Fools

by Pat Cadigan

  I sat back. “So that’s the official version: When Salazar retrieved me, my body had been altered and the Escort is MIA?”

  Skehan snapped the caddy shut. “There is no other version. What other version could there be? There is no other possible explanation.” He stood up, smiling. in answer to another question, you’ll be out of here tomorrow. You get a week of R and R and then you’re back on the job. Your contract’s not quite up, as I understand it.”

  He started to leave and then paused. “Oh, just a couple of other things. Salazar didn’t come through this unscathed herself. She wasn’t in deep undercover and your trauma affected her as well. We’ve had to wipe the memory and all her field experience went with it, I’m afraid.”

  “Sally Lazer’s in permanent retirement? Too bad, there’s a Downs joint that’ll never be the same. What are you going to do with her, early retirement?”

  “Oh, no. I believe she’s been promoted. You’ll be reporting to her when you get back from your R and R.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t make the policies. And, ah, the other thing … you had a rather persistent delusion we had quite a bit of trouble with. But it’s gone now.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “Nothing to worry about. You just seemed to, ah, be convinced you—” He shrugged. “I don’t even know how to explain it. But as I said, it’s nothing to worry about. The dry-cleaning took, you’re back to normal. No delusions. I only mention it because there was quite a lot of information entangled in it and we had to take that, too.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “I’m not really sure, to tell you the truth. Except that you may feel you’re being lied to about what happened to you during the periods you can’t remember. It’s a feeling you may not be able to get over and as a result, you could be prone to the development of paranoia. I highly recommend you allow us to put you on paranoia-watch.”

  I laughed. “Is that really a wise thing to do with an incipient paranoid? Watch her?”

  “We wouldn’t be watching. You just wear this.” He pulled something out of his pocket and held it up. “It’s a pump that—”

  “I know what it is,” I said. “No. Absolutely not. Out of the question. I’m professional enough that I can monitor my own brain. If it gets crazy in there, I’ll put myself in for treatment.”

  “But this would be immediate treatment it would deliver a precisely measured dose of—”

  “No. Get it out of my sight.” He tucked it back into his pocket.

  “Now, you get out of my sight, too.”

  Skehan nodded good-naturedly and left.

  I checked out of rehab a day early and took a jumper to Cornwallis Island, one of the few places in the Northwest Territories that hadn’t gotten all tarted up for the Ice-Tourist trade. But it wasn’t completely without amenities; you could find almost anything you wanted if you knew who to ask.

  I’ve always thought a cold climate was a good place to think things through. Whatever memory was lost, I decided, could stay lost. They say if you lose it, you never really needed it in the first place. Forgive and forget.

  Or just forget. That way, there’s nothing to forgive.

  Nothing and no one.

  So I forgot.

  PART II

  FOOL TO BELIEVE

  Sovay had dyed himself a delicate orange. It wasn’t his color. He was sitting nude on a floor mat with his legs folded and his hands resting on the junction of his ankles. Someone had piled pillows between his back and the wall for support—the regular police, probably. Suckers weren’t known to be that considerate. His long straight hair, a shade or two darker than his skin, was pushed back from his slack face and there were traces of blood beneath his unfocused jade eyes. A faint whistling sound came from between his parted lips every time he exhaled.

  I squatted in front of him and pulled gently at his lower eyelids. A thin mixture of blood and tears spilled onto my thumbs. Poor Sovay. They hadn’t been any too gentle with him. There was no sign of a struggle in the living room but Sovay and his wife Rowan still didn’t bother with furniture. It was the same loose scattering of pillows and mats I vaguely remembered from a month ago, with indirect wall-well lighting. It was like being in a tomb. Or maybe a womb.

  Rowan’s voice came to me from the hallway. “In there. Through that door.” I stood up and moved aside as three paramedics came in with a stretcher.

  “Dirty shame,” said the chief paramed, kneeling down in front of Sovay with a vitals kit. The other two unfolded the stretcher in silence, not bothering with any facial expressions. “You the Brain Police, ma’am?”

  I nodded, showing him the ID on my belt. He squinted at it briefly.

  “Heya, Mersine. Regular police seen him yet?”

  “Yah. He’s all yours.”

  The paramed took Sovay’s blood pressure with a Quik-Kuff. “Any idea who did it?”

  “I just got here myself.”

  “Dirty shame. Dirty shame.” The paramed’s bald, blue-tinted head wagged from side to side. “Used to be that was the one thing they couldn’t take from you. And they’re getting so bold.”

  I looked across the room at Rowan. She had pulled a hookah out of the wall and was sucking contemplatively on the mouthpiece. Then she moved her head, and in the lousy light, I could see the wet streak running down her face from under her eye. As I watched, the skin there turned slightly red, as if her tears contained some irritant that even she was sensitive to. It would have figured, I thought, and turned back just in time to see the paramed extract Sovay’s eyes. I hadn’t needed to see that just then. More tears and blood dribbled down Sovay’s face as the paramed shut down the optic nerve connections.

  “Mighty nice biogems,” he said, pausing to examine the eyes. “Brand-new, too. He didn’t get much use out of them.” He slipped them into a jar in the kit, where they stared like unclaimed marbles. “Dirty shame. I mean, those suckers.” He stopped up Sovay’s ears and gave him an an intravenous pop. “In through the optic nerve like a vacuum cleaner, suck you dry.” He lifted Sovay’s arm to test his pliability and then maneuvered him into a supine position so the other parameds could slip the stretcher under him. “They musta wanted him pretty bad to risk coming in after him this way.” His brow wrinkled nearly to his bald crown.

  I looked over at Rowan again. She seemed not to have heard. The perfumed smoke from the hookah had drifted across the room; it smelled appetizing but not too dopey.

  “Who was he?” said the paramed. “I mean, who did he used to be?”

  “His name was Sovay. He was an actor.”

  “Oh.” The paramed leaned close. “He musta been some hot up-and-comer, but personally, I never hearda him.” He waved at his two assistants and they took Sovay out.

  “Did you want to see his studio,” Rowan said after a long moment of silence. She was studying the pipe mouthpiece as if it were something completely new. “They broke in there, too, but there wasn’t anything to take. Just mirrored walls and carpeting. Sovay kept it locked because he said it shut his vibrations in and other people’s out.” She took another drag on the pipe and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “Does that make sense if you’re the Brain Police?”

  Dealing with the family is something you never quite get used to, even under much less complicated circumstances. Of course, it wasn’t that complicated for Rowan; she didn’t know me and I wasn’t going to tell her who I’d been once. It made me feel a bit unsavory, as if I had some further motive beyond preserving the confidentiality of the investigation that I didn’t even know about.

  “I don’t need to see his studio, not with the regular police checking it out.” I hesitated. “When they’re done, I’ll give you a lift to the hospital, if you like.”

  She shook her head. “There wouldn’t be much point in that.” Her gaze went to the mat where he’d been, as if she were just now noticing he was gone. “Do you want coffee? All I have are cubes. They’re good, though.” She blinked several time
s in that dazed way people do when they find themselves in the middle of a catastrophe and aren’t sure of the etiquette. But her movements were unhesitating as she shut off the hookah and put it away.

  In appearance, she still matched the minor memory I had of her, small, compact, a shade on the plump side and looking more so in a pouch suit. Unlike Sovay, she wasn’t much for dye-jobs or other flash. Her skin was untouched, and so was her ripply shoulder-length brown hair. Her only affectation was the set of pearlized brown biogem eyes that gave her round face an odd blind look.

  Surprisingly, there was conventional furniture in the kitchen, a table and four chairs. Or maybe that wasn’t so surprising—even the most dedicated floor-sitters probably craved a chair now and then. I sat down and Rowan served me mechanically: cup of water, spoon, napkin, jar of cubes.

  “How do you take it?”

  For a moment I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Tan.”

  “The cubes in the gold wrappers’re tan. The white are tan with sugar, the pink are sweet black, the black ones are black.” She shrugged and deposited herself in a chair as I peeled a gold-wrapped cube and dropped it into my cup. The water foamed up in an instant boil.

  “Why did they do that to him?” she asked. “Take out his eyes, plug his ears?”

  “First aid.” I stirred down the bubbles in the cup. “Too much sensory input can be adverse for an involuntary mindwipe. The pop was a tactile desensitizer as well as a sedative, it’ll keep him out till they get him into quarantine.”

  “Oh.” She piled one hand on the other.

  I’ve always thought murder must be easier in a way. The involuntary mindwipe—mindsuck—is just as gone, except the trappings of a live body remain to confound the survivors. A mindsuck is interred not in a grave but in a special quarantine to allow the development of a new mind and personality. Sometimes the new person is a lot like the old one. Most of the time, however, it’s only spottily reminiscent of the person that had been, as though the suck had freed an auxiliary person that had always been there, just waiting for the elimination of the primary personality. There was still a lot of controversy between the behaviorists and the biologists over that and plenty of theories but no clear-cut explanations.

  Regardless, the new mind was definitely Somebody Else, a stranger with no ties to the previous inhabitant of the brain. Someone told me once it was a lot easier to accept if you had enough of a mystic bent toward a belief in reincarnation, but I couldn’t exactly tell Rowan to take comfort in the study of the Great Wheel of Life.

  “Well,” she said after a bit. “Have the Brain Police ever recovered any, ah, anyone? From mindsuck?”

  A common question. You’d think in the Age of Fast Information there wouldn’t be blank spots or misconceptions. You have to tell them the truth, but I hate it, even if lying is worse. “Never intact,” I said, and took a sip of coffee. She’d been right, they were good cubes. The damnedest things make an impression on you at the damnedest times. “Most suckers part out minds as quickly as possible. They—” I stopped.

  Tell her about a chop shop? Sure—then follow up with a description of how they’d dig out Sovay’s self-contained memories with all the finesse of a chimpanzee digging grubs with a pointed stick, working fast because a hot mind wouldn’t keep in a jury-rigged hold-box. Any excised memories that could unambiguously identify the mind would be flushed and whatever remained of his talent sold. There would still be a fair number of associations clinging to it but people who buy from suckers don’t fuss about a few phantoms. Nor do they complain if the merchandise is half-mutilated from rushed pruning.

  Anything left over after that would be sold, too. It still surprised me that there were lowlifes who would buy sucker leftovers but some people will buy anything. Which meant that there might be someone with Sovay’s taste in clothes and someone else with his taste in decor and still someone else with his taste in sex.

  —Unless this was a bodysnatch and the suckers had somebody waiting for a whole new personality. Some Very Nice People back in business, under a new name or new management? Counterfeiters making the jump to mindsucking and bodysnatching didn’t happen often. Mindsucking was a crime of violence, something counterfeiters normally avoided altogether. But it wasn’t unheard of, either. The money’s good; people who want a whole new personality pay a lot more than those who just want a persona overlay. Maybe because they think if they throw enough money at it, they can actually get a personality transplant even though there’s no evidence that anybody’s ever managed to transplant a personality successfully. No evidence whatsoever. Just ask me.

  I realized I was glaring at my coffee cup. “They, uh, they have to. Work quickly, that is,” I said lamely, finishing a sentence neither of us cared about anymore.

  “I see.” Rowan exhaled noisily. “Then it hardly matters whether you catch the mindsuckers or not, does it? I mean, for Sovay or for me. He couldn’t be restored even if you found him.”

  I should have made the parameds give her some-thing for shock, I thought. Seeing to the well-being of the family was really more the province of the regular police; one of them should have been with us but they were probably working shorthanded again. The budget being what it was, I was working short-minded myself.

  “No,” I said slowly, “perhaps it doesn’t matter. Unless we catch them and keep them from doing someoqe else.”

  Rowan’s mouth twitched. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t seem to care about anyone but myself at the moment.”

  “Of course. Is there someone you can stay with?”

  “You mean someone to look after the bereaved widow, spoon broth into her mouth, cut up her meat for her, slip her tranquilizers?” The brown pearl eyes slid away from me disinterestedly. “No. I’ll manage on my own.”

  We sat in silence until we heard the regular police coming into the living room.

  The regular police had little to tell me. Sovay’s attackers hadn’t left much in the way of traces. Most likely the B and E had been jobbed out to specialists who had taken off as soon as the suckers were in. The B and E pros seldom stole anything on these runs—too traceable. Burglars don’t usually want to turn into accessories to mindsuck. So there we were. The Age of Fast Information meant we could find out we didn’t know anything five times faster than we could fifty years ago.

  Rowan remained firm in her refusal to go to the hospital so I left her my number and drove back to headquarters. I’m one of those people who prefers driving manually both land and air. It’s somewhere between a game and therapy, clears my mind, helps me think better. Traffic was fairly heavy so I had plenty of time to go over things.

  Hanging above the river while I waited for the signal to descend and merge into land traffic, I put a Gladney spike in the deck and turned on all eight speakers. Gladney was another mindsuck and this spike was an old one, music composed by his original personality, what they called a first edition.

  It was scary how so many artists of various kinds were getting sucked these days. Since the breakthrough in myelin sheath restoration, it had become possible for a brain to stand up to a greater number of complete wipes than the former limit of two. It used to be that a third wipe left a subject at about the level of an acorn squash, only not so long-lived. But now you could have yourself wiped annually—or you could have if government regulations hadn’t been tightened. Even with the restrictions, requests for voluntary mindwipe had quadrupled. So had involuntary mindwipe—mindsuck.

  My dash buzzer went off to tell me I had the right of descent and I leaned gently on the stick. The fact that Sovay was the victim seemed to indicate that we weren’t done with the events of the previous month.

  Retaliation, maybe, for what he’d done at Davy Jones’ Locker, except that was pretty extreme for counterfeiters. They were given more to things along the lines of screwing up your credit rating, not crimes of violence. Unless there was something really big at stake.

  Maybe Sovay’s glancing involvement with Some Very
Nice People had drawn someone’s attention to him. Sovay had barely obtained a reputation as a promising actor except among hard-core live-theatre aficionados. An esoteric victim, but suckers made it their business to scout out new talent. New talent was a hell of a lot easier to get at and sucker customers liked the idea of acquiring a talent in the semirough, with most of the failure supposedly sanded off. Then they could refine it to suit themselves. Stardom the easy way, and better than a persona overlay. In theory. In practice—

  Well. You can warn people about buying from suckers, tell them horror stories about what happens to you when you buy sucked merchandise only to have it go rotten with trauma in a living brain, you can legislate and overlegislate every angle, but you can’t make people believe they won’t get around the problems of buying something not only out of their aptitudes but unclean and taken by force. The legit Mind Exchange uses a procedure that took anywhere from a few weeks to several months to clean out an ability sold legally and even they couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be some mild phantoms. A few years ago, my brother bought someone’s painting talent—he’d always wanted to fill out his arty streak and become a full-fledged portrait painter—and found that every time he picked up at brush, he craved to smell fresh cedar. Last time I’d seen him, he’d had a pocket full of wood chips. Stunk like somebody’s antique hope chest.

  Well, if someone wanted to sell off a part of the mind as though it were any old heirloom out of the attic, it wasn’t my concern even if I couldn’t see the virtue of it. Maybe both seller and buyer were better off but so far, no one had made history with secondhand talent. Even so, that was voluntary. No one volunteered to get sucked.

  Traffic came to a standstill in Commerce Canyon, so I requested permission to go airborne again. Central Traffic Control took ten minutes to get back to me and tell me I could underfly the crosstown air express at my own risk and liability. I nearly got my hood crumpled but it saved me an hour.