Slant

by Greg Bear

  “Just what I mean,” Twist says. “I’ve never had a consistent strategy. Have you?”

  “I never thought I needed one. Men come to us.”

  “Yeah, but for what?” Suddenly Twist seems to collapse. She barely puts her cup on the edge of the table before she flops like a rag doll. Tears stream down her face. “Alice! My God, Alice.”

  Alice kneels beside her and holds her hand. Twist is shaking. “I am so sick of myself, it scares me. I can’t feel anything without it turning brown and dark, like shit. I’m just hanging on. All I can think about is how miserable I am.”

  “I’m getting you in for therapy,” Alice vows. “I need to pull some strings, and the hell with whatever other arrangements the David has made. You’re in bad shape, girl.”

  Twist pulls herself together enough to say, “It was supposed to be different. Pretty young women standing by the wall, waiting for the nice young men to come by—”

  “Bullshit,” Alice says.

  “So many women make themselves pretty now, so much competition, take off the pudge and straighten the hair and fix up the skin, so many smooth, clear-skinned women—”

  Alice isn’t sure where this is going, but she doesn’t like it. “There are some things the geniuses can’t touch.”

  “What? Our souls? They do that, too.” Twist sits up, takes a deep breath, then leans forward and puts her head neatly on the table, right on her ear, without using her hands as pillows. She looks so stretched and distant that Alice feels a sudden prick of fear. Am I falling into a hole as deep as this?

  “I don’t like my soul,” Twist says. “It’s brown like shit.”

  Alice’s home monitor announces a touch. Alice watches Twist for a moment. Twist sits up and lifts her cup. She slugs it back quickly, stares levelly at Alice, and says, “Maybe it’s a job.”

  “I doubt it,” Alice says, but tells the home monitor, “Okay, put it over my pad.” She does not like taking calls in the open when she has visitors.

  The touch is still fresh and the caller has waited patiently. Alice unfolds the pad and stares with a curling shiver of disorientation at a face she never expected to see again.

  “Is this Alice Grale?” the woman asks. “The vid star?” It’s the officer she passed outside the elevator on her call-in, the tall, strong-looking woman with shining mahogany skin.

  “Yes,” Alice says.

  “We met last night under unusual circumstances. My name is—”

  Another touch, this one an emergency, makes Alice lose the woman’s name. A key sign in the upper corner of Alice’s pad tells her the second touch is from Lisa at the temp agency.

  “—and I hoped you’d be able to answer some questions for Seattle PD.”

  Alice does not react quickly, so much coming in so fast. “Could you hold on a moment, please? I—need to—I’ll be right back with you.”

  She puts the officer on hold and answers Lisa’ s touch. Lisa looks frantic. Within the pad’s frame, her face is bobbing all around, and her skin is livid behind overly red lips and hastily applied eye enhancements. Lisa should never get mad. She looks so old.

  But Lisa is not just mad, she’s scared.

  “Jesus, Alice, what happened? Our payment for last night has been canceled and I’ve had touches from Citizen Oversight. Your date is dead! What in the hell happened?”

  “Nothing,” Alice says, trying to stay calm. She moves farther from the kitchen to avoid having Twist hear. “I did my job. It was not pleasant, Lisa, I’ll tell you that—”

  The information sinks in and Alice stalls. Then she murmurs, “Dead?”

  “PD released the details two hours ago. The whole apt is tombed and rumors are wild.”

  “Who was he, Lisa?”

  “His name was Terence Crest.”

  The name means nothing to Alice.

  “Did he do anything to you?” Lisa asks, fishing for information she can use perhaps in her own defense, the agency’s defense. “I mean, to make you—”

  “He was alive, he was alive when I left him,” Alice says, her voice a little screechy. “You arranged it, and he was very weird, and I hope God you never put me through anything like that again!”

  “He was a very rich and important man, Alice, and they’re not ruling out murder. The whole agency is on my back.”

  “I don’t even know what he looked like. His face was this awful blank—”

  “We can only go so far in this, Alice.”

  “My God, Lisa,” Alice says, “you set it up and you persuaded me! I did not kill the man!”

  Lisa gives her a look of utter professional disdain. “We’ll just have to see how it works out, honey,” Lisa says tonelessly. “You should keep your head down and get an advocate. I can’t assign an agency advocate—not directly. If the fibes get word you’re involved… And take a look at your account, honey. His estate pulled the payment. We have a big zero for our pains.”

  The touch ends abruptly.

  Alice stands in the living room, staring at the gently glowing blank screen, too stunned to think. The PD officer is still on hold. Alice puts the pad down on the living room table, turns as if to go talk to Twist, see how she’s doing, then stops. She picks up the pad again.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she says to the officer. “I had a call-in last night and we met on my way out. What more can I say?”

  “Did you know your client?”

  “I don’t do call-ins… as a rule. My agency vetted him. He didn’t want me to know who he was.”

  “You’ve never done this sort of thing for him, you’ve never met him before?”

  “Never. As I said, I don’t do call-ins.”

  “His name was Terence Crest. A billionaire, quite well known around town. Did you know him before your call-in?”

  “I already said no,” Alice says. “He asked for me in particular. I don’t know anything about him. And I don’t know your name. I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Seattle PD Fourth Rank Mary Choy.”

  “Yes, well, if I’m a suspect, I need an advocate before I say any more.”

  “We do know that Crest kept a vid record. You’re probably in the record.”

  “Oh, of course,” Alice says angrily, dismayed, her face flushing.

  “And so are we, I suspect—the PD, the medical. We’re getting permission from Citizen Oversight and his estate advocates to play back the vid and establish the sequence of events. I understand your position, Alice, but if you’re innocent, you’ll be cleared.”

  “Maybe you live on a different planet, Mary Choy. I’m not even going to get paid for last night if his advocates have their way.”

  “I understand.”

  The hell you do. You look very together, Mary Choy.

  “I’d like to meet with you,” the officer says, “with your advocate present—just to tie up this loose end. Actually, I’m not very concerned with this case, if it’s a suicide, as it appears to be. But it’s going to be high-profile, especially in the financial news, and I’d like to keep my department on firm footing. And Alice… I hope your agency doesn’t cut you loose.”

  Alice swallows. A tough bitch, trying to act friendly. Still, it’s best to leave one’s options open. “Give me your sig and I’ll get back to you after I think things over.”

  “Of course.”

  Mary Choy smiles at her. Alice cuts the touch.

  Twist comes in from the kitchen, scrubbing her face with a washrag. Alice stands utterly still on the metabolic carpet, shoulders drooped, head low, face locked in intense thought.

  “Not good news?” Twist asks.

  Alice jerks, straightens, trying to get back into being the together gal in this gloomy duet. It’s no good. She shakes her head.

  “Yeah, well I know what we need,” Twist says. “A really tro spin party. We should be able to chase up one of those, right?”

  Alice nods. She needs to think long and steady, bring up her defenses against this threat. She had
it so good for so long that this is almost just; this is real life in action, balancing the books. “When it pains, it roars,” she says. “But I told you I’d get you in for therapy.”

  “I’m better. Coffee seems to help. Isn’t that strange?” Twist, whatever her weirdnesses, has always been very empathic. She understands others and their situations; she just doesn’t have a clear view of her own self. “We’ll get out tonight, all right? I’ll find the party.”

  Alice gives her a too-much look and Twist lifts her small, thin fingers. “A sly spin romp, not a heavy fapper,” she says. “Dignity, toujours dignity. Did you know Gene Kelly was a nineties person?”

  “He died in the nineties,” Alice says. “He was a forties and fifties person.”

  Twist accepts this with a thin smile. “You ever make it with him, character sim?”

  “Not authorized,” Alice says.

  “Me either. I’d like to stay with you here for a while, though, if that’s all right, if you’re not in a rough about it.”

  “You’re welcome to. I need the company.”

  “You’re a true friend;” Twist says. “That’s rare in our crowd, you know?” She gathers up her nightbag and scattered clothes and goes into the bathroom to dress.

  Alice drops her smile as soon as Twist leaves the room. She touches her stomach through the robe, rubs it lightly. Sperm will remain active for several days.

  She carries the last living parts of a dead man.

  4

  The consulting room is pale green and yellow, meant to be soothing but Jonathan finds it like the bottom of a shallow sea, watery and neutral. The doctor is polite, a small woman with bobbed white hair and a direct, no-frills manner; this at least he finds reassuring.

  “Did you know your wife had substantial therapy for amygdalic disorders when she was twenty?” the doctor asks. She holds up her pad for him to view this selection from the medical file.

  “No,” Jonathan says. “She told me…” Actually, she never told him anything about such matters. She left him with the impression she was a natural; not a high natural, perhaps, but never therapied. But twenty—that means she must have been therapied after they met. “She didn’t tell me,” he concludes.

  “Yes, well, that’s common enough. We’re still ashamed of such things, which is stupid.” The doctor looks up and faces him squarely. “What do you know about therapy? Have you ever had it yourself, any kind?”

  “No,” Jonathan says. “Not that I haven’t thought about it. I mean, I don’t have any prejudices against it. Against those who have had it. I don’t know why she wouldn’t have told me.”

  He closes his mouth firmly, hoping he doesn’t seem nervous. Of course he is nervous; Chloe is in a room down the hall, under a special plug, not quite asleep but being kept in an artificial calm.

  “We just received her files. What she asked for, at the time, was therapy for impulsive-destructive behavior, what we call counter-will. She thought she was engaging in behavior against the better judgment of her conscious persona.”

  Jonathan stares at the doctor.

  The doctor ports her pad into a wall display and brings up a few charts. The jagged lines and color bars mean little to him. “She’s had a major re-tracking, something we put in the category of therapeutic fallback. All of her therapy has failed her, and apparently the failure triggered a collapse of conscious function. In old terms, not too far wrong, a nervous breakdown.”

  “What’s this “allostatic scarring’?” Jonathan points to the caption below a jagged line on the largest graph.

  “Neurons and axons can wear out like any other part of the body. It’s one of the most frequent reasons for therapy. Judging from your wife’s condition, I’d say she suffered axon path habituation and wear caused by cyclic impulses and behaviors her social persona did not feel comfortable with.”

  Jonathan nods, but he only partly understands.

  “Her original therapists rerouted the habitual pathway impulses for several important personality functions, to avoid the areas damaged by allostatic load. That requires a maintenance implant, therapeutic monitors, usually microscopic, to make sure the impulses don’t revert. It’s a routine procedure, and the monitors can last years—usually do. In your wife’s case, she had an upgrade performed four years ago. But somehow, the newer monitors have shut down. Something triggered stress… And her mind reverted to the damaged neural pathways, bringing back the old thymic imbalances. All at once. It must have been horribly painful.” Jonathan’s eyes fill with tears. “We were making love,” he says quietly.

  The doctor seems to find this unexceptionable.

  “Chloe was acting very sexy. She used… language… I thought she was really turned on. But she was just breaking down, wasn’t she?”

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor says. “I don’t think it’s possible to know. Maybe even she doesn’t. You had no idea what was happening, did you?”

  “How could I?” Jonathan says. “Was it my fault?”

  “I don’t see how it could be,” the doctor says. “Unless you had been badgering her to engage in behavior she found offensive.”

  Jonathan tries to absorb this for a few seconds. His face flushes. “She has been… stiff, less interested in me. I try to change that. Make myself… better. For her. Suggestions. But I did not,” he swallows, “badger her.”

  The doctor is silent, offering no reassurances. Jonathan realizes he has given the doctor a possible explanation for what triggered his wife’s fallback. What if he is misremembering his own behavior to protect a guilty conscience?

  The doctor looks down and shrugs. “I can’t judge a domestic situation,” she says, “but you’re not describing behavior that doesn’t take place between millions of couples every day, with no adverse consequences… None like these, I mean.” A troubled expression briefly flits over her calm features. “I sense you might blame yourself whatever the final diagnosis is, and that may not be appropriate for your own health. I can’t tell you this officially, but this hospital has been seeing a lot of fallback cases recently, covering the spectrum of therapies… Often involving failure of implanted monitors.”

  “Fallbacks… You mean, the implants are defective?”

  “We don’t know. I offer this just to keep you from brooding yourself into your own breakdown. If her implant had functioned properly, this would probably have never happened.”

  Jonathan feels sudden acid in his throat, and his skin heats. “Something wrong with a product, or procedure?” This he can deal with professionally. This he can encompass.

  “We really don’t know. Please don’t jump to conclusions.” ‘

  Jonathan realizes the doctor is uncomfortable, and well she should be. She is caught between defending her profession and perhaps her own actions, and acknowledging what might be a major problem. He feels at once personal relief and a kind of awed anger.

  “Where can I find out more about this?” Jonathan asks.

  “We’re consulting her original therapist,” the doctor says. “That might be a good place to begin.”

  MULTIWAY BRANCHES

  BROAD ACCESS (TEXT AND CHAT, with LIVE VID AND. AVATARS): THE SPUN SUGAR SHOW(Trish Hing, Today’s MOD:)

  ONE OF MANY (GENERIC AVATAR): Can anyone join this tangle?

  MOD (VID FACE OF FELICIA HANG OVER TIGER BODY): Sure, why not—where’re you from?

  ONE OF MANY: That doesn’t matter. I’m logged blank and I prefer it that way—somebody will try to sell me something. I just wanted to

  MOD: Sure, go ahead—have your say. It’s a free country.

  ONE OF MANY: Well, actually, I don’t think it is. I tell you what my grind is—they just want me to sit down and suck up what they do and pay money for it. They are trying to discourage all the new fibe posts and public channels, and they have so many ways of making all the little people pay, while limiting access to

  MOD: What do you mean, Mr. Blank?

  ONE OF MANY: I can’t get anybody
to come to my fibe hive and hang. I have all this work I’ve done, I think it’s very good stuff and so do my friends, and I can’t get any of the reviews to post it. I say the reviews are paid for by the Big Sharks, and they discourage posts by us little minnows. How can an artist make a living when nobody swims by?

  MOD: So you think you’re being discriminated against by the big companies which control all we see and hear.

  ONE OF MANY: Sure. And it may even go beyond them—the government.

  MOD: The government is against you?

  ONE OF MANY: Sure. Everybody knows they regulate the fibes and satlinks and they’re in up to their checksums with the money power. They say it’s for the common good. I sure as hell know better.

  MOD: So you want to make a living from posting your work on the fibes or satlinks, but nobody squirts you any money to download or even take a taste, hmm?

  ONE OF MANY: Not enough. And I think they’re actively discouraging repeats for little guys like me.

  MOD: They being the big intratainment industry folks or the government.

  ONE OF MANY: Yeah. They’re trying to conserve flow for the big industry posts and links.

  MOD: Well, why don’t you post your address here and let’s see if we can’t up your hit rate.

  ONE OF MANY: Nice try, but I know the kind of audience this place gets. Everybody would try to get me to sample their fibe hive.

  MOD: Isn’t that the way it works?

  ONE OF MANY: I can’t make a living if I’m spending my money at other hives. Fellow has to eat.

  MOD: We all have to eat, my friend. Maybe you don’t understand the process. (Now please, while we’re exclusive with this fellow, don’t build up your anger and carbonize him when you get on… I can just feel your pressure building!)

  ONE OF MANY: I just know it doesn’t work.

  MOD: So, let me try to psi your case here. You work at home—you’ve been out of everything but the dole for quite a few years. You haven’t advanced your education in some time—you’re afraid of going in to therapy your attitudes and get a good working joy-buzz—and maybe your boy/girlfriend isn’t as pretty as the folks on the Yox. You’d really like to live on the Yox and you know you deserve it. But you can’t afford more than say ten hours a week of second-grade Yox, not even the top new stuff, and the rest of the time you’re alone with your unhappy situation, and you’ve been hoping you could finance an upgrade by selling your own work.