Blood Music (22 page)

“I’ll kill you,” she said. “Nobody—”

He brought his leg around behind her and tripped her. She fell back on her ass with a shriek. Legs sprawled, hands spread on stiff arms behind her, she looked up at him with lips writhing. “You—”

“Brute,” he said. “Calm, cold, rational brutality. Not very different from what you put me through. But you don’t use physical force. You just provoke it.”

“Shuttup.” She held out her hand and he helped her to her feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Not once, during their three years together, had he ever struck her. He felt like dying.

“Bullshit. You’re everything I said you were, you bastard. You miserable little boy.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. The crowds of people in the hall watched them warily, murmuring disapproval. Thank God there were no reporters.

“Go play with your toys,” she said. “Your scalpels, your nurses, your patients. Go ruin their lives and just stay away from me.”

An older memory.

“Father.” He stood by the bed, uncomfortable at the reversal of roles, no longer the doctor but now a visitor. The room smelled of disinfectant and something to hide the smell of disinfectant, tea-roses or something sweet the effect was that of a mortuary. He blinked and reached out for his father’s hand.

The old man (he was old, looked old, looked worn out by life) opened his eyes and blinked. His eyes were yellow, rheumy, and his skin was the color of French mustard, fie had cancer of the liver and everything was failing piece by piece. He had requested no extraordinary measures and Bernard had brought his own lawyers in to consult with the hospital management, just to ensure his father’s wishes were not ignored. (Want your father dead? Want to ensure he will die more rapidly? Of course not. Want him to live forever? Yes. Oh, yes. Then I won’t die.)

Every couple of hours he was brought a powerful painkiller, a modern variation on the Brompton’s cocktail that had been in favor when Bernard had begun his practice.

“Father. It’s Michael”

“Yes. My mind is dear. I know you.”

“Ursula and Gerald say hello.”

“Hello to Gerald. Hello to Ursula.”

“How are you feeling?”

(Like he’s going to die, you idiot.)

“I’m a junkie now, Mike.”

“Yes, well”

“Have to talk now.”

“About what Father?”

“Your mother. Why isn’t she here?”

“Mother’s dead, Father.”

“Yes. I knew that. My mind is dear. It’s just…and I’m not complaining, mind you…it’s just that this hurts.” He took hold of Bernard’s hand and squeezed it as hard as he could-a pitiful squeeze. “What’s the prognosis, son?”

“You know that Father.”

“Can’t transfer my brain for me?”

Bernard smiled. “Not yet. We’re working on it”

“Not soon enough, I’m afraid.”

“Probably not soon enough.”

“You and Ursula-doing okay?”

“We’re settling things out of court, Father.”

“How’s Gerald taking it?”

“Badly. Sulking.”

“Wanted to divorce your mother once.”

Bernard looked into his father’s face, frowning. “Oh?”

“She had an affair. Infuriated me. Taught me a lot, too. Didn’t divorce her.”

Bernard had never heard any of this.

“You know, even with Ursula—”

“It’s over with, Father. We’ve both had affairs, and mine is turning out pretty serious.”

“Can’t own a woman, Mike. Wonderful companions, can’t own them.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Maybe you do. I thought, when I found out about your mother’s lover, I thought I would die. It hurt almost as much as this does. I thought I owned her.”

Bernard wished the conversation would take another direction. “Gerald doesn’t mind going off to school for a year.”

“But I didn’t. I was just sharing her. Even if a woman only has you for a lover, you share her. She shares you. All this concern with fidelity, it’s a sham, a mask. Mike. It’s the record that counts. What you do, how well you do it, how dogged you are.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Say.” His father’s eyes widened.

“What?” Bernard asked, taking his hand again. “We stayed on together thirty years after that.”

“I never knew.”

“Didn’t need to know. I was the one who needed to know, to accept. That’s not all that’s on my mind. Mike, remember the cabin? There’s a stack of papers up in the loft, under the bunk.”

The cabin in Maine had been sold ten years before.

“I was doing some writing,” his father continued after swallowing hard and painfully. His face wrinkled up and he made a bitter moue. “About when I was a doctor.”

Bernard knew where the papers were. He had rescued them and read them during his internship. They were now in a file in his office in Atlanta.

“I have them, Father.”

“Good. Did you read them?”

“Yes.” And they were very important to me, Father. They helped me choose what I wanted to do in neurology, the direction I wanted to take Tell him, tell him!

“Good. I’ve always known about you, Mike.”

“What?”

“How much you loved us. You’re just not demonstrative, are you? Never have been.”

“I love you. Loved mother.”

“She knew. She was not unhappy when she died. Well.” He made the face again. “I have to sleep now. You sure you can’t find a good young new body for me?”

Bernard nodded. Tell him.

“The papers were very important to me, Father. Dad.”

He hadn’t called him Dad since he had been thirteen. But the old (old) man didn’t hear. He was asleep. Bernard picked up his coat and valise and left, passing the nurse’s station to inquire-out of habit-when the next medication would be.

His father died at three o’clock the next morning, asleep and alone.

And farther…

Olivia Ferguson, the same wonderfully smooth eighteen years old as he, her first name echoing her complexion, her plush dark hair pressing against the Corvette’s neck rest turned her large green eyes on him and smiled. He glanced at her and returned the smile and it was the most wonderful evening in the world, it was fine; the third time he had taken a girl out on a date. He was, wonder of wonders, a virgin—and this night it didn’t seem to matter. He had asked her out near the bell tower on the UC Berkeley campus as she stood near one of the twin bronze bears, and she had looked at him with real sympathy.

“I’m engaged,” she had said. “I mean, it couldn’t be anything—”

Disappointed, and yet ever-prepared to be gallant, he had said, “Well, then it’ll just be an evening out. Two people on the town. Friends.” He hardly knew her; they shared an English class. She was the loveliest girl in the class, tall and composed, quiet and assured yet not in the least distant. She had smiled and said, “Okay.”

And now he felt the freedom, released from the obligation of pursuit; the first time he felt on equal footing with a woman. Her fiancé, she explained, was in the Navy, stationed at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Her family lived on Staten Island, in a house where Herman Melville had once stayed a summer.

The wind blew her hair without mussing it—miraculous, wonderful hair which (in theory) would be delightful to feel, run his hands through. They had been talking since he picked her up at her home, an apartment she shared with two women near the old white Claremont Hotel. They had driven across the Golden Gate into Marin to eat at a small seafood restaurant the Klamshak, and talked there—about classes, about plans, about what getting married was all about (he didn’t know and didn’t even bother to fake sophistication). They had both agreed the food was good and the decor not in the least original-cork floats and nets on the wall, filled with plastic lobsters and a weary-looking dried blowfish, an old holed dory perched out front on shell-strewn sand. Not once did he feel awkward or young or even inexperienced.

He thought, as they drove back across the bridge, In other circumstances, I’m sure we’d fall in love with each other. I’m positive we’d be married in a few years. She’s terrific—and I’m not going to do anything about it. The sensation he felt at this was sad and romantic and altogether wonderful.

He knew that if he pressed her, she would probably come up to his apartment with him, and they would make love.

Even though he hated and despised being a virgin, he would not press her. He would not even suggest it. This was too perfect.

They sat in the ‘vette outside the converted old mansion where she lodged and discussed Kennedy, laughed about their fears during the missile crisis, and then held hands and just looked at each other.

“You know,” he said quietly, “there are times when…” He stopped.

“Thank you,” she said. “I just thought you would be good on a date. Most men, you know—”

“Yeah. Well, that’s me.” He grinned. “Harmless.”

“Oh, no. Not harmless. Not in the least.”

Now was the turning point It could go one way, or the other. He flashed on her olive-colored body and knew it was smoothly, youthfully perfect He knew that she would go with him to his apartment.

“You’re a romantic, aren’t you?” she said.

“I suppose I am.”

“I am too. The silliest people in the world are romantics.”

He felt heat in his face and neck. “I love women,” he said. “I love the way they talk and move. They’re enchanting.” He was going to open up now, and regret it later, but what he felt was too true and undeniable, especially after this evening. “I think most men should feel a woman is, like, sacred. Not on a pedestal, that sort of thing. But just too beautiful for words. To be loved by a woman, and-That would just be incredible.”

Olivia looked through the windshield, a smile flickering on her face. Then she looked down at her purse and smoothed her calf-length blue dress with her hands. “It’ll happen,” she said.

“Yeah, sure.” He nodded. But not between us.

“Thank you,” she said again. He held her hand, and then reached up to caress her cheek. She rubbed against his hand like a kitten and tugged on the door handle. “See you in class.”

They hadn’t even kissed.

—What has happened to me since? Three wives—the third because she looked like Olivia—and this distancing, this standing apart. I have lost far too many illusions.

There are options.

—I don’t understand.

What would you wish to revise?

—If you mean go back, I don’t see how.

It is all possible here, in Thought Universe. Simulations. Reconstructions from your memory.

—I could live out another life?

When there is time.

—With the real Olivia? She…where was she, is she?

That is not known.

—Then I’ll pass. I am not interested in dreams.

There are more memories within you.

—Yes…

But where did they fit, where did they come from?

Randall Bernard, twenty-four, had wed Tiffany Marnier on the seventeenth of November, 1943, in a small Kansas City church. She wore a silver-beaded silk and white lace gown that her mother had worn for her wedding, no veil, and the flowers had been blood-red roses. They had-

They sipped a cup of wine between them and exchanged their vows and broke a piece of bread and the minister, a Theosophist who would by the end of the 1940s be a Vedantist, pronounced them equal in the eyes of the Deity, and now united by love and common regard.

The memory was tinted, like an old photograph, and not good on details. But it was there and he hadn’t even been born, and he was seeing it, and then seeing their wedding night, marveling in the quick glimpses of his own creation and how so little had changed between man and woman, marveling at his mother’s passion and pleasure, and his father’s doctorly, precise, knowing skill, even in bed a doctor.

And his father went off to war, serving as a corpsman in Europe, moving with Patton’s U.S. Third Army through the Ardennes and crossing the Rhine near Coblenz-sixty-five miles in three days—and his son watched what he could not possibly have seen. And then he watched what his father could not possibly have seen:

A soldier in plus-fours stepping into the dark, dank hallway of a brothel in Paris; not his father, not anybody he knew—

Very dim, but clear in outline, a woman rocking a child in orange sunlight coming through an isinglass window—

A man fishing with cormorants in a gray early morning river—

A child staring out of a barn loft at a curie of men in the yard below, slaughtering a huge black and white wide-eyed bullock—

Men and women doffing their long white robes and swimming in a muddy river surrounded by red stone bluffs—

A man standing on a cliff, horn bow in hand, watching a herd of antelopes cross a hazy grass plain—

A woman giving birth in a dark underground place, lit by tallow lamps, watched by smeared, anxious faces—

Two old men arguing about impressed balls of clay in a circle drawn in sand—

—I don’t remember these things. They aren’t me, I didn’t experience them—

He broke free of the flow of information. With both hands, he reached up to red-glowing circles over his head, so warm and attractive.—Where did they come from? He touched the circles and felt the answer in his hundred-cell body.

Not all memory comes from an individual’s life.

—Where, then?

Memory is stored in neurons-interactive memory, carried in charge and potential, then downloaded to chemical storage in cells, then downloaded to molecular level. Stored in introns of individual cells.

The insight was almost agonizing in its completeness and intensity.

Symbiotic bacteria and transfer viruses naturally occurring in all animals and specific for each species—are implanted with molecular memory transcribed from the intron. They exit the individual and pass on to another individual, “infect,” transfer the memory to somatic cells. Some of the memories are then returned to chemical storage status, and a few return to active memory.

—Across generations?

Across millennia.

—The introns are not junk sequences…

No. They are highly condensed memory storage.

Vergil Ulam had not created biologic in cells out of nothing. He had stumbled across a natural function—the transfer of racial memory. He had altered a system already in existence.