Fools

by Pat Cadigan

  Rowan blinked at her. “That was terrible,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Em-Cate threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, yah,” she said after a bit, wiping her eyes. “Of course it was terrible. You don’t resort to cheap tricks like throwing a drink in someone’s face if the material is any good.” Still laughing, she wandered over to the antique vanity where her makeup was spread out among the hostess’s collection of perfume bottles and sat down in front of the mirror.

  “What do you resort to if the material is any good?” Rowan asked.

  “Is that a rhetorical question?” Jasper muttered disgustedly.

  “No,” Rowan said, turning that blindy-eyed stare on him.

  He didn’t look at her. “Mine was.”

  “I knew the answer anyway.” Her gaze drifted past him and found me in the bathroom doorway. The light in here wasn’t the flatteringly soft party glow that made everyone look glamorous even if you weren’t intoxicated, and it showed her no mercy. She had aged in a way that went deeper than a few lines and some minor sagging. “Been a long time,” she said to me suddenly.

  I pretended to look at a watch I wasn’t wearing. “Six months, isn’t it?”

  “Ten years.”

  Of course; I’d forgotten about the time she’d pulled for her mindcrime. Mindcrime incarceration was like nothing else—they put you under the belljar with your mind racing so your time sense was slowed down. Real-time, six months; subjective time, ten years. I’d have thought it was a harsh sentence for a first offense if I hadn’t been on the receiving end.

  I realized I was staring at her, turned away and went back into the bathroom to clean off the makeup. If it was already all cleaned off, then I’d put some more on and clean that off, until she was gone.

  “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  I looked at her reflection in the mirror. “Migod, is it as good as the last offer? I can’t imagine what would be better than being Sovay for you.”

  “Finding Sovay for me.”

  I could hear Em-Cate’s laughter under my own. “Citizen, let me juice up your memory,” I said, touching my eyepatch. “Sovay’s been found. The show closed, the set’s been struck, and I’m still not the man you wanted me to be. Nobody is.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” I heard Em-Cate say, as if to herself.

  “They said that all the people who bought Sovay from the mindsuckers have mutated into something that is neither themselves nor Sovay,” Rowan said. “I don’t think it’s true. I think he’s still … alive. In … somebody.”

  I put more cream on my face. “The court maintained him in the sucker box as long as it could. When he disintegrated, he was declared legally dead. The men you collected to try to reintegrate him suffered rewrite conflicts—”

  “But none of them were wiped. Sovay is lying dormant somewhere.”

  I frowned. “Nope.”

  “Sovay was the core personality, the source. Every one of them had him. That doesn’t melt away like an imprint of a character. The associations still exist. Enough for you to be able to identify Sovay if you were mind-to-mind with him.”

  “What about you?” I said. “Couldn’t you identify him if you were mind-to-mind with him?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve never been mind-to-mind with Sovay.”

  “Never?”

  Her chin lifted defiantly. “Is that supposed to be unusual?”

  “I don’t know if it’s supposed to be. I/ think it is.”

  She sighed. “Sovay and I didn’t believe in it. We thought mind-to-mind contact was more intimate than a married couple should be.”

  “How about before you were married?”

  “Nothing. Ever.”

  I shrugged. “That still doesn’t mean you wouldn’t know him if you met him mind-to-mind.”

  Now she looked repelled. “I don’t want to meet him mind-to-mind. I don’t ever want to be mind-to-mind with him. To have to feel those things … not ever.”

  “What things?” It was heartless, but she’d thrown a drink in my face. By proxy, but still.

  “You know. His other contacts. His other mind-to-mind contacts, with pathosfinders, with other actors … all the people who had him, who got closer to him than I did. Including you. His big love affair. If you’d have just gone to bed in real-time, it wouldn’t have been so bad, he’d have gotten you out of his system and you wouldn’t have been hanging on to that part of him that wanted you. It’s bad enough having to know about it. I don’t want to have to feel it in my own head.”

  I wasn’t sure that it would have felt any worse than what she was feeling in her own head now, having had nothing much else to think about over the last ten subjective years of her life.

  “Maybe all that would be so if Sovay were still in existence,” I said. “But he isn’t.”

  “Yes, he is,” Rowan said. “I know he is because I know him. Not the way you knew him, or any of the others, but I know what kind of actor he was. A Method actor, yes”—she gave a short, bitter laugh—“but he had the Method backward. Everyone else could become someone else, but not Sovay. All of his characters became him. That was the kind of man he was. It was why he was able to call me after the mindsuckers started trying to sell him off. I know he’s alive in somebody somewhere, hiding, still holding his own. And you’d know him. The associations you still carry would know him. You have a foolproof Sovay detector in your head. You could find him for me.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  She blew out an impatient breath. “The associations—”

  “No. I mean, why should I?”

  She moved to stand directly in front of the mirror, which put her in my blind spot and forced me to turn and look directly at her. “Because I still want him. Because I still love him.” Somehow, the admission was more naked than if she’d made it mind-to-mind.

  “But why should I do it? What’s in it for me?”

  Now she hesitated. “Is money good enough?”

  I laughed. “Have you come out of mind-incarceration filthoid rich, money falling out of every pore and nothing better you can think to spend it on?”

  She pulled a bankcard out of her pocket, pressed her thumb to the ID spot, and showed me the balance that appeared in the upper-left corner.

  “I’m impressed,” I said truthfully.

  “You can have the whole thing if you find Sovay for me. Have your optic nerve fixed. Replace your eye.”

  “I can see just fine. Don’t you think Sovay would object if he did turn up and you’d given away your life savings?”

  “How much would you pay for your life?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “You’re asking me that question?”

  “How much?”

  I glanced at the bankcard balance again. “Less than I’d take to give it up.”

  “How much would you pay for the life of someone you love, then? I want my husband back. You’re the only one who could find him.”

  “What about the Brain Police? You could go to them with your theories—”

  “If they believed he was out there, that would be the end of him. They’d take him apart for evidence, for what information they thought he might have. And for the simple reason that they wouldn’t know what else to do with him.”

  “And what would you do with him? Or rather, with whatever poor slob that might turn up with his mind all scrambled from overwriting? If I could even find anyone?”

  “I’d help him. And you can find them all, that’s no problem.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because I’ve already found them. It wasn’t hard. I can tell you where each one of them is.”

  My gaze kept returning to the bankcard. Apparently I had an avaricious streak I’d never been aware of. Or maybe it was just knowing a bankroll like that could take me far away and let me start fresh.

  “I put all the information in your phone mailbox,” she said. “All you have to do is use it. Then you can use this.” She enter
ed some code on the top row of letters on the bankcard and then held it up to my eye. There was an infinitesimal flash that felt like a pinprick deep in my head. Or maybe a peapicker. “There. It’s keyed to you now. Show of good faith. The money’s already yours, all you have to do is come and collect it.” She tucked the card back into her pocket. “I’ll hold it for you.”

  I folded my arms. “Pretty rash. I could just go tell the bank the card is lost, get a new one, and take off with the money, all clear.”

  “Could you?” Her face was unreadable. “I’ve done nothing for the last ten years but think, about anything, about everything. You could do that, but you won’t. You’ll look for him because you want the money and because I’ve made you curious. Now you want to see for yourself if I’m right.”

  Rowan hadn’t struck me as the type of person capable of being so perceptive. But then, who was to say what ten years in solitary could do to anyone?

  Jasper made a throat-clearing noise. “If you’re about done in there, it’s time to start dressing for the late show.”

  “Thought I told you,” I called to him. “I quit.”

  In my hands, the towel suddenly shorted out and went black as the color receptors overloaded.

  Karma-gram, whispered my mind.

  There was a ghost of a smile on Rowan’s face.

  I didn’t immediately go running off on the Great Sovay Hunt with dollar signs in my eyes. Fortune or not, I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to go through with it. My life wasn’t much these days, but it was a life and it was mine. So far, anyway, from the time of Marceline’s descent into dormancy.

  I didn’t know what had caused that, and I hadn’t tried looking for any answers, not when it had happened and not since. Now and then, I’d had a few nervous nights when I’d been unable to sleep, afraid that she would wake up the next morning instead of me. Other times, I would wake with a start from some already forgotten dream, sure that it had been her dream, not mine. But nothing happened; I never felt even the slightest stirring, not so much as a taste of her essence. And yet I knew she hadn’t evaporated. If I couldn’t feel her presence, I couldn’t feel her absence, either.

  Then let’s tempt fate, I thought, and went for a walk in the Downs. If the old, familiar sights didn’t rouse her, looking for Sovay might be safe. And if they did rouse her—well, I’d be beyond caring and she’d be back where she belonged.

  My fatalism surprised me. First avarice, now fatalism—what else was I going to find out about myself? So much for instinctive living.

  The sights were familiar in a distant way, but only familiar; a lot of specific things were missing from my memory, the associations too weak, or scrambled, or perhaps gone for good, at least as far as I was concerned. Somebody else’s life had been lived here, not mine. I had passed through once in a hurry but my mental state wasn’t the same.

  Some joint called Sojourn For Truth raised a mild blip but I didn’t know why. I’d have gone in to see if I could find out, but it was so run-down and sleazy-looking, I wasn’t actually sure if it was open for business. There was a guy standing out in front as if he were waiting for someone; as I passed him, he suddenly blew a flurry of bubbles at me, each one containing a tiny glitter-star.

  Before I realized what I was doing, I had stopped to catch one of the bubbles on my finger and watch the swirl of colors in the delicate skin fade to a colorless web before it popped, leaving a little red star stuck in a wet spot. I braced myself for some kind of hot pitch, but nothing happened. The man was just watching me, as if he only wanted to see what my reaction would be. I started to say something to him and he turned away, blowing more bubbles into the air over his head. I wiped my finger on my pants and kept going.

  Several blocks in, a dream parlor called The Zoot Mill was running a halfhearted sidewalk display; the dancing unicorns flickered, full of static, and even the money tornadoes looked anemic. Nobody had stopped to watch, so I didn’t, either. I was about to walk right through the display when a scantily clad figure materialized right in front of me. He seemed to be looking right at me and though he wasn’t any less ragged than the rest of it, I was startled enough to back up and give the projection area a wide berth. The woman squatting in the parking space at the curb didn’t even give me a glance as I stepped over her outstretched legs. There was something funny about her eyes but she was on my blind side so I couldn’t see much.

  Another few blocks and I was more or less lost. There was a comm center that wasn’t particularly well patronized—I could have gone in and gotten a free map from a you-are-here but the strange apathy/malaise that seemed to be in the air had apparently settled over me like dust. It didn’t really matter where I was; when I got tired of being here., I could hunt up a freebus depot or a tube station and take the next ride out. Or keep walking till I came out the other side of the Downs.

  I paused again in front of a crib, of all places. There was nothing in my memory about it, exactly, but I had the strong feeling that there was something I should have known … or had known … I shrugged and started to walk away.

  A moment later I was standing inside, blinking in the semidark. My inner ear went crazy as déjà vu shuddered through my brain and I leaned against a wall, trying to steady myself.

  Abruptly, my blind side erupted with pictures, one after another, flashing too fast for sense, frozen frames of faces, places, things, and, under it all, a voice murmuring at me, unintelligible but relentless, insistent, demanding—

  “I said, wake up. It’s all a dream.”

  The man sitting on the sagging cot looked about a hundred years old, and not because of the snow-white hair. He reached over and picked up the connections to the system on the table next to the cot. “You didn’t come for this, did you?”

  The sign on the outside of the cubicle said Imagist. I shook my head once, carefully.

  “Didn’t think so. She said to expect you. I told her she was out of her mind, you’d never do it. But I forgot, of every one of us, she might have been the most insane, but she never, ever, was out of her mind. Not once.” If he looked a hundred, he sounded two hundred, as if his voice had been in storage somewhere and he hadn’t cleaned off the cobwebs when he’d taken it out again.

  He beckoned and I went in. There was no place to sit except on the cot and I didn’t want to get that close to him.

  “Now, we wait,” he said, as if I’d asked him something. “It shouldn’t be long. He’s a garbagehead now. Like the rest of them, I imagine.” He changed position on the cot and the springs screamed like tortured weasels. “I don’t know, really, he’s the only one I’ve seen in twenty years, wouldn’t know the others if I did see them.” He looked at the connections he was still holding, but didn’t put them down. “Which one are you—the original fake, or the fake fake?”

  “Why?” I said.

  “The one I had, she was the original fake. A persona who got too full of herself and pinocchio’ed.”

  “Pinochled?” I should get out of here, I thought.

  “Pinocchio’ed. Cute little story about a puppet who turned into a human.” He squinted at me with his cheap eyes; not biogems, just government-surplus brown. “Story everyone should know. I had time to tell it to myself. I laid it out as a full-length feature, did the remake, and then composed the opera.” His gaze drifted past me and I turned to see what was so interesting.

  Cheap gilt was flaking off the wretch standing in the doorway of the cubicle, a special effect gone wrong. He’d had a body once, but it had been some time since he’d bothered to maintain it. Or changed his clothes—I realized the washrag hanging over the front of his pants was actually the remains of a loincloth.

  He put one hand to the side of his face and tried to speak, but nothing came out.

  “Told you it wouldn’t be long.” The white-haired guy got up from the cot, making it scream again. “Come on,” he said to the wretch in the doorway. “Someone’s come to take you home now.”

  “No,” said
the wretch. “Still not right. Almost, though. It’s real close. I said I’d meet her here, and I keep coming, but I keep missing her.”

  I stood on tiptoe to look over the wall of the cubicle. The aisle was empty. That didn’t mean Rowan wasn’t nearby, only that she was smart enough to stay out of sight.

  “Don’t have to buy paranoia anymore, do you?” said the imagist. He was laughing at me.

  I shrugged. “Maybe not. Except I don’t know how she’d know I’d come here, when I didn’t know myself.”

  “Maybe she followed you and sent the nearest one. Or maybe it’s just chance favoring the prepared mind.” He led the other man to the cot and sat him down. “Is your mind prepared?” he asked, holding the connections out to me.

  Go mind-to-mind with this walking wreckage? When I barely seemed to know my own mind? “I’m nostalgic for free will,– I said, more to myself.

  “ Any thing free is worth what you pay for it.”

  The breathtaking balance on Rowan’s bankcard passed through my mind as I took the connections from him. Not because I wanted it so much anymore but because now that I had one of them, I had to know. And even while I was popping my own eye and letting the connection creep into the empty socket, I also knew that any idiotic party guest could have come up with better motivation for the most brainless scenario ever suggested to a living-room drama troupe.

  Inside, he was like the first draft of the Frankenstein’s monster. He didn’t even make a good crazy quilt, he was a junk pile, visualizations shifting like a runaway slide show without a sequence to follow. He couldn’t hang on to an idea longer than a few seconds, except for one: meeting. Rowan in a crib. But he didn’t know who was supposed to meet her—him as the whore, him as Dionysius, him as Sovay as Dionysius, Sovay as him, Sovay as him as Dionysius—he’d even lost all track of whether he or Sovay had been Dionysius.

  It was the type of confusion that spiraled inward. Follow it, and you’d chase your own tail until you imploded into a fugue state, and when you came out of it, you’d be back in the same place, ready to start over. Black hole set on permanent rewind and replay.