Complete Stories (49 page)

“Soft Death is…a kind of hospice. A home for the terminally ill. I signed a contract so I could go there when the cancer gets really bad. I might have to go pretty soon. I coughed blood in the cab, Abby, and I’m hurting bad.”

“But…half our money, Doug?”

“They pressured me, Abby. And it’s not just a hospice. I can’t tell you more, you might mess it up. We’ve both always had our secrets, haven’t we?” The pain in his stomach was beating like a bass drum.

“Oh, Doug, you’ve gotten so suspicious of me. There haven’t been any secrets, darling. It’s only because you were older than me that you worried so much. You’re all I…“

Something collapsed in Leckesh’s guts. He pitched forward onto his knees and vomited blood. The sensor in Lo’s wristwatch sent out a signal to the Soft Death ambulance that had trailed Leckesh’s taxi home.

The funeral was two days later. The only mourner aside from Abby was Irwin Garden, with his baggy pants and turbaned mind. Over Abby’s protests, he accompanied her back to her apartment.

“I promised Doug not to see you,” said Abby, pacing distractedly up and down the richly furnished living room. She stared out the window and turned to look at Garden’s calm face. His arched eyebrows showed over his glasses. Abby made up her mind. “Doug will forgive me. He and I still had so much to tell each other. He needs me, Irwin, I can feel it. Can you help me reach him?”

“I can try.”

Garden opened up his battered briefcase and drew out a large square of silk with a Tibetan mandala on it. He set it down on the dining table, and he and Abby sat down on either side of Leckesh’s old seat. Garden lit a stick of incense and began reading from a book he said was the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
.

Time passed. Abby let Garden’s droning voice wash over her, as she thought of Doug. It was nearly dark now, and the plume of incense smoke was dense above the silken mandala. The table creaked and shifted; the thick smoke began to give off a faint blue glow. Garden fell silent.

“Doug,” said Abby, staring into the luminous smoke. “Doug, are you there?”

The smoke had no words. It only moaned, turning in on itself.

“Is something wrong, Doug? Tell me. Show me.”

A pattern formed in the air, indistinct as a cheap hologram, but multicolored, with rainbow fringes at each color-volume’s edge. The face of Douglas Leckesh, his tormented face.

Now the face shrank to the size of a fist, and pale color-lines enveloped it.

“A ghost-trap,” said Garden softly. “He’s telling you that something has his spirit trapped here on earth.”

Bright blips raced along the color-lines surrounding Leckesh’s face; bright, digital blips. His moaning chattered into the sound of typewriters.

“Is it Soft Death, Doug?”

The pulsing lines fell away, and the spirit face nodded. Somewhere in the apartment, a window blew open with a crash. There was a sudden, strong wind, and something white fluttered in from the bedroom. A small white rectangle.

The incense smoke dispersed, and the mandala cloth wafted onto the floor. Doug’s face was gone, but there, lying on the table between Abby and Irwin, was a dog-eared business card. The Soft Death business card that Yung had given Leckesh three weeks ago.

Abby was at the Bertroy Building when it opened next morning. After lengthy inquiries, she found herself in Lo Park’s basement cubicle.

“What have you done to my husband?” demanded Abby.

The young Korean woman was cool and matter-of-fact. “Soft Death Incorporated has preserved his software, according to his request.”

“What do you mean?”

“We coded up Douglas Leckesh’s brain-functions as a pattern of zeroes and ones in the computer out there. Would you like to talk with him?”

“I communicated with him last night.”

The Korean woman twitched her eyebrows unbelievingly. “I will telephone him for you.” She punched some buttons and handed Abby the receiver.

There was chiming and a buzzing, and then a voice. Doug’s voice. “Hello?” He sounded bored and unhappy.

“Doug! Is it really you?”

“I…I don’t know. Abby. You’re with Lo Park?”

“Yes. She says you’re in her computer. But last night Irwin Garden called your spirit out of thin air.”

A sob of anguish. “I was a fool, Abby. I should have believed you. Get me out of here. It’s like an endless business meeting, oh, it’s like Hell.”

“Your spirit wants you out, too. But it couldn’t talk.”

“All they have in here is my digital code,” said Leckesh’s voice. “But not the rest of me. I can hardly remember it in here, Abby, the colors and smells, the feelings you give me. It’s wrong for my two parts to be split this way. I was a fool to think I was nothing but numbers. I need to get out of here, and move on to the other side.”

“I’ll save you, darling.”

It didn’t take Lo Park long to draw up a contract for half of what Abby had left. In return, Soft Death promised “Software transmission.”

That afternoon a long, powerful radio signal was beamed straight up from a dish on the top of the Bertroy Building. The signal coded a certain digital information pattern, a bit-string derived from the software of the late Douglas Leckesh. Radio signals are invisible, but if you’d been watching the sky as the Leckesh beam went up, you might have seen an iridule: a brief swirl of rainbow light.

============

Written in 1985.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, September, 1986.

Another death story from Lynchburg. The software model of a person’s brain idea is central to my novels
Software
and
Wetware
. In “Soft Death,” I was interested in clarifying the technology of the “uploading” technique. I can really imagine senior citizens buying and using lifeboxes. The idea of a lifebox program which can “tell stories just like Grandpa used to” seems quite plausible. Imagine a graveyard with a pushbutton, speaker-grill and video screen on each stone, each of them running an interactive simulation of the grave’s inhabitant, a simulation that remembers the things that you, the visitor, tell it. The only hard part would be writing the program to insert the hyperlinks into the dictated material. I have more about this idea in my novel,
Saucer Wisdom
.

The character-name “Leckesh” is a near-anagram of Sheckley. For me, the most important SF writer of all is Robert Sheckley. Somewhere Nabokov describes a certain childhood book as being the one that bumped something and set the heavy ball rolling down the corridor of years. For me, that book of books was Sheckley’s
Untouched by Human Hands
. I first read it in the Spring of 1961, when I was in the hospital recovering from having my ruptured spleen removed.

Around the time I was writing “Soft Death,” Sheckley and Jay Rothbel showed up at our Lynchburg house in a camper van and lived in our driveway for a few days, their electric cord plugged into our socket, and their plumbing system connected to our hose. I could hardly believe my good fortune. It was like having ET land his ship in your yard.

You might think of Killeville as a town where every building is a Pizza Hut. Street after street of Pizza Huts, each with the same ten toppings and the same mock mansard roof—the same shiny zero repeated over and over like same tiles in a pavement, same pixels in a grid, same blank neurons in an imbecile’s brain.

The Killevillers—the men and women on either side of the Pizza Hut counters—see nothing odd about the boredom, the dodecaduplication. They are ugly people, cheap and odd as K-Mart dolls. The Killeville gene pool is a dreg from which all fine vapors evaporate, a dreg so small that some highly recessive genes have found expression. Killeville is like New Zealand with its weirdly unique fauna. Walking down a Killeville street, you might see the same hideous platypus face three times in ten minutes.

Of course a platypus is beautiful…to another platypus. The sound that drifts out of Killeville’s country clubs and cocktail parties is smug and well-pleased. It’s a sound like locusts, or like feasting geese. “This is good food,” they say. “Have you tried the spinach?” The words don’t actually matter; the nasal buzzing honk of the vowels conveys it all:
We’re the same
.
We’re the same
.

Unless you were born there, Killeville is a horrible place to live. Especially in August. In August the sky is a featureless gray pizza. The unpaved parts of the outdoors are choked with thorns and poison ivy. Inside the houses, mold grows on every surface, and fleas seethe in the wall-to-wall carpeting. In the wet grayness, time seems to have stopped. How to kill it?

One can watch TV, go to a restaurant, see a movie, or drink in a bar—though none of these pastimes is fun in Killeville. The TV channels are crowded with evangelists so stupid that it isn’t even funny. All the restaurants are, of course, Pizza Huts. And if all the restaurants are Pizza Huts, then all the movie theaters are showing
Rambo
and the
Care Bears
movie. Mothers Against Drunk Driving is very active in Killeville, and drinking in bars is risky. Sober, vigilant law-enforcement officers patrol the streets at every hour.

For all this, stodgy, nasty Killeville is as interesting a place as can be found in our universe. For whatever reason, it’s a place where strange things keep happening…
very
strange things. Look at what happened to Rex and Candy Redman in August, 198–.

Rex and Candy Redman: married twelve years, with two children aged eight and eleven. Rex was dark and skinny; Candy was a plump, fair-skinned redhead with blue eyes. She taught English at Killeville Middle School. Rex had lost his job at GE back in April. Rex had been a CB radio specialist at the Killeville GE plant—the job was the reason the Redmans had moved to Killeville in the first place. When Rex got laid off, he went a little crazy. Instead of selling the house and moving—which is what he should have done—he got a second mortgage on their house and started a business of his own: Redman Novelties & Magic, Wholesale & Retail. So far it hadn’t clicked. Far from it. The Redmans were broke and stuck in wretched Killeville. They avoided each other in the daytime, and in the evenings they read magazines.

Rex ran his business out of a rundown building downtown, a building abandoned by its former tenants, a sheet music sales corporation called, of all things, Bongo Fury. Bongo Fury had gotten some federal money to renovate the building next door, and were letting Rex’s building moulder as some kind of tax dodge. Rex had the whole second floor for fifty dollars a month. There was a girl artist who rented a room downstairs; she called it her studio. Her name was Marjorie. She thought Rex was cute. Candy didn’t like the situation.

“How was
Marjorie
today?” Candy asked, suddenly looking up from her copy of
People
. It was a glum Wednesday night.

“Look, Candy, she’s just a person. I do not have the slightest sexual interest in Marjorie. Even if I did, do you think I’d be stupid enough to start something with her? She’d be upstairs bothering me all the time. You’d find out right away…life would be even more of a nightmare.”

“It just seems funny,” said Candy, a hard glint in her eye. “It seems funny, that admiring young girl alone with you in an abandoned building all day. It stinks! Put yourself in my shoes! How would
you
like it?”

Rex went out to the kitchen for a glass of water. “Candy,” he said, coming back into the living room. “Just because you’re bored is no reason to start getting mean. Why can’t you be a little more rational?”

“Yeah?” said Candy. She threw her magazine to the floor. “Yeah? Well I’ve got a question for you. Why don’t you get a JOB?”

“I’m trying, hon, you know that.” Rex ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “And you know I just sent the catalogs out. The orders’ll be pouring in soon.”

“BULL!” Candy was escalating fast. “GET A JOB!”

“Ah, go to hell, ya goddamn naggin’ …” Rex moved rapidly out of the room as he said this.

“THAT’S RIGHT, GET OUT OF HERE!”

He grabbed his Kools pack and stepped out on the front stoop. A little breeze tonight; it was better than it had been. Good night to take a walk, have a cigarette, bring home a Dr Pepper, and fool around in his little basement workshop. He had a new effect he was working on. Candy would be asleep on the couch before long; it was her new dodge to avoid going to bed with him.

Walking towards the 7-Eleven, Rex thought about his new trick. It was a box called Reverso that was supposed to turn things into their opposites. A left glove into a right glove, a saltshaker into a pepper grinder, a deck of cards into a Bible, a Barbie doll into a Ken doll. Reverso could even move a coffee cup’s handle to its inside. Of course all the Reverso action could be done by sleight of hand—the idea was to sell the trapdoored Reverso box with before-and-after props. But now, walking along, Rex remembered his math and tried to work out what it would be like if Reverso were for real. What if it were possible, for instance, to turn things inside out by inverting in a sphere, turning each radius vector around on itself, sending a tennis ball’s fuzz to its inside, for instance. Given the right dimensional flow, it could be done …

As Rex calmed himself with thoughts of math, his senses opened and took in the night. The trees looked nice, nice and black against the citylit gray sky. The leaves whispered on a rising note. Storm coming; there was heat lightning in the distance and thundermutter.
Buddaboombabububu
. The wind picked up all of a sudden; fat rain started spitting; and then
KCRAAACK
! there was a blast to Rex’s right like a bomb going off! Somehow he’d felt it coming, and he jerked just the right way at just the right time. Things crashed all around him—what seemed like a whole tree. Sudden deaf silence and the crackling of flames.

Lightning had struck a big elm tree across the street from him; struck it and split it right down the middle. Half the tree had fallen down all around Rex, with heavy limbs just missing him on either side.

Shaky and elated, Rex picked his way over the wood to look at the exposed flaming heart of the tree. Something funny about the flame. Something very strange indeed. The flames were in the shape of a little person, a woman with red eyes and trailing limbs.