“Nothing,” said the security chief, “zip, nada. Your cell survey came up normal. They couldn’t even get the arresting slug, nor any other slug, to duplicate the initial readings.”
“So the arresting slug was defective?”
“We’ve forced them to concede that the arresting slug may have been defective.”
“So they reassembled me and let me go, and everything is okay?”
“Not quite. That particular model slug has never been implicated in a false reading. This would be the first time, according to the militia, and naturally they’re not eager to admit that. Besides, they still had you on another serious charge.”
“Which is?”
“That your initial reading constituted an unexplained anomaly.”
“An unexplained anomaly? This is a crime?”
I excused myself for another visit to the bathroom. The urgency increased when I stood up from the armchair and was painful by the time I reached the toilet. This time the stream didn’t burn me, but hissed and gave off some sort of vapor, like steam. I watched in horror as my situation became clear to me.
I marched back to the living room, stood in front of the three holos, rolled up a sleeve, and scratched and rubbed my arm, scraping off flakes of skin which cascaded to the floor, popping and flashing like a miniature fireworks display. “I’ve been seared!” I screamed at them. “You let them sear me!”
“Sit down,” said the chief of staff. “Unfortunately, there’s more.”
I sat down, still holding my arm out. Beads of sweat dropped from my chin and boiled away on the robe in little puffs of steam.
“Eleanor feels it best to tell you everything now,” said the chief of staff. “It’s not pretty, so sit back and prepare yourself for more bad news.”
I did as she suggested.
“They weren’t about to let you go, you know. You had forfeited all of your civil rights. If you weren’t the spouse of a Tri-Discipline Governor, you’d have simply disappeared. As it was, they proceeded to eradicate all traces of your DNA from the environment. They flooded this apartment first, removed every bit of hair, phlegm, mucus, skin, fingernail, toenail, semen, and blood that you have shed or deposited since moving in. They sent probes down the plumbing for trapped hair. They subjected Eleanor to a complete body douche. They scoured the halls, elevators, lobby, dining room, linen stores, laundry. They were most thorough. They have likewise visited your townhouse in Connecticut, the bungalow in Cozumel, the juve clinic, your hotel room on the Moon, the shuttle, and all your and Eleanor’s domiciles all over the Protectorate. They are systematically following your trail backward for a period of thirty years.”
“My Chicago studio?”
“Of course.”
“Henry?”
“Gone.”
“You mean in isolation, right? They’re interrogating him, right?”
The security chief said, “No, eradicated. He resisted. Gave ’em quite a fight, too. But no civilian job can withstand the weight of the National Militia. Not even us.”
I didn’t believe Henry was gone. He had so many secret backups. At this moment he was probably lying low in a half dozen parking loops all over the solar system.
But another thought occurred to me. “My son!”
The chief of staff said, “When your accident occurred, the chassis had not yet been infected with your and Eleanor’s recombinant. Had it been, the militia would have disassembled it too. Eleanor prevented the procedure at the last moment and turned over all genetic records and material.”
I tried sifting through this. My son was dead, or rather, never started. But at least Eleanor had saved the chassis. We could always try—no we couldn’t. I was seared! My cells were locked. Any attempt to read or overwrite any of my cells would cause those cells to fry.
The attorney general said, “The chassis, however, had already been brought out of stasis and was considered viable. To allow it to develop with its original genetic complement, or to place it back into stasis, would have exposed it to legal claims by its progenitors. So Eleanor had it infected. It’s undergoing conversion at this moment.”
“Infected? Infected with what? Did she clone herself?”
The chief of staff laughed, “Heavens, no. She had it infected with the recombination of her genes and those of a simulated partner, a composite of several of her past consorts.”
“Without my agreement?”
“You were deceased at the time. She was your surviving spouse.”
“I was deceased for only three minutes! I was retrievably dead. Obviously, retrievable!”
“Alive you would have been a felon, and the fertility permit would have been annulled.”
I closed my eyes and leaned back into the chair. “Okay,” I said, “what else?” When no one answered, I said, “To sum up then, I have been seared, which means my genes are booby trapped. Which means I’m incapable of reproducing, or even of being rejuvenated. So my life expectancy has been reduced to … what?… another hundred years or so? Okay. My son is dead. Pulled apart before he was even started. Henry is gone, probably forever. My wife—no, my widow—is having a child by another man—men.”
“Women actually,” said the chief of staff.
“Whatever. Not by me. How long did all of this take?”
“About twenty minutes.”
“A hell of a busy twenty minutes.”
“To our way of thinking,” said the attorney general, “a protracted interval of time. The important negotiation in your case occurred within the first five seconds of your demise.”
“You’re telling me that Eleanor was able to figure everything out and cook up her simulated partner in five seconds?”
“Eleanor has in readiness at all times a full set of contingency plans to cover every conceivable threat we can imagine. It pays, Mr. Harger, to plan for the worst.”
“I guess it does.” The idea that all during our time together, El was busy making these plans was too monstrous to believe. “So tell me about these negotiations.”
“First, let me impress upon you,” said the chief of staff, “the fact that Eleanor stuck by you. Few other Tri-Discipline officers would take such risks to fight for a spouse. Also, only someone in her position could have successfully prosecuted your case. The militia doesn’t have to answer phone calls, you know.
“As to the details, the attorney general can fill you in later, but here’s the agreement in a nutshell. Given the wild diagnosis of the arresting slug and the subsequent lack of substantiating evidence, we calculated the most probable cause to be a defect in the slug, not some as yet unheard of nastie in your body. Further, as a perfect system of any sort has never been demonstrated, we predicted there to be records of other failures buried deep in militia archives. Eleanor threatened to air these files publicly in a civil suit. To do so would have cost her a lifetime of political capital, her career, and possibly her life. But as she was able to convince the militia she was willing to proceed, they backed down. They agreed to revive you and place you on probation, the terms of which are stored in your belt system, which we see you have not yet reviewed. The major term is your searing. Searing effectively neutralizes the threat in case you are the victim of a new nastie. Also, as a sign of good faith, we disclosed the locations of all of Henry’s hidy-holes.”
“What?” I rose from my seat. “You gave them Henry?”
“Sit down, Mr. Harger,” said the security chief.
But I didn’t sit down. I began to pace. So this is how it works, I thought. This is the world I live in.
“Please realize, Sam,” said the chief of staff, “they would have found him out anyway. No matter how clever you think you are, given time, all veils can be pierced.”
I turned around to answer her, but she and her two colleagues were gone. I was alone in the room with the russ, Fred, who stood sheepishly next to the hall corridor. He cleared his throat and said, “Governor Starke will see you now.”
II
Shortly after my accident, Eleanor and I moved into our new home, a sprawling old farmstead on the outskirts of Bloomington. We have more than enough room here, with barns and stables, a large garden, apple and pear orchards, tennis courts, swimming pool, and a dozen service people to run everything. It’s really very beautiful, and the whole eighty acres is covered with its own canopy, inside and independent of the Bloomington canopy, a bubble inside a bubble. Just the place to raise the child of a Tri-Discipline governor.
The main house, built of blocks of local limestone, dates back to the last century. It’s the home that Eleanor and I dreamed of owning. But now that we’re here, I spend most of my time in the basement, for sunlight is hard on my seared skin. For that matter, rich food is hard on my gut, I bruise easily inside and out, I can’t sleep a whole night through, all my joints ache for an hour or so when I rise, I have lost my sense of smell, and I’ve become hard of hearing. There is a constant taste of brass in my mouth and a dull throbbing in my skull. I go to bed nauseated and wake up nauseated. The doctor says my condition will improve in time as my body adjusts, but that my health is up to me now. No longer do I have resident molecular homeostats to constantly screen, flush and scrub my cells, nor muscle toners or fat inhibitors. No longer can I go periodically to a juve clinic to correct the cellular errors of aging. Now I can and certainly will grow stouter, slower, weaker, balder, and older. Now the date of my death is decades, not millennia, away. This should come as no great shock, for this was the human condition when I was born. Yet, since my birth, the whole human race, it seems, has boarded a giant ocean liner and set sail for the shores of immortality. I, however, have been unceremoniously tossed overboard.
So I spend my days sitting in the dim dampness of my basement corner, growing pasty white and fat (twenty pounds already), and plucking my eyebrows to watch them sizzle like fuses.
I am not pouting, and I am certainly not indulging in self-pity, as Eleanor accuses me. In fact, I am brooding. It’s what artists do, we brood. To other, more active people, we appear selfish, obsessive, even narcissistic, which is why we prefer to brood in private.
But I’m not brooding about art or package design. I have quit that for good. I will never design again. That much I know. I’m not sure what I will do, but at least I know I’ve finished that part of my life. It was good; I enjoyed it. I climbed to the top of my field. But it’s over.
I am brooding about my victimhood. My intuition tells me that if I understand it, I will know what to do with myself. So I pluck another eyebrow hair. The tiny bulb of muscle at the root ignites like an old fashioned match, a tiny point of light in my dark cave and, as though making a wish, I whisper, “Henry.” The hair sizzles along its length until it burns my fingers, and I have to drop it. My fingertips are already charred from this game.
I miss Henry terribly. It’s as though a whole chunk of my mind were missing. I never knew how deeply integrated I had woven him into my psyche, or where my thoughts stopped and his started. When I ask myself a question these days, no one answers.
I wonder why he did it, what made him think he could resist the militia. Can machine intelligence become cocky? Or did he knowingly sacrifice himself for me? Did he think he could help me escape? Or did he protect our privacy in the only way open to him, by destroying himself? The living archive of my life is gone, but at least it’s not in the loving hands of the militia.
My little death has caused other headaches. My marriage ended. My estate went into receivership. My memberships, accounts and privileges in hundreds of services and organizations were closed. News of my death spread around the globe at the speed of light, causing tens of thousands of data banks to toggle my status to “deceased,” a position not designed to toggle back. Autobituaries, complete with footage of my mulching at the Foursquare Cafe, appeared on all the nets the same day. Every reference to me records both my dates of birth and death. (Interestingly, none of my obits or bio’s mention the fact that I was seared.) Whenever I try to use my voiceprint to pay a bill, alarms go off. El’s attorney general has managed to reinstate most of my major accounts, but my demise is too firmly entrenched in the world’s web to ever be fully corrected. The attorney general has, in fact, offered me a routine for my belt system to pursue these corrections on a continuous basis. She, as well as the rest of El’s cabinet, has volunteered to educate my belt for me as soon as I install a personality bud in it. It will need a bud if I ever intend to leave the security of my dungeon. But I’m not ready for a new belt buddy.
* * *
I pluck another eyebrow hair, and by its tiny light I say, “Ellen.”
We are living in an armed fortress. Eleanor says we can survive any form of attack here: conventional, nuclear, or molecular. She feels completely at ease here. This is where she comes to rest at the end of a long day, to glory in her patch of Earth, to adore her baby, Ellen. Even without the help of Mother’s Medley, Eleanor’s maternal instincts have all kicked in. She is mad with motherhood. Ellen is ever in her thoughts. If she could, El would spend all her time in the nursery in realbody, but the duties of a Tri-D governor call her away. So she has programmed a realtime holo of Ellen to be visible continuously in the periphery of her vision, a private scene only she can see. No longer do the endless meetings and unavoidable luncheons capture her full attention. No longer is time spent in a tube car flitting from one corner of the Protectorate to another a total waste. Now she secretly watches the jennies feed the baby, bathe the baby, perambulate the baby around the duck pond. And she is always interfering with the jennies, correcting them, undercutting whatever place they may have won in the baby’s affection. There are four jennies. Without the namebadges on their identical uniforms, I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. They have overlapping twelve-hour shifts, and they hand the baby off like a baton in a relay race.
I have my own retinue, a contingent of four russes: Fred, the one who showed up on the day of my little death, and three more. I am not a prisoner here, and their mission is to protect the compound, Governor Starke, and her infant daughter, not to watch me, but I have noticed that there is always one within striking distance, especially when I go near the nursery. Which I don’t do very often. Ellen is a beautiful baby, but I have no desire to spend time with her, and the whole house seems to breathe easier when I stay down in my tomb.
Yesterday evening a jenny came down to announce dinner. I threw on some clothes and joined El in the solarium off the kitchen where lately she prefers to take all her meals. Outside the window wall, heavy snowflakes fell silently in the blue-grey dusk. El was watching Ellen explore a new toy on the carpet. When she turned to me, her face was radiant, but I had no radiance to return. Nevertheless, she took my hand and drew me to sit next to her.
“Here’s Daddy,” she cooed, and Ellen warbled a happy greeting. I knew what was expected of me. I was supposed to adore the baby, gaze upon her plenitude and thus be filled with grace. I tried. I tried because I truly want everything to work out, because I love Eleanor and wish to be her partner in parenthood. So I watched Ellen and meditated on the marvel and mystery of life. El and I are no longer at the tail end of the long chain of humanity—I told myself—flapping in the cold winds of evolution. Now we are grounded. We have forged a new link. We are no longer grasped only by the past, but we grasp the future. We have created the future in flesh.
When El turned again to me, I was ready, or thought I was. But she saw right through me to my stubborn core of indifference. Nevertheless, she encouraged me, prompted me with, “Isn’t she beautiful?”
“Oh, yes,” I replied.
“And smart.”
“The smartest.”
Later that evening, when the brilliant monstrance of her new religion was safely tucked away in the nursery under the sleepless eyes of the night je
nnies, Eleanor rebuked me. “Are you so selfish that you can’t accept Ellen as your daughter? Does it have to be your seed or nothing? I know what happened to you was shitty and unfair, and I’m sorry. I really am. I wish to hell the slug got me instead. I don’t know why it missed me. Maybe the next one will be more accurate. Will that make you happy?”
“No, El, don’t talk like that. I can’t help it. Give me time.”
Eleanor reached over and put an arm around me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Forgive me. It’s just that I want us to be happy, and I feel so guilty.”
“Don’t feel guilty. It’s not your fault. I knew the risk involved in being with you. I’m an adult. I can adapt. And I do love Ellen. Before long she’ll have her daddy wrapped around her little finger.”
Eleanor was skeptical, but she wanted so much to believe me. That night she invited herself to my bedroom. We used to have an exceptional sex life. Sex for us was a form of play, competition, and truth-telling. It used to be fun. Now it’s a job. The shaft of my penis is bruised by the normal bend and torque of even moderate lovemaking. My urethra is raw from the jets of scalding semen when I come. Of course I use special condoms and lubricants for the seared, without which I would blister El’s vagina, but it’s still not comfortable for either of us. El tries to downplay her discomfort by saying things like, “You’re hot, baby,” but she can’t fool me. When we made love that night, I pulled out before ejaculating. El tried to draw me back inside, but I wouldn’t go. She took my sheathed penis in her hands, but I said not to bother. I hadn’t felt the need for a long time.
In the middle of the night, when I rose to go to my dungeon, Eleanor stirred and whispered, “Hate me if you must, but please don’t blame the baby.”
* * *
I ask my new belt how many eyebrow hairs an average person of my race, sex, and age has. The belt can access numerous encyclopedias to do simple research like this. Five hundred fifty in each eyebrow, it replies in its neuter voice. That’s one thousand one hundred altogether, plenty of fuel to light my investigation. I pluck another and say, “Fred.”
The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995 Page 56
