Death was no longer the end of the billing cycle, apparently. I said, “How?”
“That’s a little mysterious, too. Your engrams are sort of flash-frozen. But it also involves voodoo, magic, and that’s the part the mission breakdown never mentions, because I think they’re just a little embarrassed to have to resort to a combination of science and sorcery. The process was sped up, then simplified, then streamlined, until we have the system we have now. We process dozens of wake-ups per day.”
“What do you do with them?”
“Assignments are the responsibility of the individual counselor,” she said. “Mostly it’s industrial labor, from what I hear.”
“You mean like slaves?”
Her expression pinched and she exhaled in a snort. Obviously, she was running out of time. She probably had to get another wake-up in here and start her spiel according to a clock. “Try not to think of it that way. Remember, you divested yourself of human rights when you—”
“Yes, I’m sure it’s all nice and legal,” I said. “But what about my identity? My home? My relatives? My stuff?”
“That’s just it.” She lent me a tiny grimace. “You’re not supposed to remember any of that. Maybe your name, maybe a few basic residual facts . . . but you’re talking in whole sentences. Most wake-ups act severely autistic, or comatose, or zombiatic. They told us the personality prints through in one out of a thousand clients.” It was clear she now suspected somebody of fudging the curve.
“Well, then, I’m a special case and we should—”
“No.” She overrode me. “There can’t be any special cases.”
“Who says so?” I felt twinges of remote-control strength in my arms, my legs. Perhaps if I could keep her talking long enough, I’d muster enough energy to be more assertive.
She showed me her clipboard, helplessly. “They do.”
That’s when my quiet time was up.
Another chair (more upright), another set of straps (stronger), and a conference desk. The whole sterile set-up resembled an interrogation cubicle. My counselor was named Eddin Hockney. He did not introduce himself, but had a sizable nameplate on his desk. He had attempted to avert his pattern baldness by shaving his head – and, it seemed, polishing and hot-waxing it as well. Watery brown eyes; thick spectacles; he was short and sciurine. His eyes darted furtively from detail to detail like some forest creature anxious to hoard nuts. His speech was better-rehearsed and more non-stop; as Bonnie had said, sped-up, simplified, streamlined.
“Surely you must agree that lost revenue via self-termination has always been an increasing problem,” Hockney said, not looking at me in particular, not searching me for signs of comprehension, just spilling out his rationale. “The data prove it. People try to – eh, do away with themselves, and stick anyone else with the bill. Old lovers. Ex-spouses. Heirs. Employers. Banks. Well, the credit companies just wouldn’t put up with it anymore. A country can’t function without viable credit and liquid assets. Do you know that some people actually run up their credit to the limit while they’re planning on killing themselves all along? And they expect to just skate on picking up the tab, their responsibility. Well, no longer.” He flipped pages, apparently disgusted by me.
“I don’t suppose—”
“Aht-aht-aht!” he overrode. “I don’t care. You have no rights. What I do see is an outstanding cumulative debt of $178,000. That gets you a standard Class Two work package – twenty years.”
I hadn’t put anything in my suicide note about monies owed, or regretting my expenditures.
“It’s basically robotic manual labor. You don’t retain any higher functions. If you think you do . . . well, those will fade.”
“What happens after twenty years?”
“Huh. Then you get to have a funeral. Cost is pre-figured into the package.”
It was not my bad finances that drove me to take my own life, but – possibly – the reduction of my character to no more than the sum of my debts. The badgering, the hectoring, the humiliation. The exponentially increasing lack of human connection in a world where everyone was the sum of their debts. “Death” and “debt” sounded alike for a reason, I concluded.
If what Hockney was saying was true, then I’d spend two decades lifting or slinging or swamping or whatever, losing pieces of the memory of my life every heavy step of the way. My wives, my lovers. My joys and ambitions. My concepts of beauty, or what was fair. My despair, which had driven me to purchase a handgun for several hundred dollars on credit. Pain, and my mistaken notion of how it might be ended.
But I didn’t forget.
I didn’ t forget that finest day of my life came unexpectedly in late 1990s, and that I realized what a flawless moment it had been, only in retrospect. Like most people. I didn’t forget abysmal black mood that prompted me to pick up gun. I didn’t forget that Victor Hugo wrote: Supreme happiness of life is conviction that we are loved.
Other things slipped away gradually.
My taskwork was in a large industrial foundry, using a ring-shank-handled skimmer over a crucible of ferrous lava that was channeled to several behemoth injection-molding machines. I live at foundry with other wake-ups. Constant labor is only interrupted by replenishment time: six hours of rest and an orally-pumped diet of fecal paste. Bodies relax, but no here sleeps. Sleep would provide oblivion. We are either awake, or more awake.
In this environment, flesh of wake-ups becomes tempered like steel, all leathery callus. No need for safety goggles, helmets, outerwear. Air swims with free silica and lead dust. Soluble cutting oils contain nitrosamines, which are carcinogenic. There’s sulfuric acid, mercury, chlorinated solvents, potassium cyanide, xylene, carbon monoxide, infrared radiation, nickel carbonyl, toxic plaster, ethyl silicate. In this atmosphere, hexamethylenetetramine decomposes to formaldehyde. We can receive thermal burns from spattered pours. If molten metal slops on floor, heat will vaporize water in cement, causing steam explosion. Sharp objects. Falling and crushing hazards. I do not know these things. I read them, on warnings for supers, who are normal humans. I can still read.
I can read control number on forehead of wake-up working next to me. 730823. Used to be black man, half his head gone, replaced by a mannequin blank – half his number is printed on plastic, half tattooed on flesh. A tear falls from his single eye and makes a white path through black soot. When I weep, my tears leave black trails on white skin. My number is 550713.
Children work here. Ex-kids. Not suicides. Others, who damned sure didn’t kill themselves. Victims of others. I think supers are lying about program for wake-ups.
We cannot feel sparks of forge, though they hit us and sizzle.
I think: We are not supposed to be abk to read, or feel, or cry, or remember. But I do.
And if I do, big vat of steel below might be crucible not of rebirth, but of re-death. I am special case. Exception. Maybe exceptional enough to will my foot closer to edge. Drop isn’t far.
Very odd, to submerge in metal hot enough to instantly vaporize my eyes . . . and feel nothing. Hot solar light and shock of obliteration.
Then a voice, saying, “Welcome to Phase Three debriefing, Number 550713.”
KARL EDWARD WAGNER WAS one of the genre’s finest practitioners of horror and dark fantasy, and his untimely death in 1994 robbed the field of one of its major talents.
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Wagner earned his M.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in 1974 and trained as a psychiatrist before becoming a multiple British Fantasy and World Fantasy Award-winning author, editor and publisher. His early writing included a series of fantasy novels and stories featuring Kane, the Mystic Swordsman. His first novel, Darkness Weaves With Many Shades (1970), introduced the unusually intelligent and brutal warrior-sorcerer, and Kane’s adventures continued in Death Angel’s Shadow, Bloodstone, Dark Crusade and the collections Night Winds and The Book of Kane. More recently, the complete Kane novels and stories have been brought together in
two volumes by Night Shade Books as Gods in Darkness and Midnight Sun.
He edited three volumes of Robert E. Howard’s definitive Conan adventures and continued the exploits of two of Howard’s characters, Conan and Bran Mak Morn respectively, in the novels The Road of Kings and Legion from the Shadows. He also edited three Echoes of Valor heroic fantasy anthologies and a collection of medical horror stories, Intensive Scare. He took over the editing of The Year’s Best Horror Stories in 1980 and for the next fourteen years turned it into one of the genre’s finest showcases.
Wagner’s own superior short horror tales were collected in In a Lonely Place, Why Not You and I? and Unthreatened by the Morning Light. A tribute collection entitled Exorcisms and Ecstasies was published in 1997.
“Health is such a chancy thing,” explained the author. “And so precious.
“That’s why there are doctors.
“That’s why you go to them.
“But you are afraid of them. Afraid of their offices and hospitals. Afraid of their questions and examinations. Afraid of their poking and probing. Afraid of their pills and needles. Afraid of their scalpels and sutures. Afraid of lying helpless and naked beneath the sterile murmur of fluorescent lights.
“Helpless.
“Can you understand their jargon, their professional aloofness? The half-hearted words, distracted frowns, and flutter of charts and lab reports? The impersonal cluster of peering faces over your bed?
“Best not to try. Just lie there and trust. And pray. What’s your choice?
“But then . . .
“Suppose the doctor isn’t just what you imagined?
“You’re lying there on the bed, vulnerable and half-naked in a humiliating hospital gown.
“You see, scalpels don’t care who they cut.
“And no one ever gets well in a hospital.
“You’re never closer to death. Never more helpless. This is real terror.
“Trust me.
“I’m a doctor.”
I
“I HAD A FRIEND at St Johns you would have liked to have met,” observed Dr Metzger. “At least the idea you’ve brought up reminds me of some of our old undergraduate bull sessions.”
“Bull sessions?” responded Dr Thackeray, his frosty brows wavering askance.
Geoff laughed easily. “Never underestimate the value of a liberal arts background, Dr Thackeray. St Johns men could find loftier subjects to drain a keg of beer over than the matter of a cheerleader’s boobs – especially with cheerleaders in short supply.
“No, Kirk Walker was something of a medievalist – and certainly a romanticist. Fancied himself the last of the Renaissance men, or some such, I imagine. Anyway, he used to put away booze like a Viking raiding party, and often he’d kick around some impossibly half-assed ideas. Argue them with dignified tenacity through all our hooting – and you were never sure whether he was serious, or handing us another piece of outrageous whimsy.
“But one of the points he liked to bring up was this idea that modern science, as we call it, isn’t all that modern. Maintained that substantial scientific knowledge and investigation have existed on a recondite basis since early history – and not just as hocus-pocus and charlatanry.”
“As I have suggested,” Dr Thackeray nodded, drawing on his cigar and tilting his padded desk chair a fraction closer to overbalance.
“Pity Kirk isn’t here to talk with a kindred soul,” Geoff Metzger continued. “He used to drag out all manner of evidence to support his claim. Go on about Egyptian artifacts, Greek thinkers, Byzantine and later Roman writings, Islamic studies after the Roman Lake changed owners, Jewish cabalism, secret researches by certain monks, on through the Dark Ages and into the so-called Renaissance – even threw out bits of Chinese history. He’d go wild talking about the quattrocento and the cinquecento and dozens of Italian names no one else had heard of- then Central Europe and France and England, and people like Bacon and Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. That was really the astonishing thing. I mean, all of us at St Johns were supposed to be well read and well versed in the classics and those great and mouldy books, but Kirk was something else. God knows how much that guy must have read!”
“Your friend Walker sounds like a man I ought to meet,” Dr Thackeray broke in.
Metzger’s face saddened. “I’m sorry to say you can’t. Quite a tragic story about old Kirk. He went on to med school after St Johns, too – some big Southern school of notable reputation. Wasn’t happy there for some reason, and ran afoul of the administration. Left after a rather stormy scene. Died not long thereafter – Hodgkins, I believe. Everyone felt bad about it at the time.”
“A pity.”
“Yes, it was. I must say I’m surprised to find someone of your position giving credence to such similar ideas. Guess maybe we took Kirk more lightly than we might have. Still, he was always one for elaborate jokes. Strange guy.” Geoff s eye fell to wandering along the impressively filled shelves which lined Dr Thackeray’s office. These walls of conglomerate knowledge – concentrated to blocky solidity, properly bound and systematically shelved – exuded the weighty atmosphere of learned dignity that one expected for the sanctum of the Chairman of the Department of Medicine.
“And why did your friend believe this unsuspected depth of scientific knowledge was kept in secret?” the older man asked carefully.
“Kirk was vague,” returned Metzger, downing his acrid coffee before it got colder. A grimy residue stained the bottom of the Styrofoam cup, and he reflected bitterly that hospital coffee deteriorated with every medical center he came to.
“He had several reasons, though. For one thing, he’d argue that our basic conception of the past comes through writings of the past, and that these writers viewed their world from their own particular set of terms. The idea of progress – in fact, the conception of science as we understand it – is a relatively modern development of thought. In another age this was altogether different. To the bulk of the populace, scientific knowledge would have been no more than a pointless exercise, useless to them. What would a serf care about a microscope? It wouldn’t clothe and feed him. What would an intellectual care about the discovery of microorganisms? Plagues were the punishment of God or the work of Satan.
“And the language of the day was totally different; there simply were no words – nor even systems of thought- to convey scientific conceptions. Thus every man who studied the stars was an astrologer, while the thoughtful investigator of elemental or molecular structure was only another alchemist seeking to create gold. And to be sure, many of these men were only superstitious dabblers in the occult. With the ignorance or even hostility of most writers of the day, fool and genius were lumped together, and the early scientist was categorized as being in league with the devil. He was ignored and mocked at best, more often persecuted by the authorities of the land. We know of several brilliant thinkers who were condemned to the stake for their efforts – or had near misses, like Galileo.
“It is any wonder then that Walker’s protoscientists kept their work secret, shared their discoveries only with a select brotherhood? At least, that was Kirk’s theory.”
Dr Thackeray considered his cigar. “Interesting. And, as you say, tragic. Medicine needs men of his caliber – and men like yourself, Dr Metzger.”
Geoff smiled at the compliment. Coming from the Grand Old Man, it meant a lot. “I consider myself fortunate to be associated with the medical center here.”
“Good. And I’ll say that we’re all delighted you decided to join us. You’re a capable man, Dr Metzger; your record is brilliant. Those of us who have watched you feel certain you’ll go far in medicine – farther, perhaps, than you might imagine.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Not at all. I’m merely stating facts. I knew your father during my residency, you know, and he was a splendid physician himself. So I’m pleased that you decided to take a position here at the Center. It’s good to learn the facilities are up to your expectatio
ns, and that you’re getting your lab set up to suit you.”
He gestured toward the sheaf of papers Geoff had carried with him. “I like the way you’ve drawn this together. I’d say it’s dead certain the grant will go through.”
“I’m counting on it, sir.”
Dr Thackeray brandished his cigar. “Oh, it will. It will. You’ve stated the scientific aspects of it beautifully – and now we’ll handle the political end of things. Politics, as you’ll learn, count for a great deal. A very great deal, Dr Metzger.”
“No doubt,” laughed Geoff drily.
It had been a good move, thought Metzger, pausing to look over his new lab facilities. A damn good move. He could make his name here at the Center.
It was a heady feeling to be in charge of his own research project – a major project at the medical center of considerable renown – and still a young man by his colleagues’ standards. But Geoffrey Metzger was inured to honors.
He was, after all, the Center’s prize catch – hotly contested for by any number of major institutions. Head of his class at St Johns and at Harvard Medical School, and he could have been one of the youngest men to finish, if he had not chosen the round-about course of a liberal arts education, a few sojourns in Europe, and a combined M.D.-Ph.D. (biochemistry) program at Harvard. Afterward he had taken his pick of the most prestigious internships and residencies, finishing as chief resident in one of the nation’s best hospital centers. Then a stint with the Public Health Service in the poverty belt – in effect voluntary, since his family connections were sufficient to keep him out of military service.
An uncle with a governorship, a brother doing Very Well in the vice-presidential ladder of a Very Big corporation, and a “good marriage”, socially. Another brother was becoming known in legal medicine, and his father-in-law was partner in a string of ENT clinics in Detroit. Medicine had called members of his family for several generations. Geoff had himself followed his father into internal medicine. His father, very influential in the A.M.A., had been supposedly slated for its top post at the time of his death from a coronary.
The Mammoth Book of Terror Page 30
