The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Like a phone number you’re trying to remember, Mira thought. You have to hold it with thought, and if you lose it, you never get it back. Mira felt hugely relieved. From the moment she waked, she kept expecting to hear her mother’s voice. Now she knew it wouldn’t come, and she could relax. She felt guilty for feeling relieved that her mother was dead, but who would blame her? Certainly not anyone who’d known her mother. Certainly not Lynn.

  “I have a sister,” she said. “Lynn.” Her jaw moved so stiffly.

  “Yes, a twin sister. Now that would be interesting.” The man grinned, his eyebrows raised.

  “Is she still alive?”

  “No,” he said in a tone that suggested she was a silly girl. “You’ve been gone for over eighty years, sleeping beauty.” He made a sweeping gesture, as if all of that was trivial. “But let’s focus on the present. The way this works is, we get acquainted. We have dates. If we find we’re compatible,” he raised his shoulders toward his ears, smiled his dainty smile, “then I might be enticed to pay for you to be revived, so that we can be together.”

  Dates.

  “So. My name is Red, and I know from your readout that your name is Mira. Nice to meet you, Mira.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Mira murmured. He’d said she died in a car accident. She tried to remember, but nothing came. Nothing about the accident, anyway. The memories that raced up at her were arguments – arguments with her mother. An argument at a shopping mall. Mom hating everything Mira liked, trying to get Mira to go to the Seniors section and buy cheap, drab housedresses. Mom had had no control of Mira’s body (she was only a hitcher, after all), but there are lots of ways to control.

  “So. Mira.” Red clapped his hands together. “Do you want to bullshit, or do you want to get intimate?”

  The raised eyebrows again, the same as when he made the twins comment. “I don’t understand,” Mira said.

  “Weeeell. For example, here’s a question.” He leaned in close, his breath puffing in her ear. “If I revived you, what sorts of things would you do to me?”

  Mira was sure that this man’s name was not Red, and she doubted he was here to revive anyone. “I don’t know. That’s an awfully intimate question. Why don’t we get to know each other first?” She needed time to think. Even just a few minutes of quiet, to make sense of this.

  Red frowned theatrically. “Come on. Tease me a little.”

  Should she tell Red she was gay? Surely not. He would lose interest, and maybe report it to whoever owned the facility. But why hadn’t whoever owned the facility known she was gay? Maybe that was to be part of the orientation she’d missed. Whatever the reason, did she want to risk being taken out of circulation, or unplugged and buried?

  Would that be the worst thing?

  The thought jangled something long-forgotten. Or more like deeply forgotten; everything in her life was long-forgotten. She’d thought something along those lines once, and there had been so much pain that the pain still echoed, even without the memory. She reached for the memory, but it was sunk deep in a turgid goo that she encountered whenever she tried to remember something. Had she really been able to effortlessly pull up memories when she was alive, or was that just how she remembered it?

  “I’m just—” she wanted to say “not in the mood,” but that was not only a cliché, but a vast understatement. She was dead. She couldn’t move anything but her face, and that made her feel untethered, as if she were floating, drifting. Hands and feet grounded you. Mira had never realized. “I’m just not very good at this sort of thing.”

  “Well.” Red put his hands on his thighs, made a production of standing. “This costs quite a bit, and they charge by the minute. So I’ll say goodbye now, and you can go back to being dead.”

  Go back? “Wait!” Mira said. They could bring her back, and then let her die again? She imagined her body, sealed up somewhere, maybe for years, maybe forever. The idea terrified her. Red paused, waiting. “Okay. I would . . .” She tried to think of something, but there were so many things running through her mind, so many trains of thought she wanted to follow, none of them involving the pervert leaning over her.

  Were there other ways to get permanently “revived”? Did she have any living relatives she might contact, or maybe a savings account that had been accruing interest for the past eighty years? Had she had any savings when she died? She’d had a house – she remembered that. Lynn would have inherited it.

  “Fine, if you’re not going to talk, I’ll just say goodbye,” Red snapped. “But don’t think anyone else is coming. Your injuries would make you a costly revival, and there are tens of thousands of women here. Plus men don’t want the women who’d been frozen sixty years before the facility opened, because they have nothing in common with those women.”

  “Please,” Mira said.

  He reached for something over her head, out of sight.

  Mira dreamed that she was running on a trail in the woods. The trail sloped upward, growing steeper and steeper until she was running up big steps. Then the steps entered a flimsy plywood tower and wound up, up. It was dark, and she could barely see, but it felt so good to run; it had been such a long time that she didn’t care how steep it was. She climbed higher, considered turning back, but she wanted to make it to the top after having gone so far. Finally she reached the top, and there was a window where she could see a vast river, and a lovely college campus set along it. She hurried over to the window for a better view, and as she did, the tower leaned under her shifting weight, and began to fall forward. The tower built speed, hurtled toward the buildings. This is it, she thought, her stomach flip-flopping. This is the moment of my death.

  Mira jolted awake before she hit the ground.

  An old man – likely in his seventies – squinted down at her. “You’re not my type,” he grumbled, reaching over her head.

  “Hi.” It came out phlegmy; the man cleared his throat. “I’ve never done this before.” He was a fat man, maybe forty.

  “What’s the date?” Mira asked, still groggy.

  “January third, twenty-three fifty-two,” the man said. Nearly thirty years had passed. The man wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “I feel a little sick for being here, like I’m a child molester or something.” He frowned. “But there are so many stories out there of people finding true love in the drawers. My cousin Ansel met his second wife Floren at a revival center. Lovely woman.”

  The man gave her a big, sloppy smile. “I’m Lycan, by the way.”

  “I’m Mira. Nice to meet you.”

  “Your smile is a little wavery, in a cute way. I can tell you’re honest. You wouldn’t use me to get revived and then divorce me. You have to watch out for that.” Lycan sat at an angle, perhaps trying to appear thinner.

  “I can see how that would be a concern,” Mira said.

  Lycan heaved a big sigh. “Maybe meeting women at a bridesicle place is pathetic, but it’s not as pathetic as showing up at every company party alone, with your hands in your pockets instead of holding someone else’s, or else coming with a woman who not only has a loud laugh and a lousy sense of humor, but is ten years older than you and not very attractive. That’s pathetic. Let people suspect my beautiful young wife was revived. They’ll still be jealous, and I’ll still be walking tall, holding her hand as everybody checked her out.”

  Lycan fell silent for a moment. “My grandmother says I’m talking too much. Sorry.”

  So Lycan had a hitcher. At least one. It was so difficult to tell – you got so good at carrying on two conversations at once when you had a hitcher.

  “No, I like it,” Mira said. It allowed her precious time to think. When she was alive, there had been times in Mira’s life when she had little free time, but she had always had time to think. She could think while commuting to work, while standing in lines, and during all of the other in-between times. Suddenly it was the most precious thing.

  Lycan wiped his palms. “First dates are not my best momen
ts.”

  “You’re doing great.” Mira smiled as best she could, although she knew the smile did not reach her eyes. She had to get out of here, had to convince one of these guys to revive her. One of these guys? This was only the third person to revive her in the fifty years that the place had been open, and if the first guy, the pervert, was to be believed, she’d become less desirable the longer she was here.

  Mira wished she could see where she was. Was she in a coffin? On a bed? She wished she could move her neck. “What’s it like in here?” she asked. “Are we in a room?”

  “You want to see? Here.” Lycan held his palm a foot or so over her face; a screen embedded there flashing words and images in three dimensions transformed into a mirror.

  Mira recoiled. Her own dead face looked down at her, her skin grey, her lips bordering on blue. Her face was flaccid – she looked slightly unbalanced, or mentally retarded, rather than peaceful. A glittering silver mesh concealed her to the neck.

  Lycan angled the mirror, giving her a view of the room. It was a vast, open space, like the atrium of an enormous hotel. A lift was descending through the center of the atrium. People hurried across beautifully designed bridges as crystal blue water traced twisting paths through huge transparent tubes suspended in the open space, giving the impression of flying streams. Nearby, Mira saw a man sitting beside an open drawer, his mouth moving, head nodding, hands set a little self-consciously in his lap.

  Lycan took the mirror away. His eyes had grown big and round.

  “What is it?” Mira asked.

  He opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind, shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Please, tell me.”

  There was a long pause. Mira guessed it was an internal dispute. Finally, Lycan answered. “It’s just that it’s finally hitting me at a gut level: I’m talking to a dead person. If I could hold your hand, your fingers would be cold and stiff.”

  Mira looked away, toward the ceiling. She felt ashamed. Ashamed of the dead body that housed her.

  “What’s it like?” he whispered, as if he were asking something obscene.

  Mira didn’t want to answer, but she also didn’t want to go back to being dead. “It’s hard. It’s hard to have no control over anything, not when I can be awake, or who I talk to. And to be honest, it’s scary. When you end this date I’m going to be gone – no thoughts, no dreaming, just nothingness. It terrifies me. I dread those few minutes before the date ends.”

  Lycan looked sorry he’d asked, so Mira changed the subject, asking about Lycan’s hitchers. He had two: his father and his grandmother.

  “I don’t get it,” Mira said. “Why are there still hitchers if they’ve figured out how to revive people?” In her day, medical science had progressed enough that there was hope of a breakthrough, and preservation was common, but the dead stayed dead.

  “Bodies wear out,” Lycan said, matter-of-factly. “If you revive a lady who’s ninety-nine, she’ll just keep dying. So, tell me about yourself. I see you had a hitcher?”

  Mira told Lycan about her mother, and Lycan uttered the requisite condolences, and she pretended they were appropriate. She held no illusions about why she had agreed to host her mother. It was, in a sense, a purely selfish motive: she knew she couldn’t live with the guilt if she said no. It was emotional blackmail, what her mother did, but it was flawlessly executed.

  But I’m dying. Mira, I’m scared. Please. Even across eighty years and death, Mira could still hear her mother’s voice, its perpetually aggrieved tone.

  An awful darkness filled her when she thought of her mother. She felt guilty and ashamed. But what did she have to feel ashamed of? What do you owe your mother if the only kindness she had ever offered was giving birth to you? Do you owe her a room in your mind? What if you loved a woman instead of a “nice man,” and your mother barely spoke to you? How about if your soulmate died, painfully, and your mother’s attempt to console you was to say, “Maybe next time you should try a man.” As if Jeanette’s death justified her mother’s disapproval.

  “What if I actually find someone here, and she agrees to marry me in exchange for being revived?” Lycan was saying. “Would people sense she was too good-looking to be with me, and guess that I’d met her at a bridesicle place? We’d have to come up with a convincing story about how and where we met – something that doesn’t sound made-up.”

  “Bridesicle?”

  Lycan shrugged. “That’s what some people call this sort of place.”

  Then even if someone revived her, she would be a pariah. People would want nothing to do with her. Her mother’s voice rang in her mind, almost harmonizing the line.

  I want nothing to do with you. You and your girlfriend.

  “I’m afraid it’s time for me to say goodbye. I should circulate. But maybe we can talk again?” Lycan said.

  She didn’t want to die again, didn’t want to be thrown into that abyss. She had so much to think about, to remember. “I’d like that,” was all she said, resisting the urge to scream, to beg this man not to kill her. If Mira did that, he’d never come back. As he reached over to turn her off, Mira used her last few seconds to try to reach for the memory of her accident. It sat like a splinter under her skin.

  Lycan came back. He told her it had been a week since his first visit. Mira had no sense of how much time had passed, the way you do when you’ve been asleep. A week felt the same as thirty years.

  “I’ve talked to eleven women, and none of them were half as interesting as you. Especially the women who died recently. Modern women can be so shallow, so unwilling to seek a common ground. I don’t want a relationship that’s a struggle – I want to care about my wife’s needs, to be able to say, ‘no, honey, let’s go see the movie you want to see,’ and count on her saying, ‘no, that’s okay, I know how much you want to see that other one.’ And sometimes we would see her movie, and sometimes mine.”

  “I know just what you mean,” Mira said, in what she hoped was an intimate tone. As intimate as her graveyard voice could manage.

  “That’s why I came to the bottom floor, to the women who died one hundred, one hundred and twenty-five years ago. I thought, why not a woman from a more innocent time? She would probably be more appreciative. The woman at the orientation told me that choosing a bridesicle instead of a live woman was a generous thing to do – you were giving a life to someone who’d been cheated out of hers. I don’t kid myself, though – I’m not doing this out of some nobility, but it’s nice to think I’m doing something good for someone, and the girls at the bottom need it more than the girls at the top. You’ve been in line longer.”

  Mira had been in line a long time. It didn’t seem that way, though. It had only been, what, about an hour of life since she died? It was difficult to gauge, because she didn’t remember dying. Mira tried to think back. Had her car accident been in the city, or on a highway? Had she been at fault? Nothing came, except memories of what must have been the weeks leading up to it, of her mother driving her crazy.

  Once she took in her mother, she could never love again. How could she make love to someone with her mother watching? Even a man would have been out of the question, although a man was out of the question in any case.

  “It’s awkward, though,” Lycan was saying. “There aren’t any nice ways to tell someone that you aren’t interested. I’m not in practice rejecting women. I’m much more familiar with the other end of the equation. If you weren’t in that drawer, you probably wouldn’t give me a second glance.”

  Mira could see that he was fishing, that he wanted her to tell him he was wrong, that she would give him a second glance. It was difficult – it wasn’t in her nature to pretend that she felt something she didn’t. But she didn’t have the luxury of honoring her nature.

  “Of course I would. You’re a wonderful man, and good looking.”

  Lycan beamed. What is it about us, Mira wondered, that we will believe any lie, no matter how outrageous, if it’s flatte
ring?

  “Some people just spark something in you, make you breathe fast, you know?” Lycan said. “Others don’t. It’s hard to say why, but in those first seconds of seeing someone,” he snapped his fingers, “you can always tell.” He held her gaze for a moment, something that was clearly uncomfortable for him, then looked at his lap, blushing.

  “I know what you mean,” Mira said. She tried to smile warmly, knowingly. It made her feel like shit.

  There was constant murmur of background chatter this time.

  . . . through life and revival, to have and to hold . . .

  “What is that I’m hearing? Is that a marriage ceremony?” Mira asked.

  Lycan glanced over his shoulder, nodded. “They happen all the time here. It’s kind of risky to revive someone otherwise.”

  “Of course,” Mira said. She’d been here for decades, yet she knew nothing about this place.

  There’s something I have to tell you,” Lycan said. It was their sixth or seventh date. Mira had grown fond of Lycan, which was a good thing, because the only thing she ever saw was Lycan’s doughy jowls, the little bump of chin poking out of them. He was her life, such as it was.

  “What is it?” Mira asked.

  He looked off into the room, sighed heavily. “I’ve never enjoyed a woman’s company as much as yours. I have to be honest with you, but I’m afraid if I am I’ll lose you.”

  Mira tried to imagine what this man could possibly say that would lead her to choose being dead over his company. “I’m sure that won’t happen, whatever it is. You can trust me.”

  Lycan put his hand over his eyes. His chest hitched. Mira made gentle shushing sounds, the sort of sounds her mother had never made, not even when Jeanette died.

  “It’s okay,” she cooed. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

  Lycan finally looked at her, his eyes red. “I really like you, Mira. I think I even love you. But I’m not a rich man. I can’t afford to revive you, and I never will. Not even if I sold everything I owned.”

  She hadn’t even realized how much hope she was harboring until it was dashed. “Well, that’s not your fault, I guess.” She tried to sound chipper, though inside she felt black despair.