"Sorry I'm late."
"Oh, hi. That's all right, Jive. I had some research to catch up on before the plenary this afternoon.” Del switched off her data feed and looked at him, perfectly relaxed. She wore a pillbox hat spun from Martian crabgrass, which flourished only under the light of the twin hurtling moons of the red planet. He had given her that hat as a Kwanzaa gift two years ago, as their marriage took its final dive into the dumpster. Was this her notion of conciliation, or a final turn of the knife in his spine? “And how's dear Auntie Tilly?"
"Matilda's about as well as can be expected,” he said. “Morbid, actually. She's got her nose stuck in that damned old TV set my Poppa gave her for her twenty-first birthday, the one he found on the curb and fixed up with valves he scrounged heaven knows where."
"They're the best for picking up the thays, those old ones, I hear,” Delphine said absently. “I have to say, the children are still obsessed by it as well, although I notice you don't ask after them. I have to—"
"The children!” Jive said, voice roughening. “What the hell's wrong with those kids? They won't answer emails, their IM messages are totally incomprehensible, they refuse to pick up when I phone them."
"For heaven's sake, don't exaggerate. At their age—"
"Exaggerate! Watch and learn!” He keyed the virtual board of his homeowatch, fastclicking his children's phones. The holographic privacy display showed an instant red, with the words: NOT AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE, OR TRY AGAIN LATER. He turned his wrist so his former wife could witness his humiliation.
"Jevon, you're losing your bearings. It's three hours earlier on the left coast. The kids are both at morning class. You know full well they're not allowed to use the access during scholastic hours."
Deflated, Jive shook his head and reached for the menu. He wasn't hungry; the brat sat in his guts like lead. I will be conciliatory, he decided. Isn't that alleged to be one of my prime work-related skills? Isn't conciliation the doctrine of Sister Grace of Magdalene, pastor of his house of worship, the Wee Baptist Kirk i’ the Glen (Scottish Rite)? To the lovely waitron, he said, “Get me a real Manhattan. And whatever my wife ... the lady is drinking, get her another. What would you like to eat, Delphine?"
"I ordered en route. You really should eat something if you're going to drink—"
"Why do you let them watch that crap?” he asked vituperatively. “They should have their heads down to their books."
"Jive, Angelina is eight and Barack is only five, let them enjoy a bit of childhood before you start cramming—"
He slammed his fist on the table, making the cut-glass soy dispenser jump. “Watching alleged dead people is enjoying childhood? Christ, you're an intelligent, educated woman, Delphine, you must know it's just a barrage of vicious propaganda beamed down on the cit sats from those goddamned Chinese—"
Showing her perfect white teeth, Delphine hissed, “Lower your damned voice, you oaf. In case you hadn't noticed—"
Faces had turned their way, hiding shock behind bland contempt. The waitron stood with their drinks.
"I didn't mean ... Oh, please, just put them down.” He gestured to the great acrylic patriotic flag above them, pinned to the four corners of the room, fifty white stars on deep skyblue, three more blue stars clinging at the inner edge of the top white stripes: New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan. “I know these Chinese are our loyal allies, our fellow citizens, but it's obvious to anyone with his damned ear to the ground that these ... these fake dead people are a plot to undermine the confidence of our nation. I'm insulted, Delphine. It's our people they are targeting especially, you know that, the Chinese think we're still a damned superstitious bunch of primitive jungle—"
"Shut up, you fool.” His wife was on her feet, seething yet containing her fury. Holding her handbag against her breast, she said, “You can get the check. I should have known better. And give the kids a call at a time when it suits them, not you."
His head had started throbbing. He threw back the Manhattan, coughed. To the impassive waitron, he said, “Get me another. And a soluble ginseng antacid."
* * * *
His head echoed like a jug kicked by a steel-tipped boot. Ensconced again in the refitted storage room that was his office, Jive Bolen groaned. He was drinking too much. Two Manhattans on a stomach with nothing in it but a brat sliver, it was self-destructive. His tongue rolled again and again against his lips, trying to dispel the over-sweet taste of cherry and burned orange peel. He noticed what he was doing, and recoiled in disgust. This was the tic that had disfigured poor Gran Bolen as she subsided inch by inch toward the grave. Tardive dyskinesia, the medically induced disorder of the nervous system inflicted by early-generation antipsychotic drugs, those barbarously crude neuroleptics such as metoclopramide. Induced supersensitivity to dopamine in the nigrostrial pathway, damaging the D2 dopamine receptor. Or so he'd been told by the apologetic physician who finally had changed the old lady's regimen, but too late, far too late. She had thought to see the dead, Jive recalled, with a shudder. Her erratic thought disorders, that late turn to Buddhism, to the belief in the Bardo Thodol and afterlife demons. As if the word of the Lord Savior were not enough.
He fumbled off a cap of cuffee, heard the hiss as it self-heated, drank it down with a trembling hand. What's wrong with me? he wondered. It's this damned cramped work space, he thought, staring peevishly at the wall to his right, the racks of classic Barbie dolls still in their virginal packaging.
Without knocking, his Uzbek secretary, Hammerlock Ganji, poked his head around the door jamb. “Christ, you look terrible, Chief. You're drinking too much."
"Shut up,” Jive said. He took another swig, but the cap was empty. The foul taste of the synthetic lingered on his lips, and he felt his tongue once again begin its bovine rotation. “It's these quarters, Ganj. Undignified for a man of my station."
Neither said anything further; it was simply a fact of life that in these straitened times the great multinational corps had to impose the most severe restrictions on their senior factors, and to be seen to do so. Ganji entered the office, squeezed past Jive's desk, stood examining, as he often did, with a perfervid fascination, the fantastically expensive collectible Barbara Millicent Roberts manikins in their plastic and cardboard cages. There was not a single Ken mounted on the wall.
"You need cheering up,” Hammerlock said at length. His eyes traveling back again to the dolls in their pristine boxes. If one of them ever went missing, which was unlikely given the covert security features in situ, Jive would know where to turn.
"I hear Jolene is in the building. I'll have her drop by. A professional call,” he said hastily. “It's part of the building code, as you know, Chief."
"If you wish,” Jive said, foraging ostentatiously in a pile of hard-copy documents. “Go away now, I'm busy."
It could only have been ten minutes later when he heard her cheerful birdsong soprano carol his name at the open door.
"I told my secretary I'm too busy for therapeutic melody today,” he said gruffly.
"Never too hectic for a heart-filling tune, I hope,” she said, and perched herself on the edge of his desk. “What's it to be? Cole Porter? Wit and a jaunty air. Something from the Beatles collection? I love ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ although people have gone off it, and I suppose we mustn't blame them."
"'Come again,'” said Jive, decisively. Jolene had the power and sweetness of a young Linda Ronstadt—it was possible that she could meet the demands of Dowland. If she knew his work.
"Come again?” she said, grinning.
"It needs a lutenist to accompany the lyrics,” Jive told her. “John Dowland? Turn of the seventeenth century?"
"Sorry."
"It's the most perfect music I've ever heard.” He cleared his throat and sang, well enough to convey the tune, if not much more, reverberant in the small office, “Thy graces that refrain, To do me due delight.” He took a deeper breath, knowing how it should be done, even if it was b
eyond his capacity to build the energy across the octave, note by note, phrase by phrase, to a gently controlled climax and release conveying the doomed sense of one long, last breath, one sigh: “To see, to hear, To touch, to kiss, To die...” His baritone broke, and shamefacedly he finished, in a growl, “With thee again, In sweetest sympathy."
The young woman was thunderstruck.
"Oh, Mr. Bolen, that's just ... that's—beautiful. Is there a recording...?"
Jive gazed at her, refreshed, his headache eased. “As a matter of fact, I have probably the last uncorrupted CD pressing of Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli singing the duet. One of the last Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft releases before the emetic plague erased—Do you think you'd care to visit my apt and hear it on my classic eMachines CD player?"
Instead of answering, she sang the fragment back to him, with luscious honeyed fragrance, effortlessly soaring. He felt his eyes dampen.
"It's about the thays, that song,” she told him guilelessly. “To die again. I wonder how that composer knew, so long ago? In sweetest sympathy. Although they don't look terribly happy."
Jive frowned.
"You're not, I hope, speaking of—"
"Did you see Leno & Letterman last night? It was hilarious. They had the top ten thays, you know, live feeds from viewers’ homes."
"Don't call them that. It's all a vicious—"
"Oh, but they are disconnected thetans, it's been scientifically proved.” Sweet Jesus, Jive realized, she's a ‘tologist. Probably second or third generation. But no more eccentric, he decided, than a Mormon or a Moonie. She leaned forward, and light gleamed below her throat, at the open neck of her bright daffodil-yellow blouse. In that moment, he felt entirely prepared to overlook her ‘tology belief structure, even forgive the golden—or gold-plated—icon nestled in Jolene's small ripe cleavage. The icon, he noticed suddenly, hung from a fine gold chain linked to a pair of bolts in the saint's neck. Like those terrible old Frankenstein movies. Out burst a guffaw. After a moment of uncertainty, the friendly smile was gone from her face.
"What."
Oh Christ. Risk everything on one wild throw of the die? What the heck. The thick Germanic neck of the iconic Church bust (speaking of busts) was turned outward, its coarse features nuzzling at her. “I couldn't help notice where your Divine Founder has his face buried,” he said jovially. “If a man was ambitious, he might hope...” He trailed off.
The sangerin stared at him, speechless. Then a hesitant smile. A shudder of relief jolted through him. Where innocent ribaldry entered freely, soon more joyful bawdry might follow.
"Hey!” she said, then, suddenly frowning. “Are you mocking my faith?"
Jive shook his head piously. “I wouldn't dream of it, darling."
* * * *
Inside the cozy plastic-shelled condo apartment high above what had once been the Hudson River and was now a stack of mighty water-pumping carbonoid pipes buried below the condo struts, he found Aunt Tilly eating a boiled Raptosaurus egg from both ends. The edible DNA-recovered commercial product rolled unsteadily on her blue-etched dining plate, spilling white albumen and deep orange yolk on the tablecloth. The dignified old lady, dressed formally for dinner in mothball-reeking black and white, kept her eyes fixed on his near-wallsized HDTV display. At her hand, the remote shined its merry red activation light. On the screen, a morose peasant face of Asian mien gazed out hopelessly at them both. Others wandered in the ill-defined monotone background, as if peering in at the living-dining quadrant, shaking their heads, moving on. Damn it, he thought, my half-senile charge has changed the channel again in my absence. He had warned her repeatedly. Maybe he needed to invoke a Parental Warning lock-down code. But, to his chagrin, he realized that he did not know how to do that.
He picked up the remote, fiddled with it impotently. He changed the channel to a repeat of Baywatch, but, to his fury, the fully electronic selector switched it back. The Chinese civ-sat radiations, he thought indignantly; they've hijacked my HDTV digital set. Swearing under his breath, he switched it off. Tilly moaned, looked reproachfully at him. She had yolk smeared over the bright red clown's mouth of her lip gloss. In his hand, without his intervention, the red pilot light flashed on again. The screen filled with its voiceless parade of woe.
He threw the useless piece of junk down on the table, and went to the small kitchen sink to find a washcloth. The newscasts were correct, then. Not just the old pre-digital sets were vulnerable, though they provided the best registration of the images, apparently. Any set with a remote control was now susceptible to manipulation by these spurious dead, or more properly their Potemkin-style manipulators, who channeljacked it instantly to their interface feed.
Creating the impression, at least in the gullible, of departed souls searching endlessly for the living they had left behind.
It was more than he could take. Jive threw the dampened cloth down into the sink, left Tilly dully viewing the propaganda, and went into his bedroom. Behind a matched, leather-bound set of the Left Behind novels Tilly had given him four or five birthdays ago, before her deterioration had proceeded to its current sorry state, he found a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's. He uncapped it, entered the half bath alcove, poured a healthy slug into his tooth glass.
I have to stop drinking, he told himself, feeling the burn. After a time, though, his depression faded away. An image of that lovely little birdsongstress filled his heart with growing elation. He'd have to dispose of Tilly for the evening. Maybe the two middle-aged ladies on the floor above, a long-term lesbian couple if he recognized the signs, would look after the senile old thing for the night. He couldn't imagine that they'd take any liberties. Not, at any rate, the kind he planned for Jolene. He wondered idly if the girl had a surname. Must have, stood to reason. Social Security stamp, the whole ID apparatus. Christ, really it didn't matter. He poured another shot.
* * * *
"Sweet love doth now invite,
"Thy graces that refrain
"To do me due delight,” sang Ms. Brightman's simulated voice, admittedly not representative of her peak but glorious still. Jolene sat decorously on the edge of his large formerly marital bed—he'd cunningly moved the CD apparatus out of the living room and into more congenial surrounds—and listened intently. Her eyes, he was happy to see, shone. As the next verse began, she read ahead from the printout he'd prepared, and sang in perfect counterpoint to Bocelli: “Come again,
"That I may cease to mourn
"Through thy unkind disdain
"For now left and forlorn."
He might as well have not been in the room. Song was her passion, that and her oddball faith. But now, after that heartbreaking pause, she turned her eyes on him and sang with the two reconstructed voices, male and female:
"I sit, I sigh,
"I weep, I faint,
"I die, in deadly pain
"And endless misery..."
Her eyes were bright with pain.
Perhaps, Jive thought, too late, this was not the best choice of song for a seduction. But the ravishing beauty of her voice, so much richer in this room, singing these old words, was so much more enthralling than in the light ditties she cast upon the conditioned air of the zeugma structure where they worked. He waited, spellbound but sorrowing, as she sang the rest of the verses.
"Deadly pain and endless misery,” she said, finally. “That's what the thays are showing us.” She clutched hopelessly at her pendant icon, and burst into tears.
He packed away his precious, irreplaceable recording while she visited the bathroom, and then, trying to hide his irritation and painful sexual arousal, escorted her home.
* * * *
Jive was half in the bag as he slipped a farecard across the turnstile and joined what seemed a substantial proportion of steaming, sweating New York on the 50th Street subway platform. Why didn't I get a cab? he asked himself. Is this my pathetic way of punishing myself ? Is my thalamic function overriding my essentially sane fronta
l brain, driving me into some sort of deliberate confrontation with the world of the Arbeitnehmer, the common workers I'm meant to be representing? He squeezed his eyes shut against the buffeting of the train as it pulled in to the station, grit and oil-scented air flying up like some Biblical plague of insects. He was jostled getting aboard, and held his tropical helmet with one hand as his homey popped on and reminded him in its high-pitched child's voice that he had an appointment at two, with the engineers at the new Thane of Cawdor thanatorium labs. He snapped the homeowatch off with a grunt. Fool thing, where the heck did it think he was headed on this damned crowded train? And what did the idiots at Industrie Globalisierung, AG, think they were doing, sending him to oversee the so-called findings of this bunch of palpable crackpots?
They sped under old Manhattan. The air-conditioning was on the fritz, hardly unusual. Imagine how life would be without the soletta, he thought. If this was actually the true greenhouse effect everyone was suffering, rather than an attenuated, sunlight-blocked ghost of—he caught his own thought again, snarled at himself. Those things, those mechanical interruptions on the screen, they were not ghosts, not the dead. It was a filthy political stunt, a sort of techno-brainwashing. No matter what foolish Tilly maintained, glued hour after hour in her darkened room, anxiously watching the dead, as she supposed them to be, marching behind her cathode ray tube, peering out, gesturing, their mouths moving silently.
Jesus, wasn't it obvious? Whatever that dear little professional virgin Vogelsangerin believed. Most of them must be Chinese actors, you could tell at a glance. In those tasteless Mao suits, or old fashioned wrapping of one kind or another. Or Indians, not Native American, dark featured and gaunt from the Indian subcontinent, or Pakistan, or Bali, or whatever. A fashion show of faux-starved mummies from hell. He shuddered, rocking as the train thudded over tracks loosely fixed to sleepers unrepaired for years. Every spare cent was required for the big boosters shoving up the materiel to spin the soletta into being, there at the Lagrange libration point nine hundred thousand miles from Earth. That, or the planet would be roasted. Not immediately, true—but in another millennium. Was that why the dead were suddenly hanging about, shoving their damned stupid faces into people's primetime viewing—
Asimov's SF, February 2010 Page 5
