Total Recall

by Piers Anthony

  HOW WOULD YOU KNOW IF SOMEONE

  STOLE YOUR MIND?

  ReKall—the multimillion dollar manufacturer of synthetic memories. In the latter part of the 21st century, their trained mind-implanters can make the impossible possible, adding spice to their clients’ mundane existences. But construction worker Douglas Quaid’s vividly imagined Martian fantasy masks a deadly secret: his true identity. And he’s being hunted by a killer from an invented past that has suddenly become frighteningly, inexplicably real...

  “YOU NAME IT,

  YOU'LL REMEMBER IT.

  AS REAL AS ANY

  MEMORY IN YOUR HEAD.”

  Quaid didn't bother to conceal his skepticism. “Yeah, right.”

  “I'm telling you, Doug, your brain won't know the difference—or your money back. You'll even have tangible proofs. Ticket stubs. Postcards. Film—shots you took of local sights on Mars with a rented movie camera. Souvenirs. And more. You'll have all the support you need for your memories. We guarantee—”

  “What about the guy you almost lobotomized,” Quaid interrupted. “Did he get a refund?”

  McClane managed not to wince. “That's ancient history, Doug. Nowadays, traveling with Rekall is safer than getting on a rocket.”

  Other Avon Books by

  Piers Anthony

  BATTLE CIRCLE (Single Volume Trilogy) • MACROSCOPE •

  MUTE • OMNIVORE • ORN • OX • RINGS OF ICE •

  BIO OF A SPACE TYRANT SERIES

  (1) REFUGEE • (2) MERCENARY • (3) POLITICIAN •

  (4) EXECUTIVE • (5) STATESMAN •

  THE CLUSTER SERIES

  CLUSTER • CHAINING THE LADY • KIRLIAN QUEST •

  THOUSANDSTAR • VISCOUS CIRCLE •

  THE INCARNATIONS OF IMMORTALITY SERIES

  BOOK 6: FOR LOVE OF EVIL

  THE XANTH SERIES

  VALE OF THE VOLE

  HEAVEN CENT

  MAN FROM MUNDANIA

  And Coming Soon in the Xanth Series

  ISLE OF VIEW

  And Don’t Miss

  PIERS ANTHONY’S VISUAL GUIDE TO XANTH

  by Piers Anthony and Jody Lynn Nye

  (An Avon Books Trade Paperback)

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  105 Madison Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © 1989, 1990 by Carolco. All Rights Reserved.

  Published by arrangement with Carolco Pictures Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-34208

  ISBN: 0-380-70874-4

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

  Published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company, Inc.; for information address Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 105 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

  First Avon Books Printing: June 1990

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  CHAPTER 1

  Mars

  Two moons hung in the dark red sky. One was full, the other crescent. One seemed to be four times the diameter of the other, and neither was exactly round. In fact, both might better have been described as egglike: a chicken egg and a robin egg. Perhaps even potatolike, large and small.

  The big one was Phobos, named after the personification of fear: the type that possessed armies and caused their defeat. The small one was Deimos, the personification of terror. This was appropriate, for these were the companions of the ancient Roman god of war and agriculture, Mars.

  The landscape of Mars was ugly. As far as the horizon, which was closer than it would have been on Earth, there were barren rock formations, overhanging ledges, and dust. There might have been a war here, fracturing the terrain, but there was obviously no agriculture. This was no-man’s-land in the truest sense.

  Douglas Quaid stood on the jaggedly sloping surface. He wore a lightweight space suit with breathing apparatus, for the atmospheric pressure here was only a hundred and fiftieth that of Earth at ground level, and the temperature was about a hundred degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. There would have been arctic snow, if the scant air had had enough water vapor to form it. Any failure of his suit, any little tear on the edge of one of the rocks, would finish him just about as quickly as it would in deep space. About the only thing Mars had going for it that the vacuum of space didn’t was gravity: slightly better than a third of Earth’s. At least it provided some notion of what was up and what was down, and made it possible to walk.

  Quaid hardly needed low gravity to help him walk. He was a massive man, so muscular that even the space suit could not hide his physique. He seemed to exude raw power. His chiseled features within the helmet were set, reflecting his indomitable will. It was obvious that he was here by no accident. He had a mission, and not even the hell that was this planet would balk him for long.

  He scanned the horizon. As he turned, the jumbled terrain changed, until it reared up into the most phenomenal mountain known in the Solar System: Olympus Mons, ten miles above the point where he stood. In its totality, it was closer to fifteen miles, more than triple the height of Earth’s largest, Mauna Loa of Hawaii, most of whose mass was hidden beneath the Pacific Ocean. Like that one, this was volcanic, but on a scale unknown on Earth. The base of its cone was some 350 miles in diameter, with radially spreading lava flows now frozen in place. A mighty scarp over two miles high ringed its base, defining it strangely but clearly. Olympus Mons was a wonder to make even a man like Quaid pause in admiration.

  There was a sound behind him, audible more as vibration in the rock than as any wave in the trace atmosphere. Someone was approaching: a woman. Quaid turned as if expecting her, unsurprised, and gazed at her with appreciation. She was worth it: she was as well formed for her sex as he was for his, voluptuous within her space suit. Behind her visor her hair showed brown, and her eyes were great and dark. She gazed back at him, and her posture suggested her interest: if she was not in love with him, she was getting there.

  But this was hardly the place for romance! The suits would have made anything significant impossible, even if they had it in mind. This was business.

  She turned and walked toward a pyramid-shaped mountain he hadn’t looked at before. Hardly on the scale of Olympus Mons, it remained big enough to be impressive. It seemed almost artificial in its symmetry. How had such a curious feature come to be on Mars? Well, it was no bigger a mystery than the human faces sculpted in other rocks, or the many little alien artifacts scattered about, evidence that man had not been the first here.

  Quaid followed, regretting that only her helmet was translucent. Even so, it was a pleasure to watch her walk. She led him to a tortured opening in the side of the mountain, evidently a fault that had sprung during one of the eruptions. It was a cave whose walls were sheer. Just enough light filtered in through crevices to enable them to find secure footing as the passage wound into the mountain.

  They came to a ledge deep inside. They were in a roughly circular chamber of considerable size. No, it was a depression, a hole; the sky of Mars showed above. Its floor was a pit so deep that it seemed to have no bottom. Quaid’s eyes, adapting to the deep shade at this level, made out only the curving rim and the cylindrical rise of the rock above. Was this a natural cavity or a chamber hewn by man? It had aspects of both, and neither. He felt an awe of it that related only partly to its size and mystery. Somehow he knew that the significance of the place transcended anything any ordinary man or woman might compass, and that what the two of them did here was more important than anyone on Earth could guess.

  The woman walked to the right. She reached down and drew out a slender cable. It seemed to be
anchored to a large rock or projection from the wall. She backed away, hauling on the cable, and it extended. She turned, and Quaid saw that the end she held was connected to an apparatus somewhat like a fishing reel mounted on a solid belt.

  She brought this belt to him and stretched out its ends. She bent to reach around his waist, wrapping the belt until it snapped together behind him. Now the reel was in front, and he was tied to the rock.

  Quaid tested it himself, stepping back and watching the cable pay out. It was coiled within the reel, flattening there but becoming round as it reached toward the rock anchor. There was actually a considerable length of it, but it weighed only a few pounds.

  He put his two gloved hands on the cable and pulled them apart. The cable held. He increased the pull, his muscles showing. Still it held. He gestured to the woman, and she approached. He formed a loop in the cable and signaled that she should sit in it. Awkwardly, she did, holding on to the top to maintain her balance. Quaid lifted his arm and drew her readily into the air. Of course, she weighed only forty-five pounds in the Mars gravity, but it was obvious that he could have lifted her full weight almost as easily. She smiled.

  He let her down, smiling also. The cable would do.

  They grasped their clumsy suited hands, bidding each other farewell. They embraced, touching visors, unable to kiss. If there was one thing he really hated about a space suit . . . !

  Quaid let her go and stepped to the edge of the rim. He put his hands on it, then swung his legs over and down in a maneuver that would have been difficult in Earth gravity. He gripped the cable, facing toward the wall, and lowered himself into the dark chasm, hand under hand.

  A lesser man would have rappelled, passing the cable under his left thigh and over his right shoulder, using a double line that he allowed to lengthen slowly for the descent. Quaid didn’t bother; he simply handed himself down almost as if on a ladder. His feet jumped down the wall a yard at a time, keeping him away from it. Child’s play!

  He paused a few yards down, looking up. The woman leaned over the rim. The upper portion of her body showed in silhouette, her head seeming to be lighted because of the translucence of the helmet. She looked like an angel on a painted ceiling. The full moon Phobos floated above her head, completing the halo.

  She put her hand to her helmet, then flung it out, blowing him a kiss.

  Quaid felt a surge of emotion. God, she was beautiful!

  But he had business. He waved back, then resumed his downward progress. He realized that he didn’t have to use his hands; the reel could be set to pay out the cable at a steady rate. He adjusted it and let go.

  Sure enough, he continued down at the same rate as before. This freed his hands for anything else they might be needed for. He relaxed and looked around.

  Moonlight illuminated the pit, showing him details he had not been able to see from above. There were dozens of gigantic vertical pipes rising from the depths, reminding him vaguely of a monstrous calliope. Somehow he was sure they didn’t play music! But what did they do? They weren’t here as a work of Martian art!

  There was a vibration at his waist. Something was going wrong with the reel! He grabbed for it, but his clumsy gloves either had no effect or made things worse. The cable uncoiled at a terrifying rate.

  Quaid plunged into the bottomless abyss. He flailed wildly, trying to stop himself. His feet lost contact with the wall, and he spun around, seeing the wall, the pipes, and the space between them whirl dizzyingly as he fell.

  “Doug!” It was the woman, calling in alarm from above.

  He tried to answer, but was too disoriented even to do that. He kept falling, hurtling down into the void, out of control.

  “Doug!” her voice came, despairingly, faint in the distance.

  The abyss filled with bright white light. Quaid knew it was the end. Somehow he wasn’t frightened; all he could do was meet his destiny.

  CHAPTER 2

  Lori

  Quaid woke, startled. He was in bed, on Earth, quite safe. The bedroom was bathed in morning light. As he reoriented and his heartbeat returned to normal, he realized that he should have known that his experience wasn’t real. He had never been to Mars, so how could he have found himself there, without even questioning it, without knowing how he had come? He had simply popped into existence on the barren surface, and met a girl, and gone into a cave or crevice in the side of a mountain shaped like a pyramid, and down into a huge hole. Did any of that make sense on any rational basis? In the dream he had accepted it, but that was the way of dreams.

  Now his mind reviewed it, finding place after place where the scene broke down. All that light from that tiny moon? Well, maybe; how could he know, without being there? But that cable—why hadn’t he simply grabbed it and halted his fall? There was no question of his ability to do that; it was attached to him, so he could have circled it at its exit from the reel with his gloved hand, and clamped down, and held on. With his weight only a fraction of its Earth amount, and the power of his arms, it would have been like catching a huge turkey someone threw to him. A jolt, but not impossible. Only the ambience of the dream had made that fall seem inevitable.

  Yet a trifling detail bothered him most. Doug! the woman had called. That meant she knew him, though he could not draw her name from his memory. Not Mr. Quaid, not Douglas, but Doug, cried out with feeling. That feeling summoned a return feeling from him, even now that he was out of the dream, back in reality. She was important to him, more than important; she—

  Then the rest of it clicked into place. How had he been able to hear her call—there in the near-vacuum of Mars’ atmosphere? They had not spoken throughout the dream, but there at the end the verisimilitude, the semblance of truth, had broken down.

  The bright light at the conclusion—that was this light, the light of day on Earth, more intense than that of Mars. Not the brilliance of Heaven or the inferno of Hell encountered at his death, but the ordinary brightness of ordinary day when he overslept. That was a relief!

  Yet that voice still tugged at him. That woman . . .

  There was someone with him. Quaid blinked and looked.

  A beautiful creature was leaning over him. She wore a filmy nightgown that was falling open with a readiness that had to be intentional, to reveal portions of her splendid anatomy. She was not the girl of the dream; she was a stunning blond Amazon. His wife, Lori. How could he have forgotten!

  “You were dreaming,” she said sympathetically as she reached forward to wipe the sweat from his brow.

  He did not answer, distracted by the clear sight of her full breasts within the hanging nightgown. He had of course seen them many times before, but somehow he never got tired of looking. Talk of impressive architecture . . .

  “Mars again?” she inquired solicitously. Her breasts moved as her arm did, as she completed cleaning his face.

  He nodded, still upset by the experience, though he was rapidly coming to terms with the current situation. What did the woman of the dream have that Lori didn’t? Brown hair, maybe; nothing else. And Lori wasn’t exactly wearing a space suit.

  Suddenly he realized that the Mars-woman’s voice had not been an error in the dream. They had been in space suits, and space suits had intercoms or whatever. He had heard her via his helmet system! It encouraged him to make that connection; it meant that his dream wasn’t quite as farfetched as he had thought.

  Lori, mistaking his distraction, started to caress him. Her hand trailed down his neck, and she squeezed the muscle of his shoulder. She liked his muscles, and liked touching them; they were a turn-on for her, and he hardly objected to that.

  “My poor baby,” she murmured, stroking his pectoral muscle. “Poor thing, with those bad dreams, those horrible nightmares.” She brought her head down, kissing the crotch of his neck and shoulder in a way that might have been comforting, but was becoming erotic. “Is that better?”

  Her lips were moving across his chest, pausing in the region of the nipple. Her eyes ang
led up to sight on his face. He didn’t want her to stop. “Mm-hmm,” he said.

  Lori resumed progress, working her way down toward his belly. She was trying to seduce him, he knew, to take his mind off the dream, and she was good at it. He was happy to let her continue. If only the woman of Mars hadn’t been in that space suit! He could imagine it was her . . .

  “Was she there?” she asked nonchalantly.

  Oh-oh. Did she have antennae to pick up his thoughts? He felt guilty, thinking of the other woman when it was manifest that Lori was all that any man could desire. But Lori’s interest in that other was amusing in its way.

  He played dumb. “Who?”

  “You know.” Lori lifted her head, making a contemplative moue. She was playing dumb too, pretending that she couldn’t quite remember or describe that other woman. “The girl with the . . .” She cupped her hands in the universal gesture for large breasts.

  He smiled. “Oh, her.” As if Lori weren’t of that type.

  But she refused to let it go. “Well, was she?”

  He laughed. “Amazing! You’re jealous of a dream!” The thing was, this did intrigue him, perhaps because it lent some reality to a figure he knew existed only in his imagination.

  Lori punched him in the stomach and twisted away. He tried to grab her, but she struggled to get out of the bed. They had always played rough, but not too rough; he never hit her back.

  “It’s not funny, Doug,” she said, half off the bed. “Let met go!” Now gravity was helping her; if he let go, she would fall on the floor. “You’re on Mars every night now.”

  All too true! “But I’m always back by morning,” he protested weakly. He realized that there was only so far this could go without turning ugly, because he really did have a secret passion for that nonexistent woman, and Lori was catching on.

  He succeeded in pulling her back on the bed. Now Lori occupied his full attention, as surely had been her purpose. They wrestled, and she got her legs around him, squeezing him in a harmless but most interesting scissors grip. He pinned her arms to her sides and tried to kiss her. She turned her head from side to side to avoid his lips.