by Anthology
“I can’t,” he said. “Don’t ask this of me.”
In the end he gave in, as I knew he would. We went to the Station. Onel, his hands shaking, adjusted a Portal for me and sent me through.
Onel had given me four hours. I appeared in the park behind a large refreshment tent. Inside the tent, people sat at small round tables enjoying delicacies and occasionally rising to sample the pink wine that flowed from a fountain in the center. As a girl I had worked as a cook in that tent, removing raw foodstuffs from the transformer in the back and spending hours in the small kitchen making desserts, which were my specialty. I had almost forgotten the tents, which had been replaced later on by more elaborate structures.
I walked past the red tent toward the lake. It too was as I remembered it, surrounded by oaks and a few weeping willows. Biologists had not yet developed the silvery vines and glittering crystal trees that would be planted later. A peacock strutted past me as I headed for a nearby bench. I wanted only to sit for a while near the lake, then perhaps visit one of the tents before I had to return to my own time.
I watched my feet as I walked, being careful not to stumble. Most of those in the park ignored me rather pointedly, perhaps annoyed by an old woman who reminded them of their eventual fate. I had been the same, I thought, avoiding those who would so obviously be dead soon, uncomfortable around those who were dying when I had everything ahead of me.
Suddenly a blurred face was in front of me and I collided with a muscular young body. Unable to retain my balance, I fell.
A hand was held out to me and I grasped it as I struggled to my feet. “I’m terribly sorry,” said a voice, a voice I had come to know so well, and I looked up at the face with its wide cheekbones and clear blue eyes.
“Yuri,” I said.
He was startled. “Yuri Malenkov,” I said, trying to recover.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“I attended one of your lectures,” I said quickly, “on holographic art.”
He seemed to relax a bit. “I’ve only given one,” he said. “Last week. I’m surprised you remember my name.”
“Do you think,” I said, anxious now to hang on to him for at least a few minutes, “you could help me over to that bench?”
“Certainly.”
I hobbled over to it, clinging to his arm. By the time we sat down, he was already expanding on points he had covered in the lecture. He was apparently unconcerned about my obvious aging and seemed happy to talk to me.
A thought struck me forcefully. I suddenly realized that Yuri had not yet met my past self. I had never attended that first lecture, having met him just before he was to do his second. Desperately, I tried to recall the date I had given Onel, what day it was in the past.
I had not counted on this. I was jumpy, worried that I would change something, that by meeting Yuri in the park like this I might somehow prevent his meeting me. I shuddered. I knew little of the circumstances that had brought him to my door. I could somehow be interfering with them.
Yuri finished what he had to say and waited for my reaction. “You certainly have some interesting insights,” I said. “I’m looking forward to your next lecture.” I smiled and nodded, hoping that he would now leave and go about his business.
Instead he looked at me thoughtfully. “I don’t know if I’ll give any more lectures.”
My stomach turned over. I knew he had given ten more. “Why not?” I asked as calmly as I could.
He shrugged. “A lot of reasons.”
“Maybe,” I said in desperation, “you should talk about it with somebody, it might help.” Hurriedly I dredged up all the techniques I had learned as a Counselor, carefully questioning him, until at last he opened up and flooded me with his sorrows and worries.
He became the Yuri I remembered, an intense person who concealed his emotions under a cold, business-like exterior. He had grown tired of the city’s superficiality, uncomfortable with those who grew annoyed at his seriousness and penetration. He was unsuited to the gaiety and playfulness that surrounded him, wanting to pursue whatever he did with single-minded devotion.
He looked embarrassed after telling me all this and began once more to withdraw behind his shield. “I have some tentative plans,” he said calmly, regaining control. “I may be leaving here in a couple of days with one of the scientific expeditions for Mars. I prefer the company of serious people and have been offered a place on the ship.”
My hands trembled. Neither of us had gone with an expedition until five years after our meeting. “I’m sorry for bothering you with my problems,” he went on. “I don’t usually do that to strangers, or anyone else for that matter. I’d better be on my way.”
“You’re not bothering me.”
“Anyway, I have a lot of things to do. I appreciate the time you took to listen to me.”
He stood up and prepared to walk away. No, I thought, you can’t, I can’t lose you like this. But then I realized something and was shocked that I hadn’t thought of it before. I knew what I had to do.
“Wait!” I said. “Wait a minute. Do you think you could humor an old lady, maybe take some advice? It’ll only be an hour or so of your time.”
“It depends,” he said stiffly.
“Before you go on that expedition, do you think you could visit a person I think might enjoy talking to you?”
He smiled. “I suppose,” he said. “But I don’t see what difference it makes.”
“She’s a lot like you. I think you’d find her sympathetic.” And I told him where I lived and gave him my name. “But don’t tell her an old woman sent you, she’ll think I’m meddling. Just tell her it was a friend.”
“I promise.” He turned to leave. “Thank you, friend.” I watched him as he ambled down the pebbled path that would lead him to my home.
IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?
Kim Newman
“Is there a presence?” asked Irene.
The parlour was darker and chillier than it had been moments ago. At the bottoms of the heavy curtains, tassels stirred like the fronds of a deep-sea plant. Irene Dobson—Madame Irena, to her sitters—was alert to tiny changes in a room that might preface the arrival of a visitor from beyond the veil. The fizzing and dimming of still-untrusted electric lamps, so much less impressive than the shrinking and bluing of gaslight flames she remembered from her earliest seances. A clamminess in the draught, as foglike cold rose from the carpeted floor. The minute crackle of static electricity, making hair lift and pores prickle. The tart taste of pennies in her mouth.
“Is there a traveller from afar?” she asked, opening her inner eye.
The planchette twitched. Miss Walter-David’s fingers withdrew in a flinch; she had felt the definite movement. Irene glanced at the no-longer-young woman in the chair beside hers, shrinking away for the moment. The fear-light in the sitter’s eyes was the beginning of true belief. To Irene, it was like a tug on a fishing line, the satisfying twinge of the hook going in. This was a familiar stage on the typical sitter’s journey from scepticism to fanaticism. This woman was wealthy; soon, Irene would taste not copper but silver, eventually gold.
Wordlessly, she encouraged Miss Walter-David to place her fingertips on the planchette again, to restore balance. Open on the round table before them was a thin sheet of wood, hinged like an oversized chessboard. Upon the board’s smoothly papered and polished surface was a circle, the letters of the alphabet picked out in curlicue. Corners were marked for YES—“oui”, “ja”—and NO. The planchette, a pointer on marble castors, was a triangular arrowhead-shape. Irene and Miss Walter-David lightly touched fingers to the lower points of the planchette, and the tip quivered.
“Is there anybody there?” Miss Walter-David asked.
This sitter was bereft of a fiancé, an officer who had come through the trenches but succumbed to influenza upon return to civilian life. Miss Walter-David was searching for balm to soothe her sense of hideous unfairness, and had come at last to Madame Irena’s
parlour.
“Is there—”
The planchette moved, sharply. Miss Walter-David hissed in surprise. Irene felt the presence, stronger than usual, and knew it could be tamed. She was no fraud, relying on conjuring tricks, but her understanding of the world beyond the veil was very different than that which she wished her sitters to have. All spirits could be made to do what she wished them to do. If they thought themselves grown beyond hurt, they were sorely in error. The planchette, genuinely independent of the light touches of medium and sitter, stabbed towards a corner of the board, but stopped surprisingly short.
Y
Not YES, but the Y of the circular alphabet. The spirits often used initials to express themselves, but Madame had never encountered one who neglected the convenience of the YES and NO corners. She did not let Miss Walter-David see her surprise.
“Have you a name?”
Y again. Not YES. Was Y the beginning of a name: Youngman, Yoko-hama, Ysrael?
“What is it?” she was almost impatient.
The planchette began a circular movement, darting at letters, using the lower tips of the planchette as well as the pointer. That also was unusual, and took an instant or two to digest.
M S T R M N D
“Msstrrmnnd,” said Miss Walter-David.
Irene understood. “Have you a message for anyone here, Master Mind?”
Y
“For whom?”
U
“For Ursula?” Miss Walter-David’s christian name was Ursula.
N U
“U?”
“You,” said Miss Walter-David. “You.”
This was not a development Irene liked a bit.
There were two prospects in his Chat Room. Women, or at least they said they were. Boyd didn’t necessarily believe them. Some users thought they were clever.
Boyd was primarily MstrMnd, but had other log-in names, some male, some female, some neutral. For each ISDN line, he had a different code name and e-address, none traceable to his physical address. He lived OnLine, really; this flat in Highgate was just a place to store the meat. There was nothing he couldn’t get by playing the web, which responded to his touch like a harpsichord to a master’s fingers. There were always backdoors.
His major female ident was Caress, aggressively sexual; he imagined her as a porn site Cleopatra Jones, a black model with dom tendencies. He kept a more puritanical, shockable ident—SchlGrl—as back-up, to cut in when Caress became too outrageous.
These two users weren’t tricky, though. They were clear. Virgins, just the way he liked them. He guessed they were showing themselves nakedly to the Room, with no deception.
IRENE D.
URSULA W-D.
Their messages typed out laboriously, appearing on his master monitor a word at a time. He initiated searches, to cough up more on their handles. His system was smart enough to come up with a birth-name, a physical address, financial details and, more often than not, a .jpg image from even the most casually-assumed one-use log-on name. Virgins never realised that their presences always left ripples. Boyd knew how to piggyback any one of a dozen official and unofficial trackers, and routinely pulled up information on anyone with whom he had even the most casual, wary dealings.
IRENE D: Have you a message for anyone here, Master Mind?
Boyd stabbed a key.
Y
IRENE D: For whom?
U
IRENE D: For Ursula?
N U
IRENE D: U?
URSULA W-D: You.
At least one of them got it. IRENE D—why didn’t she tag herself ID or I-D?—was just slow. That didn’t matter. She was the one Boyd had spotted as a natural. Something about her blank words gave her away. She had confidence and ignorance, while her friend—they were in contact, maybe even in the same physical room—at least understood she knew nothing, that she had stepped into deep space and all the rules were changed. IRENE D—her log-on was probably a variant on the poor girl’s real name—thought she was in control. She would unravel very easily, almost no challenge at all.
A MESSAGE FOR U I-D, he typed.
He sat on a reinforced swivel chair with optimum back support and buttock-spread, surveying a semi-circle of keyboards and monitors all hooked up to separate lines and accounts, all feeding into the master-monitor. When using two or more idents, he could swivel or roll from board to board, taking seconds to chameleon-shift. He could be five or six people in any given minute, dazzle a solo into thinking she—and it almost always was a she—was in a buzzing Chat Room with a lively crowd when she was actually alone with him, growing more vulnerable with each stroke and line, more open to his hooks and grapples, her backdoors flapping in the wind.
I KNOW WHO U ARE
Always a classic. Always went to the heart.
He glanced at the leftmost screen. Still searching. No details yet. His system was usually much faster than this. Nothing on either of them, on IRENE or URSULA. They couldn’t be smart enough to cover their traces in the web, not if they were really as newbie as they seemed. Even a netshark ace would have been caught by now. And these girls were fighting nowhere near his weight. Must be a glitch. It didn’t matter.
I KNOW WHAT U DO
Not DID, but DO. DID is good for specifics, but DO suggests something ongoing, some hidden current in an ordinary life, perhaps unknown even to the user.
U R NOT WHAT U CLAIM 2 B
That was for sure.
U R NOT WHAT U CLAIM 2 B
“You are not what you claim to be?” interpreted Miss Walter-David. She had become quickly skilled at picking out the spirit’s peculiar, abbreviated language. It was rather irritating, thought Irene. She was in danger of losing this sitter, of becoming the one in need of guidance.
There was something odd about Master Mind. He—it was surely a he—was unlike other spirits, who were mostly vague children. Everything they spelled out was simplistic, yet ambiguous. She had to help them along, to tease out from the morass of waffle whatever it was they wanted to communicate with those left behind, or more often to intuit what it was her sitters wanted or needed most to hear and to shape her reading of the messages to fit. Her fortune was built not on reaching the other world, but in manipulating it so that the right communications came across. No sitter really wanted to hear a loved one had died a meaningless death and drifted in limbo, gradually losing personality like a cloud breaking up. Though, occasionally, she had sitters who wanted to know that those they had hated in life were suffering properly in the beyond and that their miserable post-mortem apologies were not accepted. Such transactions disturbed even her, though they often proved among the most rewarding financially.
Now, Irene sensed a concrete personality. Even through almost-coded, curt phrases, Master Mind was a someone, not a something. For the first time, she was close to being afraid of what she had touched.
Master Mind was ambiguous, but through intent rather than fumble-thinking. She had a powerful impression of him, from his self-chosen title: a man on a throne, head swollen and limbs atrophied, belly bloated like a balloon, framing vast schemes, manipulating lesser beings like chess-pieces. She was warier of him than even of the rare angry spirit she had called into her circle. There were defences against him, though. She had been careful to make sure of that.
“Ugly hell gapes”, she remembered from Dr Faustus. Well, not for her.
She thought Master Mind was not a spirit at all.
U R ALLONE
“You are all one,” interpreted Miss Walter-David. “Whatever can that mean?”
U R ALONE
That was not a cryptic statement from the beyond. Before discovering her “gift”, Irene Dobson had toiled in an insurance office. She knew a type-writing mistake when she saw one.
U R AFRAID
“You are af—”
“Yes, Miss Walter-David, I understand.”
“And are you?”
“Not any more. Master Mind, you are a most interestin
g fellow, yet I cannot but feel you conceal more than you reveal. We are all, at our worst, alone and afraid. That is scarcely a great insight.”
It was the secret of her profession, after all.
“Are you not also alone and afraid?”
Nothing.
“Let me put it another way.”
She pressed down on the planchette, and manipulated it, spelling out in his own language.
R U NOT ALSO ALONE AND AFRAID
She would have added a question mark, but the ouija board had none. Spirits never asked questions, just supplied answers.
IRENE D was sharper than he had first guessed. And he still knew no more about her. No matter.
Boyd rolled over to the next keyboard.
U TELL HIM GRRL BCK OFF CREEP
IRENE D: Another presence? How refreshing. And you might be?
CARESS SISTA.
IRENE D: Another spirit?
Presence? Spirit? Was she taking the piss?
UH HUH SPIRT THAT’S THE STUFF SHOW THAT PIG U CAN STAND UP 4 YRSELF
IRENE D: Another presence, but the same mode of address. I think your name might be Legion.
Boyd knew of another netshark who used Legion as a log-on. IRENE D must have come across him too. Not the virgin she seemed, then. Damn.
His search still couldn’t penetrate further than her simple log-on. By now, he should have her mother’s maiden name, her menstrual calendar, the full name of the first boy she snogged at school and a list of all the porn sites she had accessed in the last week.
He should close down the Room, seal it up forever and scuttle away. But he was being challenged, which didn’t happen often. Usually, he was content to play a while with those he snared, scrambling their heads with what he had found out about them as his net-noose drew tauter around them. Part of the game was to siphon a little from their bank accounts: someone had to pay his phone and access bills, and he was damned if he should cough up by direct debit like some silly little newbie. But mostly it was for the sport.
