The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  My body was a trial. Diderits had long ago told me that it—that I—was still “sexually viable.” But this promise I had not tested, nor did I wish to. Tyrannized by vivid images of human viscera, human excreta, human decay, I’d been rebuilt of metal, porcelain, and plastic, as if from the substances—skin, bone, hair, cartilage—that these inorganic materials mocked. I was a contradiction, a quasi-immortal masquerading as one of the ephemera who’d delivered me from their own short-lived lot. Paradoxically, my aversion to the organic was another human (i.e., organic) emotion. So I fervently wanted out. For over a year and a half on Miroste, I’d hoped that Rumai and the others would see their mistake and exile me not only from themselves but also from the body continuously reminding me of my total estrangement.

  But Rumai persisted in her love, and I had lived a prisoner in the Port Iranani Galenshall—with one chilling respite—ever since the Haft Paykar explosion and cave-in. Now, entering the care of a new wardress, I brooded amid the enamel-encased engines of Nizami and wondered what sort of jail the House of Compassionate Sharers would prove.

  —

  A passenger of a monorail car bound outward from Manitou Port, Wardress Kefa in the window seat beside me, I still brooded. Anthrophobia. Lorca, I told myself, exercise self-control. And I did. From Manitou Port we rode the sleek bullet through rugged, sparsely inhabited country toward Wolf Run Summit, and I stayed sane.

  “You’ve never been ‘home’ before?” Wardress Kefa asked.

  “No. Earth isn’t home. I was born on GK-world Dai-Han, Wardress. As a young man, I traveled as an administrative colonist to Miroste, where—”

  “Where you were born again,” she said. “But this is where we began.”

  The shadows of the mountains slid across the wraparound window glass, and the imposing white pylons of the monorail system flashed past like the legs of giants—like huge, naked cyborgs hiding amid the aspens and pines.

  “Where I met Rumai Montieth, I was going to say; where I wed and settled into the life of a bureaucrat married to power. You anticipate me, Wardress.” I didn’t add that now Earth and Miroste were equally alien: the probeship Nizami had bid fair to assume first place among my loyalties.

  A ’rail from Wolf Run swept past us toward Manitou Port. The sight pleased me; the hum of the passing ’rail lingered sympathetically in my hearing, and I refused to talk, even though the Wardress obviously wanted to draw me out about my prior life. I was surrounded and beset. Surely, she’d learned all that she needed to know from Diderits and Rumai. My annoyance grew.

  “You’re silent, Mr. Lorca.”

  “I have no innate hatred of silences.”

  “Nor do I, Mr. Lorca—unless they’re empty ones.”

  Hands in lap, humming like a bioelectric, I studied my guardian disdainfully. “There are some who can’t engage in a silence without peeling it of its unspoken freight of meaning.”

  The woman laughed. “That certainly isn’t true of you, is it?” A wry expression on her lips, she gazed at the hurtling countryside and said nothing else until we disembarked at Wolf Run Summit.

  Kommfleet officers and members of the administrative hierarchy frequented the resort in Manitou Port. Civi Korps personnel had built gingerbread chateaux among the trees and engineered two of the slopes above the hamlet for yearlong skiing. “Many of these people,” Wardress Kefa explained, indicating a crowd beneath the deck of Wolf Run’s main lodge, “work inside Shays Mountain, near the light-probe port, in facilities built originally for satellite tracking and missile-launch detection. Now they monitor the display boards for Kommfleet orbiters and shuttles; they program cruising and descent lanes. Others are demographic and wildlife managers, set on resettling Earth as efficiently as possible. Tedious work, Mr. Lorca, so they come here to play.” We passed below the lodge on a path of unglazed vitrofoam. Some of Wolf Run’s bundled visitors stared at me, maybe because, in my tunic sleeves, I was undaunted by the spring cold. Or maybe they stared at my guardian….

  “How many of these people patronize your House, Wardress?”

  “Forgive me—I can’t divulge that.” But she glanced back as if she’d recognized someone.

  “What do they find in your house that they can’t in Manitou Port?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Lorca. I’m not a mind reader.”

  To reach the House of Compassionate Sharers from Wolf Run, we trekked on foot down a narrow path worked reverently into the flank of the mountain—very nearly a two-hour hike. I couldn’t credit the distance or Wardress Kefa’s stamina. Swinging her arms, jolting along on stiff legs, she went determinedly down the mountain. We met no other hikers and finally arrived in a clearing giving us an open view of a steep pine-filled glen: a grotto that, falling away beneath us, graded into a scrim of smooth white sky. But the Wardress pointed down into the foliage.

  “There,” she said: “The House of Compassionate Sharers.”

  I saw nothing but sunlight gilding the aspens, boulders huddled in the mulch cover, and swaying tunnels among the trees. Squinting, I finally made out a geodesic structure built from the very materials of the woods.

  Like an upland sleight, a wavering mirage, the House slipped in and out of my vision, blending, emerging, melting again: a series of irregular domes as hard to hold as water vapor. But after several red-winged blackbirds flew noisily past its highest turret, the House manifested—bang!—in stark relief.

  “It’s more noticeable,” Wardress Kefa said, “when someone cranks its shutters aside. Then the stained-glass windows sparkle like dragon’s eyes.”

  “I’d like to see that. Now, it appears camouflaged.”

  “That’s deliberate, Mr. Lorca. Come.”

  When at last all the way down, I could see of what colossal size the House really was: it reared through the pine needles, holding interlocking polygons to the sky. Strange to think that no one in a passing helicraft was likely to see it. Wardress Kefa led me up some plank stairs, spoke at a door, and introduced me into an antechamber so spartan that I thought “barracks” rather than “bordello.” The ceilings and walls were honeycombed, and the natural flooring smelled of the outdoors. My guardian disappeared, returned coatless, and took me into a room like a tapered well. With a hand-crank, she opened the shutters: varicolored light streamed in through slant-set windows. On high cushions that snapped and rustled whenever we moved, we faced each other.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Just listen: The Sharers have come here of their own volition, Mr. Lorca. Most lived and worked on extrakomm worlds toward Glaktik Center before we asked them to work here. Those here accepted the invitation and came to offer themselves to people much like you.”

  “Me? Are they misconceived machines?”

  “Let’s just say that the services the Sharers offer are wide. As I’ve told you, a few visitants regard the Sharers as a convenient means of satisfying exotically aberrant tastes. For others, they’re a way back to the larger community. We take whoever comes to us for help, so that the Sharers do not remain idle or the House empty.”

  “If whoever comes has wealth and influence?”

  She considered. “That’s true enough. But the matter’s out of our hands. I’m an employee of Glaktik Komm, chosen for my empathic abilities. I don’t make policy. I don’t own title to the House.”

  “But you are its madam. Its ‘wardress,’ rather.”

  “True. For the last twenty-two years. I’m the only wardress to have served here, Mr. Lorca, and I love the Sharers—for their devotion to the fragile mentalities who visit them. Still, despite all my time here, I don’t fully plumb the source of their transcendent concern. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

  “You think me a ‘fragile mentality’?”

  “I’m sorry—but you’re here, and you certainly aren’t fragile of limb, are you?” The Wardress laughed. “I also wanted to ask you to—to restrain your crueler impulses when the treatment itself begins.”

  I stood a
nd moved away. How had I borne her presence for so long?

  “Please don’t take my request amiss. It isn’t specifically personal. I make it of everyone who comes to the House. Restraint is an unwritten corollary of the only three rules we have here. Will you hear them?”

  I shrugged janglingly.

  “First, don’t leave the session chamber once you’ve entered it. Second, emerge immediately upon my summons.”

  “And third?”

  “Don’t kill the Sharer.”

  All the myriad disgusts I’d been suppressing squatted now atop the ladder of my patience, and, rung by painful rung, I stepped them back down. Must a rule be made to prevent a visitant from murdering the partner he’d bought? Incredible. The Wardress was perceptibly sweating, even her earlobes grotesquely agleam.

  “Is there a room here for a wealthy, influential client? A private room?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

  It had a full-length mirror. I disrobed and stood before it. Only during my first “period of adjustment” on Miroste had I spent much time looking at what I’d become. Later, back in the Port Iranani Galenshall, Diderits had denied me any sort of reflective surface at all—looking glasses, darkened windows, metal spoons. The waxen perfection of my features ridiculed those that another Dorian Lorca had possessed before the Haft Paykar Incident. Cosmetic mockery. Faintly corpselike, speciously paradigmatic, I was both a man and much less. In Wardress Kefa’s House, the less seemed preeminent. I ran a finger down my inner arm, studying the track of an intubated vein, for through it swirled a serum called hematocybin: a “low-maintenance” blood substitute, combative of both fatigue and infection, which needs changing only once every six M-months. With a good supply of hematocybin and a plastic recirculator, I change it myself. That night, though, the ridge of my vein, mirrored an arm’s length away, seemed more horror than miracle. Hence, horrified, I shut my eyes.

  —

  Later, Wardress Kefa came to me with a candle and an embroidered gown. She made me don it before her. With the robe’s rich, symbolic embroidery on my back, I followed her from my first-floor chamber to a rustic stairwell seemingly connective to all the rooms in the House. The dome contained many smaller domes and five or six staircases. No other person intruded.

  Lit by the Wardress’s taper, the House’s mid-interior put me in mind of an Escheresque drawing in which verticals and horizontals trade places and a figure who from one vantage seems to climb a series of steps, from another seems to descend them. Soon the Wardress and I stood on a landing above the topsy-turvy well of stairs (though more stairs loomed above); and, looking down, I experienced an unsettling reversal of perspectives. Vertigo. Why hadn’t Diderits, against so human a debility, implanted tiny gyrostabilizers in me? I clutched a rail and held on.

  “You can’t fall,” Wardress Kefa said. “It’s an illusion: a whim of the architects.”

  “Does an illusion dwell behind this door?”

  “Oh, the Sharer’s real enough. Please. Go in.” She bowed and left, taking her candle. Then I went through the door to my assignation, and the door locked of itself. My hand on the knob, I felt the night working in the chamber. The only light came from the stove-bed on the far wall, the fitted polygons overhead still blanked out by their shutters. No candles anywhere. Instead, reddish embers glowed behind an isinglass portal beneath the quilt-strewn stove-bed upon which the Sharer waited.

  Outside, the wind played harp music in the trees. I trembled, as when Rumai had visited me in the pavilion. Even though my eyes adjusted, I still found it difficult to see. Temporizing, I surveyed the dome. In its vault dangled a cage in which, perturbed by my entrance, a bird skittishly hopped about. The cage rocked on its tether.

  Go on, I told myself.

  I advanced to the dais and leaned over the unmoving Sharer. A hand on either side of his head, I braced myself. The figure moved, weakly, and I drew back. But because the Sharer didn’t stir again, I reassumed my previous stance: the posture of a lover or of one called upon to identify a mangled corpse. But I made no identification; the embers under the bed offered too feeble a sheen. In such darkness, even a lover’s kiss would have fallen amiss. “I’m going to touch you,” I said. “May I?”

  The Sharer lay still.

  Then, willing all my senses into the synthetic flesh at my fingertip, I touched the Sharer’s face: hard, and smooth, and cool.

  I moved my finger from side to side, and the hardness, smoothness, coolness, continued to flow. The object felt like a death’s-head, the cranial cap of a human being: bone rather than metal. My finger distinguished between these possibilities, deciding on bone. Half-panicked, I reasoned that I’d traced an arc on the skull of an intelligent being who bore his every bone on the outside, like an armor of calcium. If so, how could this organism—this thing—express compassion? I lifted a finger. Its tip hummed with a pressure now relieved, emanating warmth. A living death’s-head…

  Maybe I laughed. In any case, I boarded the platform and straddled the Sharer, my eyes gently closed. “Sharer,” I whispered, “I don’t know you yet.” My thumbs touched the creature’s eyes, the sockets in the smooth exoskeleton; both thumbs returned to me a hardness and a coldness clearly metallic in origin. The Sharer never flinched—though I assumed that touching his eyes, however softly, would provoke an involuntary reaction. Instead, the Sharer lay still.

  And why not? I thought. Your eyes are two sophisticated optical machines.

  Yes, two light-sensing image-integrating units gazed at me from the sockets near which my thumbs probed, and even in this darkness the Sharer, its vision sharper than my own, could discern my blind face staring down, futilely trying to create an image out of the information that my hands had supplied. I opened my eyes and saw only shadows, but my thumbs felt the cold metal rings gripping the Sharer’s photosensitive orbs.

  “An animatronic construct,” I said, rocking back on my heels. “A soulless robot. Move your head if I’m right.”

  The Sharer continued motionless.

  “All right: a sentient creature whose eyes have been replaced with an artificial system. Lord, are we brothers then?”

  I had a sudden hunch that the Sharer was very old, a senescent being owing its life to prosthetics, transplants, organs of laminated silicon. Its life had been extended by these gizmos, not saved. I asked the Sharer about this hunch. It slowly moved the helmetlike skull housing its fake eyes and its aged compassionate mind. Uncharitably, I considered myself the victim of a deception, the Sharer’s or Wardress Kefa’s. Here, after all, lay a creature who had chosen to prolong its life rather than escape it, and who had willingly employed the same materials and methods that Diderits had used to save me.

  “You might have died,” I told it. “Go too far with these contrivances, Sharer, and you’ll forfeit suicide as an option.” Leaning forward again, I let my hands move from the Sharer’s bony face to its throat. Here a shield of cartilage graded upward into its jaw and downward into the silken plastic skin covering its body, internalizing all but the defiant skull: a death’s-head with the body of a man.

  I could take no more. I rose from the stove-bed, cinched my gown, and crossed to the room’s far side. It held no furniture but the bed, so I assumed a lotus position on the floor and sat thus all night, staving off dreams. Diderits had said that I needed to dream to sidestep both hallucination and madness. In the Port Iranani Galenshall, he had had drugs administered to me every day and my sleep period monitored by an ARC machine and a team of electroencephalographers. But my dreams veered into nightmares, descents into klieg-lit charnel houses. I infinitely preferred the risk of going psychotic. Someone might pity and then disassemble me, piece by loving piece. Also, I had now lasted two E-weeks on nothing but catnaps, and I still had gray matter upstairs, not chopped pâté.

  I crossed my fingers.

  A long time later, Wardress Kefa threw open the door—morning. The freshly canted shutters outside the room admitt
ed a singular roaring of light. The entire chamber crackled, and crimson wall hangings, a mosaic of red and purple stones on the floor, and a tumble of scarlet quilts glowed within it. The bird in the wobbly cage was a red-winged blackbird.

  —

  “Where is it from?”

  “You could use a kinder pronoun.”

  “He? She? Which is kinder, Wardress Kefa?”

  “Assume the Sharer masculine, Mr. Lorca.”

  “My sexual proclivities have never run that way.”

  “Your sexual proclivities matter only if you regard the House as a brothel rather than a clinic and the Sharers as whores rather than therapists.”

  “Last night I heard two or three people clomping up the stairs in their boots, that and a woman’s raucous laughter.”

  “A client, Mr. Lorca—not a Sharer.”

  “I didn’t think she was a Sharer. But it’s hard to believe I’m in a clinic when that sort of noise intrudes.”

  “I’ve explained that. It can’t be helped.”

  “Okay. Where’s he from, this therapist of mine?”

  “An interior star. But where he’s from is of no consequence in your treatment. I matched him to your needs, as I see them, and you’ll soon go back to him.”

  “To spend another night squatting on the floor?”

  “You won’t do that again, Mr. Lorca. And you needn’t worry. Your reaction parallels that of many newcomers to the House.”

  “Revulsion? Revulsion’s therapeutic?”

  “I don’t think you were as put off as you contend.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Because you talked to the Sharer. You addressed him, not once but several times. Many clients fail to get that far during their first session.”

  “Talked to him?” I considered this. “Maybe. Before I found out what he was.”

  “Ah. Before you found out what he was.” In her heavy green jacket and swishy pantaloons, the tiny woman turned and left.