Virtual Mode

by Piers Anthony

  Pretending? Why should he pretend? He hadn't pretended about anything else. He had told her where he came from, though he knew she didn't believe him. He had made her cover her crotch, because blue jeans didn't do the job to his satisfaction. He had learned enough of her language to talk with her, and had shown how well he understood what she told him. He had been his own man throughout, despite the indignities of being confined to the shed and having to use the pot. He had embraced her nightly without even trying to take any advantage of her. In fact, he had refused sex with her when she offered it. Pretend? He had never pretended! He had said she was unsuitable because that was exactly what she was. She was fourteen years old and suicidal. How could she ever have thought he would want to marry her?

  Because he had told her he did. He had always told her the truth, and now she knew that even the least believable part of it had been valid. So he had been willing to marry her, until he learned that she was depressive. He had to have joy, to take and magnify and spread about. That was her most awful liability. She could make others laugh by her cutting humor, but if they could read her inner nature, they would be appalled. Darius would be able to read it in his realm. So he had done what he had to do, and had been kind to her, he thought, letting her go.

  "Oh, Darius!" she cried, grief-smitten. "I would have been satisfied to go with you, as your servant or your slave, just to be near you. If only I had believed! Now I have gotten what I deserved. I hope you find a woman you can marry." But that last was insincere. Colene had wanted to be his wife. Deep down, she didn't want him to be satisfied with any other woman. Oh, she wanted him to be happy, but not as happy as he might have been with her. And to know it.

  She closed her Journal and locked it away. She knew what she had to do. There was a good knife in the kitchen, maybe not as sharp as Slick's razor, but it would do the job. No more fooling around with compass points.

  She went to the house. But her mother was in the kitchen and she couldn't get the knife. Anyway, she hadn't figured out the right place to do it. She didn't want to splash blood all over Bumshed, for it didn't deserve to be soiled that way. It wouldn't be safe in her room in the house: her parents hardly ever went there, except those few times when she especially didn't want them to. They had some kind of parental radar that made them home in at the exact worst times. Outside wasn't good; someone would be sure to see her. So she would have to figure out a place first; then she could take the knife there and do it quickly.

  There was nothing to do except wrap up her homework, so that no one would be suspicious. She would go to school as usual Monday, and keep her eye out for a suitable place. She would certainly find it, and then she would act.

  MONDAY she found herself in the bathroom, contemplating her scarred wrist. But she didn't touch it. She had been playing with suicide before; this time she would do it right. That meant the right place and the right knife. She had seen how easy it was with the sharp razor; she could bleed herself out quickly by slashing both arms similarly. Once she decided on the place that was right. Where she could do it cleanly, and not be discovered until long after she was dead. She had to guarantee that she would not wake up in a hospital, to the shame of failure. Boys had it easy; they used guns, which were easy, quick and sure. But she didn't know a thing about guns; they frightened her. It has to be by a knife, so the blood could flow gently and prettily.

  No place seemed right. Finally, Tuesday night, she did something foolish: she sneaked out to Bumshed in her nightie. She made a mound of books and a pillow, pretending it was Darius, and lay next to him in the darkness. "Take me now," she breathed to the quiet form, spreading her legs and breathing heavingly. "Do anything you want to do." Of course he did not, but that did not interfere with the fancy; Darius would not have done it anyway.

  By morning she had come to three conclusions. First, she wasn't fooling herself; she knew there was no man there. So this was pointless. Second, it was too darned cold out here alone, and lonely too. Third, this was the place she had been looking for. Here where she had known him, and brief happiness. She could make it sanitary by having plenty of basins to catch the blood, and she could empty them out as long as she was able. She could make a small hole beside Dogwood and pour it carefully in and cover it up; not only would it be practically untraceable, it would fertilize the tree. She liked the idea of her decorative little tree being nourished by her blood. When she was unable to take out the basin, there might not be enough blood left in her to overflow, so it would be all right. They would find her pale cold body, and a neat brimming basin of blood. That would be nice.

  She went to school again Wednesday, concentrating on being absolutely normal. She did not give any of her things away to friends, because that was a recognized tipofi" for suicidal intention. She did not mope. She laughed and paid attention in class. As far as she knew, no one had a clue to her plan.

  That evening she fetched her favorite belongings and arranged them in a circle in Bumshed. Her ancient teddy bear, Raggedy Ann doll, her book on odd mating customs of the world, one on exotic computer viruses (for "safe" computing), her guitar, the picture of Maresy grazing, and the artificial carnation she had worn to the prom last year. The dance itself had not been great, her date had been gawky, she had been gawky too, being thirteen, but it had become her first significant dance, and now would be her last, so this symbol of it deserved respect. Maybe she would float it in the final basin of blood, her last deliberate act. A white flower on a red background, the opposite of a red rose on a white gown.

  Then she fetched the knife.

  But as she set up for it, she realized that she had forgotten the most critical thing: the basin. It was too late to fetch it; she would be risking the curiosity of her parents. Dad happened to be home this night, so naturally the two were arguing: "What's the matter, dear—your paramour have a snit?" "What do you care, you tipsy lady?" That sort of thing. As it progressed, the language would get less polite, and finally they would come to physical contact and have sex on the floor. They fought verbally, not physically, but the sex was in lieu of hitting, and could get pretty violent. Her mother got bonus points for bitchiness if she made him cheat on his mistress. That made him angry, but the woman was sexiest when bitchiest, and he couldn't resist. Colene hated that scene, but also was morbidly fascinated by it. Maybe if she had taunted Darius as impotent, the way her mother did her father, he would have gotten mad and put it to her hard. That tempted her now, in retrospect, but also repelled her. She did not like anything even hinting of rape. Yet at least she would have had him! Maybe then she would have felt obliged to believe him, and would have gone with him to his fabulous Land of Laughter. So what if she was a stranger there, unable to marry him? It couldn't be worse than what she faced here.

  So she had no basin, and was not about to go back to the house for it. What else would serve? She was definitely not going to spill her precious clean blood on the floor!

  Her eye fell on the privy pot. Oh, ugh! Yet what else was there? And it had the remnants of his substance. That was about as close as any part of her could get to any part of him now. So it would have to do. What an image for a romantic song: Blood and Feces. A sure hit with the anti-establishment crowd.

  She brought the pot and removed the cover. The stink smote her nose. Quickly she covered it again. Maybe she could put a clothespin on her nose, if she had a clothespin. Anything else? She leaned on the board over the pot, and set the knife down on it while she considered.

  She concluded that it didn't really matter. She would get used to the smell soon enough. So she sat cross-legged, in her nightie without panties, in a position that would have freaked Darius all the way out to the moon, dear man, drew the pot in to her, nestled it inside her crossed ankles, held her breath, lifted the knife, removed the cover board, leaned over, and paused.

  Should she do the left arm first, or the right one? She was right-handed, so maybe she should do the right one first, so if her left-handed slash was clumsy s
he could do it again, and again until she had a proper blood flow into the pot. Then she could transfer the knife and do the left one with one excellent slice. Then she could grasp the far rim of the pot, keeping her arms locked in place, and watch the twin blood flows. It would be glorious!

  So why was she hesitating? She was sure there was a reason. There always was.

  She explored her motives, and found the relevant one. "Oh, Darius, I don't want to die away from you!" she said. "I'd so much rather die with you!"

  She pondered some more, then decided to sleep on it. She could slice herself as well in the morning as at night. Maybe she would have a chance to sneak into the house and get a better basin, after her parents had sex-sotted themselves out and turned in. It was worth a try.

  She lay down, shivering in the cold. She wrapped the blankets around and around her, and curled up into an almost fetal ball. She knew she would not sleep, but at least she wouldn't freeze.

  SHE woke shivering, after an interminable, restless night. The floor was hard, the air was chill, and the blankets seemed to have holes that exactly matched the path of the draft coming in under the door.

  But it was her troubled thoughts that caused the greatest disruption of sleep. She was reviewing her life, trying to total up the credits and the debits, to justify her decision to end it. In snatches of dreams she talked to Maresy: "Dear Maresy, today I decided to end it. Well, actually I decided several days ago, but today was the day to do it. Only I didn't want to use a filthy potty for my blood."

  "You lost your nerve," Maresy replied.

  "No! I just want to do it right!"

  "You really don't want to die. You never did."

  "That so, smarty? Then what do I really want to do?"

  "You want to love and be loved."

  Maresy was right. She always was. She knew Colene better than Colene knew herself, because she was more objective. Death was merely the most convenient escape from a life without love. That was why she had not been suicidal in the time she had known Darius. She had had love.

  Now she had lost that love. Oh, she still had it, in a sense:

  she definitely still loved him. But he was gone, and he had explained how he couldn't come back, because it had been a random setting. So even if he loved her—and she thought he did—it was no good. They were apart forever.

  "Why do you think he loves you?" Maresy asked.

  "Because he told me he did."

  "But men lie about that."

  "To get sex from women," she agreed. "But he never had sex with me, even when I offered it. So he wasn't saying it for sex. Oh, yes, he did want something from me! He wanted my joy. And I would have given him that, if I had had any to give. So he loved me, but couldn't marry me without destroying me, and he wouldn't do that. I believe him. I believe him. I believe him."

  "So you do love, and you are loved," Maresy said. "So why do you want to die?"

  That made her ponder for some time. She did have love; why wasn't it enough? "Because it's apart," she said at last. "I want to love and be loved and have it close—like hugging close. Like kissing close. Like sex close. I want to be part of him, and have him be part of me, forever and ever. I want eternal romance."

  "You have foolish juvenile notions. It isn't that way."

  "How do you know?" Colene shot back.

  "I know from what you've read. The half-life of romantic love is one and a half years."

  "What do you mean, half-life of love?"

  "Remember your physics? Radioactive materials keep losing their radiation, getting less dangerous but never entirely finishing. So you can't say how long they last. But you can say how long it takes for their level of radioactivity to drop to half of what it was. That's their half-life, which may be a fraction of a second, or millions of years. So when it comes to the declining excitement of love, the half-life is eighteen months, on average."

  "I don't believe that! True love is forever!"

  "Look at your parents."

  Accurate counterthrust! Where was the romance in her parents' marriage? As far as she knew, there had never been any. There had just been absence and alcohol and occasional bouts of hostile sex. Yet there must once have been love, or else why had they married?

  So apply the half-life law. Suppose they had fallen in love, and in six months gotten married. She had been born the following year. Presto: their love had halved by the time she appeared on the scene, and halved again in the next year and a half. How many times had it halved by now? Take her age, fourteen, and add that first year and a half before her birth: fifteen and a half years since their first love. Enough for ten halvings. Plus maybe a quartering, or whatever. So if their love had started at a hundred per cent, it had gone to fifty per cent, then twenty-five per cent, then—brother! How low had it sunk by this time?

  Her thoughts fuzzed out, but her agile brain kept mulling it over, and in due course she concluded that it was just under one per cent. So what she was seeing now was only a hundredth of what they had started with. So now it was just a shared house, some ugly sex, and a messed-up daughter. Their love-child, as it were. More like a tough-love-child.

  "You desire that with Darius?" Maresy inquired alertly.

  "It wouldn't be that way with Darius!" she protested. But uncertainty was closing in, like dark fog at dusk. If she could be with Darius, and go to his wonderful Kingdom of Laughter, and everything was just perfect, would the romance be down to one per cent in fifteen years? Would she be an alcoholic and he be having affairs with other women? Would they have a suicidal daughter?

  Maresy faded out, for Colene was now absolutely, totally wide awake. Now she knew: it was time to end it. There was no hope for romance, even if it were possible for her to join Darius. So she had lost nothing, really; there had never been anything to make her life worth continuing.

  The dirty pot would do. It wasn't as if her life were clean. She was the offspring of a garbage marriage, and faced more garbage if she tried to grow up and get married herself. The whole thing was pointless.

  She sat with the pot, uncovered it, bared her arms, and picked up the knife. Now was the time. Two swift, deep slices, then hang on. "I'll lay me down and bleed a while," she murmured. "Then ne'er up again."

  Yet somehow she didn't make the first cut. She shivered from the cold and the anticipation, and her arms were goose-pimply, but she just sat there not doing it. She couldn't quite take that final step. She knew she had been playing at suicide before; she couldn't bleed to death from the scratch of a compass point. She could have done it from the slash of Slick's razor, but that had been in company; she had known they wouldn't actually let her die. But now it was real, and she just couldn't.

  "What a hypocrite I am!" she exclaimed. "I know what to do, and I'm too cowardly to do it!"

  The knife dropped from her hand. She sat there and sobbed. She had come to the final test of her life, and flunked it.

  Yet she could not quite give up the death either. She sat there, congealing with cold, breathing the miasma of the pot. Everything was hopeless! Maybe she would die of the cold, or at least catch pneumonia and expire. Or would that be cheating?

  COLENE! Wait for me!

  She snapped out of her drift. Time had passed, maybe a little, maybe a lot. She must have nodded off, and dreamed.

  Yet something had changed. She felt a certain imperative, or potential, or something.

  Take hold!

  It was Darius! It was no dream. Maybe she was crazy, but she was ready to go for it. If it was to be a one per cent romance fifteen years down the line, so be it, but it was a hundred per cent now, and now was what counted. She would give him everything immediately, before the joy of it could fade.

  She reached out with her mind and took hold. She felt something settle into place. That was all.

  But she knew reality had changed. It was a Virtual Mode: a ramp spanning the realities from his to hers. Darius was coming for her! If he was crazy, she would be crazy too.


  Gloriously crazy in love!

  What now, of the futility of romance? She didn't care; she was going for it. Because while she was orienting on love, she wasn't orienting on death.

  She got up and looked around. Nothing had changed physically. But this was here, in her reality. It would be different in Darius' reality.

  But how was she to get from here to there? Well, if this was a true Virtual Mode, all she had to do was walk there. She would be at one end, he at the other. It should be easy enough to cross the ramp and join him.

  Why wait for him to come for her? She had wanted to depart this life. Now she could do it—without killing herself.

  She would meet him halfway.

  Still, it might be a fair distance. She should travel prepared. She wasn't sure how far it might seem in miles. If there were an infinite number of realities, was that an infinite number of miles? No, it had to be fewer than that. But she should use her bicycle, just in case.

  She gathered up her scattered things, such as the canned food she had bought for Darius to eat. He had used some, but she had continued to bring in more as she scrounged it. Now she would eat it herself, if she had to. She also dressed and packed a change of clothing, though what she had here in Bumshed wasn't exactly clean.

  Her bike was leaning against the wall of the shed, under the overhang. It wasn't in top condition, but it was functional. She hadn't ridden it much in the past year, because a bike was really kid stuff, and a teenager was not a kid. But a bicycle was the most efficient mode of transport known to man; a person on a bike used less energy than any walking animal or any traveling machine. So she would be a kid again to travel—so that she could be a woman when she got there.

  Hastily assembled, she walked the bike out to the road. It wasn't nearly as late as it had seemed in the shed; actually her watch said eight o'clock. Things were hardly stirring outside. She could get cleanly away before her parents caught on.