Collected short fiction.., p.51
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 51
The clones were all in perfect health, and virtually indistinguishable. He finally chose one at random. The trainer examined the tattoo on the sole of its foot, and said, “D12, sir.”
Gray nodded, and walked away.
· · · · ·
He spent the week before the transplant in a state of constant agitation. He knew exactly which drugs would have prevented this, but the medical team had advised him to stay clean, and he was too afraid to disobey them.
He watched D12 for hours, trying to distract himself with the supposedly thrilling knowledge that those clear eyes, that smooth skin, those taut muscles, would soon be his. The only trouble was, this began to seem a rather paltry reward for the risk he would be taking. Knowing all his life that this day would come, he’d learnt not to care at all what he looked like; by now, he was so used to his own appearance that he wasn’t sure he especially wanted to be lean and muscular and rosy-cheeked. After all, if that really had been his fondest wish, he could have achieved it in other ways; some quite effective pharmaceuticals and tailored viruses had existed for decades, but he had chosen not to use them. He had enjoyed looking the part of the dissolute billionaire, and his wealth had brought him more sexual partners than his new body would ever attract through its own merits. In short, he neither wanted nor needed to change his appearance at all.
So, in the end it came down to longevity, and the hope of immortality. As his parents had proved, any transplant involved a small but finite risk. A whole new body every ten or twenty years was surely a far safer bet than replacing individual organs at an increasing rate, for diminishing returns. And a whole new body now, long before he needed it, made far more sense than waiting until he was so frail that a small overdose of anaesthetic could finish him off.
When the day arrived, Gray thought he was, finally, prepared. The chief surgeon asked him if he wished to proceed; he could have said no, and she would not have blinked—not one his employees would have dared to betray the least irritation, had he cancelled their laborious preparations a thousand times.
But he didn’t say no.
As the cool spray of the anaesthetic touched his skin, he suffered a moment of absolute panic. They were going to cut up his brain. Not the brain of a grunting, drooling Extra, not the brain of some ignorant slum-dweller, but his brain, full of memories of great music and literature and art, full of moments of joy and insight from the finest psychotropic drugs, full of ambitions that, given time, might change the course of civilisation.
He tried to visualise one of his favourite paintings, to provide an image he could dwell upon, a memory that would prove that the essential Daniel Gray had survived the transplant. That Van Gogh he’d bought last year. But he couldn’t recall the name of it, let alone what it looked like. He closed his eyes and drifted helplessly into darkness.
· · · · ·
When he awoke, he was numb all over, and unable to move or make a sound, but he could see. Poorly, at first, but over a period that might have been hours, or might have been days—punctuated as it was with stretches of enervating, dreamless sleep—he was able to identify his surroundings. A white ceiling, a white wall, a glimpse of some kind of electronic device in the corner of one eye; the upper section of the bed must have been tilted, mercifully keeping his gaze from being strictly vertical. But he couldn’t move his head, or his eyes, he couldn’t even close his eyelids, so he quickly lost interest in the view. The light never seemed to change, so sleep was his only relief from the monotony. After a while, he began to wonder if in fact he had woken many times, before he had been able to see, but had experienced nothing to mark the occasions in his memory.
Later he could hear, too, although there wasn’t much to be heard; people came and went, and spoke softly, but not, so far as he could tell, to him; in any case, their words made no sense. He was too lethargic to care about the people, or to fret about his situation. In time he would be taught to use his new body fully, but if the experts wanted him to rest right now, he was happy to oblige.
When the physiotherapists first set to work, he felt utterly helpless and humiliated. They made his limbs twitch with electrodes, while he had no control, no say at all in what his body did. Eventually, he began to receive sensations from his limbs, and he could at least feel what was going on, but since his head just lolled there, he couldn’t watch what they were doing to him, and they made no effort to explain anything. Perhaps they thought he was still deaf and blind, perhaps his sight and hearing at this early stage were freak effects that had not been envisaged. Before the operation, the schedule for his recovery had been explained to him in great detail, but his memory of it was hazy now. He told himself to be patient.
When, at last, one arm came under his control, he raised it, with great effort, into his field of view.
It was his arm, his old arm—not the Extra’s.
He tried to emit a wail of despair, but nothing came out.
Something must have gone wrong, late in the operation, forcing them to cancel the transplant after they had cut up his brain. Perhaps the Extra’s life-support machine had failed; it seemed unbelievable, but it wasn’t impossible—as his parents’ deaths had proved, there was always a risk. He suddenly felt unbearably tired. He now faced the prospect of spending months merely to regain the use of his very own body; for all he knew, the newly forged pathways across the wounds in his brain might require as much time to become completely functional as they would have if the transplant had gone ahead.
For several days, he was angry and depressed. He tried to express his rage to the nurses and physiotherapists, but all he could do was twitch and grimace—he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t even gesture—and they paid no attention. How could his people have been so incompetent? How could they put him through months of trauma and humiliation, with nothing to look forward to but ending up exactly where he’d started?
But when he’d calmed down, he told himself that his doctors weren’t incompetent at all; in fact, he knew they were the best in the world. Whatever had gone wrong must have been completely beyond their control. He decided to adopt a positive attitude to the situation; after all, he was lucky: the malfunction might have killed him, instead of the Extra. He was alive, he was in the care of experts, and what was three months in bed to the immortal he would still, eventually, become? This failure would make his ultimate success all the more of a triumph—personally, he could have done without the set-back, but the media would lap it up.
The physiotherapy continued. His sense of touch, and then his motor control, was restored to more and more of his body, until, although weak and uncoordinated, he felt without a doubt that this body was his. To experience familiar aches and twinges was a relief, more than a disappointment, and several times he found himself close to tears, overcome with mawkish sentiment at the joy of regaining what he had lost, imperfect as it was. On these occasions, he swore he would never try the transplant again; he would be faithful to his own body, in sickness and in health. Only by methodically reminding himself of all his reasons for proceeding in the first place, could he put this foolishness aside.
Once he had control of the muscles of his vocal cords, he began to grow impatient for the speech therapists to start work. His hearing, as such, seemed to be fine, but he could still make no sense of the words of the people around him, and he could only assume that the connections between the parts of his brain responsible for understanding speech, and the parts which carried out the lower-level processing of sound, were yet to be refined by whatever ingenious regime the neurologists had devised. He only wished they’d start soon; he was sick of this isolation.
· · · · ·
One day, he had a visitor—the first person he’d seen since the operation who was not a health professional clad in white. The visitor was a young man, dressed in brightly coloured pyjamas, and travelling in a wheelchair.
By now, Gray could turn his head. He watched the young man approaching, surrounded by a retinue of obsequious doctors. Gray recognised the doctors; every member of the transplant team was there, and they were all smiling proudly, and nodding ceaselessly. Gray wondered why they had taken so long to appear; until now, he’d presumed that they were waiting until he was able to fully comprehend the explanation of their failure, but he suddenly realised how absurd that was—how could they have left him to make his own guesses? It was outrageous! It was true that speech, and no doubt writing too, meant nothing to him, but surely they could have devised some method of communication! And why did they look so pleased, when they ought to have been abject?
Then Gray realised that the man in the wheelchair was the Extra, D12. And yet he spoke. And when he spoke, the doctors shook with sycophantic laughter.
The Extra brought the wheelchair right up to the bed, and spent several seconds staring into Gray’s face. Gray stared back; obviously he was dreaming, or hallucinating. The Extra’s expression hovered between boredom and mild amusement, just as it had in the dream he’d had all those years ago.
The Extra turned to go. Gray felt a convulsion pass through his body. Of course he was dreaming. What other explanation could there be?
Unless the transplant had gone ahead, after all.
Unless the remnants of his brain in this body retained enough of his memory and personality to make him believe that he, too, was Daniel Gray. Unless the brain function studies that had localised identity had been correct, but incomplete—unless the processes that constituted human self-awareness were redundantly duplicated in the most primitive parts of the brain.
In which case, there were now two Daniel Grays.
One had everything: The power of speech. Money. Influence. Ten thousand servants. And now, at last, immaculate health.
And the other? He had one thing only.
The knowledge of his helplessness.
· · · · ·
It was, he had to admit, a glorious afternoon. The sky was cloudless, the air was warm, and the clipped grass beneath his feet was soft but dry.
He had given up trying to communicate his plight to the people around him. He knew he would never master speech, and he couldn’t even manage to convey meaning in his gestures—the necessary modes of thought were simply no longer available to him, and he could no more plan and execute a simple piece of mime than he could solve the latest problems in grand unified field theory. For a while he had simply thrown tantrums—refusing to eat, refusing to cooperate. Then he had recalled his own plans for his old body, in the event of such recalcitrance. Cremation. And realised that, in spite of everything, he didn’t want to die.
He acknowledged, vaguely, that in a sense he really wasn’t Daniel Gray, but a new person entirely, a composite of Gray and the Extra D12—but this was no comfort to him, whoever, whatever, he was. All his memories told him he was Daniel Gray; he had none from the life of D12, in an ironic confirmation of his long-held belief in human superiority over Extras. Should he be happy that he’d also proved—if there’d ever been any doubt—that human consciousness was the most physical of things, a spongy grey mess that could be cut up like a starfish, and survive in two separate parts? Should he be happy that the other Daniel Gray—without a doubt, the more complete Daniel Gray—had achieved his lifelong ambition?
The trainer yanked on his collar.
Meekly, he stepped onto the path.
The lush garden was crowded like never before—this was indeed the party of the decade—and as he came into sight, the guests began to applaud, and even to cheer.
He might have raised his arms in acknowledgement, but the thought did not occur to him.
Fidelity
From Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1991.
· · · · ·
Throughout history, some people have searched for the perfect love "potion." With the advent of nanotechnology, they may get just what they asked for …
* * * * *
I slipped out from between the sheets quietly, determined not to wake Lisa until I returned with breakfast, but then she stirred and held out a hand toward me, and although her eyes were still firmly closed—although, for all I knew, she might simply have been tossing in her sleep—I couldn't help taking hold of that outstretched hand.
She opened her eyes and smiled. We kissed. We were both still half asleep; it was like a warm, lazy dream of a kiss. My guard was down; it doesn't matter what you say in dreams.
"I love you," I whispered.
She flinched. Very slightly, but unmistakably. I cursed myself silently, but there was no undoing the mistake. I meant the words sincerely, and I had no doubt that she believed me; the trouble was, every affirmation I made inevitably reminded her of others. Others which had sounded equally convincing, at the time.
As I straightened and started to turn away, she said flatly, "Do you? For how long?"
I should have ignored her, walked out, made breakfast. The mood would have passed; it always did, eventually. I never could walk away, though; somewhere, somehow, I'd been brainwashed into believing that it was always better to talk things through.
I steeled myself and turned to face her. "You know how I feel about you. Tell me, have I ever done one thing to make you think I've stopped loving you?" Another mistake; Protestations of the Aggrieved Husband stank of betrayal, too.
She was sitting now, arms folded, rocking,slightly back and forth; an unsettling, compulsive motion. "No. I just wondered how long you expect it to last."
I knew from experience that nothing I could say would reassure her. There was no right answer. I might as well have shrugged my shoulders and replied: How the fuck should I know?
"All my life. I hope." I instantly regretted adding that lame—if honest—proviso, but I needn't have worried; she ignored it completely.
"All your life? Really? Not ten years, like my parents? Not twelve years, like yours? Not five years, like my brother? Not six months, like your sister? We're going to be the exception, are we? Theirs was a love that broke all the rules!" There was never any need to mention her two ex-husbands and my two ex-wives; they were there, implicitly, at the top of every list of the reasons we were destined to fail.
I said, blandly, "We'll just have to try harder than they did."
I no longer put much effort into the argument. It's not that she'd won me over to her absurd pessimism, or that I'd stopped caring about her pain. I loved her, and it hurt me to see her in the grip of these fears, however unfounded I believed them to be. I was weary, though, of arguing, when no amount of reason, or passion, seemed to get through to her. I had hoped that once we were married, she would at least, begin to accept the possibility that we had a real future together. Instead, she seemed to have become more fearful than ever, and I had no idea what more I could do to prove my commitment to her.
"Everybody tries," she said, scornfully. "How far do you think that gets them?"
I made a noise of pure exasperation. "What's the point in worrying about it? Things are working now, aren't they? If problems arise, we'll handle them. Or try to. What else can we do? We got married, we took a vow. What the fuck else can anyone possibly do?"
I must have raised my voice more than I'd meant to; the psychopath next door thumped the wall twice with something heavy, just as Lisa said, "We could use Lock."
I almost laughed, but I hesitated, waiting for a sign that she was joking. As a joke, it would have been brilliant. We could have collapsed into hysterics, rolling around on the bed, trying to outdo each other with mock advertisements: "Worried about the spark going out between, you and that Someone Special? Now, your worries are over! For a relationship that lasts, and lasts, and lasts—"
It wasn't a joke.
She said, "We have something important, don't we?"
I nodded dumbly.
"Something worth protecting?"
"Yes." Light-headed, I sat down on the bed.
"Ben?"
I broke out of my stupor. "Don't you have any faith in me? In us? What do you think—if we don't have our feelings cemented into place, they're just going to slip away?"
She said, quietly, "It's been known to happen."
I just shook my head and stared at her. She stared back. Pleading. Defiant. As my indignation faded, I was struck by a second, far more painful, realization: I had thought I'd understood her fears—after all, I'd been hurt myself, disillusioned myself—but now it was clear that I'd never even guessed at the depth of her insecurity. We'd only been married three months, but we'd been together for almost two years—and what had I done, in all that time, to help her throw off this suffocating misery? I'd listened and nodded, I'd patronized her, I'd recited platitudes. How could I have been so blind to her pain, for so long?
The worst of it was, I still didn't know what more I could have done.
"You said we have to try harder. This would be trying harder."
"No. It would be not trying at all."
That brought a surge of anger. "Yeah? And what's so awful about making it easy? I'm not a masochist. I don't need to suffer to be happy. I don't need to struggle. What do you think—it makes everything more precious? More worthwhile? Well, I've been through all of that shit, and I know it's not what I want. So if you think love is about martyrdom, maybe you should just—"
The wall shuddered again, and then Sarah started crying.
Sarah was the child of Lisa's first marriage; nine years old, but an infant for life, thanks to congenital syphilis. Lisa's husband had known that he had the disease, but had never bothered to tell her. She and the child had been cured—their bodies rid of the infection—but the damage done to Sarah was irreversible.
The familiar outrage welled up in me. No fucking wonder she's cynical; if anyone has a right.… A moment later, though, I couldn't help thinking: What is she saying now? That for all she knows, I'm no better than he was? Because if that's what she believed—
"I'll go," I muttered. I bent over and kissed her again, and found that I was trembling.
