by Pat Cadigan
Because I had been mind-to-mind with him. Of course. I wondered about Dionysius. Was he still sitting in the crib, in Coney Loe’s cubicle, waiting for Rowan to come and get him, or waiting for me to come back? There hadn’t been enough of him to fix … had there?
Anwar …
… is going to be absorbed, of course, Sovay said, sounding regretful in a detached way. An ego that swallowed other people whole didn’t have much room in it for regret over someone else’s misfortune. It’s what I had to do. I never had the knack of the mirror like you did. All the characters had to be me, because I couldn’t give myself up to anyone else. But you could. That was why I went mind-to-mind with you. I thought if I could feel the way you did it, I could learn how.
Rowan’s portrait had been replaced by drifting scenes of the two of us together. The symbolism was prosaic—conjoined rings, giant stars orbiting each other, galaxies colliding—
I was confused. An aquarium? An ocean. And one lonely figure swimming through it, immersed but never part of it.
Knowledge isn’t ability, Sovay said sadly.
Truth is cheap, information costs. Who had said that to me? Coney Loe, truth whore. Did that make the truth a pimp?
The force of Sovay’s presence began to increase. Things coming back to you he said. Approval radiated from him like heat. When the right things come back to you, you’ll be her again. For some of us, who we are depends on who we’re with. And you’re with me now.
And you wanted me so badly because of the mirror, I said. Not for love, that was something you already had in the real world. You just wanted someone else who could be you.
But it’s not a true reflection, Sovay. It’s a funhouse mirror, and that’s something else altogether.
The mirror encircled us completely. The reflections weren’t clear yet, but they were forming.
No!
His negation came from his pure core of self, undisguised and uncivilized, a baby’s first cry and one that had never ended, not for him; Sovay then, Sovay now, Sovay always.
It wasn’t a bad thing, really, for someone like him, not until he had started trying to remake the world in his own image. Then he had looked into my image and found a Brain Police cop staring back at him—
The mirror shattered in an explosion all the more violent for being soundless. Fragments flew out in all directions.
Didn’t matter; it was only his perspective, and it was my mirror. But his image had fallen on it and it was still there.
The memories were already beginning to spark. When the right things come back to you, you’ll be her again.
For some of us, who we are depends on who we’re with. And you’re with me now. But if I was her, then let it be because that was who I was, not who he wanted me to be.
My own negation broke the connection.
This was one of those times when having only one eye was an advantage. It meant I could be out of the system and sighted before he was. I moved to the doorway, watching him carefully as he tucked his eyes back in. There was less of Anwar in the man who got up from the bed, looking around like someone traversing the last set of exits from a prison.
“Reinforced,” he said cheerfully. “It’s quite a feeling.
“I’ll buy that. Rowan doesn’t really care which one of you she gets, does she. Which one of you Sovays. It’ll be first come, first served, won’t it. She didn’t ask me to get the right Sovay—you’re all the right Sovay. It’s just a race to see who gets home first.”
He gave a short laugh. “The right one is the one who gets home first.”
“Well, I’ve decided to make this one easy. I’m declaring you the winner. Run home, tell her you’re the swiftest and the strongest, she’ll never know the difference. Neither will you. Though there have been a lot of other changes in the non-Sovay areas of the universe. Sir Larry’s is gone. The future belongs to living-room soap opera. Cheesy, sordid, and braindead, but you get to go to a lot of glamorous parties. And I never want to see you again. I won’t be a fool for the Brain Police and I won’t be a fool for you, or Rowan, or anyone.”
“Won’t you?” he said as I turned to leave.
I hesitated, but I didn’t turn around to look at him. “What do you mean?”
“It’ll come to you.” I could feel him smiling at my back as I marched through the apartment and out the door. Or maybe that was just the aftertaste he’d left in my brain.
I was about to step out onto the sidewalk when I remembered the onionheads. Superb, I thought; as if I couldn’t have waited, oh, ten hours before telling him off. So much for shelter. I’d really screwed that one up.
Hadn’t I?
There were no onionheads in sight in either direction. Somewhere, not far away, was an air-taxi pad, but there was someplace else I had to go first, someone I had to see, and something I had to get—
The blind side of my face began to tingle, as if a fine spray of cool water was dancing on it. I wanted to stop and wait until the sensation passed but I forced myself to keep going. If the onionheads caught me out, my face would be doing more than tingling.
There was a sudden tiny flash of light from the empty socket, followed by another and then another, until it seemed to be filled with a multitude of twinkling stars. Or glittering dust.
Or the fragments of a shattered mirror, still free-falling toward reassembly.
I heard the rattle of the chain before I saw them, but there was nowhere to go—the one storefront near the corner was empty and the rest of the building sealed up. I jammed my fists into my pockets, put my head down tike a gofer on a rush-job, and stalked across the street, trying to keep focused on where I was going rather than the flashing from my blind side.
It fooled the onionheads long enough for me to get across the street and it might have fooled them even longer if I’d been able to resist sneaking a glance at them to see if they were watching. They were, and I must have looked like the main attraction in a fox hunt. They let go with something that sounded like a cross between a scream and a yodel and I was off in an unsteady sprint with the couple pounding after me, howling for reinforcements.
I passed a doughnut shop just as someone was coming out; a whiff of appetite gas hit me right in the face and the blast of hunger pangs almost knocked me sideways. It mixed with the nagging, repetitive music from the soundtrack joint next door. I stumbled into the gutter, through several occupied parking places and then into the middle of the street, barely missing the front of a van. Through the windshield, the angry driver looked green, but it might have been a trick of the light, the real light or the strobing light from my blind side.
In the next lane, a taxi screamed to a stop several feet in front of me and flipped on its for-hire sign. I ran past it and hit the opposite sidewalk. By the sound, two more onionheads had joined the chase, though they weren’t any faster than the first two. But sooner or later, they were going to pick up a pair who could sprint faster than I could even chained together, and my chest was burning so badly that the bile was coming up out of my throat.
I swung around the next corner thinking that the next time I saw a taxi, I wasn’t going to be so panicked that I ran past it instead of using precious seconds to open the passenger door. If I ever spotted another one that would stop for me.
And then it was too late even for that, because they’d finally gotten smart instead of fast. The sidewalk ahead of me was clearing in a hurry to make room for the pair running at me from the other end of the block, chain held at neck level and no breath wasted on scary howls.
The pawnshop sign seemed to jump out of nowhere. I hit the door at a run. It stuck for one horrible, endless moment and then gave, dumping me on the floor inside just as the onionheads reached the spot on the sidewalk where I’d been a moment before.
They didn’t even bother screaming in rage. I lay on my belly, trying to breathe, listening to the rest of them congregate outside behind me. They couldn’t come in and get me and I couldn’t leave; I wondered
how the pawnbroker was going to take that.
The door swung shut, muffling the sound of onionhead grumbling and chain-clanking. After a while I raised my head and looked around.
What’s the good word?
The flash from my blind side filled my head, overwhelming everything else. I couldn’t feel the pain in my chest or the hardness of the floor under me; there was only the bright white light. As I watched, it began to pulse, brightening and then dimming, and in between, I could see the pictures, like small, sequential chunks out of a holo show. Or maybe an outdoor soap opera.
… pull free for a moment, two moments, three, and hold on tight, hold on, because this can’t last long … the overdose of memories has disoriented her and while she’s too lost to be conscious, there’s time enough to step inside here … the pawnbroker thinks I’m her on a bender, good … one fast transaction, please … yah, in trouble again, Ofrah, yah, shouldn’t have this one but I can’t go purge it, what a waste … right, you take it for now, lock it up and I’ll come back,
but don’t give it to me, no matter what, unless I tell
you …
“… the good word?”
She’s bent over me, hands on her knees, white hair fallen to one side and looking like this is the most amusement she’s had this week …
The voice in my head faded as the mirror fragment fell into place. The mirror wasn’t completely reassembled yet but there were plenty of pictures running on it, from all of us, Marceline, both Marvas, the one with all the memory and the one Sovay forced to existence. And me. Whoever I was.
I held out my hand and the pawnbroker helped me up. “Thought you’d never get back here,” she said congenially. “You do have the good word this time, don’t you?”
“Yah,” I said. “I’ve got the good word this time.” I glanced toward the door. “For all the good that’ll do me now.”
She smiled. “Well?”
‘The good word for today is forget,” I said, watching the scene from that night replay again on the mirror in my blind side. Had that really been me that night, I wondered as I followed the pawnbroker into the back room; had that been me pulling out of dormancy in Marceline/ Marva long enough to stash the one thing that would positively identify me as Brain Police? Funny, I didn’t feel like Brain Police. But I didn’t feel like Marva anymore, either. Not that I really had since I had come up six months before, but I’d thought that might have been because of all the direct memory I was missing. After all, the Brain Police officer was gone, I’d watched her go, washing out through the hole that had opened up in Sovay’s sad imitation of a mirror—
She’s coming back.
Marya?
The pawnbroker paused as she pulled the connections out of the system and looked at me. Had I spoken aloud?
All those little memories you left lying around …
Some in a pawnshop, too, I thought.
… and we’ll see if you want to be a cop again.
Ofrah reached for my eye and I put up a hand. “I think I’m changing my mind,” I said.
She let out an exasperated breath. “Not here, you’re not. You can change your mind if you want, but you’re taking this with you. Dump it on some other unsuspecting jerk if you want but I’m not keeping it and I’m not flushing it for you.”
“But I don’t want to know,” I told her.
‘You don’t? Too bad, tough stuff. Somebody’s got to know and you’re elected, not me.” She pushed me down on a well-beaten pad that might have been a mattress once. “Everybody’s got some information they’re responsible for. This is yours.” She stuck her thumb in the corner of my eye and, pushed:
At first, I thought the connections for my eye had crumpled up somehow, but after a moment, I realized that feeling of a hard painful lump in my eye socket was purely psychosomatic. The body can be as fond of symbolism as the mind.
“Is that it?” I said, sitting up.
“Didn’t take a minute, if that,” Ofrah said.
Maybe it hadn’t, but that had been time enough for more onionheads to join the mob out front; I could hear them. It sounded like hundreds now.
“Can I go out the back way?” I asked.
‘They’ll have that covered. Your best bet is the roof. They don’t like heights since it’s never just one of them that could fall.”
“What’s on the roof?”
Ofrah blinked at me. “Nothing.”
‘Then why should I go up there?”
“Are you crazy, or just stupid? To get away. You can go rooftop to rooftop until you get to a freebus depot or an air-taxi stand.”
I laughed a little. ‘You mean, I wouldn’t just happen to find somebody up there with an illegally parked air vehicle for a convenient getaway?”
The pawnbroker’s expression was unreadable. “Do you think you’re In some kind of long-playing soap opera, or is it just a dose of reverse-paranoia in your property? Maybe now you think you’re after somebody and the world Is out to make you happy?”
The pain behind my eye was receding as the information she’d given me was absorbed.
“Why didn’t you just call them,” I said. ‘Tell them it was here and they could come and get it.”
“Call who?”
‘The Brain Police.”
“I don’t mess with the Brain Police. I don’t want to end up in a rehab ward with a bib and a diaper. Whatever you did is your lookout. If I’d known what you had when you dropped it on me, you’d have never have gotten out of here by the back door or the front.”
I nodded. “Who am I, Ofrah?”
She roared with laughter. ‘You think you’re a hundred people, but that’s typical of any memory junkie.” Her laughter wound down and she frowned at me, warily. ‘You’re Marceline, okay? What’s the matter, you lose your rudder when Bateau took his fall?”
“How do you know I’m Marceline?”
“You gave me the good word,” she said, her voice cracking with annoyance. “How else would I know?”
“Maybe Marceline gave me the good word.”
She shook her head. “Jesus save me from memory junkies. Why don’t you just go get yourself a new life from some persona mill if you’re so hot to be somebody else? Why do you have to come around here bothering me and then acting like I’m doing something to you? I did you a favor that night. Return the favor now and get the hell out of my store. And don’t ever, ever come back, okay?”
The database in my mind revolved, delivered the code sequence that would have shut Ofrah off and brought up the Brain Police officer underneath. I wasn’t authorized to do that; not that I cared much for things like authorization at the moment. But it would have been a dirty trick. The cop wasn’t expecting to come up now and even a fast memory fill wouldn’t help the resulting shock and disorientation. It might even hurt, depending on what memory the cop was supposed to use on the missing time—a love affair, a vacation, an illness. False, of course, but you can’t maintain a functional person unless you cover up those long periods of dormancy and the person in question would never know the difference.
“Well?” she said impatiently.
I gave her a salute and headed for the front door.
She ran after me. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Getting out.” I pulled her hand off my arm. “And never coming back.”
‘They’ll stomp you into the sidewalk!”
“Will they?” I smiled. “Maybe they’ll feel sporting and let me have a head start so they can chase me first.”
A multitude of expressions flashed over her pale face. It was just the automated program of emergency procedures for when something went wrong during some operation but she didn’t know that, of course. “You can’t go out there.”
No, I couldn’t. I was supposed to go up to the roof and get picked up there. I glanced up at the ceiling and for a moment I wondered if maybe I wasn’t just being paranoid.
Then I opened the door and stepped out into the middle
of the onionheads.
They froze. Every last one of them froze, unable to move or shout or, by the blank looks on their faces, even think. I had to press my fist against my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.
“It’s not her,” one of them said suddenly.
Like that, they were unfrozen, echoing the words as they fell back, giving me a wide berth. Onionheads giving someone a wide berth—was anybody seeing this? I looked around. No, of course not—the sight of an onionhead mob is better than a meltdown siren for clearing an area of innocent bystanders. And not-so-innocent bystanders.
‘You’re wrong,” I said to the mob, which was still backing away from me in an ever-widening circle. “I am her. I deliberately violated marital territory. At least a dozen people saw me do it.”
“Whose?” someone shouted. “Whose territory did you violate? Show usl It wasn’t ours!”
“Not ours!” someone else called out, and then they were all yelling it at me, over and over: Not ours, not ours!
I ran out into the street, trying to look at them all, but it was hopeless. They were onionheads and one onionhead looked pretty much like another. Which was the whole idea.
Even after they dispersed, the street remained empty and quiet for a long time. Except for distant traffic noise, the only sound came from a vehicle lifting off from where it had been illegally parked on the pawnshop roof.
There was nothing to do but go home. Not to the midtown efficiency I’d been treading time in, but to Marceline’s place in the Downs. As I’d expected, she was still in residence. By remote control, of course, maintenance automatically deducted from an ever-dwindling bank account that somehow never quite dwindled to nothing. The feeling of familiarity was very slight; in a less aware state, I’d have passed it off as nothing, minor déjà vu, if that.
Had it been mostly Marceline’s mistake? Or had she just been the trigger for the unfortunate conjunction of Marva and Sovay? Or had they been the trigger for her? The database I’d gotten back from Ofrah couldn’t tell me; it wasn’t geared for explanation.
