The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "I would tell you. You could try the flat again. They won't talk to me, they don't trust my profession. Emphatic onlys are the enemy. They might talk to you, especially as you share your sister's genes."

  "I tried the flat. I told you."

  "Try the flat again, I said. Things change. And if you do find her, let me know. I'd like to know how she's doing. If she's whole. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a paying customer in five minutes, and I need to get ready."

  The sun shone through the fanlight above the front door, casting a half wheel of light onto the stairs. I passed the tennis players in the street, two women in sweats and ponytails, their game finished. I beeped my car alarm, and starlings rose in a clatter of wings from the branches of the trees in locked Fitzwilliam Park; a sudden autumn, a denuding of leaves.

  Lights were lit in the top flat of 20 Belgrave Road. I could hear the music from the street. Duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh. A girl with shoulder length bobbed blonde hair, wearing a shift dress over tartan tights, finally heard my ring over the bass. "Hello. Could I speak to.. ." I hesitated. "Tarroweep?"

  “Who?"

  "Tarroweep."

  "No one here by that name."

  "I talked to her three days ago, here, on this doorstep."

  The girl studied my face, frowned, and the creases in her features revealed her.

  "You," I breathed. "It was you! Tarroweep. I suppose the walk-in walked out again?"

  The girl looked blankly at me.

  "I'm Clionadh. Tarroweep is ... it's kind of hard to explain. Just that, if she met you, only she is going to remember you. Things she remembers, I don't. Things I remember, she don't."

  Another self. A partitioned personality. Alternative lives. Type-four dissociative reaction, Dr. Collins bad called it.

  "I'm trying to find my sister. She lived here."

  Clionadh/Tarroweep examined my face again. The Clionadh self spoke differently, carried herself differently, used different body language. Different person. Her eyes widened.

  "Kerry."

  "You remember her?"

  "You're so like her. You could be twins. Sundered selves, twins. Oh God, yes!

  You're Stephen. She talked about you."

  "Do you know where I can find her?"

  "Find Kerry? No one can find Kerry. Kerry's gone."

  I felt my heart kick, like a worm of ice and iron heaving inside its ventricles. Seeing my look of dread, Clionadh hurried to add, "Jeez, everything's so linear with onlys! It's complicated. I really don't know where she is now, your sister, but there's a guy who might. Feargal. Kerry knew him; he's sort of on the edge of multi society. There's a pub down in Temple Bar; Daley's?" I didn't know it. Clionadh gave me directions. "I'll get in touch with Feargal. I'll meet you there about nine."

  "Will I know you?"

  "You mean, will I know you? Will I be Clionadh, who remembers you and Kerry? I'll know you. The cycles last about four, five days. I'm at the mid-point now, so you don't have to worry, I'll be Clionadh for a while yet."

  "Clionadh." The girl had been closing the door. "Kerry. Is she; was she, like you? A.. ."

  "Multi. It's just a word, like gay, or lesbian. Hey, don't you know, everyone's a tribe these days? Everyone's a minority. Kerry: was she? I suppose. Is she? Not anymore. I'm sure of that."

  I tried to wear Clionadh's worldview like a pair of tinted glasses as I went down into Temple Bar. Not what she had told me about Kerry: I couldn't let that close to me yet, it was too sharp, too sudden, too penetrating. It would have killed me with its icy implications. I tried to see the nation behind her throwaway line that everyone was a tribe now. No mainstream. No society. No city, no state, no holy Mother Ireland for which the patriots died. No ultimate truth, no unifying vision. No racial destiny. But a thousand doors to God, a thousand paths to community, to expression, to family and belonging. A thousand ways of being human. Bankers. Scared poets. All types. All tribes.

  I read in those same color supplements where I learned about the Epsilon Eridani Ambassadors that micro-culturism is the logical end point of twenty-first-century post-industrialism. The fracturing of the human race into a billion interest groups will be complete when the nano-assembler experiments become a workable technology and every individual will have complete material self sufficiency. Amazing, what you can learn from the Sunday color supplements.

  Around the turn of the century, Temple Bar, between Dame Street and Dame Anna Livia Pluribelle, had been the fashionable quarter of Dublin, the epitome of the mail-order eclectic that is post-modern Bohemianism. Long before the tribes began their migrations along the lev-lines to the Land of Youth in search of tolerance and freedom, Temple Bar had enjoyed a thriving sub-culture scene. Now its narrow streets and warehouses were the tribe capital of Europe. I passed transvestite and transsexual clubs, techno-Christian love-ups, tattoo dens, deathmetal temples, rubber bars, New Revelation Buddhist urban monasteries, cyberdweeb web-domes, White Rastafarian missionaries, neo-Celts, ebilly-looking topless women in Native American feathers and leathers, gender-benders, androgynes, Seventies Revivalists, New Model mods, Star Trekkers, neo-Edwardians, New Age Samurai, manganauts on custom motorbikes, New Futurists, barbarian babes and boys. I saw Ambassadors, walking-in from Epsilon Eridani to sit in a doorway and roll a joint.

  I tried to see them as Clionadh did-as Kerry might: facets of human experience, a plethora of possible alternative social selves. As I made my way through the crowds on Essex Street to the accompaniment of the primal heartbeat of warehouse Bass Addicts, I understood a second meaning to Clionadh's comment. Everyone is an interior tribe. We are all squabbles of aspects of ourselves that stand forward when life's changing situations call them. The difference between banker/poet/detective/emotional cripple Stephen O'Neill and Clionadh/Tarroweep/Epsilon Eridani avian intelligence is the distance between facets. Mine are close, they reflect each other's light. Hers are far apart, and shine on their own. I am large, I contain multitudes, Walt Whitman yawped over the roofs of the world in his "Song of Myself." Yes, great singer of the ego, but the truth from the new millennium is that there is no Self any more, only a raucous flock of selves, flapping in every direction to world's end.

  Daley's was the kind of bar where James Joyce could have drunk, or had been made to look like the kind of bar where James Joyce could have drunk. The latter, I thought, though the Edwardian pitch-pine booths, the encaustic tiles, the gas lights, and the faded back-bar mirrors advertising long-defunct whiskey distilleries were very convincing.

  The clientele was more varied than I expected in a Temple Bar pub. But I suppose that's how a multi bar must be; everyone something different. Those someones who weren't temporarily part of some other sub-culture. Multi. I hated the taste of the word on my tongue. Multi. Kerry. It made her a thing, a condition.

  Clionadh was defending a corner booth against four young males with pints in their hands. She waved. I squeezed in. A harassed bar boy took my order. "Feargal says he'll be along about half nine," Clionadh said.

  "Feargal. Is he a .. ."

  "You have trouble with the word, don't you? Feargal? No. Maybe once. I can't tell. No one can. You'll see."

  I contemplated the rising nebula of head in my freshly arrived Guinness.

  "Do you mind if I ask you a question?" I had to shout over the boothless boys, who were singing "Fairytale of New York" in the mandatory raucous style.

  Early with the Christmas music this year. "I'm not sure how to ask this, but which is the real you: you here, or the other one, Tarroweep?"

  Clionadh shouted with high-pitched laughter. "Hey, Stevie, don't you know it's not etiquette to ask about others in front of the current? Currents never know alternates, that's the way the thing is. Onlys always want to know which is real. Answer, both. Clionadh is real, Tarroweep's real. What you really mean is, which is the original? Which came out of which?"

  "Well, if it's not unforgivably rude .. ."

  "Neither. Not as we are n
ow. I can remember vaguely having been something like Tarroweep. Alternates develop their own independent memories. I suspect that Clionadh emerged out of the pre-Tarroweep's channeling exercises. You don't become an Ambassador unless you're partway multi."

  "And this pre-Tarroweep, is she the original?"

  "She was, I think. She may still be around; it's possible she's accessible from Tarroweep but not from me. I wouldn't know, you see. Separate memories. But what I remember of her, I don't think she was a very happy person. I wouldn't want to be her again."

  I shivered in Daley's suffocating heat.

  "And Kerry?"

  "She moved in three years back. The place is well known in the scene as a multi house. Maybe the landlord is, or something. She moved into the flat across the landing. I liked her. Got to know her pretty well. She was on the edge of the scene, an emergent. Still had linkage between personas. Some can never fully make the break. Too much gravity in the black stuff down there in the memory."

  Some never even begin, I thought. Broken goods. Smashed by the gravity of black stuff.

  "Did she tell you how it, ah, started?"

  "About your family? Her mother-your mother? Jeez, yes. She was seeing a therapist."

  "I called in on him."

  "The admirable Dr. Collins."

  "He thinks the therapy may have been responsible for Kerry's breakup."

  "The word's 'emergence.' No, he might have hurried it along, but Kerry was a latent multi long before. She told me that when she was a kid and lay in bed at night and listened to your Ma raving away downstairs about what a martyr she was, what foul kids she had, how everyone was out to make her life miserable and no one loved her, she would lie there in the dark and imagine she'd been born someone else, in another house, with different parents, where everything was good and she could be what she wanted. V&Then she had the big fight, when she left you all, she had the space to live that other life she should have had, be that other person she should have been."

  I closed my eyes. It was not the smoke in the bar that bad made them water. "Ma's dead. That's what I came to tell her. Ma's gone."

  "Good," Clionadh said fiercely. "Hey! He's here!" She jumped up, waving furiously. "Feargal! Over here!"

  I thought about Tarroweep, the other, incommunicado side of this young woman beside me, and bow she had not known Kerry when I had spoken to her on the doorstep of Number Twenty. Clionadh could not tell me why that was; I knew more of her alter ego than she did. Perhaps Tarroweep and Kerry never met under those identities. Tarroweep only knew the Kerry that should have been, whatever her name and nature.

  Feargal was as Feargals should be; slightly out of date. Shaved head, tuft of chin beard from the Seattle look of over a decade ago. Unless what goes round had come round, down in Temple Bar. He had a Cork accent. He drank Beamish, as a good Cork man should. I watched him as he talked and could not dislodge the idea from my head that he had had sex with my sister. "Kerry. Yeah. Came to us eight, nine months back."

  "Us?"

  "Everyone's an 'Us' these days, friend. We're a group, a project, over in Mountjoy Square."

  The old tenement terraces of the ten-to-a-room people, the bread-and-tax people who had birthed Sean O'Casey and Brendan Behan, had new tenants now. A race beyond their ancestors' conception, come creeping up the tenement steps and staircases, through the derelict high-ceilinged rooms, looking for a place to strike roots. "A multi community?"

  "Beyond the multi scene," Feargal said. "For multis who don't want to be multi anymore."

  "She never really was, Stevie," Clionadh said. "She hated going back. Couldn't bear it that she would have to go back to it in the end. To what she was. The black."

  "Found us," Feargal said. "They do. Don't advertise, keep ourselves to ourselves. Word passes. We could do this thing she wanted. Not cheap, but price okay to her."

  "Her bank account was closed. That was you?"

  "Standard practice."

  "What did she buy from you?"

  "Complete new life. Identity, history, memories, emotions, personality. Everything."

  I thought they were fictions of films, those moments when the camera zooms in on the face of the hero while the background pulls out to infinity. They aren't. Art imitates life. The camera in my skull shrank the noisy, pushing bodies in Daley's bar to distant, buzzing insects.

  Clionadh touched my hand. It felt like mist. Her face swam before me, at once remote and enormous, like a face painted on the side of a blimp. She was speaking. "Okay? You okay Stevie? Feargal, is he all right?"

  Daley's resumed its proper dimensions of sight and sound and smell. "God," I whispered. "Feargal," Clionadh said urgently.

  "Lot to explain," Feargal agreed. "This isn't the place. Easier to show. She's all right, your sister. Believe me. She isn't hurt; we wouldn't hurt anyone, anything. But you should see. Then you'll understand, maybe."

  The electric cab left us at the tenement in Mountjoy Square. The driver charged us wrong-end-of-town prices. Long long since I was north of the river. Tribal banners bearing a dozen different crests swung from broken street lights or flapped against the fronts of the old townhouses. Traveler campervans and trailers were nose-to-tail around the central grassed square: clusters of tents, bashes and refuse sack yurts had been erected on the small green. Coats grazed, skinny dogs scavenged, heedless of traffic. Campfires sent wreaths of sparks into the cold, clear night. There was music; many musics; overlapping tribes of sound.

  It had begun with these traveling people, when Britain decided it could no longer tolerate a nomadic population. They came to Ireland, they found peace, they stayed, they spread the word. For most of its history, Ireland has exported its young, scattering its brightest and boldest and best like seed across the planet. Now the brightest and boldest and best were being gathered in from across the planet, and Ireland was a country of the young again.

  The steps to the tenement stank of urine. I think it's compulsory.

  As we climbed the spiral of worn stone stairs, Feargal explained that his project owned the whole apartment block. They'd needed somewhere big and cheap. The equipment. He paused on the first landing to call five names. Kerry's was not one of them. His voice echoed in the big, cold stairwell. Tracks of condensation ran down the glossy, institutional paint. A door opened on the next floor, a head appeared over the bannisters: a girl, shaggy blonde hair, age indeterminate, terrifyingly thin.

  "Feargal! Feargal! I remembered! Bray beach! And they were there! All of them! But they never existed!" She giggled and disappeared. The door closed loudly.

  "Trina's a transient." The name was not one of those Feargal had shouted out. "We're mostly transients. Nature of the community-, you pass through on your way from somewhere to someplace better.

  "And you?" I asked.

  "Permanent. Eternal. Day-oner. Invented this place. Least, that's what'remember." I didn't understand why he smiled.

  "And Kerry?" I asked. He nodded up the stairs.

  Feargal took us to the door at the top of the stairs, under the glass cupola. We entered the room beyond. It was dark but the acoustic and the chill of the air suggested immense size. The lights clanked on, battery by battery; heavy duty industrial floods. White light, white room: the old tenement attic, the length of the whole building.

  The thing in the middle of the floor was white too. Feargal's footsteps echoed in the big white space as he crossed the floor to the machine. A faint pulse beat of street rhythm transmitted through the row of skylights. Feargal's expression as he stood before the device was a combination of pride and awe; Clionadh's, as she ran her hand over the white scanning ring, bewilderment and disgust.

  The sheet on the padded vinyl surface was white, and neatly folded down at the top.

  "Most of the work was already done by the end of the century. Complete map of the human brain. Scanned in sections by one of these things. Axon by axon wiring diagram. What fires in response to what stimulus. Took us to make the concep
t jump: what can read can be taught to write."

  "You use that thing-scanner-to rewrite memories?"

  "What are we but what we remember we are? We came up with a new model of the brain; as an imaging system. Memories move through the brain along established paths of neural activity."

  "We?" I said.

  "Six neuroscience researchers. With a vision. And some money. Imagination, my friend. That's all it takes. Imagination is the sister of memory. Imagine that other life, that other friend, those other relatives, parents, and the scanner identifies the activated neurons, and imprints the image into memory. Single neuron e/m induction. Like making photographs from negatives. The long darkroom of the soul." Feargal fished a translucent plastic pharmaceutical tub out of his pocket. Such was the power of his metaphor, I thought for a moment it was a film can. He popped the lid, scattered white pills on the white sheet. The pills were stamped with the image of a flying dove.

  "Acetylcholine activators. Play a double function in the process. Reinforces imprinted memory while depressing the existing engram on that site cluster so there is no conflict of memories. Beautiful. Remembering and forgetting. After a couple of months the memories become independent of the imagination; like Trina, down there in thirty-three. Works best on those with fugue state tendencies. Got a complete alternative personality with ready established memory routings, so much the better. Takes about four months for new memories and personality to become permanent; about six before the old memories and personality are supplanted and erased. One thing we can't erase; what we call the cognitive discontinuity: they remember the process of imprinting, but not why they came here."

  "Kerry?" I asked. "She's gone, man. Not here anymore."

  He was smiling. He was proud of what he did. He was a savior; Jesus of the ganglia. Believe in me, be born again. A Jesus that stank of Beamish and cigarettes, with a fistful of pills. Suddenly I wanted very, very much to plant my own fist in the middle of that loop of beard around his mouth. I wanted to grab him by his sticking-out ears and smash his stubbly head against the scanning ring of his hideous machine, smash and smash and smash until his memories flowed from the cracks like grey juice. It was seething black bile, rising up my gullet, choking me. Anger.