Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales

  “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.

  “Have you seen Georgiana this morning?” he asked.

  No, the cook told him, he had not.

  Back to his own quarters, where he found his marital bed empty. He looked up and saw Courteous sitting in the chair he had vacated, wrapped in a robe of flawless white, her long, bare legs, equally flawless, stretched out in front of her. He steadied himself with a few deep breaths before joining her.

  “Good morning, my darling.” With a kiss upon her perfect cheek.

  “Beneficent. I thought you had gone to work.”

  “I’m not feeling very well today.”

  “Did you have a bad dream?”

  “Why … no. Not that I can remember, why?”

  “I thought I heard you cry out in your sleep. It’s been happening quite a bit lately.”

  “Has it?”

  She was sitting in the sun, he in the shade. She leaned her head toward him.

  “Be a dear and rub my head, will you? I have a terrible headache.”

  He scooted his chair behind hers and gently rubbed her temples.

  “Hmmmm. That feels delicious.”

  “Neither one of us has been feeling well lately,” he said. “It’s the doldrums. We can’t afford to get into a rut, darling.”

  He was referring to the last terminal human malady: boredom. Extreme cases could be deadly, permanently deadly, since they might lead to suicide, the ultimate taboo in the age of immortality. Sibyls, they were called, after the myth. Sometimes the word was used as a verb, as in, “Did you hear about Gracious? She sibylled yesterday.”

  “Let’s get away,” he continued. “Have you ever been to Antarctica? It’s the perfect time of year to visit.”

  “We just came back from the Alps,” she reminded him.

  “Antarctica is nothing like the Alps.” He traced his fingers down her neck and began to massage her shoulders.

  “I meant we just took a trip.”

  “I know it’s rather primitive by your
standards, but we’ll spare no expense. We’ll bring along the entire staff, your stylist included, that insufferable Carl or Kenneth or whatever his name is … ”

  “Kent, darling.”

  “Yes, Kent, even him, and Georgiana, of course … ” He took a deep breath and asked, as if he’d just noticed, “but where is Georgiana this morning? I don’t believe I’ve seen her.”

  “Georgiana? Oh, I dismissed her.”

  His fingers froze, but for an instant, and he said casually, “Oh, really? Dismissed her?” His mind was racing; his fingers were not. They slowly and lovingly caressed her perfect neck. “That’s a surprise. I thought her family had been with you for two hundred years or more.”

  Courteous shrugged. Shrugged! A spasm went through his hands. He closed his eyes. Hold still!

  “What … when precisely did you dismiss her?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. I thought I told you.”

  “No. Or if you did, I’ve forgotten it. What was the cause?”

  “I caught her stealing.”

  “Stealing?” His throat was tightening up. Breathe. Breathe!

  “Or conspiring to steal. I confronted her, and she confessed. So I dismissed her.”

  “I see. Well. I didn’t know her very well—hardly at all, actually—but thievery didn’t strike me as part of her character.”

  “Oh, at your age you should know that the smallest sins are the hardest to hide.”

  “But now you’re left without a persist. You should have told me before you sacked her. I could have procured another for you.”

  “Why do I need a persist, darling, when I have you?” she purred, rubbing her palms over the backs of his hands. “You will be my persist from now on, and wait on me hand and foot!”

  “Nothing would bring me greater joy, my love,” he said, and kissed her forehead. “Nothing at all.”

  He waited until the afternoon to escape, telling her he had a meeting down at the Research Center. On board the tram, he dropped a message tagged urgent into his persist’s cogbox.

  Meet me at my office. B. P.

  “Georgiana is gone,” Beneficent informed him the moment his personal assistant arrived. “I want her found.”

  “Have you dropped a message into her cogbox?” his persist asked.

  “I don’t have her address. And I can’t ask Courteous for it, and do not ask me why I cannot ask. She is missing.”

  “Courteous?”

  “Georgiana! Courteous dismissed her. Now, I know she has family in the East Quarter … ”

  “The East Quarter?” The persist’s face bled of all color. The East Quarter was a notoriously dangerous section of the ghetto. Even Omniscient’s private police, the dreaded CRC, the Captains of the Review Committee, refused to venture into the East Quarter after sunset.

  “She shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Beneficent said. “A persist from the house of Spool hasn’t been dismissed in any of their memories. It will be the talk of the ghetto. Follow the whispers to her front door.”

  “And once I find it? What would you have me do?”

  “Bring her back to me, of course!”

  “Bring her … ?”

  “Well, not literally to me. That wouldn’t do. Bring her back here. Yes. Find her and bring her here and once she’s here drop me a message. I’ll find some excuse to come down. If not, stay here with her till morning. Don’t let her out of your sight.”

  “And if she refuses?”

  “What do you mean? What if she prefers squalor and disease and starvation to the lap of luxury? If she even bothers to ask, tell her you were sent by Candid Sheet, who is looking for a new persist for his wife.”

  “And what if I can’t find her?”

  “You are not to return until you do.”

  The persist was aghast. “I can’t stay in the East Quarter past sunset! It would be suicide!”

  “Here.” Beneficent handed him a device slightly smaller than the palm of his hand. “If you find yourself in a tight spot, press the button.”

  “What happens when I press the button?”

  “Anyone within a hundred feet will be neutralized.”

  “What will keep me from being neutralized?”

  “The device itself. It insulates whoever’s holding it. Make certain you don’t use it anywhere near Georgiana!”

  He pushed the man toward the door. The day was waning. “Hurry! And you better put on some sort of disguise. You’re easy prey with that uniform on. Report to me immediately when you find her. Go!”

  Beneficent had lived many lifetimes, but none seemed longer than the rest of that day. Or that night. For the sun drew low in the sky and the shadow of the tower stretched across the river and fell over the East Quarter, and the trash fires glowed a hellish red in the darkening day. Dinner with Courteous was a particular agony. To be forced to sit through seven courses, and afterward to join her for her favorite programs inside the televerse, insipid melodramas about the insipid lives of the insipid 3Fs in which nothing really mattered because there was no real risk, even the risk of a broken heart. And then, the worst of all, lying with her in the utter dark, a blind man groping in a lightless void, where her lightest caress was scorchingly painful. After midnight now, and still no word. What has happened? Where could his persist be? Where could she be? Dropping an urgent message into his missing persist’s cogbox: Where are you? Reply at once! And hearing nothing, nothing at all. Tuning into the breaking-news stream, because surely, if his persist had used the device, word of it would leak out, even from the no-man’s-land of the East Quarter. But there was nothing, nothing. And then, with less than an hour till dawn, actually considering going into the ghetto himself. Not to find his missing persist, damn him, but to find her.

  He slept not at all that night—missing the auto-backup to his psyche-card, but that hardly mattered to him—and he rose with the sun. His eyes were red and swollen, as if he had cried his way through the night. He ordered up some coffee and waited for it on the balcony, watching the sunrise. Another message to his persist, and more silence in reply.

  The door slid open behind him. He smelled coffee.

  And muffins.

  “Georgiana … ?” He wondered if he might be hallucinating. How could she be standing there in that same drab uniform, holding a plate of muffins, as if nothing had happened? How was it possible?

  She placed the tray on the table, set down his cup. When she leaned over, he could smell her perfume, and his head swam.

  “Beneficent?” she asked. “Is something the matter?”

  “I thought … Courteous said … Georgiana, where have you been?”

  “In the kitchen, making muffins. Oh, you mean yesterday? Mrs. Page gave me the day off. I was visiting my grandmother at the Retired Persists’ Home.”

  “You were visiting … ?”

  “Didn’t Mrs. Page tell you?”

  “Of course. I must have forgotten.” He made an attempt to pick up a muffin. His hand was shaking violently.

  “Is everything all right, Beneficent?”

  “Well, yes. Everything is fine, Georgiana. Everything is … ”

  He could not go on. With any of it. He hurled the crushed pastry over the railing and cried out, “I thought I had lost you! Never do that to me again, do you understand? I cannot bear it, Georgiana. I cannot bear it!”

  Before she could escape, he threw his arms around her and pressed his face against the rough material of her uniform. Startled, she pushed against his shoulders, trying to free herself, but he had locked his hands behind her back.

  “Mr. Page! Beneficent! What are you doing?”

  “I love you. I have loved you for a very long time, and I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve never loved anyone, not in six hundred years, Georgiana, and never will again, not in six billion or six trillion. If I lost you, I would destroy my psyche-card and throw myself off this balcony—I would pull a sibyl, I swear I would! It would be better to die than live a single day wi
thout you.”

  Pressing his face against her uniform, staining it with his tears.

  “You cannot love me, Mr. Page.”

  “Exactly the problem!”

  “No. I mean, you cannot. I am a finitissium.”

  “I don’t care if you’re a turtle! It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “It matters to me.”

  He gasped. Her words weakened his grip and she broke free. Holding up her hands, as if to say Stop! No farther!

  “You’re in love with someone else,” he said. It was not a question.

  “There is no one else.”

  “Then why does it … ?”

  She shook her head. “There is no one else,” she said. “Only you.”

  She fell into his arms, her face shining in the first light of the finite sun, and he told her he knew her down to the last eyelash and she smiled as if she understood.

  What had Courteous said? The smallest of sins are the hardest to hide. No wonder he had missed it.

  The body of his persist was recovered in a steaming trench of raw sewage three days later. His throat had been slashed from ear to ear. The loss raised several uncomfortable questions in the minds of the CRC investigators, questions they shared with Beneficent. Why was his persist in the East Quarter after dark? How had he come into the possession of a neural neutralizer? Beneficent confessed ignorance on both matters, except to say his neutralizer was missing and he had long suspected his persist was addicted to metacoke, a deadly habit that Beneficent nevertheless tolerated because it greatly increased the man’s energy and efficiency. He supposed the poor fellow had gone to the Quarter to fuel his habit. Beyond that, he knew as much as they did. The file was closed that day. Beneficent was, after all, the husband of Omniscient Spool’s favorite daughter.

  Beneficent met Georgiana that afternoon in a little cottage at the western edge of the Spool compound. Years ago, the cottage had been a guesthouse, then converted into a gardener’s shed, then finally abandoned. They made love on a pile of old blankets in an atmosphere of moist earth and old fertilizer.