Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (48 page)

I took my grandmother out this evening. Mrs. Eng came in to look after Tso, and Grandma and I went out to dinner. I told her to order anything she liked, no matter how much it cost.

"You're a good girl, Li Hua," she said.

"Isn't it great? Tso's treatment, I mean." I couldn't stop talking about it.

"Yes," she said, but she still looked sad. I reached across the table and squeezed her hand.

"Don't worry," I told her.

"Oh, I suppose I'm pleased for Tso, if that's what he wants, but it just seems— I'm sorry, Li. I know I'm old-fashioned, but things were just different in the past, you see." Suddenly, I could see, she was angry. I knew that she wasn't mad at me, but I kept quiet anyway. It was as though she was talking to herself. "All those machines, Li Hua, all those wonderful machines. Then Genreng invents the bioweb, and computers aren't any use anymore. Machine obsolescence. Suddenly there's the bioweb, and how do you access it? You've got to be part of it, your whole body, through a neuroviral interface. And you can't do that unless you get dosed up with one of their synthetic viruses, and you've got to be young." She snorted. "You can't tell me that there's nothing wrong with that making yourself ill so that you can be part of the global communications network."

She fell silent and I stared at the table. I couldn't quite see what the problem was. I thought of Tso, in a month's time; lying in a cot in Harbin, sailing the viral pathways, able to reach out to everyone else who was infected. A disease is a system, I understood, and I thought it was a great mark of progress that we no longer needed to invent machines, computers, for the resources had been with us all along. Tso would be another link in the great chain of the neuroviral web, and it in turn would convey all the information he needed; the world as one great mind, unified.

"And then what happens?" my grandmother murmured. "He'll work for a few years, and then what? How do we know he's even got a future after that?"

"It's not like that, Grandma! The doctors told me. They just give you a cure, it's all perfectly straightforward."

"Maybe." She did not sound very sure. She reached out and patted my hand. "At least you'll still be here, Li Hua."

I didn't want to tell her, then, that she was wrong. Even with the low-grade viral equipment that Tang's given me in exchange for the ova, I should
be able to get a job in some webshop somewhere, and then I'll be able to reach out across the thousand miles to Harbin, and beyond, and my brother will be there. Grandma doesn't understand, you see, that you have to accommodate yourself to life, to Tao. It's like water, you have to go wherever it takes you, and you can't stop it for long. She always wanted to leave the body behind, soar out into the electronic sunlight, but you can't do that. You have to go the other way, into darkness, into the body itself. But I didn't want to argue with her, and this was something we could talk about later.

I reached out and poured more tea into her cup. I smiled at my grandmother and I could tell from the side effects that Tang's virus was working, for outside the window, the faces of the dead clustered in the shadows, beneath the unknown stars.

British writer Ian R. MacLeod was one of the hottest new writers of the nineties, and as the new century begins, his work continues to grow in power and deepen in maturity. MacLeod has published a slew of strong stories in
Interzone, Asimov's Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Amazing,
and
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
among other markets. Several of these stories made the cut for one or another of the various "Best of the Year" anthologies; in 1990, in fact, he appeared in
three
different Best of the Year anthologies with three different stories, certainly a rare distinction. His first novel
The Great Wheel
was published to critical acclaim in 1997, followed by a major collection of his short work,
Voyages By Starlight.
In 1999, he won the World Fantasy Award with his brilliant novella "The Summer Isles," and followed it up in 2000 by winning another World Fantasy Award for his novelette "The Chop Girl." MacLeod lives with his wife and young daughter in the West Midlands of England, and is at work on several new novels.

Here, in a stylish and compelling look at a decadent posthuman world that
ought
to be Utopia, he proves once again that Art— like Passion— is in the eye of the beholder.

*

Now that he couldn't afford to buy enough reality, Gustav had no option but to paint what he saw in his dreams. With no sketch pad to bring back, no palette or cursor, his head rolling up from the pillow and his mouth dry and his jaw aching from the booze he'd drunk the evening before— which was the cheapest means he'd yet found of getting to sleep— he was left with just that one chance, and a few trailing wisps of something that might once have been beautiful, before he had to face the void of the day.

It hadn't started like this, but he could see by now that this was how it had probably ended. Representational art had had its heyday, and for a while he'd been feted like the bright new talent he'd once been sure he was. And big lumpy actuality that you could smell and taste and get under your fingernails would probably come back into style again— long after it had ceased to matter to him.

So that was it. Load upon load of self-pity falling down upon him this morning from the damp-stained ceiling. What
had
he been dreaming? Something— surely something. Otherwise, being here and being Gustav wouldn't come as this big a jolt. He should've got more used to it than this by now… Gustav scratched himself, and discovered that he also had an erection, which was another sign— hadn't he read once, somewhere? —that you'd been dreaming dreams of the old-fashioned kind, unsimulated, unaided. A sign, anyway, of a kind of biological optimism. The hope that there might just be a hope.

Arthritic, Cro-Magnon, he wandered out from his bed. Knobbled legs, knobbled veins, knobbled toes. He still missed the habit of fiddling with the controls of his window in the pockmarked far wall, changing the perspectives and the light in the dim hope that he might stumble across something better. The sun and the moon were blazing down over Paris from their respective quadrants, pouring like mercury through the nanosmog. He pressed his hand to the glass, feeling the watery wheeze of the crack that now snaked across it. Five stories up in these scrawny empty tenements, and a long, long way down. He laid his forehead against its coolness as the sour thought that he might try to paint this scene speeded through him. He'd finished at least twenty paintings of foreal Paris; all reality engines and cabled ruins in gray, black, and white. Probably done, old Vincent had loved his cadmiums and chromes! And never sold one single fucking painting in his entire life.

"What— what I told you was true," Elanore said, stumbling slightly over these little words, sounding almost un-Elanore-like for a moment; nearly uneasy. "I mean, about Marcel in Venice and Francine across the sky. And, yes, we
did
talk about a reunion. But you know how these things are. Time's precious, and, at the end of the day it's been so long that these things really do take a lot of nerve. So it didn't come off. It was just a few promises that no one really imagined they'd keep. But I thought— well, I thought that it would be nice to see you anyway. At least one more time."

"So all of this is just for me.
Jesus
, Elanore, I knew you were rich, but…"

"Don't be like that, Gustav. I'm not trying to impress you or depress you or whatever. It was just the way it came out."

He poured more of the wine, wondering as he did so exactly what trick it was that allowed them to share it.

"So, you're still painting?"

"Yep."

"I haven't seen much of your work about."

"I do it for private clients," Gustav said. "Mostly."

He glared at Elanore, daring her to challenge his statement. Of course, if he really
was
painting and selling, he'd have some credit. And if he had
credit
, he wouldn't be living in that dreadful tenement she'd tracked him down to. He'd have paid for all the necessary treatments to stop himself becoming the frail old man he so nearly was.
I can help, you know
, Gustav could hear Elanore saying because he'd heard her say it so many times before.
I don't need all this wealth. So let me give you just a little help. Give me that chance
… But what she actually
said
was even worse.

"Are you recording yourself, Gus?" Elanore asked. "Do you have a librarian?"

Now, he thought, now
is
the time to walk out. Pull this whole thing down and go back into the street— the foreal street. And forget.

"Did you know," he said instead, "that the word reality once actually
meant
foreal— not the projections and the simulations, but proper actuality. But then along came
virtual
reality, and of course, when the
next
generation of products was developed, the illusion was so much better that you could walk right into it instead of having to put on goggles and a suit. So they had to
think of an improved phrase, a super-word for the purposes of marketing. And someone must have said,
Why don't we just call it reality
?"

"You don't have to be hurtful, Gus. There's no rule written down that says we can't get on."

"I thought that that was exactly the problem. It's in my head, and it was probably there in yours before you died. Now it's…" He'd have said more. But he was suddenly, stupidly, near to tears.

"What exactly
are
you doing these days, Gus?" she asked as he cleared his throat and pretended it was the wine that he'd choked on. "What are you painting at the moment?"

"I'm working on a series," he was surprised to hear himself saying. "It's a sort of a journey-piece. A sequence of paintings which begin here in Paris and then…" He swallowed. "…Bright, dark colors…" A nerve began to leap beside his eye. Something seemed to touch him, but was too faint to be heard or felt or seen.

"Sounds good, Gus," Elanore said, leaning toward him across the table. And Elanore smelled of Elanore, the way she always did. Her pale skin was freckled from the sunlight of whatever warm and virtual place she was living. Across her cheeks and her upper lip, threaded gold, lay the down that he'd brushed so many times with the tips of his fingers. "I can tell from that look in your eyes that you're into a really good phase…"

After that, things went better. They shared a second bottle of
vin ordinaire
. They made a little mountain of the butts of her Disc Bleu in the ashtray. This ghost— she really
was
like Elanore. Gustav didn't even object to her taking his hand across the table. There was a kind of abandon in all of this— new ideas mixed with old memories. And he understood more clearly now what van Gogh had meant about this café being a place where you could ruin yourself, or go mad, or commit a crime.

The few other diners faded. The virtual waiters, their aprons a single assured gray-white stroke of the palette knife, started to tip the chairs against the tables. The aromas of the Left Bank's ever-unreliable sewers began to override those of cigarettes and people and horse dung and wine. At least, Gustav thought,
that
was still foreal…

"I suppose quite a lot of the others have died by now," Gustav said. "All that facile gang you seem to so fondly remember."

"People still change, you know. Just because we've passed on, doesn't mean we can't
change
."

By now, he was in a mellow enough mood just to nod at that. And how have
you
changed, Elanore? he wondered. After so long, what flicker of the electrons made you decide to come to me now?

"You're obviously doing well."

"I am…" She nodded, as if the idea surprised her. "I mean, I didn't expect—"

"—And you look—"

"—And
you
, Gus, what I said about you being—"

"—That project of mine—"

"—I know, I—"

They stopped and gazed at each other. Then they both smiled, and the moment seemed to hold, warm and frozen, as if from a scene within a painting. It was almost…

"Well…" Elanore broke the illusion first as she began to fumble in the small sequined purse she had on her lap. Eventually, she produced a handkerchief and blew delicately on her nose. Gustav tried not to grind his teeth— although this was
exactly
the kind of affectation he detested about ghosts. He guessed, anyway, from the changed look on her face, that she knew what he was thinking. "I suppose that's it, then, isn't it, Gus? We've met— we've spent the evening together without arguing. Almost like old times."

"Nothing will ever be like old times."

"No…" Her eyes glinted, and he thought for a moment that she was going to become angry— goaded at last into something like the Elanore of old. But she just smiled. "Nothing ever will be like old times. That's the problem, isn't it? Nothing ever was, or ever will be…"

Elanore clipped her purse shut again. Elanore stood up. Gustav saw her hesitate as she considered bending down to kiss him farewell, then decide that he would just regard that as another affront, another slap in the face.

Elanore turned and walked away from Gustav, fading into the chiaroscuro swirls of lamplight and gray.

*

Elanore, as if Gustav needed reminding, had been alive when he'd first met her. In fact, he'd never known anyone who was
more
so. Of course, the age difference between them was always huge— she'd already been past a hundred by then, and he was barely forty— but they'd agreed on that first day that they met, and on many days after, that there was a corner in time around which the old eventually turned to rejoin the young.

In another age, and although she always laughingly denied it, Gustav always suspected that Elanore would have had her sagging breasts implanted with silicone, the wrinkles stretched back from her face, her heart replaced by a throbbing steel simulacrum. But she was lucky enough to exist at a time when effective anti-aging treatments were finally available. As a post-centenarian, wise and rich and moderately, pleasantly, famous, Elanore was probably more fresh and beautiful than she'd been at any other era in her life. Gustav had met her at a party beside a Russian lake— guests wandering amid dunes of snow. Foreal had been a fashionable option then; although for Gustav, the grounds of this pillared ice-crystalled palace that Catherine the Great's Scottish favorite Charles Cameron had built seemed far too gorgeous to be entirely true. But it
was
true— foreal, actual, concrete, genuine, unvirtual— and such knowledge was what had driven him then. That, and the huge impossibility of ever really managing to convey any of it as a painter. That, and the absolute certainty that he would
try
.