She tried to turn away, tried to tell herself it was none of her business, Raymond had certainly made that clear. His toy, his money. His sin. Not mine, but: Raymond’s hand on Carlene’s shoulder, not possessive but devouring, who better than Rachel to know at last what a simple eating machine he was, she who had been his feast for so long. She wanted to go to Carlene and say, Get out of here. Run for your life. But she had read the contract, so many times it was memorized. There was simply no option for Carlene.
Carlene stayed out of her way those first few months, always genuinely pleasant when they met, in the hall, in the kitchen, but also seeming to engineer those meetings deliberately, to keep them brief and few. Carlene had had her own treatment, there at the clinic, her own lessons to learn. Only Raymond had had no treatment. Only Raymond was allowed that largesse.
But finally Rachel tired of it, finally cornered Carlene in the bathroom of all places, stopped her as she left: one hand on the doorjamb, the other cool and useless at her side. The pain was a brisk thing today; it made her blunt.
“I want to talk to you.”
“All right.” No smile but no discomfort either, leading the way into the morning room: had I, Rachel thought, been so commanding, so very young? And the answer was no, of course, this was less her than that first aimless swirl of cells; the physical duplication was flawless, but the mind behind was Carlene’s own.
Now the time to talk, and the words embarrassed her with their inherent idiocy, How does it feel? What do you think about it? Carlene, that grave pucker she recalled from mirrors, that frown that meant I’m listening. “Carlene.” Rachel’s voice kept even. “What does this mean to you?”
“What?”
Rachel shook her head, impatient, waved a finger back and forth. “This, all of this.”
And with her own impatience, “That’s like asking a baby what it thinks of sex. It got me here, didn’t it?”
Rachel laughed, surprised, and Carlene smiled. “I read the contract,” she said. “I have a place to stay. Nobody said I had to like anything.” Rising up, all in black today with Rachel’s own brilliance in that color, and without thinking Rachel put one hand on Carlene’s arm, remembering the stretch and easy pull of muscles all unconscious of a time when such motion would be less memory than joke, and said, “Has Raymond tried to sleep with you yet?”
“Yet,” Carlene said, and snickered. And gone.
Yes. Well. What had she expected?—as the morning room turned cold, as the sun turned away—it was the virtual owning of a human being, Carlene’s brick-wall acceptance notwithstanding, worse than slavery even if she smiled, even if inside she screamed with laughter every time Ray’s prick saluted. You bought her, too, her mind reminded, cold calendar. Not your money, but worse. Your blood. Your pity. For Ray.
“Shit,” she snarled, and heard from the kitchen Raymond’s tee-hee-hee.
For God’s sake, why couldn’t he even laugh like a human being? And Carlene’s agreeable chuckle, had I sounded that way, too? No. No. Because I didn’t know, did I, that I was a servant, less than a servant, I thought I was a partner, I thought it was a partnership. Till death do us part.
And the old self-contempt rising up like a cobra from a basket, swaying to the music of memories, why couldn’t she be one of the ones whose mind went first, lying dribbling and serene instead of twisting like a bug on a pin, on a spike, God, and the pain came then, like a no-nonsense jailer, to take her all the way down.
* * *
“This isn’t necessary.” Raymond in the doorway, not so much frowning as issuing displeasure like a silent cloud of flatulence, metronomic glance moving back and forth, Carlene and Rachel, Rachel and Carlene. “She has a day nurse on call.”
“I don’t mind,” Carlene said. Apple juice pouring into a clear glass, such a pretty color. Rachel tried to smile as she took the glass, happy spite, drink it down. Ha ha, Ray. I’ve got your toy.
“She has these episodes, on and off. She’s going to keep having them, till, till they stop.” Staring at them both, faintly bug-eyed, what do you see, Ray? Side by side like some horrible living time-lapse photograph; what did it do to Carlene, to see her?
Finally he gave up and went away. Carlene reached at once for the apple juice, as if she knew how much effort it cost to drink it. “I’ll stay for a while,” she said.
“This,” Rachel’s mutter, “shouldn’t be legal. Shouldn’t.”
Carlene’s shrug. “Neither should marriage.”
The episode, yes, Raymond, sanitize the pain and the puking, why not, it doesn’t happen to you. The episode passed. Carlene’s illness-born habit of spending mornings with Rachel did not.
They never did much. They never talked much. Sometimes they went outside, took a walk to the main road and back. Sometimes they looked at books, Rachel’s art books, relegated by Raymond’s loud scorn—patronizing saint of the reversionist movement, nothing matters unless it’s backwards and talk about life imitating art—to the bookshelves in her room: Carlene agreed with her about Bosch. Carlene agreed with her about a lot of things.
Side by side in the morning room, slow lemon light and the thin fizz of soda water in her glass, Carlene’s profile like talking to herself, her young self, oh God had anyone ever had such a chance? Her life beginning anew without Raymond’s tyrannical insistence on his genius and her incomprehensible acquiescence to same, she could not live it all again, had no desire to, was in the end too fatally tired. But. The new improved version. What she couldn’t do.
Hearing above them Raymond’s petty bluster, eternal petulance at being again excluded from their morning tête-à-tête: “How can you stay?” Rachel asked her, and Carlene’s exquisite shrug: “Why did you?”
Exquisite, too, the tang of shared bitterness: “It was in my contract, too.”
“Yours was a hell of a lot easier to break.”
Rachel, brittle and slow, back a torment in the wicker chair, seeing her own blind chains snaking like living things to encircle these young wrists, choke out a second life; no. Very very quiet: “We’ll see.”
Carlene’s frown. “We won’t see. If I violate the terms of the contract, I can’t get a job, I can’t rent an apartment, or get credit—I can’t even get a social security card. I’m an appliance, remember?”
“No,” and even Carlene drew back now, from the venom in that word, the shaping of it like poison in the cage of withered lips, was she frightened that one day she would look that way, too? That’s what we can’t let happen, little girl. Not again. “Once,” Rachel said, “was enough.”
* * *
Time was the object. They had little of it, either of them, but they were industrious, they could squeeze everything from a moment. Carlene was decoy, pleasantly demure in the presence of attorneys, her daughterly affection touching the strangers who watched her helping her afflicted mother from office to office, my goodness isn’t there a family resemblance! “It’s not that we want to break the contract, no,” Rachel’s cool headshake, Carlene’s youthful gravity, “we only want to modify some of the circumstances. You know I think the world of Carlene, I think of her as my daughter,” and Carlene’s smile on cue, perfectly on cue.
It was her job, too, to keep Raymond busily oblivious in the times and moments when his attention would have been worse than nuisance. Sometimes Rachel watched them, phone to her ear, murmuring questions and asides and slow cool ponderings, no hint of ticking desperation in the attempts to cut the path she needed, gazing through the bedroom window: their walks in the Japanese garden, Raymond’s tee-hee-hee audible even from this distance, and she smiled like an adder, even the trebling pain a spur; I’m running away, Ray, you goddamned son of a bitch, you vampire. Finally running away.
* * *
“It’s not going to work,” Carlene’s midnight bitterness, face in hands, Rachel lying newly pinned and tubed on the bed. “You said yourself that if there were any new loopholes in the Frawley Act, these guys could find them.” More bi
tterly still: “But there aren’t.”
Who would imagine that mere breathing could hurt so much, just breathing? “We can find another way.”
“I can’t wait for another way. I can’t stand him, Rachel.”
“Neither can I. Carlene, I’m doing my best. Believe me,” looking at that face, that future, “we’re going to find a way.”
But: Episode after episode, dreary daily tragedy of a soap opera, what time she had, left lucid, was in doubt, what time at all. Raymond refused to come near her room, he said it smelled, in fact he said the smell was all over the house. He wanted her put in a nursing home. He was making some telephone calls of his own, Carlene said.
“I keep calling them back,” she said. “I tell them I’m you.”
“We’re coming so close,” Rachel said. Today the pain was thumbscrew, corkscrew, through every joint and muscle, walking through her brain, new owner. The doctors—Raymond insisted she know—were quietly shocked she had lasted this long, even with treatments, even with drugs just this side of experimental. “I think if we had more time, if—”
“Shhh.” Carlene’s hand on her shoulder. “Don’t talk, I know it hurts you to talk.” Looking up, to see Carlene’s tears.
“I didn’t want it to be you.” Crying now and that hurt, too, immeasurably but not as much as the knowledge that without her it could never have been done, without the final monstrosity of her consent, of the bits of her body given over in the same heedless headlong way she had given everything, everything to Raymond. We were stupid, in those days, she wanted to say, though nothing could finally excuse her, nothing could explain and maybe it was really only she who had been so stupid, who had not only made Raymond her life but had made another life, identical to hers, to make his as well. Crime and punishment there before her. With tears on her face.
I tried to fix it, Rachel thought, you know I did, tried, too, to tell Carlene that, but found in her lungs the brutal ache of airlessness, in her eyes the delicate swim of motes as dark as the claiming of that which ate her, now and finally, alive.
Her head on Carlene’s breast, when Raymond found them. Her eyes, as open as Carlene’s, as wide, as if both were left astonished in the ancient wake of the bridegroom, come to take the elder daughter to the dance.
* * *
“It was going to happen no matter what,” he said, heavy with the grief at having to participate in something as sorry as a memorial service. Everyone who came, he was sure, came for his comfort. “It’s not genetic, though. I had the doctors make sure. There’s nothing for you to worry about.” Silence. The slip and tug of her hair through his fingers. “Her, her half, she wanted it to go to you. And all the prenuptial things.” More silence. “It’s come to a fair amount. She was good with money. I don’t bother with the lawyers, you know, but they tell me it’s legally yours. Through me, of course.”
Carlene’s tiny nod, not seen but felt. “I’d rather not talk about it,” she said.
“I understand.” More arthritic stroking, tangling her hair so it hurt. “When I’m, when—someday, you know, I can’t leave it to you, you’re not in a position to receive property, but I’ll take care of you. I will take care of you.”
And the slow time-bomb tick of his heart, her face pillowed on the flat rise and fall of his sour old man’s chest, “Mmm-hmm,” the ghost of her silent grin in the dark. “Mmm-hmm.”
There are all kinds of contracts, when there is money enough—she had more than you think, Raymond, more than you knew about—contracts you don’t need to be legal to sign, contracts that are in themselves illegal. Rachel knew about those kinds of contracts, but they frightened her. We’ll do it the right way, she said, we’ll take the time. Rachel was so patient.
But I couldn’t wait for her. And I won’t wait for you, either, Ray.
Because I’m not patient.
Because I’m not Rachel.
OUTNUMBERING THE DEAD
Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl has been one of the genre’s major shaping forces—as writer, editor, agent, and anthologist—for more than fifty years. He was the founder of the Star series, SF’s first continuing anthology series, and was the editor of the Galaxy group of magazines from 1960 to 1969, during which time Galaxy’s sister magazine, Worlds of If, won three consecutive Best Professional Magazine Hugos. As a writer, he has won several Nebula and Hugo Awards, as well as the American Book Award and the French Prix Apollo. His many books include several written in collaboration with the late C. M. Kornbluth—including The Space Merchants, Wolfbane, and Gladiator-at-Law. His many solo novels include Gateway, Man Plus, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, The Coming of the Quantum Cats, and The Gateway Trip. Among his collections are The Gold at the Starbow’s End, In the Problem Pit, and The Best of Frederik Pohl. His most recent books are a nonfiction book in collaboration with the late Isaac Asimov, Our Angry Earth, and a new novel, Mining the Oort.
The novella, which follows, may well be one of the best pieces that Pohl has produced during his long and distinguished career—a wise, funny, madly inventive, and ultimately quite moving look at what it’s like to be the ultimate Have-Not in a high-tech future composed almost entirely of Haves …
1
Although the place is a hospital, or as much like a hospital as makes no difference, it doesn’t smell like one. It certainly doesn’t look like one. With the flowering vines climbing its walls and the soothing, gentle plink-tink of the tiny waterfall at the head of the bed, it looks more like the de luxe suite in some old no-tell motel. Rafiel is now spruced up, replumbed and ready to go for another five years before he needs to come back to this place for more of the same, and so he doesn’t look much like a hospital patient, either. He looks like a movie star, which he more or less is, who is maybe forty years old and has kept himself fit enough to pass for twenty-something. That part’s wrong, though. After all the snipping and reaming and implanting they’ve done to him in the last eleven days, what he is a remarkably fit man of ninety-two.
* * *
When Rafiel began to wake from his designer dream he was very hungry (that was due to the eleven days he had been on intravenous feeding) and quite horny, too (that was the last of the designer dream). “B’jour, Rafiel,” said the soft, sweet voice of the nurser, intruding on his therapeutic dream as the last of it melted away. Rafiel felt the nurser’s gentle touch removing the electrodes from his cheekbones, and, knowing very well just where he was and what he had been doing there, he opened his eyes.
He sat up in the bed, pushing away the nurser’s velvety helping hand. While he was unconscious they had filled his room with flowers. There were great blankets of roses along one wall, bright red and yellow poppies on the windowsill that looked out on the deep interior court. “Momento, please,” he said to the nurser, and experimentally stretched his naked body. They had done a good job. That annoying little pain in the shoulder was gone and, when he held one hand before him, he saw that so were the age spots on his skin. He was also pleased to find that he had awakened with a perfectly immense erection. “Seems okay,” he said, satisfied.
“Hai, claro,” the nurser said. That was the server’s programmed all-purpose response to the sorts of sense-free or irrelevant things hospital patients said when they first woke up. “Your amis are waiting to come in.”
“They can wait.” Rafiel yawned, pleasantly remembering the last dream. Then, his tumescence subsiding, he slid his feet over the edge of the bed and stood up. He waved the nurser away and scowled in surprise. “Shit. They didn’t fix this little dizziness I’ve been having.”
“Voulez see your chart?” the nurser offered. But Rafiel didn’t at all want to know what they’d done to him. He took an experimental step or two, and then the nurser would no longer be denied. Firmly it took his arm and helped him toward the sanitary room. It stood by as he used the toilet and joined him watchfully in the spray shower, the moisture rolling harmlessly down its metal flanks. As it dried him off, one of its hand
s caught his finger and held on for a moment—heartbeat, blood pressure, who knew what it was measuring?—before saying, “You may leave whenever you like, Rafiel.”
“You’re very kind,” Rafiel said, because it was his nature to be polite even to machines. To human beings, too, of course. Especially to humans, as far as possible anyway, because humans were what became audiences and no sensible performer wanted to antagonize audiences. But with humans it was harder for Rafiel to be always polite, since his inner feelings, where all the resentments lay, were so frequently urging him to be the opposite—to be rude, insulting, even violent; to spit in some of these handsome young faces sometimes out of the anger that was always burning out of sight inside him. He had every right to that smouldering rage, since he was so terribly cheated in his life, but—he was a fair man—his special problem wasn’t really their fault, was it? And besides, the human race in general had one trait that forgave them most others, they adored Rafiel. At least the surveys showed that 36.9 per cent of them probably did, a rating which only a handful of utter superstars could ever hope to beat.
That sort of audience devotion imposed certain obligations on a performer. Appearance was one, and so Rafiel considered carefully before deciding what to wear for his release from the hospital. From the limited selection his hospital closet offered he chose red pantaloons, a luminous blue blouse and silk cap to cover his unmade hair. On his feet he wore only moleskin slippers, but that was all right. He wouldn’t be performing, and needed no more on the warm, soft, mossy flooring of his hospital room.
He time-stepped to the window, glancing out at the distant figures on the galleries of the hundred-meter atrium of the arcology he lived and worked in, and at the bright costumes of those strolling across the airy bridges, before he opaqued the window to study his reflection. That was satisfactory, though it would have been better if he’d had the closets in his condo to choose from. He was ready for the public who would be waiting for him—and for all the other things that would be waiting for him, too. He wondered if the redecoration of his condo had been completed, as it was supposed to have been while he was in the medical facility; he wondered if his agent had succeeded in rebooking the personal appearances he had had to miss, and whether the new show—what was it based on? Yes. Oedipus Rex. Whatever that was—had come together.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection Page 84
