The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Sharkey shook his head. “No. It doesn’t involve that.”

  “Raise your left pants leg.”

  The man looked puzzled, but did as he was told. The spiral scar was gone.

  “Everything gets regenerated,” Sharkey said quietly. “They can’t help it. They can’t localize the process. They’re working on it, though. My tonsils are back, they said, and my appendix. I had to decide for myself about circumcision. Had to start everything over from scratch. Everything. I feel kind of lost. I don’t have much to go on. They’re working on that, too. How else am I different? I want to know.”

  Cody gestured to his glass. “You don’t drink beer anymore?”

  “I haven’t developed a taste for it. I liked it before?”

  Cody nodded. “You don’t sound the way you used to sound.”

  “The tapes … they try to put things back, afterward. They try to make things the same, but they don’t put back … the original things. They can’t. They don’t know how.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The memories—everything that made me whoever I used to be. Everything gets sort of … erased. They can put back academic things. They can do that. They tell me I score better in math than before. I know … facts. That’s all.”

  Cody felt dizzy, the way he used to feel when he first sat up in a wheelchair. Everything was distorted. He’d not drunk half the beer, but he was sure that if he took one more swallow he would throw up. “This is damned confusing,” he said.

  “Yes. It is,” Sharkey agreed. “I think I’ve said too much. But I need to know. Tell me who I am. What did I like? What did I hate? Why did I let them take everything from me?” The intensity of the man made Cody uncomfortable. If ever someone looked haunted, Sharkey looked driven to the brink of madness. And yet there was a distant quality in his face, as if he were operating through remote control, trying to remember expressions that corresponded to emotions that were no longer there. Nothing was quite coordinated. He blinked. “I can’t remember why I … want to be alive,” he said.

  Little by little Sharkey told him what he understood of Project R.A.B.B. “It’s done through a kind of … regression technique. I don’t understand much of it. They found out that in each of us there’s a sort of genetic switch that controls the production and growth of cells. They were looking for the switch that triggers cancer cells, they told me, and they stumbled across the regeneration switch. There’s a time—a very brief time, close to birth, when the body can correct some injuries, if the genetic switch is on. So … they figured if the brain could be convinced that the body was prenatal—the regeneration could be triggered. The catch is, when they regress a mind back to that stage, all memories are lost. For good. Everything is erased. I was ‘born’ nine months ago. My womb was a black tank filled with Epsom salts and water heated to body surface temperature. I had to learn to crawl and walk and talk all over. They try to put things back … but—” Sharkey’s gaze focused elsewhere for a moment. “They brought me clothes they said were mine. And showed me pictures of who I was. It was like reading a book about somebody else. I can’t … there’s nothing to connect any of it to. My earliest memory is of reaching up to touch a stethoscope. And … being cold. I can’t get warm. I feel so … cold all the time.”

  “So that was what you had to forfeit,” Cody murmured. “Just memories.”

  For a second something broke through Sharkey’s tranquil mask. “Just memories? You don’t know. You can’t know what it’s like, living like this.”

  “And you don’t remember,” Cody said, “what it’s like, living like this.”

  “I’ve been told what it was like.”

  “Telling isn’t living it!”

  “I know.”

  Someone had punched buttons on the jukebox for a popular country and western song. It was one Sharkey used to sing in the shower, a favorite. There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes now.

  “There were three others, before me,” he said, breaking the tension. “They’re all dead. They … killed themselves.”

  “Why?”

  “They don’t know. They’re working on it.”

  “Sharkey, I want to volunteer for this.”

  “No. Don’t.” There was fear in his eyes, as if he had just contaminated Cody.

  “Whom do I contact?”

  * * *

  He hated hospitals. And every memory connected with them. The Calmar Bio-Med Research Center, however, felt more like a medical Pentagon as he followed a white-coated technician through a maze of corridors and doors, his chair humming. Fielding and Bushnell had called him crazy to consider volunteering himself for research. He had not told them of his meeting with Sharkey. He feared, above all, the failure of promised miracles. Better they didn’t know, unless it worked, he thought. Wilson, too, had heard tales of medical guinea pigs and scoffed at hope. It was their only defense, Cody knew. He would not let them bleed needlessly. Adam had flatly refused to take him to the research center.

  “You won’t come outta there.” he grumbled.

  So it had been Diane, Wilson’s sister, who had driven him in the van to L.A. She waved to him as he was escorted into the white building, promising to be back at two.

  * * *

  Dr. Nicholas Meyers placed his fingertips together, studying Cody through thick glasses.

  “Frankly, I’m quite disturbed that you’ve come here, Mr. Cody. John did tell us he talked to you.… You must understand he is still under treatment. Project R.A.B.B. is quite confidential. We are years away from any public statement concerning this research. John left the grounds without our knowledge or permission. That he spoke with you—” The man’s fingers parted, apparently opening a floodgate of secrets spilled through the breach in security, Cody thought. He wondered if Sharkey was being kept under guard in some underground cell.

  “Where is he?”

  “John is, at present, being taught life skills to help him toward independent living. When he has completed training—”

  “When will that be?”

  “Another year perhaps.”

  “I want to volunteer.”

  Meyers placed his hands slowly on the mahogany desk, palms down flat. Cody was reminded of his father. The gesture said, “Let’s think this through. Let’s not be hasty.” His father had always been a careful decision-maker, weighing all options before he spoke. Cody thought more like his mother, making his decision on an emotional wave, then riding it out to the end, refusing to concede that his choice might have been the wrong one. This was how he had wound up in the Navy.

  “I’m here to volunteer for Project R.A.B.B.,” he said again.

  “I’m well aware of that. However.…”

  “I know there are risks. Sharkey told me. I don’t care.”

  “But we care, Mr. Cody.” The man sat back, considering. “In its present stage of development. Project Rockabye Baby is one of the most exciting and most dangerous discoveries we’ve ever come across. The potential for its misuse is enormous. Brainwashing in the truest sense of the word. We’re looking for safeguards against that. We’re trying to find a way to trigger the regeneration process so that it focuses only on specific area.” He flashed a sudden smile. “Imagine the possibilities—total body rejuvenation—the ultimate eternity elixir. We can live forever, rebirthed over and over … but we must find a way to keep the … tapes, so to speak, from being erased.”

  “Memories.”

  “Yes. Exactly.” Meyer’s brief effervescence was reined back under scientific control. “We are only beginning to understand the ramifications of this kind of loss. Seemingly trivial matters … every experience of your life, from birth, no matter how deeply buried in your mind, is still vivid if tapped by the right probe. These experiences constitute the fullness of one’s personality. At present we must forfeit the one for the other.”

  Cody felt a coolness at the back of his neck. “Is that why they commit suicide?”

  Meyers reconn
ected the tips of his fingers, closing floodgates. “We are studying the … side effects, the emotional trauma involved. It’s much more complex than simple amnesia. Subconscious memories are also erased. Everything must be replaced.”

  “They trade a mind for a body and forget what living was for,” Cody said.

  “We’re trying to rectify that.”

  “How?”

  “If you qualify for the program you will be told.” The man took several papers from a drawer and placed them in front of Cody. “We’ll need your permission to obtain your medical records.” He pointed to places for Cody’s signature.

  “There’s a hand brace with a pen attached in my backpack.” Cody said, reading over the papers. In minutes his quivery scrawl would set him on a path he was not sure he was ready to explore. Still, he was certain of his future as it was now. He adjusted the pen with his teeth and signed.

  * * *

  The testing took almost two weeks. Cody felt physically drained and brainpicked. He was homesick, to his surprise, and became incensed when he was not allowed to call Fielding and Bushnell, just to talk. He asked for some art supplies and began sketching, desperate to escape into his nameless bliss if even for a few minutes.

  “If I pass,” he asked Meyers one afternoon while the doctor took another blood sample, “I mean, if I qualify for this, and it works, will I lose my art?”

  “We can give you art instruction to try to replace what is lost. Beyond that I can’t answer. The creative process is a largely unknown area. It tends to be a right brain function. We find that left brain functions are much more easily replaced.”

  “You mean I might not be able to draw afterwards?”

  “We don’t know. You may have a genetic predisposition toward art. Emotional inclination is another matter. No one fully understands the need to create—what drives one man to paint, another to compose music, another to break the world record for flagpole sitting. Whether you re-establish your artistic direction is an unknown. Attempting to replace twenty-seven years of life in a year’s time is an arduous task.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “No.”

  Cody thought about not being able to draw. There was irony in the situation, he knew. Had he never lost the use of his body, his body would probably have been the only part of him he would have developed. He might have gone back to the oil fields, doing blue collar labor, the only job he’d ever held prior to becoming gunner’s mate in the Navy. He wondered if he would ever have discovered his artistic ability. No. He would have bowled maybe, and gotten a beer belly, and … would he have ever attempted college? Where would his ambitions have led, he mused, had life not played such an ultimate joke, making him whole in halving him, separating his mind from his body?

  “Why can’t I see Sharkey?”

  “Security reasons.”

  “Does he sing in the shower anymore?”

  Meyers withdrew the needle from Cody’s arm. “Not to my knowledge.”

  * * *

  He qualified. He sat at the long table ringed with white-smocked doctors and scientists and listened as they explained the procedure and the risks involved, should he consent to become a part of the project. It sounded magical, he thought—a deep sleep of approximately six weeks, wired up to a multitude of machines designed to serve as his surrogate mother. He would rest in a kind of fetal position in a black box that looked more like a coffin, he thought, when they showed it to him.

  They gave him two weeks to make a decision, longer than they had given Sharkey, and sent him home with a tape recorder.

  “Should you decide to participate in the project,” Meyers told him, “you’ll have three weeks to place whatever memories you want to keep, on tape. Anything you wish to preserve.” He paused. “A word of advice—you’d best make it a mixed bag.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t select only good memories. The negative also serve a purpose. One more thing … your friend—John Sharkey—”

  Cody waited for the words that would confirm what he had suspected for the last several days. Meyers looked upset. Guilty.

  “He’s dead,” the man said finally. “He died two days ago.”

  “How?”

  “He took a motorcycle and ran it into a wall. I’m … very sorry.”

  “Not enough memories?”

  Meyers looked at him. “Perhaps. Maybe … just not the right memories.”

  * * *

  At the house Bushnell and Fielding and Wilson watched him as if he were an impostor they were sure to catch in a mistake eventually. He knew he was making everyone feel awkward. He couldn’t concentrate on his artwork. Everything seemed out of kilter, as if he had returned from a trip to a distant galaxy and nothing was quite as he had left it, but he couldn’t figure out what was changed. He was changed. What he knew had changed him. That had to be it. He didn’t want to tell them that Sharkey was dead. That would lead to more questions than he was prepared to answer. Instead, he sat in his room for hours at a time, running memories onto cassette tapes. Adam had to go out and buy more. They didn’t ask what he was doing in his room with the door closed, talking to himself. They didn’t ask him anything at all.

  Cody tried to organize his memories systematically, in chronological order, reaching back to his earliest childhood. He talked about everything he could think of, including his fear of The Thing Under The Bed and how his mother had taught him to give it a name and the fear had gone away. Ralph-Under-the-Bed became a bedtime game. He didn’t know if the memory was trivial, but it was his and he wanted to keep it. He remembered how his mother had read to him, the crushed ice and 7-Up when he had the mumps, the blanket tent in the back yard, the … it went on and on. The more he thought, the more there was to remember.

  He called his mother up to tell her he loved her and she asked him what was wrong. His sudden nostalgia frightened her. Tapes mounted up. He talked until he was hoarse. In the middle of dinner he would think of something that was totally out of chronological order but he was afraid he wouldn’t remember it later, so he zipped back to his room to record it while he had it. Memories came in disorganized clumps. He wondered if he should categorize them according to subject matter, rather than by years. He found himself digressing constantly, so wrapped up in a vivid memory he lost his train of thought. Playing back the tapes simply triggered more memories he’d forgotten to mention. And he wanted them as sharply etched as he could get them, filled with smells and sounds and tastes. The words began to remind him of a Bosch or Bruegel panorama, so intricate and crowded with happenings he felt he was drowning in verbal chaos.

  Tapes covered his desk. Tapes were stacked on book shelves, in boxes, all over the floor along the walls. He gave up trying to mark them. There were times he worried that he was repeating himself, but decided twice was better than not at all. After much debate he decided he needed to put down the accident, too, so he would remember the why of things when it was all over.

  It was during one such recording that he broke down in tears. There were no words, he realized, that could convey the anguish over what he had lost. No one could ever possibly know unless they had lived it. He remembered what Sharkey had said—that it was like reading a book. Cody looked at the roomful of memories. Would that be all they were, once it was over? A lot of words? Vicarious experiences belonging to someone else? Would the words be enough to hold the memory of Jenny’s body next to him—the heat of her, the way her hair spilled over his face … the scent of her.… He closed his eyes. The tape ran, recording his silence.

  * * *

  “I need more time,” he said when the two weeks were up.

  “We need your decision now.” Meyers looked apologetic.

  “I’ll need more than three weeks to finish my life story. It’s not enough time.”

  “It’s all we can give you.”

  “It’s not enough. I don’t plan to off myself for lack of a past. I want as much as I can collect. I want my art, all t
he books I’ve read—I’m on the seventh volume of The Story of Civilization. That’s eleven volumes when I’m done, each book numbering God knows how many thousands of pages. You have any idea what that means? Can you put that back? I want nursery rhymes, I want.…” He stopped. “I can’t do it. I can’t get it all down.”

  Meyers straightened the ink blotter on his desk. “Does that mean you chose to bow out of Project R.A.B.B.?”

  “No.”

  “Once you’ve made the commitment—once you’ve begun the Sleep, there will be no turning back. You understand that?”

  “Yes. I just … there’s not enough time.”

  “It’s all we can offer.” He laid the papers out in front of Cody.

  Slowly Cody maneuvered the pen in the brace and signed his name.

  * * *

  Three weeks later, as they began to prep him for the Sleep, he was still capturing his past. In the last week he had begun to sketch memories, hoping pictures truly would be more than thousands of words.

  He closed his eyes as they wheeled him into the room with the tank, praying he hadn’t forgotten anything.

  Suddenly a whole flood of memories tumbled across his mind—the summer of the worst dust storm he could remember, when the sky turned solid black in the middle of the day. They’d held wet washcloths over their faces and stuffed towels around windows and doors and still the dust blew in rivulets across the floor … going pecan thrashing with his dad, whacking the tree branches with long cane poles until the nuts fell like green-brown hail all around him … the blood brother ceremony at scout camp with Robbie Turner—he still had the scar … watching the tornado that sucked up half the town when he was nine … the drag race out by the lake when Tony Dawson almost flipped his dad’s car into the spillway … too much … too many things.… Everything was important. Absolutely all of it. Cody felt his tears trickle back along his scalp and grinned.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, opening his eyes. Meyers and the others were like a green cloth wall closing in on him, needles primed.

  “What?” Meyers did not sound happy. “You can’t stop now. We—”

  “Yeah, I can stop. I read the fine print.”