The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  The dream-Gladney cried out, fell back, and vanished, and then the tumblers were beyond the end of the melody. But still they went on, and the music went on with them, the piano and clarinet finally making contact, playing together and opposite each other in complement.

  After some measurable time, the tumbling began to slow. When the music stopped, there was only one figure, not two, that stopped with it. He drifted in emptiness, excited and drained all at once. That was enough, I decided. Before he could think of doing anything else, I cued another relaxation exercise and wrapped it around him. As soon as he was completely absorbed in mental finger-painting I broke the contact between us and withdrew.

  —

  It took a minute or so for his vitals to calm down. I changed the exercise from finger-painting to simple abstract visuals. He was overstimulated, in need of a passive mode. After his pulse went down below eighty, I disconnected him from the system and put his eyes back in.

  A soon as he saw me, he broke into a sweat. “Don’t try to talk,” I told him, covering the connections and slipping them into the drawer in the largest component.

  “I can talk.”

  “Sure. I just didn’t want you to feel like you had to.” He turned his face away while I dismantled the system. His breathing was extremely loud in the room. Rhythmic. I let him be. The inexperienced are often overcome by an intense feeling of embarrassment after mindplay, particularly pathosfinding. It takes some getting over.

  “Listen,” he said, after a bit, still not looking at me. “You don’t know what it’s like. What it was like.” He rubbed his forehead tiredly. “I was almost him. I wanted him, and I didn’t want him.” He paused and I knew he was staring at the synthesizer. “If I’d been him, I would have been someone. I just came out of nowhere, out of his brain. But I’m not him. Now I’m a figment of my own imagination.”

  I opened my mouth to say something conciliatory but neutral when the image of the pearl necklace popped into my mind. I have not always been as I am now. And neither was anybody else. I wanted to tell him so. I wanted to tell him he’d get over that, too, that he wasn’t the only person who’d ever met the stranger in himself. Granted, his experience had been more extreme, but it was pretty much the same. I could no more tell him something like that than I could map out his life for him.

  “You can’t have somebody else’s past,” I said as gently as I could. “And there’s no such thing as a ghost, myelin or otherwise. It’s always just you.”

  “I could buy memories. People do that.” His face was hard. “They even buy whole minds, remember?”

  “And it drives them mad, trying to be two people at once. Remember?”

  That gave him pause. “God, I’m tired,” he said after a moment.

  “Take a nap. I’m just down the hall if you want to talk later.”

  “Allie—”

  I waited while he tried to settle on what it was he wanted to say. The words never came. He waved one hand, dismissing me. I let myself out, wondering how long he was going to sulk. If we prize our illusions, we are even that much more jealous of our delusions because they’re so patently untrue. I was sure, though, that in a few more sessions, he’d adjust to being exactly what he was, no more and no less, and he would accept his music as his music only, to make without the fear or the desire that it came from him at the behest of something beyond his control.

  Dr. Jesl phoned me sometime later, rousing me from a doze. “Our boy has a supreme mad-on for you,” she said. “Thing is, I can’t tell just what it’s all about. I don’t think he knows, either.” She sounded more amused than worried.

  I was still too exhausted to explain about mindplay embarrassment compounded by the loss of a self-imposed handicap. “He’ll get over it,” I told her.

  Which he did. And I was only a little bit spooked later on when he correctly distinguished all of the old Gladney’s music as having been composed by him without anyone’s identifying it for him. Great minds, I told myself, think alike.

  Passing as a Flower in the City of the Dead

  S. N. DYER

  Sharon N. Farber is a Hugo Award–nominated US writer who also uses the pen name “S. N. Dyer” and is best known for stories written in the 1970s and 1980s. She has written in many different genres, publishing mystery fiction as well. Farber has also collaborated with several writers, including James Killus, David Stout, and Susanna Jacobson. Her birth date is unknown.

  Her first published story, “The Great Dormitory Mystery,” appeared in 1976 in the anthology Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, and her work has appeared frequently in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, including her most recent story, “My Cat” (2001). She also has written two story series, each with a female protagonist: Ann Atomic and Billy Jean. She has been a finalist four times for the Hugo Award, in the category of Best Fan Writer, with her most recent nomination in 1997. Little more is known about Farber.

  “Passing as a Flower in the City of the Dead” (1984) is an excellent example of mideighties Humanist science fiction—and a forgotten gem from an underrated writer.

  PASSING AS A FLOWER IN THE CITY OF THE DEAD

  S. N. Dyer

  Henri hated parties; he was striding through the cocktail crowd, his massive head down, shoulders back. Watching her husband, Madeline wanted to laugh. This was “the pacing lion of the landscape”? What would that sycophantic art critic call him if she could see him now, skeletal after months of untreated leukemia, bald as a newborn from total-body irradiation?

  The stalking scarecrow, Madeline thought.

  She lost sight of her husband as he pushed through into the house. Madeline put down her drink; it was adding to the steady-state nausea she’d felt from the aseptic food and from the sight of the colony ceiling far overhead. Her universe was a cylinder in space, the overhead view one of land and houses, while Earth and stars hid under her feet. Perhaps 180 degrees away another woman stood in another party and watched Madeline spin by. A treeless, grassless vista painted pastel blue.

  “I’m Bob. How do you like Blues?” A man grinned at her. He had finely coiled gray hair, held a drink in each hand, and seemed more alive than anyone else at the party.

  “It takes getting used to….”

  “Of course,” he boomed, and Madeline noticed that his presence had cleared an even wider space. They were alone, haloed by emptiness like a colony of hemolytic streptococci on a blood agar plate.

  “We’re pariahs, you ’n’ I,” he said, setting down one empty paper cup, draping that hand about her shoulder, and steering her effortlessly to the refreshments table. “Moses parting the Red Sea,” he whispered, and Madeline laughed as the crowd melted away about them. He picked up a decanter, nestled in an arrangement of silk flowers, and poured full a pottery mug.

  “Drink this. It’ll settle your stomach and curdle your brain,” he commanded. “The amnestic waters of the river Styx across which the dead must pass.” He looked about with exaggerated movements, then whispered sotto voce, “Don’t tell anyone. I’ve had a classical education.”

  “You aren’t afraid?” she asked.

  “Afraid of what? Parsing verbs?”

  She giggled. “No, of me. I’m a newcomer.” She ran one hand through her crew-cut-length hair. “Some bacterium may have snuck in with me.

  “I’m a very dangerous woman,” she added in her best villainess voice.

  Bob chortled. “Not too observant, are we? Look at me!”

  Studying him, she realized why he had seemed so different, so alive. Of all those standing in the crowded patio, he alone lacked the pallor of the bloodless. He held his hand beside hers, allowing her to compare his rosy pink hue, the blue veins like ropes, with her own clear veins in cadaver flesh.

  “None of that fluorocarbon-soup artificial blood for me,” he said. “I’m the last of the red-blooded men. At least on Blues.”

  Madeline nodded. “Your immune system is intact. You can laugh in the face of any pathogen.”


  “Right.” He grinned, downing his drink. “I’m going to feel awful in the morning—I’ve got all my blood. Red, white, blue, you name it.”

  Madeline contrasted him to the others, to herself. A pale, bloodless lot. An O’Neill colony inhabited by those with leukemia, with autoimmune disease, with transplanted organs. They had all stood on the banks of the Styx, only to be saved by the killing of their every blood cell—the treacherous cells that multiplied erratically, or attacked their own organs, or fought the transplants. And the innocent blood cells had died as well, the cells that carried oxygen, fought invading microbes, stopped hemorrhages.

  They were alive, locked in a hermetically sealed, sterile tin can rotating in space.

  The man intruded on her thoughts. “Yes, I’m that fiend incarnate, that villain of stage and screen, the Outsider.”

  “But why…”

  “Was I invited? Giselle works in my department. Even she isn’t rude enough not to invite me. She just never thought I’d be rude enough to come.” His grin widened. “I’ve seen you in the hospital. You’re in the lab? Come see me. Respiratory.” He put down his cup and left, swiveling at the gate to face the crowd. “I’m leaving. You can talk about me now,” he yelled.

  “Obnoxious, isn’t he.” Giselle was at Madeline’s side, small and dainty, with brown hair to her waist. Hair was a status symbol on Blues. The longer the hair, the longer the head had been on Blues. The longer the survival from the terminal disease.

  “Loud, but amusing.”

  “You don’t have to work with him.”

  The elderly man beside Giselle snarled. “Earthies. They come in, work their stint, and leave, acting like they’re so damn superior.”

  He gazed suspiciously at Madeline as if, she thought, he were smelling pseudomonas. Or smelling anything. She was a woman without colonizing bacteria—her sweat, her breath, even her feces were almost odorless.

  He suspects, she thought, panicking. No, he could not suspect. She was as much the Outsider as Bob, but she had the protective discoloration of the bloodless.

  Giselle clapped her hands. “Everybody!”

  “Damn,” the man said. “Must you go through with this?”

  “Father, stop acting like it’s indecent.”

  “You just like to shock people. It must be your genetics. It certainly wasn’t your upbringing.” He stormed into the house.

  Giselle shrugged at Madeline. “Father’s a bit traditional….Everybody! May I have your attention—you too, you wastrel….” The revelers paused in their various pursuits and looked to their hostess. Henri, studying the flower bed with its plastic nasturtiums, glowered at Madeline.

  “During the party, many of you have met our newcomers, Henri and Madeline. Madeline, it happens, is an actual relative of mine. A blood relative.”

  The audience chuckled, to Madeline’s bewilderment. Henri merely looked as if he were trapped in an ethnographic film.

  “She was my genetic mother’s second cousin on Earth. Let’s welcome these newcomers to Blues.”

  The audience clapped politely, all the while scrutinizing the strangers like laboratory specimens. Then they returned to their interrupted pastimes. A young man with a braided beard began to flirt with Giselle. Madeline moved away, finding herself before the girl’s adoptive father.

  “You don’t approve of me.”

  He answered vehemently. “You had some nerve calling, introducing yourself.”

  Madeline sighed. It’s true, she thought. Civilization diminishes proportionally to the distance from Paris. She decided to try again, smiling ingratiatingly.

  “Giselle seems to have grown into a beautiful young lady—she looks just like her mother. Before I emigrated, Giselle’s mother begged me to find her, to see what sort of woman she’d become—”

  “Her mother! The woman who bore her? What claim has she? Who spent six months in quarantine with her, risking their lives to care for her? We did. Who raised her, taught her? We did, Hilda and me. And the whole time we’re getting her through the traumas of growing up, especially growing up in this place—the whole time she keeps getting letters from that earthside bitch.”

  Forcing down her anger, she replied, “It’s not easy for those who stay behind either. Giselle’s parents—”

  “Hilda was her mother! I am her father!” He stopped, shook his head. “I’m sorry. You’re new, you don’t understand yet.

  “To come to Blues is to die and be reborn. You get some awful disease—myeloma. You?”

  She paused a moment. “Lupus.”

  “You say good-bye to your family, write your will, dispose of all your belongings. You’re shot into space, to the quarantine station. Six months alone in tiny rooms, while radiation and chemicals kill every blood cell, every germ in your body. Then, when you’re positively bug free—because without our immune systems the common cold could wipe out the colony—when you’re safe, you enter Blues. Hairless, like a baby. Reincarnated into a new world.”

  He grabbed her left hand, holding it up. “You wore a ring for many years. Where is your husband now?”

  She barely choked back her answer.

  He nodded. “He stayed on Earth. Do you still write him? Don’t. You can never return to Earth. Let go of the past. ‘Until death do us part.’ Blues is a city of the dead.”

  Madeline asked hesitantly, “And if my husband had come with me?”

  “Come with you?” His face would have flushed livid, had he had any blood. “Fidoes. Faithful spouses following their loved ones into hell. Virtuous little toads. Don’t let me near one. I’d show him a bit of hell.”

  “I don’t understand. How can you hate someone so full of love for her husband—or wife—that she—they’d follow them here?”

  He snarled and stalked away.

  Giselle came up and put a hand on Madeline’s shoulder. Her other hand was resting loosely on Henri’s forearm. “God—what’s Father yelling about this time?”

  “Fidoes.”

  “Them again? Well, of course we all hate Fidoes.”

  “Why.” Henri always stated his questions.

  “Because they remind us of what we’ve lost. We’re under life sentences, unable to see Earth or relatives. (Not that I, personally, have any memories of either.) But we’re all unified in that respect. Then Fidoes come, like it’s a big joke, play the self-righteous martyr for a few years, then return to Earth. Father says the only way to survive here is to sever all ties with your past.”

  Madeline said, “And that’s why you don’t write your mother?”

  Giselle rolled her eyes at the mere thought.

  “Don’t judge. Annette is a lovely woman,” Henri said.

  Giselle pulled her hand away, regarding him with narrowed eyes. “How do you know? I thought you two met in quarantine.”

  Madeline said hastily, “We knew each other before, in art school.” She felt her entire past slipping away, negated by words that blithely tossed out memories of marriage, career, friends, love—anything to avoid the truth. She was a Fido.

  “Henri and I, meeting again. It was quite a coincidence.”

  “Quite,” Giselle agreed.

  Henri slept with the corner of his mouth twitching, making an occasional soft moan. Madeline lay propped up on one arm. Despite the months, he still seemed alien to her, her now bald and thin husband merging in her mind’s eye with her grandfather. Even the venous catheter high on Henri’s chest, closed except during the bimonthly infusion of artificial blood, reminded her of Grandpere’s central-line venous access when his peripheral veins could no longer sustain an intravenous line.

  Her grandfather had been only fifty-six when they diagnosed lymphoma, and he’d refused the standard treatment.

  “Let them clean me out like a rat in a lab, replace my blood with cream, send me to outer space? Never. If I must die, I shall do so with my family around me.”

  He’d done well for a while, then gone downhill with a vengeance. And so to
the special hospital in America, where he’d suffered through six-drug chemotherapy, radiation, interferon, debulking operations. Madeline remembered him wasting away, shriveling, his final days a contest to see which would kill him first—the disease or the treatment, the pain of the invading lymphocytes or the pain of the poisons that fought the cells.

  She remembered Dr. Elbein, though she found it impossible to picture him without his entourage of fellows, residents, and medical students. He’d stood outside the door, unaware how his voice carried in the stillness. “This is a rare opportunity to relive medical history,” he’d said, his voice unexpectedly gentle from a face that sharp and sardonic. “We called them ‘hot leuks,’ though lymphoma’s really just ‘leuk equivalent.’ We’d drug them until the white count dropped into the basement, then hope it would crawl back up before they died of infection.”

  “Why ‘hot leuks’?” a student asked.

  “Because leukemics are hot. They look fine one minute and crump the next. Every night on call they’d spike and you’d have to do a complete fever workup—you kids can’t imagine how much time that ate up. And if they didn’t spike they’d need blood or platelets—and they never had any veins.

  “You think it’s awful with this guy, watching him puke and get septic and waste away?” He laughed. “We had wards full of them. Now we just shoot them into space, like atomic waste.”

  “Waste,” Madeline whispered, and tried to sleep.

  She dreamed of the hospital, air sweet with bouquets and bodily decay. Her husband seemed as pale as his sheets. Watching Henri sleep had always given her a feeling of security; she’d been safe from all harm with her lion beside her. Now she was watching him, anticipating every harsh breath, afraid that the next might not come.

  He woke screaming.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  He clutched her. “Don’t leave me.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Never. I—I’m afraid. Don’t ever leave me.” And he began to cry.