CHARLES JOHNSON AND STEVEN BARNES
Anticipation [of death] reveals to [the I-self] its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the “they,” and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.
—Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
We shed the bulky, vanilla-colored coveralls worn on the Möbius line. Ferris bids the kiva surround us with breathtaking Northwest forest, green petals, and needles gleaming with dew. They shiver when caressed by the wind, as Ferris does when the tip of my tongue traces circles around her pebble-like nipples. Just visible in the distance, she has called forth an abandoned wooden Soto Zen temple, the kind once seen everywhere in Japan. When there still was a Japan. Age, even decay, has made it strangely beautiful and somehow precious in its impermanence.
Ferris enjoys coupling in settings such as this, where spirit commingles with flesh, echoes of a time when life died from the day it was born.
We drop naked onto layers of leaves covering the forest floor. I open the thumb-size vial of Thanadose. A month’s salary moving between chits to barter to black market through cutouts and burned bridges. Illegal as self-murder, and worth every erg.
Ferris tilts her head back, sipping from the vial. I follow her lead. Then, as the serum takes effect, we kiss hungrily, salty-mint syrup coating our tongues. For a time the microsynthes crawling through our veins stop whispering eternity and we can glimpse an ending, as did our ancestors. Back before we knew we were male or female, knew only that sexual sweetness banished, however briefly, fear of the eternal night.
Sweetness, in the shadow of the worm.
After a year of trysts, we know each other’s heats and tastes and textures. I can play her exactly as she wishes to be played.
She is drop-dead beautiful, as perfect as a pleasure doll. Could have an Upper if she wished. A mere fluke of genetics that she was born Lower. A fluke of luck that she wants me.
First, I push back her nut-brown, shoulder-length hair. I slowly trace my tongue along her neck, beneath her small delicate ears, where a vein dances with life. She closes her eyes and sighs, as if drifting into sleep, but it is actually shameless surrender, luxuriating in every elemental, spasm-inducing sensation I stroke up through the envelope of her skin. She trusts me completely. We keep touching until touching becomes inebriation and our eyes begin to blur. Then my left hand parts her legs. Ferris lifts her knees, and I bury my face where her vulva and labia are moist and lathered, layered like the inside of a flower. She trembles until she is carried away, far away, returning to me with her fingers tangled gratefully in my hair, her eyes bright as stars.
At last, I slide into the warmth and wetness of her. She grips at me with her inner muscles, locking so tightly I can barely move. Then releasing so that we churn, melting into one another, and finally lie in each other’s arms, sipping one another’s breath.
It is all there is, but as the Thanadose fades, the sweetness recedes. I try to hold the illusion: I will die. Everything ends. This moment is all we have . . .
But no, it is a lie. We are untouched by time. We will have tomorrow, and tomorrow, and every tomorrow thereafter. No one knows how long those who remain on planet Earth will live. Perhaps forever. That would horrify me. If I felt horror.
But I do not. Or, as Thanadose fades, love. Only the body and its microsynthes, whirring on, eternal.
We are left with after-quakes. We are told that that is enough. That this is all there is.
I don’t believe that anymore. And that is a sin.
* * *
Sweat cools.
“La petite mort,” she whispered.
“What?”
“The small death.” Her finger traced a figure eight on my chest.
“Some kind of Upper talk?” Beautiful as she is, I’d not be surprised if she had a lover across the divide. Perhaps she’d been a courtesan, demoted to the Möbius line for reasons I might never know. You could see it in the little things that betrayed her breeding, like the way she walked and talked and smiled, feminine in every fiber and almost too perfect to believe. Her elegant gestures, her perfectly pronounced speech, and elite Upper education, none of which she could hide. All that would explain some of the things she said, but not whatever it was she saw in me.
“Hundreds of years ago, the French referred to an orgasm as the ‘little death.’ ” She pressed herself closer to me, somehow a greater intimacy than that which had gone before.
“The French?” I said.
“That was when there was a France.” She shrugged, then kissed my shoulder.
I gave a headshake, yes. Now, of course, there is no France, or England or Germany. Or much of anything else outside our domed polises, each sustaining 10 million perfectly regulated lives, the city-state that is mother and father to us all. We could thank the Food Wars for that, and leveling the planet’s population to 100 million. And these days only “little” deaths seem to exist at all. I’d never thought about things like that before Ferris.
She was supposed to have been relief. Just physical release from the monotony of working the line.
She had opened my eyes.
Not like the other women I’d had over the last . . . I don’t know how long. At least a hundred and sixty years. We are discouraged from thinking about years and serial relationships long past and replaceable. Days, minutes, yes. And we’re encouraged not to forget the communal wisdom of the polis, I am because we are. No single person is special or unique. Except . . .
Ferris is special to me, I think. I want her forever and that is forbidden.
I have lost count of my years, or sex partners. I could place them all on a chorus line that would stretch a quarter mile, their faces blurring together. But Ferris is more. She is the lover who might save me from myself. For her I take risks. The Thanadose she brings to us could cost me status on the line. I could be demoted. It has taken me ten years to work my way up to assessment, off the assembly queue, repairing whatever is sent us.
But . . . if I lose something, it is worth it. She is worth it.
I can’t exactly say she loves me. Or that I love her. “Love” died during the Wars, like so many things. But this—whatever it is—is all we have, and more than I expected. It may be as much as the Uppers have, and that thought makes me smile.
* * *
We parted with a promise, but not a kiss. She retired to her sleep kiva, and I to mine. A sleeping place, living place, eating place. There are public eateries, parks, museums. They belong to all. We have all we need.
I enjoy cooking. After tubing home in our domed anthill, I spent some ergs and had fresh chicken waiting on the conveyor. Spent the evening experimenting with tastes and textures, and consumed my dinner alone, facing the framed picture of Ferris on my wall. She does not know I have it.
Perhaps I would invite Ferris to my home. It would be a big step. Perhaps one day we would ask for a contract, for a year or a decade. Whatever I could get.
I dreamed of her.
It is not love. But it is what I have.
* * *
Dreams are carefully monitored and directed, lyrical, speaking of life and hope. No nightmares (Ferris told me of those), no chasings or fallings. No flying, either.
I make a promise to tube out to the Pacific, where the transparent dome (so like photos I’ve seen of terrariums) that separates us from the toxic air outside ends. I would take a room, just sit by a window and watch the roll of pewter-gray waves beneath a blue and bottomless sky. That would be good. Nothing out there lives in the hazy atmosphere, but watching the roily, ever-changing water would bring a bit of tranquillity to my brooding, as I sometimes do, on the waxing and waning of world civilizations.
Morning comes.
Tubing in to work is pleasant, rolling through the parks. There are many, and they are all beautiful. I see the night shift playing and strolling. Some play with pets. Once upon a time I saw pictures of children playing in the park. I actually saw a child once, a tangled-haired little girl. Why her Caregiver took her outside the children’s sector is beyond me. I wonder if having children would be more . . . satisfying . . . than pets. I would never know such luxury. Or know anyone who had.
Children grow, and change, in a world where change has been banished to the shadows. So they are elsewhere. Where, I don’t know. I know I was a child once, but remember little of that time save playing with my crèchemates. I remember liking chocolate ice cream. I cannot stand it now.
Somewhere out there, the Uppers live. I’ve only heard rumors about them, strange, contradictory stories. Some say their lives are decadent and devoted to unnatural pleasures, others claim they are old-fashioned, cultivated, with close-knit families, no making love before marriage with anything other than sex dolls, and even going twice a day to temples to worship a god whose name is too holy for them to utter, and whose image, if drawn or otherwise depicted, is an offense punishable by memory wipe. On some days, when the sky is very clear, I can see their towers. Kilometers high, beautiful as death.
That is wrong. Death is not beautiful. Life is beautiful. I have heard that since always. I should go to the psyops and ask for a correction.
* * *
Work is as it always is. A machine I had not seen before came down the line. When I researched its fixing, I found that it was like a type of marine chronometer seen now only in the antique military craft sometimes used in Upper games of war, where people pretend to die. I pulled it from the line, and spent half the day exploring, and renewing the thing. Robots could do any of what I did, and maybe even better, but except for household bots, machines doing the supposedly ennobling work of men and women were abolished long ago. When the chronometer pulsed to life again, I put it back on the line, where it mysteriously went on to whatever destination it would ultimately have, off the line. Where did it go? One doesn’t ask about what goes on before or after the station where one stands every day.
At dinner, I saw Ferris. She sat alone in the dining room, which was lined with cooking stations, and the endless buffet. Food is wonderful. I love it.
I sat with her, and she acknowledged me with a nod. She seemed withdrawn, staring at a tendriled flaw in her wineglass, an indentation shaped like a starburst. I asked her if she would see me tonight, and she shook her head.
“Why?”
“I want more”—her voice quivered—“we were so close. So close.”
“Yes.” I nodded, knowing what she meant, how we carried eternity within ourselves like an ache or soreness in our muscles. “We were.”
“It was like stepping right to the edge of a cliff”—her eyes slipped out of focus as she thought about it—“looking down and feeling the ground beckoning me to step out into space, into bliss, then we backed away at the last moment . . .”
I just stared at her, afraid to speak.
“Shane, don’t run away from what I’m saying. Don’t look away when I’m talking to you! We have to do this.” Her gaze snapped back, locking into mine, refusing to let go. Her voice was barely above a whisper. “We have to die. Together.”
* * *
Hours later, back in my sleep kiva, I could still feel the thrill that flooded through me when Ferris had the courage to give voice to thoughts still unformed in my own mind. I lacked the courage to formulate them fully, let alone put them into words. We had to die. It was as simple as that. Together, at the height of our lovemaking and passion, we would taste extinction and real eternity.
Death. Forbidden fruit. The one tree we were warned not to touch.
I let the idea unwind, wondering what it would be like to nibble at this. I stepped into the spotless kitchen, where every stain and odor, sweet or offensive, was obliterated by roaming microsynthe colonies. From the cutlery cabinet, I withdrew the biggest, sharpest blade I could find. I paused for a moment. All my life I’d been what others wanted me to be. I’d bent or broken little rules here and there, sure. Everyone did that. It was expected. But I’d never toyed with anything taboo. Not until now. Trembling, taking a deep breath, and with just a single stroke, I cleanly sliced open my left wrist right to the bone. Blood . . . It should have geysered from the ugly gash I opened. But the microsynthes work with abominable speed. As if in a dream, I stared at my wrist as they worked, repairing me, removing even the individuating scar that would have distinguished me from everyone else in the polis. Suddenly, I felt a scream spasm up through my throat. I could have cut off my entire hand, but I would have just been printed another, identical one from my genome file.
I wanted—needed—to bleed. To feel that something changes. And matters. To wake up from this nightmare of forever.
We must die. I knew that then. But in order to do that we had to find the Death Dealers.
* * *
I spent the next day denying that the conversation had ever taken place, but it lingered like a low-grade fever. How could I believe it? Suspended between hope and horror, I went to the line, and worked. I didn’t see Ferris at lunch, and then I saw her and she wouldn’t talk to me. I knew her reason. Disgust with my own cowardice overwhelmed me. I wrote her a note, and tucked it under one of the flanges of a drum of combined African and Korean design, destined for Ferris’s line.
“I will try,” it said.
Heard nothing back from her, and slept that night alone, and lonely. Awakened in the middle of the night, and sent a message to the single-use drop Billy had given me twenty years ago.
She was in the cafeteria the next day, her hair gathered up in a coil, but seemed tetchy and again would not speak to me. Her eyes bled need and want.
The next day I merely rambled through the motions, feeling emotionally murky, when a repair job came in, the one I had been waiting for. Tied with a red ribbon. It felt as if a weight had been lifted from my chest, and in the cafeteria I managed to get her to take my hand, and passed her a note: “Tonight.”
She came to my table, eyes brimming with gratitude.
“My brother says he can help us,” I said.
Playfully, she raised an eyebrow and pouted her lips. “Is that a pie crust promise?”
“Huh?”
“Easy to make and easy to break.” Ferris winked at me. “Thank you. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.” Then she did something she had never done before: she leaned over, held my head in both hands, and kissed me. A few of the others looked over, curious. Public displays of physical affection were rare.
“It’s going to be so good,” she whispered. She was glowing. Her cheeks. Lips. Totally turned on. She took me by the hand to a comfort room, peeled my clothes off, and welded her body to mine.
She was like a furnace, insatiable. It had never been like that before. And would never be again.
* * *
How do you dress for death? What do you leave for others to find?
An autopod took me to a side street where Ferris waited at the entrance to a tattoo parlor. Streetlamps penciled a latticework of patterns on the moving sidewalk in front of her. Behind her, animated tats of constellations and extinct animals blossomed on the skin of living models in the windows: a gam of whales spewed columns of water skyward, a brace of eagles spread their wings, elephants thundered. Dead now, like death itself.
The pod’s doors sighed open. Once she was inside, the windows blacked out.
“The pod?” she asked.
“Off the grid,” I said. “Cost a lot of ergs, but can’t be traced.”
That seemed to reassure her. Closing her eyes, she leaned into me, her head of flush, nut-brown hair on my shoulder. “It won’t matter after tonight.”
“No,” I said. “It won’t.”
In silence, then. The pod glided on as Ferris dozed. I’d told her little about my crèchemate Billy, how we’d been raised together, but walked different paths. He was sly, crafty. He’d spent time as a cop, a psych tech, a street maintenance guy. Now . . . well, I didn’t know how he made money, and I’m not sure I’d want to. But from time to time we still exchanged favors. Now, he was going to grant me one final request.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, we came to a busy rialto close to a different zone. A kind of tenderloin marketplace abutting the upper-class zone. Judging by sound and sensation we descended into a tunnel. Long narrow drive. Then we stopped. The interior lights came on. The doors opened. Ferris and I climbed out. The autopod moved away in the direction it had come, plunging us into woolly cave-like darkness. Ferris held my hand tightly, her palms slick with moisture.
As our eyes gradually adjusted to this chamber, I realized we’d been deposited in a death brothel. Until now, I’d only heard about places like these, a hair-raising edge zone, liminal, where Uppers and Lowers shed their assigned status and met secretly for every sort of illegal sex. Faintly, as shapes came into focus in a common space that connected to a warren of private rooms, I saw death and twisted Venusian embraces commingled in exhibitionistic ecstasy. Instantly, I felt ill. Naked men wanting to be watched were grinding against women painted to resemble corpses. Others sat in shadowed cubbyholes twitching and jerking and erect, neural helmets playing end-of-life brain waves. Women coupled with aged surrogates and grunting beasts. Men gripped and thrust into things that looked as if they were barely . . . barely . . .
My god, my eyes had to have been lying. The tiny bodies and disproportionate heads, the mewling screams . . . they had to have been clones, or dolls, or . . .
My brain felt on the edge of shutdown, refusing to process what I was seeing. The scent of sex mingled with the stench of decomposition. The room rushed at me, then receded. I felt dizzy, and came within a hash mark of fainting, but Ferris was so stimulated she could hardly stand. Even in this sexual abattoir, her musk was a tangible thing. Off to our left, I saw a door. Before it stood a husky, hairy-necked, masked man, ponderous and pale as a ghost. He wore cutaway pants, exposing chalky flesh. Hermaphrodite, with a hard distended belly like a sack of marbles. Not far from him, a drooling woman crawled along the floor, eyes ripped from her face. Empty sockets swarmed with microsynthes, already knitting new orbs.
“I saw it,” she moaned. “Can’t you see it?”
Suddenly and without a sound, Billy materialized at my side.
“Shane,” he said.
“Billy.” I took a breath and with two fingers wiped sweat off my forehead. “You startled me.”
He looked much like me. Dark knotted hair, dusky copper skin. Eternally at his physical peak. Squint lines around bright eyes that had seen too much, for too long. Pimp, go-between, facilitator. My crèche brother.
“You always were jumpy, Shane. More nervous than anyone else in our litter. Never figured I’d see you in a place like this.” His brown, heavy-lidded eyes, which deceptively always made him seem sleepy when he was, in fact, alert to everything going on, swung toward Ferris, as if he was appraising a nice veal chop on his kiva’s conveyor. “She the one?”
“She’s the one,” I said.
His lips twisted up in a smile. “You always had luck with good-lookin’ ladies, brother. Sometimes I hated you for that.” I hadn’t seen Billy in thirty years, but our childhood bond was strong enough for me to read his expression, despite his carefully guarded emotions. In childhood, Billy had always covered my back when anyone tried to mess with me or when I looked like I was about to do something stupid. Like maybe now.
“Can’t talk you out of this?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Okay, it’s your funeral.”
When I looked confused by that, Ferris gently applied pressure to my hand and said, “Back when people died, their friends and family would get together with their dead bodies, all cleaned up, and say nice things about them.”
As always, I took Ferris at her word, and turned back to Billy.
“All my possessions and kiva go into a trust.” I handed him a plastic card. “This is the code. If I . . . when I die, you get everything. It’s not much, but I owe you.”
“You do.” He blinked, greed overriding brotherly love. “Miss you, my friend.”
I tried to smile, and couldn’t quite manage.
Billy gave Ferris a slow look sideways, his face suddenly suspicious. “You an Upper? Don’t lie. I can hear it in your voice.”
“No. But . . . I spent time there in childhood.”
He gazed into her eyes. I had seen the horrors of the outer room, and knew that to be nothing compared to what Billy had to know. He could imagine things beyond my mind. But even with so much history behind him, he had a lot of heart. Sympathy softened suspicion. “And . . . this is what you want, sister? You go into this, you don’t come out, ever.”
“I want it.” She nodded. “With all my heart.”
“In that case . . . then, here it is.” He extended a closed fist and opened it. There were two pills in his palm, one blue, one pink.
“What is this?” I asked.
“One for each of you. She takes the pink pill, naturally. You take the blue. Or . . . you would, if I were to give you these. But that would be against the law, wouldn’t it?”
I stared at them, there in the hollow of his hand. “If I did . . . if we did take these, what would happen?”
“Well, they are binary neurotoxins coupled with microsynthe antagonists.”
“And . . . we’ll die?”
“If you make love, yes. The microsynthes are triggered by sexual brain-wave patterns.” He managed a crooked smile and chuckled. “Literally, you’d come and go at the same time—get it?—but only with each other.”
“Why?” Ferris asked.
He shrugged. “More romantic that way, I guess. Don’t ask me. I don’t make this shit. I just sell it.” Billy dropped both pills in front of us.
I picked up mine, looked at it. The echoes of sex, pain, and simulated death filled my ears. Moans. Cries. As if even more unspeakable things were happening just outside of my sight.
Terrible.
Ferris rolled her pill around in her hand. “We take these home?”
Billy shook his head. “If I knew what you were talking about, which I don’t, I’d say no. They don’t leave here. Take them here, or not at all.”
I was shaking, trembling all over. “What happens to . . .”
“Your bodies?” A ghost of a terrible smile. “We waste nothing.”
Thoughts formed, crashed against each other, dissolved. There were no more decisions to make. “Good-bye, Billy. Thank you.”
“For what?” he said. “Do I know you?” With an easy, loose-hinged walk, he stepped away, not looking back, nodded to the hermaphrodite, then disappeared into the darkness.
The masked man beckoned to us. He opened the door, grinning, and we entered a little cubicle with a bed. It was better than we had expected.
“So . . .” Ferris said. “This is it. I always wondered what my last sight would be.”
“Could it be me?” I asked, shyly.
I felt a moment of doubt. With her left finger and thumb, Ferris turned my face, and crushed her lips against mine in answer. My senses swam.
“You’ve never kissed me like that before,” I said.
Her eyes sparkled. “I don’t think I’ve ever kissed anyone like that.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why here? Why now?”
“There’s a last time for everything.” Her answer made sense. Everything made sense.
She put the tablet on the end of her tongue, swallowed. She took mine out of my hand, and placed it on the tip of her tongue as well, then kissed me again. I felt it pass from her mouth to mine, and I swallowed it.
Her eyes glowed. “And that’s half of it,” she said. “Now the rest.”
She shed her clothes, the body I knew so well still a revelation, in the dim light so transparent she seemed made of wax. She drew me closer, stroking until I was erect, and then rolled me on top of and into her.
She arched and groaned, pulling at me, and I felt a sensation like being sucked down a deep and endless hole . . .
Her eyes rolled back.
And back . . .
Until they were blood-red spheres without sclera or irises. Tiny black lines against the red. Her mouth opened wider. Wider than any human’s had ever opened. There came a sound, barely at the edge of hearing, like an invisible insect fluttering madly within her left ventricle. I couldn’t breathe. Were the drugs killing us? Was this entire thing a trap?
I tried to pull out of her, fought to escape, and could not. Her vaginal muscles held me like a vise. I beat at her, smashed my fists against her face until my hands bled . . . and then some other light-colored fluid began streaming from her mouth.
From somewhere deep inside her chest, words arose: Don’t be afraid.
As consciousness faded, I could hear feet outside, and screaming. The trill of shock-guns. Then silence, and darkness.
* * *
Darkness receded like an oiled ocean.
I drifted in and out of nausea, briefly finding a clear space, then suddenly passed through another wave of dizziness that washed over me, leaving me weak, feeling first overheated, then chilled. Blinking, I saw the ceiling of a white-tiled medical room. Then I looked down at myself. Naked. My wrists and ankles cuffed to a hospital bed with chrome knobs and metal railing. On a table next to me was a lump covered with dull coppery hair. Ferris’s head, disconnected from her body. Her eyes were still filled with bloody liquid, flashing black lines floating within.
I screamed myself hoarse.
The door slid open, and a brown-skinned woman in a white coat, with raven-black hair, eyes green as kelp, and full, bee-stung lips, entered. “Hello, Shane.”
She ignored my silence. “How are you feeling? I don’t really have to ask that. We have scans, of course, and you’re doing fine.”
At last, I found my voice and pointed at the severed head. “What is that?”
“Your lady love,” the woman in the white smock said. “We built ten Ferrises in all, but this one was constructed specifically for you.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why me?”
The doctor, an Upper in bearing and enunciation, fiddled with dials on a panel. Beams of laser light lanced from the ceiling, mapping and exploring my naked body.
“Oh, I don’t mind telling you, because you won’t remember.” Her voice was mesmerizing, with the faintest of accents and a lilt on her labials. It was like an old, old coin that had traversed continents and civilizations, picking up hard-won knowledge from each one, passed down through centuries, and bearing the palm oil and wisdom of millions who’d handled it: the voice of the polis, enveloping and inescapable. Helplessly, I listened as she said, “We tolerate the boutique death brothels. We look the other way because they help to monitor and regulate deviancy. But a few citizens had disappeared, their microsynthes deactivated and bodies presumably destroyed. The most we could discover was a rumor that Billy was selling an . . . extreme form of the drug Thanadose. We hadn’t been able to find him, so we began searching out his crèchemates, on the theory that one of them would know how to find him. You were the third one, you know.”
“And Ferris . . . was she always . . . ?”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “A sex doll reconfigured for analysis. The minute we knew we had the genuine sample, we raided. Now we can reconfigure the microsynthes to compensate.”
“Is Billy . . .”
She looked shocked. “Dead? Oh, heavens no. We waste nothing. Like you, he belongs to all of us. And we care about everyone. We always have everyone’s best interests in mind. We need him. We need you. I suspect that’s something you forgot.” All of a sudden, she smiled at a remembrance. “My Caregiver once had a saying I’ve always seen as wise. ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place.’ ”
A sound breathed through the room, and I finally recognized it. No way out. No way out . . . It was my own voice. At some point I had curled against the wall, holding my knees. Rocking.
“Come now,” she said brightly. “You’ve been given a gift for which kings and pharaohs would have gladly exchanged their crowns.”
“I don’t want it.”
“What you—or any of us—want isn’t important. We’re all essential parts of the whole. Of the city-state. The clan. The family. And it is the height of selfishness to see oneself as separate or special within that collective. That’s what brought the old world to an end, you know: the delusion of individuality and personal identity. Of individual nation-states rather than a united polis. It is far, far better to embrace and maintain a well-tuned harmony and tidiness that leads to happiness and security for all. That way, everyone’s life contributes to the symphony.”
“But I’m not happy.”
“I know.” She smiled, her eyes softening with what I could only call pity. “You were filled with the illusion of yourself. This is a cause for concern, but not alarm, because I can take away some of those disturbing thoughts by removing certain proteins from your amygdala, and regrooving certain chemical pathways and adjusting memory traces.”
That was the moment real panic hit me. “No!” Then my voice became a whimper. “No . . . They’re all I have. They’re all of me that’s left. All that’s mine.”
“There is no you or me. No mine or yours,” she said, and shone a violet light into my eyes. “Only we.” Slowly, the edges of my visual field began to burn away.
We waste nothing. Her words. Billy’s words. Was he . . . ? But what sense . . . ? I couldn’t think, couldn’t trust my own memory . . .
Couldn’t trust anything . . .
* * *
Shane awakened at home, although it took him a time to determine where he was. He looked at his hands. Pulsing stretches of pinkish, puckered flesh crested the knuckles. Wounded flesh, already knitting together. When had he harmed them? He could not remember.
He dressed, ate, looked around. A rectangular spot on the wall opposite his dining table was slightly discolored, as if a rectangular object had once been positioned there. There used to be something else there, he was certain of it, but could not remember what it was.
Shane took the solotube to work, passing the parks and the ponds, gazing at the distant towers without curiosity. Strange, he thought. He had the sense that once upon a time he had wondered about those towers. Now he did not. If ever he had.
He sat at his place on the Möbius line, just as a broken harp trundled into sight. He examined it and sent it on. The next job was more interesting. And then . . . a plastic woman, in two pieces, body and head. Skin soft and perfect. Dark brown hair as fine as silk. Broken and chipped as if someone had beaten it horribly.
He checked its speech synthesizer, the work of a moment to trigger its last words.
“Don’t be afraid,” it said.
He shrugged. Wrote out a ticket, and sent it on to the cybernetics track. Just another job, like the job he had done yesterday, and would do tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
A society must work perfectly. Everything in its place.
He noticed that fluid was leaking from the sex doll’s damaged eye. In the overhead light, at just the wrong angle, it looked very like a tear.