The Universe of Things Page 4

  In the mid-twenty-first century CE, a new drug treatment for memory impairment went into clinical trials. It was meant to strengthen associative memory: in fact it gave patients bursts of recall so intense they were stopped in their tracks, lost in ecstatic re-experience of some childhood joy. Bootlegged Rem quickly reached the streets and became fashionable. This was in the midst of World War Three: reckless times. It didn’t worry the users that the heart-stopping delight of a Rem high was, in a few cases, literally heart-stopping. But the damage mounted. Prodromal schizophrenic symptoms, untreatable depression, vegetative coma… The clinical trials were dropped. All recreationals were legal by then, at least throughout Europe and most of the USA, but Rem’s reputation made it a poor business prospect. It vanished. The dosage given to the clinical subjects had been too low for the effect to emerge. When those who had taken it habitually realized what was happening to them, they kept quiet. So no one knew, except the immortals themselves. They were wise to keep quiet. In those days and for a long time afterwards, the Population Pulse was a terrifying force. Longevity research had been abandoned: it was just too sensitive an issue. Rem itself had not been intended to prolong life, only to ameliorate dementia and confusion. But the Pulse is over, and other things have changed. It’s not just the Lagrange colonies and the moon, and the grueling labor of love that is transforming Mars. Crucially, in a few months’ time, the first colony ships will leave Deep Space (our way station on the brink of the heliopause) and travel, at speeds believed logically impossible when Tamsin was young, to a remote-surveyed, uninhabited, Earth-type planet. This year, 2108 (2688 by the CE count), we are free, at last. The treatments came too late for me. I may live to be six hundred, but I will grow old. For younger generations there are no known limits.

  But rem immortality is still different.

  We chatted for two hours, sitting under an apple tree, the murmur of the Fleet (which runs by her garden) in the background. She talked about her son, so long dead, and her husband, killed in a climbing accident last century (immortality is not proof against blunt instruments, lynch mobs, or equipment failure). She tried to explain how it feels to have your entire life available to you, so you can be there, again and again, in every moment. How you start with the good moments, then gather courage, until you have taken possession of the whole, and your entire existence becomes coherent, like laser light in a perfect optical computer.

  “But why are you leaving?” I insisted. “You have so much to teach us —”

  “It isn’t a decision,” she said. “It was a process of conversion.”

  She stood up, smiling, and walked away from me. The air around her shimmered.

  Next moment, I was alone.

  September 1999

  Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland

  (With apologies to E.R. Eddison)

  The earth walls of the caravanserai rose strangely from the empty plain. She let the black stallion slow his pace. The silence of deep dusk had a taste, like a rich dark fruit; the air was keen. In the distance mountains etched a jagged margin against an indigo sky, snow-streaks glinting in the glimmer of the dawning stars. She had never been here before, in life. But as she led her horse through the gap in the high earthen banks she knew what she would see. The camping-booths around the walls; the beaten ground stained black by the ashes of countless cooking fires; the wattle-fenced enclosure where travelers’ riding beasts mingled indiscriminately with their host’s goats and chickens…; the tumbledown gallery, where sheaves of russet plains-grass sprouted from empty window-spaces. Everything she looked on had the luminous intensity of a place often-visited in dreams.

  She was a tall woman, dressed for riding in a kilt and harness of supple leather over brief, close-fitting linen: a costume that left her sheeny, muscular limbs bare and outlined the taut, proud curves of breast and haunches. Her red hair was bound in a braid as thick as a man’s wrist. Her sword was slung on her back, the great brazen hilt standing above her shoulder. Other guests were gathered by an open-air kitchen, in the orange-red of firelight and the smoke of roasting meat. She returned their stares coolly: she was accustomed to attracting attention. But she didn’t like what she saw. The host of the caravanserai came scuttling from the group by the fire. His manner was fawning. But his eyes measured, with a thief’s sly expertise, the worth of the sword she bore and the quality of Lemiak’s harness. Sonja tossed him a few coins, and declined to join the company.

  She had counted fifteen of them. They were poorly dressed and heavily armed. They were all friends together, and their animals — both terror-birds and horses — were too good for any honest travelers’ purposes. Sonja had been told that this caravanserai was a safe halt. She judged that this was no longer true. She considered riding out again onto the plain. But wolves and wild terror-birds roamed at night between here and the mountains, at the end of winter. And there were worse dangers: ghosts and demons. Sonja was neither credulous nor superstitious. But in this country no wayfarer willingly spent the black hours alone.

  She unharnessed Lemiak and rubbed him down — taking sensual pleasure in the handling of his powerful limbs, in the heat of his glossy hide, and the vigor of his great body. There was firewood ready, stacked in the roofless booth. Shouldering a cloth sling for corn and a hank of rope, she went to fetch her own fodder. The corralled beasts shifted in a mass to watch her. The great flightless birds, with their pitiless raptors’ eyes, were especially attentive. She felt an equally rapacious attention from the company by the caravanserai kitchen, which amused her. The robbers — as she was sure they were — had all the luck. For her, there wasn’t one of the fifteen who rated a second glance.

  A man appeared, from the darkness under the ruined gallery. He was tall. The rippled muscle of his chest, left bare by an unlaced leather jerkin, shone red-brown. His black hair fell in glossy curls to his wide shoulders. He met her gaze and smiled, white teeth appearing in the darkness of his beard. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings…look on my works, ye mighty, and despair… Do you know those lines?” He pointed to a lump of shapeless stone, one of several that lay about. It bore traces of carving, almost effaced by time. “There was a city here once, with marketplaces, fine buildings, throngs of proud people. Now they are dust, and only the caravanserai remains.”

  He stood before her, one tanned and sinewy hand resting lightly on the hilt of a dagger in his belt. Like Sonja, he carried his broadsword on his back. Sonja was tall. He topped her by a head; yet there was nothing brutish in his size. His brow was wide and serene, his eyes were vivid blue, his lips full and imperious, yet delicately modeled, in the rich nest of hair. Somewhere between eyes and lips there lurked a spirit of mockery, as if he found some secret amusement in the perfection of his own beauty and strength.

  The man and the woman measured each other.

  “You are a scholar,” she said.

  “Of some sort. And a traveler from an antique land, where the cities are still standing. It seems we are the only strangers here,” he added, with a slight jerk of the chin towards the convivial company. “We might be well advised to become friends for the night.”

  Sonja never wasted words. She considered his offer, and nodded.

  They made a fire in the booth Sonja had chosen. Lemiak and the scholar’s terror-bird, left loose in the back of the shelter, did not seem averse to each other’s company. The woman and the man ate spiced sausage, skewered and broiled over the red embers, with bread and dried fruit. They drank water, each keeping to their own water-skin. They spoke little, after that first exchange, except to discuss briefly the tactics of their defense, should defense be necessary.

  The attack came around midnight. At the first stir of covert movement, Sonja leapt up sword in hand. She grasped a brand from the dying fire. The man who had been crawling on his hands and knees toward her, bent on sly murder of a sleeping victim, scrabbled to his feet. “Defend yourself,” yelled Sonja, who despised to strike an unarmed foe. Instantly he was rushin
g at her with a heavy sword. A great two-handed stroke would have cleft her to the waist. She parried the blow and caught him between neck and shoulder, almost severing the head from his body. The beasts plunged and screamed at the rush of blood-scent. The scholar was grappling with another attacker, choking out the man’s life with his bare hands…and the booth was full of bodies: their enemies rushing in on every side.

  Sonja felt no fear. Stroke followed stroke, in a luxury of blood and effort and fire-shot darkness…until the attack was over, as suddenly as it had begun.

  The brigands had vanished.

  “We killed five,” breathed the scholar, “by my count. Three to you, two to me.”

  She kicked together the remains of their fire and crouched to blow the embers to a blaze. By that light they found five corpses, dragged them and flung them into the open square. The scholar had a cut on his upper arm that was bleeding freely. Sonja was bruised and battered, but otherwise unhurt. The worst loss was their wood stack, which had been trampled and blood-fouled. They would not be able to keep a watchfire burning.

  “Perhaps they won’t try again,” said the warrior woman. “What can we have that’s worth more than five lives?”

  He laughed shortly. “I hope you’re right.”

  “We’ll take turns to watch.”

  Standing breathless, every sense alert, they smiled at each other in new-forged comradeship. There was no second attack. At dawn Sonja, rousing from a light doze, sat up and pushed back the heavy masses of her red hair.

  “You are very beautiful,” said the man, gazing at her.

  “So are you,” she answered.

  The caravanserai was deserted, except for the dead. The brigands’ riding animals were gone. The inn-keeper and his family had vanished into some bolt-hole in the ruins.

  “I am heading for the mountains,” he said, as they packed up their gear. “For the pass into Zimiamvia.”

  “I too.”

  “Then our way lies together.”

  He was wearing the same leather jerkin, over knee-length loose breeches of heavy violet silk. Sonja looked at the strips of linen that bound the wound on his upper arm. “When did you tie up that cut?”

  “You dressed it for me, for which I thank you.”

  “When did I do that?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, some time.”

  Sonja mounted Lemiak, a little frown between her brows. They rode together until dusk. She was not talkative, and the man soon accepted her silence. But when night fell, and they camped without a fire on the houseless plain, then, as the demons stalked, they were glad of each other’s company. Next dawn, the mountains seemed as distant as ever. Again, they met no living creature all day, spoke little to each other and made the same comfortless camp. There was no moon. The stars were almost bright enough to cast shadow; the cold was intense. Sleep was impossible, but they were not tempted to ride on. Few travelers attempt the passage over the high plains to Zimiamvia. Of those few most turn back, defeated. Some wander among the ruins forever, tearing at their own flesh. Those who survive are the ones who do not defy the terrors of darkness. They crouched shoulder to shoulder, each wrapped in a single blanket, to endure. Evil emanations of the death-steeped plain rose from the soil and bred phantoms. The sweat of fear was cold as ice-melt on Sonja’s cheeks. Horrors made of nothingness prowled and muttered in her mind.

  “How long,” she whispered.” How long do we have to bear this?”

  The man’s shoulder lifted against hers. “Until we get well, I suppose.”

  The warrior woman turned to face him, green eyes flashing in appalled outrage —

  “Sonja” discussed her chosen companion’s felony with the therapist. Dr. Hamilton — he wanted the group members to call him Jim, but “Sonja” found this impossible — monitored everything that went on in the virtual environment; but he never appeared there. They only met him in the one-to-one consultations that virtual-therapy buffs called the meat sessions.

  “He’s not supposed to do that,” she protested, from the foam couch in the doctor’s office. He was sitting beside her, his notebook on his knee. “He damaged my experience.”

  Dr. Hamilton nodded. “Okay. Let’s take a step back. Leave aside the risk of disease or pregnancy, because we can leave those bogeys aside, forever if you like. Would you agree that sex is essentially an innocent and playful social behavior? Something you’d offer to or take from a friend, in an ideal world, as easily as food or drink?”

  “Sonja” recalled certain dreams, meat dreams, not the computer-assisted kind. She blushed. But the man was a doctor after all. “That’s what I do feel,” she agreed. “That’s why I’m here. I want to get back to the pure pleasure, to get rid of the baggage.”

  “The sexual experience offered in therapy is readily available on the nets. You know that. You could find an agency that would vet your partners for you. You chose to join this group because you need to feel that you’re taking medicine, so you don’t have to feel ashamed. And because you need feel that you’re interacting with people who, like yourself, perceive sex as a problem.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “You and another group member went off into your own private world. That’s good. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Let me tell you, it doesn’t always. The software gives you access to a vast multisensual library, all the sexual fantasy ever committed to media. But you and your partner, or partners, have to customize the information and use it to create and maintain what we call the consensual perceptual plenum. Success in holding a shared dreamland together is a knack. It depends on something in the neural make-up that no one has yet fully analyzed. Some have it, some don’t. You two are really in sync.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m complaining about —”

  “You think he’s damaging the pocket universe you two built up. But he isn’t, not from his character’s point of view. It’s part Lessingham’s thing, to be conscious that he’s in a fantasy world.”

  She started, accusingly. “I don’t want to know his name.”

  “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t tell you. ‘Lessingham’ is the name of his virtuality persona. I’m surprised you don’t recognize it. He’s a character from a series of classic fantasy novels by E.R. Eddison.… In Eddison’s glorious cosmos ‘Lessingham’ is a splendidly endowed English gentleman, who visits fantastic realms of ultra-masculine adventure as a lucid dreamer: though an actor in the drama, he is partly conscious of another existence, while the characters around him are more or less explicitly puppets of the dream…”

  He sounded as if he was quoting from a reference book. He probably was: reading from an autocue that had popped up in lenses of those doctorish horn rims. She knew that the old-fashioned trappings were there to reassure her. She rather despised them; but it was like the virtuality itself. The buttons were pushed, the mechanism responded. She was reassured.

  Of course she knew the Eddison stories. She recalled “Lessingham” perfectly: the tall, strong, handsome, cultured millionaire jock, who has magic journeys to another world, where he is a tall, strong handsome cultured jock in Elizabethan costume, with a big sword. The whole thing was an absolutely typical male power-fantasy, she thought, without rancor. Fantasy means never having to say you’re sorry. The women in those books, she remembered, were drenched in sex, but they had no part in the action. They stayed at home being princesses, occasionally allowing the millionaire jocks to get them into bed. She could understand why “Lessingham” would be interested in “Sonja”…for a change.

  “You think he goosed you, psychically. What do you expect? You can’t dress the way ‘Sonja’ dresses and hope to be treated like the Queen of the May.”

  Dr. Hamilton was only doing his job. He was supposed to be provocative, so they could react against him. That was his excuse, anyway… On the contrary, she thought. “Sonja” dresses the way she does because she can dress any way she likes. “Sonja” doesn’t have to hope for respect, and she doesn’t have t
o demand it. She just gets it. “It’s dominance display,” she said, enjoying the theft of his jargon. “Females do that too, you know. The way ‘Sonja’ dresses is not an invitation. It’s a warning. Or a challenge, to anyone who can measure up.”

  He laughed, but he sounded irritated. “Frankly, I’m amazed that you two work together. I’d have expected ‘Lessingham’ to go for an ultrafeminine —”

  “I am… ‘Sonja’ is ultrafeminine. Isn’t a tigress feminine?”

  “Well, okay. But I guess you’ve found out his little weakness. He likes to be a teeny bit in control, even when he’s letting his hair down in dreamland.”

  She remembered the secret mockery lurking in those blue eyes. “That’s the problem. That’s exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want either of us to be in control.”

  “I can’t interfere with his persona. So, it’s up to you. Do you want to carry on?”

  “Something works,” she muttered. She was unwilling to admit that there’d been no one else, in the text-interface phase of the group, that she found remotely attractive. It was “Lessingham,” or drop out and start again. “I just want him to stop spoiling things.”

  “You can’t expect your masturbation fantasies to mesh completely. This is about getting beyond solitary sex. Go with it: where’s the harm? One day you’ll want to face a sexual partner in the real, and then you’ll be well. Meanwhile, you could be passing ‘Lessingham’ in reception — he comes to his meat-sessions around your time — and not know it. That’s safety, and you never have to breach it. You two have proved that you can sustain an imaginary world together: it’s almost like being in love. I could argue that lucid-dreaming, being in the fantasy world but not of it, is the next big step. Think about that.”