Amnesia Moon (20 page)

“I know you and me and Billy were friends, before,” said Cale. “The rest doesn't really matter.”

“Do you remember my family? My parents?”

“No. I'm sorry.”

Everett felt like a flash of static electricity in empty space, something brief and lost.

He said, “What about Gwen?”

“You and Gwen were together before,” said Cale impatiently. “That's obvious.”

“But you don't remember her.”

“That isn't exactly true. I have a few stray memories. But it doesn't matter, Everett. She's here, now.”

This wasn't the consolation Everett was seeking. What did his attachment to Cale and Gwen mean if he could barely remember them? Who was he, if all he knew of himself was the shreds of memory that clung to these people?

And were they people at all, if they lived only inside refrigerated vials?

“There's something I want you to do, Everett. For me and Gwen. Make it real here.”

“I can't do that.”

“It's easier than things you've already done. I've supplied the ingredients.” Cale gestured at the sky. “You only have to finish the job. The one limitation here is the connection to the outside world. The dependence on it. You can break that.”

Everett didn't speak. He looked up. The sun had crossed the sky once and now it was back at the other end, starting over.

“What would it mean, anyway,” he said after a while, “to make it real?”

“An inversion,” said Cale. “Turn it inside out.” He modeled it with his hands. “Ilford and Kellogg and everything, all the broken-up, tired American reality—make it small. Make it into a drug we can take if we want, the contents of a test tube. And make this the real world, the one that persists.”

Everett was silent.

“Make Gwen real, Everett.”

“That's not Gwen. Just a hint of her, a phantom.”

“You hold it against her that she has a few blank spots? You're a fine one to talk, Everett. There's as much of her left as any of us.”

Maybe he's right, Everett thought. I came back to find her, and I found her. And what I felt there, in her arms, whatever the surrounding conditions, was real. Is real.

A month ago he'd been living in a projection booth, drinking what amounted to rubbing alcohol, dreaming Kellogg's dreams. Who was he to look a gift reality in the mouth?

He was lucky that Gwen had recognized him, had thought there was someone there to recognize let alone love. She was as much Gwen as he deserved, he decided. Maybe more.

But he couldn't let it go. “Somebody must know, Cale.”

“Know what?”

“What happened to Gwen.” And to you, he almost added. “What about Ilford? What does he remember?”

“Ilford is a liar!” The world around them flickered, crackled, brightened to impossible primary colors, then disappeared.

They were back in the flat gray space, the default zone. And Cale had turned inward, sulking, his eyes down, as though it were Everett who had thrust the world away, rejecting an offer.

In fact, Everett felt the disappearance of the landscape as a tremendous loss. No matter how little he trusted it.

“Cale.”

“Yes?”

He had to find the right question. It wouldn't work if he mentioned Ilford. “You said there was someone I should meet. Another point of view.”

“Vance, you mean.”

“That's what I need, more points of view.”

“Vance was a guy who passed through here. A year, six months ago, I don't know. If he was real, they're supposedly having this big war there. With aliens.”

“Where?”

“L.A. But other places too. That's one of the things that makes it different from just another bad dream.”

“There was a part of the desert,” said Everett. “Something military going on.”

“It's been a while since I visited him. It's not exactly
scenic
.”

“How—”

“Billy gave him a dose so I could meet him. While he was here, I helped him create a version of his world, a record. You'll see.”

A new doorway appeared, and Cale and Everett went through. Everett experienced immediate vertigo; he'd somehow stepped into the rear of an airplane or helicopter or hovercraft which was tilted so drastically that the side windows nearly faced the cityscape below. He saw that he was dressed differently here, in a full bodysuit with wiring and terminals. Cale, standing beside him, was dressed the same way. The city beneath them was flat and gray and dead. Everett closed his eyes and felt the pitch of the craft, the vibration of the engine.

“Cale,” said a voice. Everett looked up. A man, also in uniform, ducked through the low door from the cockpit of the craft. He was black and young, but his hair was completely silver. He wore tiny dark glasses that just covered his eyes.

“Vance,” said Cale. “I brought a friend of mine—Everett Moon.”

“Vance Escrow,” said the man. He stood, spread legs almost bridging the width of the craft's floor, and stuck out his hand. Everett used the handshake to steady himself.

“Everett's been away,” said Cale. “He's sort of caught Ilford's interest.”

“Don't tell me,” said Vance, making a face. He turned, and Everett could feel his stare through the dark glasses. “You dream?”

“Well, yes,” said Everett.

“You should join us,” said Vance.

“Never mind that, Vance,” said Cale. “I brought him here to find out about the war.”

Vance smirked. “What do you want to know? We're what's left, fifteen or sixteen hundred free men. Everyone else is just slave apes. We try not to kill too many of them, because it's not their fault. It's the hives we're after.”

The craft leveled and dipped low, buzzing the rooftops of an abandoned mall. Everett saw dark figures scurry around the corner of a building like rats. From the cockpit came the staticky crackle of voices on shortwave.

“Hey, Stoney,” called Vance back through the cockpit doorway, “even it out. We're talking.”

“Yassuh,” came the sardonic reply.

“I thought you were fighting aliens,” said Everett.

“Right, but not like you're thinking. Not just some bogeyman Martians. You know why we're in the air, right? Cale tell you about that?”

“They dominate on the ground,” Cale explained. “Like dreamers, but alien dreamers. The only way to stay clear of it is to stay in the air.”

“If we set down, we'd be slave apes too,” said Vance. “Free man is
airborne.”

“Slaves—to what?” said Everett. He kept one eye on the shifting landscape in the window, trying to remind himself that it wasn't real.

“The hives,” said Vance. “They're growing inside all the houses. Humans have to tend them, bring them food, trinkets, little offerings. The place where the aliens come from, the dominant species is some sort of hive intelligence, and the bigger animals serve as their arms and legs. So that's what they did to us when they landed. Turned us into animals. And they don't really give a damn about the condition of their animals, not when there are so many of them. People aren't exactly brushing their
teeth
a lot anymore, if you get my meaning. Or remembering to eat.”

“The hives—they don't ever leave them?”

“Nope. Think of it as a cancer, Moon. Tumors, earth-tumors growing inside the houses, breaking through the basement floors, teeming with this unnatural alien life that can get inside your head, brainwash you, make you care about keeping them comfortable. Like being the butler of a
tumor.”

They flew out over water. Everett stared down at their reflection: a propless helicopter, just like the one in the desert that had marked his car with pink goo.

“So you don't ever land?”

Vance shook his head. “Not here. We have to fly to other zones for that. Here we live in the air. You'll gel used to it. Man adapts.”

“Don't be patronizing,” said Cale. “Everett is Mr. Adaptation.”

“I bet,” sniggered Vance. “Where you come from, Moon?”

“Hatfork, Wyoming. But California, before that.”

Vance jutted his chin at Cale. “You knew these people before the break?”

“We grew up together,” interjected Cale before Everett could answer.

“So Ilford wants Everett here to be his boy,” said Vance. He leaned back against a bulkhead, crossing his arms. “For the big expansion.”

Cale nodded.

Vance turned to Everett. “Listen carefully. If Ilford rolls down here, or out to some other place where the hives are in charge, he's going to have a lot to answer for. The fragmentation is all that's keeping them from running the whole show.”

“Maybe another reality would predominate,” said Everett. “Maybe you'd win, that way.”

“The hives are from
somewhere else
, my friend. They're not competing on the same level. We had a few dreamers around here, in the air, I mean. Not too useful, kept screwing up operations, until we got them isolated. But a human dreamer, down there—just another slave ape.”

“Then why would you want me?”

“We're working with you people now, carefully. Not here, in Mexico. We've got a few ideas.”

“Vance and I don't necessarily agree on this,” said Cale.

Vance waved his hand impatiently. “Listen: why do you think the world got broken up?
Because the aliens landed.
It was a defensive response, an evolutionary step. Reality shattered to isolate the hives.”

“I don't understand how the dreams come into it,” said Everett.

“The hives are responsible for that—they induce the dreaming. The more the world coheres, the more they can grab. It's a countermove. You dreamers are dupes, Moon.”

Asking him to believe in an alien invasion was asking a lot, maybe too much. But Everett could concur with
dupe.

“Listen, Moon. I'll keep it simple.” Vance waved at Cale, at the ship. “Just because Wonderboy here created this thriving simulation doesn't mean things haven't changed in L.A. I might be dead by now, the real me, that is. They could've knocked us out of the air by now. If so, then the breakup is all that's keeping you and a lot of other people from getting to know the hive situation intimately.”

They broke through a bank of low clouds, and the city tilted back into view. Everett realized what was wrong with the scene. L.A. was built for cars, and without them it was bereft, a body drained of blood.

Or a hive itself, only emptied. A husk.

 

“How much of that is true?” asked Everett. They were back in Cale's null space.

Cale spread his hands. “You just heard all I know.” He seemed sunken in depression.

Everett could feel the dose wearing off.

“The vehicle we were in,” he said. “I saw one in the desert. They marked my car.”

“They get around. But they could just be dreaming. You haven't ever seen a hive, have you?”

“No.”

“Well, neither have I. In his version of L.A. you never touch down. You just go around blowing things up from a distance.”

Everett suddenly wondered: What if he could do what Cale hoped? If he dreamed Cale's test tube world into reality, and Vance was actually dead, would that bring the dead man back to life?

Was that what he was supposed to do for Gwen?

 

 

 

 

“Of course I remember Vance,” said Dawn Crash. “He's an arrogant, macho fool.”

“So he's real,” said Everett. “Not something Cale cooked up.” It had occurred to him that the L.A. scenario might all be a rhetorical fiction, a tool of persuasion in Cale's quiet struggle with Ilford.

“He's real, all right. And he made a real scene up here, until Ilford had him chased away.” She smirked. “Actually, I slept with him, if you want to know the truth.”

“So the aliens . . .”

“Vance being real doesn't mean the aliens are,” said Fault. “It's just another dream, Everett. What better way to keep people under your thumb? Make up some big enemy, justify everything as part of the war effort.”

Dawn and Fault had shown up in Dawn's car, just after the sun went down, and invited him out for a drink. Everett was sitting at Fault's place at the basement window and watching the glow fade through the fog, in the aftermath of his visit with Cale. Fault raised his eyebrows at the sight of the pried-off refrigerator lock but said nothing.

They'd taken him down the hill to a bar in the Submission, a place called Void's which served brackish beer in big, greasy pitchers. Everett felt that he'd been there before, but the elusiveness of the feeling, and then the irrelevance of it in the face of all he couldn't reconstruct, depressed him. The bar was crowded, the booths and tables filled with teenage Mexican boys with wispy beards and aging prostitutes scouting drinks. At the pool table a scowling black man studied his shot. The bartender fed coins continuously into the jukebox, as though he didn't want to have to overhear any conversations. Everett, Dawn, and Fault sat in a dark booth against the back wall.

Everett felt the pulse of the music and the chill of the alcohol move through him, and it seemed to him that he was nothing more than the sum of those effects.

“Do you remember my parents?” he asked Fault.

“I never met them,” said Fault carefully. He seemed to sense Everett's darkness.

“Did I ever talk about them?”

“Not that I recall.” Fault raised his beer glass and hid behind it.

“I thought I was coming back to something, if I came back here. To a self.”

“When I found you in Vacaville, your name was Chaos. Remember
that? Be
grateful for what you have.”

“Who you are isn't a matter of memories, anyway,” said Dawn. “Especially lately.”

“What is it, then?” Everett asked with bitter sarcasm. Only after it was out did he realize how badly he wanted an answer.