Memsen hesitated, and Spur heard the low, repetitive pa-pa-pa-ptt that he had decided she made when she was consulting her predecessors. "If you insist, we can make it simple for you." Memsen thrust her face close to his. "Comfort died," she said harshly. "Tell that to everyone in your -village. She was horribly burned and she died."
Spur recoiled from her. "But you said you saved her. Dr. Niss...."
"Dr. Niss can show you the body, if you care to see it." She straightened. "So."
"Goodbye, Spur," said the High Gregory. "Can we help you back onto the bed?"
Beneath them Spur could see the outskirts of Longwalk. Abruptly the hull of the hover turned opaque and the ceiling of the cabin began to glow. Spur knew from watching hovers land from the window of his hospital room that they camouflaged themselves on the final approach over a city.
"No, wait." Spur was desperate to keep the upsiders talking. "You said she was going with you. I definitely heard that. You said she was saved. Is she ... this is like the other Memsens that you told me about, isn't it? The ones that are saved in you?"
"This is a totally inappropriate conversation." Memsen pinched the air with both hands. "We'll have to ask Dr. Niss to strike it from your memory."
"He can do that?"
"Sure," said the High Gregory. "We do it all the time. But he has to replace it with some fake memory. You'll have to tell him what you want. And if you should ever come across anything that challenges the replacement memory, you could get...."
Spur held up his hand to silence him. "But it's true what I just said?"
Memsen snorted in disgust and turned to leave.
"She can't admit anything." The High Gregory grasped her hand to restrain her. He held it to his chest. "But yes."
Spur was gripping the push rims of his wheelchair so hard that his hands ached. "So nobody dies on the upside?"
"No, no. Everybody dies. It's just that some of us choose to be saved to a shell afterward. Even the saved admit it's not the same as being alive. I haven't made my mind up about all that yet, but I'm only twelve standard. My birthday is next week, I wish you could be there."
"What will happen to Comfort in this shell?"
"She's going to have to adjust. She didn't expect to be saved, of course, probably didn't even know it was possible, so when they activate her, she'll be disoriented. She'll need some kind of counseling. We have some pretty good soulmasons on Kenning. And they can send for her brother; he'll want to help."
"Stop it! This is cruel." Memsen yanked his hand down. "We have to go right now."
"Why?" said the High Gregory plaintively. "He's not going to remember any of this."
"Vic was saved?" Even though he was still safe in the wheelchair, he felt as if he were falling.
"All the pukpuk martyrs were." The High Gregory tried to shake his hand loose from Memsen, but she wouldn't let him go. "That was why they agreed to sacrifice themselves."
"Enough." Memsen started to drag him from the cabin. "We're sorry, Spur. You're a decent man. Go back to your -cottage and your apples and forget about us."
"Goodbye, Spur," called the High Gregory as they popped through the bulkhead. "Good luck."
As the bulkhead shivered with their passing, he felt a fierce and troubling desire burn his soul. Some part of him did want to go with them, to be with Comfort and Vic on the upside and see the wonders that Chairman Winter had forbidden the citizens of the Transcendent State. He could do it; he knew he could. After all, everyone in Littleton seemed to think he was leaving.
But then who would help Cape bring in the harvest?
Spur wasn't sure how long he sat alone in the wheelchair with a thousand thoughts buzzing in his head. The upsiders had just blown up his world and he was trying desperately to piece it back together. Except what was the point? In a little while he wasn't going to be worrying anymore about Comfort and Vic and shells and being saved. Maybe that was for the best; it was all too complicated. Just like the Chairman had said. Spur thought he'd be happier thinking about apples and baseball and maybe kissing Melody Velez. He was ready to forget.
He realized that the hover had gone completely still. There was no vibration from the hull skimming through the air, no muffled laughter from the L'ung. He watched the hospital equipment melt into the deck. Then all the bulkheads popped and he could see the entire bay of the hover. It was empty except for his wheelchair, a gurney with Comfort's shroud-covered body and the docbot, which rolled up to him.
"So you're going to make me forget all this?" said Spur bitterly. "All the secrets of the upside?"
"If that's what you want."
Spur shivered. "I have a choice?"
"I'm just the doctor, son. I can offer treatment but you have to accept it. For example, you chose not to tell me how you got burned that first time." The docbot rolled behind the wheelchair. "That pretty much wrecked everything I was trying to accomplish with the conciliation sim."
Spur turned around to look at it. "You knew all along?"
The docbot locked into the back of the wheelchair. "I wouldn't be much of a doctor if I couldn't tell when patients were lying to me." It started pushing Spur toward the hatch.
"But you work for the Chairman." Spur didn't know if he wanted the responsibility for making this decision.
"I take Jack Winter's money," said the docbot. "I don't take his advice when it comes to medical or spiritual practice."
"But what if I tell people that Comfort and Vic are saved and that upsiders get to go on after they die?"
"Then they'll know."
Spur tried to imagine keeping the upsiders' immortality a secret for the rest of his days. He tried to imagine what would happen to the Transcendent State if he told what he knew. His mouth went as dry as flour. He was just a farmer, he told himself; he didn't have that good an imagination. "You're saying that I don't have to have my memory of all this erased?"
"Goodness, no. Unless you'd rather forget about me."
As they passed Comfort's body, Spur said, "Stop a minute."
He reached out and touched the shroud. He expected it to be some strange upsider fabric but it was just a simple cotton sheet. "They knew that I could choose to remember, didn't they? Memsen and the High Gregory were playing me to the very end."
"Son," said Dr. Niss, "the High Gregory is just a boy and nobody in the Thousand Worlds knows what the Allworthy knows."
But Spur had stopped listening. He rubbed the shroud between his thumb and forefinger, thinking about how he and the Joerlys used to make up adventures in the ruins along Mercy's Creek when they were children. Often as not one of them would achieve some glorious death as part of the game. The explorer would boldly drink from the poisoned cup to free her comrades, the pirate captain would be run through defending his treasure, the queen of skantlings would throw down her heartstone rather than betray the castle. And then he or Vic or Comfort would stumble dramatically to the forest floor and sprawl there, cheek pressed against leaf litter, as still as scattered stones. The others would pause briefly over the body and then dash into the woods, so that the fallen hero could be reincarnated and the game could go on.
"I want to go home," he said, at last.
The End
Table of Contents
The Year's Best SF - 23rd Annual Collection
The Little Goddess
Ian McDonald
The Calorie Man
Paolo Bacigalupi
Beyond the Aquila Rift
Alastair Reynolds
Second Person, Present Tense
Daryl Gregory
The Canadian Who Came Almost all the Way Back from the Stars
Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold
Triceratops Summer
Michael Swanwick
Camouflage
Robert Reed
A Case of Consilience
Ken MacLeod
The Blemmye's Stratagem
Bruce Sterling
Amba
William Sander
s
Search Engine
Mary Rosenblum
Piccadilly Circus
Chris Beckett
In the Quake Zone
David Gerrold
La Malcontenta
Liz Williams
The Children of Time
Stephen Baxter
Little Faces
Vonda N. McIntyre
Comber
Gene Wolfe
Audubon in Atlantis
Harry Turtledove
Deus Ex Homine
Hannu Rajaniemi
The Great Caruso
Steven Popkes
Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck
Neal Asher
Zima Blue
Alastair Reynolds
Planet of the Amazon Women
David Moles
The Clockwork Atom Bomb
Dominic Green
Gold Mountain
Chris Roberson
The Fulcrum
Gwyneth Jones
Mayfly
Peter Watts & Derryl Murphy
Two Dreams on Trains
Elizabeth Bear
Angel of Light
Joe Haldeman
Burn
James Patrick Kelly
Also by Gardner Dozois
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection Page 206