Rags & Bones Read online

  Afterward, he held her in his arms, her head resting on his chest, and he watched the dust motes spin in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the cracks between the rotting boards. He thought of the CRC pulling his persist’s bloated corpse from the trench reeking of human waste. The image had been mass broadcast, and he had inadvertently opened the message in his cogbox. He deleted it immediately, but it was too late, he had seen it.

  Rot. Decay. He saw it everywhere lately, though it had surrounded him for generations. Even the beautiful flowers of the Spool gardens growing in abundance reminded him of the finiteness of all life—except his own. One day a strong wind would come and the walls of the old cottage would collapse. The wood would break down to its unrecognizable essence. Winter would come and the flowers would die. And the girl in his arms? She, too. She, too.

  But he would go on and on. Young, ancient, blessed, cursed. The time was coming, as sure as the sun would one day swallow the Earth in its fiery maw, when every atom of her body, all seven billion billion billion of them, would be scattered and diffused. Nothing would remain but his memory of her, to torment him for eternity.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked. “Your heart is beating very fast.”

  “I’m wondering if she suspects.”

  “Of course she suspects. That’s why she played that trick on you, told you I was sacked.”

  “She cannot find out, Georgiana. Where does she think you are?”

  “I told her my brother was sick.”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

  “You don’t know many things about me.”

  “I want to know everything. Your favorite color, what sort of music you like, what you dream about, the secret things you’ve never told anyone … ”

  “I don’t have secrets. Well, just one, and that one you already know.”

  They could run away. Flee the city. It would be absurdly easy. There were still remote places in the world where they could hide. He could fake a suicide—the master files of all sibyls were erased, their psyche-cards destroyed. They could grow old together and, when they died, his atoms would scatter and mix with hers, like a flock of fourteen billion billion billion birds twirling in the sky.

  “Well, there might be one more,” she said.

  “And that is? Come, you must tell me, Georgiana!”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “I don’t care. Tell me.”

  “She will never give you a child.”

  He was shocked. “How do you know?”

  “Because then you could divorce her. She knows the reason you married her. She’s known since the beginning. ‘He thinks I’m stupid. He thinks I don’t know what he really wants.’ ”

  The imitation was so dead-on, Beneficent laughed. “That was perfect. You sound just like her, emphasis, inflection, even your expression. Perfect!”

  “I have spent my entire life in her company,” Georgiana reminded him. “Nearly everyone has known her longer, but there is no one who knows her better. Because I am her persist: What does it matter what I know? And I will tell you one last thing I know, my love—she does not love you.”

  “Then why doesn’t she leave me?”

  “You really don’t know? The answer is obvious. For the same reason she left so many before you at the altar. She is terrified of failure. Making a mistake, admitting she made a mistake—unthinkable! Now that she’s taken the plunge, she will never admit defeat, and she will never allow you to force defeat upon her. As long as there is no child, you will stay, for it is the only thing you desire!”

  “The only thing I used to desire.”

  He urged her onto her back and stared deeply into her eyes.

  “Now tell me what you desire.”

  She looked away. “Don’t make me say it. Please.”

  “I will hold you here until you say it, my darling, even if it takes a lifetime.”

  “A lifetime,” she whispered. “Yes.”

  “A thousand lifetimes.”

  And she replied, breaking his heart, “A thousand? No.”

  The hours with her lasted no longer than a blink of her mortal eye. Those apart from her were longer than the age of the universe. He had never worked hard; now he hardly worked at all. He spent his days scheming, scouring the globe for a remote place in which they could hide, researching the law regarding the penalties in case they were caught, inventing plausible scenarios for a fake suicide. It struck him as exceedingly ironic that he served on a committee tasked with finding a new Eden before the sun blew up in their faces.

  He managed to keep his plans from Georgiana for some time. He feared she might refuse. Not because she didn’t love him, but because she also loved her family. If the truth came out, it would mean certain banishment to the ghetto, a sentence worse than death, their lives cut short by violence and disease and the slow suicide of despair. At some point, of course, he would have to tell her. He just didn’t know when. Or how.

  And then one day it slipped out.

  Courteous was off on a weeklong shopping trip in Buenos Aires with her mother and twelve of her closest sisters. Beneficent gave the staff the week off, and they had the quarters entirely to themselves. For the first time, they had complete privacy. No schedule to keep. No facade to maintain. He had never known such feelings of freedom and release, and he was a man who enjoyed the ultimate freedom. He feasted upon her, day and night. He explored every inch of her lovely terrain. Drunk with love, he let down his guard and confessed his plans.

  “You can’t be serious,” she said.

  “I couldn’t be more serious, my darling.”

  “Oh, Beneficent! My wonderful, mad, naïve, immortal lover. You know it could never work.”

  “But why? We’ve but to commit to it with all our hearts. The rest is mere logistics.”

  “It will never happen. You’re too afraid of death.”

  He was stunned. He had expected her to bring up her family. She would refuse to sacrifice them upon the altar of their love.

  “You’re forgetting who you’re talking to,” he said.

  “All of you are,” she went on, speaking of the 3Fs. “It is the fruit you hunger for, the drink you thirst for.”

  “What you describe isn’t fear but its opposite,” he said.

  “What does death bring, Beneficent?” she asked him.

  He found himself shaking. Why was he shaking?

  “Annihilation.”

  “No. It brings beauty.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “What is life without death, Beneficent? You of all people can answer that question. A never-ending orgy of emptiness that you stuff with meaningless activity. Everything is disposable, including your relationships—especially your relationships. Courteous understands that much at least. She wants to pretend it matters, that by killing death you have not killed all hope of love.”

  “But she doesn’t love me. You said so yourself.”

  “Not you, Beneficent. Not love for any particular person. Love. There is no meaning, no beauty, no love without death. Don’t you understand? That’s why you’re afraid. You hunger for something that only death can give you.”

  “No,” he said, thinking it over. “I can’t put into words why you’re wrong, but I can say this: I love you. I know I love you. I will always love you, though I live ten billion years.”

  Her eyes welled with tears of pity. She touched his face. “That is the effect, not the cause, my love. We both know why you fell in love with a persist, a servant girl, a finitissium. I will pass like a spring rain, Beneficent. And you will go on.”

  He puzzled over her argument for many days. One rainy afternoon he walked alone in Omniscient’s gardens, amid the wildflowers and roses, and wondered how much of their beauty came from the fact that they would fade. Death was the horrible blemish they had managed to wipe clean from the human face. Now perfected, was that face hideous? By making it perfect, had they defiled it past all recogniti
on? Was that what lay behind their obsession with “looks,” disposable bodies with which they quickly grew dissatisfied, casting them aside as casually as an old coat? In another thousand years, we will be loosed from all corporal confinements, Candid had predicted. There would be nothing outside themselves but a “tin cup” floating in a lightless void. The pleasures of the flesh would exist only inside their own holographic constructs, in every way “real” but in no way actual. The ultimate freedom of life unending. The ultimate prison of unending life.

  “Georgiana is right,” he said to himself, to the roses and wildflowers, to the rain. “It is about death. Not my own, though. No, not mine!”

  He turned on his heel and hurried back to his office. He had been looking at the problem from the wrong angle. He’d been selfish. It was not what he was willing to give up, but what was in his power to give. In less than an hour, he had settled upon the basics, the broad outline of a very narrow path that led the way out of his impossible dilemma.

  As he told Georgiana: once the heart commits, the rest is logistics.

  “I have something for you,” he told her a week later. They were cuddling beneath a blanket in the old cottage. The year had grown old, the days cold, gray, and cheerless. Naked, she shivered against him.

  He pressed an envelope tied with red ribbon into her hand.

  “What is it?” she asked. He had never given her a present before.

  “Open it and see.”

  She pulled out the small blue card and said, “Oh, no, Beneficent.”

  “Only in case something happens. I’m leaving for my anniversary trip in three days.”

  It had been his idea to celebrate the five-year mark of his marriage on the moon, the place where his vow to love Courteous for all eternity had been sealed.

  “It’s a very touching gesture, my love,” Georgiana said. “But if something should happen, they will ask why your wife’s persist has your psyche-card.”

  “It isn’t my psyche-card.”

  Her eyes widened in the gloom. “Courteous’s?”

  “Yours.”

  She was speechless. What he said made no sense.

  “Or it will be,” he added nervously. Her silence unnerved him. “Once you’ve been downloaded onto it.”

  “You offer a gift that isn’t yours to give,” she said finally.

  “Only if I’m caught.”

  “No,” she said, pressing the card against his fist. “Take it back, Beneficent. I don’t want it.”

  “It doesn’t hurt, you know,” he murmured, gently stroking her bare arm.

  “I won’t be downloaded onto a piece of plastic. Besides, what would be the point?”

  “I have a friend who works on the Research and Development Committee. There’s a program he’s working on that can merge two psyches. Well, not a true merger. The donor psyche loses consciousness forever. The receiver retains his personality and memories, but incorporates those of the donor into himself.”

  “You would … take me into yourself?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I don’t mean now. I mean … I mean, just in case. When … when the time comes.”

  “You would make me immortal.” Her eyes shone with wonder and love. “Hiding forever inside you.”

  “I told you once I wanted to know everything.”

  She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, again and again, pressing her deliciously warm flesh against the length of his body and, oddly, he swore he could smell muffins.

  That evening he and Courteous dined at the Olympus, which no one called the Olympus, but the Top, as in, “Let’s meet at the Top.” The restaurant sailed a thousand feet above the city, held aloft by a quantum envelope of antigravity, offering spectacular sunset views of the metropolis, where the 3Fs might dine like the gods, far removed from the petty mortal strife of the ghetto. The only thing missing was ambrosia, though the Top made up for it with twelve courses, a wine list unrivaled in the Western Hemisphere, and an after-dinner massage.

  “To five wonderful years,” Beneficent said, raising his glass.

  “No, to persistence,” Courteous said.

  Persistence? Was that a play on words? He said, “That implies I had a choice whether to pursue you. But the truth is I couldn’t give up even if I wanted to.”

  She set down her glass without drinking. “Then why did you?”

  “I didn’t. I haven’t. What do you mean?”

  “What is five years to us, Beneficent?” she demanded. “What is five hundred? Five thousand? A day. An hour. A blink of an eye. Look around you. Everything you see in this room, everything you see outside this room for as far as you can see it, all of it will be gone one day, but you and I will endure.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We will endure.”

  “Why do we celebrate anniversaries and birthdays anyway? Why do we celebrate any benchmark when time no longer matters?”

  “It isn’t about time. It’s about—”

  “It’s all about time,” she snapped. “Time so abundant it has no value anymore. Once the most precious thing on earth, now the most worthless. It is as if we took a diamond and ground it into a lump of coal.”

  “My darling, you know where that kind of thinking leads. Remember what they teach us in school: Value the moment. Don’t think too much about the future. Don’t try to imagine yourself a thousand or ten thousand years from now. Imagine now.”

  “And what do you imagine when you imagine now, Beneficent?”

  “I imagine you being happy.”

  “And I imagine you being honest.”

  Their first course arrived, gliding to their table upon a silver tray. Grilled flounder in a light cream sauce. The fish’s eye stared back at Beneficent, blank, unblinking, dead.

  “Are you enjoying her, Beneficent?” Casually, as if asking how he liked the fish. “Enjoying the now of her? Because, you know, the then will not be so pretty or exciting. Will you still be enjoying her in two hundred years, when you can hold the entirety of her being in the palm of your hand? She is a diamond now. What will you do when time has ground her to dust?”

  He set down his fork and said quietly, “Do you want a divorce?”

  She laughed. “Over Georgiana? That thing? Really, Beneficent, you’re forgetting who you’re talking to. You should be punished, I agree, but it would be an odd punishment that gave you exactly what you wanted!”

  “You will dismiss her—for real this time.”

  “That would be a fitting punishment for her, but not for you. You were willing to sacrifice your own persist to rescue her, which makes me wonder what you would not risk. You might leave me, in any case, and I will not let you leave me, Beneficent. Do you understand? I will not allow you to leave.”

  “And how will you stop me?”

  “You know how I will stop you. What masochistic pleasure does it give you to hear me say it?”

  “You’ll report her to the CRC. She’ll be tried for consorting and put to death.”

  “You really should thank me, Beneficent,” Courteous said with a brilliant, beautiful smile. Her face was flawless, the face of Venus herself, and the most hideous thing Beneficent had ever seen. His stomach turned in revulsion.

  “Thank you?” he choked, tasting the oily bile bubbling up the back of his throat.

  “For keeping her as my persist. That way you may enjoy her until time is finished with her.”

  “Hmmm.” He tried to appear calm, but his blood roared in his ears, his heart threatened to explode from his chest. “That seems a punishment even odder than divorce.”

  “Do you think so? She will fade bit by bit before your very eyes, hour by hour, day by day, year by year, the slow torture of time, her malicious lord, Beneficent, though not yours, not yours. Your torture will be to watch it—to watch and be powerless to stop it.”

  “Your punishment presumes that I love her,” he pointed out coldly, or at least he hoped he sounded cold. Hold still, hold still!

  “Your
words confirm that you do.”

  She dismissed the subject then with a wave of her hand. His love for Georgiana held no more significance for her than the sun setting over the smoky horizon. Pretty in its way, spectacular even, but commonplace, an everyday occurrence.

  “Now you said on the way to dinner that you had a surprise for me,” she said. “Something to do with our anniversary. Tell me, Beneficent. I’m dying to know.”

  The second course arrived: a tomato bisque and rolls dripping in butter. Courteous tore off a piece of bread and dunked it into the rich soup, and the flesh of the bread turned scarlet.

  “It’s not something I can tell you,” he said. “I must show you.”

  “I’d prefer that you just tell me.”

  “And I would prefer that I just show you.”

  Through the next ten courses, as all light bled from the sky, during the after-dinner massage, lying naked beside her on the white divans, the twinkling lights of the city shining through the glass floor, like, his mind insisted, a million diamonds, and then the shower afterward, lathering her perfect flesh, her quintessential form, he maintained his composure. They chatted about their pending celebration upon the moon. Gossiped about the latest scandal among the First and Foremost Families. Discussed the recent news, fresh from their cogboxes, of the fighting in Africa and the proposed union of the Republic of North America with the United States of Europe into one mega-state, the United Atlantic Republic. They boarded the private shuttle a little after midnight, sated in body and spirit.

  “Where are we going?” Courteous asked, for it was clear they were not heading in the right direction. “Beneficent? Where are you taking me?”

  “To show you the surprise.”

  He took her hand. Smiled reassuringly. Kissed her gently. The shuttle dropped into the unloading bay and then it was just a few steps to the tram, and then just a couple of stops to their destination.

  “My Transfer boutique?” she asked. “Beneficent, what do you have up your sleeve?”

  “Come and see,” he said.

  The Transfer agent was waiting for them behind the frosted-glass door, smiling, obsequious, giddy with excitement, a coconspirator in Courteous’s anniversary surprise. Giggling, the agent led Courteous to the prep room, asked in a very dramatic voice, “Are you ready, darling?” and threw open the door. Courteous gasped.