The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  PATIENT NAME: Wendy Wanders

  In front of me the pages blurred. Shuddering I gripped the edge of my chair. Nausea exploded inside me, a fiery pressure building inside my head until I bowed to crack my forehead against the table edge, again and again, stammering my name until with a shout a technician ran to me and slapped an ampule to my neck, I couldn’t bear the sight of my own name: Dr. Harrow usually filled in the charts for me and provided the sedatives, as she had a special lab all in gray for the empath who couldn’t bear colors and wore black goggles outside; as she had the neural bath ready for another whose amnesia after a session left her unable to talk or stand or control her bowels. The technician stood above me until the drug took effect. I breathed deeply and stared at the wall, then reported on my unsuccessful session with the poet.

  * * *

  —

  That evening I walked to the riverside. A trio of security sculls silently plied the river. At my feet water striders gracelessly mimicked them. I caught a handful of the insects and dropped them on the crumbling macadam at the water’s edge, watched them jerk and twitch with crippled stepladder legs as they fought the hard skin of gravel and sand. Then I turned and wandered along the river walk, past rotting oak benches and the ruins of glass buildings, watching the sun sink through argent thunderheads.

  A single remaining restaurant ziggurat towered above the walk. Wooden benches gave way to airy filigrees of iron, and at one of these tables I saw someone from the Human Engineering Laboratory.

  “Anna or Andrew?” I called. By the time I was close enough for her to hear I knew it was Anna this time, peacock feathers and long blue macaw quills studding the soft raised nodes on her shaven temples.

  “Wendy.” She gestured dreamily at a confectionery chair. “Sit.”

  I settled beside her, tweaking a cobalt plume, and wished I’d worn the fiery cock-of-the-rock quills I’d bought last spring. Anna was stunning, always: eyes brilliant with octine, small breasts tight against her tuxedo shirt. She was the only one of the other empties I spoke much with, although she beat me at faro and Andrew had once broken my tooth in an amphetamine rage. A saucer scattered with broken candycane straws sat before her. Beside it a fluted parfait glass held several unbroken pipettes. I did one and settled back grinning.

  “You had that woman today,” Anna hissed into my ear. Her rasping voice made me shiver with delight. “The poet. I think I’m furious.”

  Smiling, I shrugged. “Luck of the draw.”

  “How was she?” She blinked and I watched golden dust powder the air between us. “Was she good, Wendy?” She stroked my thigh and I giggled.

  “Great. She was great.” I lowered my eyes and squinted until the table disappeared into the steel rim of an autobus seat.

  “Let me see.” Her whisper the sigh of air brakes. “Wendy—”

  The rush was too good to stop. I let her pull me forward until my forehead grazed hers and I felt the cold sting of electrolytic fluid where she strung the wire. I tasted brass: then bile and summer air and exhaust—

  Too fast. I jerked my head up, choking as I inadvertently yanked the connector from Anna. She stared at me with huge blank eyes.

  “Ch-c-c-” she gasped, spittle flying into the parfait glass. I swore and pushed the straws away, popped the wire and held her face close to mine.

  “Ahhh—” Anna nodded suddenly. Her eyes focused and she drew back. “Wendy. Good stuff.” She licked her lips, tongue a little loose from the hit so that she drooled. I grimaced.

  “More, Wendy…”

  “Not now.” I grabbed two more straws and cracked one. “I have a follow-up with her tomorrow morning. I have to go.”

  She nodded. I flicked the wire into her lap along with the vial of fluid and a napkin. “Wipe your mouth, Anna. I’ll tell Harrow I saw you so she won’t worry.”

  “Good-bye, Wendy.” She snapped a pocket open and the stuff disappeared. A server arrived as I left, its crooked wheels grating against the broken concrete as it listed toward the table. I glimpsed myself reflected in its blank black face, and hurried from the patio as behind me Anna ordered more straws.

  * * *

  —

  I recall nothing before Dr. Harrow. The drugs they gave me—massive overdoses for a three-year-old—burned those memories as well as scorching every neural branch that might have helped me climb to feel the sun as other people do. But the drugs stopped the thrashing, the headbanging, the screaming. And slowly, other drugs rived through my tangled axons and forged new pathways. A few months and I could see again. A few more and my fingers moved. The wires that had stilled my screams eventually made me scream once more, and, finally, exploded a neural dam so that a year later I began to speak. By then the research money was pouring through other conduits, scarcely less complex than my own, and leading as well to the knot of electrodes in my brain.

  In the early stages of her work, shortly after she took me from the military crèche, Dr. Harrow attempted a series of neuro-electrical implants between the two of us. It was an unsuccessful effort to reverse the damage done by the biochemicals. Seven children died before the minimum dosage was determined enough to change the neural pattern behind autistic behavior, not enough to allow the patient to develop her own emotional responses to subsequent internal or external stimuli. I still have scars from the implants: fleshy nodes like tiny ears trying to sprout from my temples.

  At first we lived well. As more empaths were developed and more military funding channeled for research, we lived extravagantly well. Dr. Harrow believed that exposure to sensation might eventually pattern true emotions in her affectively neutered charges. So we moved from the Human Engineering Laboratory’s chilly fortress to the vast abandoned Linden Glory estate outside the old City.

  Neurologists moved into the paneled bedrooms. Psycho-botanists tilled the ragged formal gardens and developed new strains of oleander within bell-shaped greenhouses. Empties moved into bungalows where valets and chefs once slept.

  Lawrence Linden had been a patron of the arts: autographed copies of Joyce and Stein, and the lost Crowley manuscripts graced the Linden Glory libraries. We had a minor Botticelli and many Raphaels; the famed pre-Columbian collection; antiquarian coins and shelves of fine and rare Egyptian glass. From the Victorian music room with its Whistler panels echoed the peacock screams of empties and patients engaged in therapy.

  Always I remained Dr. Harrow’s pet: an exquisite monster capable of miming every human emotion and even feeling many of them via the therapy I make possible. Every evening doctors administer syringes and capsules and tiny tabs that adhere to my temples like burdock pods, releasing chemicals directly into my corpus striatum. And every morning I wake from someone else’s dreams.

  * * *

  —

  Morgan sat in the gazebo when I arrived for our meeting, her hair pulled beneath a biretta of frayed indigo velvet. She had already eaten but servers had yet to clear her plate. I picked up the remains of a brioche and nibbled its sugary crust.

  “None of you have any manners, do you?” She smiled, but her eyes were red and cloudy with hatred. “They told me that during orientation.”

  I ran my tongue over a sweet nugget in a molar and nodded. “That’s right.”

  “You can’t feel anything or learn anything unless it’s slipped into your breakfast coffee.”

  “I can’t drink coffee.” I glanced around the Orphic Garden for a server. “You’re early.”

  “I had trouble sleeping.”

  I nodded and finished the brioche.

  “I had trouble sleeping because I had no dreams.” She leaned across the table and repeated herself in a hiss. “I had no dreams. I carried that memory around with me for sixty years and last night I had no dreams.”

  Yawning I rubbed the back of my head, adjusting a quill. “You still have all your memories. Dr. Harrow sai
d you wanted to end the nightmares. I am surprised we were successful.”

  “You were not successful.” She towered above me when she stood, the table tilting toward her as she clutched its edge. “Monster.”

  “Sacred monster. I thought you liked sacred monsters.” I grinned, pleased that I’d bothered to read her chart.

  “Bitch. How dare you laugh at me. Whore—you’re all whores and thieves.” She stepped toward me, her heel catching between the mosaic stones. “No more of me—You’ll steal no more of me—”

  I drew back a little, blinking in the emerald light as I felt the first adrenaline pulse. “You shouldn’t be alone,” I murmured. “Does Dr. Harrow know?”

  She blocked the sun so that it exploded around the biretta’s peaks in resplendent ribbons. “Dr. Harrow will know,” she whispered, and drawing a swivel from her pocket she shot herself through the eye.

  I knocked my chair over as I stumbled to her, knelt and caught the running blood and her last memory as I bowed to touch my tongue to her severed thoughts.

  A window smeared with garnet light that fuddles across my hands. Burning wax in a small blue glass. A laughing dog; then darkness.

  * * *

  —

  They hid me under guise of protecting me from the shock. I gave a sworn statement to the military and acknowledged in the HEL mortuary that the long body with the blackened face had indeed shared her breakfast brioche with me that morning. I glimpsed Dr. Harrow, white and taut as a thread as Dr. Leslie and the other HEL brass cornered her outside the Emergency Room. Then the aide Justice hurried me into the west wing, past the pre-Columbian collection and the ivory stair to an ancient Victorian elevator, clanking and lugubrious as a stage dragon.

  “Dr. Harrow suggested that you might like the Home Room,” Justice remarked with a cough, sidling two steps away to the corner of the elevator. The brass door folded into a lattice of leaves and pigeons that expanded into peacocks. “She’s having your things sent up now. Anything else you need, please let her know.” He cleared his throat, staring straight ahead as we climbed through orchid-haunted clerestories and chambers where the oneironauts snored and tossed through their days. At the fourth floor the elevator ground to a stop. He tugged at the door until it opened and waited for me to pass into the hallway.

  “I have never been in the Home Room,” I remarked, following him.

  “I think that’s why she thought you’d like it.” He glanced into an ornate mirror as we walked. I saw in his eyes a quiver of pity before he looked away. “Down here.”

  A wide hallway flanked by leaded windows overlooking the empties’ cottages ended in an arch crowded with gilt satyrs.

  “This is the Home Room,” murmured Justice. To the right a heavy oaken door hung open. Inside saffron-robed technicians strung cable. I made a face and tapped the door. It swung inward and struck a bundle of cable leading to the bank of monitors being installed next to a huge bed, paced to the window and gazed down at the roof of my cottage. Around me the technicians scurried to finish, glancing at me sideways with anxious eyes. I ignored them and sat on the windowsill. There was no screen. A hawkmoth buzzed past my chin and I thought that I could hang hummingbird feeders from here and so, perhaps, lure them within reach of capture. Anna had a bandeau she had woven of hummingbird feathers which I much admired. The hawkmoth settled on a BEAM monitor beside the bed. The technicians packed to leave.

  “Could you lie here for a moment, miss, while I test this?” The technician dropped a handful of cables behind the headboard. I nodded and stretched upon the bed, pummeling a pillow as he placed the wires upon my brow and temples. I turned sideways to watch the old BEAM monitor, the hawkmoth’s wings forming a feline mask across the flickering map of my thoughts.

  “Aggression, bliss, charity,” droned the technician, flicking the moth from the dusty screen. “Desire, envy, fear,” I sighed and turned from the monitor while he adjusted dials. Finally he slipped the wires from me and left. Justice lingered a moment longer.

  “You can go now,” I said flatly, and tossed the pillow against the headboard.

  He stood by the door, uncomfortable, and finally said, “Dr. Harrow wants me to be certain you check your prescriptions. Note she has increased your dosage of acetlethylene.”

  I slid across the bed to where a tiny refrigerator had been hung for my medications. I pulled it open and saw the familiar battery of vials and bottles. As a child first under Dr. Harrow’s care I had imagined them a city, saw the long cylinders and amber vials as battlements and turrets to be explored and climbed. Now I lived among those chilly buttresses, my only worship within bright cathedrals.

  “Two hundred milligrams,” I said obediently, and replaced the bottle. “Thank you very, very much.” As I giggled he left the room.

  I took the slender filaments that had tapped into my store of memories and braided them together, then slid the plait beneath a pillow and leaned back. A bed like a pirate ship, carved posts like riven masts spiring to the high ceiling. I had never seen a pirate ship, but once I tapped a boy who jerked off to images of red flags and heaving seas and wailing women. I recalled that now and untangled a single wire, placed it on my temple and masturbated until I saw the warning flare on the screen, the sanguine flash and flame across my pixilated brain. Then I went to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  Faint tapping at the door woke me a short while later.

  “Andrew,” I yawned, pointing to the crumpled sea of bedclothes. “Come in.”

  He shut the door softly and slid beneath the sheets beside me. “You’re not supposed to have visitors, you know.”

  “I’m not?” I stretched and curled my toes around his finger.

  “No. Dr. Leslie was here all day, Anna said he’s taking us back.”

  “Me, too?”

  He nodded, hugging a bolster. “All of us. Forever.” He smiled, and the twilight made his face as beautiful as Anna’s. “I saw Dr. Harrow cry after he left.”

  “How did you get here?” I sat up and played with his hair: long and silky except where the nodes bulged and the hair had never grown back. He wore Anna’s bandeau, and I tugged it gently from his head.

  “Back stairs. No one ever uses them. That way.” He pointed lazily with his foot toward a darkening corner. His voice rose plaintively. “You shared that poet with Anna. You should’ve saved her.”

  I shrugged. “You weren’t there.” The bandeau fit loosely over my forehead. When I tightened it tiny emerald feathers frosted my hand like the scales of moths. “Would Anna give me this, do you think?”

  Andrew pulled himself onto his elbows and stroked my breast with one hand. “I’ll give it to you, if you share.”

  “There’s not enough left to share,” I whined, and pulled away. In the mirror I caught myself in the bandeau. The stippled green feathers made my hair look a deeper auburn, like the poet’s. I pulled a few dark curls through the feathers and pursed my lips. “If you give this to me…”

  Already he was reaching for the wires. “Locked?” I breathed, glancing at the door.

  “Shh…”

  Afterward I gave him one of my new pills. There hadn’t been much of Morgan left and I feared his disappointment would evoke Anna, who’d demand her bandeau back.

  “Why can’t I have visitors?”

  I had switched off the lights. Andrew sat on the windowsill, luring lacewings with a silver cigarette lighter. Bats chased the insects to within inches of his face, veering away as he laughed and pretended to snatch at them. “Dr. Harrow said there may be a psychic inquest. To see if you’re accountable.”

  “So?” I’d done one before, when a schizoid six-year-old hanged herself on a grosgrain ribbon after therapy with me. “I can’t be responsible. I’m not responsible.” We laughed: it was the classic empath defense.

  “Dr. Harrow wants to
see you herself.”

  I kicked the sheets to the floor and turned down the empty BEAM, to see the lacewings better. “How do you know all this?”

  A quick fizz as a moth singed itself. Andrew frowned and turned down the lighter flame. “Anna told me,” he replied, and suddenly was gone.

  I swore and tried to rearrange my curls so the bandeau wouldn’t show. From the windowsill Anna stared blankly at the lighter for a moment, then groped in her pockets until she found a cigarette. She glanced coolly past me to the mirror, pulling a strand of hair forward until it fell framing her cheekbone. “Who gave you that?” she asked as she blew smoke out the window.

  I turned away. “You know who,” I replied petulantly. “I’m not supposed to have visitors.”

  “Oh, you can keep it,” she said airily.

  “Really?” I clapped in delight.

  “I’ll just make another.” She finished her cigarette, tossed it in an amber arc out the window. “I better go down now. Which way’s out?”

  I pointed where Andrew had indicated, drawing her close to me to kiss her tongue as she left.

  “Thank you, Anna,” I whispered to her at the door. “I think I love this bandeau.”

  “I think I loved it, too.” Anna nodded, and slipped away.

  * * *

  —

  Dr. Harrow invited me to lunch with her in the Peach Tree Court the next afternoon. Justice appeared at my door and waited while I put on jeweled dark spectacles and a velvet biretta like Morgan Yates’s.

  “Very nice, Wendy,” he commented, amused. I smiled. When I wore the black glasses he was not afraid to look me in the face.

  “I don’t want the others to see my bandeau. Anna will steal it back,” I explained, lifting the hat so he could see the feathered riband beneath.