Speculative sullivan the.., p.87
Speculative Sullivan: The Collected Short Fiction, page 87
“We thought we were doing the right thing.”
“Who are you trying to kid?”
He had no answer for that.
“You were an educated man and you read books,” I said, pressing my point. “You weren’t some semi-literate boob without a clue. You studied history, and you knew how unscrupulous power-mongers use patriotism and religion to turn kids into killers. You’d been in a war yourself, even if you came through it without a scratch.”
“Please. . . .”
“How does it feel to know your son died trying to live up to an exaggerated image of manhood you planted in his innocent mind?” I shouted this question at him even though I knew how he felt about it. He had told me little else since the signal brought him back to me.
My accusation was apparently too much for Dad. He began to fade.
“Wait!” I had gone too far, and I knew I would miss him now that he was leaving me again. “Don’t go, Dad. I’m sorry.”
Agony was engraved in his face. His tormented image streaked and dissolved into an uncountable number of pale motes. A moment later he was gone.
“Shit.” I clutched my temples, regretful that I had been so hard on him. He was all the family I had left, even if he was only a simulacrum, a phantom recreated through uber-symmetry.
I probably should have told him that I still loved him, in spite of everything. There was so much to say, but the bad stuff had built up until I just couldn’t stop myself from spewing it at him. When the object of one’s anger appears magically out of nowhere, well . . . if it ever happens to you, you’ll see what I mean.
When I said “magically” just now, it was metaphorical. There was no magic in Dad’s reappearance. It was a product of quantum entanglement, one of the great mysteries of physics.
It tied in with superpositioning, but don’t ask me how. I’m not even good at basic math, let alone understanding uber-symmetry. I only know that it’s akin to 3/2 spin. Two complementary particles are spinning in opposite directions a vast distance away from one another while a third tunnels through space-time. Trillions of these third particles cluster until they accumulate into a signal that resurrects the image and personality of someone who died abruptly.
A receiving station, popularly called a memory cage, can be set up to intercept them once tunnel pathways are discovered. This one was the closest to Earth found so far.
The phenomenon is random, so you never know who’s going to come back to haunt us. Once a ghost does turn up, though, the signal tends to home in on the same area repeatedly. That’s how you can track down a dead loved one if you want to.
It can be pretty unnerving, though, because its appearance is from the moment prior to death, just before bodily functions ceased and the physical state began to decay. The bullet hole in Dad’s head wasn’t there yet, but he looked careworn and gaunt, just as I remembered him toward the end.
This was the fourth occasion on which I had seen his ghost. The first time he was silent and hazy, the second he was almost not there at all, the third he was unaware of me, although I could see and hear him.
The fourth time was the charm. Or it would have been, if I hadn’t blown it. It wasn’t a dialogue, it was an attack. I had hurt Dad and I wasn’t sure he would want to see me again.
Sitting in the dark memory cage, I felt like crying. But what good would that do? There was no way to get Dad back at that moment. It would be days or weeks before I had another chance to speak with him, if then . . . if ever. But when he returned, I would be here, hoping that it would go a little better next time. It was hard to see how it could go any worse.
So I would wait. What else could I do? I untangled myself from the cocoon and pressed the palm-sized button to let myself out. As the hatch swung open, light from the corridor made me wince.
Natalia Yermakova, the cage tech, looked in at me and nodded, smiling a little.
“Are you okay, Jim?” she asked, extending a hand to help me out of the cage.
“Yeah, thank you, Natalia.” I nodded as I emerged. I was in no mood to chat, so I made my way down the corridor, grasping handholds and pulling my floating body along.
Natalia kept the memory cage running and monitored the signals, studying its effects and trying to make sense of it all. She didn’t eavesdrop. Privacy was guaranteed, and no one would ever know a word of what had been said if I didn’t tell.
Still, Natalia must have heard me yelling, even if she couldn’t make out what I was saying.
She had seen disappointed people come out of the cage before, but usually that was because nothing happened—the signal had been too weak, the image too faint, the sound garbled. I had seen my father four times, and even had a short talk with him. His signal was remarkably strong.
He had been dead since 1968. Until a few years ago, I had no idea that I could ever talk to him again, other than in my imagination.
When I found out about his signal, I had to see him. That took some scheming. I would never have managed it if not for my fluency in bullshit. Everyone has a talent, and mine is talking my way into places where I don’t belong, such as the Titan Research Station. I volunteered to serve as the station’s “custodial tech,” a fancy title for a handyman, orbiting Saturn’s largest moon. There were few volunteers for the job who had constitutions as hardy as mine.
My physical condition was important because robots usually did the menial tasks, but sometimes hard radiation messed up their programming while they were on the station’s exterior. So a human who could perform some of their tasks was needed, just in case. All the other people on the station had specific jobs, but not me. I was the grunt with almost miraculous powers of longevity and recuperation. The fact that I had worked in a lot of different occupations during my long life was in my favor, too. Most applicants just wanted to get off the Earth, but I had a more compelling argument. Personnel gave me the benefit of the doubt and I was hired.
Sometimes it was hard, doing a machine’s job. But when the bugs were pounded out of the robots’ programming, they went back to work and I had plenty of free time. Dad’s signal was currently passing through the station every once in a while. Things had worked out just as I planned.
It helped to know that all the ghosts were archived. Upon request, their signals were transmitted back to Earth so that people could at least see and hear the deceased again. But that was second-hand contact at best, like watching a kinescope of The Honeymooners, instead of being a member of the live audience in 1955.
In the memory cage, you got the real deal.
Maybe it was just as well that you couldn’t touch, smell, or taste the long-dead person. But you saw her or him and heard the voice—and most startling of all, sometimes you could interact with the consciousness.
So I took the elevator up to an orbital dock, and from there boarded a ship to Mars, and finally ventured past the asteroid belt and Jupiter, nearly eight hundred million miles from home, to see and hear dear old Dad once again. Not quite in the flesh, but a more than reasonable facsimile.
Or maybe it was just my idea of him, given shape and sound.
Opinion was divided on whether the ghosts were genuine recreations or projections of thought patterns, reshaping the particulate signal to our needs or desires, memories of the dead personified and brought back to life through some heretofore unknown property of physics. That seemed far-fetched to me, but no more so than the other hypothesis.
Be that as it may, I went to my quarters in a funk after talking to Dad’s ghost. I should have been ready, but I wasn’t. It was just too disturbing to face him again.
Those three earlier times in the memory cage had probably made it worse, because I didn’t know if I would ever get the chance to unload. As the old adage goes, he was so near and yet so far away.
Until the fourth time, I didn’t quite grasp what it would be like to actually hear him reply to my pointed questions, or to see the suffering in his face as he responded to my wrath.
I began to feel like a real son of a bitch.
I wrapped myself in my net, hoping there would be no robotic breakdowns while I wallowed in guilt. Not wanting to do anything, I just loafed and felt sorry for myself. I couldn’t sleep, so I tapped the feed from Earth, and saw that things were no better than when I left—maybe even worse.
The news made me glad I was in space.
The Water Wars wore on, with people dying in numbers that made World War II seem trivial by comparison. Most of the deaths were from dehydration, or eating etiolated plants that had accumulated toxins from the seared soil.
But good old-fashioned mayhem killed millions, too. The oligarchs’ private armies were slaughtering all those who had the temerity to approach the enclaves of the wealthy minority.
Trying to convince myself that current affairs had been dire since the beginning of recorded history, I rummaged through the staser for something to eat and came up with a pistachio licker. It tasted okay, but I didn’t derive all that much pleasure from it. It’s tough to enjoy yourself when you know you’ve been abusive to your own father, especially since he was in emotional distress. I guess I might claim that I couldn’t help myself. But that’s been the excuse for the hard-hearted from time immemorial, so it didn’t help.
Moira Okinda buzzed me. I accepted her projection, and there she was in all her dark-skinned and bright-eyed loveliness.
“Jimmy, how are you?” she asked, looking concerned, her head and torso in the air and her hips and shapely legs in the staser.
“I’m okay.”
“I heard you tried the memory cage again.”
“Yeah.”
“Did anything happen this time?”
“Way more than I bargained for.”
“Oh . . . so you talked with him?”
“It was more like I talked at him.”
“Well, you had a lot to say.”
“Too much, as it turned out.”
“It must have been stressful.”
“It was and still is.”
“I’m sorry.” Moira was a nice person, and I liked her very much. I might even have loved her, if I had let myself.
“I appreciate that, Moira.” But I really didn’t. Not then.
“What’s it like in the memory cage?”
“You know,” I said. “You’ve been in there.”
“Not when a signal was coming in.”
“It’s enervating.”
“I’m sorry.” Her sympathy was genuine, even if I didn’t deserve it.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll get over it.”
“Of course you will.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but there was no reason to cause her concern.
“Would you like some company?”
I had to think about that for a moment, and then decided against it. “Not right now, Moira, but thank you. I need to be alone.”
“Sure, see you later.” She tried to smile as she signed off.
After I lay there a while longer I thought about buzzing her back to say I’d changed my mind, but it wouldn’t have been fair to her.
Without Moira’s image and voice in my cramped quarters, my solitude felt even more desolate than before. I wondered what she liked about me, a rootless Methuselah who had never mastered a professional career. I could only speculate.
Back when switching genders first became fashionable, I made the change for a few years. As a female, I went after both men and women promiscuously. Except for the rearranged plumbing, I was no different than I had been as a man. I indulged in self-destructive behavior because I was lonely, stuck in a job I hated, like every job I ever had. Fortunately, I was physically resilient, thanks to the fixbees in my system, so I worried little about disease.
Moira didn’t hate her job as the station’s spectrologist. But she was just as isolated as I had been in my female days, maybe even more so, considering where she was living.
Once, relaxing after sex, I asked her if she had ever considered making a switch.
“No,” she said, “I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s hard for me to put it in words.”
“You just wouldn’t feel right?” I persisted. “Is that it?”
“Essentially.”
“It’s probably true,” I said. “I never felt entirely comfortable when I was a woman.”
“How long before you changed back?”
“Twelve years.”
“You really gave it a chance,” she said, kissing me on the neck. Her warm breath delighted me. “Twelve years.”
“It wasn’t such a long time, really.”
“Not for you, Grandpa,” she said, smiling. “Why did you make the change in the first place?”
“I was trying to keep up with the times.”
“Considering your age, I’d say you succeeded, Jim.” She laughed and kissed me again, and I drew her to me. We always had a good time together.
But I couldn’t be with her tonight, not after what I’d been through in the memory cage. Maybe I’d see Moira in a few hours, or maybe not. After all, where would she go? Where would either of us go while we lived on the station? Maybe she would find another lover, but I didn’t think so. Of the seventeen other people working on Titan Station, six couples were paired off. The five remaining souls were the station commander and four specialists who didn’t seem inclined toward romance. Or maybe they just didn’t have time for it.
If Moira decided to go with someone else, I could live with it. At least I thought I could. I might feel differently if she really did dump me.
I had something else on my mind just now: the misery of a past I had never been able to escape. Conning my way onto the Titan Station was my earnest attempt at wrestling with it instead of fleeing from it, for the first time since Dad’s suicide.
It seemed that I couldn’t handle it, even after all this time. As if not a moment had gone by, my raw emotional wounds were still bleeding. Maybe a brain-blank would be preferable to ongoing angst, but that wouldn’t be available until I got back to Earth. For now, I was determined to see it through.
That was another reason I was angry at Dad. He had been a great proponent of facing one’s inner demons.
Dad was a Freudian back in the day, as many educated people were in the mid-twentieth century. When he went to work at the state hospital I was only five or six. I was brought up to believe that the mentally ill were salvageable, and that they had rights like everyone else. Indeed, my earliest memory of going with Mom and Jerry to visit Dad at the hospital was not unpleasant. There were no screaming lunatics in straitjackets staggering through the halls, no shock treatments or lobotomized patients in sight. In a big, sunny recreation room people played cards, read, or listened to music, and one woman sat staring through a window. It was too cold to go outside that day, or they might have been allowed on the expansive lawn adjacent to the main building. They didn’t look like crazy people at all to my innocent eyes.
I had no idea that most of them were sedated.
A lot of the personnel on the station were, too, but not with tranquilizers. Oneiric stimulants were the preferred means. Onees, as they were popularly called, were little charged wedges that interacted with the nervous system through the pores, turning the mind inward, away from the infinite blackness surrounding the station’s insular metal skin. It was tough to spend months in a cramped space where all you had to look at was a yellow-green ice moon, the luminous rings of a gas giant, and the stars in the yawning night stretching to eternity.
Onees made the tedium a little more bearable.
An onee fucked you up pretty good, in fact, sending you on voyages to new places that were strangely familiar. All you had to do was hold one in your hand. When you’d had enough of your dream world, you simply let go of the onee and it was collected magnetically for return to the station’s oneiric library. You were right back where you started, as if you hadn’t been anywhere at all.
You hadn’t, of course. But you could easily forget that while you were holding the onee and staring at nothing.
It wasn’t nothing to you, of course. You passed through the bulkhead and loped down deserted streets or sailed on a galleon through a cloud, while objects transmogrified and people appeared out of thin air to befriend you, frighten you, delight you, disgust you, guide you or lead you astray, share your secrets or betray you. Some asked you for help and some didn’t seem to notice you existed as you turned down an alleyway to nowhere or orbited a desolate planet, counting its craters as you drifted among the stars.
If your mind could form such persuasive vistas out of a positronically charged, minuscule metal wedge, one could barely imagine what it might do with an enhanced particulate signal.
Uber-symmetry, superpositioning, and tunneling are mysterious physical properties, but the workings of the mind are pretty tricky, too.
Put the two together in an unlit chamber and you have the memory cage.
How could particles at vast distances be shaped into ghosts? That question brought me back to the hypothesis that we drew them to us through an as-yet-unknown process of the unconscious mind.
But if so, why did I have to go all the way to Titan to visit my father’s ghost? Why couldn’t I see him on Earth?
There was no end to my obsessive speculation, until the explosion in the cargo bay. It was silent and it didn’t spread into a fire because the bay was open and consequently there was no oxygen. On my end of the station we felt a shock, a brief EM pulse dispersing into the vacuum. The entire incident was over in an instant. Three people were injured, but only one of them died. She had been handling the freeze-dried food shipment with the bomb in it, sent from Ares Colony. Her body was flung out into space and never recovered.
The dead woman was Moira.
You’ve doubtless heard of this infamous act of sabotage, the first of its kind beyond the asteroid belt. How the saboteurs had managed to hide a bomb in the crate was a matter for investigation, but one thing was immediately clear to everyone on the station. The ferment on Earth had reached us. There was no getting away from it anymore.
