by Ellen Datlow
Caverty?
If I want to. That’s what it is, you see. I can clear them all out if I want to. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to! I! DON’T! WANT! TO!
It was a mental blast that blew me into the center of the room. I flew through the ghosts, tasting a thousand different emotions in a second, the admiration, the desire to be close, the envy, the sorrow, the loneliness, the gladness, the fatigue of routine followed by the sense of security, the euphoria, the craving that is addiction and most of all the appeasement that came both from having received something and having had something taken, the sweet need of being increased, the even sweeter need of being diminished.
They meant to pin me but ghosts can’t really do anything, not even mental ones. I spread them out easily, clearing an area around myself big enough to accommodate myself and Caverty’s ego.
I know you don’t want to, Caverty, I said, calling to him through the wraiths wrapping themselves around his face, but if you’re willing to join me here, you can and it won’t be me forcing you to do anything. Understand?
Understand, they all said, Caverty and all of them together. Don’t want to, though!
Then that’s it, I said. We don’t have anything more to do.
Arlen The Bear floated over me with his big arms held out. Are you sure about that? he asked with Caverty’s mental voice.
I pulled all the way into myself so they—he, Caverty, I reminded myself—so he wouldn’t feel my anger for the time and effort wasted when he’d never intended to try working with me. For several mental moments, I was aware only of composing myself. When I came out of it to face Caverty again, he was much closer than before, almost intrusive. My alarm nearly showed; after eight years without any mindplaying, he shouldn’t have had that much skill at creeping up on me. Time to go, I thought, threw myself out of the visualization into the relaxation exercise. Caverty followed me and the colors caught him like quicksand and held him.
Even so, the taste of his consciousness seemed slow to fade out of my own mind, as though he were still chasing me anyway. My problem, I thought; sometimes the most unlikely people can get a hook into you and it’s hell to get out. When I got home, I’d have myself dry-cleaned. And at NN’s expense.
I disconnected from the system the moment it told me I could do so without trauma, groped for my eyes and couldn’t contain the sigh of relief at finding them still in the container. I popped them back in and just sat for several minutes in Caverty’s comfortable chair, rocking back and forth and breathing my way down to a calm state.
We were alone in the room. I hadn’t expected us to be. I’d expected to come out and find them all there, waiting, wanting to—I forced the thought away before my heartrate could increase again.
Caverty lay on his chaise, completely relaxed. I had a strong urge to just leave him like that, limp and blind and harmless, and sneak out of the house and run all the way back to the agency. We hadn’t even touched on ideas or holos or creativity or anything vaguely related. I hadn’t even found any memories—just that damned Entourage, as present in his brain as it was outside of it.
Except for Mad-a-LAYNE, I realized. I hadn’t felt her in there anywhere. As though she didn’t exist.
I shook away my questions. Ask later; get out now. Now. But it was another minute before I could bring myself to touch Caverty even just to disconnect him from the system and put his eyes back in.
“Jesus,” he said, sitting up slowly. He rubbed his forehead in a dazed way. “I didn’t realize that—I didn’t realize.” He looked up at me pleadingly. “I don’t know what to say to you.”
I capped his connections and slipped them into a drawer in the system. “You don’t have to say anything. I’ll be going now.”
“We aren’t going to try again?”
“I don’t think we can. Not until you do something about the general population in there.”
He touched his forehead again. “They are all in there, aren’t they?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And I think if you hooked in with each of them, you’d find me in every single one.”
“That’s right.”
“Madeleine?”
I nodded. “Prolonged empathy.”
A slow smile spread across his face. “Sometimes I was afraid it hadn’t worked. But Madeleine was right.” His eyes narrowed. “And that’s why you don’t want to try again. Because I like it.”
“Not the only reason, but that’s part of it.”
“And you don’t like it.”
I shrugged. “If you like it, it doesn’t make much difference about me.” Without saying anything, he got up, stretched, and walked over to the pile of unused holo equipment. I paused for a moment, watching him, and then capped the set of connections I’d used. “I’d appreciate it if Harmony or someone would call me a flyer.” No response. He didn’t even look at me. “As for your fee, my agency may give you a partial refund. Minus expenses and time spent in the system.” Still no response. I couldn’t even get a clear reading of his Emotional Index. Maybe he was thinking about what it meant to give up the art for the audience. I didn’t know and I really didn’t want to. I moved around to the other side of the system to run a three-second diagnostic before disassembling the components and turned my back to him. It was the dumbest thing I ever did.
Coming to from a state of unconsciousness when you’re hooked into the system is like going from death to a dream. For a while, you don’t even know you’re conscious and when you finally do realize it, the vertigo is furious. You fall in every direction at once, through every idea and thought you have. It seems like you’ll fall forever and then you grab onto something, some concept, some belief, some identity thing, and you hold as tight as you can for a long time. And then, a mental century later, you feel steady enough to look around and see where you are and why and who else is there, if anyone.
I was back in the banquet room again, except this one was my banquet room, not the one in Caverty’s mind, and there was no one there but me. At the moment. I could sense him nearby, though, waiting for me to tell him to come in.
I don’t work that way, Caverty, I said and strode to the door. It was a big wooden antique with a shiny carved handle. I’m coming out to you.
I yanked at the handle. It wouldn’t budge. Smoothing out the panic ripples, I stepped back from the door and gathered my strength into my hands, making them big, even bigger than Arlen The Bear’s, and took hold of the handle again, intending to crush it. It swelled to fit my palms and even as I pressed on it, my hands were shrinking.
I jumped back, looking around for another way out.
Forget it, said the chandelier. Harmony. You don’t want to leave. You don’t know what it’s like to feel that way, to not want to leave. If you did, you’d feel differently.
I didn’t want to deal with that absurdity, nor did I want them to sense how trapped I felt. All right, I said, standoff. I don’t get out and you don’t get in.
Wrong.
Softer than a whisper; quieter than a brush against you in passing. She stood in the center of the empty room, very small. Delicate, even; a delicate vessel filled with so many feelings. She came toward me. I tried to back away but the floor shifted under me, keeping me in the same spot but still letting her approach.
They’ll know how you feel and you’ll know how they feel, she said gently. Cracks appeared in the wall behind her. Without a word needing to be spoken. Her arms reached for me.
Somehow, I managed to pull back a little. The cracks in the wall grew larger; faces showed through. Not ghosts this time.
We’re all here now. We thought it could work made contact with Caverty after you hooked in together, but we were wrong. Your concentration would allow only limited contact. We were all ghosts and I couldn’t even appear. You didn’t even recognize us as being present. So I made contact with Caverty and then we hooked you in with him. Much better. It’s working now.
She did not quite have me, though
; she couldn’t quite reach through the layers of deadpan to my core.
Every relationship is something like this, she said, trying to pull me closer. People feed on each other whether it’s lover to lover, friend to friend, audience to artist. We consume, we are consumed. You couldn’t live otherwise. We’ve just refined it, made it more efficient—more satisfying. You’ll see. Dinner here is always an Event. Especially when we finally get something new in. A nice change, to have variety in the menu. It’s been a long time since the last one.
I struggled back a little more, gaining ground even though the cracks in the walls were opening wider. The only problem is I’m not willing.
And as soon as I said it, I knew that was the dumbest thing I’d ever done. Admitting to it, admitting to anything at all gave her the lever she needed to pry off the last of Deadpan, leaving naked Allie.
The walls, as they say, came tumbling down while Mad-a-LAYNE lowered me to the floor. They swelled around her, blocking out the light with their faces.
Unwillingness, she said, face close to mine, is a feeling. We know how you feel.
And they did, every single one of them, while she directed traffic. Caverty. Harmony. Arlen The Bear, the chubby man, the domestic drama guy. The Nordic blonde in the kimono. The umbrella woman, the chicken people. Even Priscilla. Even Priscilla. Over and over again. Over and over and over.
Maybe it went on for days. Maybe only hours. When Mad-a-LAYNE disconnected me, I was asleep. In Caverty’s studio. They were all gone. Sleeping it off themselves. I staggered around and when my vision cleared, I figured out how to pack my system up.
They should have caught me going down the stairs with it. Priscilla the cop, you know. I got to the bottom of the stairs and that Compass and I thought I was caught because someone came out from behind the staircase. I didn’t recognize the face but I remembered the style of dress and the manner. Employee. That’s when I found out I couldn’t talk, right then, because I was going to beg for mercy and nothing came out. Like the record skipped the groove. You remember records. He didn’t say anything, either. He just took one look at me and went over to the panel near the front door and pressed a button. I was too fried to run for it so I just waited for them all to come swooping down on me but the house stayed quiet. A little later—I don’t know how little, my sense of time was still gone—I heard the flyer land outside. Completely automated, no pilot. I looked through the navigator program and found a picture of a place I liked. Not telling you what it looked like. I just punched for it and off I went and here I am and that’s about all.
Yah, so maybe they meant to let me go? Could be. Maybe they figured I’d be too disoriented to turn up anywhere. I guess maybe they didn’t want to keep me because they’d stabilized, you see. They were all so proud of having stabilized, they didn’t need a new item on the menu permanently. Just for a change of pace.
Yah, so. I could let you find me and you could get them, right. I mean, this is big-time mindcrime here.
So you go ahead and go get them.
But you’re not getting me.
It’s peaceful now. I won’t ever have to hook in with anyone again or talk, ever. I like that idea. It appeals to my basic deadpan nature, see. I don’t want to know how anyone feels anymore. And I don’t want anyone knowing how I feel, either. Caverty’s Entourage, they’re not the only ones who feed off each other’s emotions. Everybody does it, even just a little bit. I’m not taking any chances anymore. Nobody else is going to feed off me. They all know how I feel and that’s enough. That’s enough.
Clang-clang. Clang-clang.
Ever since the first story about Deadpan Allie, “The Pathosfinder,” appeared in 1981, there’s been the potential for a story involving vampirism. “Dirty Work” was, in fact, the second story I set out to write, but after two pages, I put it away. It was too soon. Five years later, Ellen Datlow began putting together this nontraditional vampirism anthology and we both agreed Allie was a natural.
Ellen got upset with me for what happened to Allie. “How could you do that to her, you creep?” she said. I thought, gosh, maybe I should have given Allie more of a break—maybe I’ve been entirely too merciless.
And then I thought, Naaah.
Pat Cadigan
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES
LEONID NIKOLAYEVICH ANDREYEV
Thanks to Maxim Gorky’s introduction to Russian literary society, Andreyev became one of the best-selling authors in Russia during the first few years of the twentieth century. He disliked the Bolshevik regime as much as he had disliked the czarist regime, as reflected in his plays He Who Gets Slapped. and Life of Man, the latter earning him first an attack by the Russian church for blasphemy and later by the communist party for “petit bourgeois negativism.” His work was banned for decades after that in the U.S.S.R. In his later years, and after three suicide attempts, he left Russia for Finland, where he died in 1919.
SCOTT BAKER
Scott Baker lives in Southern California. In 1982 he won the Prix Apollo for Best SF Novel published that year in France (Symbiote’s Crown, Berkley, 1978). In 1984 he was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for his infamous novelette The Lurking Duck, and in 1985 he won the World Fantasy Award for his short story, “Still Life With Scorpion.”
In 1986 and 1987, Tor published his novels Firedance and Drink the Fire From the Flames, the first and second books in the Ashlu Cycle, a work about Babylonian shamanism.
EDWARD BRYANT
Edward Bryant was born in New York and reared on a cattle ranch in southern Wyoming. He now lives in Denver. Early in his career he wrote science fiction, winning two Nebula Awards, but he’s now better known for his horror fiction. His horror books include The Baku and Fetish.
PAT CADIGAN
Pat Cadigan was born in New York, grew up in Massachusetts, spent most of her adult life in the Kansas City area, and now lives in London, in the UK. She has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice for her novels, Synners and Fools, as well as the Locus Award for best short story—“Angel”—and best collection—Patterns. Although her novel-length work to date is exclusively science fiction, a good percentage of her shorter fiction has been fantasy and horror. Now that she lives in London, she expects to write a lot more in those genres as she wanders through some of the older and more shadowy places, particularly in North London where she lives with her son Rob and her husband, the Original Chris Fowler (not to be confused with the author of Roofworld).
SUSAN CASPER
Susan Casper is a native Philadelphian who attended Temple University and recently retired from the bureaucracy of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to write full time. Her fiction has appeared in Playboy, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Amazing, as well as most other science fiction and fantasy magazines and several anthologies, including the prestigious In the Fields of Fire (Jack Dann and Jeanne Van Buren Dann, editors). She has collaborated with Gardner Dozois in editing an anthology entitled Ripper!
JACK DANN
Jack Dann is a multiple-award winning author who has written or edited over seventy books, including the international bestseller The Memory Cathedral; The Man Who Melted; The Silent, a novel of the Civil War; The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean; and a number of short story collections: Timetipping, Jubilee, Visitations, The Fiction Factory, and Promised Land, a companion volume to The Rebel. Dann lives in Australia on a farm overlooking the sea and “commutes” back and forth to Los Angeles and New York.
GARDNER DOZOIS
Gardner Dozois was the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine for almost twenty years, and is still the editor of the annual anthology series The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He has won fifteen Hugo Awards and thirty-one Locus Awards for his editing, and two Nebula Awards and a Sidewise Award for his own writing. He is the author or editor of over a hundred books.
S.N. DYER
S.N. Dyer is the author, under various names, of a novel, sixty short st
ories, and a few cartoons; also, the loser of several writing awards. The author has been cursed by ownership of three inattentive, ungrateful rescued cats.
HARLAN ELLISON®
Harlan Ellison® has been called “one of the great living American short story writers” by the Washington Post. He has won the Hugo Award 8 ½ times, the Nebula Award three times, the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America twice, the Georges Méliès fantasy film award twice, and was awarded the Silver Pen for Journalism by P.E.N. He won the first Bram Stoker Award of the Horror Writers of America for Best Collection for his thirty-five-year retrospective, The Essential Ellison. Recent collections include Angry Candy and Slippage. He is a recipient of the Life Achievement Award of World Fantasy Convention and the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. He has also been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.
JOE HALDEMAN
Joe Haldeman has written about two dozen novels and appears in about twenty languages. His novels The Forever War and Forever Peace won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. He’s won five Nebulas and five Hugos all together, and three times the Rhysling Award for science fiction poetry.
He also paints and plays guitar, both as a devoted amateur, and bicycles whenever the weather allows. He and his wife Gay bicycled across America, 3,050 miles, from Florida to California a few years back. When he can, he seeks out dark skies for his 12" telescope.
He teaches writing as a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology every fall semester.
His most recent novels are Camouflage, which won the Nebula and Tip-tree Awards, Old Twentieth, The Accidental Time Machine, and Marsbound.
HARVEY JACOBS
Harvey Jacobs’ latest novel is Side Effects, a pharmaceutical fable. His last novel, American Goliath, based on the true story of the Cardiff Giant scam, was a World Fantasy Award finalist. Earlier works include the novels Beautiful Soup, The Juror, and Summer On A Mountain Of Spices, and the short story collections My Rose & My Glove and The Egg of the Glak. His stories have appeared in many anthologies (including several edited by Ellen Datlow) and many magazines in the U. S. and abroad including New Worlds, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, Esquire, and Playboy, He lives and works in Sag Harbor, New York.
