In the Deadlands

by David Gerrold

  The police fired into a crowd of demonstrating students, killing three of them.

  A famous rock star died of an accidental overdose of drugs, and, a week later, a presidential candidate was assassinated.

  Perhaps the two of them had been directly touched by some of these incidents, perhaps not—it didn’t make much difference. The times were such that no one could long ignore the one recurring fact of human fragility—that all men are perpetually on the edge of death.

  It touched him, how close he was to death, how close they both were. Suppose that pickup truck had been just a little faster. Suppose they had been visiting in Laurel Canyon. Suppose they had turned out for the demonstration—or even for the political rally. How close would the bullet have come?

  So he cried at the unfairness of it all. Trapped in life, they were thus condemned to death. The dreadful inevitability of it chilled his flesh and made him unable to speak.

  She asked him what was the matter and he said, “I can’t explain, I can’t say—”

  “Is it something I’ve done, oh dearest, please let me share your tears.”

  He shook his head no, but she kept asking, so at last he whispered, “It’s death—I’m afraid of it.”

  “Oh, no, no—” She tried to deny it. “Death isn’t to be feared. It’s to be accepted.”

  “I know, I know—but it’s not just my own death I fear—it’s the death of us. The death of our love.”

  And at that, she felt the chill, although she did not yet know why she should feel so.

  “We’re two people,” he explained. “Two. Sooner or later, one of us will die and the other will be alone. And I can’t bear that thought. I can’t bear the thought of me without you—or the thought of you without me. I don’t want to hurt you—ever.” And he cried again, great heaving sobs.

  She cried too, for she could not stand to see him in such sorrow.

  Perhaps it was a foolish thing to cry over. Perhaps not. The terrible part about love is that it is always doomed. Always. Even if it should last a lifetime, it has to end with death.

  At last she kissed away his tears and whispered, “But my love—that’s what makes it so precious. Because it’s so impermanent. Because it can only happen once.”

  He lay there and looked at her, but said nothing.

  She said, “What we must be happy about is that we have each other now, that we have this happiness, and that nobody will ever be able to take it away from us. This love is ours.”

  “But it’s not, it’s not,” he insisted. “It’s only for a little while—and then time, that damnable thief, will steal it from us.” The tears were streaked on his face. “It’s not enough. Why couldn’t it last forever? Why shouldn’t it? Why should we have to grow old? Will I still love you after years of watching your beautiful body decay? Will you still love me when I’m withered and wasted? Will we learn to hate each other because the familiar actions will have become so boring that they’re contemptuous? Will death be only a blessed release from a painful binding? Or will it be a parting that—that destroys us?” His voice caught suddenly. “We could die tomorrow—either one of us, or both—” he realized. “An accident could rob us of our future; we could be cheated even of that. Oh, I love you, but we’re doomed to sorrows.” And then the tears flowed again, because in the night, alone, with only the two of them in that big bed, with only each other, forever seemed like such an incredible vastness, a long, long emptiness—

  They both cried that night, in each other’s arms.

  They were young, and the young are always slightly foolish. It gives a flavor of whimsy and zest to their lovemaking that the old can only remember and envy. There is an innocence and naiveté that only the young and the young at heart can experience.

  But always after that night, that one eternal and aware night, always it seemed as if their lovemaking had an air of urgency about it—as if this might be the last time that they would hold each other, the last time that they would be able to look longingly into each other’s eyes and be immersed in that beautiful intensity of emotion.

  They were so very much in love.

  There was an alternative to sorrow.

  And in that they were lucky, too. For this was an age when the secret had been unlocked and the answer was there for the asking.

  He brought up the subject first. She was hesitant, a bit scared—and very cautious. “Is it dangerous?”

  “No,” he reassured her. “And it will bring us even closer together. The intensity of our love will never die out.”

  She wanted to—because he wanted to, and she wanted to please him. Then, as she listened and studied, she came to understand what was required and what would happen—and she began to want it for herself, too. She realized his reasons for wanting to take the step, and she began to feel the same. It would let her love him even more intensely—and forever.

  So she said yes. Her reasons were selfish. So were his. They both wanted to preserve something delicate, something flowering. They wanted to freeze that perfect penultimate moment and stretch it from here to infinity.

  Wide-eyed and innocent, they were too much in love.

  What happened was this:

  First they gave her sodium pentothal to put her to sleep. Then, after she had fallen asleep, they gave her another anesthetic, a local one; they lowered her body temperature and put her in an ice bath. They shaved part of her head and peeled back a portion of her scalp. Carefully, they cut a hole in her skull. And they implanted a device.

  It was a thing of colloidal plastics; it had been grown layer by layer in a process that was part photographic etching and part chemical engineering and overall somehow akin to organic growth. The device was powered by ions which it took from the red blood cells which passed through it and it modified the electrical impulses of the brain to which it was attached. One of the output leads went directly to the pleasure center.

  They sewed up her skull and they brought her temperature back to normal and then they wheeled her into the recovery room.

  Then they did the same thing to him.

  The devices were identical in function. They were little computers with dual-coded transceivers tuned to each other; each one took information from certain sections of the brain. Each one had outputs to certain others, notably the pleasure center.

  The devices were two halves of the same circuit; they gathered information, they coded it and they exchanged it.

  The effect on the lovers was telepathic—no, empathic. The tiny plastic monitors tuned them to each other’s rhythms, made them incomplete without each other.

  There were adjustments to be made, of course. Her glandular rhythms were not the same as his; his emotional cycles were not always compatible with hers. Sometimes they had headaches.

  When this happened, they had to go back to the doctors. The master computer would be patched into their circuit and the problems would be analyzed. The big machine knew their special code frequencies and it could reprogram each device into more careful alignment with the other.

  This process of reprogramming and adjustment went on for many months. But they didn’t mind; their love was total. It was ecstasy unlimited. They were closer together than they had ever been before.

  Now they were tuned to each other. They were ready to take the next step.

  They returned to the doctors and they were strapped to tables. Needles were put into their arms and into their legs. Plastic tubes fed into their lungs and into their bladders. Wires were connected to their heads and to various parts of their bodies.

  But they knew nothing of this, for they had already fallen asleep...

  Asleep. In a timeless world of light and color, modeled in music and structure too complex to follow. It was a fluorescent world of yes and no, of existences and nonexistences, intense glowing planes against ultimate blackness, references without textures—had there been eyes to see it, they would have slid maddeningly across the glimmering surfaces. The colors swirled and cha
nged. Somewhere a monitor circuit triggered and somewhere else, another circuit began the laborious process of uniting the two entities as one.

  The bodies breathed. Regularly. Slowly. With a steadiness that no human impulse could have originated. The chemical balances were perfect; they had to be for the machines to function. Bit by bit, two souls were joining; two flickering consciousnesses were becoming closer than any two had ever been before.

  He was becoming she, and she was becoming he. They would be one person sharing two bodies—and if these two bodies died, they would exist without them in the mind of the computer, or they would find new bodies. But the important thing was that they would never be apart.

  Never.

  A single tear welled up in his right eye. A matching tear appeared in her left.

  A technician noticed and wiped them away, but whether they were tears of joy or unhappiness no one would ever know but these two.

  Long after the adventure had been forgotten, long after their bodies and the bodies of the doctors who had ministered to them had crumbled into dust, they still endured; the two of them lived as the flux of patterns within a mighty complex; their existences were fantastically more varied than any living human being could have conceived. Their wonder was bright and their love was intense and endless.

  They were not alone. There were others, hundreds, thousands, millions of others, all of whom had chosen not to die but to live on in this curious glittering web. But these two were special—not because they were among the first, but because they were curiously different from the rest.

  “For one thing,” explained a master technician to his apprentices in a far-removed century, “these two patterns are identical. They act, react, and respond in unison to every imaginable impulse or set of impulses. For that reason, we’re sure that they’re only monitor patterns maintained in the matrix as a control for all the other patterns. Certainly, it would make no sense to duplicate any single individual this way, there’s no purpose for it—but there is a purpose for monitors and self-comparison controls. This year we expect to add at least three million patterns to the hereafter matrices. We have to keep our transmission errors below one in every one billion bits. That’s why these monitor patterns are so important.

  “One of the first things you learned in information theory is that information held in storage tends to decay; but the whole purpose of the hereafter matrices is to prevent decay of the personality patterns of the individuals within. We use these two monitor patterns for that purpose...”

  The master technician droned on, lost in his lesson and unaware of the vast changes that had come about in the world; he was only a victim of it too, not a master.

  He perceived himself as a floating silver sphere; that was his identity module, a sensory device which did his traveling for him. The students were lesser modules, colored to show their status and identity. The bodies, if any, were removed elsewhere, floating in weightless tanks of nutrients.

  The interface between man and machine had become so total that it no longer existed—man and machine were two parts of the same entity, a vast many-faceted being. The range of possible experience for the human mind had become unlimited.

  This was a world where sex was an electronic experience, programmed for maximum impact. Love was unnecessary. This was a world where electronic telepathy allowed all minds to be one. Hence, love was a perversion. This was a world where bodies were only inefficient storage units, to be replaced as soon as possible. Thus, love was a psychosis. Physical coupling no longer existed, mental coupling had been forgotten, and pair bonding was an unknown process.

  In his glorious reach for godhood, man had been liberated from his body; and with it, he had been liberated from all the bloody-animal experiences that went with it. Love was unknown.

  “But these are human patterns, aren’t they?” asked an apprentice. “Aren’t they aware?”

  “They’re pseudo-human patterns,” corrected the master. “But I understand what you’re asking. Yes, they’re aware—but it’s a theta two awareness, a false awareness. Originally, these two patterns had been tied together with a comparison and correction circuit—that is they monitored each other and adjusted continually, but we eliminated that centuries ago, and also removed some of the memory inconsistencies which had been allowed to appear in each. We couldn’t erase the crystals completely, of course, but we could reprogram them. Now, instead of each pattern looking at the other, they look only at themselves and each thinks it’s seeing its opposite number. So you see, they aren’t really aware at all—and even if they were, they wouldn’t mind. After all, they’re happy, aren’t they?”

  AFTERWORD:

  Someone reading these last few stories might assume that I have a jaundiced view of human emotions. Especially love.

  They’d be right and they’d be wrong.

  They’d be wrong because it’s a mistake trying to psychoanalyze an author through the stories he tells. But they’d be right to the extent that I was sorting out a lot of conflicting experiences about the nature of relationships. It was a wild and desperate decade.

  In truth, looking back from this distance, these stories are all evidence that I’m a hopeless romantic. I believe in the possibility of a profound connection between two human beings.

  These stories were about some of the stuff that gets in the way.

  They depressed me. A lot. Probably more than they depressed the readers.

  Once I noticed that, I started writing a different kind of love story. Unfortunately, none of those are in this collection. That came later. Sorry about that.

  Skinflowers

  This is the other story I sold to that reckless editor.

  It’s not a bad story—but I’ve never been able to figure it out. Is it a horror story or what?

  Perhaps if I understood it, I’d think better of it.

  On Wednesday, there were bristly patches on the backs of his hands. They looked like a field of tiny white goose bumps and gave his skin a sandpapery feeling. He didn’t like it; he was in the habit of rubbing the back of one hand against his cheek. He hadn’t shaved this morning and the roughness of his hand matched the roughness of his face. It disturbed him.

  —and yet, somehow, the scratchiness of the sensation was intriguing. As he rubbed his bristly hands thoughtfully, he decided not to shave at all.

  On Thursday, the bumps on his hands were stiffer. They seemed to be growing into tiny little spines. Although they were firm, they weren’t rigid. They stood away from the skin, but they could be pressed back into it without any feeling. They weren’t painful, so he felt a curious lack of distress about them.

  Friday, the first of the flowers appeared.

  The spines were noticeably longer by then. Most had tiny swellings at their ends. One or two of the swellings had begun to open up into little cuplike shapes, but it wasn’t until Saturday that there were recognizable clusters on each hand.

  The blossoms were carefully shaped cups, one at the end of each pale stem; a fleshy convex lens. They were as white as bloodless skin.

  Saturday was when he first began to be aware of them—really aware. And curious. Why was there a field of delicate flowers on the back of each of his hands and wrists? Turning on the high intensity lamp over his desk, he examined them carefully.

  The stems were less than a quarter inch in length. They were flexible and seemed to be extensions of the skin itself. The blossoms were shaped like dichondra, each a single white cusp. He felt no sensation from then at all.

  Some kind of growth, perhaps—? He tried cutting them off with a razor. The smaller ones came off easily, but the larger flowers tugged and resisted as if their stems were beginning to become cartilaginous. The scissors worked better than the razor, but it left uneven and bristly stubs. They felt as scraggly as a three-day beard and they looked even worse. Besides, cutting the flowers gave him an uneasy feeling—as if he were amputating part of himself. So he stopped with his left hand. He didn’t c
ut the flowers from his right one.

  He didn’t go out on Saturday—except once to the grocery store. The gloves he wore were uncomfortable. They pressed the flowers into his skin and they seemed to irritate the rough patches of spines. He was glad to get them off when he got home again.

  He rubbed at the flowers on his right hand as if to restore their circulation and make them stand up again. It wasn’t necessary. They moved easily at his touch. But there was no sensation at all from them, or from the patches of spines and bumps that were extending up the back of his forearm.

  The skin beneath still had sensation though, and the feel of the flowers between his fingers and his skin was most peculiar—like moist warm leaves. Like soft dry noodles. He almost enjoyed the way they felt as he ran his fingers through them. The sensation was as interesting as the hole left behind by a tooth freshly pulled out.

  On Sunday, there were more of the flowers. On his right arm, they extended across his wrist and fresh buds were appearing on his forearm. On his left, where he had cut them, they were already beginning to grow back. Many of the spines had already opened their buds. For some reason, that pleased him. He was afraid he might have damaged them when he cut them, and he was curious to see just how far they would spread and how large they would grow.

  The newer buds on his arms were still very tiny, but the oldest ones were almost as big across as the nail of his little finger. The close, edge-to-edge pattern they formed was fascinating to look at; they were a clustered field of pink-white cups. They were beginning to take on color.

  As he sat in his chair and stroked the back of his hand across his neck and cheek he became aware of their odor. It wasn’t an unpleasant odor—it was kind of sweet-sour and fleshy, almost like the familiar smell of old age, but not quite. It was the smell of skin, the fragrance of flesh. What gave it its hint of pungency though, was its almost total lack of musk. The odor was more flowery than human.