Rags & Bones Read online

  “Would you like to join me?” he asked, casually waving toward the empty chair beside him. He shut down his cogbox to silence the morning program in his head. Suddenly, he found the announcers’ voices extremely irritating.

  “Thank you, Mr. Page, but Mrs. Page will be rising soon and … ”

  “She won’t be up for hours, we both know that. I can’t remember a day when Courteous rose before noon. Please, Georgiana. I have no one to enjoy the sunrise with.”

  The persist had little choice but to join him. She sat with her knees pressed together, not looking at him, but across the water at the smoky glow of the tenement fires. She had extended family down there, though she had not seen them in several years. She was afraid to visit. She was young and pretty and well fed. She might be targeted by a gang for her nice clothes, robbed, beaten, perhaps raped.

  “Have a muffin,” Beneficent said.

  “I had one already,” she confessed.

  “I know. I see a bit of crumb on your lip. May I?”

  He reached toward her—she was very careful not to pull back or flinch—and gently brushed the crumb away with his thumb. The first touch was accidental; this second touch was not.

  “Tell me something, Georgiana. How long has your family been with Courteous?”

  “Almost two hundred years,” Georgiana answered.

  “And what do you think of her?”

  “I care for Mrs. Page very much.”

  “No doubt, but I wonder if there might be some, for lack of a better word, resentment, too?”

  “Oh no. Why would I resent her?”

  “I would think resentment would be quite common for your people.”

  “To tell you the truth, Mr. Page, sometimes I … ” She took a deep breath. It was a very dangerous thing to say. “Sometimes I actually feel sorry for her.”

  “Really? And why should someone like you feel pity for someone like her?”

  She did not answer right away. Watching the smoke and the light that lit up the smoke, knees pressed together, refusing to look at him, she finally said, “When I was very small my mother told me a very old story, about a covetous man who wanted everything he saw, so when he died he was cursed with eternal hunger and thirst and imprisoned in a pool of water with a handful of delicious fruit hanging above him. Every time he bent to drink, the water receded, and every time he reached for the fruit, the fruit was pulled away.”

  “And that story reminds you of Courteous?”

  “It reminds me of … many people.”

  “But we all drink to our fill,” he argued. “We all eat till we can eat no more. Well, actually, ours is the feast that never ends.” He popped the remainder of the warm muffin into his mouth, delighting in its rich, moist texture. “For example, tomorrow I am off to hunt great whites off the coast of Australia, armed with nothing but a bowie knife. The odds are extremely likely that I will be eaten alive. Yet I will wake the next day as whole and healthy as I am right now.”

  “In a different body,” she pointed out. “And with no memory of what happened.”

  “Well,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t think being eaten alive is something I’d want to remember.”

  “I don’t see the thrill in doing something dangerous if there is nothing to lose.”

  “Funny you should say that. I’ve often thought the same about love.”

  There was an awkward silence. Now why did I bring up love? he wondered. It was an odd transition, from being eaten alive by sharks to love. As the millennia passed, however, it seemed less odd and more prescient.

  “Love or sharks, does it matter?” she asked. “Isn’t all of it pointless if … ”

  “Yes, Georgiana? If … what?”

  She lowered her eyes. “If you cannot fail.”

  He might have told her that he had failed. That he was a dismal failure when it came to love, if never having loved meant failure. For a shocking instant, he felt as if he might cry. He had not cried in … what? Five hundred years or more? When was the last time he had cried? He had no memory of it, but that did not mean much. The memory could belong to a lost day, like the one that would be sacrificed if he lost his duel with the sharks, for example. Your memory was only as complete as the latest download to your psyche-card.

  “Have you ever been in love, Georgiana?” he asked.

  She shook her head. Refusing to look at him. It was that refusal, he realized after many centuries of introspection, that had done him in. If she had looked at him in that pivotal moment, the spell her touch had cast might have been broken. It might have satisfied his curiosity, convinced him that she was nothing more than an ordinary girl, a finitissium unworthy of his notice.

  But she did refuse to look at him, and, even more than that first touch, it was the look withheld that doomed him.

  “What a pity,” he sighed. “I was hoping you could tell me what it feels like.”

  “But you love Mrs. Page,” the girl protested, looking at him finally, but he did not see it; he had turned away.

  He left for Australia the following morning, without Courteous—she was absurdly, when you think about it, afraid of the ocean—and bagged four sharks on the first day, but on the next his luck ran out. A twenty-foot monster rocketed up from the deep, taking him by surprise, ripping his body to shreds before dragging the mangled corpse into the lightless depths. His persist returned home with his psyche-card, backed up the night before his last ill-fated dive, and within an hour of touching down, Beneficent had been downloaded into the new body he had reserved on the morning of his departure. He remembered nothing of his demise, of course. That distasteful memory had perished with the body that was slowly digesting in the guts of a dozen sea creatures, from the shark that had shredded him to the tiny bottom-feeders that scuttle across the floors of silent seas.

  On the morning following his return, he was sitting on the balcony with his coffee, his cogbox on silent because just the thought of the announcers’ voices was enough to set his teeth on edge, when he heard the door slide open behind him. He turned, smiling expectantly, certain that it was Georgiana with another plateful of muffins. It seemed more than just a few days since he had seen her.

  “What?” Courteous asked. “Why do you look so surprised to see me?”

  “I thought you were asleep,” he answered easily.

  His wife slid into the seat beside him. She was naked. The newborn light of day caressed her luminous flesh, her flawless skin. Beneficent sipped his coffee and looked away.

  “You were smiling and now you’re not,” Courteous pointed out. “Do you find me hideous?”

  “What an absurd thing to say.”

  “Tell me what kind of body you’d like and I’ll switch.”

  “No, no. There is no need to switch, dear. I would love you no matter what look you wore.”

  “I don’t like your teeth,” she said.

  “My teeth?”

  “They’re too long. Big as a horse’s. Why did you choose something with such big teeth?”

  He forced himself to laugh. “The better to eat you with, my dear!”

  She wrinkled her nose. “It smells out here.”

  “It’s the fires. I rather like it.”

  “I don’t know how those people stand it.”

  “I suppose they have no choice.”

  “No, but we do.” She stretched her bare arms over her head. “Let’s go inside, and you can make love to me with those big teeth.”

  “Of course. Do you mind if I finish my coffee first?”

  “We haven’t made love since you came back from Australia. Is there something wrong?”

  His coffee had gone ice cold. He sipped it anyway. A tiny sip.

  “No.”

  “I’m curious to see if your teeth are the only things overly large.”

  She rose from the chair. She was glorious, perfect, and he did not look at her. The door slid shut behind her. Beneficent turned up the volume of his cogbox to drown out his own though
ts. Several minutes later, the door opened again, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was Georgiana, dressed in the drab gray uniform of a persist. He broke into a smile, though a small one. He was self-conscious now about the size of his new teeth.

  “Georgiana! But where are my muffins?”

  “Mrs. Page sent me to find you, sir.”

  “Why would she do that?” he wondered. “She knows where I am.”

  “She said you’ve either fallen off the balcony or got lost on your way to the bedroom.”

  Looking at her, he was struck by the contrast between her face and his wife’s. Courteous was stunningly beautiful, possessing features only the daughter of a Spool could afford, a face that put Helen’s to shame, and Georgiana’s, though pretty, was so ordinary as to be homely next to hers. Why, then, did something bright and wonderful bloom inside him at the sight of that ordinary face?

  “What shall I tell her, Mr. Page?”

  “Georgiana, we’ve known one another nearly five years now. Please, call me Beneficent.”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied with a slight stammer, lowering her eyes. He could see the fires down below reflecting in them. “Beneficent.”

  “Only when we’re alone,” he cautioned. “Never in Courteous’s presence.”

  He handed her his empty cup. Trailed the tip of his finger along the back of her hand. She kept herself very still, eyes downcast, holding his empty cup.

  “I’ve been thinking of you,” he said softly.

  “Of me?” She seemed shocked.

  “Since the morning you brought me those delicious muffins. In all my lifetimes, Georgiana, I swear to you I have never tasted anything more sumptuous, more … decadent than your muffins. Will you make them again for me? Tomorrow?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. … ”

  “Ah, ah.”

  “Beneficent.”

  “That’s a good girl.” He sighed. “Well, I suppose I must go see my wife now. Tell me something, Georgiana: What do you think of my new teeth?”

  “Your teeth?”

  “Do you think they’re too large?”

  She shrugged. “You can always switch if you don’t like them.”

  “Of course, but I was asking if you liked them.”

  “Everyone’s taste is different.”

  “You have no opinion, then?”

  “It isn’t my opinion that matters.”

  “It matters to me.”

  “Why?” Something like anger flashed in her eyes. “Why should my opinion matter to you or to anyone?”

  “Dear Georgiana,” he answered. “I may be immortal, but I am still human.”

  “I suppose that depends on the definition.”

  “Of immortality?”

  “Of what is human.” She moved at last toward the door, away from him. “And what is not.”

  Beneficent went inside and, finding Courteous waiting for him in their private quarters in all her unblemished perfection, made love to her, his cogbox blaring at full volume, not so much to drown out his own thoughts but to drown out Georgiana’s parting words, Of what is human … and what is not.

  Afterward, a quick shower and then a short tram ride to his job at the Research Center, the vast complex deep beneath the streets of New New York. Courteous’s father had arranged an appointment for him to the prestigious Relocation Committee, which was charged with the enormous task of finding an Earth-like planet in the vastness of space to which the 3Fs could flee when the sun expired in a few billion years. The work was not terribly demanding, since finitissium technicians performed the bulk of it. Committee members, like Beneficent, mostly reviewed reports they couldn’t understand, wrote—or had written for them—memoranda that few ever bothered to read, or, more often than not, played holographic games downloaded into their cogboxes. It was stultifyingly boring work, but serving on the Relocation Committee was considered a high honor and a stepping stone to the most powerful committee in the Republic, the Conduct Review Committee, Omniscient’s committee, the committee that held in its hand the power of life itself and the one upon which Beneficent desperately wanted to sit.

  Where he would be sitting, if not for one condition he had yet to meet. An unspoken but well-understood condition:

  Four years into it, and the marriage had yet to produce offspring.

  The bonds of holy matrimony were not terribly strong among the 3Fs. A marriage that lasted beyond four or five Transfers was uncommon; Beneficent was on his sixteenth marriage and Omniscient himself had been married more than forty times. Marriage doesn’t last, the saying went, but children go on and on. Courteous’s child—his child—would be a legitimate addition to the clan, and as its father Beneficent would be forever a link in the Spool dynastic chain. His marriage might—probably would—end, but never the children from it. It was the only reason he had pursued Courteous. And, as long as they remained childless, he remained vulnerable.

  He had broached the topic many times with her. It was the thing he talked about most. And it seemed the more he talked about it, the less she listened.

  “I’m not ready,” she would say. Or “In another decade or two. I’m still young. What’s the rush?”

  He dared not press too hard. She wasn’t very bright, but she had siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins who were and who might, if they already hadn’t, become suspicious that he had married her with less than honorable intentions.

  He had lunch that day with an old chum from his boarding school days, Candid Sheet, who was in his two hundred and seventeenth year of service on the Research and Development Committee. He hadn’t seen Candid in a while, so he had to reintroduce himself when they met in the restaurant.

  “Well, I was going to ask how the shark hunting went, but now I don’t need to,” Candid remarked drily. “You’re taller. I thought you never liked going over six-two.”

  “Courteous is five-nine and she wanted something at least six inches taller.”

  “I always stay within a half inch of my First Me,” Candid said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m cheap. I don’t want to change out my entire wardrobe with every switch.”

  Lunch was a light affair: lobsters, porterhouses, creamed asparagus and fries, baked Alaska, and, ordered on a whim, a plate of blueberry muffins, which arrived during their postlunch cigars.

  “Muffins?” Candid asked.

  “I positively crave them.” Beneficent took a big bite and was vaguely disappointed. They were not Georgiana’s muffins, not by a long shot. “Tell me what you think about the teeth.”

  “What teeth?”

  “These teeth.”

  “They’re blue.”

  “That’s from the muffin. I was talking about the size. Do you think they’re too large?”

  “Obviously someone thinks they are.”

  “Well, I just switched. I doubt Omniscient will grant a waiver based on the size of my teeth.”

  “He would if Courteous asked for one.”

  “I have a feeling she might.”

  “If she’s interested, I have just the thing for oversize teeth. The prototype has just been approved for testing.”

  “What is it?”

  “Simply marvelous is what it is! We developed it in conjunction with the Marriage Integrity Committee in an effort to strengthen and prolong fidelity. Basically the program accesses your visual cortex and overlays a holographic screen image over the face of your lover—or anyone’s face, for that matter … ”

  “A holographic image of what?”

  “Anyone you please! Say you’ve developed a little crush on a coworker or a friend or even some starlet in the televerse. It could be anyone. No need to risk divorce over a little crush. Simply execute the program and, voilà, the virtual face replaces your spouse’s. Or, in your case, Courteous could overlay your current look with your prior appearance, and gone will be the offensive teeth.”

  “That does sound marvelous,” Beneficent allowed.

 
; “And the most marvelous part is only you can see it. Your partner need never know.”

  “She might like that,” Beneficent said. “I do want her to be happy. We made love this morning, and I could tell the teeth bothered her, even though I was very careful to keep my mouth closed.”

  “I’ll send her a copy of the prototype.”

  “No,” Beneficent said, popping the last muffin into his mouth. “She’ll think it’s a virus and just delete it. Forward it to my cogbox, and I’ll pass it along.”

  “This is just the beginning, Beneficent,” his friend said, his eyes glowing at the prospect. “The second stage of human evolution is coming to an end. In another thousand years, we will be loosed from all corporal confinements. The third and final stage: pure conscious, pure being. The work of your committee will be scrapped—there will be no need to find a new Earth, and we will flee the dying solar system in a vessel the size of a tin cup.”

  Beneficent’s heart quickened with something very much like fear.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Our entire existence will be virtual, a holographic construct of our own design, in which everything we desire will be ours to live and relive for all eternity. The end of pain, loss, heartbreak … and big teeth! The universe will expire, but we will not. We will lie forever in a paradise of our own making. We will be like true gods, then.”

  “My! That sounds … ” Beneficent searched for the word. “Wonderful.”

  He tried out Candid’s fidelity program that night. The experience was disconcerting, bordering on the bizarre. The image kept slipping every time Courteous moved her head and there was a slight delay in reaction time. For example, Courteous’s mouth would come open and, a millisecond later, the overlaid hologram of Georgiana’s would follow suit. It was as if he were making love to both women—and neither of them. He found himself whispering to his wife, “Hold still, hold still.” For when she held still, the image of Georgiana’s face sprang to life in his visual cortex, the reproduction of it from his memory nearly perfect. His heart would leap exactly as if the woman in his arms actually were the woman of his dreams. Hold still. Hold still.