And as far as emperors went, this one was much nicer than most, but a mad emperor was a dangerous emperor, no matter how nice he had been before he’d lost his marbles. A dangerous emperor had to be handled very carefully; until something could be figured out, a mad, dangerous emperor had to be humoured. Everyone turned to everyone else and whispered, Just nod and smile at whatever he says so we can get out of here alive, okay? Everyone, that was, except Sadie and Nick, who weren’t sitting close enough to anyone to whisper, weren’t getting any sort of transmissions, and were the only other people, besides the emperor himself, who didn’t know what was going on. But they could hear the whispers, like the rustling of a thousand paper rose petals, or maybe the biggest forest fire there had ever been, and they were both positive the people in the audience were planning their deaths. Horribly.
So as the emperor ran up and down the aisles turning the occasional handspring, doing the odd dance step, and sniffing necks and wrists for traces of cologne or whatever, people remained very still, so as not to attract any attention to themselves, hoping that the emperor would soon work off his manic phase and drop into a stupor or something so he could be removed without muss or fuss.
But the man’s energy seemed to have no bounds at all. Every time it seemed that he might be winding down, he would instead get rev up and run around the auditorium again, inviting people to touch his arms and head so that they could see how light and flexible the hotsuit was, how the helmet was positively weightless.
“Possibly lighter than air!” he crowed to one startled grande dame whose hand he was forcing through his salt-and-pepper curls. “Lighter than hair!” As he straightened up, laughing at his own joke, he caught sight of Sadie and Nick sitting frozen on the stage. In his enthusiasm for completely transparent reality-ware, he had all but forgotten them. “And those are the geniuses who developed completely transparent reality, and the completely transparent reality-ware that goes with it!” The audience turned as one to see whom he was pointing at. So you’re the ones who drove the emperor crazy, the audience seemed to say silently. You’re dead meat. Sadie was positive she heard someone actually mutter the words dead meat aloud.
“We did it for free!” she suddenly shouted, desperate. “We didn’t make a penny on this! And we refuse to take any royalties! We work pro bono!”
“However, movie rights are negotiable,” said the emperor and laughed. “How about that, everyone? Are they saints or are they saints? They are donating this marvelous technology, this revolution, this breakthrough, to humanity. Complete altruism! Surely we can all spare such benefactors a little for movie rights! Right? Right?” He looked around for support and pointed at an older man sitting half a dozen seats from the aisle. “Right?”
“They should get what they deserve,” said the man. “Absolutely.” He turned to give Sadie a murderous look.
“That’s right!” said the emperor joyfully, skipping down the aisle. “I can hardly believe this, do you know that I can actually smell with this technology? I mean, smell spontaneously! No programming, no adjusting the settings, it just happens! Just like in real life!”
As he reached the front of the auditorium, an older woman sitting on the end seat in the front row stood up and moved to stand directly in front of him. “This is real life, you damned fool.”
The entire audience, including everyone at home, gasped, and waited. The emperor stood staring at the woman in what looked like shock. Everyone waited for the shock to turn to rage. They seemed to wait forever. Then the emperor turned to Sadie and gave an incredulous laugh.
“How do you do it? She looks and sounds exactly like my mother!”
“For God’s sake, Gerald, I am your mother!” the woman called after him as he skipped past her and hopped up onto the stage again. “Gerald, you turn around and look at me when I’m talking to you—”
But the emperor continued to walk back and forth across the stage, extolling the virtues of completely transparent reality, occasionally pointing at the woman who claimed to be his mother and praising her utter realism. Suddenly, Nick stood up, walked over to the emperor and hit him hard on the back of the neck. The emperor went down like a collapsing building.
The audience jumped to its feet and the emperor’s mother said, “What the hell did you do that for? He’s a damned fool but he didn’t deserve—”
“When he wakes up,” Nick said, “we will explain that the system malfunctioned, causing the sensation of being struck hard enough to lose consciousness. But the sensation was so real that he actually did lose consciousness. This means that completely transparent reality-ware is far too dangerous for public consumption and we have to go back to the drawing board with it, and it may take years and years of hard work, calculations, calibrations, testing on non-living subjects, and so forth.”
“Well, not a bad solution,” said the emperor’s mother. “I just wish you didn’t have to go and hurt him. He’s not a bad boy.”
“Sorry. I was desperate. I think we all were.” Raising his voice, Nick added, “Desperate enough to edit this out for replay. Right?”
“Right!” chorused the auditorium, the people in the parking lot, the entire network viewing audience, and the emperor’s mother, without hesitation.
Nick turned back to Sadie. “Come now, I think we’d better go before the traffic gets bad.”
“Just one question, you two!” called a voice from a place near the center of the auditorium.
Nick and Sadie turned towards the audience, surprised. “Yes?” asked Nick.
A man in a bright yellow sweater stood up and looked down at the clipboard he was holding in his left hand. “Can you give us any idea when the next working model of completely transparent reality will be ready?”
Nick looked at Sadie and then at the again totally silent auditorium. He took off the rose headpiece and wiped the sweat off his forehead and cheeks. “We’ll call you,” he said and exited, with Sadie, stage right.
<
~ * ~
FERRYMAN
BY ERIC BROWN
Richard Lincoln sat in the darkened living room and half-listened to the radio news. More unrest in the East; riots and protests against the implantation process in India and Malaysia. The President of France had taken his life, another suicide statistic to add to the growing list... The news finished and was followed by a weather report: more snow was forecast for that night and the following day. Lincoln was hoping for quiet shift when the bracelet around his wrist began to warm. He pushed himself from his armchair, crossed to the computer on the desk, and touched the bracelet to the screen.
The name and address of the deceased glowed in the darkness.
Despite the weather and the inconvenience of the late hour, as ever he felt the visceral thrill of embarkation, the anticipation of what was to come.
He memorised the address as he stepped into the hall and found his coat, already planning the route twenty miles over the moors to the dead man's town.
He was checking his pocket for the Range Rover's keys when he heard the muffled grumble, amplified by the snow, of a car's engine. His cottage was a mile from the nearest road, serviced by a pot-holed cart track. No-one ever turned down the track by mistake, and he'd had no visitors in years.
He waited, as if half-expecting the noise to go away - but the vehicle's irritable whine increased as it fought through the snow and ice towards the cottage. Lincoln switched on the outside light and returned to the living room, pulling aside the curtain and peering out.
A white Fiat Panda lurched from pot-hole to pot-hole, headlights bouncing. It came to a stop outside the cottage, the sudden silence profound, and a second later someone climbed out.
Lincoln watched his daughter slam the door and pick her way carefully through the snow.
The door-bell chimed.
For a second he envisaged the tense confrontation that would follow, but the warm glow at his wrist gave him an excuse to reduce his contact with Susanne to
a minimum.
He pulled open the door. She stood tall in an expensive white mackintosh, collar turned up around her long, dark, snow-specked hair.
Her implant showed as a slight bulge at her temple.
She could hardly bring herself to look him in the eye. Which, he thought, was hardly surprising.
She gave a timid half-smile. "It's cold out here, Richard."
"Ah... Come in. This is a surprise. Why didn't you ring?"
"I couldn't talk over the phone. I needed to see you in person."
To explain herself, he thought; to excuse her recent conduct.
She swept past him, shaking the melted snow from her hair. She hung her coat in the hall and walked into the living room.
Lincoln paused behind her, his throat constricted with an emotion he found hard to identify. He knew he should have felt angry, but all he did feel was the desire for Susanne to leave.
"I'm sorry. I should have come sooner. I've been busy."
She was thirty, tall and good-looking and - damn them - treacherous genes had bequeathed her the unsettling appearance of her mother.
As he stared at her, Lincoln realised that he no longer knew the woman who was his daughter.
"But I'm here now," she said. "I've come about-"
He interrupted, his pulse racing. "I don't want to talk about your mother."
"Well I do," Susanne said. "This is important."
He recalled his excuse. "As a matter of fact it's impossible right now..." He held up his right hand, showing Susanne the band around his wrist.
"You've been called."
"It's quite a way - over the Pennines. Hebden Bridge. I should really be setting off. Look... make yourself at home. You know where the spare room is. We can... we'll talk in the morning, okay?"
He caught the flash of impatience on her face, soon doused by the realisation that nothing came between him and his calling.
She sighed. "Fine. See you in the morning."
Relief lifting from his shoulders like a weight, Lincoln nodded and hurried outside. Seconds later he was revving the Range Rover up the uneven track, into the darkness.
~ * ~
The road through the Pennines had been gritted earlier that night, and the snow that had fallen since had turned into a thin grey mush. Lincoln drove cautiously, his the only vehicle out this late. Insulated from the cold outside, he tried to forget about the presence of Susanne back at the cottage. He half-listened to a discussion programme on Radio Four. He imagined half a dozen dusty academics huddled in a tiny studio in Bush House. Cockburn, the Cambridge philosopher, had the microphone: "It is indeed possible that individuals will experience a certain disaffection, even apathy, which is the result of knowing that there is more to existence than this life..."
Lincoln wondered if this might explain the alienation he had felt for a year, since accepting his present position. But then he'd always had difficulty in showing his emotions, and consequently accepting that anyone else had emotions to show.
This life is a prelude, he thought, a farce I've endured for fifty-five years - the end of which I look forward to with anticipation.
It took him almost two and a half hours to reach Hebden Bridge. The small town, occupying the depths of a steep valley, was dank and quiet in the continuing snowfall. Streetlights sparkled through the darkness.
He drove through the town and up a steep hill, then turned right up an even steeper minor road. Hillcrest Farm occupied a bluff overlooking the acute incision of the valley. Coachlights burned orange around the front porch. A police car was parked outside.
Lincoln climbed from the Range Rover and hurried across to the porch. He stood for a second before pressing the door-bell, composing himself. He always found it best to adopt a neutral attitude until he could assess the mood of the bereaved family: more often than not the mood in the homes of the dead was one of excitement and anticipation.
Infrequently, especially if the bereaved were religious, a more formal grief prevailed.
He pressed the bell and seconds later a ruddy-faced local constable opened the door. "There you are. We've been wondering if you'd make it, weather like it is."
"Nice night for it," Lincoln said, stepping into the hall.
The constable gestured up a narrow flight of stairs. "The dead man's a farmer - silly bugger went out looking for a lost ewe. Heart attack. His daughter was out with him - but he was dead by the time she fetched help. He's in the front bedroom."
Lincoln followed the constable up the stairs and along a corridor. The entrance to the bedroom was impossibly low; both men had to stoop as if entering a cave.
He saw the bereaved family first, half a dozen men and women in their twenties and thirties, seated around the bed on dining chairs. An old woman, presumably the farmer's widow, sat on the bed itself, her husband's lifeless blue hand clutched in hers.
Lincoln registered the looks he received as he entered the room: the light of hope and gratitude burned in the eyes of the family, as if he, Lincoln himself, was responsible for what would happen over the course of the next six months.
The farmer lay fully-dressed on the bed, rugged and grey like the carving of a knight on a sarcophagus.
An actor assuming a role, Lincoln nodded with suitable gravity to each of the family in turn.
"If anyone has any questions, anything at all, I'll be glad to answer them." It was a line he came out with every time to break the ice, but he was rarely questioned these days.
He stepped forward and touched his bracelet to the dead man's temple, where his implant raised a veined, weather-worn rectangle beneath the skin. The nanomeks would now begin the next stage of the process, the preparation of the body for its onward journey.
"I'll fetch the container," he said - he never called it a coffin - and nodded to the constable.
Together they carried the polycarbon container from the back of the Range Rover, easing it around the bends in the stairs. The family formed a silent huddle outside the bedroom door. Lincoln and the constable passed inside and closed the door behind them.
They lifted the corpse into the container and Lincoln sealed the sliding lid. The job of carrying the container down the stairs - attempting to maintain dignity in the face of impossible angles and improbable bends - was made all the more difficult by the presence of the family, watching from the stair landing.
Five minutes of gentle coaxing and patient lifting and turning, and the container was in the back of the Range Rover.
The constable handed over a sheaf of papers, which Lincoln duly signed and passed back. "I'll be on my way, Mr Lincoln," the constable said. "See you later." He waved and climbed into his squad car.
One of the farmer's daughters hurried from the house. "You'll stay for a cup of tea?"
Lincoln was about to refuse, then realised how cold he was. "Yes, that'd be nice. Thanks."
He followed her into a big, stone-flagged kitchen, an Aga stove filling the room with warmth.
He could tell that she had been crying. She was a plain woman in her mid-thirties, with the stolid, resigned appearance of the unfortunate sibling left at home to help with the farm work.
He saw the crucifix on a gold chain around her neck, and then noticed that her temple was without an implant. He began to regret accepting the offer of tea.
He sat at the big wooden table and wrapped his hands around the steaming mug. The woman sat down across from him, nervously meeting his eyes.
"It happened so quickly. I can hardly believe it. He had a weak heart - we knew that. We told him to slow down. But he didn't listen."
Lincoln gestured. "He was implanted," he said gently.
She nodded, eyes regarding her mug. "They all are, my mother, brothers and sisters." She glanced up at him, something like mute appeal in her eyes. "It seems that all the country is, these days."
New Worlds Page 4
