Asimov's Science Fiction 03/01/11
Page 18
“You know,” I say, on my way out the door, “the guys from Vendi liked my proofs just fine.”
Jurgen rolls his eyes. “What can you expect from the Japanese?”
I wander the skywalks in a daze, tower to tower. In an enclosed glass footbridge I pause and watch a storm develop over the triple cities, even though my phone tells me no storms are scheduled till the end of the week.
I decide to call Ming. He answers after twenty-seven rings.
“Hey. How are things? Joseph, isn’t it?” Ming’s eyes sparkle like stars.
“It’s Ray,” I say. “And I’m losing my mind.”
“Oh, that’s right. You’re limming.” His face literally beams at me, projecting golden rays. Through the audio I hear him tapping and shuffling, looking up my file. “A face. A bus ride. Flashing lights. We’ve been running curtains, shoes, and cigarettes on you. The cigarettes are a bust. I see you haven’t used the scent pack. You say you’ve been getting some bleedthrough?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The subliminals. They’re working up into your conscious thoughts? You’re seeing things? Getting flashbacks? Mood swings?”
“I’m flipping out,” I say. “I just blew an important contract.”
“It’s your memory, champ. You’re not used to using it.”
“They’re paying me in collectibles, Ming. If they decide to pay me at all.”
“I used to collect things, once,” Ming says. “Butterflies. Shark teeth. Now there’s some guy in Malaysia who does it for me. A trust fund, you know. I wonder if he still keeps up with it.”
“Ming, I’ve got to find her.”
“His name is Ananda. He works by referral only. I could give you a letter, but I can’t promise anything.”
“Ming, what are you talking about?”
“I was in coins, after teeth. Then newspapers. Then coral. Then coins again. I should have stayed with coral. It’s dying out the fastest.”
“The girl, Ming. Not the collector. I’m talking about the girl. The girl with curly hair, from my memory. The girl who meant something to me, once.”
Ming frowns, and a question mark glows above his head. “I thought you said you were moving into collectibles.”
“I’ve got to find her,” I say. “She gave me hope, Ming. Do you know what that’s like?”
His image is all warm smiles and sunshine, but I hear him sigh. “Look, Joe. I mean, Ray. We’re zeroing in. But it takes time. Currently, we’ve got significant ocular response to a curtain swatch. Only three companies have ever used the pattern. They track usage, of course, through public photo uploads, and if we kick over some credit I can tap their indices—”
“How much, Ming?”
“Excuse me?”
“How much credit will this take?”
“Backed by collectibles? I don’t know. Unless you’re trading in scrimshaw. I heard the last sperm whale died last week. Not to put too fine a point on it, Ray, but—”
“Forget it. I’ll give up on the pocket accounts, tap my savings portfolio. Just find her, Ming. Please.”
Monday is a new account, a flight to Nebraska, an agribusiness tycoon in an office tower grinning over stock photography.
Tuesday is a recreational day. Wednesday is my recovery from the recreational day. Thursday is also a recovery.
Friday I fly to Johannesburg to replenish my supply of recreational substances.
Saturday through Tuesday are a blur.
Wednesday night is recuperation in the arms of a busty brunette. She calls me Duce and I call her Clara. I feed her lingerie from the hall dispenser. She asks me to strip and stand in the corner. “Nice crumpets,” she tells me, and I force a laugh.
Thursday, Ming calls. “You reacted in a big way to government housing in Paris. Lots of ocular response, skin conductivity spikes. We’re getting close.”
Sunday, I’m evicted from my apartment. It’s not my fault: the whole building has been torn down. Seems the Israeli landlord invested too heavily in cold fusion. “Tough break, champ,” the new AI landlord says.
Sunday night I have a breakdown. I see visions. I’m on a Paris street. I hear the ocean. I’m on a cliff above the sea. I’m lost in a magic palace in which all rooms connect, looking for someone, but I can’t seem to find her . . . I feel my mother’s presence. Does my mother live near the sea? Last I heard, my mother was designing belts in Moscow. Is this even my own memory, my own past?
Someone told me once that it’s better to forget the past. An angel. Or perhaps it was my father. At any rate, I’m starting to see what he meant.
More visions of the girl with curly hair. Yellow light glows behind her, cigarette smoke trickles past her eyes. The sensation of hope is like a taste, like honeydew, like fruit punch.
On Monday, Ming calls again. “We found her.”
I book a red-eye to Spain. My mystery girl lives there, according to Ming. Her name is Jeanine. I say the name to myself repeatedly. It’s charming and strange that the girl should have a name.
In the airport I realize I ought to warn Jeanine I’m coming. I take out my phone. What if Jeanine speaks only Spanish? I make sure my translation software is up to date and leave a voice message. I try to be vague but not creepy, suave but not sleazy.
The flight passes in a haze of video games. Spain rises around me, old stone foundations capped with glassy towers. Is this Barcelona? Did it used to be Barcelona? The signs are in an unfamiliar script. The people speak a strange language, not Spanish, not English. My wristex GPS guides me over a medley of pavements, cobbles and concrete slabs, macadam, recycled lignin binding artificial soilbeds.
I’m in the city center when Jeanine calls back. On my wrist, she looks just as I remember, small, pretty, bangs in her eyes.
“Ray?” She speaks English, with a faint Irish accent.
“You remember me.”
Her face is hard to read. Amusement? Anger? She says, “Oh, you bet.”
We meet in a bookshop, a paneled parlor with rickety chairs. People line up at the recycler, dumping in old books and wedding catalogs, waiting as the scrubber and printer grind away, walking off happily with travel guides and magazines.
Jeanine sits at a table by the coffee bar. When I see her, it hits me again—pure hope, so powerful it nearly unhinges my knees. It’s like arriving in a new country, like buying a new home.
I sit across from her. We watch each other for a long time.
“Listen,” I say. “I’m going to level with you, Jeanine. I don’t remember you very well. You know the story: life is hectic, things move too fast. It’s overwhelming, it’s overstimulating—frankly, I don’t have time to worry about it. I found you with a lim. I want you to know that.”
Jeanine lights a cigarette.
“I remember your face,” I say. “I remember you with a cigarette, just like now. I remember that you meant something to me, once. You gave me hope.”
Jeanine takes a drag. Smoke pours from her nose. The future is here, imminent and wonderful; I can sense it, a wilderness of lights rushing up to swallow me, dazzling and hopeful like a city below a plane.
“Unbelievable,” Jeanine says.
I prickle with fear.
“You don’t remember. You really don’t.”
I grip my coffee cup with both hands. “I want to remember. Please.”
“Poor Ray. Still living the fast life, after all these years.”
The book recycler thumps and growls. A bookstore patron walks away with a celebrity memoir.
“It’s a wild life, isn’t?” says Jeanine. “A bright, exciting world. And it keeps getting better and better, all the time.”
For the first time in my life I feel truly lost. I see myself standing atop a palace by the sea. Is it a memory? What does the image mean?
“Eight years ago,” Jeanine says, tapping ash from her cigarette, “I was a young untalented artist, living in Paris. You showed up on my doorstep, said you knew me fro
m somewhere, just like now. A vision, you said, a memory. You scared me, at first. But you were so hopeful. You really believed.”
Construction-bots are remodeling a building across the street, turning it into a shoe store. “What happened?” I whisper.
“What do you think? It was thrilling, at first. Like a hunt for buried treasure. We traveled Europe, talked through the night. We looked at old photographs, films, journals, games. I was so excited. Think of it! A handsome man, coming out of the blue, talking about fate and hope.
“It was thrilling,” Jeanine says, “and then it wasn’t. All the searching we did. So many moments, so many records. I couldn’t believe how much I’d forgotten.”
She aims her cigarette at my eyes: a challenge.
“Was that really me in the photographs? That girl with the ponytail? Had I really lived in that house, kissed that boy? Was that really my online journal; were those really my childhood friends? It was grueling. The closer we looked at the past, the more distant it seemed. I started to think about what it means, then—to be a ghost in a machine.”
“But we found something,” I say. “We must have found something. I remember . . .”
“We sure tried. We paid the government datajocks everything we had. Dig up the past for us, tell us what it means! Quite a racket those folks run.”
The coffee shop is changing around us, wood turning to metal, glass to fabric. My chair shrinks, buckles, folds in on itself, so gently that I scarcely notice I’m sinking toward the floor. A passing man notices my discomfiture, waves and laughs. “Remodeling,” he says. “Every morning at nine. Programmable nano-materials. Isn’t it neat?”
Did he really say “neat”? Is my translation software up to date?
Jeanine is changing, too. She taps something behind her ear. Her hair turns yellow. Her curls uncurl. Long, straight locks hang around her eyes. Her muscles twitch, tense; her face pulls back, tight on the bones. New eyebrow hairs sprout; her lipstick changes color; her eyes phase from gray to blue.
“But our connection,” I say desperately. “We had a connection. We meant something to each other.”
Jeanine is taller now, thinner. My chair has become a cushion. We’re in a Japanese tearoom, all cedar and clean lines.
“What do you want the past to be, Ray?” Her voice is changed, unfamiliar. She has a French accent. She looks at her cigarette. “Isn’t that the point?”
“Were we lovers?” I say. “Friends? Siblings? Are you a celebrity? Help me, Jeanine, please. I feel—I don’t know what I feel.”
Jeanine is now a blonde woman, young and tall. When she taps her cigarette, it turns to smoke and blows away. She lifts a handbag off a nearby table. “I’m late for an appointment. And my name isn’t Jeanine, these days. It’s Daphne.”
“Help!” I shout, falling off my cushion. “Please help me remember!”
Daphne pauses. Is that pity in her eyes, or disgust?
“At this point in my life, Ray, I’m more focused on forgetting.”
She doesn’t look back as she heads for the door.
The next weeks are a flurry of flights, rescheduling, damage control. Moscow, Tokyo, Mumbai, Prague. I live on energy boosters, vitamins, cocaine, caffeine. I plug into the sleep-simulation booths for ten-minute naps, make it through whole workweeks on two hours of sleep. I ride a wave of drugs and lights, soothed by the hands of prettyboys and chickadees, harried by a dozen new contracts I’ve taken on.
One day I have an attack. Total memory breakdown. I can’t remember my job, my address, not even my age. When I come to I’m in a Toronto apartment, hardwood floors, plenty of light. A new building by a new canal, watery reflections winking through the windows.
My mind is a blank slate, raw from its recent cleansing. It’s better this way. It’s important to adapt. I appoint the apartment in disposable furniture, order new shirts. Plaid is back, apparently, and lace.
Apparently, I’m involved in some sort of agribusiness contract. It pays off big. Industrial pith, pyrethrum. My contact’s name is Claire.
“I knew a Claire, once,” I say. “I believe she had good taste in shirts. You don’t think—?”
Claire shakes her head. “Until last week, I was a man.”
Claire and I head home and rip my disposable bed from the wall. We tussle. We gasp. When I compliment her crumpets, she laughs. “I love retro slang.”
Only one thing mars the moment. A vision: I’m in a palace by the ocean, searching for someone in the countless rooms. I find him at last; he embraces me, feather-soft and blonde, a young strong angel in my arms.
I file a mental note to call Ming tomorrow. Rent a lim kit, track down the scene. Just one problem, one cause for doubt.
When have I ever lived by the sea?
Copyright © 2011 Nick Wolven
Previous Article POETRY
POETRY
The Spirit Rover Longs to Bask in the Sunshine
Geoffrey A. Landis
THE SPIRIT ROVER LONGS TO BASK IN SUNSHINE Although one crippled wheel drags behind, we must outrace the sinking of the sun. To survive the winter, for which we weren’t designed, Spirit must drive to find a sunlit home. The burned-out wheel turns soil like a plow, excavating sand, a drag upon our...
Top of POETRY
SHORT STORIES DEPARTMENTS
POETRY
The Spirit Rover Longs to Bask in the Sunshine
Geoffrey A. Landis
THE SPIRIT ROVER LONGS TO BASK
IN SUNSHINE
Although one crippled wheel drags behind, we must outrace the sinking of the sun.
To survive the winter, for which we weren’t designed,
Spirit must drive to find a sunlit home.
The burned-out wheel turns soil like a plow, excavating sand, a drag upon our motion.
We dig through sand to sulfate salt below, the buried trace of vanished ancient ocean.
We cannot pause to follow up:
we move or die. We cannot stop.
To tilt its solar cells into the day’s sun we need a hillside angled to the north.
Spirit must drive to reach a winter haven, for winter comes, and days grow cold and short.
—Geoffrey A. Landis
Copyright © 2011 Geoffrey A. Landis
DEPARTMENTS
DEPARTMENTS
Editorial
Sheila Williams
EDITORIAL Sheila Williams NEAL BARRET, JR. Last spring, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named Neal Barrett, Jr., the 2010 Author Emeritus. I was honored to be asked to introduce him at SFWA’s Nebula Awards Banquet in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The following editorial is a slightly...
Reflections
Robert Silverberg
REFLECTIONS Robert Silverberg THE PLOT GENIE Along time ago—1973, as a matter of fact—Sherry Gottlieb, who used to run a science fiction bookstore in Los Angeles, gave me a copy of a book called The Plot Genie, which was intended, an even longer time ago, to provide writers with handy formulas for...
On the Net
James Patrick Kelly
On the Net James Patrick Kelly NEW BRAINS FOR OLD remembering When I began writing this column, what I thought I was about was finding websites that readers of Asimov’s might like to check out. But as time passed it became clear that the net was not only a vast digital library, but also a toolset...
NEXT ISSUE
APRIL/MAY DOUBLE ISSUE There’s a bit of a Steampunk feel to our colossal April/May double issue. A journey of discovery is related in Alexander Jablokov’s complex and compelling cover story about a pair of intrepid twins. On “The Day the Wires Came Down,” this enchanting twosome uncovered a few...
ON BOOKS
NESFA Rules! Who—or what—is a NESFA? The acronym stands for the New England Science Fiction Association, and you can find them at POB 809, Framingham, MA 01701. Or, more swiftly, online at www.nesfa.org. They are a fannish organization of deep roots and vast traditions, one of which is publishing...
The spring convention season gets off to an early start. Boskone (where I’ll be), ConDFW, ConDor, Potlatch, StellarCon, FantaSciCon, and LunaCon (me again) are good—something near no matter where you live. Plan now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans....
Top of DEPARTMENTS
POETRY INFORMATION
Next Article
DEPARTMENTS
Editorial
Sheila Williams
EDITORIAL Sheila Williams
NEAL BARRET, JR.
Last spring, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named Neal Barrett, Jr., the 2010 Author Emeritus. I was honored to be asked to introduce him at SFWA’s Nebula Awards Banquet in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The following editorial is a slightly revised version of my remarks. Neal’s latest story can be found on page 26.
Possum Dark watched the van disappear into the shop. He felt uneasy at once. His place was on top. Keeping Ginny from harm. . . . Dog locked the gate and turned around. Didn’t come closer, just turned.
“I’m Dog Quick, he said folding hairy arms. “I don’t care much for Possums.”
“I don’t care for Dogs,” said Possum Dark.
Dog seemed to understand. “What did you do before the War?”
“Worked in a theme park. Our Wildlife Heritage. That kind of shit. What about you?”
“Security, what else? Dog made a face. “Learned a little electrics. . . . He nodded toward the shop. “You like to shoot people with that thing?”
“Anytime I get the chance.”
“You ever play any cards?”
“Some.” Possum Dark showed his teeth. “I guess I could handle myself with a Dog.
“For real goods?” Dog returned the grin.
“New deck, unbroken seal, table stakes,” Possum said.