Blue Shifting (8 page)

He indicated another door along the hall. "Follow me."

He opened the door and entered the room. He turned to face me, his laughter mocking my shock.

Behind him, spread across the floor and the far wall, were the remains of what once might have been a human being. It was as if the wall and the floor had suddenly snapped shut to create a grotesque Rorschach blot of flesh and blood. The only part of the body that had survived the mutilation was the head. It sat beside Lassolini's right foot, staring at me.

It was the head of the same woman...

Lassolini left the room and strode to the next door. He paused on the threshold. "My dear..." I stumbled after him, amenable with shock.

Another atrocity. This time the woman had been lasered into bloody chunks and arranged on plinths around the room after the fashion of Dali.

"You're mad!" I cried.

"That did occur to me, my dear. Though what you see here is not the cause or symptom of it, but an attempt to cure myself. A catharsis, if you like."

"But... but which one is Stephanie Etteridge?"

"None of them is Stephanie," he said. "She is alive and well and living in Paris. And yet... all of them
were
Stephanie."

I took control of my shock, levelled the pistol and said with determination: "Look, Lassolini – I want answers. And if I don't get them..."

He bowed. "Very well, my dear. This way – and I assure you, no more horrors."

He strode down a long corridor. I had to run to keep up. We came to a pair of swing doors with circular portholes, and Lassolini pushed through. Another surprise: after the luxury of the ballroom, the stark and antiseptic utility of what looked like a hospital ward. Then I remembered that this place was once the city morgue.

We stopped at a line of horizontal silver tanks, and with an outstretched hand Lassolini invited me to inspect their contents.

I peered through the first frosted faceplate and made out the young, beautiful face of Stephanie Etteridge. In a daze I moved on to the next one, and the next: Etteridge, again, and again. Each tank contained a flawless replicas of the actress.

I stared at him. He smiled.

"Clones..." I murmured, and I experienced a curious vacuum within my chest.

"Perspicacious of you, my dear."

"But I thought the science was still in its experimental stages – I thought the Kilimanjiro Corporation had the rights..."

Lassolini laughed. "The science
is
still in its experimental stages," he said. "And I
am
the Kilimanjiro Corporation."

I gestured in the direction of the ritually slaughtered Etteridge clones. "But you still murdered human beings," I said. "Even clones are-"

Lassolini was shaking his head. "By no stretch of the imagination can they be considered human – as of yet. They are grown from DNA samples taken from the original Stephanie Etteridge, and their minds remain blank until the encoded identity of the subject is downloaded into them."

"So those...?"

"Merely so much dead meat. But it pleased me to sacrifice Stephanie, if only in effigy. These bodies were the ones I kept in supply for the time when she aged and required her youth again."

I looked into his youthful face. "So both you
and
the Stephanie Etteridge out there are clones?" I was beginning to understand.

He regarded me, as if calculating how much to divulge.

"We were married for twenty years," he said. "When her career came to an end, and she began to show signs of age, I promised her a new lease of life – virtual immortality. Perhaps only this kept her with me for so long, until my scientists perfected the technique of cloning, and the more difficult procedure of recording and downloading individual identity from one brain to another.

"She was sixty, ten years ago, when we downloaded her into the body of her twenty year old clone. Then she left me, and nothing I could do or say would make her return. I had such plans! We could have toured the universe together in eternal youth..." He seemed to deflate at the recollection of her betrayal.

"I considered hiring an assassin to kill the man she left me for, but as events transpired that proved unnecessary. She divorced me, and a matter of days before she was due to marry her lover he was arrested by the German police and charged with conspiring to sabotage a European military satellite. He was jailed for life."

He paused there and licked his lips. When he spoke next it was in barely a whisper. "You mentioned that you were on her 'case'?"

"That's right."

"Then... you're in contact with her?"

I was guarded. "I might be."

"
Then
bring
her
to
me
!" And I was shocked by the intensity of his emotion.

I glanced at the Etteridge clones, then back at the surgeon who had performed this miracle.

"I have a price," I said.

"Name it!"

With trembling fingers I fumbled with the buttons of my
cheongsam
and revealed my body.

~

Claude was snoozing in his flier when I jumped aboard and yelled at him to take off. I checked my watch. It was five-forty, and Etteridge and Dan were due to phase-out at six. We burned across Paris towards
Passy
.

Ten minutes later we sailed in over the Seine. Claude slowed and we cut across the corner of the Etteridge estate. I opened the hatch and prepared to jump. "See you later, Claude."

His reply was lost as I dived.

This time I missed the marshmallow and fell through a bush with leaves like sabres. I picked myself up, bleeding from a dozen cuts, and limped through the jungle. It was three minutes to six when I emerged from the trees, and the smallship was still berthed inside the marquee. I ducked back into the vegetation and ran along the side of the tent. Once behind it I left the cover and dodged guy ropes.

I lifted the tarpaulin wall of the tent, squirmed through the gap and ran over to the dorsal escape chute. I palmed the sensor and waited for the hatch to cycle – ten seconds, though it seemed like as many minutes. I checked my watch: one minute to go. Then the hatch slid open and I jumped inside and curled in the darkness. Above me, the computerised locking system of the interior hatch rumbled away to itself and finally opened. I pulled myself into the carpeted, semi-lighted corridor. And I'd realised a childhood ambition: I was inside a smallship.

I could see along the corridor and into the bridge. Etteridge sat in a swivel-seat between the arms of a v-shaped instrument console, speaking to a soft-voiced computer. Beside her was the sen-dep tank, the hatch dogged and the alpha-numerics pulsing a countdown sequence. Dan was already in there.

I drew my pistol and started towards the bridge. If I could untank Dan before he fluxed-

Then the 'ship phased into the
nada
-continuum.

And I could not move. I was a fly in amber, a statue immobile in the gelid medium of null-space. My watch insisted that we were in there for less than three minutes, but going by the biological clock in my head it was more like three hours. Outside, the void of the
nada
-continuum was a featureless grey mist. I felt ill.

Then my stomach lurched, the nausea lifted, and through the viewscreen I could see the concrete expanse of a penitentiary exercise yard. We were there for less than ten seconds. I heard the hatch wheeze open, and Stephanie's cries as a prisoner ran towards the ship and scrambled aboard. Laser bolts ricocheted from the concrete and hissed across the skin of the 'ship. Then the hatch slammed shut and I readied myself for another dose of space sickness.

We converted, and I giggled like a lunatic. If only my younger self, the kid who'd haunted the Orly star terminal just to get a glimpse of phasing starships, could see me now: stowaway on the craziest jailbreak of all time.

Three minutes became as many hours; time elasticated – then snapped back to normal as we re-emerged in the real world of the red-and-white striped marquee on the lawn of the riverbank mansion.

Through the viewscreen I could see Claude, waiting for me in his flier.

I ran.

The Etteridge clone and the escapee were in each others' arms when I reached the bridge; they had time to look round and register surprise and shock before I raised my pistol and fired, sending them sprawling stunned across the deck.

When I delivered Stephanie Etteridge, Lassolini would take from me the DNA which in four years, when cloned, would be a fully grown nineteen year-old replica of myself – with the difference that whereas now my body was a ninety percent mass of slurred flesh and scars, my new cloned body would be pristine, unflawed, and maybe even beautiful.

While Etteridge and her lover twitched on the deck, their motor neurone systems in temporary dysfunction, I untanked Dan. I hauled out the slide-bed, pulled the jacks from his spinal socket and occipital implant and helped him upright.

Of course, Lassolini had said nothing about what he intended to do with his ex-wife – and at the time I had hardly considered it; my mind was full of the thought that in four years I would be whole again, an attractive human being, and the shame and regret would be a thing of the past.

It never occurred to me that there would be a price to pay...

Now I thought of Stephanie Etteridge in the clutches of Lassolini. I imagined her dismembered corpse providing the sick surgeon with his final cathartic tableau, a sadistic arrangement of her parts exhibited beneath the chandeliers of the ballroom in the ultimate act of revenge.

Etteridge crawled across the deck to the man she had saved. She clung to him, and all I could do was stare as the tears coursed down my cheeks.

What some people will do for love...

~

I pulled Dan away from the tank. He was dazed and physically blitzed from his union with the infinite, his gaze still focused on some ineffable vision granted him in the
nada
-continuum.

"Phuong...?"

"Come on!" I cried, taking his weight as he stumbled legless across the bridge. I kicked open the hatch and we staggered from the smallship and out of the marquee. I had to be away from there, and fast, before I changed my mind.

Claude helped Dan into the flier. "What about-?"

"I'm leaving her!" I sobbed. "Just let's get out of here."

I sat beside Dan on the back seat and closed my eyes as the burners caught and we lifted from the lawn. We banked over the Seine and Dan fell against me, his body warm and flux-spiced from the tank.

As we sped across Paris, I thought of Etteridge and her lover – and the fact that she would never realise the fate she had been spared. I wished them happiness, and gained a vicarious joy I often experience when considering people more fortunate than myself.

~

I assisted Dan into the darkened office and laid him out on the chesterfield. Then I sat on the edge of the cushion and stared at the tape on the desk, set up two hours ago to record my last farewell.

I picked up the microphone, switched it on and began in a whisper. "I've enjoyed working for you, Dan. We've had some good times. But I'm getting tired of Paris – I need to see more of the world. They say Brazil's got a lot going for it. I might even take a look at Luna or Mars. They're always wanting colonists..." And I stopped there and thought about wiping it and just walking out. Even nothing seemed better than this bland goodbye.

Then Dan cried out and his arm snared my waist. I looked into his eyes and read his need, his fear after his confrontation with the infinite. And something more...

His lips moved in a whisper, and although I was unable to make out the words, I thought I knew what he wanted.

I reached out and wiped the tape, then lay on the chesterfield beside Dan and listened to his breathing and the rain falling in the boulevard outside.

The Disciples of Apollo

"I'm sorry..."

"How long?"

"At least six months, perhaps even as many as nine."

"How will I know when...?"

"For two days beforehand you'll feel drowsy, lethargic."

"And pain?"

"I can assure you that your condition is quite painless."

"I suppose I should be thankful for small mercies."

"There is a retreat for sufferers of the Syndrome. Because of the highly unusual nature of the disease, you are advised to spend your final weeks there. Of course, you can go before then, if you wish. Your family will be able to visit you-"

"I have no family."

"In that case Farrow Island might be perfect."

~

Between the time of diagnosis and the actual realisation that he was going to die, Maitland passed through a period of disbelief. There is a difference between the intellectual knowledge of one's eventual end, and the sudden sentence of death. Grief came one morning when he awoke and knew that his awakenings were numbered, and as he watched the dawn he realised that soon the sun would rise without his continued presence to witness it; grief filled his chest with nausea and suffocated him, and he turned like a loner in a crowd for someone on whom he might unburden his anguish and regret. There was no one, and this compounded his pain. At times in the past Maitland had managed to convince himself that he could do without the usual human involvements that most people took for granted. Yet now, with the imminence of his extinction, he realised that no one could live – or die – without having shared in some experience of affection, even love. He cursed himself for so aloofly denying down the years the inner voice that had cried out for human contact, cursed the coward in him that had shied from the trauma of new experience with the excuse that he had existed for so long without it... It came to him with the intensity of an cerebral scream that now it was too late. He had no chance of finding in six months that which had eluded him for a lifetime. He would die alone, as he had lived, and whereas to live alone was easy, to die alone, with so much guilt and remorse, and yearning for a somehow
altered
past, he knew would be beyond endurance.

~

Then, however, he passed through this phase of anger and entered a period of passive resignation, and he saw his death as the inevitable consequence of a life lived as he had lived it. He would gain nothing from regret, he told himself; his former self was a stranger whose actions he had no way of changing. He could only accept his fate, and anticipate anything that might lie beyond. He recalled the doctor's recommendation, and made arrangements to leave.

In the following weeks Maitland said goodbye to his colleagues at the university, making the excuse that he was taking a short vacation. He sold his house and all his possessions, his books and his classical record collection. He felt a buoyant sense of relief when at last his house was empty. Since the diagnosis, he had been troubled at the thought of his material possessions remaining
in
situ
after his death, mocking him; it was as if the acquisitions of a lifetime somehow circumscribed the parameters of his physical existence, and would bear mute testimony to his non-existence when he died.

Spring came and Maitland left the mainland on the ferry to Farrow Island. On the crossing he attempted to determine how many of his fellow passengers were also suffering from the Syndrome. As far as he knew there were no outward, physical symptoms of the disease – the physiological debilitation was taking place on a sequestered, cellular level. Nevertheless, Maitland convinced himself that at least a dozen other passengers, of the twenty or so aboard the ferry, were making their way to the hospice. Their despondent postures and sapped facial expressions spoke to him of moribund futures, bitter presents and only guilt and regret in retrospect. He realised, as the ferry approached the island, that they were mirror images of himself.

A car was awaiting him on the cobbled quayside of the small fishing village. He was greeted by Dr Masters, the woman with whom he'd corresponded.

"Aren't we waiting for the others?" he asked as he climbed into the rear of the car.

"Others?" Dr Masters regarded him with a smile. "The other passengers are Islanders. You are my only new resident this week."

The hospice was a sixteenth-century mansion set in wooded parkland on a clifftop overlooking the straits. Dr Masters conducted him around the workshops and recreation rooms, the library and dining hall. She told him that the residents could take their meals in their rooms, if they wished, and that the recreational facilities and group therapy sessions were optional.

Maitland was thus reassured. The thirty or so residents he had seen so far in the mansion had about them a collective air of apathy, as if the fact of their ends had reached back and retroactively killed them in both body and in mind.

In contrast, Maitland had briefly glimpsed a few lone individuals in the grounds, striding out resolutely across the greensward, or posed in isolation on the windy clifftop. Maitland fancied that he detected something heroic in their lonely defiance in the face of death, and ultimately sad and tragic also.

As the weeks passed and Spring turned gradually to Summer, Maitland imposed his own routine on the identical days that stretched ahead to the time of his death in the New Year.

He would rise early and breakfast alone in the hall before setting out on a walk around the island that would often take him three or four hours. He would speak to no one, not because he wished to be rude or uncivil, but because no one ever spoke to him. He was a stranger on the island and therefore an 'inmate' up at the mansion, and the locals viewed the victims of the Syndrome with suspicion, sometimes even hostility.

He would take lunch in his room and eat it slowly, sometimes taking an hour to finish. Then he would sit by the window and read, or listen to the radio, until the gong announced the evening meal at seven.

This meal he did take with the other residents in the main hall, though he rarely joined in the conversation, which he found inane and self-pitying. There were constant debates as to the reason for the disease, and the only conclusion ever arrived at by the residents was that they were the chosen ones of their God, Apollo. These people, in Maitland's opinion, were as irrational as the madmen who could no longer live with the thought of their deaths, and had to be removed to psychiatric units on the mainland.

One night, over coffee, Maitland decided that he had heard enough. He threw down his napkin and cleared his throat. The dozen residents at the table, the people Maitland considered to be the hard-core of the hospice's strange religious movement, until now debating among themselves, fell silent and stared at him. They sensed his long-awaited contribution to the discussion.

"There is," Maitland said, "no
reason
for what we have. It's a freak, an accident, a cellular mutation. We are just as likely to be disciples of the Devil as we are to be the chosen ones of your God. In my opinion we are neither."

Later, as he stood by the French windows and watched the sun fall behind the oaks across the river, he sensed someone beside him. "But how can you continue, Mr Maitland? How do you manage to live from day to day if you believe in nothing?"

Maitland could not reply, and retired to his room. He often wondered the same thing himself.

~

Summer gave way to Autumn, and the sunsets beyond the stand of oak turned the golden leaves molten. Maitland struck up an acquaintance with a fellow resident, a retired major who bored him with stories of his army life. The only reason Maitland tolerated his company was because he played a passable game of chess, and they would spend the long Autumn afternoons in the library, intent on the chequered board between them. They rarely spoke; that is, they rarely
conversed
. Maitland tried to ignore the major's monologues, for he was contemplating – in contrast to the old soldier's full and eventful life – the arid years of his own brief existence to date, his time at university, both as a student and later as a lecturer, and the missed opportunities he told himself he did not regret, but which, of course, he did.

The major's going came about on the third week of their acquaintance. The old man had been complaining of headaches and tiredness for two days, and his concentration had often wandered from the game. Maitland realised what this meant, and he was unable to say whether he was shocked by the fact of the Major's approaching death, or at the realisation, for the first time, that his own life too would end like this.

On the third day the major did not arrive, and Maitland sat alone by the window, his white pawn advanced to queen's four in futile anticipation of the challenge.

He took to playing chess against himself in the empty afternoons that followed the major's death. Winter came early that year, impinging on the territory that the calendar claimed still belonged to Autumn. Maitland found it too cold to enjoy his walks; the wind from the sea was bitter, and it often rained.

He appeared a lonely figure in the library, bent over the chessboard, apparently rapt in concentration but often, in reality, devising for himself an alternative set of events with which he wished he had filled his life. He repulsed all offers to challenge him, not with harsh or impolite words, but with a silent stare that frightened away would-be opponents with its freight of tragedy and regret.

One afternoon, during a storm that lashed and rattled the windows, Dr Masters joined Maitland in the library and tried to persuade him to take up her offer of group therapy, or at least counselling. They had experts who could...

He wanted to ask her if they had experts who could revise his past, give him the happiness he should have had long ago, but which had passed him by. He stopped himself before asking this, however. He knew that he had only himself to blame for the emptiness of his life.

Dr Masters said that she thought he should mix more with the other residents. Didn't he know that, even now, nothing was so important or rewarding as human relationships?

And Maitland replied that he needed nothing, and never had, of
human
relationships
.

One week later he met Caroline.

~

He noticed her first one Sunday at the evening meal. She was at the far table by the blazing fire, and it was more than just her youth that set her apart from the other diners; she was
alive
in a way that none of the others were. Something in her manner, her movements, told Maitland that she could
not
be dying. Then he experienced a sudden stab of grief as he realised that her dynamism might be just a facade, an act to disguise her despair.

Later it came to him – with a sweeping sense of relief – that she was related to one of the residents and down here on a visit. Relatives came so infrequently – like the Islanders they saw the victims of the Syndrome as bizarre and freakish, as if the disease were some kind of curse, or could be transmitted – that it hadn't occurred to him that this was what she was, the daughter or grand-daughter of one of the afflicted.

She excused herself from the table and Maitland watched her leave the room. Seconds later he saw her again through the window. She crossed the patio and ran across the greensward towards the clifftop. She wore moonboots, tight denims and a chunky red parka, and he guessed that she could be no more than twenty-five. Maitland had almost forgotten what it was like to feel such yearning, and to experience it now served only to remind him of his wasted years and the fact of his premature death.

In the morning Maitland went for a long walk through the wind and the rain. He returned, showered and ate lunch in his room and, feeling refreshed and invigorated, went downstairs to the library and played himself at chess.

In the middle of the afternoon he sensed someone beside him. He turned and saw the young woman.

She smiled. She was dressed as she was last night, with the addition of a yellow ski-cap pulled down over her ears, and mittens. Evidently she too had just returned from a walk.

"Can I give you a game?" she asked, indicating the board. Despite himself, Maitland smiled and began setting up the pieces.

They played for an hour with only the occasional comment, and then she looked up, directly at him, and said: "You're not like the others. You've not given in..."

He wanted to tell her that he had surrendered long ago, that his resolution now in the face of death was nothing more than the cynicism that had fossilised his emotions years before.

Instead he smiled.

"I mean it," she said, as she toppled her king in defeat. "There's something about you..." She gestured. "The other fools have given in, one way or another – gone stark staring mad or joined that crackpot cult."

She mistook his cynicism for valour, seeing him through eyes of youthful enthusiasm, and Maitland hated himself for the charlatan he knew himself to be.

He felt a sudden sympathy, then, with the residents who had taken to religion, or madness, as protection against the inevitable. At least they had had full and worthwhile lives against which to measure the futility and horror of their deaths.

"Perhaps if you were in the position of these people, facing death, you might give in too. Don't belittle them-"

Something in her eyes made him stop.

She began collecting the scattered pieces, placing them in the wrong positions. "But I am a resident here," she said. "Another game?"

They played all day, but Maitland gave little attention to the games. During the hours that followed he found himself intrigued by the young woman, who introduced herself as Caroline. He opened up, talked about himself for the first time in years. He wanted to turn the conversation around, to ask Caroline about herself, her life before the hospice but mainly her life since the diagnosis. Most of all Maitland wanted to know how she could remain so overtly optimistic with the knowledge of what was to come.

But she parried his questions and kept the conversation trivial, and Maitland was happy to join her in the exchange of banalities he would have found intolerable at any other time.