Elemental (9 page)

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Authors: Steven Savile

BOOK: Elemental
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“I kept your intimates safe.”
Girl 77 seemed genuinely perplexed. She said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Jared Spoon said, “In the freezer.”
 
 
The discussion didn't go as planned.
Girl 77 took one look at the collected vacuum-packed works of mystery person, eyed the burning candles arranged around the table, and screamed, “Satanist!”
Jared Spoon stumbled to his feet. “I just wanted to make you happy.”
“How would this make me happy, you fucking loony?”
She bolted from the apartment. “I'm going to tell,” she said. “I'm going to tell everyone!”
In the event she told no one.
She ran out into the road and was hit by a bus.
 
 
Seven people came to the funeral.
Originally they'd come for somebody else's, but it started pissing down and they needed somewhere to go. They huddled inside the chapel and did their best to be moved by the eulogy.
They wouldn't leave after that.
They said it was impolite not to follow through on the whole occasion. So they followed Jared Spoon all the way home.
They stood in front of the TV and reminisced about the life of the woman in the photo frame. Jared Spoon didn't know her either. He'd only just bought it but it seemed to make them happy.
He found a packet of biscuits and put them on a plate.
They remarked on what a fine spread it was. She would have loved it, they said.
That was the day Jared Spoon started smoking again.
 
 
The form read:
Please sign and date to acknowledge receipt of your parcel.
Jared Spoon eyed the package with dread.
Another one?
Perhaps this was her last gift to him. He said: “When was this posted?”
The delivery driver checked his log. “This morning.”
“That can't be right.”
“Why not?”
“She's dead.”
“So what's the problem?”
“Getting to a Post Office I should imagine.”
The delivery driver didn't understand. He wasn't paid to understand. Though that was frankly evidence of nothing, he wasn't paid to tap dance either.
“Look, mate,” he said. “Do you want it or not?”
Jared Spoon thought about it before asking that one question he probably should have asked to begin with. “Who sent it?”
The delivery driver checked his log again. “Dunno,” he said. “But there's a return address if you want.”
“Please.”
“The Second Vonnegut and Fowler Institute of Cloneography.”
 
 
“You may call me Ersatz,” said Mister Ersatz Ersatz.
Jared Spoon sat across the office from him, his bodily collection piled up on a cart and said, “What if I don't want to?”
 
 
“What is it you do here?” Jared Spoon said.
With a broad welcoming smile, Mr. Ersatz Ersatz said, “We're like Kinko's for people.”
“Is it usual for someone to photocopy their arse and post it out?”
Mr. Ersatz Ersatz seemed genuinely befuddled. “Did you receive an arse in the post?”
“No. I got a foot, among other things.”
“And very well it suits you too.”
“It's not mine. I didn't request anything. None of these bits and pieces are my bits and pieces.”
“Well whose bits and pieces are they?”
Jared Spoon said the answer to that question was why he had come here.
 
 
They took a test.
By
they
, I mean neither Jared Spoon nor Mr. Ersatz Ersatz. But somebody. Probably somebody who worked for Mr. Ersatz Ersatz.
The results led to merchandise that lived down on the sixty-fifth floor.
 
 
Jared Spoon looked like he'd seen a ghost.
A handicapped ghost with parts of two legs, a foot and a gall bladder missing, and dragging a life support machine around behind her on an umbilical, but a ghost nonetheless.
He said, “My God, she looks just like Girl 77. How is this possible?”
“She wanted to be perfect for you, Mr. Spoon. She wanted to show you how much she really loved you. She filled a capsule with the only personality she had that made the slightest bit of sense and rammed it up the tubes of this delightful little photocopy and was all ready to make the switch until we hit a snag.”
Jared Spoon watched her lolloping form amble around the room. “She's perfect …”
“Perfectly penniless.”
“This girl doesn't belong to anybody?”
“She belongs to us. Only she doesn't want to. You see she loves you, Mr. Spoon, just as much as Girl 77 did. We're very good, you see. She loves you so much she's willing to do anything.”
Jared Spoon finally understood. “She's been smuggling herself out a piece at a time.”
“Yes. And I'm afraid that puts you in a bit of a bind.”
“Me? Why?”
“We're talking theft, Mr. Spoon. That's very serious.”
“You're going to have her arrested?”
“Her? We can't very well charge our merchandise with stealing our merchandise. That would just be silly. No, we're going to have you arrested.”
“For what?”
“Receiving stolen goods. You did receive goods, did you not?”
“Yes.”
“They were stolen, were they not?”
“Not by me.”
“But by somebody!”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so.”
“I didn't know they were stolen.”
“That's no excuse!”
“I believed they were legitimate and accepted them in good faith.”
“Faith has nothing to do with it! We are men of science are we not?”
“You're a man of science. I'm a man of no fixed employment.”
Mr. Ersatz Ersatz pondered on this.
Jared Spoon said, “Surely we can come to an arrangement?”
Mr. Ersatz Ersatz grinned from ear to ear. “How's your credit rating?”
 
 
One day she just took a knife to him.
She said, “I'm gonna cut that up for ya. I'm never gonna let you eat that way again.”
He was shocked, obviously. He had a mouthful of lunch.
“What way?”
“Or how about I cook you some fish fingers? Yeah, some funky fish fingers. See how you like that?”
So he wiped his mouth on the napkin. Set his sandwich down. Almost like, should he get a good meal out of this it would still be nice to get back to the sandwich.
In the end she didn't cut it up for him. She threw something amazing together instead.
It was hot.
He responded with a kind of Parkinson's twitch.
 
 
She didn't have a name after that.
He called her Jigsaw Janet.
When they'd finished stitching her back together he took her home and they spent the most wonderful love-filled days together.
They never argued. They never disagreed. She was perfect.
And by Friday, he was bored out of his brains.
 
 
She found him out on the front steps, a black suitcase by his side, puffing furiously on a long Sobranie Black Russian. Cigarettes for hard bastards who laughed at their lungs. There was nothing like the real thing.
Jigsaw Janet sat quietly down beside him. “It's over, isn't it?” she said.
“I'm afraid so.”
“Why? Don't you love me?”
“No,” said Jared Spoon. “I find you derivative.”
BY LARRY NIVEN
 
Larry Niven has been a staple of the science fiction community since his first story, “The Coldest Place,” debuted in 1964. In 1970, Niven published the first novel in the award-winning Ringworld series (
Ringworld
,
The Ringworld Engineers
,
The Ringworld Throne
, and
Ringworld's Children
)—reputedly one of the greatest science fiction series of all time. The Ringworld titles, however, make up only a small portion of his famous Known Space world of future history, which in itself contains more than thirty short stories and novels. Niven is also the creator of the shared-world Man-Kzin War series. He most recently coauthored (with Brenda Cooper) the novel
Building Harlequin's Moon
.
In a departure from the hard-core science fiction he is best known for, Niven addresses one of writing's biggest metaphysical questions in “The Solipsist at Dinner.” Does everything really exist, or is the world we know simply a figment of our imagination? “You might say I've been thinking about this topic for forty or fifty years,” Niven says. “The storytelling generation ahead of my own all had something to say on the subject. Everybody has a solipsist lurking inside him—that level of arrogance is a normal part of humanity—but the universe keeps swatting it down.”
Niven lives in Chatsworth, California, with his wife, Marilyn, cat, Amelia, and several fish.
 
 
Wayne Morris
had ordered a spicy tuna hand roll, extra chili. He tried a piece and managed to swallow it, but there were tears in his eyes. “Wow. That's powerful.”
Nero grinned at him. “You said you were getting to like it that way. Too much?”
Wayne took another bite. His eyes were still tearing up, but he savored it. Then he said, “It's just that the whole world seems to be getting a little blurry.”
“Like what?”
“Well, my eyesight. Sense of taste. Hearing.”
Nero laughed and wiggled his bushy black eyebrows. “That's just what everyone says when he gets older! You're near seventy.”
“Like, I hear a ringing. It's always there. Sometimes I don't notice it, but if I listen—” He listened and heard the ringing, a steady bell tone.
“It's called tinnitus.” Nero raised his voice slightly, enunciating a little more carefully. The sushi restaurant was noisy, particularly at the counter. “Lots of people get tinnitus. You get it young if you work in a noisy environment, like if you're an artillery officer or a movie critic.”
“I don't care what it's called, it's still distracting. I have to crank the volume up when I'm listening to TV. Sharon hates it. My sense of taste is going too. I like things spicy. As a kid I wouldn't have touched this stuff I'm eating now. And when I'm driving at night, all the lights are colored blobs. Everything else is a little blurry too, except—”
“That's normal too. Except? Something isn't blurry?”
“Clouds, trees, they look okay. I finally figured out that anything fractal looks okay because I don't
expect
sharp edges and geometric shapes. My mind extrapolates.”
“That's a cute notion. Might even be true. Eyes are funny.”
“What I think is that my imagination is failing.”
Nero shrugged his eyebrows at him. Wayne said, “There's a philosophical position called solipsism. It means—”
“I know what it means. There's nothing else in the universe, there's just you. Everything else is your imagination. Philosophical position, my ass.”
“Well, it is. I think, therefore I am, but what about the rest of you? It's internally consistent and impossible to disprove.”
“When I was a kid,” Nero said, “all the science fiction writers wrote stories about … vampires, time travel, robots, faster than light travel, all that stuff—”
“Heinlein. Whatever Robert Heinlein wrote, everyone else had to imitate.”
“And solipsism. Everyone wrote a solipsism story. They were all sort of alike. I mean, if you take it seriously, what have you got? No protagonists, no background, no external conflict—”
“Yeah. Forty years I've been writing short stories and I never did anything
with that.” Wayne got the sushi chef's attention and ordered a California roll. “If I had it to do all over again I'd imagine a better short story market.”
“You'd be God,” Nero said suddenly. “And God's imagination would be failing. Wow. Think how powerful your imagination must have been, before you imagined you were a baby.”
“Think how screwy the laws of physics would be getting, right about now.”
“An expanding universe, speeding up. Einstein's jigger factor gone all wrong. Dark matter. Dark energy. All just metaphors for death?”
The sushi chef set their order in front of them: rice wrapped around avocado, bits of vegetable, and fish treated to imitate crab. Wayne mixed wasabi with soy sauce. He said, “Might be more interesting the other way around. First I'm God. I create a universe. I wait. Eventually there's intelligence. Intelligence starts evolving ideas about the universe. I incorporate the good ones.”
“You mean, for awhile there really was a steady-state universe?”
“And a Zodiac. God was using star patterns for blackboard diagrams, a scheme for mapping out lives. Later there were black holes that didn't evaporate until Hawking changed his mind. It's all a collaboration! There was a nasty simplistic Hell at first, but then Dante started adding details. Since then everybody wants to improve on Dante, so now Hell is horrendously complicated.”
“God wouldn't need much of an imagination at all,” Nero said. “Just a sense of consistency. It doesn't start with a Big Bang. It starts with Eden and then
blooms
.”
They went through the California roll, then ordered monkfish liver. Wayne asked, “Who dreams up diseases?”
“Oh … there'd be shamans, and then shamans would need to explain why people hurt. Now it's priests on one side and medical researchers—” Nero looked up. “Something?”
“I'm positive on prostate cancer.”
“Damn.”
He'd been trying to put it out of his head. “I went back to Doctor Wells this morning. Positive. My morbid imagination at work.”
“Well, yeah, a solipsist would think that. Now you'll have to dream up a psychiatrist to cure you of thinking you've got cancer.”
“Maybe—”
“Sorry. I shouldn't be making fun—”
“Maybe I should dream up a friend. A psychiatrist is just a hired friend anyway, right?”
“Have you talked to Sharon about this?”
Wayne covered his ears. The tinnitus surged.
He dreaded telling his wife. He didn't have enough friends. Maybe he'd taken this solipsistic stuff too seriously when he was younger. He didn't believe it now, and as for Nero, Nero had worked in a novel, long ago. Wayne had killed him off in the sequel and he wasn't plausible today, Nero with his funny-hat eyebrows.
It was time to stop talking to imaginary characters, time to talk to Sharon. Wayne paid the bill and left.

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