Much though he’d have loved to agree with anything Dottie suggested, Frank shook his head. “I really don’t drink that kind of stuff… Not that I have a problem with it…” He felt compelled to add. “I just like to take care of myself.”
“Oh yes.” Frank could feel—literally fucking feel—Dottie’s gaze as it travelled over him. “I can see. You work out?”
“Well. A bit. There’s not much else to do in time off when you’re crew.”
She made a wry smile. “So. About that drink. Maybe some more coffee? I’m guessing decaf, right?”
Dottie, he noticed, settled for a small ouzo, although the Warren thing restricted himself to orange juice, a considerable amount of which she then had to mop up from around his wizened neck. There was a strange and unminderly tenderness about her gestures that was almost touching. Lovely though she was, Frank found it hard to watch.
“You do realise,” she said, balling up paper napkins, “that most of the stories you told us about Knossos are pure myth?”
Frank spluttered into his coffee. But Dottie was smiling at him in a mischievous way, and her mouth had gone slightly crooked. Then the knowing smile became a chuckle, and he had to join in. After all, so much of what they’d just been religiously inspecting—the pillars, the frescos, the bull’s horns—had been erected by Arthur Evans a couple of hundred years before in a misguided attempt to recreate how he thought Knossos should have been. But Evans got most of it wrong. He was even wrong about the actual name. Frank never normally bothered to spoil his tales of myths and Minotaurs with anything resembling the truth, but, as Warren drooled and he and Dottie chatted, vague memories of the enthusiasm which had once driven him to study ancient history returned.
Dottie wasn’t just impossibly beautiful. She was impossibly smart. She even knew about Wunderlich, whose theory that the whole of Knossos was in fact a vast mausoleum was a particular favourite of his. By the time they needed to return to the tour bus to view the famous statue of the bare breasted woman holding those snakes—now also known to be a modern fake—Frank was already the close to something resembling love. Or at least, serious attachment. There was something about her. Something, especially, about that golden gaze. There was both a playful darkness and a serene innocence somewhere in there which he just couldn’t fathom. It was like looking down at two coins flashing up at you from some cool, deep river. Dottie wasn’t just clever and beautiful. She was unique.
“Well…” He stood up, as dizzy as if he’s the one who’s been knocking back the ouzo. “Those treasures won’t get looked at on their own.”
“No. Of course.” A poem of golden flesh and shifting sundress, she, too, arose. Then she leaned to help the Warren-thing, and for all his disgust at what she was doing, Frank couldn’t help but admire the way the tips of her breasts shifted against her dress. “I’m really looking forward to this afternoon. I mean…” After a little effort, Warren was also standing, or at least leaning against her. His mouth lolled. His toupee had gone topsy-turvy again, and the skin revealed beneath looked like a grey, half-deflated balloon. “We both are.” Dottie smiled that lovely lopsided grin again. “Me and my husband Warren.”
Minders were always an odd sort, even if they did make up the majority of Frank’s shipboard conquests. But Dottie was different. Dottie was something else. Dottie was alive in ways that those poor sods who simply got paid for doing what they did never were. But married? You sometimes encountered couples, it was true, who’d crossed the so-called bereavement barrier together. Then there were the gold-diggers; pneumatic blondes bearing not particularly enigmatic smiles as they pushed around some relic in a gold-plated wheelchair. But nowadays your typical oil billionaire simply accepted the inevitable, died, and got himself resurrected. Then he just carried on pretty much as before. That was the whole point.
Frank Onions lay down in his accommodation tube that night with a prickly sense of dislocation. Just exactly where was he going with his life—living down in these crew decks, deep, deep below the Glorious Nomad’s waterline where the only space you could call your own was so small you could barely move? It might not seem so up along the parks and shopping malls, but down here there was never any doubt that you were at sea. Heavy smells of oil and bilge competed with the pervasively human auras of spoiled food, old socks and vomit. It was funny, really, although not in any particularly ha-had way, how all the progress of modern technology should have come to this; a hive-like construct where you shut yourself in like you were a pupae preparing to hatch. No wonder he wasted his time in the crew gym working his body into some approximation of tiredness, or occupied what little was left hunting the next easy fuck. No wonder none of the ship’s many attractions held the slightest interest for him. No wonder he couldn’t sleep.
All he could think of was Dottie. Dottie standing. Dottie seated. Dottie smiling her lopsided smile. The sway of her breasts against that prismatic fabric. Then Frank thought, even though he desperately didn’t want to, of what Dottie might be doing right now with that zombie husband of hers. Mere sex between them didn’t seem very likely, but mopping up food and levering withered limbs in and out of stairlifts was merely the tip of the iceberg of the tasks minders were required to perform. The thing about being dead was that blood, nerve cells and tissue, even when newly cloned, were susceptible to fresh corruption, and thus needed constant renewal and replacement. To earn their salaries, minders didn’t just give up a few years of their lives. After being pumped full of immune-suppressants, they were expected to donate their body fluids and tissues to their hosts on a regular basis. Many even sprouted the goitre-like growths of a new replacement organs.
Frank tossed. Frank turned. Frank saw throbbing tubes, half flesh, half rubber, emerging from unimaginable orifices. Then he felt the rush of the sea beneath the Glorious Nomad’s great hull as she ploughed on across the Mediterranean. And he saw Dottie rising shining and complete from its waters like some new maritime goddess.
As the Glorious Nomad zigzagged across the Aegean from the medieval citadel of Rhodes to the holy island of Patmas, Frank Onions kept seeing Dottie Hastings even when she wasn’t there. A glint of her hair amid the trinkets in the backstreets of Skyros. A flash of her shadowed thighs across the golden dunes of Evvoia. He felt like a cat on heat, like an angel on drugs. He felt like he was back in the old times which had never existed.
Warren Hastings wasn’t hard to find out about when Frank ransacked the Glorious Nomad’s records. He’d made his first fortune out of those little hoops you used to get hung at the top of shower curtains. His second came from owning the copyright on part of the DNA chain of some industrial biochemical. Warren Hastings was seriously, seriously rich. The sort of rich you got to be not by managing some virtual pop band or inventing a cure for melancholy, but by doing stuff so ordinary no one really knew or cared what it was about. For all the money a top-of-the-range Ultra-Deluxe Red Emperor Suite must be costing him, he and Dottie should by rights have been plying the oceans on their own cruiser, living on a private island, or floating in a spacepod. Perhaps they enjoyed the company of lesser immortals. Or perhaps they simply liked slumming it.
The more Frank thought about it, the more the questions kept piling up in his head. And the biggest question of all was Dottie herself. It was an odd shock, despite all the times he’d now seen her and Warren exhibiting every sign of tenderness, to discover that she’d married him ten years earlier before he’d even died in a small, private ceremony in New Bali. There she was, dressed in virginal white beneath a floral arch, with Warren standing beside her and looking in a whole lot better shape than he did now. The records were confused and contradictory about exactly when he’d chosen to die, but he must have started seriously decaying before he finally made the leap, whilst Dottie herself seemed to have just emerged, beautiful and smiling and entirely unchanged, into the more discreet and upmarket corners of the society pages, and into what you could no longer describe as Warren’s life.
&nbs
p; It all still felt like a mystery, but for once Frank was grateful for the contract clause which insisted he spend a designated number of hours in the company of paying passengers. He mingled at the cocktail hour of the Waikiki Bar, and feigned an interest in a whole variety of passenger activities about which he couldn’t have given the minutest fuck until he worked out what kind of social routine the Hastings were following, and then began to follow something similar himself.
Onward to the island of Chios with its Byzantine monastery and fine mosaics, and the autumn waves were growing choppier as Frank Onions ingratiated himself with what he supposed you might call the Hastings crowd. Sitting amid the spittle rain of their conversations as Warren gazed devotedly in Dottie’s direction with his insect sunglasses perched on his ruined Michael Jackson nose, Frank could only wonder again at the continuing surprise of her beauty, and then about why on earth she’d consented to become what she was now. Most minders, in Frank’s experience, were almost as dead as the zombies they were paid to look after. They’d put their lives on hold for the duration. Apart from the money, they hated everything they were required to do. Even in the heights of passion, you always felt as if their bodies belong to someone else.
But Dottie didn’t seem to hate her life, Frank decided once again as he watched her wipe the drool from her husband’s chin with all her usual tenderness and Warren mooed equally tenderly back. The thought that they made the perfect couple even trickled across his mind. But he still didn’t buy it. There was something else about Dottie as she turned to gaze through the panoramic glass at the wide blue Mediterranean in proud and lovely profile. It was like some kind of despair. If her golden eyes hadn’t been fixed so steadily on the horizon, he might almost have thought she was crying.
He finally got his chance with her after a day excursion on the tiny island of Delos. The Hastings had opted to join this particular tour party, although they hung back as Frank delivered his usual spiel about the Ionians and their phallic monuments as if Dottie was trying to avoid him. Then there was a kafuffle involving her and Warren just as the launch arrived for the return to the Glorious Nomad. A lover’s tiff, Frank hoped, but it turned out there had been some kind of malfunction which required immediate action as soon as they got back on board ship.
Dottie still had on the same white top she’d worn all day when she finally emerged on her own at the Waikiki Bar later that evening, but it now bore what looked to be—but probably wasn’t—a small food stain on the left breast. Her hair was no longer its usual marvel is spun gold, either, and the left corner of her mouth bore a small downward crease. She looked tired and worried. Everyone else, though—all these dead real estate agents and software consultants—barely noticed as she sat down. They didn’t even bother to ask if Warren was okay. The dead regarded organ failure in much the same way that flat tyres were thought of by the petrol motorists of old; a bit of a nuisance, but nothing to get too excited about just as long as you made sure you’d packed a spare. The spluttering talk about annuity rates continued uninterrupted, and the tension lines deepened around Dottie’s eyes as her fingers wove and unwove in her lap. Even when she stood up and pushed her way out through the corral of matchstick limbs toward the deck, Frank was the only person to notice.
He followed her out. It was a dark, fine night and the stars seemed to float around her like fireflies. A flick of hair brushed Frank’s face as he leaned close by her on ship’s rail.
“Is Warren alright?”
“I’m looking after him. Of course he’s alright.”
“What about you?”
“Me? I’m fine. It wasn’t me who—”
“I didn’t mean that, Dottie. I meant—”
“I know what you meant.” She shrugged and sighed. “People, when they see us both, they can see Frank’s devoted to me…”
“But they wonder about you?”
“I suppose so.” She shrugged again. “I was just this girl who wanted a better life. I was good at sports—a good swimmer—and I had these dreams that I’d go to the Olympics and win a medal. But by the time I’d grown up, Olympic competitors no longer used their own limbs or had anything resembling normal human blood flowing in their veins. So I eventually found out that the best way to get steady work was on ships like this. I did high dives. I watched pools in a lifevest. I taught the dead and the living how to swim—how to paddle about without drowning, anyway. You know what it’s like, Frank. It’s not such a terrible life just as long as you can put up with the tiny sleeping tubes, and all those drinks served with paper umbrellas.”
“What ships were you on?”
“Oh…” She gazed down into the racing water. “I was working on the Able May for most of this time.”
“Wasn’t that the one where half the crew got killed in the reactor fire?”
“That was her sister ship. And then one day, Warren comes along. He looked much better then. They always say the technologies are going to improve, but death hasn’t been particularly kind to him.”
“You mean, you really did find him attractive?”
“Not exactly, no. I was more—” She stopped. A small device on her wrist had started beeping. “I have to go to him. Have you seen to a suite like ours Frank? Do you want to come down with me?”
“Wow! This is nice…”
Gold. Glass. Velvet. Everything either glittery hard or falling-through soft. Frank had seen it all before, but this wasn’t the time to say. The only jarring note was a large white structure squatting and humming beside the cushion-festooned bed.
“…I just need to check…”
It looked as if Dottie was inspecting the contents of some giant, walk-in fridge as she opened one of its chrome and enamel doors and leaned inside. The waft of air had that same tang; a chill sense of spoiling meat. There was even that same bland aquarium light, along with glimpses of what might have been trays of beef and cartons of coloured juice, although by far the biggest item on the racks was Warren himself. He lay prone and naked in such a way that Frank had fine view of his scrawny grey feet, his hairless blue-mottled legs, his scarred and pitted belly, the winter-withered fruit of his balls and prick. He looked not so much dead as sucked dry. Far more alarming, though, was the empty space on the rack beside him, which was plainly designed to accommodate another body.
“He’s fine,” Dottie murmured with that weird tenderness is in her voice again. She touched one or two things, drips and feeds by the look of them. There were flashes and bleeps. Then came a sort of glooping sound which, even though he couldn’t see exactly what was causing it, forced Frank to look away. He heard the door smack shut.
“He’ll be right as rain by morning.”
“You don’t get in there with him, do you?”
“I’m his wife.”
“But… Jesus, Dottie. You’re lovely.” Now or never time; he moved toward her. “You can’t waste you life like this… Not when you can…” It seemed for a moment that this oh-so direct ploy was actually working. She didn’t step back from him, and the look in her golden eyes was far from unwelcoming. Then, as he reached out to her cheek, she gave a small shriek and cowered across the deep-pile, rubbing at where his fingers hadn’t even touched. It was if she’s been stung by a bee.
“I’m sorry, Dottie. I didn’t mean—”
“No, no. It isn’t you Frank. It’s me. I like you. I want you. I more than like you. But… Have you heard of imprinting?”
“We’re all—”
“I mean the word literally. Imprinting is what happens to the brain of a chick when it first sees its mother after it hatches. It’s an instinct—it’s built in—and it’s been known about for centuries. It’s the same to some or other degree even with the more advanced species. That’s how you can get a ducking to follow around the first thing it sees, even if it happens to be a pair of galoshes.”
Frank nodded. He thought he understood what she meant, although he hadn’t the faintest idea where this was leading.
“We humans have the same instinct, although it’s not quite as strong or simple. At least, not unless something’s done to enhance it.”
“What are you saying? Humans can be imprinted and attached to other humans? That can’t be legal.”
“When does whether something’s legal matter these days? There’s always somewhere in the world where you can do whatever you want, and Warren already knew he was dying when I met him. And he was charming. And he was impossibly rich. He said could offer me the kind of life I’d never achieve otherwise no matter how long I lived or how hard I worked. And he was right. All of this…” She gestured at the suite. “Is nothing, Frank. It’s ordinary. This ship’s a prison with themed restaurants and a virtual golf range. With Warren, I realised I had my chance to escape places like this. It didn’t seem so difficult back then, the deal I made…”
“You mean, you agreed to be imprinted by him?”
She nodded. There really did look to be tears in her eyes. “It was a small device he had made. You could say it was a kind of wedding gift. It looked like a silver insect. It was actually rather beautiful. He laid it here on my neck, and it crawled…” She touched her ear. “In here. It hurt a little, but not so very much. And he made me stare at him as it bored in to find the right sector of my brain.” She shrugged. “It was that simple.”
“My God! Dottie…” Again, but this time more impulsively, he moved toward her. Once more, she stumbled back.
“No. I can’t!” She wailed. “Don’t you see? This is what imprinting means.” The stain on her left breast was rising and falling. “I’d love to escape this thing and be with you, Frank. But I’m trapped. At the time, it seemed like a small enough price to pay. And it’s true that I’ve been to incredible places, experienced the most amazing things. Living on a cruise ship like this, looking at the ruins of the ancient world because we can’t bear to look at the mess we’ve made of this one… It’s meaningless. There’s a different kind of life out there, Frank, in the high mountains, or up in the skies, or deep beneath the oceans. For those few who can afford it, anyway. And Warren could. We could. It’s like some curse in a fairy tale. I’m like that king, the one who wanted a world of made of gold, and then found out that he was killing everything that was important to him in the process. I wish I could be with you, Frank, but Warren will carry on and on as he is and I can’t give myself to anyone else, or even bear to have them touch me. I just wish there was some escape. I wish I could unwrite what happened, but I’m forever tied.” Her hand reached towards him. Even in tears, she looked impossibly lovely. Then her whole body seemed to freeze. It was as if a glass wall lay between them. “I sometimes wish we were dead.”
Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 31
