Amnesia Moon (19 page)

“True enough,” said Harriman. “Our emphasis should be on the
opportunity
—”

Cale continued, talking over Harriman. “Vance passed through here just after the change. You should meet him. He'll give you another point of view.”

How can I meet your friend Vance, Everett wanted to say to Cale, when I can't meet you?

“—only reasonable for us to want to protect our vision,” Harriman was saying. “Isn't it, Everett?”

“Get away from them so we can talk,” said Cale.

“Look at him,” said Dawn suddenly.

“Look at who?” said Fault, panicked, clearly thinking she meant Cale.

“Everett, that's who. He's exhausted, Harry. You and Ilford have to let him get his bearings, for Christ's sake. You're just
bullying
him with all this nonsense.”

“Dawn's right,” said Fault quickly. “I'm feeling a little wasted myself.” He sagged back in his seat on the couch, obviously relishing the prospect of an end.

“Don't say yes or no tonight,” said Harriman. His expression was challenging, one eyebrow raised above the black frame of his glasses. “Just say that you'll sleep on it, so to speak.”

“Okay,” said Everett.

“It is getting late,” said Ilford. “Let's have a last drink.” He spread his hands. “Brandy?” He looked a little desperate, as if in another minute he might try to drink the varnish off the furniture.

 

Everett went outside, trailed by Dawn and the version or projection of Cale.

At the very doorstep they were cradled in fog. It clung to the eucalyptus branches and blocked out the night sky. Dawn lit a cigarette.

“I went to Gwen's room today,” said Cale, hurrying, as if he was going to fade soon.

“Gwen is the woman in the dream, isn't she?” asked Dawn, blowing out a gust of smoke that floated up into the fog. The question was directed at Everett. Now that it didn't matter, she acted as though Cale didn't exist.

“It's none of your fucking business, Dawn,” said Cale, surprisingly loud.

She raised her eyebrows and stepped away from them, but not so far that she couldn't eavesdrop. Or would Cale's words sound in her mind at any distance, until the dose of him wore off?

“You saw her?” asked Everett.

Cale nodded. “I spoke with her.”

“You did?”

“She wanted to know when you'd come back.”

It tore at him, unexpectedly sharp, to think of her there, asking for him. He wanted to object, to argue that she couldn't possibly experience any gap between his visits, that she didn't exist if he wasn't there himself, hadn't called her up.

But to want that was to believe that she wasn't real, and that Cale wasn't real. That the two of them were only memories, waking dreams, and nothing more of them was left now. And he couldn't believe that, couldn't let himself.

Even as Everett thought this, Cale began to fade.

 

 

 

 

The next morning he left at daybreak and walked down the hill without seeing anyone from the house. By the time he reached the Submission, the streets were coming to life. He walked the broad avenue, savoring the anonymity, the indifferent, glancing contact with the people he passed. His dreams hadn't preceded him here.

The Mexican shopkeepers began the day by dragging their milk-crate seats out to the curbs, the peddlers by laying out their wares: loose floppies, broken solar laptops, sealed bottles of pills, sets of stolen keys for houses in Ate Hashberry and the Callisto, each tagged with a hand-lettered address. Everett walked up to a vendor's stand for a quesadilla, then realized he had no money with him, that he didn't know what passed for money here anyway.

He saw the televangelist, the one he'd seen with Fault when they first came back to the city. It was drawing in chalk on the pavement, its huge body bent over double, its tattered smock hiked up to expose a cluster of wiring and fuses. Two Mexican children stood a short distance away, shyly japing. The robot ignored them. But when Everett moved closer, curious to see the drawing, the televangelist sensed the attention and turned its telescreen face. Everett knew it wasn't the video image of the televangelist's eyes that actually watched him, but he couldn't help gazing into them.

The drawing was of a crucifix, the style borrowed from some medieval icon, duplicated with uncanny accuracy by the robot's hand.

“Do you even recognize this form?” said the televangelist in a surprisingly small voice, the blustery features crestfallen now. “You, man, who have fallen so far.”

“I recognize it,” said Everett.

“There was once a time when Christ was your king,” said the robot. It stood up over the drawing and faced Everett. Its smock was smeared with chalk dust. “I know this to be true. I remember.”

“Maybe you're only programmed to remember,” said Everett.

The televangelist shook its head, doubly, the robot moving the telescreen from side to side while the video image of the old preacher pursed his lips and closed his eyes and shook his head sorrowfully. “I remember,” it said. “The world has fallen away from Him. We have failed in our work. There are few now who believe, fewer still who come to praise Him.”

“We?”

“Others like myself. We were sent oul alone and separate into the world. But it is better, in the darkness, not to be alone. It is better to be found than lost.”

The televangelist might remember the world before, Everett thought. It wouldn't be bent by dreams. It might have preserved a kind of objectivity, might be able to provide an account of what happened—if there was some way to weed through the biases of its programming. A tall order.

A beggar came and stood beside them with his hand stuck out, his feet scuffing the chalk crucifix on the pavement. The robot turned, the sun flashing off its screen, and handed the man a pamphlet from a pocket on its tunic. Everett spread his hands and shrugged, and the beggar wandered off.

The televangelist straightened and looked into the distance, as though listening to some faraway call. A bedflat soared overhead, shadowing the avenue. Everett had a stray memory of the time when discarded antigrav mattresses first worked their way out of rubbish dumps and began floating above the city. This one had red spray-paint markings on the underside, but it drifted out of view before he could make out the words.

“What changed?” asked Everett.

“Everything,” said the televangelist, and the face on the screen seemed to wince in pain, as though the body underneath had suffered a blow. “Men began to hear voices. Here and there you see a man drawn upward, but then the voices come again and pull him down.”

Everett understood that it meant the dreaming.

“Do you hear the church bells?” said the televangelist.

Everett listened. There were no bells. “Church?”

“It is Sunday, friend. Will you come?”

Sunday. Somewhere, back in Vacaville, Edie had moved again. But had he been here that long? The count of days was different here. Or else the televangelist was wrong.

Everett followed the robot from Submission Boulevard to a large white church a few blocks away. The neighboring houses were quiet, some with boarded windows, some open to the light and perhaps inhabited, all dominated by the oversize cast-iron gate of the church. There was a pile of charred rubble in the center of the church parking lot, blackened wire armatures in a pile of cinder. Everett thought of ceremonial burnings, crosses, wicker men. The televangelist unlocked the gate of the church with a key kept on a chain around its neck, and they went inside.

“Shouldn't it be unlocked?” said Everett. “What if someone wanted to come in?”

The televangelist turned, its huge body tilting ominously over him. “The altar here has suffered, as you will see. Someday men may wish to return to His house. Until then we must keep it in good order.”

They stepped through the inner doors and into the central room. The pews were filled with dozens of robots, all weatherbeaten and dented like the first. On their screens were a crazy variety of faces: corpulent black Baptists, stern Orthodox rabbis, sober, guilty Catholic priests. Others had malfunctioning screens that showed only static. All the robots wore ragged tunics, many of them jeweled with a wild assortment of religious trinkets—crosses, stars of David, Christian fish, tiny jade Buddhas, Masonic eyes. One, whose screen showed an FBI warning against illegal reproduction of copyrighted computer-graphic formats, wore an ungainly crown of thorns. At the sound of Everett's footsteps they turned and stared. The room was silent.

“I found a pilgrim,” said the first.

Everett thought suddenly of Cale and Gwen. Stepping into this church was like taking the injection from Fault and entering a hidden space, a preserve of—

What?

Simulations?

One of the robots came forward. Its face was that of a missionary lost for years in the jungle, bearded and drawn and impossibly grave. Everett pictured a programmer working to craft an image that would resonate, inspire religious awe, and settling on this one. “Welcome, sir. We're honored, though we have little to offer a seeker anymore—perhaps Ralfrew has told you.”

“He didn't say,” said Everett.

“Ralfrew is courageous to go out among the fallen,” said the wizened prophet. Its screen blurred momentarily with static. “The rest of us rarely do. Since anointing us with holy zeal, God has cast us adrift.”

“But you stay in the city.”

It looked down and said, “We stay in the church.” Then it turned away. The rest of the televangelists went back to their prayer, heads bowed, ferroplastic fingers grating as they folded them together. Everett could hear one robot murmuring to itself, a small sound that echoed in the vault of the church ceiling.

Everett went through the lobby and out of the church, baffled, his eyes stinging. Tears. The televangelist named Ralfrew rushed after him, covering the distance in a few huge strides.

“What is it?” said Ralfrew.

“Your memories are fake. Software.”

“Fake?”

“You're just an empty space,” said Everett. “Like the church.”

“I don't understand,” said Ralfrew.

“The memories, God, whatever, they just floated through, once, a long time ago. They're gone now.”

It was pointless even to discuss it, Everett thought. The robot had no real self to get back to.

“We remember—”

Everett fled, back up the hill.

 

 

 

 

“Explain,” Everett commanded. He'd rushed back to the basement apartment, broken the lock on Fault's refrigerator, and helped himself to a dose of Cale.

“Let me show you something first,” Cale said.

A door appeared in the black. “This way.” He went through, and Everett followed into emptiness. Cale shut the door, and suddenly they stood before a scene, horizon, hills, trees, a nestled lake. At first glance Everett read it as depthless, flat, a brilliant mural inches away. But as he moved his head, it bloomed into three dimensions, a world. He turned then and saw the small house. The house from Chaos's dream.

He shut his eyes, overwhelmed, and was flooded with sounds, the rustling in the trees overhead, the noises of living things, a chirping, a keening. Then the smells: pine, dew, rot. He felt the slickness of the grass, the hollow thump of the ground beneath his step. He opened his eyes. They were on the lawn beside the house. A cloud crossed in front of the sun and shaded half the lake. Nearer, a squirrel spiraled out of view on a post.

“I built it for you,” said Cale. “It's a place for you and Gwen.”

“How—where is this?”

“I built it from your memories. This is where you lived when you left the city.”

“I remember. But only from the dreams.”

Cale sat down on the grass. Everett sat too, leaned back on his hands and felt the cool grass tangle in his fingers, felt the slight moisture of the ground beneath it. How far would the detail go? What if he dug in the ground? Would there be insects?

“This is what I spend my time doing now, Everett. Making worlds. I've made a lot of them.”

“How?”

“I don't know.” Cale shrugged, almost embarrassed. “It's just what I do. I don't usually show them off.”

“Why not?”

“Billy's not particularly impressed. And it takes a lot of effort. I wear off faster.”

They fell into silence.

“You could do this too,” said Cale. “Make a world here. You could do it better. It wouldn't fade away.”

“I don't understand.”

“You could dream it into reality.”

“You're like your father. You want me to do impossible things.”

“Don't compare me to Ilford.”

Compare
isn't the word for it, Everett thought. I don't know where Ilford stops and you begin.

But all he said was, “Your father and Harriman want too much from me.”

“Don't talk to me about fucking Ilford,” snapped Cale. The world around them flickered and flattened, briefly short-circuited.

“Cale, how did things get like this?”

“The break. Everything changed.” He was still angry, but his voice, and the landscape, had settled.

“You don't remember any more than I do, do you?”

“I don't know what you remember.”

“Almost nothing. You—you triggered a memory for me, the story about the train. I thought you remembered our past. Growing up.”

Cale laughed. “You gave me the memory of the train. It was the first dream I had when you came into range. Vacaville, I guess. Something about your friend Kellogg, in an underground well. Then it turned into us in the tunnels.”

Everett didn't know what to say. He looked at his hands, which were crisscrossed with lines from the grass. But were they his real hands, in this pretend place?