by Pat Cadigan
Unlucky combination, I decided. Three people who should never have gotten together. And perhaps most of the blame was Marceline’s. She’d been allowed to collect too many memories in the course of feeding her habit, and when she had made mind-to-mind contact with Marva, it had filled in too many blanks—those that had not been filled in when Marva and Sovay had gotten too close in the course of a love affair they had erroneously assumed was just them leading their own lives.
Or maybe it was really all Sovay’s fault for being the way he was: They all became me. Yah. Sure did. When he had realized he was Brain Police, too—had that happened when he’d discovered me dormant behind the Marva facade, or had he discovered me because he realized what he was?
If that had been me he’d found. My head began to ache; strictly psychosomatic. I went to the one window in the apartment, over the futon, and opened it. It looked out at the side of the building next to it, but if I leaned out far enough, I could see a slice of the street, vehicles and pedestrians passing by. I had the mad thought of running downstairs and stopping people randomly. Do you know you’re an operative for the Brain Police? Do you? And you? And you?
I put on the dataline, flipped through the channels, News reports, sitcoms, talk shows, documentaries, commercials—I paused at one for something called The Nicer Person. They’d reworked the old melty animation from Some Very Nice People.
Ah, yes. We were all Some Very Nice People, or The Nicer Person, or Power People. Maybe that had been how it had started, a decoy operation set up as a persona mill. And everyone who came in got indoctrinated—or maybe contaminated was a better word. And all of them mindplaying after they left, thrillseeking, buying neuroses, selling their dreams and buying others, and the contamination was spreading like some weird mental variation on a social disease. One day the sun came up and everybody had joined the Brain Police.
And maybe a few people found out once in a while, they would wake up and say, Wait a minute here, what’s this doing in my life? And the Brain Police would pay them off, give them a contract, and promise that they’d never notice the missing time. We’ll only use you
when we need you; then we’ll deactivate you and leave you alone, and you never even have to know if you don’t want to.
Quite a generous contract.
Don’t worry about whether your life has a purpose. It does … now.
I shut off the screen.
How’d you get so genius, figuring stuff out like you got a sherlock circuit.
Paid for it Coney. It was very expensive information.
It would be even more expensive if the Brain Police caught up with me now. They couldn’t come right out and do something to me—I’d give the whole thing away. Instead, they’d sent Rowan to put me on a fool’s mission: find the Sovays. Yah. Thinking Sovay would trigger the reemergence of that upstanding Brain Police officer Mersine, who would go trotting home with the database intact unscratched, and uncomprehended, so that the secret could be reburied with no muss, no fuss, and life would go on. After all, the show must go on, especially when it’s all theatre anyway.
Was it like this everywhere? I wondered. Or had things just gotten out of hand—achieved escape velocity—here in this one city?
I already knew the answer to that one. How long would it take? Another century, or just another couple of decades? Would anyone be spared? And if not, what would happen when we reached full … saturation? Would we all just come up simultaneously, spontaneously, exploding in a surge of unity?
Or would we just explode?
And had this always been the point that mindplay had been leading us toward, from the very beginning? Whether we’d known it or not?
I turned to look at my own system, sitting next to the futon.
The cliff was still there. Sometimes it looked like the open panorama window of a sky-island, but mostly it was a cliff overlooking a blank nothing of a landscape.
Standing next to me, Marva wanted to know why. Both of her.
Because one individual can make a difference. And that’s not any of us.
Marva said it wasn’t Marceline, either.
It wasn’t once, but it is how, I told her. The fragmentation of being a memory junkie—that’s what made it possible for me to merge with the remains of the Brain Police in her. Without us, she’s cut off. She’ll be the only person in town who isn’t on the team. And they’ll never know.
Marva wanted to know why it mattered, then.
Because it does. Because there should be at least one other person in the world. Someone to Escort the Brain Police out of this world and leave it to people again.
But would she, Marva asked skeptically.
She’ll try. And now, let’s go. All of us. I turned to Sovay, standing a little ways behind us, faint and not very well developed, but there nonetheless; he had come with his part of the database. You, too.
He didn’t want to, but he wasn’t strong enough to resist When we went, the database would go with us. The Brain Police didn’t really need it for their own information, but it would rob them of an easy entrée to Marceline. Which would increase her chances of survival as an individual.
Don’t take any wooden memories.
She was too dormant to feel me but with any luck, she might be more cautious about what she did with herself when she came up.
The mirror shattered again when I threw it over, the pieces flying around as if in a high wind. But I’d figured it would take the combined weight of all of us to drag them down.
You know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake up and the last year of your life is gone. Naturally, the first thing I do is panic.
This, they say, is the lot of the memory junkie: bad cess, bad living, tough stuff. I am not exactly in a position where I can complain to karma-rama. But who ever sets out to be a memory junkie, anyway? Ten thousand people buy memories every day but you, you ducky luck-off, you get the thunderbolt in the head. Little lucky number ten thousand, this is your life and this is your life, and this is your life, and this, too, could be your life, if you could afford to feed your habit that well. Most can’t, and don’t kid yourself, you won’t be able to, either. Wouldn’t be so bad if you could just get out and make a few memories by original recipe, but it’s never your own memories that junk you up. That’s the one sure mark all memory junkies share: None of us are particularly memorable citizens. If we were, maybe I’d know what happened to me.
Could be I got a nasty sclerosis grinding away from whatever I been doing during the missing time, in which case I got to hie my bad old self to a clinic for a retread. That’s about as much fun as getting trepanned, with the added attraction of having the meds bitch to a fair glow for doing shit I can’t even remember I did, and getting bitchier because I can’t sound sorry enough.
Or it could be I been done out by the last pawnshop I went to. Happens—you get an inexperienced operator who doesn’t know the difference between clean and wipe, or you get a very experienced operator who’s booked on the next flight out and doesn’t have to give a shit about what the carriage trade will say. You’d think I’d have a lawsuit coming for that, and if I’d been some safe-sex day-wage priv from uptown with a receipt from a Commerce Canyon salon, there’d be no question. But someone from the Downs suing a Downs pawnshop—double zero. There wasn’t an eagle in the immediate world who’d even take a call about it. That’s technically discrimination, but find somebody who gives a fuck.
Could also be that I made someone mad at me, which means I’m lucky I got off this easy, and I can just get on with my life as it is now and hope it doesn’t happen again.
Or I coulda been rousted by the Brain Police. In which case, I should probably just stand in the middle of the Downs with a “Suck Me” sign on my forehead and get it over with.
All this goes through my poor old tampered-with mind in double triphammer-time, so even in my panic, I know I can neg sclerosis. The general rule is, if you know the word “sclerosis,” you ain’t got
it. So there’s a little relief, no bitchy what’d-you-expect-you-bad-girl lectures to sit through while I’m getting a fresh coat of myelin.
A pawnshop fuck-over is still a definite maybe. I’ll have to get back to that one.
Making someone mad is also a maybe, but there’s usually a few tokens of their disaffection to go along with the memory loss—shaved head, broken nose, and two black eyes. My face doesn’t feel like anybody did the fandango on it, but there’s something wrong with the panorama of the cracks in my ceiling. I climb out of bed and check in the bathroom mirror.
Still got all my hair. Looks like a wild animal had a restless night in it and I forgot—ha, and ha—to take the combs out. My nose has been broken, but not in the last twenty-four hours. It’s that missing eye that tips me off that everything isn’t like it should be. I squint on the trouble-shooter, checking for any misalignment in the connection that would mean something had been yanked against my will. I wish they were the fancy kind with the auto-log feature so I’d know when I’d had them out last, but for what I can pay, I’m lucky I get the whole visible spectrum. They’re not even biogems, just government-surplus brown. I’m so glad I didn’t make anybody mad, I could almost face the Brain Police, except that’s the worst way to make everybody mad, even if it’s not my fault. But if the Brain Police have been at me, there should be a copy of the warrant on the dataline screen, where I’d see it first thing. I stump over to it, but it’s blanko on the lousy little built-in. Except for the blinker in the corner. Message waiting. I punch for it.
Q-up and calm down—a million strung~out hypeheads can’t be wrong. Carefully, now: you’re not a memory junkie anymore. Before you run out the door, consider two things:
The future is already set, only the past can be changed, and If it was worth forgetting, it’s not worth remembering.
Your fairy godmother
I read it over twice. The kind of life I live, I’m liable to wake up to anything, and I accept that. Like I say, I don’t have a leg for a complaint with karma-rama. But apparently I have a fairy godmother and I can almost remember her … certain associations are still there, like ghosts, even if the memory itself is gone. That happens, no memory ever stands completely alone. All I know is, I can trust her to give me not only the truth, but right information as well, and if she tells me something’s not worth remembering, I’d do worse than to let whatever stay where it is.
She’s even right about me not being a memory junkie anymore. I got no craving at the very moment and with a six-month hole, I ought to be tearing my own ratty hair out. This doesn’t mean it’s not gonna jump up on me never again. Unless one of us really did change the past …
I touch the patch over my eye. Now, I’d rather have two eyes but one feels … I don’t know, right. I sure hope it’s because it was my idea and not, say, Bateau’s. One eye and a memory loss is something he’d do to teach somebody a lesson. But I don’t feel punished and Bateau never lets anybody go without feeling punished; it’s part of the fun for him.
I start to punch in a phone number and something makes me stop, some kind of bad feeling I can’t quite get a hold of to look at. Yah, but shit, what am I supposed to do, watch six months of archives and try to figure out my place in the universe from that? I’m nothing and nobody, and with my memory gone, I could be looking at the story of my life and not know it.
It almost makes me sick, but I get the number punched in. The screen lights up on the seventh ring.
“You look like a bad year in hell,” I say. “This got anything to do with something I misplaced?”
Anwar’s got this look like I’m the last person on earth he ever expected to hear from. “I don’t know,” he says, finally. His voice sounds like his throat’s full of slow-hardening glue. “What did you lose?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Can I come over and look for it at your place?”
“Sure,” he says. “Sure, come right now.”
I break the connection. Just as I’m getting up, some glitch throws the message from my fairy godmother back up on the screen instead of blanking it.
The future is set, only the past can be changed, and if it’s worth forgetting, it’s not worth remembering.
Okay, so I’ll remember it anyway, and if I don’t like it, I’ll just forget it again. Ofrah’ll always do business with me.
And I really want to see Anwar. I could have seen him just yesterday, but as far as I know right now it’s been six months. If that’s closed and done with because the past got changed and I forgot, then that’s how it is, but I got a right to know.
I mean, it’s my life, isn’t it?
Special thanks to:
Sheila Williams, Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper, Ellen Datlow, Cheryl Cordes, Jim Cappio, Dwight Brown, Lawrence Person, Glen Cox and Jill Engel, David Garnett and Frances Jobling, Mike Resnick, Malcolm Edwards, Merrilee Heifetz, Beth Meacham, Lisa Tallarico-Robertson, Jeannie Hund, and the Delphi Wednesday Night Irregulars.
An additional round of thank-yous to Jim Brunet, Allen Varney, Laurie Mann, Carl Fink, Larry ‘Wombat’ Hammer, Katherine Lawrence, Lenny Bailes, Tappan King, Connie Hirsch, Rick Wilber, and Nathan/EVPA, for their suggestions and commentary about word-processors.
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Also By Pat Cadigan
Novels
Mindplayers
Synners
Tea From An Empty Cup
Fools
Collections
Patterns
Dirty Work
Dedication
This one is for
George and Marguerite Fenner,
my parents-in-law,
with love and thanks
Pat Cadigan (1953 – )
Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, NY, and grew up in Fitchburg, MA. Attending the University of Massachusetts on a scholarship, she eventually transferred to the University of Kansas where she received her degree. Since embarking on her career as a fiction writer in 1987, her Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated short stories have appeared in such magazines as Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine as well as numerous anthologies. Her first collection, Patterns, was honoured the Locus Award in 1990, and she has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1992 and 1995 for her novels Synners and Fools. Pat Cadigan moved to the UK in 1996 and now lives in London.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Pat Cadigan 1992
All rights reserved.
The right of Pat Cadigan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 12026 6
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Pat Cadigan, Fools
