Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  “It may reassure some people,” Val says, “Mrs Lomax.”

  “I said not to bother with my name.” Just as uninvitingly Mrs Lomax says “Have you both been good subjects today?”

  “We’re on our way to be.”

  “I’m asking have you done your exercises your friend Guv says everybody has to.”

  “A lot more than an exercise,” Phil says. “We’ve remembered getting married.”

  “I could have told you you’d done that.” Leaving no gap for an answer, Mrs Lomax says “And did you do your public duty with it?”

  “We put it on the app.”

  As Mrs Lomax emits a noise like a denial of a laugh Val says “What else have you remembered about us?”

  “I couldn’t say just now.” By way of explanation Mrs Lomax adds “I don’t trust that thing they’ve put on everybody’s phone. It’s a way of controlling our minds if we let them.”

  “But you’ve been using it,” Val says as if there can’t be any question.

  “I’ll let you guess. That’s part of what your mind’s for,” Mrs Lomax says and stalks under a trellis twined with defunct roses, up the path to her cottage.

  As her door slams the Devines hear a vehicle ahead. Is somebody being tested? Phil and Val thought they were first in the schedule, or have their minds let them down? No, the vehicle is a black van with no windows on its side, just the words FRIEND GUV. Perhaps they’re all there’s space for, but the phrase feels less friendly than imperative. The van halts outside Rita Lomax’s cottage. “Phil,” Val murmurs. “Have they come for her? What do you think they’ll do?”

  “We haven’t time to find out now,” Phil says as the driver, a stocky man wearing a black Guv For You jacket, climbs out and unlocks the back of the van. “If we’re late they may think we forgot we’re supposed to be there.”

  “He’s letting someone out,” Val says, having glanced over her shoulder. “They’re all going to her house.” Phil is anxious that neither of them should be distracted from the task ahead, but diverting Val’s attention might distract her too. He hears Rita Lomax’s front door slam again, and Val gives up looking back. They’re in sight of the village hall when she falters. A middle-aged woman is leading a man about as old towards them by one arm. “Scrubbed,” Val whispers as if her voice is shrinking from the spectacle.

  You can tell the worst victims of the catastrophe by their look. The man’s face is so loose it lacks definition, and it’s expressionless apart from the eyes, which are doggedly eager but flicker with bewilderment. The woman looks as desperate, though in a different way. “Now here’s your house again, John Francis Jenkins,” she’s saying. “You live in this house, John Francis Jenkins. You live here with me…”

  Phil and Val can only give her sympathetic smiles masking their embarrassment as she continues her single-minded monologue, which repeats his name like a refrain at the end of every line. He still hasn’t uttered a word by the time they leave the Jenkins couple behind. While the Devines are making sure they’re on time, it feels like fleeing the threat the scrubbed mind represents. To fend it off Phil tries to picture the interior of a car viewed from the driver’s seat, but the mental diagram is nothing like completed by the time they reach the village hall.

  Loose wooden tiles clack underfoot in the solitary corridor, which is deserted except for swarms of dust caught in swathes of feeble downcast sunlight. The building feels hollow, close to abandoned, and smells so much of disinfectant that it might be doing duty as another kind of institution. Redundant posters adorn the walls. Perhaps they’re meant to function as reminders, but they’re so faded that they just suggest how faint Phil’s memories have grown. A printout announcing EXAMINATIONS is insecurely taped to the nearest left-hand door. Phil is about to knock when the door is opened by a narrow man—narrow eyes and lips, thin face that looks as if it has pinched his nose long and sharp—in a black Guv For You jerkin. “Are you here for testing?” he says.

  Phil hears Val resolve not to be daunted. “We are.”

  He brings up a list on his phone. “Your names, please.”

  “Valerie Elizabeth Devine,” Val says, “and—”

  He’s already scrutinising Phil. “Just your own.”

  “Philip Anthony Devine.”

  Val touches Phil’s arm, and he thinks she’s wishing him luck until she says “Do you mind if I go first?”

  He would have liked more notice, but says “If you’d rather.”

  The man from Guv hasn’t looked away from his phone. “I have Philip booked for the first session.”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it? We’re together.” As if this is bound to persuade the official, Val says “We’re married.”

  “I have Philip booked for the first session.” With no change of tone, not that he offered much to start with, the man says “Valerie, if you would like to wait in the office.”

  Even how he stands aside for her feels officious. “What should we call you?” she says.

  “You should call me Examiner.”

  “Don’t you need reminding of your name like the rest of us are meant to?”

  “If I did I wouldn’t be doing this work. Please make yourself ready, Philip.”

  Phil gathers he’s being sent to the toilet like a child told how to behave by a teacher. The pale room smells of disinfectant and sports a lone urinal next to an empty cubicle. Who’s looking in the window? There’s none, and it’s a mirror. He’s seen them often enough, and he doesn’t need showing whether he looks as nervous as he feels. He rids himself of some of the result and marches out to face Examiner. “Ready when you are.”

  Val waves him off from the doorway of the office. “Remember I’ll be with you, Phil.”

  She’s reminding him how they’ve been practising in each other’s arrested vehicles for weeks, performing all the actions of a driver while pronouncing them aloud. For the last few days they’ve described their routine in chorus. Outside the building Examiner turns to him as if he expects an answer to a question Phil didn’t hear. “I assume you remember how to proceed.”

  Phil reads out the registration number of a car some distance away and then, to prove that’s not a fluke, the one beyond. Examiner barely nods, perhaps just to indicate his vehicle, a small black saloon crowned with a Guv Test sign. It’s not a brainy car, but the Devines never used to give lessons in those, believing pupils needed to learn how to operate manual controls before they let the car take over. Phil tries to find some comfort in the driver’s unyielding seat as Examiner straps himself in. “Whenever you’re ready, Philip.”

  Phil ensures the car won’t buck when he starts it, and is inserting the key when Examiner says “You need to describe the process, Philip.”

  “I’m putting the key in the slot.”

  “We require the precise words, Philip.”

  “I’m—” Val said it, she said it several times, which has to mean he can remember, but the attempt feels like trying to close an insubstantial grasp on a void. “I’ve put the key in the ignition,” he blurts as he manages to recapture the term, and in case this is expected adds “Examiner.”

  “Please proceed, Philip.”

  “I’m starting the engine.” He tries not to twist the key too hard for fear it will betray his anxiety, and the engine responds with a purr he could find smug. “I’m looking in the mirror,” he says, not a window, a mistake he can’t believe he made. “I’m pushing up the lever to show I’m pulling out, I mean I’m going to. I’m treading on the pedal, that’s the clutch. I’m letting this lever down, that’s taking the brake off. I’m treading on the next pedal as well, the speed one, the accelerator, only not too hard. Now I’m letting the clutch up and I’m turning the wheel…”

  Surely his companion’s silence denotes satisfaction, or should Phil keep calling him Examiner? He tries that as the car gathers speed along the road devoid of traffic. Not just the man’s chosen name is coming easier to Phil. His body has recollected how it feels to
drive, an experience so liberating he has to rein back his enthusiasm. He keeps consulting the speedometer and saying so, and describes all the manoeuvres Examiner directs him to execute—dealing with several village roundabouts and a variety of junctions, backing into a space not much larger than the car, turning it across a narrow road… He’s on the way back to the village hall, feeling nearly confident enough to ask whether he’s succeeded in his task, when he sees Rita Lomax.

  Two men whose faces make it plain their minds have been scrubbed are leading her by the arms to the Friend Guv van. “I’m not like them,” she’s protesting. “I’ll never be like them.” Curtains blink beyond neighbouring windows, but nobody risks being seen. While the men’s vacuity resembles gentleness, they lift her off her feet to plant her in the back of the van. As soon as they’ve followed her the driver locks the rear doors. Moments later the van speeds away, and nobody in it makes a sound Phil can hear. He’s unsure he wants to learn “What will they do to her?”

  “She’ll be educated.”

  The phrase is as void of expression as the faces of her escorts were, and Phil isn’t tempted to enquire further. He remarks on his actions until the car is parked outside the hall and he has returned the keys to Examiner, by which time he’s eager to ask “How did I do?”

  “You failed to specify some of the actions you took before starting the car, Philip. Your driving was inappropriate to the current traffic situation. And you allowed yourself to be distracted by the educational intervention.”

  Phil tries to find a reason to appeal. “Maybe I took more care than we have to, but I wouldn’t mark a pupil down for that.”

  “You may present yourself when I return in three months if you wish. Now I need to test Valerie before I move on.”

  Phil is desperate not to infect her with failure, but as soon as she comes out of the room she reads the truth he’s struggling to mask. “Oh, Phil, what went wrong?”

  “Forget about me,” he says, which Examiner gives a sharp look. “Go and win for the team, Val.”

  “If you’ll wait in the office, Philip,” Examiner says like an injunction of silence.

  The room is no longer an office, if it ever was. Did Examiner forget the correct word? Phil wants to find this heartening but can’t decide whether it is. Straight chairs face their twins along two sides of the room, which is as bare as the walls. Phil perches on the nearest chair and listens for a car. Is Val encountering some trouble? When at last he hears the car start and recede beyond his senses, he tries to summon up scraps of the past to share with Val when she comes back.

  He can’t distinguish any memories they haven’t added to ReMind. Searching his brain feels like groping in the dark for an item he can’t locate without knowing in advance what it is. Eventually he settles for reading on his phone the latest theories about the situation. Everybody’s memories were wiped by cosmic rays let in by climate change, or the event was a preamble to an alien invasion, or it was caused by a new breed of phone masts, or engineered by governments—not just Guv—to trick the populace into accepting global mind control… The official news says experts are close to a solution, and meanwhile Guv reminds everybody of the one they’re expected to employ: Remember to Remember. The slogan prompts Phil to wonder whether anyone recalls the moment or however long it was when their memories left them. Perhaps people are afraid to try, but could it be the key to retrieving their past? He shuts his eyes and clasps his hands in something akin to a prayer and sends his mind back.

  “Never remember forgetting.” The slogan returns to him just too late to be heeded. Reliving the moment of loss feels like plunging into a bottomless utterly black void that engulfs his mind. His eyes jerk open, and he stares at the unrewarding room. He’s waiting for, he has to wait here, wait for Val, for Valerie Elizabeth Devine while she, while she’s tested in a car. He clenches his fists as if this may help him keep hold of the knowledge and fights not to let anything else into his mind.

  He has no idea how long he stays like this before he hears loose objects clatter in the corridor. Val appears in the doorway, looking wistful. “You didn’t pass either,” Phil says and almost gasps with relief at remembering his own attempt.

  “I did, Phil. I’m just sorry you didn’t as well.”

  He follows her and her companion to another anonymous room, which is equipped with safes. The man shows one a code on his phone to unlock it and finds a metal object he hands to Val. Although it’s labelled with her details, Phil has no idea what it’s supposed to be. “You should receive your authorisation within the next few days,” the man tells Val, “and then you can recommence giving tuition. Drivers are among our urgent needs.”

  “You can look after the distributor for me, Phil.” So that’s what it’s called, and Phil feels more trusted than perhaps he ought to be. As they head for home Val says “Let’s go for a drive to celebrate. If you like you can take over once we’re out where there’ll be nobody to see.”

  He’s glad when she retrieves the component from him, since this saves him from betraying he’s forgotten where it goes. She fits it into the engine as he takes refuge in the seat next to the driver’s. He sees how delighted she is to be back in control, and doesn’t want to spoil her triumph. He thinks it’s wisest to stay silent while she drives into the countryside. They’re on a straight deserted stretch of road between meadows like emblems of rebirth when she turns to him. “Shall we swap so you can practise?” she says and blinks at him. “Did you want to ask me something, Phil?”

  He has to risk admitting his state, however shameful owning up threatens to feel. “It’s just slipped my mind for the moment. What did you tell me this morning I ought to know?”

  Val’s expression looks in danger of collapsing, but then her mouth hauls itself up by its corners. “I know somewhere you’ll remember,” she says, and as the car speeds towards the mystery of the horizon Phil can only hope her words mean all they can possibly promise.

  Samuel R. Delany

  THERE are on Inring (so GI told me) a few small areas that have been built up. My destination point was not, however, one.

  We spent the morning setting up the imported artwork (2417-Y) in the vaurine library at the far end of the station complex: in the course of it, I began to get some feel for just how primitive the little world I’d come to was.

  Have you ever spent time (a few months, say) somewhere in love with reflection? Where the streets, the walls, the windows, the transportation machines and disposal gondolas all have polished surfaces on which, right or distorted, your own image glides past you wherever you pass? And have you, from there, gone on to a place where all objects are wholly without gloss? In your first hours or days at your matte location, you find that the multiplicity and iteration of image you’d learned to live with somehow had become more than just background: they’d become an extension of you—to an extent only fully felt once you moved along alleys and avenues whose stone and mottled plastics gave you nothing back, their opacity having cut out all cursory repetition (of you or anything else) at a root, that lies, to your astonishment and even pain, not between yourself and the world, but within that model of the world within you which is all you ever know of it; and you learn something of your limitations as a woman.

  There’s a similar amputation, diminishment, and constraint (and insight) when you go from a place where all is mentally activated illusion to one with a more material surface.

  Certainly, in that Inring compound beside the landing field, there was adequate GI: ask a question and it was answered, briefly and quickly, by a burry voice projected into the back of your mind. But there were not the attendant projections of memories, associations, and suggestional supplements that attended the larger GI systems you find in extensive urban complexes and at free data nodes.

  Oh, there were quite enough mentally activatable switches. When you stood in front of a door and thought, “Aperture-7,” the door opened—though, on your third trip through, you realized that th
e smudges on the white oval, just below chin-height, were not some carefully modulated design in subtle, smeary grays, but were rather the trace of many, many women before you who’d pushed it open by hand.

  When you went into a dark room and thought “Glow-4,” the strip lights came on all across the ceiling of the octagonal chamber—though, after a moment, you realized that the single white panel in the far corner that remained dark and the other one near it that now and again flickered were not a refreshing asymmetry incorporated in the arrangement of the illumination elements: they were broken.

  And when you stood in the twenty-meter beige cradle connecting the major and minor office complexes and looked across the benches out at that huge transparent canopy curving up and arching back overhead, you knew that the rock and dust outside, scattered to the horizon under a near-empty night, were exactly what was there. (There’d been no planoforming, not even a seeding of elephant lichen on this sector of Inring.) And there were no numbers or words or colors or smells in any codic combination you could think of to change it.

  At last, with many comings and goings, 2417-Y was gotten into its tiny chamber, whose real space was perhaps three by three by three meters, but which, when you got permission from the compound librarian and entered its red doorway, put you into hundred-meter marbled halls, towering columned arcades, and sky-lit gardens of glass rods, a-flitter with smoke and light, a-clatter with harsh music, a structure almost as extensive and ornate as Dyethshome back on Velm—though conceived in a (much greater number of) vastly different style(s). But helping set it up in the vaurine projector with my new [employer.sub.1] that morning (the kind of thing an Industrial Diplomat may be called on to do if the destination point is backward enough), I’d already noticed her bearded face had about it the set of lip and slightly narrowed eye we humans display on almost any world when disappointed.