The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990
Page 16
So we’re freaks, constructed and conditioned to meet the demands of the job. Less so than soldiers or professional athletes. Far less so than the average street gang member, who thinks nothing of using illegal growth promoters that lower his life expectancy to around thirty years. Who, unarmed but on a mixture of Berserker and Timewarp (oblivious to pain and most physical trauma and with a twenty-fold decrease in reaction times), can kill a hundred people in a crowd in five minutes, then vanish to a safe-house before the high ends and the fortnight of side effects begins. (A certain politician, a very popular man, advocates undercover operations to sell supplies of these drugs laced with fatal impurities, but he’s not yet succeeded in making that legal.)
Yes, we’re freaks; but if we have a problem, it’s that we’re still far too human.
* * *
When over a hundred thousand people phone in about an investigation, there’s only one way to deal with their calls. It’s called ARIA: Automated Remote Informant Analysis.
An initial filtering process identifies the blatantly obvious pranksters and lunatics. It’s always possible that someone who phones in and spends ninety percent of their time ranting about UFOs, or communist conspiracies, or slicing up our genitals with razor blades, has something relevant and truthful to mention in passing, but it seems reasonable to give their evidence less weight than that of someone who sticks to the point. More sophisticated analysis of gestures (about thirty percent of callers don’t switch off the vision), and speech patterns, supposedly picks up anyone who is, although superficially rational and apposite, actually suffering from psychotic delusions or fixations. Ultimately, each caller is given a “reliability factor” between zero and one, with the benefit of the doubt going to anyone who betrays no recognizable signs of dishonesty or mental illness. Some days I’m impressed with the sophistication of the software that makes these assessments. Other days I curse it as a heap of useless voodoo.
The relevant assertions (broadly defined) of each caller are extracted, and a frequency table is created, giving a count of the number of callers making each assertion, and their average reliability factor. Unfortunately, there are no simple rules to determine which assertions are most likely to be true. One thousand people might earnestly repeat a widespread but totally baseless rumor. A single honest witness might be distraught, or chemically screwed-up, and be given an unfairly poor rating. Basically, you have to read all the assertions—which is tedious, but still several thousand times faster than viewing every call.
001.
The chimera is a Martian.
15312
0.37
002.
The chimera is from a UFO.
14106
0.29
003.
The chimera is from Atlantis.
9003
0.24
004.
The chimera is a mutant.
8973
0.41
005.
The chimera resulted from human-leopard sexual intercourse.
6884
0.13
006.
The chimera is a sign from God.
2654
0.09
007.
The chimera is the Antichrist.
2432
0.07
008.
Caller is the chimera’s father.
2390
0.12
009.
The chimera is a Greek deity.
1345
0.10
010.
Caller is the chimera’s mother.
1156
0.09
011.
The chimera should be killed by authorities.
1009
0.19
012.
Caller has previously seen the chimera in their neighborhood.
988
0.39
013.
The chimera killed Freda Macklenburg.
945
0.24
014.
Caller intends killing the chimera.
903
0.49
015.
Caller killed Freda Macklenburg.
830
0.27
(If desperate, I could view, one by one, the seventeen hundred and thirty-three calls of items 14 and 15. Not yet, though; I still had plenty of better ways to spend my time.)
016.
The chimera was created by a foreign government.
724
0.18
017.
The chimera is the result of biological warfare.
690
0.14
018.
The chimera is a were-leopard.
604
0.09
019.
Caller wishes to have sexual intercourse with the chimera.
582
0.58
020.
Caller has previously seen a painting of the chimera.
527
0.89
That was hardly surprising, considering the number of paintings there must be of fantastic and mythical creatures. But on the next page:
034.
The chimera closely resembles the creature portrayed in a painting entitled The Caress.
94
0.92
Curious, I displayed some of the calls. The first few told me little more than the printout’s summary line. Then, one man held up an open book to the lens. The glare of a light bulb reflected off the glossy paper rendered parts of it almost invisible, and the whole thing was slightly out of focus, but what I could see was intriguing.
A leopard with a woman’s head was crouched near the edge of a raised, flat surface. A slender young man, bare to the waist, stood on the lower ground, leaning sideways onto the raised surface, cheek to cheek with the leopard woman, who pressed one forepaw against his abdomen in an awkward embrace. The man coolly gazed straight ahead, his mouth set primly, giving an impression of effete detachment. The woman’s eyes were closed, or nearly so, and her expression seemed less certain the longer I stared—it might have been placid, dreamy contentment, it might have been erotic bliss. Both had auburn hair.
I selected a rectangle around the woman’s face, enlarged it to fill the screen, then applied a smoothing option to make the blown-up pixels less distracting. With the glare, the poor focus, and limited resolution, the image was a mess. The best I could say was that the face in the painting was not wildly dissimilar to that of the woman I’d found in the basement.
A few dozen calls later, though, no doubt remained. One caller had even taken the trouble to capture a frame from the news broadcast and patch it into her call, side by side with a well-lit close-up of her copy of the painting. One view of a single expression does not define a human face, but the resemblance was far too close to be coincidental. Since—as many people told me, and I later checked for myself—The Caress had been painted in 1896 by the Belgian Symbolist artist Fernand Khnopff, the painting could not possibly have been based on the living chimera. So, it had to be the other way around.
I played all ninety-four calls. Most contained nothing but the same handful of simple facts about the painting. One went a little further.
A middle-aged man introduced himself as John Aldrich, art dealer and amateur art historian. After pointing out the resemblance, and talking briefly about Khnopff and The Caress, he added:
“Given that this poor woman looks exactly like Khnopff’s sphinx, I wonder if you’ve considered the possibility that proponents of Lindhquistism are involved?” He blushed slightly. “Perhaps that’s far-fetched, but I thought I should mention it.”
So I called an on-line Britannica, and said “Lindhquistism.”
Andreas Lindhquist, 1961–2030, was a Swiss performance artist, with the distinct financial advantage of being heir to a massive pharmaceuticals empire. Up until 2011, he engaged in a wide variety of activities of a bioartistic nature, progressing from generating sounds and images by computer proce
ssing of physiological signals (ECG, EEG, skin conductivity, hormonal levels continuously monitored by immunoelectric probes), to subjecting himself to surgery in a sterile, transparent cocoon in the middle of a packed auditorium, once to have his corneas gratuitously exchanged, left for right, and a second time to have them swapped back (he publicized a more ambitious version, in which he claimed every organ in his torso would be removed and reinserted facing backwards, but was unable to find a team of surgeons who considered this anatomically plausible).
In 2011, he developed a new obsession. He projected slides of classical paintings in which the figures had been blacked out, and had models in appropriate costumes and make-up strike poses in front of the screen, filling in the gaps.
Why? In his own words (or perhaps a translation):
The great artists are afforded glimpses into a separate, transcendental, timeless world. Does that world exist? Can we travel to it? No! We must force it into being around us! We must take these fragmentary glimpses and make them solid and tangible, make them live and breathe and walk amongst us, we must import art into reality, and by doing so transform our world into the world of the artists’ vision.
I wondered what ARIA would have made of that.
Over the next ten years, he moved away from projected slides. He began hiring movie set designers and landscape architects to recreate in three dimensions the backgrounds of the paintings he chose. He discarded the use of make-up to alter the appearance of the models, and, when he found it impossible to find perfect lookalikes, he employed only those who, for sufficient payment, were willing to undergo cosmetic surgery.
His interest in biology hadn’t entirely vanished; in 2021, on his sixtieth birthday, he had two tubes implanted in his skull, allowing him to constantly monitor, and alter, the precise neurochemical content of his brain ventricular fluid. After this, his requirements became even more stringent. The “cheating” techniques of movie sets were forbidden—a house, or a church, or a lake, or a mountain, glimpsed in the corner of the painting being “realized,” had to be there, full scale and complete in every detail. Houses, churches, and small lakes were created; mountains he had to seek out—though he did transplant or destroy thousands of hectares of vegetation to alter their color and texture. His models were required to spend months before and after the “realization,” scrupulously “living their roles,” following complex rules and scenarios that Lindhquist devised, based on his interpretation of the painting’s “characters.” This aspect grew increasingly important to him:
The precise realization of the appearance—the surface, I call it, however three-dimensional—is only the most rudimentary beginning. It is the network of relationships between the subjects, and between the subjects and their setting, that constitutes the challenge for the generation that follows me.
At first, it struck me as astonishing that I’d never even heard of this maniac; his sheer extravagance must have earned him a certain notoriety. But there are millions of eccentrics in the world, and thousands of extremely wealthy ones—and I was only five when Lindhquist died of a heart attack in 2030, leaving his fortune to a nine-year-old son.
As for disciples, Britannica listed half a dozen scattered around Eastern Europe, where apparently he’d found the most respect. All seemed to have completely abandoned his excesses, offering volumes of aesthetic theories in support of the use of painted plywood and mime artists in stylized masks. In fact, most did just that—offered the volumes, and didn’t even bother with the plywood and the mime artists. I couldn’t imagine any of them having either the money or the inclination to sponsor embryological research thousands of kilometers away.
For obscure reasons of copyright law, works of visual art are rarely present in publicly accessible databases, so in my lunch hour I went out and bought a book on Symbolist painters which included a color plate of The Caress. I made a dozen (illegal) copies, blow-ups of various sizes. Curiously, in each one the expression of the sphinx (as Aldrich had called her) struck me as subtly different. Her mouth and her eyes (one fully closed, one infinitesimally open) could not be said to portray a definite smile, but the shading of the cheeks hinted at one—in certain enlargements, viewed from certain angles. The young man’s face also changed, from vaguely troubled to slightly bored, from resolved to dissipated, from noble to effeminate. The features of both seemed to lie on complicated and uncertain borders between regions of definite mood, and the slightest shift in viewing conditions was enough to force a complete reinterpretation. If that had been Khnopff’s intention it was a masterful achievement, but I also found it extremely frustrating. The book’s brief commentary was no help, praising the painting’s “perfectly balanced composition and delightful thematic ambiguity,” and suggesting that the leopard’s head was “perversely modeled on the artist’s sister, with whose beauty he was constantly obsessed.”
Unsure for the moment just how, if at all, I ought to pursue this strand of the investigation, I sat at my desk for several minutes, wondering (but not inclined to check) if every one of the leopard’s spots shown in the painting had been reproduced faithfully in vivo. I wanted to do something tangible, set something in motion, before I put The Caress aside and returned to more routine lines of inquiry.
So I made one more blow-up of the painting, this time using the copier’s editing facilities to surround the man’s head and shoulders with a uniform dark background. I took it down to communications, and handed it to Steve Birbeck (the man I knew had leaked my helmet log to the media).
I said, “Put out an alert on this guy. Wanted for questioning in connection with the Macklenburg murder.”
* * *
I found nothing else of interest in the ARIA printout, so I picked up where I’d left off the night before, phoning companies that had made use of Freda Macklenburg’s services.
The work she had done had no specific connection with embryology. Her advice and assistance seemed to have been sought for a wide range of unconnected problems in a dozen fields—tissue culture work, the use of retroviruses as gene-therapy vectors, cell membrane electrochemistry, protein purification, and still other areas where the vocabulary meant nothing to me at all.
“And did Dr. Macklenburg solve this problem?”
“Absolutely. She knew a perfect way around the stumbling block that had been holding us up for months.”
“How did you find out about her?”
“There’s a register of consultants, indexed by speciality.”
There was indeed. She was in it in fifty-nine places. Either she somehow knew the detailed specifics of all these areas, better than many people who were actually working in them full-time, or she had access to world-class experts who could put the right words into her mouth.
Her sponsor’s method of funding her work? Paying her not in money, but in expertise she could then sell as her own? Who would have so many biological scientists on tap?
The Lindhquist empire?
(So much for escaping The Caress.)
Her phone bills showed no long distance calls, but that meant nothing; the local Lindhquist branch would have had its own private international network.
I looked up Lindhquist’s son Gustave in Who’s Who. It was a very sketchy entry. Born to a surrogate mother. Donor ovum anonymous. Educated by tutors. As yet unmarried at twenty-nine. Reclusive. Apparently immersed in his business concerns. Not a word about artistic pretensions, but nobody tells everything to Who’s Who.
The preliminary forensic report arrived, with nothing very useful. No evidence of a protracted struggle—no bruising, no skin or blood found under Macklenburg’s fingernails. Apparently she’d been taken entirely by surprise. The throat wound had been made by a thin, straight, razor-sharp blade, with a single powerful stroke.
There were five genotypes, besides Macklenburg’s and the chimera’s, present in hairs and flakes of dead skin found in the house. Precise dating isn’t possible, but all showed a broad range in the age of shedding, which meant reg
ular visitors, friends, not strangers. All five had been in the kitchen at one time or another. Only Macklenburg and the chimera showed up in the basement in amounts that could not be accounted for by drift and second party transport, while the chimera seemed to have rarely left her special room. One prevalent male had been in most of the rest of the house, including the bedroom, but not the bed—or at least not since the sheets had last been changed. All of this was unlikely to have a direct bearing on the murder; the best assassins either leave no biological detritus at all, or plant material belonging to someone else.
The interviewers’ report came in soon after, and that was even less helpful. Macklenburg’s next of kin was a cousin, with whom she had not been in touch, and who knew even less about the dead woman than I did. Her neighbors were all much too respectful of privacy to have known or cared who her friends had been, and none would admit to having noticed anything unusual on the day of the murder.
I sat and stared at The Caress.
Some lunatic with a great deal of money—perhaps connected to Lindhquist, perhaps not—had commissioned Freda Macklenburg to create the chimera to match the sphinx in the painting. But who would want to fake a burglary, murder Macklenburg, and endanger the chimera’s life, without making the effort to actually kill it?
The phone rang. It was Muriel. The chimera was awake.
* * *
The two officers outside had had a busy shift so far; one psycho with a knife, two photographers disguised as doctors, and a religious fanatic with a mail-order exorcism kit. The news reports hadn’t mentioned the name of the hospital, but there were only a dozen plausible candidates, and the staff could not be sworn to secrecy or immunized against the effect of bribes. In a day or two, the chimera’s location would be common knowledge. If things didn’t quiet down, I’d have to consider trying to arrange for a room in a prison infirmary, or a military hospital.