by Pat Cadigan
He put a dirty hand around my upper arm. “They took all the cabs. And if you were paranoid, you’d know where. And why.” He wiggled his tangled eyebrows at me and blew out another stream of stars. My stomach did a slow forward roll. “Come on, it’s a done deal anyway, ain’t it? You know there’s something going on, you just can’t figure out where-to. You buy some paranoia from me, you’ll be so here-and-now, you’ll be reading the future in the traffic patterns the way happy idiots read what happens in the daily news. Live hot, only the dead are cool. Whaddaya say?”
I jerked away from him. He took a step toward me and then jumped back. I was holding a steel comb, sharpened points aimed at his face. He raised both hands, blew a star-laden kiss at me, and hurried off.
He wasn’t half as surprised as I was. I examined the comb. Everything had happened so fast, I couldn’t even remember doing it. Obviously, the comb had to have come out of my hair. Except I never wore combs, my hair was—
I caught sight of my reflection in the tinted window of the comm center then, and I had the weirdest flash that it wasn’t a window at all, but a funhouse mirror. I went over to it, ignoring the derelicts making faces at me from the other side. Migod, the street vendor had been right—obviously I wasn’t paranoid enough. Even worse, I thought, touching that round face and the brown rat’s-nest that was supposed to be hair, I had absolutely no sense of design.
Characterization amnesia was one thing, but I’d never in my life forgotten that I’d gone into full costume. For that matter, I’d never gone into full costume while I was still working on a character. Sir Larry’s cos turners wouldn’t even look at a design sketch until the week a production was scheduled to open, much less execute something.
So what did this mean … had I jumped the gun for a reason I couldn’t remember anymore? And something this extensive—migod, no wonder Rowan had been acting so strangely. I was completely unrecognizable.
A hand clutched my upper arm again. I turned away from the window and whipped the comb up. “I told you to skin—”
Green fingers plucked the comb out of my hand, flipped it over and around like a magician’s prop, and made it vanish into a matching green sleeve. “Very dangeroso,” said the green man, still holding my arm. His hand felt strong enough to snap the bone if he’d cared to. “I keep saying you shouldn’t be allowed to have things with sharp points on them, Mar, but nobody listens to me.”
I tried pulling at his fingers and he tightened his grip so much I could feel the muscle bruising. “Nah-nah-nah.” He grinned. His teeth were a lighter shade of the same green, a kind of rain-forest emerald. I made a mental note never to dye my own teeth if I went color-mental. “You’ve got an appointment you’re long overdue for. Bad to be any later.”
“You’ve got the wrong party,” I said. “I’m just passing through here—”
He grabbed my other hand and took a long, hard look at my fingertips before seizing my chin and taking an equally good look at my eyes. He had telemicro; very pricey feature. I was impressed, not to mention relieved. My finger- and retina-prints would tell him he’d been fooled by a chance resemblance and that would be that.
It seemed like ages before he refocused on my face.
“Same old mess, eh, Mar? Let’s go.”
“Wait a minute,” I said as he dragged me up the sidewalk.
He laughed and kept going, much to no one’s dismay except mine. I barely got a glance from the gofers sharing a parking space and a bottle. This was the Downs, after all, people dragged each other away on a regular basis. I had to dance along with him in double-time or fall down and let the pavement sand my skin off.
“Please,” I said, “you’re hurting—”
He swung me around square-dance style and I saw the side of a van coming at me. I closed my eyes and felt someone catch me just before I would have hit.
“You really stunk it up, running out the back door like that, Mar.”
I opened my eyes. My friend the maniac who had taken me to the memory lane a thousand years ago this morning. His name popped into my mind out of nowhere: Anwar.
“I don’t know you, either,” I said, without much hope. He kicked open the side door of the van and tossed me inside.
“This is a mistake,” I said into the carpeted floor as the green guy drove us away from the curb. Anwar was sitting on my back. “Whoever you think I am, I’m really not. I’d know if I were, really—”
“Thou shalt not fucketh around,” laughed the tint from the driver’s seat. “But if you do, don’t be stupid about it.”
“But I’m not—”
Anwar gave me a glancing swat on the back of the head. “No more garbage, okay, Mar? I bought amnesia before breakfast, but it’s closer to lunch now. Nobody runs out the back door of a memory lane because they can’t remember anything. You wouldn’t cover for me for the same thing and you know it. So do me the service of not trying to bury me up to my eyes in bullshit. Just as a thank you for the coffee, if nothing else.”
I had a vague memory of drinking a cup of coffee-flavored chemicals last night while in character. “Not that coffee,” I said.
He gave me another swat. The van accelerated.
We didn’t travel long before the van went over a bump and began descending. The light coming through the windows faded, leaving the interior in near darkness. I kept telling myself that this was good, the sooner we got to wherever they were taking me, the sooner they’d find out the tint’s telemicro had malfunctioned. Then they’d kick me out and my worries would be over.
By the time we stopped, I almost believed it. But as the tint got out and walked around to open the side door, I decided Plan B was better—the moment I was out, kick him in the crotch and run for it.
The door slid back and I tensed, waiting for Anwar to pull me up. Something cool touched my upper back, spreading out to my shoulders, up my neck, and around to my face. There was just enough time for a regret before the Vitamin Q in the transcutaneous patch Anwar had stuck to me took over.
Q-up and calm down, a billion strung-out hypeheads can’t be wrong, as the saying went. I calmed way down, beyond the level of bothering to notice what I was doing or where I was. The buzz had it that you could counteract Q by sheer force of will if you really needed to, but that had always sounded like pharmaceutical folklore to me. Even if it was true, my will just wasn’t up to the dosage.
I began to notice the world again just as we stepped off a lateral or elevator (I had no idea if we’d gone up, down, or sideways) into an immense, airy-looking space, with a sunken area in the middle of it. Sunken living rooms had been all the retro-rage last year, I thought idly, still too Q’ed to care, but they’d always looked like furnished swimming pools to me. Which reminded me of something, but all I could think of for some reason was a fish and a line …
“Well, another country heard from,” someone said from across the room. Part of my mind knew it should have been panicking; another part was trying to log the memory of the disconnected feeling exactly for possible later use. You can’t take the woman out of the Method or the Method out of the woman.
On the upper level directly across the sunken area a small man in white pajamas was standing in front of a desk. He pointed at the couch lining the sunken place with a careless gesture.
As soon as I stepped on the carpeting, I knew for certain that I was still heavily drugged—no power on earth could have made me walk on it otherwise. It was one of those crawly, half-alive things that’s supposed to feel so good on your feet, though I’d always thought people bought them to have sex on. And then there’d been that kinko guest director from last year, who had bought one to have sex with …
Pajamas did a slow walk halfway around on the upper level, passing out of my peripheral line of sight. I was staring at the carpet fibers, working away on my shoes in a vain attempt to stimulate them.
“This wasn’t my idea,” the tint said.
“I was afraid she’d panic and try to run,”
Anwar said defensively. “So I dosed her.”
“Quite all right,” Pajamas said breezily. “I think you did the right thing, Anwar.” I hadn’t seen him come down into the sunken area but suddenly he was bending down and looking into my face. “I even think I like her better this way. Not so prone to trivial debate.” Pajamas looked up and to my right. “Though I don’t imagine she does much for you like this. Does she? Or does she?”
Deep in my mind, something stirred, as if there was some part of me that hadn’t been affected by the Q. I had no feeling one way or the other about that, either. The sensation of alertness was a strangely isolated thing, like an air bubble going from deep under the ocean to the surface.
Abruptly, my vision gave a jump and something happened in my left eye. No, in the left side of my field of vision. It was like seeing through a window with a crack in it …a window, or a mirror, where everything on one side of the crack was slightly displaced, so that it didn’t match up with the other side.
Interesting, I thought; was I falling into character, or just having a stroke? I was still too dosed to be any more than mildly curious.
Pajamas took hold of my chin and lifted my face, frowning.
“What?” said Anwar.
Pajamas turned my face one way and then the other. “Something just happened in there.” He let go of my chin but I held the position, not really wanting to look up at him but not having any reason to move. “This is the last time I ever put a memory junkie on the payroll. Much too unstable.”
“I don’t think—” Anwar started and Pajamas made a cutting motion at him.
“That’s good. Because thinking’s not what I pay you to do, Anwar.”
The left side of my vision became unusually vivid. I could feel a sort of mental searching or groping, as if I were trying to remember something. Except I wasn’t.
Aliens, I thought, bombarding my head with thought-control rays. So this was schizophrenia. And even that didn’t feel like my own thought. Maybe this was schizophrenia.
“—no surprises,” Pajamas was saying. “What I always liked best about you, Marceline. In the six months you’ve been in my employ, you’ve never once surprised me. Until now. And that makes me feel”—he looked pained—“unhappy.” He picked up my hands and held them. “Now. I have to have what’s mine, dear. The good girl you used to be would understand that.”
Marceline. Well, that explained it; the character had slipped the leash, achieved escape velocity, and formed some liaisons without my knowledge or cooperation. God only knew what she’d been up to—
I had a sudden absurd flash that God had chewed me up and spit me out before the rest of what Pajamas had said registered on me. Six months? Six? Months?!
Impossible. I never worked on a character for that long; nobody did. Let alone in full costume for the duration—
Unless Marceline really had managed a complete break with my life. But that would have meant I’d been a missing person for half a year with no one looking for me—even more impossible. Even if the rest of the troupe had hated me as much as Em-Gate did, none of them would have let me go missing for six days without pursuit—the lawsuit for negligence would have left me owning all their sorry asses. These people, Pajamas, the tint, Anwar, they all had to be crazy, or their minds had been tampered with—
Well, of course, I realized. We’d all been tampered with. This had to be an improvisational exercise—long and involved, but an improv just the same. The scene at the memory lane must have been part of the scenario and I must have been playing it just fine until I’d fallen out of character, thanks to a certain ham-handed famine fancier.
And so Anwar must have given me the Q to try to induce the character to resurface. But he’d overestimated the dosage and turned me into a zombie. No real harm done; the Q was starting to wear off now. My alertness was increasing, except it still felt strangely distant … as if the Q were wearing off my body, but not me. But wasn’t that impossible, too? I’d have to ask someone.
You want to check line?
Check the reality, Sovay, I thought. Pajamas let go of my hands. They fell limply onto my thighs. Anwar and the tint got me up on my feet. I was at least a head taller than Pajamas. He folded his arms and looked up at me, still with that pitying expression.
“For all your faults, Marceline, you were really a damned good Escort. I’ll miss you. Your technique was—” He kissed his fingertips to the air. Ham, I thought at him. I felt like laughing out loud, never a good sign. If we didn’t break within the next minute or so, I’d have to disrupt things and tell them I still wasn’t back in character. They’d all probably have a group tantrum over the wasted time and effort, but it wouldn’t have been fair to let things go on any longer if I couldn’t react properly. Out of character, I was just terrible at improv.
I concentrated on making my mouth move to produce the words We have to stop, saying them over and over in my head. Then I cleared my throat, and my voice slid out thick and low, like a slowed-down recording.
“Jee habba cop.”
Pajamas blinked at me. “Pardon?”
Migod, I thought, exasperated. The split-vision effect intensified. Whatever was doing it was now affecting my speech center as well. I’d have to warn Anwar not to give me so much Q in the future.
I swallowed and cleared my throat again for another try. Before I could make a sound, the left side of my vision gave a funny jump and I could no longer remember how to talk. But my voice came out anyway.
“She had a cop,” I heard myself say. “She was a cop. She was Brain Police in deep undercover.”
Pajamas looked from Anwar to the tint and back to me. “What are you talking about?”
I’m not talking, I tried to say, but my voice went on without me. “That last trick … client. The actor.
She was Brain Police in deep undercover. That was why she wanted an Escort. To kill the cop. We killed a cop.”
Pajamas took a step back as if that would somehow help him see me better. “To refresh what seems to be your suddenly failing memory, the client is a silly stage actor who couldn’t purge herself of some useless character she’d made up for some stupid flop of a play.”
Migod. This fool of a scenery-chewer was actually so caught up in the improv he was going to fit whatever I said into the scenario without questioning it. “That’s what she told you,” I continued, unable to stop myself. “And me. But she was Brain Police in deep undercover. The cops set her up with a life and if she had too many personalities, well, who’s counting anyway? She wasn’t even supposed to find that one, but she did. Or rather, her lover did. I got the whole story when I threw the cop over the cliff.”
Pajamas’ face was wary. “All those silly stage actors are multiples, and they’re all Method actors. They believe they’re whoever they’re supposed to be. That’s not our problem, unless you start believing it, too.”
My head went from side to side. “The cop was the real thing. And—”
—and she’s still here.
I finally managed to will my voice to shut off but the unspoken thought burned slowly into my mind like a shot of absolute truth. It didn’t make any sense whatsoever. The character was a memory junkie, but unless there had been some kind of major script rewrite while I’d been unconscious, Escort services and Brain Police didn’t figure into any part of the plot. Unless Marce-line …
But then, that would mean this wasn’t an improv.
Just how out of hand had things gotten?
“That’s got to be horseshit,” the tint was saying. “Stupid delusions. She’s a crunching memory junkie, she’s got a whole head full of horseshit. She wants to be somebody else anyway, she probably believes she’s God on the even-numbered days.”
Pajamas gave him a look. “Today is an even-numbered day.” He frowned at me and then went up to the upper level to fiddle with something in his desktop. “Hm. The client’s mailing address has changed from that dreary storefront theatre to some very nice peop
le. Moving up in the world. Perhaps Souse was right and our girl here has just been indulging in a little persona pattycake.” He chuckled. “Dear Souse. I’d give her a raise, but it would just go to her head, and she’d waste it all on bad doughnuts, anyway.”
“Should we go get the trick?” asked the tint.
Pajamas rubbed his palms together slowly, as if he were mashing a bug between them. “Yah,” he said, coming back down to stand in front of me again. “I think we should talk to her. It might have been just some silly character, or it could be our girl here got all mixed up and she’s having a delusion or two from the persona overlay. Or it might be the real thing. There’s no way to tell without having a look at the trick. Maybe she’ll tell us where our girl has been for the last week.”
“And what’ll we do with our girl in the meantime?”
The tint gave me a hard poke.
“Hold for later disposal, of course. I want to get the both of them together. If the trick actually conned our girl into dumping a cop, there should be a lot of very interesting information locked up in here.” He tapped his index finger on my forehead. “Box her at three-quarters capacity. That ought to keep her motor idling well enough without anything wearing out too soon.
Most of them don’t even realize they’re in a system when you run them at seventy-five percent.
“Then go visit some very nice people and bring the actor in. Alive. But fast. If it’s the real thing, it’ll take time to jigger her memory. I don’t plan to go down for a cop-kill.” He pinched my cheek. “If it comes to that, that’s what you’re here for.” He made a brief dismissing gesture.
I waited for everyone to break out of character. Instead, Anwar and the tint walked me out of the sunken area and back into the elevator/lateral. Elaborate, extended exit, I thought desperately. They weren’t really going to drop me on a slab, pluck out my eyes, and plug me into a system … were they?
The door closed. Anwar gathered my hand into his as the lateral began moving to the left. I started to shake. The Q had all but worn off now and I knew it wasn’t an improv.
