Fools Read online

  “Well, I knew it was something out of the ordinary,” he says conversationally, as if I weren’t sitting there paralyzed, “when you didn’t make any of your pickups. You’ve never failed to make your pickups before.” He looks at me like I said something, and then hits his forehead with the heel of his hand, fakelike. “Oh, leave it to me. You never knew about the pickups. Me and my big mouth.” He winces showily. “Sorry, Marceline.”

  Also never good. I could have guessed I was doing plenty for Bateau that I didn’t know about, but the smart employee doesn’t do that kind of guessing. A little blank part out of your day here and there, so who needs to remember every little thing anyway? Not me. If you ain’t pulling a fugue state once in a while, you’re just not trying, right?

  And why would I ever try to remember making my pickups? No reason. So there are some memories that I don’t know how I got? I don’t care. I’m a junkie and it doesn’t matter where it comes from just as long as it comes, that’s the gospel. I don’t have to remember marching around the Downs like a zombie, stopping in here and stopping in there for a little stolen this-and-that. Stopping in at a fetishist and a dreamland and a pawnshop or two and coming out with a memory a lot fuller than when I went in. Hell, none of them know they’re working for Bateau, why should they know I’m anything more than a convenient place to dump the dregs they can’t fence. And all of it so mixed in with whatever I’d gotten from some dead trick, even if I’d gotten stopped and searched, the Brain Police wouldn’t have been able to make sense out of the alphabet soup in my head. Shit, I never could.

  Until now. Because it isn’t just me anymore.

  She conned me when I threw her over the cliff; she fooled me. She dangled all her memories in front of me, said Gonna let all this go to waste, a hard-up junkie like you in serious need of arise, a free rise? I didn’t even have to say yes, the habit said it for me. The beast said Feed me, and we did. Except it ate a little more than it bargained for, and here we all are together.

  Bateau pinches my chin between his fingers and pulls my face up to look at him. He’s got new biogems, lapis lazuli. First time I’ve noticed.

  “Now, you know what has to happen here,” he says. “I can’t have anyone holding out on me, even a good and faithful servant like you. The first thing you should have done when you discovered the cop was come straight home to me. I know, I know, they kept you, didn’t they? Some Very Nice People kept you, because apparently you were laboring under the delusion that you were her.” He turned my head to the actor for a moment. “They, of course, did wrong by not just packing you up and sending you home, and that is why she’s here with us. They kept my goods, so now I’m keeping theirs.” He pauses to study me with narrowed eyes. “I think you’re following this, but I can’t be sure. Well, doesn’t matter, you’ll get the idea when you go back in. You see, we can’t have any evidence of a Brain Police officers murder hanging around. The penalties are—” He shudders.

  “So what we’ll do, Marceline—what you’ll do, rather—is Escort that sorry sack of shit over there out of this existence once and for all. Not just a character but every one of her. The catch is, of course, that she doesn’t want to die, so you’ll have to persuade her or force her or—” He shrugs. “You’re the Escort, you’ll know what to do. You always have.”

  He gets up. “And after that … well, we’ll just see. It all depends on what you manage to get from her while you’re seeing to her departure. And how I have to get it out of you. If you keep thinking you’re her, we just might have to blast.” He laughs. “On the other hand, you come up with the database, and we’ll call it even. Including your past debts. Which means, you get to walk away from this. How’s that for incentive?” His lips curve in a smile that doesn’t touch the rest of his face.

  If I could work up enough will to care, I would ask him how he thinks I’m going to Escort anybody all dumbed down with whatever he put in the coffee—Super-Q, or some wild brew he thought up himself. But even stupored-out, I know better. I’m not supposed to walk away. I’m not even supposed to come out of the system. He’ll just take whatever he wants out of my mind and let my vitals flatten along with hers. Two for the price of one. Actor dies of heart failure; unidentified hypehead found dead. Two for the price of one.

  I try to close my eyes so I don’t have to see him reaching to take them out, but I can’t.

  Well, hell, I think, walking up that long, twisty dirt road, I know why it didn’t work, I know why she isn’t dead: this wasn’t the way she wanted to go. In my line of work, you don’t just go kill somebody—you seduce them to death.

  There was the guy who wanted to take a flyer out of a sky-island casino after losing it all to the roulette wheel; that was a happy death. He was happy, and later on, Bateau was even happier, because the guy’s roulette losses had included a whole lot of stuff about stocks and properties. Nothing I understood, but for months after that, the stock market treated Bateau like its personal favorite son.

  There was the woman who blew up the sun; yah, lots of bright lights and a big noise and Bateau sold that one off to the sado-peeps: see the people burst into flames, see them suffer before the whole thing blows, rated XS for Extra-Sick. Can anyone believe it, she thought she was being sneaky. She thought I’d let myself get caught in it. She had the ghosts of all her friends there and all her enemies as well, but in the end, she couldn’t fool herself into believing they were anything more than ghosts, and her own ghosts at that. In the end, she knew she was going alone and she couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand it that she had to face the Big Question Mark without even one other person to face it with her.

  But I’ve done the exploding sun ending before. In some ways, it’s easier to dodge that one than a flyer off a sky-island. Or a jump off a cliff.

  The cliff. It’s up there ahead of me, waiting, and she’s waiting there on the edge with this personality she doesn’t want. That’s not how it went, though. How it went was, the three of us walked up the road to that final destination. That was the client’s choice, and the client always gets to choose. That’s the way it’s supposed to go.

  What’s wrong with this picture is, the client wasn’t the intended. First time I ever did it that way.

  The trees lining the road are whispering, but it’s a foreign language and I don’t understand what they’re saying.

  Something makes me turn around and look back, and there it is. The mirror. I see my reflection in the act of walking away, but even though I keep walking, I don’t get any farther away from it.

  My reflection? My reflection … but not me. Not the client, either. Almost her, but not quite.

  I’d have my memory wiped and hope I wasn’t fool enough to want it back again.

  But this was not my memory. I hadn’t done this.

  You want to check the line?

  No, Sovay, I think I’ve got it straight now. I’d been afraid, back when we’d decided to do it, meet mind-to-mind and settle our feelings toward each other, I’d been afraid that instead of coming to a resolution, we’d open something we couldn’t close.

  I’d been afraid in other ways. The kind of apprehension you get, say, when you go into someone’s bedroom for the first time and see a pair of handcuffs hanging off the headboard.

  Yah, I’d had all kinds of fears, but the one thing I forgot to be afraid of was what I might find out about myself. But that’s the kind of stuff you’d never see if it weren’t reflected in another person’s eyes.

  Is it a lie if you don’t know you’re lying?

  I hadn’t believed when Sovay showed it to me. Make that, when I’d seen for myself. But there it was—there she was—cocooned and quiet and camouflaged by the mirror itself, the funhouse mirror in my head that made reflections-to-order for me, characters that lived as long as the run of what plays they were created for and sank back into the mirror after the final curtain call.

  How had he seen through everything to where she was? If he’d just been infatuated
, he’d have just inspired one more reflection, the person he’d wanted to see, the one who would take that ride through the old Tunnel-O-Love with him. It wouldn’t have been her; migod, it wouldn’t even have been me. She’d have been safe, and so would I; I’d have been busy with the ersatz-Sovay character I needed for my own love-affair scenario. So what happened? How do you see the truth about somebody when all you’re looking for is the pleasant lie?

  You want to check the line?

  Was that all that had triggered her? What could possibly have been in that question that could have taken him all the way through to her?

  Had it just been that I hadn’t known the line?

  Or had I just changed my mind?

  Change of heart, thus a change of mind; the things that can happen when someone catches you in a weak moment.

  She had to say yes to Some Very Nice People; I’d spent months lying in wait for them, knowing they’d come. The franchisers have whole staffs that do nothing but cruise theatres and holo parlors, looking for a new face. Not just any new face, but a hungry new face. The big firms like Power People just do it to keep current—the new faces come to them and they cull what they want for their persona catalogs.

  Then there’s Some Very Nice People. One way to survive in competition with the big ones like Power People is to be better than they are, but that’s too hard. Another way is to bootleg. The Flavor-Of-The-Month is already taken? No problem; send one of your staff over as a customer, get an imprint and bring it back to the workshop. The knockoff is up and running before dinner.

  And maybe it’s got a few refinements as well, some extra features that the bootleg custom wouldn’t know as anything fenced from a chop shop. Wouldn’t know, wouldn’t want to. Except, of course, for the ones that do know because that was what they wanted in the first place.

  Complicated times we live in, yes; they call for complicated schemes and counterschemes. But I made it simple for her. She existed simply to respond to one mating call: Hey, baby, want to be Famous?

  Her line was just one word, easy to remember: Yes. Once she was in, all she had to do was be Some Very Nice People herself, gathering information while she manufactured personas. And after a set period of time, there’d be a certain customer who would ask for a particular, tailor-made persona that only she could produce, and that would be the cue for me to come up out of deep undercover, send up a flare, and take them all in.

  And then Sovay barged in and changed her mind. Just what he set out to do, too. Either I made her too good back in the Brain Police system, or he made himself see too much in her—it doesn’t matter much anymore. He just did it. Looking for her, he raised me instead.

  You want to check the line?

  Was that the cue? If it wasn’t, it was close enough for government work—ha, and ha, as Marceline would say—it meant more to me than it did to her.

  Maybe there was too much leak-through; maybe, along with all her information, I got her infatuation, too.

  He changed her mind about Some Very Nice People; one mental night with Sovay and she didn’t want to go anymore. Except she wasn’t supposed to feel that way because that was her purpose, to go with them, be Famous. She resolved that conflict the only way she knew how … in the mirror.

  But the new reflection was from her. The new reflection wanted to be Famous. She gave it existence; I gave it purpose; and Sovay gave it the undeniable truth about both. Perhaps that was the one thing the reflection needed to achieve escape velocity from the mirror, and from me: the truth.

  The new reflection of Marva knew exactly what to do about it. If you can create a persona, then you can get rid of one. And if you can’t get rid of it by yourself, hire a professional to do it.

  Some Very Nice People knew just where she could find one.

  Yah, but what I do is send them over and keep the memories. She wanted me to send her over memories and all.

  Because if you don’t, she’ll grow back.

  Uh … what? How’s that again?

  Everything must go.

  If she thought I was going to let perfectly good memories go into the Great Good’bye … hell, I didn’t even have a say about it. I might: have, but that beast of a habit wasn’t about to let anything like it happen.

  That was how she hooked me, too. Your weaknesses, damn, you got to watch them every moment and still you might not know what happened till long after the fact.

  I thought it would be all right, though. I got a habit, but I got experience, too. Plenty of them have tried to hook me. Plenty of them change their minds at the last second or think they do, and they try all kinds of things. They try walking on water, they try shifting into reverse, and when it fails, they try taking me with them for company. That solitary thing is what gets them most of all. They try to make me feel it along with them so that when they reach for me, I’ll reach for them and either pull them back or go over with them—at that point, they almost don’t care which, as long as they don’t have to face the Great Goodbye alone.

  But I never in my life ever saw one of them fly. Her will to live was as strong as mine, and I knew, watching her hold herself up above the void, that I’d been had.

  I didn’t know what to do then. She wasn’t supposed to be the real one, she was supposed to be the artificial one, just a persona, a mask with a little history. And the beast woke up, the habit came alive and said, Don’t bother to wrap it, I’ll eat it here!

  No memory junkie ever had it so good, not in my memory, ha, and ha. But that’s all that would have come of it, if it hadn’t been for the mirror. Funhouse mirror … what you see is what you get is what you see.

  Not just one mirror, but two: one for the cop, one for the Method actor the cop made. She had to have her own, because it was what made her a Method actor. You put two mirrors together and what you see is what you get is what you see is what you get is what you see into infinity, bouncing back and forth between them, and me caught in the middle.

  The one I’d thrown off the cliff was gone, and the client thought that meant she’d finally given out and fallen, the way it was supposed to have happened. She was wrong. She was

  * * *

  somebody else now.

  Somebody else and somewhere else, who I was before I found too many reflections in the mirror and one of them decided to get rid of a few, so she could keep the made-up life and live it out. But the reflections go on forever in two mirrors facing each other.

  The original person, and the original persona she made for an assignment in deep undercover, reflecting back and forth now in the mind of the Escort. And the Escort woke up as me. Migod.

  The actor had tried to obliterate the cop’s memory after the fact, after the Escort got it, but the actor didn’t understand that it was two mirrors reflecting each other, and as soon as she erased the associations, they all came back into existence further along in the series, a little more obscured, but still there nonetheless. And a memory lane famine fancier also in deep undercover recognized me in the system and tried to make contact, except she didn’t go far enough along the series of reflections to find the right one, and got me instead. It was the gap in my memory she worked on, not the memory of the Brain Police officer, still in deep undercover.

  Deep undercover; deeper than anyone had ever been before while remaining distinct enough to persist. That’s the will to live in action, and that’s the nature of infinity—if you can see far enough into anything, what you’ll see is yourself looking back. You won’t know if you’re looking outward or inward, upward or downward—doesn’t matter. Any way you take it, it’s you.

  And what are you but what you remember being?

  What I remember being is pretty goddamned angry. Do someone from the Brain Police and it’s no mercy for you. If they get in with a search warrant and find that kind of evidence, they turn you over for rehab, no appeal. Rehab; you see people who got rehabbed around now and then. Nobodies, ciphers. Nothing gives them a rise or hypes them up, and nothing hurts.
They’re just clocks, keeping time till they wind down for good.

  I remember being sure I’d rather go over that cliff myself than have that happen to me. Then I remember thinking maybe I was a little hasty about that.

  Funny, no matter how many times you’ve been to the brink of death, you never lose your will to live or your fear of death. Maybe that was all it took to save her life, the will to live and the fear of dying.

  So I saved her life. Then she invested it—

  Her presence manifested as a flicker of lightning over the patchwork inner landscape. My perspective shifted jerkily and I swore I could feel my vitals jump. I imagined Bateau standing over both our inert bodies out there in the real world, smirking at her, then me. This contact was different, not like before at Some Very Nice People, when she had just made an imprint and left it to find me wherever it would. That would have worked, except I’d been watching and I knew, and knowledge was power, power enough to override the imp.

  But what did I know now, and what kind of power could it give me?

  I’d have my memory wiped and hope I wasn’t fool enough to want it back again.

  I wanted to look at the place where she was making contact, but some force pulled my vision back to the mirror.

  Sally’s chewing.

  The memory was there in the mirror, the famine fancier in a strange office of obese furniture. I was seeing her the way the Escort had come upon her—the Escort had gone under looking for a memory boost but it was my memory that had had to be boosted. A Method character will accept any old false memory you feed it, but what happens if it isn’t a character?

  The famine fancier’s head whips around and she sees me.

  Sally’s chewing—

  And then she spits—

  I went up that dirt road to the edge of the cliff, too; sometimes I was walking along with her, sometimes I was being dragged like the inert cop, trapped in the prison of deep undercover and unable to come out and save herself. I wanted to stay and have a life just as much as the other Marva did, but I wanted mine in live theatre, as one of the troupe at Sir Larry’s, not as a persona hack for a cheap franchise operation. It was my life, too.