When putting together a short-fiction collection, any
author who writes across a variety of genres is tempted to offer a sample of
that range. Some readers appreciate that eclectic sort of approach. But I’ve
been at this fiction-writing game for a while. I have enough stories of various
types that I don’t have to mix-and-match. My last collection,
Raiding the Hoard of Enchantment,
was made up
entirely of imaginary-world selections.
Futures
Near and Far
is for those of you out there who prefer science fiction
and just science fiction. As in, tales of space travel and nanotechnology and
genetic engineering and virtual reality and extraterrestrial lifeforms. Here
you are. Nary a dragon nor a vampire nor a superhero-in-tights to be seen.

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INTRODUCTION TO “SUICIDAL TENDENCIES”

One day in 1914,
over forty years before my birth, my great-grandfather Herman Smeds, an elderly
man suffering from incurable cancer of the mouth, got tired of the pain. He
took a rope, walked down to the river that bordered my grandparents’ farm in
central California, and hung himself from one of the huge oak trees on the
bank.

That’s typical of how
suicide has touched my life. Remotely. I have known suicidal people — some of
whom succeeded in their quests for death — but it has played no large part in
my life, nor have I ever considered killing myself. I wanted to get that
straight, given the tendency of some readers to speculate about the auctorial
motives that lead to a story with suicide as a major theme.

The inspiration for this
story was not personal. Eric Drexler’s
Engines of Creation
was still a recent book and I was one of
the many people fascinated by the long-term potential of nanotechnology.
“Suicidal Tendencies” was the first of three works written as set-pieces
examining aspects of a fictional milieu I was developing for a novel,
Light
Years Apart.
I never completed that novel
and no longer plan to, in part because the stories — which also include “Reef
Apes” and “A Marathon Runner in the Human Race” — reached a standard that I did
not feel the novel would. The stories, I am happy to say, are complete in their
own right. Each paints a picture of how humans and human society may change in
response to nanotechnology. Each has its own theme. “Suicidal Tendencies”
directs itself to suicide, “Reef Apes” looks
at rape, and “Marathon Runner” deals with romance. I also wrote a fourth
story, “Evaporation,” which you will find
elsewhere in these pages. It is also set in a future where “nanodocs”
have rendered people immortal and physically
youthful, but “Evaporation” was never meant to fit within the continuity
of the others and I don’t regard it as part of the set. For that matter, you
should keep in mind that even the three don’t quite fit into the same imaginary
future. For instance, in “Suicidal Tendencies,” memories are sometimes edited
to cope with trauma. In the other two, memories are what they are, and a person
must cope in full with the recollections of what they’ve experienced.

“Suicidal Tendencies”
allowed me to work in black humor in a way I have not done at any other point
in my career. The result seemed to please fans and reviewers. I keep telling
myself I have to do something like this again. I’m not sure if that can be
planned, though. The mother/daughter relationship that lies at the heart of the
tale required me to approach the material in just this way. I couldn’t have
done it differently and have remained true to the characters and their
situation.

Welcome to a portrait
of a generation gap.

SUICIDAL TENDENCIES
Mother

My daughter killed me Tuesday morning.

I opened my front door and there she was in the hallway,
armed with a wood axe.

“Cheryl—” I blurted.

“Hi, Mom,” she said, and swung the axe.

My ribs made a funny sound.
Chock
. The noise reminded me of a dropped watermelon striking a tile
floor. Suddenly all the thoughts that come with death burst forth in my head.
Memories. Fear. Denial.
It’s going to
miss, it’s going to miss.
But it had already struck, and I was sliding
quickly into shock.

My left knee banged against the doorsill; the right
collapsed altogether. My face swung down over a puddle of blood. It seemed odd
to discover this red, wet liquid soaking into my welcome mat. It didn’t
register that the torrent originated from the vicinity of my left lung.

I suppose I felt a lot of pain, but my nanodocs have edited
out the memory. It must have hurt, because my mouth popped open and stayed that
way. I couldn’t say a single word. Just as
well, I suppose, considering the language I would have used had I been
capable.

Cheryl whacked me on the spine next. I sprawled over the
threshold. I guess I must have died at about that point, because the next thing
I knew my ethereal self manifested up near the ceiling. I had a bird’s-eye view
as Cheryl brought the axe down like Paul Bunyan on my neck. My head bounced
down the hallway and came to a stop against the potted fern by the elevator.

Cheryl regarded my
decapitated body. The damn kid didn’t even have the decency to turn
green. She sighed, tossed the axe and her
bloodstained clothes into the recycler, cleaned herself up, generated a
new outfit from my wardrobe player, and left the apartment. She stole the
barrette from my hair on her way to the elevator.

My ethereal self haunted the corridor, still too connected
to the flesh to disappear into the Big White Light. Below me the nanodocs
initiated resuscitation.

The big choice must have been whether to put my head back on
my body, or my body back under my head. The docs chose the latter, probably
because rebuilding the brain would take all that double-checking. I agreed with
the choice — not that my condition allowed me to have any input.

Molecule by molecule, the docs stole material from the mess on the apartment threshold and funneled
it down the hallway. A grainy stream, looking for all the world like a
parade of sugar ants, gathered at my neck.

Once they got going, the docs worked quickly. My spine
formed, only to vanish under layers of connective tissue, nerves, muscle, and
fat. The corpse in the doorway dissolved steadily. The docs didn’t neglect the
blood in the carpet and the welcome mat; raw
material was raw material.

Something pulled at my ethereal self. I descended.

I awoke to the tickle of a fern frond against my eyebrow.
Instinctively I reached for my throat. No seam. Of course not.

Someone was standing beside me.

I jerked into a sitting position, hands up to guard my head.
Then I saw who it was.

“Oh. Hi. Joan.”

I extracted the words with invisible forceps. I guess part of me wasn’t convinced my vocal cords would
function.

My neighbor surveyed me
as if she were a Mark Twain schoolmarm. Never mind that her body morph
presented her as a stylish, if a bit
voluptuous, nineteen-year-old blonde. Her carriage betrayed that she was
really a prune-faced, four-hundred-year-old gossip.

“Your daughter again?” Joan asked. Her eyebrows drew
together, broadcasting sympathy, yet somehow that concern did not extend to
helping me up.

“Yeah. My daughter.” I
didn’t offer specifics. Joan was bound to make up something even more
embarrassing than the truth, no matter what I told her. Might as well not give
her grist for the mill. At least she probably hadn’t seen the axe.

“The kids today — they just aren’t like we were.” The
eyebrows stayed drawn.

Count on Joan for a handy cliché. Yet to my dismay, I had to
agree with her this time.

“Got to run. Drop by later if you need to talk,” Joan said,
putting on her confidante hat.

Sure, Joan.

Once she was gone, I
climbed to my feet. My reflection shimmered in the brass of the elevator
door. My hair hung in disarray. If someone had shouted “Boo!” right then, my
head would have fallen off again. I stumbled into my apartment, closed the
door, and sagged onto my sofa.

Cheryl, Cheryl, Cheryl. Sixty-one years old and still acting
like four.

The clock in the entertainment console advanced to 9:22
am.
Twelve minutes had passed since Cheryl had arrived at my door. That
alone told me how careful the nanodocs had been as they repaired my tissues,
edited the pain out of my memory, made safety checks, and kick-started my
autonomic functions.

I’d been killed, one way or another, five other times in my
life. But used to it or not, I could barely rise from the sofa.

I grabbed my kimono off the floor by the front door. My hand
fit right through the rents over the left breast and center of the back. I
tossed the garment into the recycler and
coded the wardrobe player to generate another in the morning. Same
style, but I altered the sash to lavender.
No way could I stand to wear a red one for a while.

I stank. The docs had put back every particle of my body,
right down to the thin layer of perspiration that had burst from my skin the
instant the axe swung.

I stepped into the cleanser. My skin tingled as the scrubbers vacuumed out my pores and dissolved the
carpet lint in my hair. Feeling distinctly better, I sat down at my dining table and ordered it to create a pot of hot
chamomile tea. Only after the first
cupful — when I was damn good and ready — did I ask the Link to put me
in touch with Cheryl’s therapist.

“You were right,” I said as soon as Ellen’s virtual self
materialized in one of my dining chairs.

“Matricide?” she asked.

“A regular tribute to Lizzy Borden,” I replied. Ellen listened intently to the description of the
assault. Like many psychologists, she affected the appearance of a
studious person just entering classic middle
age, complete with crow’s feet at the outer corners of her eyes, an
extra freckle or two on the cheeks, and strands of gray in her auburn hair. All these centuries since eternal
youth became the norm, it’s still easier to take advice from someone who projects an aura of maturity and
experience.

I wondered what sort of morph she wore during her private
time. Preadolescent, maybe?

“Well,” Ellen said. “I wish she’d proven me wrong. At least
you weren’t taken totally by surprise.”

I thought of the swinging
axe. Not taken by surprise? I shuddered. She’d forewarned me that Cheryl
would
try
to kill me, but that didn’t mean I was prepared for the attempt to
succeed, or to be done so . . . vividly.

“I don’t know if I can go through this again,” I said. “You
should have seen her face.”

Ellen placed her phantom
hand atop mine. Strangely, it soothed me. Any other person would have acknowledged the intangibility of the Link and not
bothered to reach out. She seemed to know it was what I needed. It was
an example of why she’d reached adept level in her profession.

“What would you ordinarily have done if you didn’t have me
to call?” she asked.

I saw what she was getting at. “I would have called Cheryl
and asked her what the hell was up.”

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