Futures Near and Far (2 page)

The psychologist nodded.
“And she knows that. We’ve got to show her that the rules have changed.”

“I know. I didn’t really think she’d resort to murder,
though.”

“She’s never had to before.” Ellen leaned back. “You know,
it’s not too late to change the plan. I could still petition for a personality
remorph. It would be easier on everybody.”

My fingers tightened around the teacup. “Not easier for
Cheryl.”

Ellen pursed her lips. “Actually it would be. Once it’s
done, the new Cheryl would thank us.”

The new Cheryl. I cringed, thinking of someone I’d known
who’d had a personality remorph. “No,” I said. “I can’t. Not yet.”

Was that approval in the
psychologist’s pensive smile? “Then we’ll have to work it through. I’ll
talk to her today. I don’t expect much,
though. You should expect to be killed at least one more time.”

I blanched. “I understand.”

Ellen prepared to blink
out. “Anything else?” she asked.

I sighed. “I feel like a terrible mother.”

Ellen waited until I was willing to meet her glance straight
on. “On the contrary. The problem is that you’ve been too good a mother. She needs the opposite right now.”

I bit my lip, and pretended that I accepted that.

“Your mom still hasn’t
called, has she?” Giselle asked.

I pretended not to hear.
Jacques was getting ready to jump. I focussed on that.

We were high in the
Cascades, at the brink of a gorge. Scoured by glaciers and attacked by
snow melt, the cliff below us was fissured and crumbling — not the smooth,
tall, granite precipice type that attracts imagemakers and tourists. Steep, but
nicely off the beaten track — we could usually get wilderness permits good at
the site for an hour every week.

I could feel Giselle’s smug grin, even if I didn’t look at
it. I yawned, projecting nonchalance. Not that it would fool anyone. Giselle
knew me better than that.

Jacques leaped. He hit ass-first on a shelf about fifty feet down, probably breaking his pelvis. It slowed
him down, but he regained enough momentum to tear open his viscera on a
jagged projection a hundred feet below that. He bounced against the cliff,
through brush and over ledges, losing parts of himself, and slammed to rest
near the outcropping we all called Buffalo with an Attitude.

“Not bad,” Giselle commented. “He was probably conscious
until that last series of boulders.” We both knew that meant a lot to Jacques.
He preferred to leave his memories unedited. No pain, no gain.

“Coming with me?” Giselle sprang onto a rock at the very
edge of the drop.

I shrugged. “Nah. I’ll wait another minute or two.”

“Oh, Cheryl,” she
taunted. “If she hasn’t called by now, she’s not going to. You always
expect so much.”

“Why don’t you give
yourself a Tabasco sauce enema?” I asked.

She mocked an expression of deep offense. I glared at her.
Her scowl transformed into a crooked smile, still a bit smug, but laced with a
certain amount of empathy.

Giselle and I operated
from the same foundation. She, Jacques, and I constituted half of the
sixty-something-year-olds in all Oregon. She knew what it was like to be a kid born in a society of Old Farts. Except for us,
everybody alive had been around ever since nanotechnology had eliminated
aging. None of them knew what it was like to grow up among immortals. When
they’d been young, their elders had politely croaked, opening up the good jobs,
the good home sites, providing at least a chance to excel in some aspect of
life. Giselle and I had met at Reed College, had tried to compete in classes
with students back for their seventh or twelfth or twentieth degrees, and had
joined the local chapter of the Suicidals together.

“Parents,” Giselle said, sighing. She had both a father and a mother, a fact I thought rather quaint.
“Fuck ’em.”

She leaned farther and
farther back, until the slightest breeze
would have committed her to the plunge. She gazed downward over her
shoulder. The anticipation stiffened her nipples until headlights formed along
the front of her pullover sweater.

“Oh, look,” she said. “The coyotes are back.”

I peered down. A small pack of the animals circled near the
base of the precipice. They yapped and whined, searching for pawholds in the
scree. Obviously they smelled the blood and intestines with which Jacques had
decorated the side of the mountain. My best guess said they wouldn’t be able to
reach the spot where most of the corpse rested.

“Poor puppies,” Giselle said. “Do you think it’s the same
bunch as last time?”

“Naturally,” I said. Though we hadn’t been here for a month
or so, the three of us visited often enough that the critters had figured out
the routine. Time before last I’d revived from a fall to see a young female and
her litter scampering off with one of my legs; my nanodocs had to steal
material from a nearby streambed to fashion the replacement. The park rangers
would’ve given us hell if they’d found out.

Thrusting with her
ankles, Giselle sailed clear of the cliff. Her trajectory, unlike that of
Jacques, guaranteed she wouldn’t snag on anything on the way down.

“Choke on thiiiiiisss,” she screamed at the coyotes as she
picked up speed.

She impacted quite
fabulously on a shelf of jagged rocks well
below Jacques’s partially repaired body. Even from my vantage point many
hundreds of feet above I could see her brains spray, anointing the granite with
a shade distinctly lighter than the crimson that smeared everything else.

Suicide Number 6,327 for her. She was one ahead of me, but
I’d soon fix that.

Yet I waited. It was
stupid. Giselle was right. If Monica had been going to call, she would
have. But shit, all my dear mother had to do was say a few words to the Link
and her virtual ass could sit itself down beside me, even for just a minute. Was that really too much to expect?

I stared at the high
peaks jutting up above timberline to the north, kicked a pebble over the
edge, and got ready to follow it.

“Call for you, Cheryl,” said the disembodied voice of the
Link. “It’s Ellen Branson.”

Just fucking great. Well, I could refuse it, but she’d only
keep bugging me. “Put her through,” I said.

Dr. Branson’s image materialized beside me. She sat in an
invisible chair, her hair unruffled by the mountain breeze. She looked around,
noticed the bodies below, and gave me that
professional frown of concern she so carefully cultivated.

“I talked to your mother
an hour ago,” she said. “Your stunt didn’t impress her.”

“It wasn’t supposed to impress her,” I said. “It was just
supposed to get her attention.”

“You’re lucky she doesn’t file a complaint with the Net.
They’ve just increased the community service time for murder and other
misdemeanor assault, you know.”

“I’m real worried about it,” I quipped.

“You’ll miss work. You’ll blow your commission and have to
petition for another career.”

“Another chance of a lifetime, thrown down the face of an Oregon mountain.” I wobbled and pretended to
lose my balance. I leaned out over the gorge for several seconds, smiled
demurely at Dr. Branson, and straightened up. “Why
should I worry, Doc? I’ve filed a suicide petition. Pretty soon I won’t
have to worry about anything. I’ll be checking out. Permanently.”

Dr. Branson massaged her forehead. “I’ve read your case
history, dear. You’ve filed suicide petitions before. You have to refile every
day for thirty days running before the Net will deactivate your docs. You
always run out of steam before the end.”

I kicked her in her
intangible knee. “So what? This time it’s real. I’m going all the way. You tell
that to my mother.”

She sighed. “But she knows it’s not true. You’re just
waiting for her to make a fuss over you like she’s always done. I think she’s
tired of that. I think she’s leaving it for you to work it out on your own.”

“I have worked it out. In five days, I get archived. All I
want is for her to acknowledge that.”

“Why should she? It’s not her problem.”

I blinked. Something
about the matter-of-fact way Dr. Branson delivered her statement awakened my
suspicions. I yelled so loudly it echoed across the gorge. “You’re
telling her to ignore me, aren’t you?”

Doc folded her palms together. She didn’t actually smile,
but I felt like a victim of the Cheshire Cat anyway. “Yes. I told your mother
not to speak to you until you’ve cancelled the suicide petition.”

“Keep your nose where it belongs,” I said. “You’re supposed
to be
my
therapist, not Monica’s. How
the hell did I get reassigned to you? What are you, a journeyman, or a fucking
apprentice?”

She didn’t answer that
last part. “I
am
your therapist,
Cheryl. Why does that scare you? Why do you have to try to run back to Mommie?”

“Cancel link,” I said. Dr. Branson’s image popped out just
as she opened her mouth to utter some more bullshit.

Mom couldn’t keep it up. I knew her better than that. A lot
better than any psychologist. I’d really thought the axe would do it, but if not — well, there were other ways.

I looked down to find Jacques, fully rebuilt, waving up at
me. I waved back.

“That was nothing!” I yelled. “Take a look at this!”

I launched into the air.
The bottom of the gorge raced up at
me. On the rocks below, the coyotes licked their chops.

The transit pod dropped me off over on the west bank of the Willamette, in one of the old
residential sections of town. I could tell just how long the
neighborhood had been there because the trees and walkways still threaded among
the houses in a vaguely gridlike pattern, following the courses of vanished
streets. My assignment took me to a roomy old two-story Post Quake Revisionist
set on a full third of an acre.

I asked the Net to play back the job request while I
inspected the house and its grounds. The resident must have had some job rating to have scored all this for himself. A programmer, maybe, or even a regional
policymaker. Talk about perks. There wasn’t even a co-occupant
registered.

I wanted to tear my hair
out. Here was I, a journeyman landscape architect for forty years,
getting ready for my master certification, and the only housing the Net would grant
me was an apartment. What I wouldn’t give for my own yard.

I double-checked the instructions. They didn’t make any sense to me. The yard’s present motif was the
ultimate in western Oregon
xeriscaping. The flora and microfauna were not much different from what might have inhabited the neighborhood
in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first centuries, or whenever this part
of Portland had been settled. Someone, maybe
even a maestro landscaper, had gone to a great deal of effort to create
an environment perfectly suited to the house, to the city, and to the climate.

And I was supposed to change it?

I was still staring at the existing design, brows furrowed,
when the occupant emerged. “Any problems?” he asked.

He was tall, blond, and muscular, the very epitome of
maleness, yet he walked with a mincing gait. Maybe “he” was really a woman — the
name on the job request was not gender-specific — but I didn’t think so. A
woman who goes to the trouble of adopting a male morph usually does not use it
to project female body language.

“Actually, yes,” I said. “This says you want lots of sun, but the foliage you’ve asked for is all
deep-shade stuff. Hydrangeas,
rhododendrons, azaleas. Your nanogardeners are going to have to compensate
every summer to keep those thriving.”

“Isn’t that what they’re there for?” he asked.

I opened my mouth to reply, but closed it. I could tell
already that I wasn’t going to win this one. “I’ll just get started,” I said
evenly.

“Of course,” he said, as if I’d had no choice but to comply.
He lingered. Oh, God. He was going to watch. I hated that.

His grounds control box lay half-hidden under a honeysuckle
vine by the side of the house. I opened up the programming port, identified
myself, and set to work.

I deconstituted the broad ash and walnut trees around the
property line first, set the soil parameters for higher acidity and moisture,
and assembled the new plants while the old ones dissolved. For ground cover I
selected a Geary Classic strain of baby’s tears — one of those with the aqua undertones
— from the maestro’s catalog of journeyman creations.

The resident pointed to a camellia bush. “I want that over
by the steps.”

“But—” I stopped short of explaining how that positioning
destroyed the front yard’s balance, but he seemed to guess what I would have
said.

“Look, if this is that hard for you, I can request a new
landscaper.”

“That won’t be necessary,” I said with false cheer.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ve got an errand to run. I’ll be back
later for the fine-tuning.”

A pod arrived for him and soon whisked him away. I was
grateful.

Mother Nature was going to hate me for this day’s work.

As I labored, the high
cloud cover withdrew, heralding a gorgeous afternoon. Time passed
quickly. That was a rare blessing. In the two days since Cheryl had come at me
with the axe, I’d spent every moment of it obsessed over her. It was good to be
able to focus on something else.

I was programming the sunscreens on a bed of primroses when
a pod descended into the cradle at the end
of the lane. I kept my back turned, not looking forward to another
encounter with the resident.

The footsteps behind me stopped. No voice. I looked.

Cheryl stood there, holding a handgun.

It was one of those ancient models with a silencer — I never
remember the brand names. She must have gone to a lot of trouble to get it. I
don’t know of many nanoplayers that permit creation of firearms. Perhaps she’d
located an actual antique. The only time she
ever showed real initiative was when she was up to no good. At least she
wasn’t going to flaunt the local noise abatement ordinance.