make me return.
“Tell me about when you worked for the Canterbury Line,” the woman said. “Is it true that in flux you experience Nirvana?”
“Some Enginemen claim that.”
“Did you?”
“Do we have to talk about this?” he said, and I knew that his hands would be trembling.
In my mind’s eye I could see the woman giving an unconcerned shrug. “Very well, but I hope you don’t mind discussing your occipital implant-”
Dan, “Why?” suspicious.
“Because I’m interested.” Her tone was hard. “What kind is it, Leferve?”
“Standard Sony neo-cortical implant-”
“With a dozen chips in the pre-frontal lobe, subcortex, cerebellum, etc...?”
“You’ve done your homework,” Dan said. “Why the interest?”
“When was the last time you fluxed?”
I cried out.
It took Dan aback, too. The silence stretched. Then: “Almost two years ago...”
“Would you consider doing it just one more time,” she asked, “for twenty-five thousand dollars?”
I balled my fists and willed him to say no...
“I have a smallship I need taking on a short haul,” she said.
There was a brief moment of silence, then Dan spoke.
“Insystem or interstellar?”
And I yelled, “Dan...”
“Neither,” the woman said. “I want you to push the ship through the nada-continuum from here to Frankfurt.”
Dan laughed. “You’re mad...”
“I’m quite sane, I assure you. From A to B and back again. You’ll be in the flux-tank for less than one hour.”
“And the ship?”
“An ex-Indian Navy Hindustan-Tata with Rolls-Royce ion drive-”
“Crew?”
“None. Just you and me. The ship is pre-programmed with the co-ordinates. All it needs is someone to push it.”
“And I’d be wasting my time asking what all this is about?”
The woman assented. “You’d be wasting your time. Can I take it that you want the job?”
Dan murmured something.
“Good,” she said. “Here’s my card. If you arrive at five, we’ll phase out at six.”
They left the restaurant and took the downchute to the landing stage. I sat in the darkness and stared at the wall, wishing that Dan had had the strength of will to turn his back on the flux. He craved union with the nada-continuum, but this gig would be just a quick fix after which his craving would be all the more intense.
I switched off the tape, then switched it on again. I couldn’t face Dan and tell him that I was leaving—that way I’d end up screaming and shouting how much I hated him, which wasn’t true. I’d leave a message to the effect that I needed a long break, and quit before he got back. I picked up the microphone.
Then the Batan chimed and Claude’s big face filled the screen. “Phuong, I got the information on that flier.”
“Yeah?” My thoughts were elsewhere.
“Belongs to a guy called Lassolini—Sam Lassolini.”
I just shrugged.
Claude went on, “He’s a surgeon, a big noise in European bio-engineering.”
I remembered the documentary, and Etteridge’s last marriage. “Hey, wasn’t he married to-”
Claude nodded. “That’s the guy. He hit the headlines a few years ago when the film star Stephanie Etteridge left him.”
“You got his address, Claude?”
“Sure. De Gaul building, Montparnasse.”
“Pick me up in five minutes.”
I thought about it.
Now why would Sam Lassolini follow the Stephanie Etteridge look-alike to her mansion in Passy...?
There was only one way to find out.
* * * *
The de Gaul building was the old city morgue, deserted and derelict but for the converted top floor, now a penthouse suite. Claude dropped me on the landing stage and I told him to wait. I took the downchute one floor and hiked along a corridor. I came to a pair of double doors and hit the chime. I felt suddenly conspicuous. I hadn’t washed for two days, and I’d hardly had time to learn my lines.
A small Japanese butler opened the door.
“Lassolini residence?” I asked.
“The doctor sees no-one without an appointment.”
“Then I’ll make an appointment—for now.”
I tried to push past him. When he barred my way I. showed him my pistol and said that if he didn’t sit down and keep quiet I’d blow a hole in his head. He sat down quickly, hands in the air.
I tiptoed down a passage and came to a vast ballroom with a chequerboard floor of marble and onyx tiles, and a dozen scintilating chandeliers. There was no sign of Lassolini; I would have called out, but the weight of the silence intimidated me.
I opened the first door on the right.
It took me about fifteen seconds to recognise the woman who this morning had visited the office, who I had followed to the mansion, and who, less than thirty minutes ago, had been dining with Dan.
She was hanging by the neck and her torso had been opened with something sharp from sternum to stomach; the contents of her abdomen had spilled, and the weight of her entrails anchored her to the floor.
I heard a sound behind me and turned. A tall, Latin guy looked down on me. He wore a white suit and too much gold. I did mental arithmetic and decided that he looked good for sixty.
“Sam Lassolini?” I asked.
He didn’t deny it. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
I drew my pistol and aimed at his chest. Next to it I hung my identification. “Phuong Li Xian,” I said.
“I have the power of arrest.” I indicated the woman. “Why did you do it, Lassolini?”
He looked past me at the body and smiled. “If I may answer a question with a question: why your interest?”
I hesitated. “I’m worki
ng on her case.”
He threw his head back and laughed.
My fist tightened on the pistol. “I don’t see what’s so funny.”
He indicated another, door along the hall. “Follow me.”
He opened the door and entered the room. He turned to face me, his laughter mocking my shock.
Behind him, spread across the floor and the far wall, were the remains of what once might have been a human being. It was as if the wall and the floor had suddenly snapped shut to create a grotesque Rorschach blot of flesh and blood. The only part of the body that had survived the mutilation was the head. It sat beside Lassolini’s right foot, staring at me.