Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  She was cautious, too, in manisfesting her own multiple identities. She wished she did not have to pretend to have other selves. But they had to be brought forth now and again, if only to maintain Van’s interest in her. Multiples were notoriously indifferent to singletons. They found them bland, overly simple, two-dimensional. They wanted the excitement of embracing one person and discovering another, or two or three. So she gave him Lisa, she gave him Vixen, she gave him the Judy-who-was-Cleo and the Cleo-who-was-someone-else, and she slipped from one to another in seemingly involuntary and unexpected way, often when they were in bed.

  Lisa was calm, controlled, straitlaced. She was totally shocked when she found herself, between one eye blink and the next, in the a arms of a strange man. “Who are you?—where am I?” she blurted, rolling away and pulling herself into a fetal ball.

  “I’m Judy’s friend,” Van said.

  She stared bleakly at him. “So she’s up to her tricks again.”

  He looked pained, embarrassed, solicitous. She let him wonder for a moment whether he would have to take her back to her hotel in the middle of the night. Then she allowed a mischievous smile to cross Lisa’s face, allowed Lisa’s outraged modesty to subside, allowed Lisa to relent and relax, allowed Lisa to purr—

  “Well, as long as we’re here already—what did you say your name was?”

  He liked that. He liked Vixen, too—wild, sweaty, noisy, a moaner, a gasper, a kicker and thrasher who dragged him down onto the floor and went rolling over and over with him. She thought he liked Cleo, too, though that was harder to tell, because Cleo’s style was aloof, serious, baroque, inscrutable. She would switch quickly from one to another, sometimes running through all four in the course of an hour. Wine, she said, induced quick switching in her. She let him know that she had a few other identities, too, fragmentary and submerged. She hinted that they were troubled, deeply neurotic, self-destructive: They were under control, she said, and would not erupt to cause woe for him, but she left the possibility hovering over them to add spice to the relationship and plausibility to her role.

  It seemed to be working. His pleasure in her company was evident. She was beginning to indulge in little fantasies of moving down permanently from Sacramento, renting an apartment, perhaps even moving in with him, though that would surely be a strange and challenging life. She would be living with Paul and Ned and Chuck and the rest of the crew, too, but how wondrous, how electrifying.

  Then on the tenth day he seemed uncharacteristically tense and somber. She asked him what was bothering him, and he evaded her and she pressed, and finally he said, “Do you really want to know?”

  “Of course.”

  “It bothers me that you aren’t real, Judy.”

  She caught her breath. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “You know what I mean,” he said quietly sadly. “Don’t try to pretend any longer. There’s no point in it.”

  It was like a jolt in the ribs.

  She turned away and was silent a long while, wondering what to say. Just when everything was going so well, just when she was beginning to believe she had carried off the masquerade successfully.

  “So you know?” she asked timidly.

  “Of course I know. I knew right away.”

  She was trembling. “How could you tell?”

  “A thousand ways. When we switch, we change. The voice. The eyes. The muscular tensions. The grammatical habits. The brain waves, even. An evoked-potential test shows it. Flash a light in my eyes and I’ll give off a certain brainwave pattern, and Ned will give off another, and Chuck still another. You and Lisa and Cleo and Vixen would all be the same. Multiples aren’t actors, Judy. Multiples are separate minds within the same brain. That’s a matter of scientific fact. You were just acting. You were doing it very well, but you couldn’t possibly have fooled me.”

  “You let me make an idiot of myself, then.”

  “No.”

  “Why did you—how could you—”

  “I saw you walk in that first night, and you caught me right away. I watched you go out on the floor and fall apart, and I knew you couldn’t be multiple, and I wondered, What the hell’s she doing here? Then I went over to you, and I was hooked. I felt something I haven’t ever felt before. Does that sound like the standard old malarkey? But it’s true, Judy. You’re the first singleton woman who’s ever interested me.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head. “Something about you—your intensity, your alertness, maybe even your eagerness to pretend you were a multiple—I don’t know. I was caught, I was caught and hard. And it’s been a wonderful week and a half. I mean that.”

  “Until you got bored.”

  “I’m not bored with you, Judy.”

  “Cleo. That’s my real name, my singleton name. There is no Judy.”

  “Cleo,” he said, as if measuring the word with his lips.

  “So you aren’t bored with me even though there’s only one of me. That’s marvelous—tremendously flattering. That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day. I guess I should go now. Van. It is Van, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  “How do you want me to talk? I fascinated you, you fascinated me, we played our little games with each other, and now it’s over. I wasn’t real, but you did your best. We both did our best. But I’m only a singleton woman, and you can’t be satisfied with that. Not for long. For a night, a week, two weeks maybe. Sooner or later you’ll want the real thing, and I can’t be the real thing for you. So long, Van.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Don’t go.”

  “What’s the sense of staying?”

  “I want you to stay.”

  “I’m a singleton, Van.”

  “You don’t have to be,” he said.

  The therapist’s name was Burkhalter, and his office was in one of the Embarcadero towers. To the San Francisco multiples community he was very close to being a deity. His specialty was electrophysiological integration, with specific application to multiple-personality disorders. Those who carried within themselves dark and diabolical selves that threatened the stability of the group went to him to have those selves purged or at least contained. Those who sought to have latent selves that were submerged beneath more outgoing personalities brought forward into a healthy functional state went to him also. Those whose life as a multiple was a torment of schizoid confusions instead of a richly rewarding contrapuntal symphony gave themselves to Dr. Burkhalter to be healed, and in time they were. And in recent years he had begun to develop techinques for what he called personality augmentation. Van called it “driving the wedge.”

  “He can turn a singleton into a multiple?” Cleo asked in amazement.

  “If the potential is there. You know that it’s partly genetic: The structure of a multiple’s brain is fundamentally different from a singleton’s. The hardware just isn’t the same, the cerebral wiring. And then, if the right stimulus comes along, usually in childhood, usually but not necessarily traumatic, the splitting takes place, the separate identities begin to establish their territories. But much of the time multiplicity is never generated, and you walk around with the capacity to be a whole horde of selves yet never know it.”

  “Is there reason to think I’m like that?”

  He shrugged. “It’s worth finding out, if he detects the predisposition, he has effective ways of inducing separation. Driving the wedge, you see? You do want to be a multiple, don’t you, Cleo?”

  “Oh, yes, Van. Yes!”

  Burkhalter wasn’t sure about her. He taped electrodes to her head, flashed bright lights in her eyes, gave her verbal-association tests, ran four or five different kinds of electroencephalograph studies, and still he was uncertain. “It is not a black-and-white matter.” he said several times, frowning, scowling. He was a multiple himself, but three of his selves were psychiatrists; so there was never any real problem about his office hours. Cleo wondered if he ever
went to himself for a second opinion. After a week of testing she was sure that she must be a hopeless case, an intractable singleton, but Burkhalter surprised her by concluding that it was worth the attempt. “At the very worst,” he said, “we will experience spontaneous fusing in a few days, and you will be no worse off than you are now. But if we succeed—”

  His clinic was across the bay, in a town called Moraga. She spent two days undergoing further tests, then three days taking medication. “Simply an anticonvulsant,” the nurse explained cheerily. “To build up your tolerance.”

  “Tolerance for what?” Cleo asked.

  “The birth trauma,” she said. “New selves will be coming forth, and it can be uncomfortable for a little while.”

  The treatment began on Thursday. Electroshock, drugs, electroshock again. She was heavily sedated. It felt like a long dream, but there was no pain. Van visited her every day, Chuck came too, bringing her two potted orchids in bloom, and Paul sang to her, and even Ned paid her a call. But it was hard for her to maintain a conversation with any of them. She heard voices much of the time. She felt feverish and dislocated, and at times she was sure she was floating eight or ten inches above the bed. Gradually that sensation subsided, but there were others nearly as odd. The voices remained. She learned how to hold conversations with them.

  In the second week she was not allowed to have visitors. That didn’t matter.

  She had plenty of company even when she was alone.

  Then Van came for her. “They’re going to let you go home today.” “How are you doing. Cleo?”

  “I’m Noreen,” she said.

  There were five of her apparently. That was what Van said. She had no way of knowing, because when they were dominant she was gone—not merely asleep but gone, perceiving nothing. But he showed her notes that they wrote, in hand writings that she did not recognize and indeed could barely read, and he played tapes of her other voices: Noreen, a deep contralto; Nanette, high and breathy; Katya, hard and rough New York; and the last one, who had not yet announced her name, a stagy, voluptuous, campy siren voice.

  She did not leave his apartment the first few days, and then she began going out for short trips, always with Van or one of his alters close beside. She felt convalsecent. A kind of hangover from the drugs had dulled her reflexes and made it hard for her to cope with traffic, and also there was the fear that she would undergo a switching while she was out. Whenever that happened it came without warning, and when she returned to awareness afterwards she felt a sharp discontinuity of memory, not knowing how she suddenly found herself in Ghirardelli Square or Golden Gate Park or wherever it was that the other self had taken their body.

  But she was happy. And Van was happy with her. One night in the second week, when they were out, he switched to Chuck—Cleo knew it was Chuck coming on, for now she always knew right away which identity had taken over—and he said, “You’ve had a marvelous effect on him. None of us have ever seen him like this before—so contented, so fulfilled—”

  “I hope it lasts, Chuck.”

  “Of course it’ll last! Why on earth shouldn’t it last?”

  It didn’t. Toward the end of the third week Cleo noticed that there hadn’t been any entries in her memo book from Noreen for several days. That in itself was nothing alarming: An alter might choose to submerge for days, weeks, even months at a time. But was it likely that Noreen, so new to the world, would remain out of sight so long? Lin-lin, the little Chinese girl who had evolved in the second week and was Cleo’s memory trace, reported that Noreen had gone away. A few days later an identity named Mattie came and went within three hours, like something bubbling up out of a troubled sea. Then Nanette and Katya disappeared, leaving Cleo with no one but her nameless, siren-voiced alter and Lin-lin. She was fusing again. The wedges that Dr. Burkhalter had driven into her soul were not holding; her mind insisted on oneness and was integrating itself; she was reverting to the singleton state.

  “All of them are gone now,” she told Van disconsolately.

  “I know. I’ve been watching it happen.”

  “Is there anything we can do? Should I go back to Burkhalter?”

  She saw the pain in his eyes. “It won’t do any good,” he said. “He told me the chances were about three to one this would happen. A month, he figured; that was about the best we could hope for. And we’ve had our month.”

  “I’d better go, Van.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “No?”

  “I love you, Cleo.”

  “You won’t. Not for much longer.”

  He tried to argue with her, to tell her that it didn’t matter to him that she was a singleton, that one Cleo was worth a whole raft of alters, that he would learn to adapt to life with a singleton woman. He could not bear the thought of her leaving now. So she stayed: a week, two weeks, three. They ate at their favorite restaurants. They strolled hand in hand through the cool evenings. They talked of Chomsky and Whorf and even of shopping centers. When he was gone and Paul or Chuck or Hal or Dave was there she went places with them if they wanted her to. Once she went to a movie with Ned, and when toward the end he felt himself starting to switch she put her arm around him until he regained control so that he could see how the movie finished.

  But it was no good. He wanted something richer than she could offer him: the swtiching, the doubling, the complex undertones and overtones of other personalities resonating beyond the shores of consciousness. She could not give him that. He was like one who has voluntarily blindfolded himself in order to keep a blind woman company. She knew she could not ask him to live like that forever.

  And so one afternoon when Van was somewhere else she packed her things and said good-bye to Paul, who gave her a hug and wept a little with her, and she went back to Sacramento. “Tell him not to call,” she said. “A clean break’s the best.” She had been in San Francisco two months, and it was as if those two months were the only months of her life that had had any color in them, and all the rest had been lived in tones of gray.

  There had been a man in the real-estate office who had been telling her for a couple of years that they were meant for each other. Cleo had always been friendly enough to him: They had done a few skiing weekends in Tahoe the winter before; they had gone to Hawaii once, they had driven down to San Diego. But she had never felt anything particular when she was with him. A week after her return she phoned him and suggested that they drive up north to the redwood country for a few days. When they came back she moved into the condominium he had just outside town.

  It was hard to find anything wrong with him. He was good-natured and attractive, he was successful, he read books, and liked good movies, he enjoyed hiking, rafting, and backpacking, he even talked of driving down into the city during the opera season to take in a performance or two. He was getting toward the age where he was thinking about marriage and a family. He seemed very fond of her.

  But he was flat, she thought. Flat as a cardboard cutout: a singleton, a one-brain, a no-switch. There was only one of him, and there always would be. It was hardly his fault, she knew. But she couldn’t settle for someone who had only two dimensions. A terrible restlessness went roaring through her every evening, and she could not possibly tell him what was troubling her.

  On a drizzly afternoon in early November she packed a suitcase and drove down to San Francisco. She checked into one of the Lombard Street motels, showered, changed, and walked over to Fillmore Street. Cautiously she explored the strip from Chestnut down to Union, from Union back to Chestnut. The thought of running into Van terrified her. Not tonight, she prayed. Not tonight. She went past Skits, did not go in, stopped outside a club called Big Mama, shook her head, finally entered one called The Side Effect. Mostly women inside, as usual, but a few men at the bar, not too bad-looking. No sign of Van.

  She bought herself a drink and casually struck up a conversation with a short, curly-haired, artistic-looking type.

  “You come here often?�
� he asked.

  “First time. I’ve usually gone to Skits.”

  “I think I remember seeing you there. Or maybe not.”

  She smiled. “What’s your now-name?”

  “Sandy. Yours?”

  Cleo drew her breath down deep into her lungs. She felt a kind of light-headedness beginning to swirl behind her eyes. Is this what you want? she asked herself. Yes. Yes. This is what you want.

  “Melinda,” she said.

  JACK McDEVITT

  Cryptic

  SETI—the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence—has been a reality for decades now, and though no proof has as yet been found that there really are extraterrestrial civilizations Out There, the radiotelescopes continue to search the skies for signs that We Are Not Alone, and men and women from all corners of the earth still look up at night and hope for messages from the distant stars.

  But what if when we do receive such a message, we don’t like what it has to say …?

  Born in Philadelphia, Jack McDevitt now lives in Woodridge, Illinois with his wife and three children. He is a frequent contributer to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and has also sold stories to The Twilight Zone Magazine and to Chess Life. An ex-naval officer, ex-English teacher, and former customs inspector, he is currently the regional training officer for the Chicago Customs Region.

  It was at the bottom of the safe in a bulky manila envelope. I nearly tossed it into the trash along with the stacks of other documents, tapes, and assorted flotsam left over from the Project.

  Had it been cataloged, indexed in some way, I’m sure I would have. But the envelope was blank, save for an eighteen-year-old date scrawled in the lower right hand corner, and, beneath it, the notation “40 gh.”