Year's Best Scifi 8 Part 41

"OK. But if she's not genuine..."

My aide overheard money changing hands, and it had modeled the situation well enough to know how I'd wish, always, to respond. "Move now," it whispered in my ear. I complied without hesitation; 18 months before, I'd pavloved myself into swift obedience, with all the pain and nausea modern chemistry could induce. The aide couldn't puppet my limbs-I couldn't afford the elaborate surgery-but it overlaid movement cues on my vision, a system I'd adapted from off-the-shelf ch.o.r.eography software, and I strode out of the bushes, right up to the motorboat.

The customer was outraged. "What is this?"

I turned to Holder. "You want to f.u.c.k him first, Jake? I'll hold him down." There were things I didn't trust the aide to control; it set the boundaries, but it was better to let me improvise a little, and then treat my actions as one more part of the environment.

After a moment of stunned silence, Holder said icily, "I've never seen this p.r.i.c.k before in my life."

He'd been speechless for a little too long, though, to inspire any loyalty from a stranger; as he reached for his weapon, the customer backed away, then turned and fled.

Holder walked toward me slowly, gun outstretched. "What's your game? Are you after her? Is that it?" His implants were mapping my body-actively, since there was no need for stealth-but I'd tailed him for hours in Baton Rouge, and my aide knew him like an architectural plan. Over the starlit gray of hisform, it overlaid a schematic, flaying him down to brain, nerves, and implants. A swarm of blue fireflies flickered into life in his motor cortex, prefiguring a peculiar shrug of the shoulders with no obvious connection to his trigger finger; before they'd reached the intensity that would signal his implants to radio the gun, my aide said "Duck."

The shot was silent, but as I straightened up again I could smell the propellant. I gave up thinking and followed the dance steps. As Holder strode forward and swung the gun toward me, I turned sideways, grabbed his right hand, then punched him hard, repeatedly, in the implant on the side of his neck. He was a fetis.h.i.+st, so he'd chosen bulky packages, intentionally visible through the skin. They were not hard-edged, and they were not inflexible-he wasn't that m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic-but once you sufficiently compressed even the softest biocompatible foam, it might as well have been a lump of wood. While I hammered the wood into the muscles of his neck, I twisted his forearm upward. He dropped the gun; I put my foot on it and slid it back toward the bushes.

In ultrasound, I saw blood pooling around his implant. I paused while the pressure built up, then I hit him again and the swelling burst like a giant blister. He sagged to his knees, bellowing with pain. I took the knife from my back pocket and held it to his throat.

I made Holder take off his belt, and I used it to bind his hands behind his back. I led him to the motorboat, and when the two of us were on board, I suggested that he give it the necessary instructions.

He was sullen but cooperative. I didn't feel anything; part of me still insisted that the transaction I'd caught him in was a hoax, and that there'd be nothing on the barge that couldn't be found in Baton Rouge.

The barge was old, wooden, smelling of preservatives and unvanquished rot. There were dirty plastic panes in the cabin windows, but all I could see in them was a reflected sheen. As we crossed the deck, I kept Holder intimately close, hoping that if there was an armed security system it wouldn't risk putting the bullet through both of us.

At the cabin door, he said resignedly, "Don't treat her badly." My blood went cold, and I pressed my forearm to my mouth to stifle an involuntary sob.

I kicked open the door, and saw nothing but shadows. I called out "Lights!" and two responded, in the ceiling and by the bed. Helen was naked, chained by the wrists and ankles. She looked up and saw me, then began to emit a horri-fied keening noise.

I pressed the blade against Holder's throat. "Open those things!"

"The shackles?"

"Yes!"

"I can't. They're not smart; they're just welded shut."

"Where are your tools?"

He hesitated. "I've got some wrenches in the truck. All the rest is back in town."

I looked around the cabin, then I led him into a corner and told him to stand there, facing the wall. I knelt by the bed.

"Ssh. We'll get you out of here." Helen fell silent. I touched her cheek with the back of my hand; she didn't flinch, but she stared back at me, disbelieving. "We'll get you out." The timber bedposts were thicker than my arms, the links of the chains wide as my thumb. I wasn't going to snap any part of this with my bare hands.

Helen's expression changed: I was real, she was not hallucinating. She said dully, "I thought you'd given up on me. Woke one of the backups. Started again."

I said, "I'd never give up on you."

"Are you sure?" She searched my face. "Is this the edge of what's possible? Is this the worst it can get?"

I didn't have an answer to that.

I said, "You remember how to go numb, for a shedding?"

She gave me a faint, triumphant smile. "Absolutely." She'd had to endure imprisonment and humiliation, but she'd always had the power to cut herself off from her body's senses.

"Do you want to do it now? Leave all this behind." "Yes."

"You'll be safe soon. I promise you."

"I believe you." Her eyes rolled up.

I cut open her chest and took out the Qusp.

Francine and I had both carried spare bodies, and clothes, in the trunks of our cars. Adai were banned from domestic flights, so Helen and I drove along the interstate, up toward Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., where Francine would meet us. We could claim asylum at the Swiss emba.s.sy; Isabelle had already set the machinery in motion.

Helen was quiet at first, almost shy with me as if with a stranger, but on the second day, as we crossed from Alabama into Georgia, she began to open up. She told me a little of how she'd hitchhiked from state to state, finding casual jobs that paid e-cash and needed no social security number, let alone biometric ID. "Fruit picking was the best."

She'd made friends along the way, and confided her nature to those she thought she could trust. She still wasn't sure whether or not she'd been betrayed. Holder had found her in a transient's camp under a bridge, and someone must have told him exactly where to look, but it was always possible that she'd been recognized by a casual acquaintance who'd seen her face in the media years before. Francine and I had never publicized her disappearance, never put up flyers or web pages, out of fear that it would only make the danger worse.

On the third day, as we crossed the Carolinas, we drove in near silence again. The landscape was stunning, the fields strewn with flowers, and Helen seemed calm. Maybe this was what she needed the most: just safety, and peace.

As dusk approached, though, I felt I had to speak.

"There's something I've never told you," I said. "Some-thing that happened to me when I was young."

Helen smiled. "Don't tell me you ran away from the farm? Got tired of milking, and joined the circus?"

I shook my head. "I was never adventurous. It was just a little thing." I told her about the kitchen hand.

She pondered the story for a while. "And that's why you built the Qusp? That's why you made me?

In the end, it all comes down to that man in the alley?" She sounded more bewildered than angry.

I bowed my head. "I'm sorry."

"For what?" she demanded. "Are you sorry that I was ever born?"

"No, but-"

"You didn't put me on that boat. Holder did that."

I said, "I brought you into a world with people like him. What I made you, made you a target."

"And if I'd been flesh and blood?" she said. "Do you think there aren't people like him, for flesh and blood? Or do you honestly believe that if you'd had an organic child, there would have been no chance at all that she'd have run away?"

I started weeping. "I don't know. I'm just sorry I hurt you."

Helen said, "I don't blame you for what you did. And I understand it better now. You saw a spark of good in yourself, and you wanted to cup your hands around it, protect it, make it stronger. I understand that. I'm not that spark, but that doesn't matter. I know who I am, I know what my choices are, and I'm glad of that. I'm glad you gave me that." She reached over and squeezed my hand. "Do you think I'd feel better , here and now, just because some other version of me handled the same situations better?"

She smiled. "Knowing that other people are having a good time isn't much of a consolation to anyone."

I composed myself. The car beeped to bring my attention to a booking it had made in a motel a few kilometers ahead.

Helen said, "I've had time to think about a lot of things. Whatever the laws say, whatever the bigots say, all adai are part of the human race. And what I have is something almost every person who's ever lived thought they possessed. Human psychology, human culture, human morality, all evolved with theillusion that we lived in a single history. But we don't-so in the long run, something has to give. Call me old-fas.h.i.+oned, but I'd rather we tinker with our physical nature than abandon our whole ident.i.ties."

I was silent for a while. "So what are your plans, now?"

"I need an education."

"What do you want to study?"

"I'm not sure yet. A million different things. But in the long run, I know what I want to do."

"Yeah?" The car turned off the highway, heading for the motel.

"You made a start," she said, "but it's not enough. There are people in billions of other branches where the Qusp hasn't been invented yet-and the way things stand, there'll always be branches without it. What's the point in us having this thing, if we don't share it? All those people deserve to have the power to make their own choices."

"Travel between the branches isn't a simple problem," I explained gently. "That would be orders of magnitude harder than the Qusp."

Helen smiled, conceding this, but the corners of her mouth took on the stubborn set I recognized as the precursor to a thousand smaller victories.

She said, "Give me time, Dad. Give me time."

Geropods

ROBERT ONOPA.

Robert Onopa (departmental website http://maven.english. hawaii.edu/cw/pagel2.html) is a.s.sociate professor of creative writing and literary theory at the University of Hawaii. He has been a Fulbright lecturer in West Africa and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Fiction Writing. In 1980, he co-edited (with David G. Hartwell) TriQuarterly 49, the special science fiction issue of that distinguished literary quarterly, which included stories by Gene Wolfe, Thomas M.

Disch, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and a first story by Michael Swanwick. The issue also set a record at the time for generating subscription cancellations. His SF novel, The Pleasure Tube, was published in 1979, and he has since published a number of well-written stories in F&SF over the last twenty years.

"Geropods," from F&SF, is an amusing variant on the gestalt personality trope common in SF since the days of Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human. It is also an interesting contrast to Eleanor Arnason's story appearing earlier in this book. In the near future, a geropod is a legal ent.i.ty that const.i.tutes a full human being: "any group of infirm old people whose combined physical and mental capacities const.i.tutes the powers of a single, competent individual is collectively ent.i.tled to act as an individual." So old Kaplan, in need of a posse to right a wrong done to his daughter, forms a geropod.

Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be....

-Robert Browning

Like me, my two elderly companions had outlived their wives, but I was new to Arcadia. You know the sort of place I'm talking about, somewhere between a nursing home and a morgue: pastel walls with prints of rolling hills in "quality" antiqued frames, st.u.r.dy plastic furniture, a tiled, low-maintenance floor.

That afternoon, the digital holo in the corner of the sunroom was tuned to The Young and the Old, a trendy soap starring the ancient Macaulay Culkin, his already pale colors so washed out by the late afternoon glare he looked transparent. The air was laced with the odors of antiseptic and urine. Distant rattling and the indistinct conversations of the old echoed through the chip-array hearing aid I wore like a baseball cap.

I'd come out of a long stay in the hospital-my total deafness aside, a Parkinson's-like movementdisorder was getting the best of me. Pinkie and I hadn't had any kids. After my long career as a shrink, it looked like I'd moved into my final home.

"Bored?" Kaplan said from his wheelchair. "Are you kidding? I used to be a Hollywood agent.

Bored? It's so boring here it must be a new medical condition, right?"

"That evidence is accepted by this court," Judge Ortiz said from the couch, waving his red-and-white striped cane. The dot from its laser guidance flew around the room like a bug.

"I had depressives who literally put me to sleep," I recalled from my practice. "But, okay, maybe we do break new ground here. The question is, what's the alternative? We're disabled and technically incompetent. The law says we can't leave."

"Not quite right," Kaplan said. "Judge, tell him about Geropods."

"Geropods?"

The judge shushed me in a conspiratorial way as an orderly cruised in behind a trolley rattling with gla.s.s and plastic. I already knew him as Dennis, his hair the color of straw, his neck wider than his ears.

He pa.s.sed me my dopamine agonists in a little plastic cup and ticked his stylus on his palm chart.

"DIDN'T SEE YOU AT THE LUAU LAST NIGHT, DOC," Dennis shouted, as if my hat was out of order.

"That's because I lived in Hawaii during the Aussie war," I muttered, watching my hand shake and water splash out of the cup. "Luau Night here is pathetic. Hawaii without the beach."

"Exactly," Judge Ortiz agreed.

Kaplan swung his wheelchair around, just missing Dennis's s.h.i.+n. "Casino Night without the money,"

he chimed in. "Casting without the couch."

Dennis, who'd gone a bit pink, tucked the palm chart into the trolley. "Valentine's Day coming up,"

he said ingenuously. "Let's see. That would be s.e.x without the...."

Kaplan pumped his arms and nailed him with a quick reverse sweep of his chair.

"Re...strictions...," Dennis hissed when he could speak. "Going to talk to...Nurse Tucker...Re...strict...you all from...recreation...room...."

When we were alone again, Kaplan wheeled over to the judge. "All right, tell him about Geropods.

The Doc's been in the hospital."

"Okay," said Judge Ortiz. "Supreme Court decision last month. Civil rights case brought by the AARP. You're correct; the law says we can't leave as individuals-danger to ourselves, incompetent, all that c.r.a.p. But the Court ruled that any group of infirm old people whose combined physical and mental capacities const.i.tute the powers of a single, competent individual, is collectively ent.i.tled to act as an individual, as a single, legally defined human being."

"A Geropod," Kaplan chimed in. "Free as a blue jay."

"Justice Kirkpatrick's term," Ortiz said. "I'm blind, but Kaplan here can see. Kaplan's in a wheelchair, but you're ambulatory. As a matter of fact, you're the one who's going to move us around."