Zelazny, Roger - Novel 05

by Today We Choose Faces

  TODAY WE CHOOSE FACES

  Roger Zelazny

  To Philip K. Dick, electric shepherd

  Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Part Three

  Part One

  Drifting . . . Placid, yet relentless. Peaceful, yet merciless. Drifting.

  A bolt of lightning, followed by an infinite sigh …

  Rushing, falling ...

  A slow shower of jigsaw pieces, some of them coming together about me ...

  ... And I began to know.

  It was as if I had known all along, though.

  Then the picture was complete, and I beheld it in its entirety as from a timeless vantage.

  There was a sequence, of course, like vertebrae or dominoes, and it was not at all difficult to here, here, there it.

  Here. For example.

  ... Leaving the club on a cold Saturday night in November. A little after 10:30, I guess. Eddie was with me, and we stood behind the glass doors at the front of the place, buttoning our overcoats and looking out at a damp Manhattan street, gusts of wind sailing bits of paper past us, while we waited for Denny to bring the car around. We said nothing. He knew I was still in a bad temper. I took out a cigarette. He hurried to light it for me.

  Finally, the glossy black sedan drew up. I had just pulled one glove on and was holding the other. Eddie moved forward and opened the door, held it for me. I stepped outside and the chill air stung my eyes, bringing tears to them. I paused to get out a handkerchief and wipe them, mainly conscious then of the wind, the idling of the engine and a few distant horn notes.

  As I lowered the handkerchief I became immediately aware of another figure which had appeared in the car, in the rear seat, and in the same instant realized that the rear window was down and that Eddie had moved six or seven paces away from me.

  I heard some of the gunfire, felt the impact of a couple of the slugs. It was to be a long while before I learned that I had been hit four times.

  My only consolation right before the lights went out was, twisting as I fell, seeing the smile vanish from Eddie's face, his hand jerking after, but not making it to his own weapon, and then the slow beginning of his topple.

  And that was the last I ever saw of him, falling, an instant before he hit the pavement

  Here. For another.

  Listening to Paul talk, I regarded what could have been a lovely view of a bright mountain lake fed by a little stream, a giant willow tree quivering beside it as if chilled by the water it tested with the green and shiny tips of its limbs. It was a fake. That is, it was real, but the picture was relayed from a spot hundreds of miles away. It was more pleasant than looking out a window from his upper-floor apartment, though, when all I could see would be a section—albeit a neat, attractive area—of that urban complex which extended from New York to Washington. The suite was soundproof, air-conditioned and I suppose tastefully decorated in accordance with the best sensibility of the times. I could not judge, since I was not yet familiar with the times. Its brandy was excellent, though.

  "... Must have been puzzling as all hell," Paul was saying. "I am amazed at how quickly you have adapted."

  I turned and looked at him again, a slim, still-young, dark-haired man with an engaging smile and eyes that really told nothing of what went on behind. He was still a thing of fascination for me. My grandson, with six or seven greats in front of the word. I kept looking for resemblances, finding them where least expected. The jut of the brow, the short upper lip, heavy lower one. The nose was his own, but then he had our way of quirking the left corner of his mouth at moments of pique or amusement.

  I sent the smile back.

  "Nothing that amazing about it," I replied. "The fact that I made the provisions I did should have indicated I had done some thinking about the future."

  "I guess so," he said. "But to tell the truth, my only thought was that you had been looking for an out on death."

  "Of course I was. I was aware of the possibility of my getting it the way that I did, and while body-freezing was still a fairly novel thing back in the 'seventies—"

  'The nineteen-seventies," he interrupted, with another smile.

  "Yes, I do make it sound like just a couple of years ago, don't I? Try it sometime and you will understand the feeling. Anyway, I figured what the hell. If I got shot down, whatever got damaged might be replaceable— someday. Why not set things up to have them freeze me and hope for the best? I had read a few articles on the subject, and it sounded like it might work. So I did. After that, it was funny . . . It got to be kind of an obsession with me. I mean, I got to thinking about it quite a bit, the way a real religious man might think about heaven—like, ‘When I die, I'll go to the future.' Then I found myself wondering more and more what it would be like. I did a lot of thinking and a lot of reading, trying to figure different ways that things might work out. It wasn't a bad hobby," I said, taking another drink. "It gave me a lot of fun, and as things turned out it's paying off."

  "Yes," he said. "So you were not really surprised to learn that a means of traveling faster than light was developed, and that we have visited worlds beyond the solar system?"

  "Of course I was surprised. But I had been hoping for it."

  "And the recent successes in teleportation, on an interstellar scale?"

  "I was more surprised at that. Pleasantly, though. Hooking the outposts together that way will be a great achievement."

  "Then let me ask you what you have found the most surprising."

  "Well," I said, finding myself a seat and taking another sip, "outside of the fact that we managed to get this far and still have not found a way to remove the possibility of war—" I raised a hand at this point as he began to interrupt me with something about controls and sanctions. He shut up. I was glad to see that he respected his elders. "Outside of that," I went on, "I suppose that the single most surprising thing to me is that we have gone more or less legitimate."

  He grinned.

  "What do you mean 'more or less'?"

  I shrugged.

  “Well?" I said.

  "We are as legitimate as anybody," he countered, "or we would never have been able to get listed on the World Stock Exchange."

  I said nothing, but found another smile.

  "Of course, it is a very well-run organization."

  "I would be disappointed if it were not."

  "Just so, just so," he said. "But there we are. COSA Inc. All legal, proper and respectable. Been that way for generations. The tendency in that direction had actually begun in your day, with—as feature writers liked to put it—the 'laundering' of funds and their reinvestment in more acceptable enterprises. Why fight the system when you are strong enough to be big in it without fighting? What are a few dollars one way or the other when you can have everything you want and security, too? Without the risks. Just by following the rules."

  "All of them?"

  "Well, there are so many that it has become, if anything, easier, when you can afford the brainpower."

  He finished his drink, fetched us refills.

  "There is no stigma," he concluded then. "The image we had in your day is ancient history now."

  He leaned forward conspiratorily.

  "It must really have been something, though, living in those times," he said, and then he looked at me expectantly.

  I did not know whether to be irritated or flattered. From the way they had been treating me since my arousal a couple of weeks earlier, I obviously shared some
historical niche with the bedpan and the brontosaurus. On the other hand, Paul seemed to regard me with more than a little pride, rather like a family heirloom which had been entrusted to his keeping. By then, I was aware that his position in the organization's power structure was both secure and potent He had insisted that I be his houseguest, though I could have been put up elsewhere. He seemed to take a great delight in getting me to talk about my life and times. I learned slowly that his knowledge of these things was largely based on the gaudier writings, films and rumors of the day. Still, I was eating his food, sleeping under his roof, we were relatives and the statutes had long since run. So 1 obliged him with some reminiscences.

  It might have disappointed him that I had spent a couple of years in college before taking over my father's business when he met his sudden, untimely end, but the fact that I spent a chunk of my earliest life in Sicily before he had sent for the family seemed to make up for this. Then I believe I disappointed him again when I told him that to the best of my knowledge there had never been a worldwide criminal conspiracy centered there. I saw the onorata society as a local, not unbeneficial, family-centered thing, which had in its time produced such notable galantuomi as Don Vito Cascio Ferro and Don Cald Vizzini. I tried to explain that there was a necessary distinction between the society degtt amici with its own, parochial interests and individuals who migrated, who may or may not have been amici, who engaged in illicit activities and preferred doing business with one another rather than with strangers, and who preserved a strong family tradition. Paul was as much a victim of the conspiracy mystique as any tabloid devourer, however, and was convinced I was still preserving some secret tradition or other. I gradually came to see that he was something of a romantic, that he wanted things to have been the other way, that he wanted to be part of the unreal tradition. So I told him some of the things I knew he would enjoy hearing.

  I told him how I had dealt with the matter of my father's passing, as well as several other encounters which helped justify my name, Angelo di Negri. Somewhere along the line, the family had later changed it to Nero. Not that that mattered to me. I was who I was. And Paul Nero smiled and nodded and lapped up the details. He had an infinite capacity for secondhand violence.

  All of which may sound somewhat contemptuous, but is not, not really. For I came to like him considerably as time went on. Perhaps this was because he reminded me somewhat of myself, in another time and place—a softer, easier-going, more urbane version. Perhaps he was like something that I might have been, or wished that I could have afforded the luxury of trying to be.

  But I was pushing forty. My character had long ago hardened. Though the circumstances that shaped me had long since passed, my pleasures in a, to me, almost pressureless society, were infiltrated by notes scored to a different measure, resulting at first in a vague uneasiness, to be followed by a growing dissatisfaction. life is seldom so pivotally crisis-conditioned a thing as novelists would have us believe. While it is true that we sometimes recover from shocks with a sense of the freshness of reality and the wonder of existence, this state of mind does pass away—and fairly rapidly, at that—leaving both reality and ourselves untransfigured once more. Consciousness of this fact came to me as I sat sentimentalizing past crudities for my descendant, and grew into a major discontent during the weeks that followed. I had not changed much, though everything else had. It was not completely a sense of being superfluous, though there was something of that, nor could it be nostalgia, as my memories were sufficiently recent and substantial to preclude any glossing over of what, to Paul, was the distant past. Perhaps it was a growing sensitivity to the fact that people seemed a trifle gentler, more pacific, that aroused some feelings of inferiority, as though I had just missed out on some necessary step in the process of civilization. I was not ordinarily given to such introspection, but when feelings become sufficiently strong and persistent they force their own exploration.

  Still, how does one picture his mental life to anyone, let alone one who seems a distorted image of himself? What I wanted to say was manifold and not the sort of thing that could really be communicated by words.

  Paul may have done better than I thought in understanding it, in understanding me, though. For he made two suggestions, one of which I followed immediately, while thinking about the other.

  There. For example.

  I went back to Sicily. An almost predictable thing, I would say, for a man in my circumstances and state of mind. Aside from the obvious associations it held, reaching back to my childhood, I had learned that it was one of the remaining places in the world which had not yet suffered from overdevelopment. It was then, in a very real way, a means of traveling back through time for me.

  I did not stay long in Palermo, but headed almost immediately into the hinterland. I rented an isolated place that had a familiar feeling to it, and spent several hours every day riding one of the two horses that had come with it. Mornings, I would ride down to the rocky shore and watch the surf come creaming and booming toward me, picking my way along the wet shingles it slid from, listening to the squawks of the birds as they arced and dipped above it, breathing the acrid sea-wind, watching the play of dazzle and shade across the gray, white, bleak prospect. Afternoons or evenings, as the mood moved me, I would often ride in the hills, where scraggly grass and twisted trees clung desperately to the thin soil and the damp breath of the Mediterranean drifted sultry or cool, as the mood moved it, about me. If I did not stare too long at the several stationary stars, if I did not raise my eyes when a transport vehicle flashed high and fast over head, if I refrained from using the communications unit for anything but music and rode to the nearest small town but once every week or so for perishable supplies, it was almost as though no time at all had passed for me. Not just the intervening century, but my entire adult life seemed to recede and fade into the timeless landscape of my youth. So what happened then was not wholly inexplicable.

  Her name was Julia, and I encountered her for the first time in a rocky cul-de-sac that grew lush by comparison with the bruise-colored hills through which I had been riding all that afternoon. She was seated on the ground beneath a tree which resembled a frozen fountain of marmalade to which some pale confetti had adhered, her dark hair drawn back and fastened with a coral clip, sketchpad in her lap, eyes darting and hand shifting, precise, deliberate, as she sketched a small flock of sheep. For a time, I just sat there and watched her, but then a cloud moved on and the emerging sun cast my long shadow down past her.

  She turned then, and shaded her eyes. I dismounted, twisted the reins about a nearby shrub's handiest branch and headed down.

  "Hello," I said, as I approached

  It was ten or fifteen seconds before I reached her, and it took her that long to decide to nod and smile slightly.

  "Hello," she said.

  "My name's Angelo. I was riding by and saw you, saw this place—thought it might be pleasant to stop and smoke a cigarette, to watch you draw. If that's all right?"

  She nodded, bit into the lower half of a new smile, accepted a cigarette,

  "I'm Julia," she said. "I work here."

  "Artist in residence?"

  "Bio-tech. This is just a hobby," she said, tapping the pad and letting her hand remain to cover her work.

  "Oh? What are you bioteching?"

  She nodded toward the woolly crowd.

  "Her," she said.

  "Which one is she?"

  "All of them."

  "I'm afraid I don't follow …”

  "They are clones," she said, "each one grown from the tissue of a single donor."

  "Neat trick, that," I said. 'Tell me about clones," and I seated myself on the grass and watched it being eaten.

  She seemed to welcome the opportunity to close the pad without letting me see her work. She launched into the story of her flock, and it required only a few questions here and there for me to learn somewhat of herself also.

  She was originally from Catania, but she ha
d been to school in France and was presently in the employ of an institute in Switzerland which was doing research in animal husbandry and was employing cloning techniques to field-test promising specimens in various environments simultaneously. She was twenty-six and had just ended a marriage on a very sour note and gotten herself transferred to the field with a test flock. She had been back in Sicily for a little over two months. She told me a lot about clones, really warming to the subject in the face of my obvious ignorance, describing in overabundant detail the processes whereby her sheep had been grown from cellular specimens of a hybrid in Switzerland to replicate her in all details. She even told me of the peculiar and still not understood resonance effect, which involved the fact that all of them would exhibit temporary symptoms of the same illness should one of them be stricken—in eluding the original in Switzerland and others in other parts of the world. No, to the best of her knowledge, cloning had not yet been attempted at the level of human beings—myriad legal, scientific and religious objections existed—although there were rumors concerning experimentation on one of the outpost worlds. While she apparently knew her business quite well, it struck me after a time that her words were put forth more with a pleasure at having someone to talk to than from any desire too inform. And we had this, too, in common.

  But I did not tell her my own story that day. I listened, we sat a time in silence, watching the sheep, watching the lengthening shadows, talked again, in a desultory fashion, of small, neutral matters. As we talked, a mutual assumption gradually became manifest in our speech, that this was but a part of a continuing conversation, that I would be back, the next day or the day after, that we would be seeing one another again, and again. Nor was this assumption incorrect

  Before very long, she became interested in horseback riding. Soon we were riding together every day, mornings or evenings, sometimes both. I told her where I was from, and how, omitting only what I had done there and the exact nature of my passing. I did not realize that I was falling in love until long after we had become lovers. I did not discover the fact until the day I determined to reach a decision on Paul's second suggestion and I realized how much of a factor she had become in my thinking.