by Ellen Datlow
Chet Williamson
TIME LAPSE
Joe Haldeman
A father’s loss triggers an obsession that ends up violating the trust needed within families. A powerful poem by Joe Haldeman, who is primarily a science fiction writer, “Time Lapse” perfectly captures the need that becomes vampirism in a tortured relationship.
At first a pink whirl
there on the white square:
the girl too small to stay still.
After a few years, though
(less than a minute),
her feet stay in the same place.
Her pink body vibrates with undiscipline;
her hair a blond fog. She grows now
perceptibly. Watch … she’s seven,
eight, nine: one year each twelve seconds.
Always, now, in the audience,
a man clears his throat.
Always, a man.
Almost every morning
for almost eighteen years,
she came to the small white room,
put her bare feet on the cold floor,
on the pencilled H’s,
and stood with her hands palms out
while her father took four pictures:
both profiles, front, rear.
It was their secret. Something
they did for Mommy in heaven,
a record of the daughter
she never lived to see.
By the time she left (rage and something
else driving her to the arms of a woman)
he had over twenty thousand
eight-by-ten glossy prints of her
growing up, locked in white boxes.
He sought out a man with a laser
who some called an artist
(some called a poseur),
with a few quartets of pictures,
various ages: baby, child, woman.
He saw the possibilities.
He paid the price.
It took a dozen Kelly Girls
thirty working hours apiece
to turn those files of pretty pictures
into digits. The artist,
or showman,
fed the digits into his machines,
and out came a square
of white where
in more than three dimensions
a baby girl
grows into a woman
in less than four minutes.
Always a man clears his throat.
The small breasts bud
and swell in seconds. Secret
places grow blond stubble, silk;
each second a spot of blood.
Her stance changes
as hips push out
and suddenly
she puts her hands on her hips.
For the last four seconds,
four months;
a gesture of defiance.
The second time you see her
(no one watches only once),
concentrate on her expression.
The child’s ambiguous flicker
becomes uneasy smile,
trembling thirty times a second.
The eyes, a blur at first,
stare fixedly
in obedience
and then
(as the smile hardens)
the last four seconds,
four months:
a glare of rage
All unwilling,
she became the most famous
face and figure of her age.
Everywhere stares.
As if Mona Lisa, shawled,
had walked into the Seven/Eleven …
No wonder she killed her father.
The judge was sympathetic.
The jury wept for her.
They studied the evidence
from every conceivable angle:
Not guilty,
by reason of insanity.
So now she spends her days
listening quietly, staring
while earnest people talk,
trying to help her grow.
But every night she starts to scream
and has to be restrained, sedated,
before she’ll let them take her back
to rest
in her small white room.
I carried this idea around for almost seventeen years. I remember mentioning the notion of this creepily exploitative father to my brother when his daughter was born. I wrote it a few months after taking her downtown to get her first driver’s license.
Why so long a gestation period? Maybe it’s because I was thinking of it in too conventional a way. As a plain short story, it couldn’t jell, because plot and character were subordinate to the single visual image that’s at the center of the story. Written as a narrative poem, though, the story can “radiate” from the image. That’s my theory, anyhow. It was fun to write.
Joe Haldeman
DIRTY WORK
Pat Cadigan
Deadpan Allie, the pathosfinder, is a character familiar to Pat Cadigan fans, who’ve followed Allies career through several science fiction stories (a few of which appeared in OMNI) and the sf novel Mindplayers (Bantam). Because of my fondness for the character and because so many of her “cases” seemed to verge on the subject of vampirism, I asked Pat to write a Deadpan Allie story for this book.
Com 1879625-JJJDeadpanAllie
TZT-Tijuaoutlie
XQWithheld
NelsonNelson
NelsonNelsonMindplayAgency
TZT-Easct.Njyman
XQ.2717.06X0661818JL
GO
So, NN, how’s the family? Ah, sorry, I mean the agency. Of course. Yes, of course. I’m sending you this instead of coming back myself. Sorry to cut into your Bolshoi Ballet viewing time like this. I won’t be transmitting a vocal. I haven’t spoken for, I’m not sure, days. Lots of days. Something’s happened to my speech center. I’d have to put a socket in my head to vocalize and there doesn’t seem to be a surgeon handy. Anyway, I know how much you hate sockets. Then, too, I don’t speak any Romance language. But just about all the merchants sign, so I make my needs known that way. I used to sign a lot back at J. Walter Tech when I was getting my almost worthless education and learning to read Emotional Indexes—Indices?—and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it. You know, NN, I like it so much, I’m thinking about just letting my speech center go. I haven’t sustained complete damage to language. I can write, and I can read what I’ve written for as long as my short-term memory cares to hold it. It’s a capricious thing, short-term memory. Where was I? Oh. Ever hear of that kind of damage before? I don’t know if I can understand anything said to me because I haven’t heard any English or Mandarin since I got here. But then, maybe I wouldn’t know if I had. I hear them talking here in their own language and it doesn’t sound right, it doesn’t sound like language. It sounds like noise. Clang-clang, clang-clang. Being a mute may be unnecessary in this day, but it’s hardly a handicap in my profession. People talk too goddam much.
You wouldn’t see it that way. You talked me into this job. Big bonus, you said. Buy the apartment I’ve been scouting, you said. Just a job, where’s my professionalism, you said, and you said, and you said. Nothing wrong with your speech center.
But you know it—you would love me if you could see me now. Because one of the other effects of this half-assed aphasia I’ve got is my facial muscles are paralyzed. You’d never ask me again if they called me Deadpan Allie for nothing.
That’s what you asked me when you talked me into this. I can remember. I’ve got one eye out and I’m plugged into the memory boost (all the equipment’s here, I wouldn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. Like yours.) Left eye. I tried the other eye but I don’t think my left hemisphere wants to talk to you because I can’t type and remember at the same time plugged in on that side. Typing lefthanded, too. I guess I’ve got enough language on that side of the brain.
I’m meandering. You’ll have to bear with me.
I told you when you talked me into this I don’t do dirty work. People like me because I’m clean. I was clean with the fetishist, I was clean with the mindsuck composer, I was clean with your son-in-law and he pushed me. But you wanted me to do this one. Do you remember what I said or do you need a boost for it? I told you anyone who insisted on working with an empath didn’t need me.
Fine. It’s a silly prejudice. Maybe I wouldn’t want anyone to get that close to me without the decency of a machine between us. It’s my right to feel that way. Why did you send me when you knew I felt that way? Professionalism. I know that. Don’t try getting in touch with me to tell me something I already know. Fine. They asked for me. They asked for me. Fine. They asked for me. They asked for me. Fine. They asked for—
Excuse. I got a bounce on that, a real ricochet. I’m not myself today. Or maybe I am, for the first time in a long time.
I’d always thought of the entourage as a thing of the past. Not just entourage, but Entourage, as in the people who tend to accumulate around someone who happens to be Somebody. Now, I’ve seen performance artists who keep an audience on retainer so they can hone work as they go but an Entourage is a lot more than that, and a lot less, too. Caverty had a whole houseful of Entourage—highly unusual for a holo artist, I thought—and there was a hell of a lot of house. I’d already been told how it was with him—hell, I knew about the empath, didn’t I?—but that didn’t mean I could anticipate the experience of opening the front door and finding them all there.
Yes, I did open the front door myself. Noisy crowd, they didn’t hear me ring so I tried the controls and the door swung open to the entry hall. All those done-over mansions in the Midwest retained the original entry halls, complete with chandelier. Yesterday’s gentility, today’s bright idea. This one was tiled in a black-and-white compass pattern. When you came in, you could see you were standing just slightly east of true north, if that sort of thing mattered to you. The Compass hasn’t permeated everything the way the Zodiac has, but then it’s a pretty new idea. Personally, I think What’s your direction? will always be as dumb a question as What’s your sign? None of the half-dozen people standing around in the entry hall asked me either question, or anything else, including Need some help? as I unloaded my baggage from the flyer. The pilot watched from the front seat; she was union and definitely not a baggage handler, as she’d told me several times on the trip out.
It wasn’t until I had all my system components piled up on the center of the compass—excuse, Compass, I mean (they’d want it that way)—that someone broke loose from the group and came over. To examine the boxes, as it turned out. She refused to notice me until she heard the whiny hum of the flyer as it lifted off outside.
“Are these for Caverty?” she asked, putting one hand on top of the pile proprietarily.
I put my own hand atop the pile, even with hers. “Not exactly. I’m the pathosfinder.”
The silver-and-gold-weave eyebrows went up. In the middle of the day, they gave her the look of someone who hasn’t yet gone home from last night’s party. So did the rest of her outfit, which seemed to be a collection of swatches from this season’s best fabrics or something, predominantly silver and gold with the textures varying. Some people I know would have tried to buy it right off her back.
“Pathosfinder,” she said, tasting the word uncertainly. “I don’t think—” she shrugged. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember us ordering a pathosfinder.” She turned to the other people still clustered over near the foot of a curving marble-and-ebony staircase. “Anyone put in an order for a pathosfinder?”
“Caverty did,” I said before any of them could answer. “You should ask him.”
The gray eyes widened; not biogems, I noticed, but eyes that looked like eyes. It seemed kind of out of character for her. “Oh, no,” she said. “Caverty works with an empath, everybody knows that.”
“He still works with an empath,” I said, “only he’s also going to be working with me temporarily.”
The woman shrugged again. “I’m sorry, I don’t think you understand how things are. If Caverty ordered some equipment from you, I’m sure he means to use it himself somehow, but I know that he didn’t order you to come with it. You can leave the equipment here and I’ll see that he gets it and sends your company a receipt but—” She was starting to show me the egress when the chandelier said, in a cheery, female voice, “You’re a lousy doorman, Priscilla, you should stick to partying. I’m coming right down.”
For several moments, all Priscilla did was gape up at the chandelier with her mouth open. I stole a look at the little group by the stairs; the Emotional Indices ranged from apprehension to mild indignation to somewhat malicious satisfaction. I felt myself going over a mental speed bump. The milieu here was going to be a bitch to get around, and it would no doubt be reproduced in some way in Caverty’s mind. Terrific, I thought. As if the job weren’t already hard enough, I had a complicated social structure to clamber around on. NN, you old bastard.
Then another woman came trotting down the staircase. “Ah, here we are. The pathosfinder. Alexandra Haas, right? Deadpan Allie?” Somehow her hitting the foot of the stairs shooed everyone, including Priscilla, away; they flowed off into a room to the left, or west, according to the Compass.
“Sorry about that,” said the woman. She was all business, tailored, no frills, brown all over, including her eyes, which were some kind of artificial gem the color of oak. “Sometimes the Entourage gets a little out of hand around here. I’m Harmony. At least, Caverty hopes I am.” She laughed. “I’m kind of the general factotum, grand scheduler, traffic director, hall monitor. I try to keep things harmonious. I’m the one who contacted your agency about you. I’ve done quite a lot of research on pathosfinders; I’m really happy you were able to take the job.”
I nodded. “Thanks. I need a place to stash my equipment and then I’d like to meet Caverty.”
“I’ve had a room prepared for you upstairs, away from the general foofooraw and infighting—”
“Somewhere close to Caverty, I hope?” I said, as she tried to herd me toward the stairs. “I like to be as available and accessible to a client as possible.”
Harmony’s face clouded slightly. “Oh. Well. I, uh, I’d really have to check that out with Caverty. He has his own section of the house where no one else stays, out of respect to his need for a private working environment. You’re experienced with creative people, so I guess you know how that is.”
“I understand completely. However, clients sometimes feel that they have to see me right away, in the middle of the night or whatever. I need to be easily available.”
Harmony smiled with indulgence. “There’s nowhere you can go in this house where you would not be available to Caverty on a moment’s notice or less. Everyone here understands that. It is his house, after all.”
I opened my mouth, thought quickly, and shut it again. Trying to explain to her that I was not just another body added to the general Entourage population wasn’t going to penetrate; I could tell. She was sure she knew the kind of people who stayed in Caverty’s house, she was one of them. “My system—” I said, gesturing at the stack of components still sitting in the center of the Compass.
“I’ve already taken care of that. It’ll be moved up to your room for you.”
“I’ll just wait here, then, until I see everything moved.”
The professional mask almost slipped. She caught herself before she could sigh and spoke into her brown bracelet instead. “Entry hall right now.” Four people with straps and handtrucks emerged from a door half hidden by the start of the curve of the staircase. They weren’t exactly in uniform but there was a sameness to them and I knew immediately from their posture that they weren’t Entourage. They were employees.
“We don’t do that much heavy lifting and moving large objects around here,” Harmony said as the hired help labored along behind us with my system. “The people who come and go here tend to travel
light, although we haven’t actually had anyone leave for a long time. Leave permanently, I mean. Which is good. For all of Caverty’s—oh, I don’t know what you’d call it, wildness of heart or freedom of spirit, I guess—for all that, he really needs a stable living situation. And things have really stabilized here. It’s good. I think you’ll see that while you’re here.”
Even though I was getting short of breath on those damned stairs I had to do breathing exercises to maintain the deadpan. She was making my skin crawl.
Whoa. Have to stop sometimes. That boost. Too vivid sometimes. I don’t know why I’m reliving this for you anyway, NN. I mean, can you appreciate it? What do I think I’m doing, making art or something? I’m no artist, not in that sense. But I’m the best pathosfinder in the hemisphere. Right? You made me the best pathosfinder in the hemisphere, remember? You did it. And you know, that was nothing compared to what some people can do to you.
I know what you’re saying right now. I went into it with a bad attitude. Isn’t that what you’re saying? I know it is, even though—chuckle, chuckle—I doubt I could actually understand you if I were there right now and you were saying it to me. Clang-clang, clang-clang.
Um, bad attitude. Yes, you’d say I’d gone into it with a bad attitude. Now what kind of a thing is that for someone trading on the name Deadpan Allie, and my reputation and all. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s knowing when you’re in a bad situation. I wanted to pack up and go right then. Leaving aside the skin crawling and that stuff (interesting mental image, there, pack up and go and leave aside the skin crawling; there I go meandering again, bear with me, it happens, did I mention that? I guess I did but it’s too late to go back and see if I really did because I can’t read that part any more). So. Even if my skin hadn’t been crawling like a lizard, like a million little tiny lizards, I should have seen it was already too hard. Pathosfinding you need privacy for. Go down and root around in somebody’s soul like that; the client gets embarrassed in front of me sometimes. Facing someone else can be impossible. Caverty should have known that, he was a professional, he’d worked with a pathosfinder years before, before he’d discovered his empath.
