Asimov's SF, February 2010 (7 page)

"Sorry."

"It's the most perfect music I've ever heard.” He cleared his throat and sang, well enough to convey the tune, if not much more, reverberant in the small office, “Thy graces that refrain, To do me due delight.” He took a deeper breath, knowing how it should be done, even if it was beyond his capacity to build the energy across the octave, note by note, phrase by phrase, to a gently controlled climax and release conveying the doomed sense of one long, last breath, one sigh: “To see, to hear, To touch, to kiss, To die...” His baritone broke, and shamefacedly he finished, in a growl, “With thee again, In sweetest sympathy."

The young woman was thunderstruck.

"Oh, Mr. Bolen, that's just ... that's—beautiful. Is there a recording...?"

Jive gazed at her, refreshed, his headache eased. “As a matter of fact, I have probably the last uncorrupted CD pressing of Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli singing the duet. One of the last Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft releases before the emetic plague erased—Do you think you'd care to visit my apt and hear it on my classic eMachines CD player?"

Instead of answering, she sang the fragment back to him, with luscious honeyed fragrance, effortlessly soaring. He felt his eyes dampen.

"It's about the thays, that song,” she told him guilelessly. “To die again. I wonder how that composer knew, so long ago? In sweetest sympathy. Although they don't look terribly happy."

Jive frowned.

"You're not, I hope, speaking of—"

"Did you see Leno & Letterman last night? It was hilarious. They had the top ten thays, you know, live feeds from viewers’ homes."

"Don't call them that. It's all a vicious—"

"Oh, but they
are
disconnected thetans, it's been scientifically proved.” Sweet Jesus, Jive realized, she's a ‘tologist. Probably second or third generation. But no more eccentric, he decided, than a Mormon or a Moonie. She leaned forward, and light gleamed below her throat, at the open neck of her bright daffodil-yellow blouse. In that moment, he felt entirely prepared to overlook her ‘tology belief structure, even forgive the golden—or gold-plated—icon nestled in Jolene's small ripe cleavage. The icon, he noticed suddenly, hung from a fine gold chain linked to a pair of bolts in the saint's neck. Like those terrible old Frankenstein movies. Out burst a guffaw. After a moment of uncertainty, the friendly smile was gone from her face.

"What."

Oh Christ. Risk everything on one wild throw of the die? What the heck. The thick Germanic neck of the iconic Church bust (speaking of busts) was turned outward, its coarse features nuzzling at her. “I couldn't help notice where your Divine Founder has his face buried,” he said jovially. “If a man was ambitious, he might hope...” He trailed off.

The sangerin stared at him, speechless. Then a hesitant smile. A shudder of relief jolted through him. Where innocent ribaldry entered freely, soon more joyful bawdry might follow.

"Hey!” she said, then, suddenly frowning. “Are you mocking my faith?"

Jive shook his head piously. “I wouldn't dream of it, darling."

Inside the cozy plastic-shelled condo apartment high above what had once been the Hudson River and was now a stack of mighty water-pumping carbonoid pipes buried below the condo struts, he found Aunt Tilly eating a boiled Raptosaurus egg from both ends. The edible DNA-recovered commercial product rolled unsteadily on her blue-etched dining plate, spilling white albumen and deep orange yolk on the tablecloth. The dignified old lady, dressed formally for dinner in mothball-reeking black and white, kept her eyes fixed on his near-wallsized HDTV display. At her hand, the remote shined its merry red activation light. On the screen, a morose peasant face of Asian mien gazed out hopelessly at them both. Others wandered in the ill-defined monotone background, as if peering in at the living-dining quadrant, shaking their heads, moving on. Damn it, he thought, my half-senile charge has changed the channel again in my absence. He had warned her repeatedly. Maybe he needed to invoke a Parental Warning lock-down code. But, to his chagrin, he realized that he did not know how to do that.

He picked up the remote, fiddled with it impotently. He changed the channel to a repeat of
Baywatch,
but, to his fury, the fully electronic selector switched it back. The Chinese civ-sat radiations, he thought indignantly; they've hijacked my HDTV digital set. Swearing under his breath, he switched it off. Tilly moaned, looked reproachfully at him. She had yolk smeared over the bright red clown's mouth of her lip gloss. In his hand, without his intervention, the red pilot light flashed on again. The screen filled with its voiceless parade of woe.

He threw the useless piece of junk down on the table, and went to the small kitchen sink to find a washcloth. The newscasts were correct, then. Not just the old pre-digital sets were vulnerable, though they provided the best registration of the images, apparently. Any set with a remote control was now susceptible to manipulation by these spurious dead, or more properly their Potemkin-style manipulators, who channeljacked it instantly to their interface feed.

Creating the impression, at least in the gullible, of departed souls searching endlessly for the living they had left behind.

It was more than he could take. Jive threw the dampened cloth down into the sink, left Tilly dully viewing the propaganda, and went into his bedroom. Behind a matched, leather-bound set of the
Left Behind
novels Tilly had given him four or five birthdays ago, before her deterioration had proceeded to its current sorry state, he found a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's. He uncapped it, entered the half bath alcove, poured a healthy slug into his tooth glass.

I have to stop drinking, he told himself, feeling the burn. After a time, though, his depression faded away. An image of that lovely little birdsongstress filled his heart with growing elation. He'd have to dispose of Tilly for the evening. Maybe the two middle-aged ladies on the floor above, a long-term lesbian couple if he recognized the signs, would look after the senile old thing for the night. He couldn't imagine that they'd take any liberties. Not, at any rate, the kind he planned for Jolene. He wondered idly if the girl had a surname. Must have, stood to reason. Social Security stamp, the whole ID apparatus. Christ, really it didn't matter. He poured another shot.

"Sweet love doth now invite,

"Thy graces that refrain

"To do me due delight,” sang Ms. Brightman's simulated voice, admittedly not representative of her peak but glorious still. Jolene sat decorously on the edge of his large formerly marital bed—he'd cunningly moved the CD apparatus out of the living room and into more congenial surrounds—and listened intently. Her eyes, he was happy to see, shone. As the next verse began, she read ahead from the printout he'd prepared, and sang in perfect counterpoint to Bocelli: “Come again,

"That I may cease to mourn

"Through thy unkind disdain

"For now left and forlorn."

He might as well have not been in the room. Song was her passion, that and her oddball faith. But now, after that heartbreaking pause, she turned her eyes on him and sang with the two reconstructed voices, male and female:

"I sit, I sigh,

"I weep, I faint,

"I die, in deadly pain

"And endless misery..."

Her eyes were bright with pain.

Perhaps, Jive thought, too late, this was not the best choice of song for a seduction. But the ravishing beauty of her voice, so much richer in this room, singing these old words, was so much more enthralling than in the light ditties she cast upon the conditioned air of the zeugma structure where they worked. He waited, spellbound but sorrowing, as she sang the rest of the verses.

"Deadly pain and endless misery,” she said, finally. “That's what the thays are showing us.” She clutched hopelessly at her pendant icon, and burst into tears.

He packed away his precious, irreplaceable recording while she visited the bathroom, and then, trying to hide his irritation and painful sexual arousal, escorted her home.

Jive was half in the bag as he slipped a farecard across the turnstile and joined what seemed a substantial proportion of steaming, sweating New York on the 50th Street subway platform. Why didn't I get a cab? he asked himself. Is this my pathetic way of punishing myself ? Is my thalamic function overriding my essentially sane frontal brain, driving me into some sort of deliberate confrontation with the world of the Arbeitnehmer, the common workers I'm meant to be representing? He squeezed his eyes shut against the buffeting of the train as it pulled in to the station, grit and oil-scented air flying up like some Biblical plague of insects. He was jostled getting aboard, and held his tropical helmet with one hand as his homey popped on and reminded him in its high-pitched child's voice that he had an appointment at two, with the engineers at the new Thane of Cawdor thanatorium labs. He snapped the homeowatch off with a grunt. Fool thing, where the heck did it think he was headed on this damned crowded train? And what did the idiots at Industrie Globalisierung, AG, think they were doing, sending him to oversee the so-called findings of this bunch of palpable crackpots?

They sped under old Manhattan. The air-conditioning was on the fritz, hardly unusual. Imagine how life would be without the soletta, he thought. If this was actually the true greenhouse effect everyone was suffering, rather than an attenuated, sunlight-blocked ghost of—he caught his own thought again, snarled at himself. Those things, those mechanical interruptions on the screen, they were not ghosts, not the dead. It was a filthy political stunt, a sort of techno-brainwashing. No matter what foolish Tilly maintained, glued hour after hour in her darkened room, anxiously watching the dead, as she supposed them to be, marching behind her cathode ray tube, peering out, gesturing, their mouths moving silently.

Jesus, wasn't it obvious? Whatever that dear little professional virgin Vogelsangerin believed. Most of them must be Chinese actors, you could tell at a glance. In those tasteless Mao suits, or old fashioned wrapping of one kind or another. Or Indians, not Native American, dark featured and gaunt from the Indian subcontinent, or Pakistan, or Bali, or whatever. A fashion show of faux-starved mummies from hell. He shuddered, rocking as the train thudded over tracks loosely fixed to sleepers unrepaired for years. Every spare cent was required for the big boosters shoving up the materiel to spin the soletta into being, there at the Lagrange libration point nine hundred thousand miles from Earth. That, or the planet would be roasted. Not immediately, true—but in another millennium. Was that why the dead were suddenly hanging about, shoving their damned stupid faces into people's primetime viewing—

Jive caught himself with an audible obscenity.

"No call for that language, sir,” a young blonde mother said, rebuking him with a scowl as she turned her child away.

Apologize? Damn it, no. He was furious with himself, with the way he'd allowed the absurd obsessions of gullible people to draw his unconscious into betraying what he knew for a fact. The train was pulling into Brooklyn; he pushed his way to the door. One consolation: if he'd taken a cab he'd have been cooler, yes, and the ride smoother, but he'd still be trapped somewhere in traffic-lock, probably. With the meter ticking.

The so-called thanatorium was within walking distance of High Street station. His headache was easing, and his dyspepsia.

A long-jawed, raw-boned specimen in a stained lab coat introduced him, the head of engineering, Dr. Samuels. Bart Samuels asked him to say a few preparatory words on behalf of the oversight entity of their funding body.

"Very well, gentlemen. And lady,” Jive told the assembled nerds and geeks in the traditional garb of their professions or trades. “Let me make one thing clear. I don't want to hear any claptrap—and I believe I speak for the Aktiengesellschaft in saying this—about discarnate souls, or cross-overs, or unnucleated thetans.” The nerds lounged as if they were taking an authorized anti-stress break, sucking their Prozac spansules, and stared at him without interest, dully. The one woman scientist or engineer actually rolled her eyes. Then, to his disbelief, she poked out her tongue, not at him but for her own entertainment, rolled it as well, and stared cross-eyed at its purplish tip. This was impudence beyond his capacity to cope. He took his seat abruptly, turning his back on most of them. Samuels signalled a bored audiovisual geek to activate the bank of some twenty antique television receivers arrayed like something out of the Apollo project command room three-quarters of a century earlier.

The screens took an agonizingly long moment to come alive, as tubes warmed and electrons skittered about inside magnetic fields. One by one, then, the grey screens lit up with images: two repeats of
I Love Lucy
and one of
Gunsmoke
, broadcast on the free-to-view channels, and a maddening diorama of meaningless, unscripted, silently parading men, women, and children.
The Family of Man
, Jive told himself, half-hysterically, recalling a book his grandma had loved and made him leaf through every time he and his sisters visited her in the nursing home. Gone these two score years, God bless her. And here were the same faces of every nation, peering out into the drab humming, shuffling, and rustling of the ad hoc, modified media lab.

One of the nerds came forward to a podium. “We've had trained law enforcement lip readers examine the images, Mr. Bolen,” he said in a bored, impudent tone. “Most of them are speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, and dialectal variants. There's an admixture of other major languages, of course, including German, Arabic, English, French, Spanish—"

"Chinese, you say!” Jive cried.

"They seem to be lost and looking for their families. The popular rumor that they are so-called ‘thays’ or thetans is not borne out by synoptic analysis of the recorded utterances to date. The more articulate among their number are asking for our aid, the assistance of living scientists. Hence this briefing. We are not authorized to—"