In the first message she recorded on my houseputer, El said, “Good for you. Call when you’re done.” In the second she said, “It’s been over a week, must be a masterpiece.” In the third, “Tell me what’s wrong. You’re entirely too sensitive. This is ridiculous. Grow up!”
I tried to tell her what was wrong. I recorded a message for her, a whole seething litany of accusation and scorn, but was too cowardly to post it.
In her fourth message, El said, “It’s about Henry, isn’t it? My security chief told me all about it. Don’t worry; they frisk everyone I meet, nothing personal, and they don’t rewrite anything. It’s their standing orders, and it’s meant to protect me. You have no idea, Sam, how many times I’d be dead if it weren’t for my protocol.
“Anyway, I’ve told them to lay off Henry. They said they could install a deadman alarm in Henry’s personality bud, but I said no. Complete hands off. Okay? Is that enough?
“Call, Sam. Let me know you’re all right. I … miss you.”
In the meantime I could find no trace of a foreign personality in Henry. I knew my Henry just as well as he knew me. His thought process was like a familiar tune to me, and at no time during our weeks of incessant conversation did he strike a false note.
El sent her fifth message from bed where she lay naked between iridescent sheets (of my design). She said nothing. She looked directly at the holoeye, propped herself up, letting the sheet fall to her waist, and brushed her hair. Her chest above her breast, as I had discovered, was spangled with freckles.
Bouquets of real flowers began to arrive at my door with notes that said simply, “Call.”
The best-selling memoirs that had stymied my Buffalo houseputer arrived on pin with the section about Eleanor extant. The author’s sim, seated in a cane-backed chair and reading from a leather-bound book, described Eleanor in his soft southern drawl as a “perfumed vulvoid whose bush has somehow migrated to her forehead, a lithe misander with the emotional range of a militia slug.” I asked the sim to stop and elaborate. He smiled at me and said, “In her relations with men, Eleanor Starke is not interested in emotional communion. She prefers entertainment of a more childish variety, like poking frogs with a stick. She is a woman of brittle patience with no time for fluffy feelings or fuzzy thoughts. Except in bed. In bed Eleanor Starke likes her men half-baked, the gooier the better. That’s why she likes to toy with artists. The higher an opinion a man has of himself, the more painfully sensitive he is, the more polished his hubris, the more fun it is to poke him open and see all the runny mess inside.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I yelled at the sim. “El’s not like that at all. You obviously never knew her. She’s no saint, but she has a heart, and affection and … and … go fuck yourself.”
“Thank you for your comments. May we quote you? Be on the lookout for our companion volume to this memoir installment, The Skewered Lash Back, due out in September from Little Brown Jug.”
I had been around for 147 years and was happy with my life. I had successfully navigated several careers and amassed a fortune that even Henry had trouble charting. Still, I jumped out of bed each day with a renewed sense of interest and adventure. I would have been pleased to live the next 147 years in exactly the same way. And yet, when El sent her farewell message—a glum El sitting in a museum somewhere, a wall-sized early canvas of mine behind her—I knew my life to be ashes and dirt.
* * *
Seventy-two thick candles in man-sized golden stands flanked me like sentries as I waited and fretted in my tuxedo at the altar rail. The guttering beeswax flames filled the cathedral with the fragrance of clover. Time Media proclaimed our wedding the “Wedding of the Year” and broadcast it live on the Wedding Channel. A castrati choir, hidden in the gloom beneath the giant bronze pipes of the organ, challenged all to submit to the mercy of Goodness. Their sweet soprano threaded through miles of stone vaults, collecting odd echoes and unexpected harmony. Over six million guests fidgeted in wooden pews that stretched, it seemed, to the horizon. And each guest occupied an aisle seat at the front.
In the network’s New York studio, El and I, wearing keyblue body suits, stood at opposite ends of a bare soundstage. On cue, El began the slow march towards me. In Wawel Castle overlooking ancient Cracow, however, she marched through giant cathedral doors, her ivory linen gown awash in morning light. The organ boomed Mendelssohn’s wedding march, amplified by acres of marble. Two girls strewed rose petals at Eleanor’s feet, while another tended her long train. A gauzy veil hid El’s face from all eyes except mine. No man walked at her side; a two-hundred-year-old bride, Eleanor preferred to give herself away.
By the time of the wedding, El and I had been living together for six months. We had moved in together partly out of curiosity, partly out of desperation. Whatever was going on between us was mounting. It was spreading and sinking roots. It was like a thing inside us, but apart and separate from us, too. We talked about it, always “it,” not sure what to call it. It complicated our lives, especially El’s. We agreed we’d be better off without it and tried to remember, from experiences in our youth, how to fix the feelings we were feeling. The one sure cure, guaranteed to make a man and a woman wish they’d never met, was for them to cohabitate. If there was one thing humankind had learned in four million years of evolution, it was that man and woman were not meant to live in the same hut. And since the passage of the Procreation Ban of 2041, there has been little biological justification for doing so.
So, we co-purchased a townhouse in Connecticut. It wasn’t difficult for us to stake out our separate bedrooms and work spaces, but decorating the common areas required the diplomacy and compromise of a border dispute. Once in and settled, we agreed to open our house on Wednesday evenings and began the arduous task of melding our friends and colleagues.
We came to prefer her bedroom for watching the nets and mine for making love. When it came to sleeping, however, she required her own bed—alone. Good, we thought, here was a crack we could wedge open. We surveyed for other incompatibilities. She was a late night person, while I rose early. She liked to travel and go out a lot, while I was a stay-at-homer. She loved classical music, while I could stand only neu-noise. She had a maniacal need for total organization of all things, while for me a cluttered space was a happy space.
These differences, however, seemed only to heighten the pleasure we took in each other. We were opposites attracting, two molecules bonding—I don’t know—two dogs trying to get unstuck.
* * *
The network logged 6.325 million subscribers to our wedding, altogether a modest rating. Nevertheless, the guest book contained some of the most powerful signatures on the planet (El’s admirers) and the confetti rained down for weeks. The network paid for a honeymoon on the Moon, including five days at the Lunar Princess and round-trip fare aboard Pan Am.
Eleanor booked a third seat on the shuttle, not the best portent for a successful honeymoon. She assigned me the window seat, took the aisle seat for herself, and into the seat between us she projected one cabinet member after another. All during the flight, she took their reports, issued orders, and strategized with them, not even pausing for lift-off or docking. Her cabinet consisted of about a dozen officials and, except for her security chief, they were all women. They all appeared older than El’s current age, and they all bore a distinct Starke family resemblance: reddish-blond hair, slender build, the eyebrows. If they were real people, rather than the projections of El’s belt system, they could be her sisters and brother, and she the spoiled baby of the family.
Two cabinet officers especially impressed me, the attorney general, a smartly dressed woman in her forties with a pinched expression, and the chief of staff, who was the eldest of the lot. This chief of staff coordinated the activities of the rest and was second in command after El. She looked and spoke remarkably like El. She was not El’s oldest sister, but El, herself, at seventy. She fascinated me. She was my Eleanor stripped of meat,
a stick figure of angles and knobs, her eyebrows gone colorless and thin. Yet her eyes burned bright, and she spoke from a deep well of wisdom and authority. No wonder Henry, a pleasant voice in my head, admired El’s cabinet.
It had been ages since I had flown in an orbital craft; my last time had been before the development of airborne nasties, smartactives, militia slugs, visola, and city canopies. In a tube, you hardly noticed your passage across barriers since the tube, itself, was a protuberance of the canopies. Looking out my window, I was surprised to see that the shuttlecraft wing was covered with the same sharkskin used on militia craft. But it made sense. Once out of the hangar we were in the great, wild outside and the target of every nastie released into the atmosphere. On the runway, the sharkskin’s protective slime foamed away contaminants. After takeoff, the skin rippled and trimmed itself, and our speed was our protection until we reached the stratosphere where the skin relaxed and resumed its foaming.
The flight attendant, a michelle named Traci, was excellent. When the view outside my window lost my interest, she brought me a pillow. I had been about to ask for one. She offered us drinks, including Eleanor’s chief of staff who happened to be in the middle seat at the moment. This pleased Eleanor immensely. The michelle knew that if a passenger reserved a seat for her belt valet, it was best to treat the valet as real.
We watched the michelle attend to the other passengers in our compartment. She had well-rounded breasts and hips and filled out her smartly tailored teal uniform. She was diminutive—a michelle grew to about five feet tall—a doll woman, dark complexioned and full of promise, Mediterranean. Eleanor said, “Applied People employees are consistently superior to MacPeople people.”
“No matter their agency, michelles are superior,” said her chief of staff. “You simply cannot fluster them.”
Before my nap, I left my seat to use the rest room. The forward toilets were occupied, so I went aft through the coach section. All of the passengers there were clumped in the most forward seats, except for five people—one woman and four men—at the tail, with a large unoccupied section between the two groups. Odd. When I reached the tail, I noticed a sharp, foul odor, like rotting cheese. The odor was even stronger in the rest room, and I wondered how Pan Am could operate so negligently. Returning through the coach section, I realized that the bulk of passengers were sitting forward to avoid the odor, and I wondered why the small group of five remained at the tail. When I glanced back at them, they—all of them—regarded me with cold malice.
Back in my seat, I plumped my pillow and prepared to nap. El’s security chief, whose turn it was in the middle, looked at me and leered, “So what you think of ’em?”
“Them who?”
“The stinkers back there.”
“The stinkers?” I wasn’t familiar with the term. (Seared, said Henry in my head.) “You mean those people were seared?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry. They’re harmless, and then some.”
I was appalled. Of course I’d heard that the National Militia was searing living individuals these days—felons mostly, whose crimes were not heinous enough to warrant outright extermination—but I had thought it to be a rare punishment. And now here were five of the seared on the same shuttle. “Where are they going?”
“Let’s see,” said the security chief. “They have passage booked from the Moon aboard a Jupiter freighter. They’re emigrating to the colonies, most likely. Good riddance.”
* * *
So the flight, so the honeymoon. Within hours of checking into the Sweetheart Suite of the Lunar Princess, Eleanor was conducting full cabinet meetings. I was left to take bounding strolls around the duty-free dome alone. I didn’t mind. I like my solitude.
I happened to be in the suite when Eleanor “took the call.” The official seal of the Tri-Discipline Council filled our living room with its stately gyration and dissolved as Audrey Foldstein, herself, appeared before us sitting at her huge oaken desk. She greeted us and apologized for barging in on our honeymoon. I was dumbfounded. Here was Audrey Foldstein, chair of the Tri-D Board of Governors, one of the most powerful persons on Earth, parked at her trademark desk in our hotel suite. She turned to me and praised the inventiveness of my work in package design, and especially the camouflage work I had done forty years before for the National Militia. She also mentioned my evacuation blanket for trauma and burn victims. She spoke sincerely and at length and then turned to Eleanor. “Ms. Starke, do you know why I’m here?”
“I believe so, Ms. Foldstein.” Eleanor sat erect, regarded the holo with a steady gaze, and sent me a message through Henry, Eleanor’s chief of staff extends Eleanor’s apology for not informing you sooner of her nomination. She would have told you had she thought there was any chance of her actually being designated.
Nomination to what? I tongued back.
“These are the most exciting days known to humankind,” said Audrey Foldstein, “as well as the most perilous. Each hour that passes brings wonders—and dangers—unimagined by our parents.…” Foldstein appeared to be in her mid-forties, an age compatible with her monstrous authority, while my El looked like a devoted daughter. “… and as a member of the Tri-Discipline Board of Governors, one must ever dedicate oneself—no, consecrate oneself—to upholding these principles, namely…”
A Tri-D Governor! Was that possible? My El?
“… You will be asked to make decisions and bear responsibilities no reasonable person would choose to make or bear. You will be a target of vocal—even violent—recrimination. And with a new family…” Ms. Foldstein glanced at me, “… you will be that much more vulnerable…”
Henry whispered, Eleanor’s chief of staff says Eleanor asks twice if you know what this means.
I puzzled over this message. It had been flattened by its passage through two artificial minds. What Eleanor had probably said was, “Do you know what this means? Do you know what this means?”
Yes, dear Eleanor, I tongued through Henry, I do. It means that every door everywhere stands open to you. Congratulations, lover. It means you have climbed onto the world stage.
She glanced at me and winked.
By the time we shuttled back to Earth, the confirmation process was well underway. Over the next few tortuous weeks, Congressional Committees strenuously debated Eleanor’s designation in public, while multinationals and the National Militia deliberated in camera. One day El would float through the house in regal exaltation. The next day she would collapse on the couch to bitterly rue the thousands of carefully buried indiscretions of her past that threatened to resurface. On the morning she testified before the Tri-D Board of Governors, she was centered, amiable, and razor-sharp. Immediately upon returning home she summoned me to my bedroom and demanded rushed, rough sex from me. Twenty minutes later she couldn’t stand the sorry sight of me.
I supported her every which way I could think of. I put my own career on hold. Actually, I hadn’t been to my Chicago studio since nursing Henry there.
When Eleanor was finally confirmed, we took the slipstream tube down to Cozumel for some deep-sea diving and beachcombing. It was meant to be a working vacation, but by then I suffered no illusions about Eleanor’s ability to relax. There were too many plans to make and people to meet. And indeed, she kept some member of her cabinet at her side at all times: on the beach, in the boat, at the Mayan theme village, even in the cramped quarters of the submersible.
We had planned to take advantage of an exclusive juve clinic on the island to shed some age. My own age-of-choice was my mid-thirties, the age at which my body was still active enough to satisfy my desires, but mellow enough to sit through long hours of creative musing. El and I had decided on the three-day gelbath regimen and had skipped our morning visola to give our cells time to excrete their gatekeepers. But at the last moment, El changed her mind. She decided she ought to grow a little older. So I went to the clinic alone and bathed in the gels twice a day. Billions of molecular smartactives soaked through my skin;
permeated my muscles, cartilage, bones, and nerves; politely snip, snip, snipped away protein cross-links and genetic anomalies; and gently flushed away the sludge and detritus of age.
I returned to the bungalow on Wednesday, frisky and bored, and volunteered to prepare it for our regular weekly salon. I had to sift through a backlog of thousands of recorded holos from our friends and associates. More congratulations and confetti for El’s appointment. The salon, itself, was a stampede. More people holoed down than our bungalow could accommodate. Its primitive holoserver was overwhelmed by so many simultaneous transmissions, our guests were superimposed over each other five or ten bodies deep, and the whole squirming mass of them flickered around the edges.
Despite the confusion, I quickly sensed that this was a farewell party—for Eleanor. Our friends assumed she would be posted offplanet; all new Tri-D governors were, as all Earth posts were filled. At the same time, no one expected me to go with her—who would? Given people’s longevity, it could take decades—or centuries—for Eleanor to acquire enough seniority to be transferred back to Earth. But I replied, each time the subject was broached, “Of course I’m going with her; a husband needs the regular realbody presence of his wife.” Lame but true, yet each time I said it I felt sick. I didn’t want to leave Earth. I had never wanted to be a colonist. I became constipated at low-g. Lifesuits gave me a rash. And would I be able to work? It was true I could holo my Chicago studio anywhere, but if I followed Eleanor out to some galactic rock, would my Muse follow me?
By the time the last guest signed off, we were exhausted. Eleanor got ready for bed, but I poured myself a glass of tea and went out to sit on the beach.
The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995 Page 52
