Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (23 page)

“If you don’t
like it, you can always choose another,” he said.

“Another what?”

“Another look. I don’t mind. It isn’t the look I love, it’s you, Georgiana. Why, you can even switch back if you like.”

“Switch back? Switch back into
what
?”

“All they need is a sample from your former self. A strand of hair from your comb, for example. They can grow a replacement.” His voice rose with his spirits. Of course!
Why hadn’t he thought of it before? “A replacement you can replace when it reaches a certain age so you will always be the Georgiana you always were!”

“And how will we explain
that
?” she demanded. “A 3F switching to a replica of her dead persist?”

“An expression of your love for her,” he offered rather weakly. “A tribute to her lifelong devotion. A way to bring her back from the grave, as it
were … ”

“They will think I’ve lost my mind—or that
Courteous
has lost her mind, I should say. I don’t think you understand the magnitude of your crimes, Beneficent. Not only did you murder her, but you have imprisoned me inside her body, inside her
life
, for now, for all
eternity
, I must live inside the fiction that I am her … Oh God, what have you done? Beneficent, what have you done?”

He
decided it was a terrible mistake, putting Georgiana into a look Courteous had worn, particularly a look she had worn on her wedding day. It was too much for both of them; it raised his dead wife bodily so she stood between them, casting a blemish over the perfection of their love. Upon their return to New New York, he approached Omniscient and tactfully asked for another waiver, explaining that his
favorite daughter had not liked her anniversary present as much as they both thought she would. He brought Georgiana back to the boutique to pick out a new look, something that would remind neither of them of Courteous. But that proved more difficult in practice than in theory, for some
part of every sample reminded Georgiana of her dead mistress. The nose. The shape of the ears. The curve of
the mouth. He grew frustrated, at one point blurting out, “Well, good God, there’s going to be
some
resemblance. We’re
human
after all—we can’t transfer you into a dog!” They left without making a choice.

That night, he was unable to perform in bed, and he fled onto the balcony, his heart burdened with a sense of profound and utter despair. She followed him without even pausing to throw a robe
over her faultless body and, when he saw her naked, he snarled at her to conceal herself. Her nakedness reminded him too much of Courteous, who had lacked all modesty.

“What shall I put on?” she shot back. “My old uniform? Would you like that, Beneficent? I’ll put it back on, though it’s much too small for me now, and I’ll go down to the kitchen and make you some fresh muffins—is that what would
please you?”

That was it, he thought. That
must
be it. He brought a few strands of her original hair to the Incubation Facility. While he waited for the new Georgiana to be grown, he spoke to her family and friends, or rather
Courteous’s
family and friends, explaining that the reason she had not chosen a new persist was that she could not move past the loss of her old one. She had loved Georgiana
like a sister. Well, just a little bit
more
than her actual sisters and half sisters, to be honest. Her psych-profile indicated it might help her through the mourning process if she switched into a replica of the poor girl for a few years. To his astonishment, everyone thought it was a marvelous idea, terribly touching and therapeutic at the same time. Somehow the news leaked, and stories about
the plan began to appear in cogboxes and in the televerse. It became a national sensation. Never had the two worlds of 3Fs and
finitissium
collided in such a way. He managed
to keep Georgiana out of the public eye, refusing all requests with the excuse that she was too overcome with grief to grant any interviews.

When the time came and she saw her new—that is, her
old
—body lying lifelessly upon
the table in the Transfer room, Georgiana was overcome. The prospect did not feel like a return to her. To her it was the pool. It was the delicious fruit. And when she awoke and looked at Beneficent with the same eyes that had adored him in the old cottage, he did not appear the same, as if
he
had switched into a new body and this face before her was the face of a stranger. That night she dissolved
into tears when he tried to make love to her. To her, it did not feel like lovemaking.

It felt like rape.

Beneficent assured her these feelings would pass. They had an eternity to grow used to each other again. Privately, he was not so sanguine. He, too, was deeply troubled. She was not, though he tried with every ounce of his ancient being to pretend otherwise, the same sweet persist he had
fallen in love with twenty years before. He grew a little desperate, and one night while they made love activated the old program Candid had given him, generating a holographic image in his visual cortex of her former face, identical in every regard to her current one, overlaying the present with the past, and the past jerked and shifted and refused to hold still, and afterward he had a horrible
dream of standing in a pool of crystal clear water, dying of thirst but unable to drink.

Her body grew old. She switched into a new one—that is, the
old
one—but the problem, for lack of a better word, persisted. She agreed, for both their sakes, to wear her old uniform when
they were alone in their quarters. She even cooked his muffins and brought them to him on the balcony at sunrise. It was
on one of these mornings, while she sat across from him silently watching the smoke from the cooking fires curl lazily into the temporal blue, that he looked over at her profile and recoiled in disgust. He set down his half-eaten muffin. It tasted like cardboard.

One day several thousand thereafter, he returned home from work to find her missing. No note. No message from her in his cogbox. He
dropped a message into hers; they had reservations that evening at the Top, and he wondered where she might have gone. The message went unanswered. He dropped several more into the family’s boxes:
Have you seen Courteous? We have a seven thirty at the Top.
No one had seen her all day. For a brief moment, he was filled with terror. Somehow they’d been found out. The CRC had taken her into custody.
Any moment they would appear at his door. Arrest. Conviction. Oblivion. He tore apart their quarters, looking for any clue that might tell him where she had gone. He even dug through the trash, and that’s where he found her psyche-card, shredded into a dozen pieces. While he stared with dumb horror at the shards of plastic in his hands, as if it had been waiting for the perfect time to drop, a
message appeared in his cogbox:

My love. By the time you receive this …

He silenced her voice, flung the useless remains of her memory onto the floor, and raced from the room, into the elevator, onto the launch platform, into the hovercraft, across the darkening landscape, high above the petty mortal strife, his thought a single refrain,
Hold still, hold still!
He did not know where she was,
but he knew where he must go.

He leapt out of the craft onto the wet grass of Omniscient’s garden and tore down the path, between the undulated heads of a thousand flowers, toward the old cottage, where a crowd had already gathered, including members of the press and agents of the CRC. Courteous’s mother and Genuine, her favorite sister, were there too, and when they saw him they pushed the crowd
aside, making a path for him to the front door that hung precariously upon a single hinge. He stepped inside, knowing what he would find.

There is no meaning, no beauty, no love …

He fell to his knees before her lifeless body and, forgetting himself in that moment, cried out, “Georgiana! Georgiana, do not leave me!”

A hush fell over the onlookers, the witnesses she had arranged for her suicide
to prove she was a Sibyl, to ensure her master file would be destroyed. Someone whispered, “He calls her Georgiana!” And another: “He’s mad with grief, poor thing.”

“Like
her,
” a third said. “Didn’t you hear? Courteous left a note: she simply could not go on without her darling Georgiana!”

“I
saved
you,” Beneficent wailed. “I gave you eternal life! Don’t go, Georgiana, don’t go!”

But it was
too late. She was gone. In truth, she had left him long ago. The moment he stole her mortality from her, his true love was gone.

Courteous had told him that time had no power or meaning anymore, and he prayed she was wrong, that with the passage of enough of it, the pain might fade, the memory of Georgiana would recede after a few thousand years into a sepia-toned, bittersweet, infinitesimally
small point in his endless life, a life that
expanded like the universe until objects dropped over the cosmic horizon, forever too far away to see. A few thousand years did pass, during which he remarried—several times—fathered hundreds of more children, even rose into the Conduct Review Committee, where he sat at the right hand of Courteous’s father. Georgiana’s death had bound him to the family
as no offspring ever could.

Then a million years. And another. And another. Then a billion and a billion more on top of that. The sun ballooned in the sky, turned an angry red. Temperatures soared. The oceans began to evaporate. Their probes located another planet in a distant galaxy, nearly identical to Earth and much younger, a new home that would last a good six or seven billion years. The
basecamp on one of Saturn’s moons was completed, their last refuge before the final launch into deep space.

As he settled into his seat for the ferry ride to Titan, next to his new wife—they had been married only six hundred years—Beneficent looked out the window for his last view of Earth, a hellish landscape, lifeless, infused in crimson light, not a leaf or flower or stubborn weed left anywhere
(the weeds were the last to die). He took his wife’s perfect hand and closed his perfect eyes and sorted through his cogbox until he found the message he had been saving since, it seemed to him, the dawn of time. A time when the world was green and wildflowers bloomed in summer gardens and eternal life had yet to mar the perfect mortal face of his beloved.
My love. By the time you receive this
…

He had started to delete it innumerable times over the millennia. It wasn’t the words so much that he dreaded to hear—he was sure he knew the gist of them—but the sound of her voice. He wasn’t sure he could bear hearing it again. He had kept the
message, though, because nothing else of her remained. Those seven billion billion billion atoms had diffused long ago across the vast surface of
a dying world.

It seemed fitting to hear her voice now, before that world was gone. So he played the message as the seat beneath him shuddered and he began to rise above the shattered Earth, her voice filling the darkness inside his head, the lightless abyss between his immortal ears:

My love. By the time you receive this I will be gone. I will have taken back the precious thing that was taken
from me. Do not grieve for me, beloved. And do not torture yourself with blame and guilt. Death is the yoke that frees me. From boredom and regret and envy, though the worst of these is envy. I am filled with it. I envy every living thing. I envy the trees. I envy the grass. I envy everything that grows or walks or crawls upon the face of the Earth. You would make me perfect by giving me eternal
life, but, beloved, don’t you understand it was your
love
that made me immortal? Your love that perfected me? And that it was the very fact that I would one day die that made me precious to you? Now that I am gone, your love will come back to you. It will, I pray, sustain you until the end of time, until the never-ending ends and the last star dies.

Beneficent dropped his reply into the void,
where it fell for an eternity, unheard:

Tell me it isn’t pointless. Tell me that it’s beautiful.

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE
…………………………………

A brilliant and eccentric (read “mad”) scientist, aided by a physically grotesque assistant, takes it into his head to play God with dire consequences.
Frankenstein
? No. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” a story published twenty years after Mary Shelley’s Gothic masterpiece.

“The Birth-Mark” is certainly not the most famous Hawthorne story, and it doesn’t
even come close to being one of the best. But it has always appealed to me, despite its painfully dated melodrama and—to our twenty-first-century sensibilities—naïve fear of progress (read “science”). But as a piece of speculative fiction, as an example of the nineteenth century’s fear and fascination with scientific progress, and as a tragic romance, I love it. The lead character, a stereotypical
mad scientist type, is blinded not by ambition or pride, like many tragic figures—and in the end it isn’t science or progress that dooms him—but love.

We look at scientists differently these days, but our fear of technology run amok lingers. It is, perhaps, even more pervasive now than in Hawthorne’s day. So I thought it might be fun to take the underlying themes of “The Birth-Mark” and place
them squarely in the middle of that fear, in a possible future where that fear might be fully realized. For we suspect—well, deep in our hearts we’re pretty damn sure—that it isn’t the scientists who are mad … it’s science itself.

M
ARGARET
S
TOHL

I. L’Incidente (The Accident)

If they had only found the body,
Theo thought,
so much of this unpleasantness could have been avoided.

Corpses, though unattractive, were a matter of indisputable fact. And facts, especially on the set of a decidedly B horror movie like
The Castle of Otranto
, were hard to come by—as hard to come by as truth, maybe, or your own trailer. Both
of which were the topics of the day, especially after all the trouble.