Rags & Bones Read online

  Lying upon the padded table was the wedding look she had chosen over her mother’s objections five years before. Tall with flashing green eyes, because green was Beneficent’s favorite color.

  “Well, what do you think?” Beneficent asked, beaming. “They’ve discontinued this look, but I managed to pull a few strings … ”

  “I found it,” the agent said proudly. “Pulled it out of deep, deep storage. The last one!”

  Courteous pursed her lips and said, “I don’t want it.”

  “Oh, darling, please say that you will,” Beneficent said. “It’s perfect, don’t you see? A new beginning—or rather, another chance at the same beginning.” He turned to the agent. “A moment, please.”

  When they were alone, he took her hands in his and gazed imploringly into her eyes.

  “My old look is waiting in the next room, my love,” he whispered. “I’ll switch, too, and it will be as if the last five years didn’t happen.”

  “It’s too soon,” she whispered.

  “Your father signed the waivers yesterday. Here.” He dropped the documents into her cogbox.

  “Father approved?”

  “Courteous, you are right. Of course it was stupid—is stupid—of me to consort with that girl. It’s not the thing I desire, but denied that desire I turned to her … ”

  “The thing you desire … ” she echoed. “What do you desire, Beneficent?”

  “You know what I desire. What sadistic pleasure does it give you to hear me say it?”

  “You would have me believe you seduced Georgiana because I refused to bear you a child? It is my fault?”

  “It is the fault of our curse, Courteous. The blemish upon our perfect face.”

  “Don’t talk to me in riddles. I don’t care about the waiver; I was never fond of that look.”

  “But I was,” he said. “Courteous, you know there is no choice between her and you. How can there be? You said it yourself. She will pass; you will endure. I pledged to care for you for all eternity, and that I will. No mortal thing can ever come between us—how could it? No matter how much I think it can’t or hope it won’t, the flower fades, the rain passes, the sun winks out.”

  He fell to his knees before her, still clinging to her hands.

  “Put on the look,” he pleaded. “You may switch when we return, but for this, for me, for us, put it back on.”

  “Are you a wise man, Beneficent?” she asked, her eyes filling with tears. “Or are you a fool?”

  But she allowed him to lift her onto the empty table. Beneficent summoned the Transfer agent. Handed him Courteous’s blue psyche-card for the upload to her master file. Her eyelids fluttered; she was “saved.” A final kiss and then, whispered so only he could hear, “I will do it, Beneficent. I will bear your child.”

  “I know, I know,” he whispered back, stroking her perfect cheek. He spoke the obligatory words, May you wake safely upon that far shore … He stepped away from the table. The agent took his place. Unobserved, Beneficent removed her card from the slot and inserted an identical card.

  She will pass; you will endure.

  The agent administered the first shot, the one that stole away her consciousness. As she drifted into oblivion, she kissed Beneficent’s hand, and said in a desperate voice, “Tell me it isn’t pointless. Tell me that it’s beautiful.”

  “It is not, and it is,” he told her, but she had already fallen asleep.

  “That was the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” the agent said, tears streaming down his cheeks. A moment later, his joy turned to confusion: the system was not responding to the Transfer command. His fingers danced over the touch screen, trying to track down the error.

  “Is there a problem?” Beneficent asked.

  “Incompatible data streams,” the agent muttered. “The psyche-card isn’t matching the master file … ”

  “But it matched on the upload,” Beneficent said.

  “I know! I’ve seen mismatches before on uploads—a damaged psyche-card or an input error—but never afterward.”

  He pulled the psyche-card from the slot to examine it for defects. Beneficent left his wife’s unconscious body and stood behind the agent, peering over his shoulder.

  “It can’t be the card,” Beneficent pointed out. “As you said, if the card was damaged it wouldn’t have uploaded.”

  He pulled the blue card from the agent’s grasp and slid it back into the slot.

  “Download her.”

  “I’m not allowed,” the agent protested. “The protocol is quite clear, Mr. Page. In the event of incompatibility with the master file … ”

  “Overwrite it.”

  The poor agent was taken aback. “Excuse me?”

  “Overwrite the master file.”

  “Mr. Page, if I overwrite the master file with corrupted or incompatible data, the damage could be irreversible.”

  “I will take full responsibility.”

  The agent didn’t quite know what to say. The proper procedure was to abort the Transfer, wake Courteous, and run a full system check to track down the error. With any other client, he might refuse, but this was not just any other client. This was a member of the first and foremost family of all the First and Foremost Families. Refusal could cost him his livelihood. Or worse, his life. But if he didn’t refuse, if he overwrote the file and something terrible happened, he still would be held responsible for ignoring the protocol! He was in an impossible situation. His only prayer was Beneficent’s same prayer: that the Transfer took without a hitch.

  May you wake safely upon that far shore …

  The eyelids of Courteous’s new look—or her old one, since she had worn it before, on her wedding day—fluttered as the data flooded into its brain, igniting synapses, wiring the irreversible connections that made up the human map, mixing memory and desire, breeding lilacs, as the poet said, out of the dead land. Both men held their breaths until it was done, and the green eyes came open, the pupils contracting in the sudden onslaught of light. Beneficent leaned over, so his face filled the entirety of her vision, so that all she could see was his reassuring smile.

  “Hello, my love.”

  Her body convulsed upon the table, and Beneficent seized her flailing hands and held them tightly between his own, whispering urgently, “No, no, no. Don’t be afraid. It’s fine now, perfectly fine, it’s done, you’re here with me forever now, my precious one, my darling, my true love.”

  And he covered her new face with kisses, Georgiana’s perfect, flawless face.

  “Beneficent,” Georgiana whispered hoarsely. “What have you done?”

  “It is not about what I am willing to give up for you,” he told her. “But what I can give to you.”

  Beneficent dropped a message into Georgiana’s cogbox: You are Courteous now! If he suspects anything, we’re both doomed!

  “And how are we feeling?” the agent asked Georgiana, patting her bare arm.

  “A little light-headed,” she murmured, clutching her lover’s hand.

  “Hmmm-mmmm.” The agent was studying her vitals on the monitors. Blood pressure and heart rate slightly elevated, but that was to be expected, brain activity normal. He ran quickly through the obligatory questions. What year was it? Who was the president of the Republic? What was her mother’s maiden name? What was her earliest memory? She answered all fifty questions correctly—there was no one who knew her mistress better—hesitating on only one: What is the name of your persist?

  The agent had her wiggle her toes, flex her fingers. He tested her reflexes, then helped her down from the table and ran the usual tests on balance, coordination, and basic neurological function. All the while, messages from Beneficent dropped into her cogbox. You’re doing marvelously! It’s almost over. Be strong, my love.

  The agent was a bit baffled, but relieved. The Transfer was a complete success. He excused himself and wheeled Courteous into the adjoining room for the second shot, the one which would stop her heart. It
could be disconcerting, to say the least, to watch the body you had just a moment before occupied die right before your eyes. In any other age, it would be called murder. In this age, it was called termination of the redundancy.

  In this particular case, however, it was murder.

  “You must stop him,” Georgiana demanded.

  “It’s too late,” he said.

  She shoved him aside and started toward the door, but collapsed before she had taken two steps. A Transfer could be overwhelming, a disorienting existential disconnect, particularly the first and especially if you’ve had no warning, no chance to prepare yourself mentally. Beneficent lifted her into his arms and carried her back to the table.

  “Why?” she asked weakly.

  “Because I could not suffer you to die.”

  The Transfer agent returned to their room. Georgiana burst into inconsolable tears, but it was too late: Courteous was already on her way to the incinerator.

  At Beneficent’s request, the agent gave Georgiana a mild sedative. It was not an uncommon reaction, to grieve the passing of your former look. The little death, it was called.

  He brought her back to their quarters in the white tower and laid her in his marital bed, drawing the covers over her shivering form, promising her she would feel better in the morning. Dawn was near. He went onto the balcony and waited.

  He closed his eyes when the door behind him slid open. The smell of warm muffins. Her delicate scent. What had he said to Courteous? The flower fades, the rain passes, the sun winks out. Her cool hands pressed against his closed eyes and her soft voice murmured in his ear.

  “Good morning, my love.”

  He grasped her wrists and stood up. She saw at once something in his expression. Love gives us eyes that see down to the marrow of our lover’s bones.

  “What is it, Beneficent?” she whispered.

  “Nothing,” he answered, gazing into the face of Georgiana’s redundancy. He realized he was seeing this face for the last time, and his heart ached with a sudden rush of grief. You’re smashing the empty vase, he told himself sternly, the flower within endures! Keeping a firm grip upon her wrists, he swung her toward the railing. She giggled nervously, a little unnerved and confused.

  “A trifle,” he said. “Not to be considered.” And he kissed her one last time before hurling her over the railing.

  Two days later, they departed for the moon to celebrate the anniversary of his marriage to his dead wife. It was understandably hard for Georgiana. Not only did she have to adjust to her new body, which can be hard enough, but she had to adjust while pretending to be her former mistress, mourning the untimely and tragic suicide of her persist, who also happened to be herself! Beneficent had justifiable concern for her mental health. The trip could not have come at the more perfect time. Just the two of them, away from all family and familiar surroundings, the ideal opportunity for her to recover and get used to her new body—and the mind-boggling reality of life eternal.

  Their room had a glass dome for a ceiling, so when they made love they could see the Earth suspended like a glittering blue diamond in the star-encrusted sky. Their bodies, unfettered from Earth’s heavier gravity, strangely insubstantial, as if their bones were hollow. She cried afterward and here even her tears were lighter and rolled as if in slow motion down her perfect cheeks.

  “You lied to me,” she accused him. “You said you would take me into yourself, not imprison me.”

  “Imprison you?” He was confused. “But I have freed you, Georgiana.”

  “You are a murderer, and I am the accessory to the crime.”

  “More like the motive, I would say.”

  She struck him across the cheek. The blow fell lightly, though, like her tears.

  “What I have done, I have done,” he said simply. “It was the only way.”

  He kissed away her tears. They did not taste the same as her old tears. He pushed that disconcerting thought away. Not the vase, but the flower! He looked deeply into her luminous green eyes, the color of the wet grass of Omniscient’s garden, and, despite himself, saw a stranger there.

  “If you don’t like it, you can always choose another,” he said.

  “Another what?”

  “Another look. I don’t mind. It isn’t the look I love, it’s you, Georgiana. Why, you can even switch back if you like.”

  “Switch back? Switch back into what?”

  “All they need is a sample from your former self. A strand of hair from your comb, for example. They can grow a replacement.” His voice rose with his spirits. Of course! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? “A replacement you can replace when it reaches a certain age so you will always be the Georgiana you always were!”

  “And how will we explain that?” she demanded. “A 3F switching to a replica of her dead persist?”

  “An expression of your love for her,” he offered rather weakly. “A tribute to her lifelong devotion. A way to bring her back from the grave, as it were … ”

  “They will think I’ve lost my mind—or that Courteous has lost her mind, I should say. I don’t think you understand the magnitude of your crimes, Beneficent. Not only did you murder her, but you have imprisoned me inside her body, inside her life, for now, for all eternity, I must live inside the fiction that I am her … Oh God, what have you done? Beneficent, what have you done?”

  He decided it was a terrible mistake, putting Georgiana into a look Courteous had worn, particularly a look she had worn on her wedding day. It was too much for both of them; it raised his dead wife bodily so she stood between them, casting a blemish over the perfection of their love. Upon their return to New New York, he approached Omniscient and tactfully asked for another waiver, explaining that his favorite daughter had not liked her anniversary present as much as they both thought she would. He brought Georgiana back to the boutique to pick out a new look, something that would remind neither of them of Courteous. But that proved more difficult in practice than in theory, for some part of every sample reminded Georgiana of her dead mistress. The nose. The shape of the ears. The curve of the mouth. He grew frustrated, at one point blurting out, “Well, good God, there’s going to be some resemblance. We’re human after all—we can’t transfer you into a dog!” They left without making a choice.

  That night, he was unable to perform in bed, and he fled onto the balcony, his heart burdened with a sense of profound and utter despair. She followed him without even pausing to throw a robe over her faultless body and, when he saw her naked, he snarled at her to conceal herself. Her nakedness reminded him too much of Courteous, who had lacked all modesty.

  “What shall I put on?” she shot back. “My old uniform? Would you like that, Beneficent? I’ll put it back on, though it’s much too small for me now, and I’ll go down to the kitchen and make you some fresh muffins—is that what would please you?”

  That was it, he thought. That must be it. He brought a few strands of her original hair to the Incubation Facility. While he waited for the new Georgiana to be grown, he spoke to her family and friends, or rather Courteous’s family and friends, explaining that the reason she had not chosen a new persist was that she could not move past the loss of her old one. She had loved Georgiana like a sister. Well, just a little bit more than her actual sisters and half sisters, to be honest. Her psych-profile indicated it might help her through the mourning process if she switched into a replica of the poor girl for a few years. To his astonishment, everyone thought it was a marvelous idea, terribly touching and therapeutic at the same time. Somehow the news leaked, and stories about the plan began to appear in cogboxes and in the televerse. It became a national sensation. Never had the two worlds of 3Fs and finitissium collided in such a way. He managed to keep Georgiana out of the public eye, refusing all requests with the excuse that she was too overcome with grief to grant any interviews.

  When the time came and she saw her new—that is, her old—body lying lifelessly upon the table in the Transfer room, Georgiana was
overcome. The prospect did not feel like a return to her. To her it was the pool. It was the delicious fruit. And when she awoke and looked at Beneficent with the same eyes that had adored him in the old cottage, he did not appear the same, as if he had switched into a new body and this face before her was the face of a stranger. That night she dissolved into tears when he tried to make love to her. To her, it did not feel like lovemaking.

  It felt like rape.

  Beneficent assured her these feelings would pass. They had an eternity to grow used to each other again. Privately, he was not so sanguine. He, too, was deeply troubled. She was not, though he tried with every ounce of his ancient being to pretend otherwise, the same sweet persist he had fallen in love with twenty years before. He grew a little desperate, and one night while they made love activated the old program Candid had given him, generating a holographic image in his visual cortex of her former face, identical in every regard to her current one, overlaying the present with the past, and the past jerked and shifted and refused to hold still, and afterward he had a horrible dream of standing in a pool of crystal clear water, dying of thirst but unable to drink.

  Her body grew old. She switched into a new one—that is, the old one—but the problem, for lack of a better word, persisted. She agreed, for both their sakes, to wear her old uniform when they were alone in their quarters. She even cooked his muffins and brought them to him on the balcony at sunrise. It was on one of these mornings, while she sat across from him silently watching the smoke from the cooking fires curl lazily into the temporal blue, that he looked over at her profile and recoiled in disgust. He set down his half-eaten muffin. It tasted like cardboard.

  One day several thousand thereafter, he returned home from work to find her missing. No note. No message from her in his cogbox. He dropped a message into hers; they had reservations that evening at the Top, and he wondered where she might have gone. The message went unanswered. He dropped several more into the family’s boxes: Have you seen Courteous? We have a seven thirty at the Top. No one had seen her all day. For a brief moment, he was filled with terror. Somehow they’d been found out. The CRC had taken her into custody. Any moment they would appear at his door. Arrest. Conviction. Oblivion. He tore apart their quarters, looking for any clue that might tell him where she had gone. He even dug through the trash, and that’s where he found her psyche-card, shredded into a dozen pieces. While he stared with dumb horror at the shards of plastic in his hands, as if it had been waiting for the perfect time to drop, a message appeared in his cogbox: