by Brian Craig
It was a joke of sorts, but the Kid couldn’t quite bring himself to laugh. He had, after all, just been obliquely informed that he wasn’t overly likely to have the opportunity to spend what he earned.
“Just what is on that disc?” he asked, in a tone which sounded more exasperated than he had intended. “And why does everyone think that the end of the world is just around he corner?”
“There will be time enough for explanations,” Tanagawa assured him, apparently unworried by his own inconsistency. “First, Mr Zero, we have a deal to complete. Will you tell me now exactly where you hid the fourth copy of Dr Zarathustra’s disc?”
The Kid buried his exasperation, and told the M-M man what he wanted to know. He told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He was, after all, an honourable man.
3
The city streets are damp with recent rain, glistening redly wherever the light of the setting sun can penetrate the crevices between the huddled tenements. The streets are crowded with hurrying pedestrians of both sexes, whose heads are—without exception—bowed and hooded. The sun seems unnaturally large and the clouded sky is tinted vivid orange, as though the entire western horizon were aflame.
You have a gun in your right hand; it looks like a forty-five Magnum but there is no sensation of weight to back up the visual evidence and you don’t waste much time in looking down at the weapon anyway, because your gaze is flicking avidly back and forth over the crowds.
(You’re probably looking for someone—but what chance can you possibly have of finding them, when there is not a naked face to be seen?)
You step out into the path of one of the hurrying figures—it seems to be a smartly-dressed young woman, clicking along on high heels. She takes half a step backwards, obviously alarmed, but you can’t see anything within the folds of her hood.
You reach out with the hand which holds the Magnum, and use the barrel of the gun to push the hood back. You keep pushing until it falls.
Perhaps it is a young woman, but perhaps not. The hair is grey and wispy; the cheeks are mottled, as though covered in yellowing bruises; the lips are blackened, chapped and cracked and the teeth behind them are as yellow as the mottled skin. Most remarkable of all are the eyes: their “whites” are silvered like a polished ball-bearing; the irises are blood-red; the pupils are mere-pinpricks.
(How is it possible to read expression into such a face? Is that stare malevolent, or is no other appearance of emotion available to such features as these?)
You step back again, lowering the gun and clearing the way so that the other may proceed. She pulls up the hood again, carefully obscuring her hideous visage, and hurries on her way, head bowed.
You begin the search again, your eyes flickering from hood to hood—but while you watch, you begin to move along the street, skulking in the shadows cast by the tall buildings, whose windows are all shuttered and whose doors are all sealed.
(Can you have the slightest doubt that all the hooded faces are as frightful as the one which you exposed? This world has surely been the victim of some dire plague which transfigures without killing—some mutant micro-organism spawned in the polluted rivers, or some engineered virus escaped from a secret laboratory—and all human beauty has been banished from it. You can’t help but wonder what the consequences of that fact might be, for human relationships.
For now, it seems, the people are content to hide themselves for fear of offending one another’s eyes, but for how long? Will there not come a time when the hoods are thrown back, so that God may look upon the faces of His people, and none will be ashamed to be seen as they are? Will there not come a time when these Brave New Men will obliterate the cultural heritage which preserves images of another kind, destroying all the paintings, all the books, all the films, all the photographs—until no evidence remains to remind the people of the world that they have not always been as they are? And when that has been done, will not people come to think themselves fine and handsome again, and will they not learn to cherish the stigmata of their affliction?)
You move from the sunlit street into a shadowed alleyway—a deep crevice carved in the body of the city, from which the fiery sky is visible only as a high and narrow slit. There are fewer people here, but there are some, hurrying in both directions. Your gaze selects them one by one: checking, judging, appraising.
Here comes another of much the same height and build as the last, and again you move out to block her way. This one does not step back, but merely stops, and when you reach up with the gun-barrel she turns it aside with a gnarled and mottled hand. She also tries to block your other hand as it comes up to perform the task instead, but the hand—which is not discoloured—brushes her much smaller one aside, and hauls back the hood.
It is the same face as the other—or so similar that it cannot be told apart. This time, though, the spoiled lips move. They emit a hissing sound, and then the woman—if it is a woman—spits in your face.
You see the spittle coming at you, but there is no sensation of being hit by it. You don’t recoil, nor do you retaliate. You simply step back, and allow the other to cover herself up again.
She goes on her way.
(And in time, no doubt, these people will come to consider that they are made in the image of God, and will redesign their icons. Should any baby be born miraculously immune to the ravages of the disease, it will be promptly killed for its deformity. If the disease is a virus, made of the same stuff as the genes which are the carriers of human nature, it will be accepted and adopted into that human nature; if it is something other, it will become a second system of heredity, its own future evolution being part and parcel of the evolution of the race. That is the fate of universal diseases—to become commensals instead of competitors.
Perhaps men were once gods, before they were weakened by plague after plague after plague, so that they became only men…and perhaps, in time, they will degenerate even further, until they are no more than ugly beasts…and in the end, completing the devolutionary process, no more than gory blobs of protoplasm. Disease to disease, slime to slime.)
You move again, into an alley narrower than the other, so that the illuminating sky is no more than a striplight; but you can still see the people who go by, in both directions. You can still examine them one by one, dismissing all those who stand too tall or too broad, and all those who wear male attire.
Only the women attract your eye, drawing your attention like magnets; only the women who might be young.
Clearly, you do not expect your adversary to wear a disguise, save for the hood with which she will hide her face.
Again, one comes who might be the one you’re looking for. Again you step out to block her path.
She doesn’t step back; she doesn’t even stop. She cannons into you, but you’re so tall and solid and she’s so small and frail that she rebounds—and then she cowers and quivers in evident fear, and clutches with both hands at the black velvet hood which hides her shame. When you reach out with your free hand to seize the cloth and tear it away she resists, but not strongly—panic makes her impotent.
You yank the hood back, brutally, to display the ridiculous wisps of hair upon the scabby head, and the cheeks and chin the colour of pus, and the shattered lips smeared with something as black and sticky as tar. But the eyes—the eyes the colour of blood—are staring at you as though you are the hideous monster.
She begins to retreat, in spite of the fact that you’re holding her. She begins to move backwards, into the shadowed building, which seems to be coming to meet her and merge with her. She fades into its substance, so that her body becomes blackened brick and her face, denuded of its hood, becomes the one unshuttered window in the whole world. Her face is just glass, which you can’t see through at all, and her repulsive features are only a reflection.
Your reflection.
Then the window shatters, and from within there emerges a cataract of liquid which cascades over your face and body. But you can’
t feel it as it douses you…you can’t feel anything at all….
Because it is, after all, only an illusion…only a horrorshow…only a trick.
“Holy shit,” said the Kid, when he emerged. His heart was hammering and his palms were sweaty. “That’s pretty weird stuff. Are you telling me that Pasco chose to see that?”
Dr Yokoi made a slightly dismissive gesture with his hand. “The script which we fed in was gradually modified by the signals with which his own brain reacted to it—but chose is too strong a word. When a subject knows that he is in a sensurround his consciousness can at least act as a censor, but all these tapes were made before the two men were fully revived. The process of modification in this case—as in your own dream of the trackless forest—was entirely subconscious.”
“Pasco must be a pretty screwed-up guy,” observed the Kid.
“We all have our fears,” said Yokoi. “A man who has sight in only one eye may be entitled to deeper fears than those who have two.”
“I didn’t feel that I was only seeing with one eye,” said the Kid. “Anyhow, he has an artificial one in place of the one he lost.”
“Your experience cannot be the same as his,” Yokoi pointed out. “When the tape is played back, you see as if with your own eyes. And yes, it is true that Pasco has an artificial eye to compensate for his lack—but there is a level at which his fears are still very much aware of his loss. Of course, we can only attempt to deduce what psychological processes lie behind the modifications which his brain activity made to the script—all that is on the tape is the programme’s visual presentation after modification by his responses. When the tape is played back, you see what is on the tape and hear what is on the tape as though you were the protagonist. Your own responses—associations, interpretations, chains of thought and speculation—may not resemble Pasco’s at all.”
The Kid struggled with the implications of all this, trying to sort out in his memory of Pasco’s dream just what had been visual image and what had been his own interpretation. Some of it could be bracketed as his and set aside quite easily, but it wasn’t easy to draw the line—it wasn’t easy at all. He wondered what Yokoi had seen and felt and thought when he reviewed the tape.
In the meantime, the Kid adjusted his sitting position, rather awkwardly, and sipped tea from his cup. He was beginning to get used to the tea, but his muscles were still having trouble adapting to the business of squatting on a rug instead of sitting on a chair.
“Even if it’s subconscious, though,” he said thoughtfully, “he’s still choosing it.”
“I cannot agree,” said Yokoi reprovingly. “The word choice implies too much and too little. Must we be said to choose our natural dreams and nightmares because they come from the subconscious? It is the brain and not that aspect of it which we call the mind which learns so rapidly to emit directive signals into the encephalograph. My machine has no self-conscious mind at all—it is simply a computer designed to simulate in the manner of its internal wiring the configurations of the human brain. What we are seeing as a result of the two-way flow of information is a mutual reprogramming which is only peripherally concerned, if at all, with that particular brain-phenomenon we call consciousness. It calls into question the very concept of choice, and it may be that we will have to think again about what we can mean by the word. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Not really,” the Kid admitted. “But where’s it all leading? If your machines can put people’s dreams and nightmares on tape, does that mean you can use it to straighten people out? On the other hand, if it can make those nightmares worse, can it be developed into a means of torture? Or can you have it both ways?.”
“You have a remarkably vivid imagination,” observed Yokoi shrewdly, “for a person with such a limited education.”
“I may have had a limited education,” retorted the Kid, “but I’m not as screwed up as Pasco, am I? I had a nice dream, didn’t I—and I also talked myself out of believing that it was a dream, even though I didn’t know where the hell I was? Pasco couldn’t even figure that out, could he?”
“It might be too harsh a judgment to conclude that he could not,” said the scientist, carefully. “Mr Pasco has used our horrorshow booths quite extensively, and people who do that tend to become willing collaborators in the illusion. In order to partake of a horrorshow fully, users of the booths must learn to overlook the evidence that their experience is not real—Mr Pasco may have put a good deal of hard work into learning to ignore the signs of falseness and incompleteness in order that he might subject himself to an authentic test of his courage.”
The Kid sipped more tea.
“You’ve woken Pasco up now?” he asked.
“Yes,” Yokoi agreed. “We could not keep him too long in a virtual state of suspended animation, lest his muscles begin to waste. I would have liked to extend the series of experiments further, but it would have been wrong to endanger his health.”
“He tried very hard to endanger my health,” muttered the Kid. “Arc you going to let me see some more of Pasco’s tapes? It might be interesting to eavesdrop on the other guy, too.”
“I am sure that you would find it so,” agreed Yokoi. “Mr Preston has been closely associated with Dr Zarathustra for some time now, and I could not resist the temptation to see if we could elicit some interesting reactions to some well-chosen cues.”
The Kid looked up sharply from his cup. “How come the mercy boy knows Zarathustra?” he asked.
“Mr Preston was dressed in a borrowed uniform,” Yokoi told him, off-handedly. “Until he was sent after you he was, in effect, Dr Zarathustra’s personal bodyguard.”
The Kid nodded slowly, wondering whether he’d have handled things any differently back at the tunnel if he’d known that. “In that case,” he said, “I’d certainly like to scan the tape that you made.”
“In time,” said Yokoi non-committally. “But we must remember, Zero-san, that you are here in order that you may be investigated, rather than that you may investigate others.”
The Kid shrugged. “You can put me back in any time you like, Doc,” he said. “For what you’re paying me, I’ll dream as much as you want me to.”
Yokoi permitted himself a tiny smile. “If only it were as easy as that,” he said, with a sigh. “If only I could put you in the booth and run a programme which would tell me everything I need to know. Perhaps one day…who can tell what rewards this avenue of research will yield? In the meantime, alas, my research produces far more questions than answers; the path which leads from exploration to explanation is always difficult to follow. You will forgive me, I hope, if I proceed in a much more pedestrian manner, by asking you some very ordinary questions.”
“Fire away,” said the Kid.
“How did you first encounter Lady Venom?”
“I was looking for a hidey-hole. So was she. We met, and she bit me. I was sick for two days, but I got better. She was still around.”
“You didn’t attempt to destroy her after she bit you?”
“No. She was only doing what came naturally. It was her hidey-hole and I was the invader. I was glad when she finally decided to let me stay—I figured it would be no bad thing to have an extra disincentive to callers. I heard that people could build up an immunity to snakebite, and it seemed like a neat idea to be able to hide out with the rattlers—there are quite a few of them about on the edges of the desert. I’d been bitten before, by a little one, and I figured that might be what helped me get over the Lady’s bite. So I stopped being scared of them, and let myself get bitten two or three times more—though not by the Lady. I tried to let the Lady bite me, but she wouldn’t. She was too well-used to me by then, I suppose. After the fifth bite I was hardly sick at all. I don’t think I need to worry about rattlers any more.”
“Can you control Lady Venom?”
“After a fashion. I don’t think she understands English or anything stupid like that, but when I tell her to do something she usually
does it. Maybe she’s telepathic, or something. Maybe I read too much into it—maybe she just likes being around me. Not that she needs me at all—she can do her own hunting well enough.”
“Can you control other snakes?”
“Not so’s you’d notice. Lady Venom’s the only one I ever met who isn’t shy.”
“You know, of course, that she’s presumably a mutant?”
The Kid shrugged. “I heard people talking about mutants,” he admitted. “Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t. Maybe she’s the next step up the evolutionary ladder for serpentkind. Maybe, when we’re gone, it’ll be the snakes instead of the rats and the cockroaches who inherit the earth.” The Kid grinned, to show that it was a joke, but Yokoi didn’t even crack the kind of polite smile he gave out on a regular basis.
“Do you really think that the human empire is coming to an end?” asked the scientist softly. “Did you choose your dream?”
“Don’t you think we’re doomed?” countered the Kid amiably. “Homer Hegarty does—and so does your boss, Tanagawa, if I can take him at his word. Everybody knows that the deserts are spreading, and that the sea level’s rising. The rivers are already dead, and they say the seas are dying too. Ecocatastrophe, isn’t that what they call it?”
“The term is freely used,” Yokoi conceded, in his customary over-scrupulous fashion, “but its meaning is rather vague. I doubt, though, that Director Tanagawa’s anxieties have much to do with an impending ecocatastrophe. He is much more concerned about the war.”
“Which war?”
“The war, Zero-san. The war between the corporations—GenTech’s war.”
“I thought that was just hype—just a way of talking about the way the corps compete for the workingman’s dollar.”
