Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  “Fickle woman!” the stranger turned on her. “Only yesterday I was your baleful addiction.”

  “I love you,” she said. “I can’t stand the thought of losing you. You must think that I’m weak.”

  “I exist only to love you,” said the dark stranger. “Do you know what a torture that is?”

  She took his hand. “Tell me what to do.”

  He led her to a bench, and they sat. “It will not be easy, but when it is done, we will be together forever.”

  “Just tell me,” she said. “I don’t care anymore. I just can’t stand the thought of being without you.”

  George Carmichael was returning from work, an expensive leather briefcase in hand. He stood at the door to his flat, shaking the rain from his topcoat.

  “Good evening, George,” said Maryanne. She was standing in the doorway, her blouse unbuttoned to the space between her breasts, her hands behind her back.

  “Hello, Mrs. Spenser,” said George, not meeting her eyes, not noticing her.

  “Would you like to come in for a moment?” said Maryanne. “There’s something I’d like to show you.” She smiled her most winning smile.

  George raised his eyes to look at her. “What are you on about?” he said. “Why don’t you just let it drop? This is only making it worse.”

  “Oh, I do wish you’d reconsider,” said Maryanne. She brought her left hand around in front of her so George could see the pistol she held. “This belonged to my husband. He showed me how to use it before he went off to the war.”

  George’s face went white. “What the hell!” he cried.

  “Quiet, George. Come inside.” All business, she stepped forward and grabbed George’s shoulder, pulling him into the flat. He came along, stumbling.

  “Listen,” said George. “I’m sorry about what happened between us, all right? But this is ridiculous.”

  “Get in the chair.” She motioned the gun toward her ether station.

  “Mrs. Spenser, please,” said George, eyeing the machine with fear.

  Maryanne said nothing; she pulled back the hammer on the pistol.

  Slowly, George put down the briefcase and climbed into the chair.

  Maryanne opened a brown bottle and poured the equivalent of four doses of the EAM cocktail into a tumbler. “Drink,” she said.

  “But—”

  “Drink it!”

  George raised the tumbler and drank down its contents.

  Maryanne fastened the restraining straps over George’s arms and legs and switched on the machine, turning up the gain as high as it went.

  “You want to know the truth, George? I broke it off with you because I didn’t like the way you pawed at me. Like you were a dog, and I was your bitch. Do you think that’s what women want? Your stupid, clumsy hands all over them? Just you wait, George.”

  George gasped and his eyes fluttered. His breath caught in his throat and he choked. A violent tremor ran through his body.

  Maryanne stepped back, unbuttoning her blouse. She felt empty. She unzipped her skirt and stepped out of it.

  George lay on the ether station, his arms and legs shaking. The machine hummed. Maryanne removed the clasps from her garters and rolled down her stockings.

  Finally, as the last light from the cold November day disappeared from the windows, George’s body stopped moving. Maryanne, naked, gingerly removed the restraints and stared at his face. It was different, altered. His eyes opened, and Maryanne could tell at once that the eyes were not those of George Carmichael. She had succeeded.

  The dark stranger rose from the chair and took her roughly in his arms. She let him kiss her mouth, her neck, her breasts. He pushed her down onto the sofa and made love to her, fantasy made flesh. She wept, her fingers digging deep scratches into his back.

  Maryanne woke up in the middle of the night, alone in bed. The dark stranger was gone, the pillow cold. Her husband’s pistol was missing from the kitchen table. She stood and stared at the empty table for a long while.

  It was almost dawn when he returned. Maryanne was still standing in the kitchen, leaning against the stove.

  “Where were you?” she said.

  “Removing an obstacle,” he said, placing the gun on the table. He took her hands and drew her close.

  A horrid memory reared up in the bowels of Maryanne’s mind, and she shrieked, pulling away.

  “What’s wrong?” said the dark stranger. “I am here.”

  Maryanne stumbled backward and leaned against the sofa. “I—I’m sorry. I thought … I was just remembering.”

  The dark stranger closed his eyes and began to unbutton George Carmichael’s shirt. “Yes, the boy Parker.”

  “You know about him?” Maryanne’s body began to shake, and she could not control it.

  “I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “I wanted to apologize, but I can’t. I’m not sorry.” He slipped the shirt off, revealing a muscular, hairless chest.

  “Apologize?” Maryanne sank into the sofa, clutching her arms across her breast.

  “When you called to me then, I did not know how to answer your call. I was unformed then. I could not fill him.”

  “It was you?”

  “It was.”

  “What do you mean? How did I call you?”

  “I am yours,” said the dark stranger. “I exist only to love you. You wished me into existence even before you formed the cornerstone of the palace. You sculpted me with your heart. I am for you.” He fell to his knees. “Do you still not understand? In there, in your shadow palace, you dare to ask for what you cannot have in this world. You dare to love; you dare to hate. You do these things because you believe that none of it is real. You let your genuine desires take root, in the most fertile ground of the mind. I am the fruit of that desire. I am your lust, your hatred, your desire for vengeance and wickedness; and I am also your one true love, with a face and body sculpted by your own thoughts. And now I am free to clear a path for you through the waking world.”

  “I’m frightened.” Maryanne began to cry.

  “You do not need to be frightened anymore, Maryanne,” he said. He sat beside her and put his arms around her. “Never again.”

  Maryanne wanted to scream. She wanted to pull away from him, to run out of the apartment and keep running. Instead she returned his embrace, felt the rush of him in her blood, and sighed.

  Mike Resnick is the author of more than forty science fiction novels, twelve collections, over 130 stories, and two screenplays, as well as the editor of close to thirty anthologies. He has won four Hugos, and his work has been translated into twenty-two languages.

  Kay Kenyon is the author of six science fiction novels. Among other themes, she has written about the transformation of Earth by an icelike ecology of information (Maximum Ice, nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award); the collapse of terraforming (Rift); and a galactic search for biodiversity (The Seeds of Time).

  DOBCHEK, LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE

  Mike Resnick and Kay Kenyon

  In the morning, Dobchek found another cat in his garden. He reached under the lemon tree to grab it, but the tabby backed farther in, forcing him to scramble over the woolly thyme that had been genetically altered for winter blooms. Dobchek lunged. The cat bit. Undaunted, he latched on to the cat and hauled it out of the thyme, cursing it for digging holes in the urban garden he’d cultivated for forty years.

  Holding the scrawny creature by the scruff of the neck, Dobchek strode down the apartment hallway and banged on Mrs. Murchie’s door. When the door opened, he thrust the tabby at her.

  “It bit me,” Dobchek announced.

  “You chased it, then,” old Mrs. Murchie said, folding the animal into her arms. “There now,” she crooned at it. Her apartment stank. Four cats and no windows will do that to a place.

  “Keep them out of my garden,” he insisted. “They use it for a litter box.”

  Dobchek had no idea how they got in. The courtyard wa
s in the middle of the four apartment towers that formed their complex. The only way in was through his apartment. Originally the courtyard had been a gathering place for the tenants, but it had been fifty years since people dared to gather in parks. Rent on the courtyard was cheap.

  Mrs. Murchie shut the door in his face. Then she opened it again and thrust her pudgy chin out. “You got a birthday, don’t you Dobchek?”

  He blinked, wondering how she knew. She must have memorized the birthdays of everyone in the building. It was the curse of the very old, to know too much. Especially if, like Mrs. Murchie, you weren’t a scholar. She wasted her somatic computer. All that DNA computational power, squandered on the Mensa version of the Times crossword puzzle and raising cats.

  She persisted: “Your eightieth, isn’t it?”

  “So?”

  Eighty was the year many old people went over the top and got lost in the labyrinth of Knowing. Some people called it “lost in the funhouse.” It was the opposite of Alzheimer’s; you simply knew too much, and turned inward. Thinking, thinking, always thinking.

  “So why not have a party?” she sneered. “How long’s it been since you ever had a party, Dobchek?”

  He turned and walked away from her.

  But her voice followed him: “Invite all those cat-hating friends of yours.” He heard the door slam.

  But of course he didn’t have any cat-hating friends. In point of fact, he didn’t have any friends at all. But then, neither did Mrs. Murchie. He took some small measure of comfort from that.

  A group of twenty-year-olds sat in their chairs, looking blankly at Dobchek. Enrolled in the engineering school, they were the brightest of the bright. (Which, because they were twenty-year-olds, was not really very bright at all.) They hadn’t had time to master their somatic computers. Sure, they’d done the Change, done the treatments. But just because they now had a billion times the computing power of their grandfather’s Power Macs didn’t mean they understood anything.

  Dobchek sighed. Here we go again. He tried to explain the elastic properties of ceramics using four-dimensional math, but they looked as glazed over as Mrs. Murchie’s cat. There was one young woman who generally picked up on things first. She raised a hand. Thank God for her.

  “Yes, Britney?”

  “Will this be on the test?”

  He scowled at her. A wave of annoyance rolled over him. He felt it stacking up in his throat.

  Then it spilled out: “It’s all on the test. You have to learn it all.” They glared at him, resentful that they were young and stupid and he wasn’t. “I can’t spoon-feed you. You have to read. Study. Not sit there and wait for enlightenment to visit you. There is no enlightenment. Each of you is a miraculous computer. The point is to learn to access it. Not,” he said, glancing at Britney, “to fool the tests.”

  He dismissed them, wishing he hadn’t lost his temper. Their images faded like soap bubbles from bathwater, leaving him in his garden, staring at the lemon tree.

  Despite the wonders of the body’s somatics, the interface was damnably difficult. Subtle. Over decades, new neural connections had to be forged, as the brain learned to use the new tools at its disposal. Those new tools were the body and all its systems, guided during the Change by designer molecules, and sustained by messenger chemicals, creating links between DNA molecules or the junk DNA that was available for the task of computing. But it went beyond DNA. The biocomputer stored knowledge in organs, systems, and the gestalt of the whole body. Even the molecular programmers didn’t understand how the body took to the Change and what it was becoming. It wasn’t FDA-tested and -approved. It began as a guerilla movement; first a few scientists, then the very rich, followed by the kooks and the scholars, and then—well, everybody. You couldn’t stop it.

  But there was no magic pill of knowledge. You still had to learn the old way. Read. Study. You never forgot anything you read or heard. Just the same, kids thought they should be smarter, that four-dimensional math should be easier. Well, someday it would be. When they were old farts.

  As old as Dobchek.

  Feeling depressed, Dobchek took his coat from its peg and went outside. Usually he looked forward to his teleconference classes. At least, he told himself, it was some form of social contact.

  He found himself walking toward the museum, his usual destination. It was twelve blocks, but he let others have the Personal Rapid Transport cars. In the time Before, he used to take the subway. Or the bus. But, being terrorist targets, those were long gone.

  Long gone. Sonorous words that carried so much. He never walked up to the museum without thinking of what was long gone. The games at the stadium, real crowds, none of this tele-this, tele-that. Also gone—the Web, the old Internet where you could reach out and connect to friends and strangers all over the world. What a flash in the pan that was, as the terrorists figured out how to infect electronics, down to the last encrypted military computer. He remembered the day he finally threw away his computer. It was a dinosaur. Even disks carried pernicious viruses. Electronic circuits became the inroads the terrorists used to create mayhem. Silicon had let us down.

  But damn, it had been fun while it lasted! He remembered meeting Alicia in the chat room, moving to e-mail love, and thence to their first real date. All that was decades ago. Alicia was a poorly remembered ghost, killed by a fundamentalist who blamed a nameless crowd at the grocery store for his country’s cultural erosion via the World Wide Web.

  Now Dobchek carried his computer in his creaky old body. Instead of zeros and ones, there was the A, C, T, and G of the DNA platform. Having gone beyond silicon, computers were in vivo. In life-forms. But there was no Net, no Web. Sure, they had keyboards and screens and silicon peripherals like printers, with cyborg connections to these. But there were no connections to other people. Not one.

  All of which drove the terrorists into a frenzy. With no connections, there was simply no way they could infect the in vivo stuff. Two billion years of evolution had devised the best antivirus program possible: the human immune system.

  Dobchek climbed the palatial steps to the museum. Flags snapped in the breeze off the river, and several people sprinted up the stairs to avoid forming a crowd at such a public place.

  Dobchek took his time, letting people swarm by. A man selling pretzels at a sidewalk stand nodded at him, in friendly greeting. After a certain age, terrorists simply couldn’t terrorize you anymore. You weren’t anxious to die, but you were ready to. Here the guy was, selling pretzels under a big, striped umbrella. A nice target, and he couldn’t care less.

  In the grand vestibule, Dobchek paid his fee. A docent lectured to a group of noisy youngsters in his favorite wing, of impressionist painters. He put that off for later and turned left into the wing of those awful moving sculptures. Why couldn’t art stay put anymore?

  A mobile statue beckoned to him. Motion-activated, the art grouping interacted with the viewers, changing postures, changing colors. Awful stuff, really. What was art anymore, if the artists couldn’t make up their minds? Dobchek didn’t want to interact with art. He wanted to look at it, study it, admire it.

  Next to him a woman and young boy watched a statue that was morphing into a bull. “Hey, toro!” the boy chirped. The bull’s eyes glinted, perhaps getting ready to fake a charge.

  The next part happened very fast, and very slow. The man from the pretzel stand was there amid the statues. Carefully unzipping his jacket, he revealed a machine attached to his chest. As he pushed a button, his body came apart. Not cleanly, like the evolving statues, but with the messy red pulp of the truly in vivo.

  The blast knocked Dobchek and the woman into the wall. People and art lay in pieces. Shaking, the woman clung to Dobchek, and he to her. Between them was the little boy, silent, rolled into a tiny ball. Nearby a woman moaned, “Oh no, oh no!” looking at her shredded hand.

  Alarms mixed with shouts and screams as museum staff rushed to help the injured. Statues began moving again, covered in bloo
d, dancing now, a dance of death. A trickle of blood wound past them like a river seeking the sea. Sirens began whining.

  Dobchek still held the woman. She moaned, looking around at the carnage. The boy said, his voice like the bark of a tiny bird, “Shussh, Mom, it’s over now.” She shivered, clutching Dobchek. He wrapped his fingers around her hand, and around the boy’s. They were intertwined like strands of ivy, and shaking in unison.

  It was in that moment that Dobchek got lost in the funhouse.

  As he thought of it later, it was like falling through a hole—a hole in his self-regard. He went to a place of warm intensity. It was too fine to call peace, although later he thought it might be relief. He was so close to the woman’s cheek. Her skin was pink and fragile, her eyes lustrous. And in those moments he thought that he knew her, and her son. And, strangely, that he knew himself through them. All this was impossible, delusional. But he held them tighter, squeezing out the essence of the world he’d just fallen to.

  “Are you folks all right?” The medical squad guy was crouching next to them.

  Dobchek blinked. The fellow was pasty-faced and cold, more like an art statue than a living being. By comparison.

  The woman scrambled to her feet, shaking off Dobchek as though he were the terrorist. He held out a hand to her, wanting to prolong the moment, to say, What happened? How do I know you? But, narrowing her eyes, she recoiled from his hand, from his obvious neediness. She dragged the boy away, fleeing the museum.

  He staggered after her, then stopped himself. Someone gave him a cloth to wipe blood off his face. He’d forgotten the terrorist blast. He was still staggered by the hole, the place where he’d fallen and dwelled for a few glorious seconds. It wasn’t the funhouse, that place of computational madness. It was someplace else.

  Standing at the top of the great staircase, he looked out at the mundane world. The striped umbrella of the pretzel stand now stood empty of its vendor. The woman and the boy had disappeared into the urban maze.

  He missed them.

  Dobchek fretted. Within three days he was back at the museum, lying in wait for the woman. The blood, debris, and pretzel stand were gone. Everything looked normal, but normal had become a deep question for Dobchek.