Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  In her office, she faced the invisible, hungry multitude. Her mind tried to push me back into the memory but I clamped down and kept out of her perspective. The seizure had leaked into her visual center and the slate on the desk swelled to enormous size. She backed away from it, hallucinating patterns on the slate. Faces again. Give them what they want.

  The pain doubled her over. She straightened up slowly, both hands on her belly. There was a dark stain on the stretchy material of the secondskins, just below navel level. Something from nothing. Give them what they want. Her fingers gripped the cloth. Psychotics frequently displayed extraordinary physical strength. And then there were those with a touch of telekinesis, unusable until a moment of crisis. It didn’t matter if the crisis took the form of an hallucination brought on by an anxiety attack.

  Her hands fell away. She didn’t explode, or convulse, or even scream. She simply opened up and thirty years of misery poured out.

  The memory went black, along with everything else. Then the mind stirred itself again and wrapped around me. Kitta Wren may have died, but her mind wanted life. Any life. Mine would do just fine.

  Listen, she said. The memory was so worn only her words remained. All they want is the show. Give them what they want, but never ask anything of them. Something from nothing. The Wren looks out for herself.

  I pulled back, preparing to withdraw. The mind flexed and the feel of it was almost plaintive now. Without warning I was face to face with the image of Kitta Wren as she had been, spiderwebs glistening. They still looked like shattered gems at first glance and they always would. I concentrated on that thought, sending it toward the image in steady waves. After some timeless interval, new lines appeared in the webs, running like fissures. The mind fought, trying to maintain solidity, but I was right. The cracks crept over her face slowly. I had to strain to keep them going, but they went, dividing her forehead into a myraid of little territories, fragmenting her cheeks, sundering her mouth. The image shuddered, almost held, and then just came apart, every piece sailing away from every other piece. When they were all gone, I withdrew without difficulty.

  The first thing I saw after I put my eyes back in was the brain in the canister. The stay-juice looked milky now, a sign of imminent decay. Without really thinking about it, I leaned forward and shut the maintenance box off.

  Nelson Nelson held up an official-looking chip-card. “This is a lawsuit.”

  I nodded. He put the card down on his desk and picked up another one.

  “And this is a lawsuit.”

  I had my own card and I held it up. “And this is a countersuit. In case anyone actually has the nerve to go to court.”

  NN looked tired. “Everything’s already being settled out of court. The agency took your side of course. No one can say I don’t back my people, isn’t it so?”

  It was so. But I could tell by the way that puckered old mouth was twitching that he’d probably thought about filing against me himself for taking it upon myself to shut off the maintenance box. If the morgue laboratory had not come out and said that the composition of the stay-juice had indicated degeneration beyond the point where the mind could be re-entered, I would most likely have been signing my next thirty years of salary over to Nelson Nelson.

  “Why’d you do it, Deadpan? What got into you?”

  “She was dead. And nothing at all got into me.”

  “Sabian says the brain couldn’t have deteriorated so quickly between the time you went in and the time you came out. Could it?”

  I didn’t attempt an answer right away. The brain had been a lot deader when I came out than it had been when I’d gone in. I kept thinking in the back of my mind that had something to do with it even though I couldn’t have proved it one way or the other. Was there telekinesis after death as well as art? I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. “Maybe the solution was defective,” I said after a bit. “Or hadn’t been changed often enough.” That was the argument in my countersuit anyway, that Sabian had allowed me to hook into an unstabilized brain which caused me to act in an irresponsible manner by shutting my client off instead of calling for him so he could do it. Sabian was just bitched because it meant he couldn’t enter the mind after I was through to do his own little postmortem, figuring he could sell Phylp all the stuff I’d missed. He wasn’t gassing me. Nobody filed a lawsuit over a protocol violation.

  NN shrugged. “Phylp’s charge is more serious.”

  “Seriouser and seriouser. It’ll never hold up. He/she got all the postmortem fragments I could find. I had them all memorized. I did my job. It’s not my fault he/she thinks none of them were worth the effort. And he/she can’t sue me for the wrongful death of someone already dead.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that, Allie.”

  “But that’s what it amounts to. He/she’s charging that before I broke contact—”

  “Prematurely broke contract.”

  “—I dissolved her Self and killed her a second time, compounding that by turning off the box.”

  “That’s the way it looks in the transcript of your report.”

  “That’s the way it was.”

  I thought Nelson Nelson was going to choke. I sat up, rubbing the small of my back with both hands.

  “Just between you and me, NN, yes. That’s exactly what I did.”

  He reached down and fiddled with something on the side of the desk facing him. Of course; he’d been recording. He was always recording. This one would have to be doctored.

  “You know how a dead body will twitch when you send a current through it? A dead mind’ll do the same. It takes more than current, but it’s a good comparison. They had the neurons firing so well, it forgot it was supposed to be dead, and it tried to use me to come back.”

  “Could it have?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t work. I killed it.”

  “But what do you think?”

  I sighed. “Possibly I might have ended up incorporating elements of her personality and some of her thoughts and memories. Then you’d have had to have me dry-cleaned to get rid of her.”

  NN raised his invisible eyebrows. “Now there’s an interesting situation.” “Not for me. I wouldn’t want any of that woman in me.”

  “I mean in terms of the legal definition of existence. If such a thing had happened and the agency did have you dry-cleaned, would we, in fact, have been killing her all over again?”

  I glared at him. “No. She was already dead.”

  “But if she returned to life in you—well, never mind, Allie. It’s just an intellectual exercise at this point.” He waved the subject away. “All this aside, tell me. Did you learn something?”

  From a bitter woman who had literally torn herself apart? “I learned she shouldn’t have been buying psychoses. She was already fogged in.”

  “No, now really, Allie. Wasn’t there anything in there at all—some insight, or a vision beyond—ah, any final knowledge of any kind?”

  I lit a cigarette by way of stalling. How old was Nelson Nelson anyway? And how old was he expecting to get? I wanted to tell him that if there was an answer—or an Answer—it wouldn’t have been in a dead mind because you couldn’t ask the right questions in there. If you don’t know now, you can’t know then. Instead, I lay down on the couch again and blew smoke at the ceiling. “Life’s a bitch. Then you die.”

  I could almost hear NN’s mouth drop. There was a long, thick moment of silence and then he began to laugh. “That’s a good one, Deadpan,” he said finally, wiping his eyes. “You almost had me there.”

  I’d almost been there myself, but I just grinned as if he had caught me out. For his own sake, I hoped he always thought it was funny. Just to be on the safe side, I put myself in for dry-cleaning as soon as the lawsuits were settled. Just to be sure.

  JOHN KESSEL

  Hearts Do Not In Eyes Shine

  To forget! To somehow wipe away the past and try again … How many countless thousands of men and women ha
ve longed for that throughout the ages? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could press a magical button and somehow erase all the pain and trauma and sadness of our tangled and mismanaged lives, be given a clean slate, a fresh start? It would be wonderful—

  Wouldn’t it?

  Alas, as the subtle and elegant story that follows suggests, it might not be quite that simple …

  Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is an assistant professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. One of the most skilled and literate of the genre’s new writers, Kessel made his first sale in 1975 and has since become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; his stories have also appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, New Dimensions, Galileo, The Twilight Zone Magazine, The Berkley Showcase, and other places. In 1983, Kessel won a Nebula Award for his brilliant novella “Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year. Upcoming is a novel written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, tentatively entitled Freedom Beach.

  Connie found Harry in the bar at Mario’s. He saw her come in, finished his drink quickly and stood up.

  “You came,” he said, fumbling in his jacket pocket as if he’d lost something. “I have something for you.”

  He found a small envelope in an inside pocket and handed it to her; it felt like a card. “Don’t open it now,” he said. “Wait until later.”

  Connie felt strangely calm. “Okay. Let’s eat.”

  She let him do most of the talking; he seemed to have marshalled his arguments. “I know this must seem like a crazy idea. I think I’m half crazy to suggest it, but people do it all the time and I couldn’t let you go without trying something.”

  “You’re not letting me go. You let me go a long time ago.”

  He pulled at his lower lip and sat silent. “You’re right. I don’t deny it …”

  “You can’t.”

  “Please … I know I’ve made mistakes; we’ve both made mistakes. But think about the way we felt about each other when we first met. The emotions then were real. You can’t deny that. That’s why I’m here asking this, even though I know I don’t deserve to ask it. But in the last month or two, I’ve about gone crazy thinking about the good times we spent together.”

  Connie tried to stay calm, to think rationally. “Harry, why do we have to go through this? It’s too hard. I remember other times. We wouldn’t be separated otherwise.”

  “No. I think you’re wrong there. We made mistakes and did things to hurt each other, but I’ve thought about it a lot—I’ve hardly thought about anything else—and I know, I know we are basically compatible. I knew that the first time I saw you. The things that have pushed us apart are only things that happened to us—they aren’t who we are. Who we are doesn’t change, and that’s the whole point of getting erased. We stay the same people, but we get rid of the bad things that happened and get another chance to build our marriage up again. Please, Connie. You know this is the truth, don’t you?”

  She didn’t know anything. She sipped her wine, sat back and watched him.

  Harry seemed uncomfortable under her gaze. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, opened them again. That was always the sign of his exasperation with her, when he couldn’t get her to believe what he wanted, when the words failed him. The words had not failed him yet. He must have thought them up a long time before he had the nerve to call her. Perhaps the letter from her lawyer had jolted him. Perhaps the erasure clinic had given him the arguments he was using on her. That was something she would never have suspected of Harry in the early days; she would have taken him at his face value.

  Connie must have smiled at her own cynicism: he looked at her angrily and said, “Don’t laugh at me Connie.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay. Just don’t laugh.”

  There wasn’t much trust left in her, and suddenly she realized that she did not like it. What had he done to her that she had come to be so suspicious, that the honesty of her emotions had been leached away until she responded to him as if he were a pitchman for a sex show? Maybe his exasperation—if it was exasperation, and not just fear or confusion—had a reason.

  “I don’t know, Harry. I’m afraid. You’ve hurt me too much, and I can never forget the things you’ve done.”

  He leaned forward. “That’s right,” he said quietly. “But they can make us forget. You don’t have to give up anything. You just have to be willing to take a chance.”

  She played with the card he had given her, turned it over, ran her index finger along the edge of the smooth rectangle of cream-colored paper.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Harry looked hurt; the silence stretched. “Look, Connie, maybe this was a bad idea. Don’t make me feel any more a fool than I am.”

  “I’m not making you a fool.” God. The last thing she wanted was to feel sorry for him.

  “I’m sorry I tried to make you do something you didn’t want to do. Can you blame me for trying?” He looked at her levelly.

  This was not going the way it ought to have. They ought not to let men like Harry live to reach twenty-one. They ought to test them when they hit puberty, and if the test showed a person wouldn’t be able to tell if he was telling the truth or not, they could castrate him. While they were at it they could get rid of the ones with Harry’s green eyes and Harry’s voice.

  She held up the card and stood to leave. “Can I open this now?”

  He smiled a little sadly. “It doesn’t say ‘I love you.’”

  Connie slid a fingernail under the flap and opened the envelope. The front of the card was blank, and inside, was written, “No matter what you decide, I will never lie to you again.”

  She put the card back in the envelope, put the envelope into her purse. At his station, the maitre d’ had already cleared their table on his service screen and was watching them impatiently. Connie looked at him, looked at Harry, and sat down again.

  She told Harry she would call him and returned to the office without having made up her mind. She spent that afternoon trading foreign currencies, with Fox, her computer trading model, hooked into her left ear and the newsline into her right. She stayed in front of the terminal without a break until the session ended, then retreated to her office to take client calls until most of the staff had left for the day.

  The lowering clouds that threatened Connie and the other bicyclists riding home suggested that perhaps the streetcar would have been a better idea that morning. But the rain held off until after she reached her street. She lived in a large old house in a neighborhood that had declined to a near-slum in the third quarter of the century only to be refurbished in the eighties before its second genteel slide after the turn of the century. Harry and Connie had moved into the white frame monstrosity a year before they contracted; seven years later he had moved out, and it had taken her months to feel comfortable again there after a period of rattling around its twelve rooms like the drunkard in the random walk theorem.

  That night a relapse threatened. In the mail printout she found a brochure for an erasure company, New Life Choices, Inc. She did not recognize the name. Harry had to have sent it; she threw it into the wastebasket without reading it. She skipped supper, fixed several stiff drinks and tried to forget about erasure. She walked through the house listening to the spring drizzle and breathing deep the humid air that blew through opened windows. She picked up her clothes from about the bedroom, did the laundry, had a couple more drinks, smoked a joint, tried to read a book. She sat by the phone for twenty minutes, then dialed Harry’s number quickly to tell him to forget it. The face of a middle-aged woman came onto the screen and told her curtly she had the wrong number. She hesitated, then searched the wastebasket for the brochure.

  FREEDOM IS A STATE OF MIND

  The Immortal bard, William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

  asked,

  Can you cure a
troubled mind,

  Plunge a deep sorrow out of the memory

  Erase the troubles written on a brain

  And with a sweet potion

  Clean all the pain and sadness

  From a heavy heart?

  —At New Life Choices, we can.

  The next page told Connie:

  We see the world through dark glass. By selective forgetting, we can take off the dark glasses that superimpose the fearful past upon the present, and begin to know that love is forever present. The Jacobovsky Process is used to selectively edit the memory. Forgiveness then becomes a process of letting go of whatever we thought others may have done to us, or whatever we may think we have done to others. Our safety and security are the simple words, “I don’t remember.”

  Harry had been bright and moody and could make her laugh whenever he wanted. Connie remembered quite well.

  She had loved to watch him fix things. He had beautiful hands, strong and skilled. His hands knew just how much force to give, could feel out the source of a problem without his having to think about it. Normally he was a talkative man who did not use words well, but when he was in the converted playroom in the attic he became a quiet one, concentrating on the task before him, devoted only to finding the solution to the problem; patient, intuitive. His eyes would sober, without the anger they would show during his depressions, and he would look at the machine as if somehow, if he waited in the right way, it might speak to him—and he would not be surprised when it did.