by Rebecca Ore
“Sure,” I said.
The warm, fuzzy boy’s story:
Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived in the bottom of a lake. Perhaps we should say she wasn’t quite a woman. She swam up to the surface shimmering like a mirror and saw a fisherman in a boat and fell in love with him. He didn’t see her because she hadn’t known what falling in love felt like and thought that she’d been frightened. So, she sank back down in the water, but she couldn’t forget the fisherman. Sometime later, another time when the surface of the lake glittered like quicksilver, she rose from the bottom of the lake again. The fisherman’s boat wasn’t there. She felt terribly lonely. Perhaps, she said to herself, I wasn’t frightened. Perhaps I was feeling an emotion I’d never felt before.
So, each time the water surface turned silver, she rose to see if the fisherman was back. On the third day, she saw the boat and rose in front of it to see if the strange emotion would be stranger if she saw him looking at her.
“What are you doing in my lake?” he asked her.
“I was born here,” she said.
“I’m the lord of all this land and the waters in my land’s hollows and I’ve never seen you before.”
The water woman said, “I hid.”
“Why aren’t you hiding now?”
“I’ve been thinking about you since I first saw you. The last time you were fishing.”
“Don’t lie to me. Where are you from?” the lord said.
“May I come into your boat? I think I can show better than I could tell.” The water woman put her hands on the bow of the boat. She wore a dress spun from water spider silk, water spiders still nesting in it. As the lord helped her into the boat, a stickleback ran out of the nest he’d rolled in her dress’s hem, all his dorsal spines flared.
“I can see that you’re different,” the lord said. “Are you dangerous?”
“Are you?” the water woman asked back. “Perhaps danger is what I felt, as I thought I must be afraid. My heart beat so.”
“Perhaps I should throw you back and talk to a priest,” the lord said.
“I’d like to go with you,” the woman said.
“Your teeth are sharp and your skin is cold and there is a dent at the top of your skull, big as a teacup.”
The woman didn’t know what a teacup was, but she told the lord, “If we keep water in my skull hollow, I can go with you to the priest.”
The priest was very upset, but the woman didn’t die when the priest emptied her skull hollow and filled it with holy water. So the priest blessed both of them and said he’d say the banns for their marriage.
The woman had never sewn, but the lord’s sister taught her. The woman kept a water pitcher with her at all times. The sister said, “I can’t imagine a woman growing up anywhere so clumsy with a needle. Except, perhaps, a woman with such sharp teeth as you have. We should file them blunt before you marry my brother.”
“Will he love me more?” the woman asked the lady sister of her lord. The lake woman now knew love was what made her heart beat faster and little waves vibrate in the water on top of her skull.
“Yes,” said the sister with the file in her hand.
I didn’t hear more. My vision whited out. Some time later, I could see. The warm, fuzzy boy said, “I’ll finish the story later. You’ve got to help them now.”
Infinite regress of TV screen in front of my eyes. “We’ve got the visual cortex. Now the memory links.”
The warm, fuzzy boy asked, “Allison, can you remember being arrested?”
White glare. I visualized myself standing naked, on the video display. “Okay, that registered lots of places. Try to remember when you made contact with me,” Kearney said.
On the monitor he was a small man with sallow skin. I was talking to him. The warm, fuzzy boy squeezed my hands again and said, “Allison, I’ll see you when it’s over.”
The monitor ripped into a fish woman with pike teeth sitting by a red-headed woman with an iron file in her hand. “Aren’t you going to finish the story?” I asked.
“When you’re finished cooperating with these people,” the boy said. His voice was leaving the room.
I saw his face on the monitor. Kearney said, “Allison, try to remember who you spoke to before me.”
I was buying the vibrator from the clerk. I exploded like a child bomb, then woke up.
Kearney said, “Don’t worry if we tap nightmares. The drugs you’ve got will mute the emotional load. Now before that?”
The clerk at the store in Picayune. I watched myself, more a sketch than a clearly visualized person, walk back to my car and get in beside Mr. Gun. Mr. Gun was the sharpest image on the monitor, then the survivalists.
“We’ve mapped that,” another voice said. “And speaking of maps, Picayune is on old 59.”
“Allison, we’re going to take you back up 59. Where did you get on 59?”
On the monitor, I saw Lookout Mountain at Chattanooga. I drove off looking for the aquarium. I watched fish from my memory for a while, then Kearney asked, “Before Chattanooga?”
Joe and I were on the monitor arguing with mountain communards about deep ecology. I looked at Joe, tried to visualize him better. Ah, Joe, I miss you, myself on the video tried to say, but the video wasn’t wired to pick up my speech centers.
“Allison, try to keep visualizing what happened in the past, as best you can remember,” Kearney said. “Show us more about your friend here. I’m sure you’d like to remember him.”
Cascades of Joe and Miriam, the trip down the Colorado, the Pacific Northwest. Kearney said, “That’s that damn bitch again.”
“Miriam and Joe,” I said. I’d always trusted Joe and Miriam, good people.
“Good, Allison,” Kearney said. “Someone else also identified Miriam and Joe for us. We’re sure we’ll catch them soon. What’s your intensest memory of these people?”
Hetch Hetchy Dam exploded before it could be closed again. Miriam and Joe lay on the grass laughing. I was up, binoculars over my eyes looking for rangers. “We saved it the second time,” Joe was trying to say. We ran through the recovering meadows, laughing.
“We saved Hetch Hetchy,” I told Kearney.
“Very good, Allison. Who helped you plan that one?” Kearney asked.
We were sitting in a house in Bolinas, plastique on the table, a computer screen full of data. “Can you remember what was on the screen, Allison?”
The monitor enlarged the screen, showing that I hadn’t visualized real character on it. I remembered a bit and some lines turned into clear text: HETCH HETCHY AQUEDUCT, SCOVILLE SECURITY PERSONNEL RECORDS. A photo there was of a man I recognized, one of us who’d infiltrated, who’d never been caught.
“What were the man’s numbers, Allison?”
The screen within the screen squirmed, showed a 2 and some hash, then a 56. “Okay, Allison, we’d like you to remember another time that was maybe more dangerous.”
I was young, standing against a chainlink fence. “How old here?” Kearney asked.
“Eighteen. I’m getting shot at by police.” I couldn’t understand why I looked so afraid.
“Eco-action?”
The radio materialized in my hand. “I didn’t know what to do with my life then.”
Then I visualized Jergen. who saved me and gave me a community and a cause. On screen, then back to me. I got over the fence and ran, the cops who’d shot my compadres back at the store tracking me with sweat tracers, like rattlesnakes slowly follow the infrared tracks of the dying animals they poison. I could run, but I couldn’t hide. A back door opened. Jergen grabbed me with one hand and held a spray can in the other. “Sometimes, it pays to know the enemy,” he said, spraying away my traces. He rubbed a ball over my sweaty skin and rolled it down the street.
I stood there with the radio. “Why?” Jergen asked.
“We use the parts.”
“Bricoleurs,” he said. “Shredding the system for parts you can use. I didn’t know t
hose gangs let girls play with them.”
Behind the screen’s reality, Kearney asked, “Can’t you get the sound, too.”
“Almost,” another voice said.
I said, aloud. “I’m a mechanical sex person.”
Jergen asked. “Were you going to use the radio to build a better dildo?”
I was angry but afraid—why?—to show it. “Street kids can’t afford to go to clinics,” I said. “Most of us are wanted by the law. But we’re not going to give up orgasms.”
“Sit down,” Jergen said. “The cops won’t come here.”
“Why not,” I said.
“I haven’t done anything in a while,” Jergen said. “Sit down.” He subtly changed into the older Jergen, then the pixels reformed Jergen as I first saw him, a cynical thirty-year-old.
Outside the screen, behind reality, a voice said, “Very good.”
“She’s not giving us anything more than what we know,” another voice said.
So they had busted Jergen before they busted me. On the screen, Jergen gave me soup and sat me down on the couch. “Do you want to tell me your name?”
“Allison, but when I’m forty, I’ll be Mattie Higgins.” Behind my head, Kearney’s voice said, “Sometime, we have that trouble, memory mixed with fantasy.”
Jergen said, “I’m Jergen. Just Jergen. Allison, tell me about how you were almost busted back there.”
Or was that Kearney asking? “I wasn’t almost busted. They’d have gunned me down as a looter.”
Jergen and I were in bed, flesh huddled against flesh. “Masturbation isn’t wrong,” Jergen said. “It also makes you more sensitive for intercourse.”
“AIDS,” I said.
“Saliva kills the HIV virus,” he said. He moved his head down my body. I didn’t do anything for him. I couldn’t speak, spasmed, then looked down. The screen showed my breasts, nipples sweaty and flaccid, his head on my belly, eyes dilated, looking back at me.
He said, “I like doing things for women. If we want to do more, I know a medic who doesn’t report to the government.”
I said, to explain, “I’d never felt protected before.” Kearney sighed. Jergen got up and sat naked on a chair by the kitchen table. He leaned on his elbows and ran his fingers through his hair. “Allison, I’m hiding, too. I’ve been so lonely.” I was firmly in my body, looking at him from the bed. “Jergen, are you a drug dealer?”
“No.”
“What kind of bad guy are you?”
“I’m a good guy. I’m trying to save the planet from the bad guys.”
My techno-thief friends thought the Luddies and Illichers were silly, but Jergen wasn’t silly. They were the silly ones, thrill seekers going in for bare skin shoplifting, industrial society’s human cockroaches, eating away at the edges. Bruce being snide and macho popped up on the screen, frozen in an attitude, then I was back with Jergen, getting recruited.
Getting invited to do good. Within the memory, I visualized Bruce dying in the drug store, packet of orgasm drugs in his fist, body jerking as the open wounds dissolved the drugs into his system. I whirled and ran, my memories shattered.
Be aggressively good. Attack the demons.
The video jerked forward a month. I, in a dress, and Jergen, in a suit, walked by mowed grass and clipped boxwood. We shaved in all the appropriate places, deodorized, and were equipped with fake papers, Jergen was taking me to stink-bomb a polluter’s corporate headquarters. “Our toxins aren’t anywhere was bad as their toxins,” Jergen said, kissing an image of me. My memories watched from overhead as a foreshortened me walked into the bronzed glass building and went to the ladies restroom. I pulled Jergen’s bomb out of my purse and flushed it down the toilet. The bomb had a guidance system that would run it in a counter-geotrophic direction. My mind’s eye played the diagram of the bomb floating and crawling up the building’s sewer lines, then exploding on the executive floor. I left the building and got in the car with Jergen.
“We’ll read about it in the papers,*’ he said. “Or not, if they re too embarrassed.”
I kissed him, so much better than a kid ganger, my first grown-up lover, taking me out on exciting dates. “Will they know how we did it?”
“The prop and track are biodegradable and the explosion should distort things.”
“If one of them sits down on it?”
“It’ll be on the floor when it explodes, not in one of the fixtures.”
We drove away. What happened wasn’t in the papers, but the next group that tried to bring the corporation reminders of its pollutants said the toilets had screens.
Jergen and I laughed with our friends, then Jergen said, “So we take it to their homes.”
Jergen and I drove toward Oregon. We passed a sign that said MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL. “I’d seen some things that made me think Minneapolis, but I wasn’t sure,” Kearney’s voice said. “Now we know.”
“We’ve got a good mapping,” another voice said. “Good traces for most likely relevant memories.”
Now without my consciously trying to bring up the memories, I saw Jergen and me firing guns in snow-tipped mountains. Miriam and foe came over the ridge with a picnic basket. “We’re the senators for this place,” Joe said.
At nights, Miriam taught me the math and poetry of ecology, the chemistry of polymers, of proteins and of DNA. And my nightmares stopped except for the piddling one where I was supposed to be in class, but hadn’t attended for six weeks.
The video showed Miriam and Joe sat on a couch watching videos when Jergen brought me in. “Hi,” he said. “This is a friend, a good friend.” I was shy around them until we’d spiked the old growth trees with gas bomblets.
Time skipped. Jergen told me, “You can’t cooperate even just a little bit. They’ll lie to you, make you think your leaders sold you out. Don’t imagine that you can trick them. If you’re captured, consider yourself dead.”
Miriam nodded. This was sometime after we’d come to Seattle. She said, “If you’re captured and you get out, escape, especially if you escape, we’ll never trust you again.”
I heard someone sigh. I couldn’t tell whether it was on the screen or behind me, or if I myself sighed.
“Have you seen Jergen?” Miriam was older. I was, too. We’d been a team for more than twelve years, my family. We didn’t have children because the planet was too full of them, but both Miriam and I had birth control failures higher than normal.
“No,” I said.
“If he’s caught…” Miriam didn’t finish. I stared at her. She said, “Joe and I are leaving. Let’s meet again in a year where you first saw us.”
If Jergen’s captured, if Jergen leads them… “Did you capture him?” I asked Kearney.
Kearney said, “Let’s take her out of the loop now that we re reading directly.”
No…o…o. said my voice. “No,” said my voice on the monitor.
“She voided urine,” a woman’s voice said. “You scared her.”
“Allison, it will just be like going to sleep.” Kearney said. “What are you doing to me? I said I’d cooperate. Don’t make me go to sleep.”
The screen turned to hash. “Jim was right about the worry drug,” the woman’s voice said. A needle pierced a membrane. Cool things ran in my veins.
Kearney’s face was in front of my eyes. “Allison, it would be easier for you not to see what you’re remembering.”
“Don’t rummage through my brain while I’m unconcious.”
The fear ebbed away. Watching my memories on video fascinated me. Kearney moved back behind me. “You enjoy remembering your life?”
“Yes,” I said. “After I met Jergen.”
“Perhaps this will work for us. Make sure you keep that drug in her,” Kearney said.
Memories lived on. Miriam and Joe met me on the mountain. After we did Hetch Hetchy, they took me east to meet other people. The world was more crowded, more polluted, more degraded than when we’d begun.
“We need to t
each people to use less energy, to use their muscles to make things rather than to work out in expensive gyms,” Martin Fox said.
Another man said, “What we really need to do is sterilize people. Overpopulation is the problem. Technological solutions won’t work. You can’t micromanage the environment.”
Martin Fox said, “Sterilize the whole damn planet.”
I said, “What can you distribute that won’t impact negatively on the environment? It’d damage other life forms.”
Martin said, “Put it in people food.”
Joe said, “Man we know worked out something that will attack egg and sperm cells, anything with half the normal chromosomes. And it self-destructs in a week, good enough for a city.”
Miriam said, “No, Joe, not nanotech.”
After that conversation, Miriam and Joe disappeared. Time skipped again. Martin Fox said, “If we attack the refineries, destroy oil, we can force them to use the last of it. Then we’ll have to use less chemical energy.”
Behind my head, Kearney said, “Can you fix a date?”
I was about to answer when another voice said, “She wasn’t thinking dates when she laid down these memories. It’s on a trace straight from the memory of meeting Jergen, see?” On the screen, a door opened and Jergen pulled me inside.
Martin Fox said, “If we attack the refineries…”
I said, “Couldn’t you ask me when this was?”
“When?” Kearney’s voice said.
“Last November.”
“Follow all the traces from here,” Kearney’s voice said. “Is Martin Fox your infiltrator?” I asked.
Miriam and Joe and I sat at a table, drumming our fingers against the Formica. Joe said, “We need to do something in memory of Jergen.”
Miriam got up and set a teakettle in the focus of a sun stove, then opened a window and turned the reflectors so raw sunlight would boil our water.
I asked, “Are you sure he’s dead?”
“Nobody’s seen him,” Joe said. “If he’s betrayed us, then we’ll all have to stay away from scanners. I think he’s more likely to have your retinas than ours, though.”
