by Robert Reed
—excerpt from a tailoring text, available through World-Net
He isn’t wearing black this time, and he’s not on Garden. It’s a place Toby doesn’t know, and he soberly watches the flat featureless plain stricken with geometric shapes—severe and shadowless—and hears the mournful sound of a gusting wind. Toby is hunting someone. He wants to tell them something, only the message escapes him. Ahead, far off on the horizon, is a sharp pyramid that draws him. He walks and walks, finally reaching its base. On its peak is an enormous black head, hairless and smooth with its eyes and mouth shut. Toby says something to the head. The eyes come open. He repeats himself. The mouth breaks into a long slow smile.
Toby opens his own eyes.
He sits upright and shudders, thinking there are limits and he can’t stand the son-of-a-bitch getting into his sleep, too. Sometimes he thinks the Morninger puts himself into his dreams. Sometimes he wonders if Gabbro’s some kind of psychic—people who can throw their thoughts and who haven’t existed since they were proven impossible.
Gabbro Gleason.
They’ve been at odds since Toby’s first day in this place. He remembers everything about the first time they met, Toby coming down the stairs from the floater pad and Gabbro with the girl climbing the same stairs. Toby had just bought a chair from a little Old Quarter shop—cheap living wood that would root into his carpet, money back if not happy—and he was trying to manage the weight in the narrow stairwell. He hadn’t spent enough time preparing for the Earth’s gravity. Not enough calcium implants and not enough electro-isometrics. And there was a cyborg climbing toward him, completely unexpected. Gabbro had called up to him, saying something, and Toby hadn’t heard him. Then the floater lifted and was gone and he realized it was the floater they wanted. And Gabbro said something to him. He said, “Thanks, neighbor,” with hooks in his voice. And while this wasn’t Garden, and Toby partly understood how exposed and alone he would be on the Earth, the bulk of him thought in the reflexive terms of someone raised as a Soul of Eden.
Cyborgs are nowhere near the Ideal.
Whether you’re a conservative or permissive Gardener, without exception, you look on cyborgs as the ultimate corruption—the marriage of flesh and machinery, soul and circuits. Toby recalls the dry heat coming off Gabbro and the way he towered, his blackness darker than shadows and his big glass eyes giving him a strangely human stare as they squeezed past one another. Toby was frightened and outraged at the same instant. He tasted bile welling up in his dry throat.
A few moments later, softly, Toby cursed the cyborg.
Maybe cyborgs have inhuman ears. Maybe he spoke louder than he realized. Either way, Gabbro paused and turned and asked Toby what he had just said. Repeat it.
Toby said nothing.
Stooge? Gabbro asked. To the circuit? His voice was eerily smooth, something about it almost pretty. Isn’t that…what? he asked. A fancy insult? Are you insulting me?
Toby didn’t answer him. He remembers being terrified and embarrassed for being so helpless. Gabbro said:
So you’re moving in upstairs from me?
His girlfriend said, Gabbro? Love?
Well, said that smooth voice, take some time and think before you talk like that to me. His face was stern and absolutely human. Gabbro was wearing shorts and a simple shirt, his black feet bare, and Toby saw the ropy cords of his hyperfiber muscles showing in the thick legs and long arms. He asked Toby, Where’s your home?
Toby said nothing.
Don’t you know where you’ve come from? he asked.
Some voice from inside him announced, I don’t have to answer to you!
Come on, love, said the girlfriend. Forget him, she said, laying a ridiculously tiny hand on one oversized arm.
There was a man inside that lifeless shell.
It’s always difficult for Toby to think in those terms.
Gabbro began to smile. It was a sudden expression, the white teeth shining and the eyes smiling too. He asked, You’re a little asshole, aren’t you? Aren’t you?
Toby said, Leave me alone.
And Gabbro gave a loud laugh. It was as if a joke had been told. He said, You’re precious. He laughed louder, then turned and took the girl by an arm. They climbed to the roof with Gabbro still laughing, and Toby began to breathe again. His arms were shaking. He remembers the terror and how the chair was suddenly out of his grasp and falling, crashing down the last stairs and giving an audible crack at the bottom. A living leg was broken, sap coming out in slow golden drops. Dammit! he thought. Dammit! And still he heard the cyborg’s laughter coming down at him, tormenting him.
It’s been that kind of year, he thinks.
Start to finish.
Toby’s father, and his mother too, have always been part of the permissive wing of the Souls. Politically they support pragmatic changes in the Prophet Adam’s visions. Economically they favor a more open society than the Conservatives think proper or smart. The Prophet was a great person, they argue. Not divine. His visions covered an enormous range of social and ecological facets, yet there are still gaps and odd distortions and areas of conflicting ideals. The Prophet’s work wasn’t done when he died. His Ideal is not a crystal completed. The challenge for Garden—or so argue the Permissives—is to accept the grayness of His plans and expand Garden’s potentials accordingly.
There are millions of people living in the Jovian system. Plus the cetaceans, of course, and some AIs, and maybe the odd Ghost here and there. Toby, raised in a Permissive household, knows the arguments by heart. Garden must cultivate its trading and diplomatic relationships with its neighbors. His father had always been adamant on the issue. Jupiter’s own little system has potentials untapped. Father Jove itself is full of wasted energy and useful mass and even a simple native ecology—single-cell organisms as big as fists, drifting in the warm hydrogen atmosphere, feeding on lightning and fermenting hydrocarbons and such. Someday, his father would state, Garden could become a vital hub in the System at large. Its beauty and its spiritual purity could serve as a guidepost to people everywhere. The Prophet was a great visionary, yes, but that doesn’t mean His descendants couldn’t be the same. On and on he spoke about these enormous possibilities, and Toby can remember halfway listening, believing none of it, the words washing over him and clean away.
Ideology is a frightful bore.
He hates it and hates having to suffer it when he knows the speaker is incapable of seeing a fraction of it come true.
Toby is a mess of tangled feelings, and he blames his father for the worst of it. He came to the Earth against his will because his father had the power and the urge to see him suffer. The logic was that he would learn lessons at the hands of the Terrans, and the lessons have come. Yes indeed. He’s not the same child who was content to look no further than Garden’s sweet air and private sun. Now he does think about the Prophet’s philosophy. He does. After a year on the Earth and a string of indignities, small and not, his old beliefs, sketchy and shallow, have been updated. Just as his father must have known would happen. Sure. But the final joke, thinks Toby, is on him. It’s on his father. If the man came into the room now, sat and asked how he was doing, Toby would look straight at him and tell him the truth. “I’m a staunch Conservative. I am. And you helped make me so.”
He isn’t sure about his specific beliefs. Not yet. And he’s rather sure that the Conservatives wouldn’t recognize parts of them. Presuming, of course, that he could explain them. But there’s something in him, real and potent, and sometimes, at odd times, that something makes him wake in the night, alone, a fever inside him and some half-formed vision of his own set somewhere nearby. Somewhere just out of sight.
His father was right about one salient point, however.
The Prophet was not the last Gardener prophet. He feels the truth down in his bones.
His bedroom wall is still linked to a fantasy channel. Without sound or audience, it has run through the night.
Toby sits on his m
attress and stares at the scene, his thoughts changing. He feels the usual longing for Garden’s sea and sky and the way its bright sun rises and sets and rises again, the days so quick that you have trouble counting them. He remembers holidays and feasts, and of course there are the ceremonies culminating in the Passion Necklace. The one thing every Terran knows about Garden is the Necklace. To Toby it was logical and enjoyable and buoyed up by tradition. Now, in its absence, it seems holy. It is beautiful and true. But to the Terrans and their crude minds it is a mere orgy. Nothing more. The average Necklace lasts for days, even in Earth time, and each is built from people standing in a great ring, their androgynous bodies linked and each person coupling with his or her neighbors—several thousand bodies sometimes joined around the margins of an entire island.
The Passion Necklace is held until one of its people faints away.
Or, on some occasions, dies.
Sex is as much a part of Garden as are the whitesmear palms and the bluestone fish. It’s taught before walking or talking. There’s not a day in Toby’s life, at least in memory, when some erotic interlude didn’t prominently figure. Yet since arriving here his only regular diversion has been the fantasies on the wall—built by the bloodless AIs for modest fees, light and sound created by whim and held in storage for whenever he has the urge.
He sees a sunstruck beach and Gardeners standing with their feet in the slowly curling surf.
The Passion Necklace has been growing through the night. It began with three Gardeners, one of them plainly Toby, and every minute or so another two would join them and match their motions, Toby in the center, no one making a wrong move or a missed step while coming out of the palms or the sea. He looks at the image of himself, at his straining face and groping hands and the way he seems tired without having to worry about collapsing, and he considers the thousands in this Necklace and knows something about how it would feel.
Usually he stops the fantasy before now.
Today, for no real reason, he punches a button that causes the image to shrink to a spot no bigger or brighter than the brown tip of his thumb. Then he makes the spot drop into the corner of the wall, out of sight, and he stands and glances out the window and thinks about that damned bird before he goes to the bathroom.
He has no fondness for masturbation.
He use to go down to the Old Quarter from time to time and rent the services of a whore. Male or female. It didn’t so much matter. The last whore was a saucy woman with enormous breasts and a protruding rump, perfume hanging on her like some dense private atmosphere. She had seen Toby first, advancing and asking if he was lonely. He said nothing, made no gestures, yet she seemed encouraged. She pushed one breast against him. A lump of concrete would have felt firmer, but barely, and the nipple looked black through her shirt, huge and sticking into him like a thumb. But would you like some fun? she asked. She could be had for an entire splendid night for a reasonable price. She called him “Darling.” She said, I do like Gardeners. I do!
Have you ever been with one? he asked.
Of course, she lied. I prefer them!
How much? he asked.
She quoted a figure, and he went through the mental calculations of how much cash he was carrying and how much his mother would send next month, plus how much reserve he had in the form of little quiver chips hidden at home. Then he offered her half of what she wanted and she shaved a little from her first offer, him thinking and finally saying:
Okay. Fine.
It was nighttime. They boarded a floater and went to his home because hotel rooms cost and he knew the looks he would get from strangers. They thought he was a whore trying to look like a Gardener, and they’d talk to him and sometimes touch him with their humid hands, asking, Where’s your skullcap, honey? Hey! Get certified and get a skullcap, honey. Then we’ll have a fine time. You bet!
It was odd. He wasn’t afraid of that whore. She was so large and so willing to voice her thoughts, crude and simple as they were, that Toby couldn’t find any place to hang his fear. She was stupid. She was loud. If she meant him any harm, he was certain, she’d look him in the eyes and say so. No hesitations.
Is this it? she asked as the floater descended.
He said nothing.
Not much to look at! she declared. I myself live to the west. (She named her neighborhood, Toby not knowing it from any other place.) She said, It’s nice out there. We’ve got a little lake and river and look down on Farmstead country. We do.
The floater was down and paid and gone, and Toby stood still for a moment and listened to the noise below.
What is it, honey?
He said, He’s having a party.
Who is? Some friend of yours?
He said, Nightmares of the Prophet. Damn, damn!
They went downstairs and into his home. The whore decided that a drink would help. Toby had nothing that she wanted, but she needled him until he ordered a bottle of something to be sent to him. Gabbro was having an enormous party downstairs. He and his miner friends, plus a smattering of Terrans, and their noise made the floor tremble. The whore wanted to dance to the beat of the music, and she made fun of Toby’s disinterest and danced with herself, pulling off her shirt and exposing a single golden chain strung between her breasts, rooted in the skin somehow.
The bottle arrived with a soft whoosh.
The whore downed most of the clear liquor herself, and only then was she ready and able to contemplate bed. It was a moonless night. Toby had her lying on his mattress, in the dark, and he worked with her until he had climaxed a good dozen times. He was bathed in sweat, lying beside her, and she was on her belly. Two large moles were on her rump, one to each cheek, and a thick rope of golden hair grew from each of them. She was looking at him. She gave a drunken laugh and licked the sweat off his chest, smacking her lips and saying:
Honey! You taste girly!
Toby climbed out of bed and opened the window. She was asleep before he could lie down again, her snoring slow and harsh and wet. The party didn’t sound so loud in his bedroom, for which he was thankful, but he couldn’t sleep or even relax. He thought about using the whore again. A dozen times was nothing. Not even for a disinterested Gardener. He felt some obligation to prove this to her, thinking that if he could just get her to say what a great lover he was, honey, then maybe the money and everything would be worth it.
A little after midnight the party spilled out into the yard.
Toby heard splashes like explosions. He looked outside without standing, and he saw water rising past in a fountain still thick and rising higher. The Morningers were jumping up and crashing into the pool. Toby began to smell the water—a fishy stink, cool and lingering—and then he could almost taste it in his mouth. He wasn’t relaxed but he was tired. Thinking in a straight line was difficult. He felt a mist on his face and didn’t know what to think. He finally sat up and breathed and tried to collect his senses.
The whore’s skullcap was glowing into the pillow.
She had rolled onto her back, her breasts pointing at the ceiling and ignoring gravity.
Then he realized what was happening. Damn! He stood and went to the open window and shouted, Hey! Stop that! You, hey! A new fountain emerged from the pool, concentrated and quick. It struck the window before Toby could shut his eyes, or jump, and he heard the laughter before he saw the big ebony figures standing in the yard with no clothes. There were men and women too. Morningers and the Terrans scattered among them. They were all terribly drunk and laughing to tears, and Toby shouted down at them.
Nightmares! he shouted.
Circuit stooges!
The whore came awake behind him. Hey, she said, what’s this?
One of the women miners bent at the knees and leaped higher than she stood, tucking and dropping on the water to put up another fountain.
Toby cursed all of them.
He tried everything he knew to bruise them, his voice cracking and their laughter undaunted.
He hear
d Gabbro say something about a jerk. A Garden jerk.
Listen to the mouth, said another. What a mouth.
Ignore him, said Gabbro. Let it slide. He’s crazy and you just have to ignore him.
Then Toby saw Gabbro’s girlfriend standing close to the pool, drunk enough to stagger. He remembered her name from having eavesdropped, and he called to her. He said, Get inside, bitch! And take that machine cock with you!
There was a sudden silence, enormous and cold. Toby waited. He was standing on his toes, face pressed to the screen, and then a strong hand grasped him by the ankle and he wheeled and saw the whore by her skullcap. She wanted him back in bed. She said, Quit teasing them, honey! Get a bottle and get back in here!
April was beating on Gabbro with both fists, cursing and crying and finally falling down. She wanted him to do something. She wanted him to defend her from the insults. For me! she shouted. Pull the fucker to pieces, now now now!
Toby waited, listening to the girl’s sobs. Gabbro’s eyes came up and found his face in the dark.
Gabbro said, Watch her.
His voice was soft and careful.
Gabbro came out from among the other miners, his bulk without weight, his strides long and smooth. He bounced once and came over the railing onto Toby’s balcony, the balcony moaning under the load, and Toby strained against the wet screen and watched and tried to believe it wasn’t happening. It all seemed unreal—Gabbro fitting his fingers into the glass, tugging, the locks breaking and the door coming open and him inside. Toby tried shutting the bedroom door, and one massive hand gave it a push, a tap, and put him flat on his back on the floor.
