Periphery (12 page)

She turned at my approach, and in spite of knowing what I should expect, it hurt to see her look at me with that small, unrecognizing smile. I was a stranger to her. I who’d shared her bed for ten years. The reality of it knotted my fists before I made myself relax.

“Hey,” I said. “One of the hostesses mentioned you were in jump-and-jostle.”

“I was,” she said, and touched the prosthesis where it peeked out behind her ear. “My name’s Tisha Rho.”

“Prosper Larkin,” I said. “Junior. My friends call me Junie.” She nodded at that, neither accepting nor rejecting, and I guessed I’d gone too fast. “Are you working at all these days?”

She shook her head. “Not, not just at the moment. I had a runner, and I’m waiting to see if things resolve.” She paused. “And yourself?”

It was politeness, not real interest, but I answered anyway. “I had the same problem. I’ve been working the breaker beaches to build up a stake again.”

“Oh.” She relaxed a little, as though that explained my approach.

“Was it a bad one?” I asked, after a moment, and she frowned for a fleeting instant before she understood.

“Bad enough. Achronia. I’m still waiting to see what comes back.”

That was better than I’d heard, but I didn’t dare hope. “Do you dance?”

She paused, and I could guess what was going through her mind. She would consult the prosthesis, see if it had the files she needed, or if it could find the memories, then weigh that time-lagged assistance against the possibility that muscle memory could carry her through. I was holding my breath, and made myself stop, take one breath, two, then three, before she smiled.

“Why not? But I warn you, I may be slow.”

“Me, too,” I said, and hoped it wasn’t true.

There was a line dance forming, and we found places side by side in a middle row. Everybody knew the tune, and the dance, though the band did a nice job of making it seem fresh. I hooked my thumbs in my sash and let my feet follow the music, turning, dipping, Tisha Rho at my side for the first time in almost a year. She didn’t know me, yet, but it was still enough to make me giddy, make me throw in a flourish here and there, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Tisha doing the same. She smiled at me when the song ended, the wide, inviting smile I’d noticed first about her years before. I wanted to laugh and sob aloud all at the same time.

I didn’t do either, of course, and she turned from clapping the band to say, “That was fun. Thank you.”

“You’re a good dancer.”

There was a fleeting look of puzzlement on her face, as though I’d triggered something the prosthesis couldn’t handle, but then it vanished. “Thanks.”

“They’re playing a double-line,” I said. “Shall we?”

Her smile returned. She nodded, and we took places facing each other in the forming lines. A double-line isn’t that much different from a regular line dance, except that the lines of dancers stand face to face. We rested hands on hips, watching each other, then caught the beat and were off. For an instant it was all wrong, Tisha frowning as she tried to think, and the prosthesis gave her answers half a beat behind, and then she flung her head back and fixed her eyes on me, and we fell abruptly into the old pattern. She knew what I’d do almost before I did it; I saw her hands move, her hips shift, and knew how to answer, so we went spinning and turning down the length of the line like stars tumbling around a common point. I caught her hand, coming back, and we ducked and twirled under the others’ lifted arms and came at last, breathless and laughing, to lift our hands and let the next pair pass. Her fingers were cool on mine, and she held my hands a fraction of a second after the music ended. Her smile had vanished, and I could see the questions forming on her lips. I could see a hostess looking our way, too, visibly wondering if this was more than was permissible, breaking the sisterhood of the dance, and I took a half-step back.

“I need a breath of air,” I said, dry-mouthed.

“But—” She stopped abruptly, scowling, not at me but at something inward, something only she could see. I took another step away, and she said, “Wait.”

“I can’t.” Couldn’t, because if I stayed, I might take her in my arms, remind her physically, the only way she could remember me, and that would damn us both. I turned away, though my feet felt numb, head and heart disconnected from my body. There were curtained arches on the far side of the room that would lead, I knew, to a long hallway. I pushed through the nearest, smelling dust in the heavy cloth, and found, as I’d hoped, a set of doors that would open onto one of the Rainwater’s waterfall balconies. It was unlocked—that was a surprise—and I half expected an alarm to sound as I pushed open the door. There was no alarm, just the sudden rush of water, falling over the bubble that covered the narrow balcony. The water deflected the lights of the facade, turned the space odd, dim shades of blue and muted gold; it roared and clattered against the bubble, and the floor shivered beneath my feet. It was cold, too, the walls damp. Probably there had been heating, once, but not any more. I closed the door behind me, and leaned cautiously against stone, my hands folded at the small of my back to protect my dress. If she would follow, if she would only follow me. But there was no reason to think she would, and I shoved hope away. I had seen her, she hadn’t known me: what now?

Then behind me I heard the scrape of the door latch turning, and pushed myself away from the wall. It would be one of the hostesses, surely, come to send me away, but the door opened, and it was Tisha Rho.

She came onto the balcony quietly, closing the door behind her. “I knew you’d be here,” she said in a voice that was not smug or satisfied but only surprised. “That’s the first thing I’ve known in a year. Why?”

“We were lovers,” I said. The words came out harsh, too loud, from fear, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Ten years we were lovers, we had a ship together, working the sweet-not-yet, but then we wrecked….”

She didn’t say anything for a long moment, visibly turning the words over in her mind, asking the prosthesis and getting no answers that were any help at all. Then her dark eyes focused on me and she gave her old, half-rueful smile.

“You’d better show me,” she said, and took my face in her hands, and kissed me.

My lips parted for her. We swayed together, bodies meeting, shifting without thought or memory to fit as we had always done, and she made a small, soft sound; surprised content. Her hand slid to my breast, where it had always gone. I cupped her buttock, familiar, soft, and then she was straddling my thigh, her hand slipping from my breast to tug at my dress. Her fingers trailed across my belly, between my legs, and I came too soon, felt her shudder moments later to the same conclusion. We clung together a moment longer, letting our legs steady, and then Tisha Rho gently pushed herself away. I could feel the damp seeping through the back of my dress where my shoulders had been pressed against the wall.

“Well,” she said, and smiled. “I guess that settles that.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“Prosper Larkin Junior,” she said, tasting the words the same way she’d tasted my mouth. “Junior?”

“It’s a long story.”

“We’ll make the time.”

*

MS:
I first began thinking about diseases of time and the sweet-not-yet at ConFusion, a marvelous convention held just outside Detroit, where I was guest of honor in 2003. First, the science guest of honor, Jack Cohen, gave a talk in which he mentioned a concept called the “adjacent possible.” Although he was kind enough to send me the paper that explained it properly, what I understood, and what I worked from, was the notion that there is a sort of place outside regular space/time that contains things that haven’t yet happened, or could have happened but didn’t, and it seemed to me that there was a space drive somewhere in that. Then the artist guest of honor, Alan M. Clark, had some wonderful pieces in the art show, including a very strange piece in which faces seemed to grow from strange stalactites, painted in a palette of glowing blues that reminded me of Maxfield Parrish. At the time, he was soliciting writers for a collection to be based on paintings of his, and asked me to contribute something based on the painting I had been admiring. I agreed, and ended up writing a story called “The Sweet-Not-Yet,” which was published in
Imagination Fully Dilated: SF
. However, while I was working on that story, I considered a subplot involving someone’s parents editing out a disapproved-of lover, but quickly realized it needed a story of its own. This is that story.

For a few minutes after the shuttle crossed the terminator, the sun still lit its outspread wings. A moonlit world of sea and cloud curved below. Ahead, stars outlined a circle of blackness that was the spacecraft’s destination. Only one end of the vast, cylindrical satellite was visible from the shuttle’s approach angle. It made a round, empty patch on the sky, like a tunnel into nothing.

Monodrumco Prison: back on Earth they called it the Black Hole. From the shuttle it looked like one, but that was not the reason for the name. The reason was the event horizon that surrounded it. Things that went into Monodrumco were gone forever.

In the shuttle observation bubble a speaker cleared its throat. “All passengers return to your seats,” it said. Aleph glanced at it. There was only one passenger, herself. She didn’t know how the shuttle crew had guessed she was not entirely human, but they had. Throughout the flight they had treated her with impersonality, closely guarding their precious gift of individual being.

She knew why they did it, how vulnerable they were. But it was useless. Their pores betrayed their horror.

The misty panorama below produced no feeling in her at all. Aleph had only come up to the observation bubble to escape the thick soup of pheromones in the cockpit. During takeoff she had practically gagged on human tensions. Up here the air was slightly cleaner; her body was regaining equilibrium.

She put out her hand to touch the window. It was cold. Millimeters from her fingers was vacuum: clean, neutral, free of biology. Her mind and body felt transparent, uncontaminated. She watched a film condense on the windowpane around her fingers; when she took her hand away the moonlight shone through the negative print on the glass. Just as it shone through her.

Outside, the dark face of Monodrumco had almost swallowed the stars. In her present state Aleph was incapable of fear; the satellite prison ahead was only an abstraction, like the future. Like Aleph herself, it was all possibility, all potential, not limited by fixed shape or form.

“We are commencing docking maneuvers. Please return to your seat,” the speaker said. It sounded more peremptory this time. Expressionless, Aleph turned to obey.

*

The metal cavern of the shuttle bay roared and hissed with the fading echoes of the engines as Aleph left the shuttle, dressed in a dark flight suit and boots. In a crowd, she would have disappeared, utterly forgettable. It was hard to say if she was tall or short, heavy or lean, or even what sex she was. She was blank as a department-store mannequin.

A worker in a black uniform led her to an elevator, instructing her to stand on the right-hand side and hold the handrail, as she would be taking on the spin of the drum. The doors sliced off the noise, and they plunged outward from the cylinder’s zero-G core, into the heart of the prison.

When the doors opened again, the pseudo-gravity was near normal. Aleph stepped out, and the smell of Monodrumco met her: the smell of fear. She noted it without bias, as neutral information. The smell was not strong enough to affect her.

Her guide set off down empty gray corridors paved in a flexible material that absorbed all footsteps, all heartbeats. At last they turned into a long, tunnel-like passage with a single, unmarked door at the end. When they reached the door, Aleph’s guide plugged a pocket intercom into a wall receptacle. “Dr. Johanson, the anthroform is here,” she said. Presently there was a buzz and a click as the door unbolted. Aleph stepped through alone.

The room was absolutely black but for two spotlights: one on a steel-gray desk, the other on a chair facing it. Behind the desk, a middle-aged woman sat smoking a cigarette. Her wiry, gray hair was drawn so tightly back from her face that her skin seemed taut. She watched the visitor from marble-hard eyes, taking three sucks on her cigarette before she spoke.

“They told me you were the best,” she said.

Aleph did not answer.

“Come here. Turn around,” Dr. Johanson said. Her eyes tracked Aleph as she stepped into the light and turned around.

“Alright. Sit down,” Johanson said. Aleph obeyed. The chair was low, the spotlight hot on her face. The setting would have bothered a human.

“So what’s your name?” Johanson said.

“We do not have names,” Aleph answered. Her voice was clear and toneless. “We have designations. Mine is Aleph-34. You can call me Aleph.”

“I can, can I?” Johanson’s mouth twitched as if at something ludicrous. “Alright, Aleph. I don’t usually order my employees out of catalogs, you know. You seem to be the body type I wanted. Basic Caucaso-Mediterranean. Your hair was supposed to be dark, though.”

“The hair will change. You wanted me in a null state.”

It had been a strange request: a protean anthroform in an unindividuated state. Aleph’s agency had searched hard to find a protean willing to live in filtered isolation for the weeks necessary to distill away all traces of individuality. Aleph had finally accepted the contract, not so much for the money as to see if she could withdraw from the strong drug of human personality that had been in her system for years.

“You’re a last resort, you know,” Johanson said. “We have tried everything else.” She leaned back in her chair, a trail of smoke rising from the cigarette in her fingers. “Looking at you, it’s hard to believe this will work. You’re not like her at all. Too ordinary. Too inconspicuous.”

Clients were always skeptical at first, sometimes ashamed and defensive. Aleph had dealt with it a hundred times. “Have you ever seen a protean anthroform work?” she asked.