by Moira Crone
“There are the others—the ones I worked with, helped me with my first big grant. Everything was about to happen for me. I was about to become well known, about to win the Albers Prize,” she said, pointing to a row of bearded men in ancient style suits, that ridiculous boxiness male clothes had at the time. She continued, turning more pages. “Oh, here he is again. I guess there are two I didn’t destroy,” she said. In this one he was in profile, looking at her, touching her arm. I hated that, for some reason.
“What’s his name?”
“John Ottoman. Some town where he settled took up his causes—it’s one of the shore towns that have since gone under.” She looked as if she were going to say something else, then she thought better of it. “Have you ever heard of such a name? John Ottoman?” she asked.
“How would I?”
“Just curious,” she said. “He had a reputation. But he went off the deep end. Got involved, finally, in a rebellion, a late and futile rebellion. His science required a politics. His politics posited a science—”
“What sort of science was that?”
She didn’t answer.
“I thought you didn’t know what happened to him,” I said.
“Well, we cut off communication, mostly, so I don’t really know—”
“Did you marry?” I was never supposed to ask things like that. I knew it. It was almost as much of a breach as touching her would have been. Or about half as bad.
“Of course not,” she said. “What would have been the point? There were so many regulations already; it was clear where things were heading. He wasn’t going to be an Heir, and the Procreation Acts had come in—there was no having children. I was being Treated, how could I have married? He was a radical, anyway. He stopped believing in Albersian—”
“Free Wheel?” I asked.
“Not really—” she said. “We fought like dogs, over politics, economics, after that first fight over his ideas. Things were very unstable. No one knew how we were to keep it going. We still had some idea of a nation, but it was fading. The two kinds had so little in common—those on, and those hoping to leave, the cycle. The original Protos, the first Heirs, the aristocrats. It was just before the outbreaks, all the bombings—I said that. The lines were being drawn. You have no idea what civil war is.”
“No, I don’t know,” I said. “But we have our own conflict, here and now. Klamath and Mimi are very concerned; they want you to consider your health. And what could happen. And I think you should consider—What can I do to help you get ready? For WELLFI? The transport to Memphis?”
She looked up from her reverie, mildly surprised that I’d changed the subject. It wasn’t my place. But she shrugged. She was done. She had shown me what she was going to show me. I had no consciousness of its significance—she seemed to accept that.
“Don’t you see I’m not ready to get ready?” she asked.
*
It was late in the evening. More dire reports of Hurricane Horace. I sat in my room, thinking about the worst case. The flooding could increase, the Sea could rise, and storm surges were predicted. And there had been no answer from Lazarus. I wrote again, said it was urgent.
She was in her room. I could hear her stirring occasionally.
I had never been exasperated like this at an Heir. What had she discovered? With all her retreating and regressing? Her chanting, her meditating, her “mystical attempts,” her elixirs from South America? I was willing to tell her it was enough. Continuing to put her health, her very status as an Heir, at risk, was foolish. I would even mention how her deterioration would be blamed on Klamath and Mimi, and even me. I went back to see her, found her lights were on.
She was sitting at her desk. I could see she had taken out her luggage, which was encouraging—I had not expected that.
But then I saw there weren’t any clothes inside. Just a cloak I recognized, spread out on the bench by the pool. It was a romantic cloak, of some antique fabric, bronze, brocade. I also saw her wooden shoes, the platforms, the ones she used sometimes to stalk across the marsh, to keep her feet from getting wet. Mimi called them “Japanese” once.
Two large valises were wide open, and empty, their satin genenfabric pouches attached to the top lids, drapes above an empty stage.
She was lit from below. I still could be surprised by how wizened and tiny she was. Her almost hairless head and her obvious skull made her look like a water bird. She moved to the bench by the pool so I could come over and sit beside her.
It was odd. How focused she became when she looked up at me. That old sharpness. She asked, “How old were you when you got to Lazarus’s Foundling house? To Audubon Island?
“They decided I was two or maybe three. What difference does it make?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. She picked up one of her albums. “Some of my books say there were many lives in a line, one after the other. Or that the life force goes into a wide sea, and then comes in again, reforms, condenses, nothing is ever lost. And we meet the same ones over and over. And everything and everyone is connected to everything else—what does that mean to you?
I said I had no idea.
Then she touched the place between the bottom of her nose and the top of the pink of her own tiny bluish lip. “Do you know what this is called?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“The philtrum,” she said. She traced her own indentation. “On you it is very shallow—you told me once you thought it had been sewed closed. That was your director Jeremy’s explanation. But you don’t remember that, do you? A needle pinching closed your lip? Lift it up,” she said.
I did what she said although it made me quite uneasy. I was ashamed of my heat, my scent, my saliva. She came in close—as close as she had when I was confined, on Galcyon—inspected the place inside my mouth, where it was attached to the gum. “Oh,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s attached all the way down—it isn’t sewn, that isn’t scar tissue, it’s a ligament—“
She let me let go of my lip. So I could speak. “Oh?”
“See mine?” In her mouth there was a shallow web of flesh at the top where the inside of the upper lip met the gum. On me, that web came all the way down to my teeth. I’d never known I was different. “Do you know the legend?” she asked. She reached to touch my lip—she touched my lip.
I shook my head, pulled back. She was so tiny, and her skin so transparent, crimpled cellophane.
“The legend is that you know the other worlds before you are born, or reborn. But a force, an intention, something, comes down and touches you right there, on your upper lip, and says, shh, shh. Forget it all, forget—think of it as the place where all the rest we could know, we once knew, is filtered out. That trap door in your foundling home. So we live in the place of solid things, of one direction, of closed gates. Of yes or no. The Chronics are seeping back to yes and no somehow, I think, or into some in between.”
She noticed my agitation. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she said. Then, “You are such a sweet boy. Young man. So terribly, so—what is it? Reticent, patient, withheld. Do I make you nervous? Did I come too close to you? Was it terrible that I touched you?” She took a breath, leaned back, and withdrew her finger. “My friend insisted we could evolve. Or that some could. Evolve so that we could still hold that all within us. The memory of the passage in and the memory of the passage out. And we would know the way. Some of them say another world is right here, right next to us, and we can’t see it, our reason keeps us from seeing it—or there are many, not just one, as if enfolded in another and another. What would we have to do, if that were true? To find them? Where do the near-so longed go, for example? The ones the common doctors occasionally revive? If they see worlds, where are they, if not right here, beside or inside this one?” She brought all her narrow fingers to a point. “What is the mechanism? Where are the directions?”
“Why talk about things we can’t see?” I asked. “We should
be talking about Memphis, you need to get ready, and go. I have to go talk to Lazarus. There is a problem with my Trust. I’ve written, but he hasn’t answered. I’m going to leave soon. I have to—but I won’t until you do.”
“They got in touch today,” she finally said. “Chotchko’s team is about to announce a new drug combination that keeps them down. They haven’t had an uncontrollable case in six months, all of them are remaining ‘within the confines of ordinary experience,’ she is very proud to announce. They’ve reversed them, put them through Re-description, stopped all anomalies in several cases. Everybody is content. Or at least manageable. They are fine, although she does say, ‘They all express a certain yearning on occasion, like a trace memory, for that unfocused, inchoate state. For its “intensity,” which I believe we can address, with right enhancements, the right probes in place when we do their Re-descriptions.And of course your research on “mapping,” these “other states” could be of great use, perhaps to give them something of what they want, some simulacrum, which could pacify—’ Of course, now that they have found a ‘cure,’ they are happy to admit that my research—our research—was not doctored. In fact, she needs every scrap of it and is willing to give me credit. To claim our data was real. She can send them back to their normal Heir lives, and she has.”
“Well that’s a triumph,” I said. “There’s no reason not to go back.”
“The problem hasn’t been solved,” she said. “Chotchko’s just postponing. Eventually, eventually, they will continue down that path—do you see? Immortality is an entirely different—”
“John?” I asked. I thought of the man in the pictures, and I had, again, a certain pang, like anger.
“What about him?” she asked.
“Wasn’t he the one that thought immortality was different?” I asked.
She paused. “He was willing to give up too much. He was willing to wait for another generation, to work with genetics, not Albersian techniques—he was willing to—he did, so long—he could have surrendered, he could have been Treated—”
“Well then don’t take a risk now,” I blurted out, at that very moment. It was in a moment of bravery, or clarity, or bravado. Everything seemed to come together, for that second. Fall into place. “Please, go to Memphis for my sake, because of—us,” I said. “Us.”
How shocking what I’d just said was. I felt a jolt.
Her expression started to change, to widen.
“I don’t want you to—to—,” I said. “For my own sake.”
Inside, then, the jolt was gone. In her face I saw the consequence of what I had said. I saw forever. I felt something falling in on a surface, and breaking through, and then that breaking through another level, and so on. “I want to live forever with you,” I heard myself say. And then I said something that seemed to come from another place entirely, not from my own body, not really, but from the farthest reaches of my hopes, far out at the tips of my thoughts: “I love you. Or, when I am worthy I—”
I watched her face, then, trying to take it in. Her round skull, under her thin blue skin.
I had said something I wasn’t allowed to say, ever, never, not until I was an Heir.
She looked down. Even when I became a Nuovo, the gap would be enormous—we’d be ostracized for the match. It would be us against the world.
I saw her smile. “Is that what you want?” she asked. “I never knew that.” Then she said, mysteriously, “Well perhaps it would be so.” Smiled, and in a few moments, she said, “Yes.”
I was trembling. She said yes. She opened her tiny arms. She expected me to fall into her lap. I thought for a moment, of kissing her small lips, now so papery and delicate. I thought for a minute, she’s not really an Heir, she’s not covered in a prodermis—but I couldn’t. It seemed like a theory, an experiment, when I’d said, “I want to live forever with you.” A gambit, a try. It had worked. Now it was true. So quickly. So strangely. She’d taken my up on my offer.
I felt again the thrill and fear I’d felt the first day she’d interviewed me. But if I held her, I would crush her. I said, “Wait until you are back, in yourself again.”
She said, smiling more, now, “Oh, of course, of course, but call me Lydia.”
“Lydia,” I said. That was our greatest intimacy. I said, “Lydia.” Then she touched my cheek. She touched me, and I did not ask her to take her hand away, and she did not take her hand away. I think I trembled.
Any question of what I’d do when I was an Heir, was solved, now.
But the question of whether or not I’d be one, was not solved.
Her fingers were very cold.
*
The storm, Horace, went south of us, but we had terrible weather for three days—swirls and bands of rain, and rough seas, so rough WELLVAC wouldn’t come to take her away. So we waited, and got her ready, put her skin back on her bones, and all the rest. Mimi put her in a beautiful white dress, and she wore a long cloak with high wings at the top of the shoulders, with a brilliant purple lining. A queen.
It was Tuesday and hot as it could be after a bad storm, blue, and very dry. And exactly noon. The transport was a handsome, black and gold vehicle, almost two stories high, square. It was mud-splattered and fouled by the time it parked at the gate at the end of the boardwalk. The officers came out in their elegant black uniforms, with handsome collars and cuffs, three of them, silver stripes down the pants legs, and immediately started cleaning.
Then the side doors opened and two WELLMED nurses lowered the chair that would carry her. She could walk, of course, but this was part of the ceremony, the pomp, the service. I knew the chant, from the days when WELLMED had come to get Lazarus for his Re-jobs.
We all meet the Reveal on our own, and our renewal, alone. They said in unison, and she was to respond:
So I come now alone, to be restored.
“We can’t see the rest,” Klamath told me. “We are not allowed. It’s a ritual—private.”
But I was hers now. I was different, now, wasn’t I? Didn’t I deserve?
The chair was a throne, with a high back decorated with a huge sideways-eight figure, the infinity figure, WELLFI’S emblem. There was the sound of horns—a recording, I guessed.
“We have to go inside or they will chase us,” Klamath said.
So I went to my pallet and thought about the promise I’d made, the future I’d have, forever.
VIII
11:00 PM October 12, 2121
Miramar Penthouse Arena
Mississippi I-Road
Far East De-Accessioned Gulf Territory, U.A. Protectorate
“It’s just like in the old moving flats, hospital dramas, with those crude little tubes,” Gepetto was saying.
“Ginger” seemed to be asleep, but then, when Tamara spoke to her, she nodded, closing her eyes tightly.
I could hear Sebastian from the catwalk say, “Lighting Check. Sound. Malcolm—curtain going soon.”
The stage lights went on—red, pale green. Tamara came over, waving her beautifully manicured hand at me—the nails were darkest green, curved as claws, I noticed this time. “We aren’t ready, tell them to hold off.”
“Curtain in two minutes,” Sebastian hooted down.
“I’ve got to get her comfortable!” she called up to him. She looked over at me at my station in the wings. She was about to talk to me again, but she’d forgotten my name.
“Malcolm,” I whispered.
“You ever worked one of these?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Well, help me with the bed.”
She was beautiful, if annoying, and I followed her. She squatted near the wheels, reached under. “Can’t find the lever,” she whispered.
“I don’t want to jerk her. Her bones ache—” When she stood back up, she was close to tears.
I got on my knees, and I found a small handle on the rail of the bed, which released the crank so she could elevate the Ginger, who smelled terrible, really, it was awful to b
e near her, my nose level with the mattress.
“Thank you,” she said, batting her eyes for a moment. “You are?”
“Malcolm,” I said for the third time.
“Yes, I have a lot on my mind. I’m going to depend upon you. Help me if I need it,” she said. “I suppose these parasites want to see everything, don’t they? I hear her father is coming. I think she’s waiting for him… ”
“He won’t come,” the man beside her said. “Too angry.” He had the same fierce green eyes. He wore his hair slicked over the high dome of his head, the way Serio did. He took Tamara’s hand, then, and his face seemed broken with sadness.
“This is my brother Naroh, he’s Ginger’s husband,” Tamara said. “This is—” She still hesitated over my name, then retrieved it. “—Malcolm, to guard us.”
I nodded hello. He had one hand on this Ginger’s body, and the other was holding Tamara’s hand, so I didn’t offer mine to shake. He repeated himself to me, “Her father won’t come. He’s been against it all along. Ginger insisted—“
“These parasites—” Tamara said. “I wouldn’t have encouraged it if I could have imagined it. No shield. No privacy.”
