Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (19 page)

She shrugged. “You can always switch if you don’t like them.”

“Of course, but I was asking if
you
liked them.”

“Everyone’s taste is different.”

“You have no opinion, then?”

“It isn’t my opinion that matters.”

“It matters to me.”

“Why?” Something like anger flashed in her eyes. “Why should my opinion matter to you or to anyone?”

“Dear Georgiana,”
he answered. “I may be immortal, but I am still human.”

“I suppose that depends on the definition.”

“Of immortality?”

“Of what is human.” She moved at last toward the door, away from him. “And what is not.”

Beneficent went inside and, finding Courteous waiting for him in their private quarters in all her unblemished perfection, made love to her, his cogbox blaring at full volume, not so much
to drown out his own thoughts but to drown out Georgiana’s parting words,
Of what is human … and what is not.

Afterward, a quick shower and then a short tram ride to his job at the Research Center, the vast complex deep beneath the streets of New New York. Courteous’s father had arranged an appointment for him to the prestigious Relocation Committee, which was charged with the enormous task of
finding an Earth-like planet in the vastness of space to which the 3Fs could flee when the sun expired in a few billion years. The work was not terribly demanding, since
finitissium
technicians performed the bulk of it. Committee members, like Beneficent, mostly reviewed reports they couldn’t understand, wrote—or had written for them—memoranda that few ever bothered to read, or, more often than
not, played holographic games downloaded into their cogboxes. It was stultifyingly boring work, but serving on the Relocation Committee was considered a high honor and a stepping stone to the most powerful committee in the Republic, the Conduct Review Committee, Omniscient’s committee, the committee that held in its hand the power of life itself and the one upon which Beneficent desperately wanted
to sit.

Where he
would
be sitting, if not for one condition he had yet to meet. An unspoken but well-understood condition:

Four years into it, and the marriage had yet to produce offspring.

The bonds of holy matrimony were not terribly strong among the 3Fs. A marriage that lasted beyond four or five Transfers was uncommon; Beneficent was on his sixteenth marriage and Omniscient himself had
been married more than forty times. Marriage doesn’t last, the saying went, but children go on and on. Courteous’s child—
his
child—would be a legitimate addition to the clan, and as its father Beneficent would be forever a link in the Spool dynastic chain. His marriage might—probably would—end,
but never the children from it. It was the only reason he had pursued Courteous. And, as long as they
remained childless, he remained vulnerable.

He had broached the topic many times with her. It was the thing he talked about most. And it seemed the more he talked about it, the less she listened.

“I’m not ready,” she would say. Or “In another decade or two. I’m still young. What’s the rush?”

He dared not press too hard. She wasn’t very bright, but she had siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins
who were and who might, if they already hadn’t, become suspicious that he had married her with less than honorable intentions.

He had lunch that day with an old chum from his boarding school days, Candid Sheet, who was in his two hundred and seventeenth year of service on the Research and Development Committee. He hadn’t seen Candid in a while, so he had to reintroduce himself when they met in
the restaurant.

“Well, I was going to ask how the shark hunting went, but now I don’t need to,” Candid remarked drily. “You’re taller. I thought you never liked going over six-two.”

“Courteous is five-nine and she wanted something at least six inches taller.”

“I always stay within a half inch of my First Me,” Candid said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m cheap. I don’t want to change out my entire wardrobe
with every switch.”

Lunch was a light affair: lobsters, porterhouses, creamed asparagus and fries, baked Alaska, and, ordered on a whim, a plate of blueberry muffins, which arrived during their postlunch cigars.

“Muffins?” Candid asked.

“I positively crave them.” Beneficent took a big bite and was vaguely disappointed. They were not Georgiana’s muffins, not by a long shot. “Tell me what you
think about the teeth.”

“What teeth?”

“These teeth.”

“They’re blue.”

“That’s from the muffin. I was talking about the size. Do you think they’re too large?”

“Obviously someone thinks they are.”

“Well, I just switched. I doubt Omniscient will grant a waiver based on the size of my teeth.”

“He would if Courteous asked for one.”

“I have a feeling she might.”

“If she’s interested, I have
just the thing for oversize teeth. The prototype has just been approved for testing.”

“What is it?”

“Simply marvelous is what it is! We developed it in conjunction with the Marriage Integrity Committee in an effort to strengthen and prolong fidelity. Basically the program accesses your visual cortex and overlays a holographic screen image over the face of your lover—or anyone’s face, for that
matter … ”

“A holographic image of
what
?”

“Anyone you please! Say you’ve developed a little crush on a coworker or a friend or even some starlet in the televerse. It could be anyone. No need to risk divorce over a little crush. Simply execute the program and,
voilà
, the virtual face replaces your spouse’s. Or, in your case, Courteous could overlay your current look with your prior appearance,
and gone will be the offensive teeth.”

“That
does
sound marvelous,” Beneficent allowed.

“And the
most
marvelous part is only you can see it. Your partner need never know.”

“She might like that,” Beneficent said. “I do want her to be happy. We made love this morning, and I could tell the teeth bothered her, even though I was very careful to keep my mouth closed.”

“I’ll send her a copy of the
prototype.”

“No,” Beneficent said, popping the last muffin into his mouth. “She’ll think it’s a virus and just delete it. Forward it to my cogbox, and I’ll pass it along.”

“This is just the beginning, Beneficent,” his friend said, his eyes glowing at the prospect. “The second stage of human evolution is coming to an end. In another thousand years, we will be loosed from all corporal confinements.
The third and final stage: pure conscious, pure being. The work of your committee will be scrapped—there will be no need to find a new Earth, and we will flee the dying solar system in a vessel the size of a tin cup.”

Beneficent’s heart quickened with something very much like fear.

“What do you mean?”

“Our entire existence will be virtual, a holographic construct of our own design, in which
everything we desire will be ours to live and relive for all eternity. The end of pain, loss, heartbreak … and big teeth! The universe will expire, but we will not. We will lie forever in a paradise of our own making. We will be like true gods, then.”

“My! That sounds … ” Beneficent searched for the word. “Wonderful.”

He tried out Candid’s fidelity program that night. The
experience was disconcerting,
bordering on the bizarre. The image kept slipping every time Courteous moved her head and there was a slight delay in reaction time. For example, Courteous’s mouth would come open and, a millisecond later, the overlaid hologram of Georgiana’s would follow suit. It was as if he were making love to both women—and neither of them. He found himself whispering to his wife, “Hold still, hold
still.” For when she held still, the image of Georgiana’s face sprang to life in his visual cortex, the reproduction of it from his memory nearly perfect. His heart would leap exactly as if the woman in his arms actually
were
the woman of his dreams.
Hold still. Hold still.

“Well, how did it go?” Candid asked him when they met again for lunch a few days later.

“She noticed a few glitches.”

“For instance?”

Beneficent explained the shifting, the delay between the real expression and the hologram’s. Candid suggested the problem might not lie in the program, but in whatever image Courteous was accessing. There might not be enough data.

“She might not remember your old self well enough. The hologram is only as good as the recollection.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the better
she can remember a face, the better it will be holographically reproduced. Our studies have shown very poor results if one simply looks at a photograph or even a three-dimensional image. It’s the living face that we best remember, smiling, laughing, frowning, talking, eating, what have you.”

Beneficent said, “That might prove difficult.”

“Because that face was eaten by a shark?”

“Perhaps she
knows someone who has smaller, more attractive teeth. I’ll ask her.”

He did not, of course. Instead, he gave his persist a tiny holocorder and instructed him to follow Georgiana anywhere she went outside the company of her mistress. On errands, at night in her quarters (if he could manage it without getting caught), on her off-day. He demanded daily uploads into his cogbox of the footage. At
night, after Courteous had fallen asleep, he would creep out of bed and sit on the balcony, playing the footage over and over, trying to memorize every line, every detail of the girl’s face, freezing on the close-ups and lingering over them for hours on end. He pinpointed every freckle, every blemish, calculated the precise angle of her smile. One night he even counted her eyelashes.

Hold still,
hold still.

His results improved, but still were not perfect. He decided, if there was any hope of success, he must study Georgiana himself. It was very risky. He didn’t dare stalk the girl, but made excuses to be around her more. He took a week off from work and whisked her and Courteous off to Paris for a four-day shopping spree. Then three weeks skiing in the Alps. And, of course, every morning
he insisted Georgiana join him on the balcony for muffins and coffee.

Hold still, hold still!
And the image would briefly fall perfectly into line and he could imagine it was Georgiana in his arms, her body beneath his, her sweet breath on his face and his upon hers, which was utterly
perfect
, down to the last eyelash, until Courteous moved or spoke, shattering the illusion.

“What is it?” she
would demand. “Why do you seem so angry when we make love?”

“Not angry,” he answered. “Self-conscious. The teeth thing.”

“Really?” Courteous was becoming suspicious—who wouldn’t? The urgent whispering, over and over,
hold still, hold still
, and the
intense, disconcerting way he stared at her. She began turning off the light before their lovemaking, which ruined it for him; the program did not
work in the dark.

And, because it didn’t, something else didn’t work either.

“I am so
sorry
I ever mentioned it,” Courteous snapped after one particularly embarrassing session, when nothing they tried worked. “Those damned teeth. Tomorrow I’m speaking to Daddy about a waiver.”

“I don’t think it’s the teeth,” he confessed.

“Then what is it? What look do you want for me, Beneficent? I’ll Transfer
into it tomorrow.”

“No, no. It isn’t the look, darling. It’s … well, it’s been nearly five years now and there’s still no … Well, it starts to feel a little, how do I say it? Pointless.”

“
What
feels pointless?”

He laid his hand upon her bare stomach. “Just yesterday your father asked again. Just yesterday.”

“And? Did you tell him he was asking the wrong person? Whichever one I may be in, it’s
my body. I will decide when to burden it with child.”

“Perhaps that’s the problem,” he gently suggested. “It is not usually the kind of burden one takes on alone.”

“You have children already, Beneficent,” she reminded him. There were sixty-two of them from his prior marriages.

“But none with you, my love.”

“And without a child, our union is pointless?”

“No, merely … imperfect.”

He woke the
next morning from a terrible nightmare. It began well enough. He and Georgiana were making love and in the middle of it she reached up and pulled off her entire face,
revealing Courteous’s face beneath the mask.
I know
, Courteous said to him in the dream.
I
know.

He felt he had no choice. He must confess his love to Georgiana, for he had come at last to the conclusion that there was no substitute
for her, virtual or otherwise. Rising carefully so as not to disturb his wife, he tiptoed onto the balcony and waited for the dawn. He rehearsed what he would say when she arrived with the muffins. He would promise to be careful. He understood that, if they were caught, Georgiana could lose everything. Banishment to the ghetto, perhaps torture or worse. There was a law, rarely enforced but a
law nevertheless, that stated carnal relations between 3Fs and the
finitissium
were punishable by death—for the
finitissium
, of course. He wouldn’t put it past Courteous to push for the ultimate punishment.

“I can protect you,” he planned to say. “If she discovers us, I’ll find a place for you to hide, and I will visit you as often as I can. I cannot bear it any longer, Georgiana. I cannot bear
the thought of being without you.”

The sun rose. The golden light spread over the sprawling slum, kissed the dark surface of the river, crawled up the gleaming edifice atop which he waited.

He waited, and Georgiana never came.

At midmorning, he sprang up and staggered to the door in a panic. Something was wrong; he felt it to the bottom of his immortal being. The sum of four hundred lifetimes
told him something was terribly wrong.

And he was right.

The door to her quarters was locked. He knocked softly, though did not dare call out her name. He hurried to the kitchen, but only the cook was there.