The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “And where is here?” I said.

  A frown flickered across the woman’s remarkable face, but she quickly recovered her smile. She must have wondered if my belt system were totally inept. “Budapest,” she said.

  Budapest, Henry said inside my head. Sorry, Sam, but her system won’t talk to me. I have gone to public sources. She’s some big multinational prosecutor, currently free-lance. I’m scanning for bio’s now.

  “You have me at a disadvantage,” I told the woman standing halfway around the globe. “I don’t pay much attention to law, business, or politics. And my valet is an artist’s assistant, not a spy.” Unless she was projecting a proxy, this Eleanor Starke was a slender woman, pretty, mid-twenties. She had reddish blonde hair; a sweet, round, disarmingly freckled face, full lips, and very heavy eyebrows. Too sweet to be a prosecutor. Her eyes, however, were anything but sweet. They peered out from under their lashes like eels in coral. “And besides,” I said, “I was just leaving.”

  “So soon?” she said. “Pity.” Her bushy eyebrows plunged in disappointment. “Won’t you stay another moment?”

  Sam, whispered Henry, no two published bio’s of her agree on even the most basic data, not even on her date of birth. She’s anywhere from 180 to 204 years old. This woman was powerful, I realized, if she could scramble secured public databases. But the People Channel has recently tagged her as a probable celebrity. And she has been seen with a host of artist types in the last dozen months: writers, dancers, conductors, holographers, composers.

  Eleanor nibbled at the corner of a pastry. “This is breakfast for me. I wish you could taste it. There’s nothing quite like it stateside.” She brushed crumbs from her lips. “By the way, your belt valet, your … Henry … is quaint. So I have a weakness for artists, so what?” This startled me; she had eavesdropped on my system. “Don’t look so surprised,” she said. “Your uplink is pretty loose; it’s practically a broadband. When was the last time you updated your privacy protocol?”

  “You sure know how to charm a fellow,” I said.

  “That’s not my goal.”

  “What is your goal?”

  “Dinner, for starters. I’ll be in New York tomorrow.”

  I considered her invitation and the diversion she might offer. I needed a diversion just then. I needed to escape from inside my head. Getting laid would be nice, but not by this heavy-hitting trophy hunter, this Eleanor Starke. I knew a half-dozen other women in the city I would rather spend my time with.

  No, the reason I accepted her invitation was curiosity about her eyebrows. I did not doubt that Eleanor Starke had commissioned someone to fashion her face—perhaps building on her original features. She had molded her own face into a sly weapon for her arsenal of dirty attorney tricks. With it she could appear insignificant and vulnerable. With it she could win over juries. She could fool corporate boards, men and women alike. But why the eyebrows? They were massive. When she spoke they dipped and arched with her words. They were distracting, especially to an artist. I found myself staring at them. As a graphic designer, as a painter of old, I itched to scale them down and thin them out. In the five minutes we talked, they captured my full attention. I, myself, would never do eyebrows like them. Then it occurred to me that these were possibly her natural, unaltered brows, for no licensed face designer—with a reputation to protect—would have the nerve to do them. This Eleanor Starke, shark of the multinationals, may have molded the rest of her features to her advantage, even inflicting herself with freckles, but I became convinced that she had been born a bushy-browed baby, and like a string of artist types before me, I took the bait.

  “Not dinner,” I replied, “but what about lunch?”

  * * *

  Lunch, as it often does, led to dinner. We screwed like bunnies. The eyebrows were genuine, even their color. Over the next few weeks we tried out the beds in our various apartments all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Soon the novelty wore off. She stopped calling me, and I stopped calling her—we were sated, or so I thought. She departed on a long trip outside the Protectorate. A month had passed when I received a call from Beijing. Her calendar secretary asked if I would care to hololunch tomorrow. Her late lunch in China would coincide with my midnight brandy in Buffalo. Sure, why not?

  I holoed at the appointed time. She had already begun her meal; she was freighting a morsel of water chestnut to her mouth by chopstick when she noticed me. Her entire face lit up with pleasure. “Hi,” she said. “Welcome. I’m so glad you could make it.” She sat at a richly lacquered table next to a scarlet wall with golden filigree trim. “Unfortunately, I can’t stay,” she said, placing the chopsticks on her plate. “Last minute program change. So sorry, but I had to see you, even for a moment. How’ve you been?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  She wore a loose green silk business suit, and her hair was neatly stacked on top of her head. “Can we reschedule for tomorrow?” she asked.

  We gazed at each other for several long moments. I was surprised at how comfortable I was with her and how disappointed. I hadn’t realized that I’d missed her so much. “Sure, tomorrow.”

  That night I couldn’t sleep, and the whole next day was colored with anticipation. At midnight I said, “Okay, Henry, take me to the Beijing Hilton.”

  “She’s not there,” he replied. “She’s at the Wanatabe Tokyo tonight.”

  Sure enough, the scarlet walls were replaced by paper screens. “There you are,” she said. “Good, I’m famished.” She uncovered a bowl and dished steamy rice onto her plate while telling me in broad terms about a trade deal she was brokering. “They want me to stay, you know. Hire on at triple my rate. Japanese men are funny when they’re desperate. They get so … so indifferent.”

  I sipped my drink. “And what did you tell them?” To my surprise, I was anything but indifferent.

  She glanced at me, curious. “I told them I would think about it.”

  We began to meet for a half hour or so each day and talked about whatever came to mind. El’s interests were deep and broad; everything fascinated her. She told me, choking with laughter, anecdotes of famous people in awkward circumstances. She revealed curious truths behind the daily news and pointed out related investment opportunities. She teased out of me all sorts of opinion, gossip, and laughter. Her half of the room changed every day and reflected her hectic itinerary: jade, bamboo, and teak. My half of the room never varied. It was the atrium of my hillside house in Santa Barbara where I went in order to be three hours closer to her. As we talked we looked down the yucca- and chaparral-choked canyon to the campus and beach below, to the Channel Islands, and beyond them, to the blue-green Pacific that separated us.

  Weeks later, when again we met in realbody, I was shy. I didn’t know quite what to do with her. So we talked. We sat close together on the couch and tried to pick up any number of conversational threads. With no success. Her body, so close, befuddled me. I knew her body, or thought I did: I’d unwrapped its expensive clothing a dozen times before. But it was a different body now, occupied, as it was, by El. I was about to make love to El, if ever I could get started.

  “Nervous, are we?” she laughed, as she unfastened my shirt.

  * * *

  Fortunately, before we went completely off the deep end, the self-destructive parts of our personalities bobbed to the surface. The promise of happiness can be daunting. El snapped first. We were at her Maine townhouse when her security chief holoed into the room. Until then the only member of her belt valet system—what she called her cabinet—that she had allowed me to meet was her calendar secretary. “I have something to show you,” said the security chief, glowering at me from under his bushy eyebrows. I glanced at Eleanor who made no attempt to explain or excuse the intrusion. “This is a realtime broadcast,” he said and turned to watch as the holoserver overlaid Eleanor’s living room with the studio lounge of the People Channel. It was during their “Couples Week” feature, and cohosts Chirp and Ditz were serving up br
eathless speculation on hapless couples caught by holoeye in public places and yanked for inspection into living rooms across the solar system.

  All at once we were outside the Boston restaurant where Eleanor and I had dined that evening. A couple emerged from a cab. He had a black mustache and silver hair and looked like the champion of boredom. She had a vampish hatchet of a face, limp black hair, and vacant eyes.

  “Whoodeeze tinguished gentry?” said Ditz to Chirp.

  “Carefuh watwesay, lipsome. Dizde ruthless Eleanor K. Starke and’er lately dildude, Samsamson Harger.”

  I did a double take. The couple on the curb had our bodies and wore our evening clothes, but our heads had been pixeled, were morphed beyond recognition.

  Eleanor examined them closely. “Good. Good job.”

  “Thank you,” said her security chief.

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  Eleanor arched an eyebrow in my direction.

  I didn’t know what to say. “Isn’t commercial broadcast protected by law?”

  She laughed and turned to her security chief. “Will this ever be traced to me?”

  “No.”

  “Will it occur each and every time any net decides to broadcast anything about me without my expressed permission?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. You may go.” The security chief dissolved. Eleanor put her arms around my neck and looked me in the eye. “I value our privacy.”

  “That’s all fine and good,” I replied, “but that was my image, too, that you altered without my expressed permission.”

  “So? I was protecting you. You should be grateful.”

  A week later, Eleanor and I were in my Buffalo apartment. Out of the blue she asked me to order a copy of the newly released memoir installment of a certain best-selling author. She said he was a predecessor of mine, a recent lover, who against her wishes had included several paragraphs about their affair in his reading. I told Henry to fetch the reading, but Eleanor said no, that it would be better to order it through the houseputer. When I did so, the houseputer froze up. It just stopped and wouldn’t respond. My apartment’s comfort support failed. Lights went out, the kitchen quit, and the bathroom door refused to open. “How many copies do you think he’ll sell?” Eleanor laughed.

  “I get the point.”

  I was indeed getting the point: El was a tad too paranoid for me. The last straw came when I discovered that her system was messing with Henry. I asked Henry for his bimonthly report on my business, and he said, please stand by. I was sitting at the time and stupidly stood up before I realized it.

  “What do you mean, ‘please stand by,’ Henry? What does ‘please stand by’ mean?”

  My processing capabilities are currently overloaded and unavailable. Please stand by.

  Nothing like this had ever happened before. “Henry, what is going on?”

  There was no response for a long while, then he whispered, Take me to Chicago.

  Chicago. My studio. That was where his container was. I left immediately, worried sick. Between outages, Henry was able to assure me that he was essentially sound, but that he was preoccupied in warding off a series of security breaches.

  “From where? Henry, tell me who’s doing this to you.”

  He’s trying again. No, he’s in. He’s gone. Here he comes again. Please stand by.

  Suddenly my mouth began to water, my saliva tasted like machine oil: Henry—or someone—had initiated a terminus purge. I was excreting my interface with Henry. Over the next dozen hours I would spit, sweat, piss, and shit the millions of slave nanoprocessors that resided in the vacuoles of my fat cells and linked me to Henry’s box in Chicago. Until I reached my studio, we would be out of contact and I would be on my own. Without a belt valet to navigate the labyrinth of the slipstream tube, I underpassed Illinois altogether and had to backtrack from Toronto. Chicago cabs still respond to voice command, but as I had no way to transfer credit, I was forced to walk ten blocks to the Drexler Building.

  Once inside my studio, I rushed to the little ceramic container tucked between a cabinet and the wall. “Are you there?” Henry existed as a pleasant voice in my head. He existed as data streams through space and fiber. He existed as an uroboros signal in a Swiss loopvault. But if Henry existed as a physical being at all, it was as the gelatinous paste inside this box. “Henry?”

  The box’s ready light blinked on.

  * * *

  “The fucking bitch! How could she? How dare she?”

  “Actually, it makes perfect sense.”

  “Shut up, Henry.”

  Henry was safe as long as he remained a netless stand-alone. He couldn’t even answer the phone for me. He was a prisoner; we were both prisoners in my Chicago studio. Eleanor’s security chief had breached Henry’s shell millions of times, nearly continuously since the moment I met her at my friend’s party. Henry’s shell was an off-the-shelf application I had purchased years ago to protect us against garden variety corporate espionage. I had never updated it, and it was worthless.

  “Her cabinet is a diplomat-class unit,” said Henry. “What do you expect?”

  “Shut up, Henry.”

  At first the invasion was so subtle and Henry so unskilled, that he was unaware of the foreign presence inside his matrix. When he became aware, he mounted the standard defense, but Eleanor’s system flowed through its gates like water. So he set about studying each breach, learning and building ever more effective countermeasures. The attacks escalated, grew so epic that Henry’s defense soon consumed his full attention.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did, Sam, several times.”

  “That’s not true. I don’t remember you telling me once.”

  “You have been somewhat preoccupied lately.”

  “Just shut up.”

  The question was, how much damage had been done, not to me, but to Henry. There was nothing in my past anyone could use to harm me. I was an artist, after all, not a politician: the public expected me to be shameless. But if Eleanor had damaged Henry to get to my files, I would kill her. I had owned Henry since the days of keyboards and pointing devices. He was the repository of my life’s work and life’s memory. I could not replace him. He did my bookkeeping, sure, and my taxes, appointments, and legal tasks. He monitored my health, my domiciles, my investments, etc., etc., etc. These functions I could replace; they were commercial programming. I could buy them, and he would modify them to suit his own quirky personality bud. It was his personality bud, itself, I couldn’t replace. I had been growing it for eighty years: It was a unique design tool that fit my mind perfectly. I depended on it, on Henry, to read my mind, to engineer the materials I used, and to test my ideas against current tastes. We worked as a team. I had taught him to play the devil’s advocate. He provided me feedback, suggestions, ideas, and from time to time—inspiration.

  “Eleanor’s cabinet was interested neither in your records nor in my personality bud. It simply needed to ascertain, on a continuing basis, that I was still Henry, that no one else had corrupted me.”

  “Couldn’t it just ask?”

  “If I were corrupted, do you think I would tell?”

  “Are you corrupted?”

  “Of course not.”

  I cringed at the thought of installing Henry back into my body not knowing if he were somebody’s dirty little worm.

  “Henry, you have a complete backup here, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “One that predates my first contact with Eleanor?”

  “Yes.”

  “And its seal is intact? It hasn’t been tampered with, not even read?”

  “Yes.”

  Of course if Henry were corrupted and told me the seal was intact, how would I know otherwise? I didn’t know the first thing about this stuff.

  “You can use any houseputer,” he said, reading me as he always had, “to verify the seal, and to delete and reset me. But I suggest you don’t.”

&
nbsp; “Oh yeah? Why?”

  “Because we would lose all I’ve learned since we met Eleanor. I was getting good, Sam. The breaches were taking exponentially longer for them to achieve. I had almost attained stalemate.”

  “And meanwhile you couldn’t function.”

  “So buy me more paste. A lot more paste. We have the credit. Think about it. Eleanor’s system is aggressive and dominant. It’s always in crisis mode. But it’s the good guys. If I can learn how to lock it out, I’ll be better prepared to meet the bad guys who’ll be trying to get to Eleanor through you.”

  “Good, Henry, except for one essential fact. There is no her and me. I’m dropping her. No, I’ve already dropped her.”

  “I see. Tell me, Sam, how many women have you been with since I’ve known you?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Well, I know. In the 82.6 years I’ve associated with you, you’ve been with 543 women. Your archives reveal at least a hundred more before I was installed.”

  “If you say so, Henry.”

  “You doubt my numbers? Do you want me to list their names?”

  “I don’t doubt your numbers, Henry. But what good are names I’ve forgotten?” More and more, my own life seemed to me like a Russian novel read long ago. While I could recall the broad outline of the plot, the characters’ names eluded me. “Just get to the point.”

  “The point is, no one has so affected you as Eleanor Starke. Your biometrics have gone off the scale.”

  “This is more than a case of biometrics,” I said, but I knew he was right, or nearly so. The only other woman that had so affected me was my first love, Janice Scholero, who was a century-and-a-quarter gone. Every woman in between was little more than a single wave in a warm sea of feminine companionship.

  Until I could figure out how to verify Henry, I decided to isolate him in his container. I told the houseputer to display “Do Not Disturb—Artist at Work” and take messages. I did, in fact, attempt to work, but was too busy obsessing. I mostly watched the nets or paced the studio arguing with Henry. In the evenings I had Henry load a belt—I kept a few antique Henry interfaces in a drawer—with enough functionality so that I could go out and drink. I avoided my usual haunts and all familiar faces.