That was a man wearing the uniform of a Security colonel who spoke. Cedric jumped to obey. (Of course he also instantly realized what being left in charge of the wineshop implied.) He put the “Chiuso” sign on the bordello door for us and scampered back across the street.
Inside the building, the professor gave our surroundings a dismissive glance. I didn’t think they were that easy to dismiss. Over every door was a mural displaying what specialties were on offer inside, and inside the tiny rooms virt teams were doing them. I couldn’t take my eyes off them—not because I liked looking at dirty pictures so much as that sometimes they made me think of something Gerda and I had done, and never would do again.
The professor poked at things in the control panel by the door until all the virts fizzled and disappeared at once, then looked around for a place for us to sit. Since the brothel had had little use for chairs, the professor settled for patting one end of a stone slab—in the old days no doubt the workstation for one of the whores—and sat himself on the other.
“Bradley,” he said, “I’m worried about you.”
I thought I was for once ahead of him. “Because your tests showed you what was wrong with me?” I guessed.
He was shaking his head. “No, Bradley,” he said. “They didn’t. We don’t have a lot of experience with people who have gone through a deep penetration, and we’re even scantier on people who were given a Stans love shot. We do have some theoretical projections on what should be happening with you now.” He turned to look at me more closely. “Worst case,” he said, “you should have killed yourself by now. You haven’t. You haven’t even tried.”
“You don’t know that,” I told him.
“Oh, hell, Bradley, of course we do. Do you think I haven’t had you watched? I could tell you what the projections show, but it gets pretty technical,” he said.
“Go ahead,” I said, and it did. It wasn’t just full of high-tech psychobabble; it was simply all wrong. The important thing was not at all descriptive of the heartfelt, the almost holy love that I felt for my permanently beloved, if absent, sweetheart.
Well, I listened to all of it, or at least pretended to. I don’t think I fooled the professor. When he had finished he looked at me in silence for a moment, curled around on that unforgiving stone slab, and then he sighed.
I thought it was my turn to speak, so I said, “I understand what you’re telling me. So what do I do now? More tests?”
He made a face. “Of course you’re going to do more tests, but for our sake, not yours. All your test results’ll be in the literature for a hundred years. For you, all you have to do is go on living your life, avoiding stress as much as you can.”
I had been observing the lines of worry and weariness on his face. “You ought to do that yourself,” I told him. “You look like hell.”
That almost made him laugh, or at least produce a kind of raspy chuckle. “I’m a little tired,” he admitted. “Shao-pin’s been after me to take naps and that’s probably a good idea. Have you got any questions?”
At that point I swallowed hard. It was the first good chance I had had to unload a second question that was keeping me awake at night. “Actually I do,” I said. “It’s about Gerda. Why do you think she did it?”
The professor had been standing up to go, but now he sat back down again, looking at me with something like resentment. “I said questions,” he remarked. “I didn’t say hard ones. How do I answer that? When she was Brian Bossert she killed innocent bystanders and that didn’t seem to bother her. You could even say she was sanctimonious about it.”
“Not millions and millions,” I said.
He sighed. “Point taken. That does make a difference, doesn’t it?” He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I wasn’t going to tell you, at least not just yet, but one of the things we found in the farmhouse was stuff Gerda was working on. What she was doing seems to have been giving a lot of thought to that exact question. We found a lot of—I guess you’d call it research—on the subject. Of course,” he added, “it’s all classified. Security would classify the used paper in the toilets if they could figure a way to get it out of the bowl.”
I could feel my mouth opening to ask him a question—it was going to start with the word “please”—but he was shaking his head. “I was thinking when I was going over it that you’d really like to see this stuff. I don’t know, maybe you even have a right to it. Anyway if I can find a way to get some of it to you I will.” Then he was standing up again. “Enough for now. Let’s get out of this fake whorehouse.”
At the door he paused, regarding me. “But you know, Bradley, we need to do something about these gapers outside. They’re more stress on you, and it’s going to get worse.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Does it have to? Couldn’t I just, like, change my name and move away?”
Then he really did laugh. “Bradley,” he said, “you have no idea how much trouble people are going to go to to get a look at you.” He stared at me for a moment and then sort of half-laughed again. “Yes,” he said, “I think it would work for you if you’re willing. Did you ever hear of Lola Montez?”
I probed my available memory. Some European floozy who had been in some sort of scandal? “Not really,” I told him. “Why?”
He opened the door a crack and peered out. The gapers had, if anything, multiplied. “Let me think some more, Bradley. I’ll get back to you. Right now I’m going to have Barcowicz send someone to take over your duties here and take you to some more private place for a while.”
The more private place was the not-a-real-jail-cell that I had occupied before. It was handy for the new job Elfreda had found for me, and both it and the job site were well out of the public eye.
That new job was back at the live-action gladiatorial arena where I once had performed, briefly and poorly. Now my job was supervising some of the actual non-virt living combatants, which mostly meant seeing that they weren’t too drunk or stoned to perform. It didn’t take much of my time. Neither did the tests the professor kept ordering, so I had plenty of hours in each day for my principal occupation, not to say career, which was namely mourning for my lost love, Gerda Fleming. Because you must not think that, just because I haven’t mentioned it in every sentence, I wasn’t always, always doing that. I was. Painfully. Obsessively. Endlessly.
I was getting overinformed in some ways—the wall screens were full of stories about the cure for the Flu—and information-starved in others, because neither Shao-pin nor Elfreda could, or would, tell me what the professor meant by his mention of this Lola Montez. For a day or two after I started my new job I worked the wall screens to find out what he was talking about, but all they seemed to want to say about his mystery woman was that she had been the bedmate for some old archduke.
I gave it up. He could explain when he liked, but meanwhile I had another mystery going on. A pair of carpenters showed up one day and began sawing and hammering together a great big chair, followed by a couple of painters and upholsterers. When they had finished, what their creation looked most like was the kind of throne big stores used to put up every year for Santa Claus to sit on so kids could climb up onto his lap and whisper their yearnings into the microphone in his ear that delivered every word of what they wanted for Christmas to the shopping counselors in the next room.
When the professor did at last call on me, I had a new sorrow to add to all the sadnesses I already had. The professor was sick. And I knew what the blood tests had to have shown.
He wasn’t visually shedding pieces of anatomy—not yet. Nothing showed. But the reason for that was artifice, and it was denied by the pain in his expression and the fatigue in his eyes. When he said, “Good morning, Bradley. Please don’t tell me how well I look,” his voice gave it away. He rasped, and sometimes he squeaked. The Flu was eating away at his vocal cords.
I did what he told me. “I’m glad to see you, Colonel,” I said.
He didn’t respond to that. “Y
ou’ll want to know about your tests. Nothing has changed. You’ve given us a lot of data about what the effects of that damn deep penetration are on the chemistry of that stuff Bossert gave you, for which all my successors will be indebted to you, but it doesn’t help your case. But there are some things we need to talk about while I can still talk at all. One”—he raised a forefinger—“you’re not going to want to spend the rest of your life in hiding. I don’t suppose you want to let the plastic surgeons remodel you. So what I’m thinking is we can turn the problem into a solution. Do you remember I mentioned Lola Montez?”
“I do. The Irish girl—she wasn’t even Spanish—that shacked up with the archduke of Bavaria.”
“Good for you, Bradley. I respect a man who does his homework. But Montez’s story didn’t end there. Toward the end of her life for a while she’s supposed to have been penniless and alone, so she joined a circus.”
I began to feel that I was frowning—not in anger—not yet. But in puzzlement. I couldn’t see what he was driving at.
Then he explained. “What Montez’s circus act was was simply answering questions from the audience about what it was like to be the archduke’s mistress. All kinds of questions. What the archduke was like. Whether she really loved him. Did she regret the kind of life she had led? She let them ask whatever they wanted, but you wouldn’t have to—”
That’s when I began to see what he was driving at. “I—?”
“Yes, Bradley, you. Did you ever wonder what they were building in the arena? That’s where you will sit, and it will all be in good taste.”
That’s when I exploded. “Good taste?”
He smiled—I guess it was a smile. “I thought you’d take it that way, Bradley. But what else do you have? While I’m here, I can protect you a little, but I’m afraid that situation won’t last much longer. And then your case is likely to be turned over to Major Piranha.”
He didn’t dwell on what that implied. He didn’t have to. “For a while,” he went on, “I thought I might have a different solution. There was a reward for whoever found a cure for the Flu. I thought you had a good claim for it and money can buy you privacy. But Brussels said no, so you’ll have to earn the money yourself.”
He paused, squinting as though in pain. “Well, Bradley? What do you say?”
I said it was ridiculous and offensive, and I kept on talking in similar vein after that, but not for very long. I really had no choice, did I? The convincer was that he had mentioned that I could be turned over to Piranha Woman. “All right,” I said finally.
He said, sounding rueful, “I wish I had had a better solution.” Then he grimaced. “A couple of other things. Shao-pin is willing to take early retirement to be your manager. The lawyers are drawing up a contract for you to sign. She’ll protect you. She gets ten percent of whatever you earn, if that’s all right with you.”
It didn’t sound like enough to me. I said so.
The professor said, “Oh, I think it will be. Now one last thing. These are for you.”
He took a couple of coils out of his briefcase and set them in front of me. They all had printing on them, most of which I couldn’t read at that distance. But there was one word, large, bold type, the same on each coil, that I had no trouble at all reading. It said “SECRET.”
I looked at them but didn’t touch. The professor said impatiently, “Put them in your pocket. Don’t let anybody see them, not even Shao-pin. When you’ve seen all you want give them back to me.”
I did as ordered, but I couldn’t help saying, “Shao-pin would never rat you out.”
He looked annoyed. “What are you talking about? The point is we’re dealing with felonies here, Bradley. There’s no reason to expose her. Or Nola. Now, I’ve given you two coils. One is the research sort of thing Fleming was working on; you’ll have to make what you can out of it. Anything I said about it would just be a guess. The other’s different. The agency is trying to put together a record of what Fleming was doing, those years in the Stans. It’s nowhere near complete, and I can’t tell you how they got some of it, and that’s one of the reasons why that ‘secret’ classification has to be taken seriously. But I thought you should see what they’ve got.”
He had taken my breath away. “See Gerda? Living those years? What she was doing? Where she lived? Who—?”
He cut me off. “Yes, that sort of thing, though only to a sort of first approximation right now.”
I couldn’t help it. It was totally unexpected, like the finest Christmas present anyone had ever found under a tree. I jumped up and grabbed his hand. “Thank you! Thanks more than I can say—”
He pulled his hand away, looking almost apologetic, shaking his head. “Don’t say that, Bradley. After you’ve screened it, you may not be grateful. You may hate my guts.”
29
GERDA IN THE STANS
It turned out that he was right about that. For a while there I did hate his guts—I’ll come to why later on. But that wasn’t the first thing. If he gave me a ton of pain when he gave me that coil, which he did, it was also true that first the coil also gave me a ton of joy.
I couldn’t display the coils on the wall screen because I couldn’t know who might take a notion to turn on the spy cameras, so I had to play them into my opticle. When I slid the first coil into the reader and the image of my dearest beloved swam into shape before me, the joy came first. I would not have believed so much of that was possible. There she was, seated on a gold hassock very like the pink one from her sitting room that, I remembered, we had put to good use more than once in those happier days. And, looking just as I remembered her, she began to speak.
“The next place I want to show,” she was saying, “was called Rapa Nui by the islanders who lived there. What the captain of an English ship called it when he, by accident, came across it on Easter Sunday was Easter Island.” But Gerda had disappeared from my opticle, and I was now looking at a not very interesting island, with Gerda’s voice as her only presence. I tried to get her back, but for the next few minutes of the coil the pictures seemed to be of just the island and all there was of Gerda was the voice. I jumped the coil ahead at random and got Gerda’s voice again, though now accompanying a picture of a little park with some kind of a monument in it, surrounded by tacky-looking high-rise apartments. “—outside of Kiev,” her voice was saying. “It was called Babi Yar and—”
I ejected the coil, having figured out what I was doing wrong. I was looking at the wrong recording.
When I put the other coil in I could tell right away that it was definitely the one I expected, but that doesn’t mean it was anything I wanted to see. What it showed was a man lying on an operating table, naked except for a few mostly see-through bandages, his head shaved bald, one eye bandaged shut, much of his skin covered with a sort of coffee-colored cream. Oh, and his right arm was apparently immobile, and his front teeth were missing.
I knew him right away. Apart from those alterations it was Brian Bossert. So whatever that bit of coil was about it was probably something I would want to know about … but, I told myself, not just then. At that moment in time what I wanted to see, what I hungered for, was more of my beloved.
And, happily, there really was more, much, much more, though quite a lot of it gave me no pleasure at all.
The ones that did, though, gave me plenty. These were pictures of the love of my life, and as I looked at them I was pretty close to blubbering. All my hopeless love and unbearable sorrow was coming to the surface at once. If the professor had been present just then I would have put my arms around him and told him that, far from hating his guts, I would have kissed him if he let me. But that was before I had watched the coil all the way through.
What I was seeing at the beginning of the coil was puzzling, because I didn’t know what was going on, but it wasn’t upsetting. There was a voice, no doubt doing some explaining, but as it wasn’t in English it didn’t help. But at the top of each frame were characters in the Cyrillic a
lphabet. It took long sessions of puzzling over the disk for me to realize that that was a name—something, when transliterated, like Vassarian Ilyitch Nevirovski, followed by a number of initials.
Once I had that much many secrets were unlocked. Then I could look the name up in the reference books in the public library. When I did things became more clear, because V. I. Nevirovski was the name of a famous surgeon, known to be practicing in the Stans. And it seemed that Dr. Nevirovski was careful to record every stage of Gerda’s makeover because unmistakably that was what I was looking at.
I don’t intend to tell all about every stage of what was on the coil. There was too much of it, and it went on too long.
Oh, when I sat there that day the first time seeing all those pictures I did study every one of them in detail, don’t mistake me about that. But the refabrication of my true love into the shapes and textures I loved so much took a long, long time. There’s no reason anyone needs to hear about the whole thing. It’s often boring. A lot of the time Gerda herself was spared because she was in a chemically induced coma to spare her the pain and indignity—and the tedium—of what Dr. Nevirovski and his helpers were doing to her. I wasn’t. Old Vassarian Ilyitch was wedded to his photojournalism. His operating-room cameras recorded every slice and stitch that he and his gang perpetrated on her. So I got to see pretty much everything that happened to those fifty-odd kilos of raw meat that were the person I so hopelessly—yes, even then—adored. Watched every moment of it, I did, all two years’ worth of moments, no matter how much the subject came to look like the Sunday roast for some very large family dinner. Or, no, it didn’t look that good, but more like the leftovers of a large freshman anatomy class that poverty had compelled to share a single cadaver.