Gray Matters (5 page)

And so Vera played various roles, on camera and off, before a succession of accidental friends, casual lovers, and supernumerary husbands. She took her cues from the moment. As a young star in Prague, she was a properly zealous socialist artist, bright, literate and opinionated. She became an instant patriot the night of the Cannes Film Festival when she rose in her seat to denounce the Russian intervention and brought tears to the eyes of everyone present, including the French producer who, a half hour earlier, had offered her a lucrative five-year contract if she would defect. For ten years the reigning sex queen on the Continent, she was photographed frequently wearing only a pastel mink, owned a different color Rolls for each day of the week, and when asked about diamonds said that she preferred the big ones, naturally.

While in her forties, her voice lowered by an octave, she abandoned the films for a stage career, played Medea at Epidaurus and Lady Macbeth at Stratford, became the darling of the homosexual set, and attempted suicide on two occasions, meeting with only moderate success. By the time her hair turned white, she was ensconced in international society. At fifty-five she married a doddering Italian nobleman who responded to her enduring sexual ferocity with an abrupt coronary before the honeymoon was six days old.

Vera’s finest role was that of the majestic widow. She was every inch the quattrocento duchess. The pawnshop escutcheon of the Medici surmounted the entrance to her palazzo overlooking the Arno. She kept a villa in Fiesole to house her collection of exotic animals and startled the complacent Florentines by parading under the arcade along the Piazza della Repubblica with two bewigged blacks holding her brocade train, a baboon straining on one golden leash, an ocelot on another, and her scandalous retinue chattering at her elbow in a variety of tongues.

As Vera grew older her fear of being alone developed into a mania. Her house overflowed with guests. The young man of the moment was always there to turn down the sheets at night. Like the Sun King, she employed special servants to assist her onto a fur-lined toilet seat. Secretaries arranged her day to prevent any chance of privacy. Death, of course, remained the ultimate solitude, and the bulk of the ducal fortune was expended to forestall that eventuality. There were periodic trips to Switzerland for rejuvenating monkey-gland injections. Cosmeticians ironed away wrinkles, inserted silicone into sagging breasts, and tucked a series of chins up somewhere behind her ears. When one heart failed a team of surgeons rushed in to replace it with another. Collapsed veins were reinforced with plastic tubing. A gangrenous hand was removed and a mechanical silver replica from Van Cleef and Arpels set a fashion trend which started hundreds of women throughout the world clamoring for amputation.

When the second millennium was thirty years old, Vera celebrated her one-hundredth birthday, a plumber’s miracle of transplanted organs and artificial limbs. She delighted her guests by eating a piece of cake and drinking three glasses of champagne. For fifteen years Vera was fed intravenously, after advanced cancer necessitated the removal of her entire intestinal tract. Later surgeons inserted a highly serviceable latex receptacle that emptied through a valve in her navel and was flushed clean each month with liquid detergent. “Now I can eat and never get fat,” she laughingly told her partner as the orchestra began another tango. Dancing was no problem for Vera. Her arthritic outmoded joints had long since been supplanted by efficient self-lubricating nylon hinges. She was limber as a teenager.

It seemed to Vera that she would live forever; the party would go on without end. Certainly she was durable enough. Her lungs were still sound, and even if they gave out an ingenious battery-powered oxygenator was soon to be mass produced by the same South African firm that successfully marketed the first portable mechanical kidney. It was reassuring to know there was no shortage of replacement parts.

Also, luck seemed to be on Vera’s side. When the Thirty-minute Thermonuclear War of 2066 atomized every major city in North America and Asia and girdled the earth with radioactive clouds that reduced the populations of Europe and the Near East by two-thirds, Vera was safely in Santiago de Chile on a round-the-world tour. Even the financial chaos that followed left her unscathed. Vera’s money was in South American and African holdings and she watched her fortune triple as those continents rose to world dominance in the final decades of the twenty-first century.

In the long run, Vera felt the war had done a lot of good. Certainly Europe seemed much nicer now that it wasn’t so crowded; no more camera-ladened Americans jammed the streets. And the way the old buildings glowed in the dark was really romantic. The rash of two-headed babies was unfortunate, but the United Nations Euthanasia Corps (UNEC) soon eliminated the problem and the possibility of bearing monsters was a good incentive for population control. All in all, the world was much improved, a fine place in which to live forever.

But Vera’s plans for eternal life were upset one morning when her doctor made his weekly medical report. Vera’s health was fine. Her body could be maintained mechanically for an indefinite time. The trouble was, in spite of everything, the old woman was fast approaching senility. It seemed a shame, for certain recent advances in geriatric endocrinology would eventually eliminate the problem. But treatment had to be started by the age of 100. If only she were fifty years younger. A real pity, to watch the mind deteriorate. Of course, there was an alternative, a bit drastic perhaps, but—“Anything,” Vera pleaded. The doctor recommended cerebrectomy.

Deep within the complexity of Center Control, a labyrinth of microcircuits, conductors, directional transmitters, relay switches, and transistors extending for almost a square mile at the heart of the Depository System, a special series of computer banks (ordinarily assigned to the regulation of an entire subdistrict) is considering the problem of Skeets Kalbfleischer. Because of his symbolic importance, it is intolerable that Skeets still resides on the lowest level of the System. Recent analysis shows that the Elevation of mankind’s original cerebromorph will have profound spiritual results. The Ascension of Jesus Christ and the Enlightenment of Gautama Siddhartha are mentioned as comparable transcendental events.

Skeets is not uncooperative. For two hundred and seventy years he has diligently followed every study program outlined for him by Center Control. He faithfully participates in the meditation exercise each morning. He hasn’t filed a late auditing report in nearly a century. But, in spite of this exemplary behavior, Skeets still registers close to 100 on the Ego Scale each time a diagnosis is made. Deep in his subconscious, Skeets prefers riding the range and packing a six-gun to fasting, navel contemplation, and walking on water. As far as he is concerned, one man’s
karma
is another man’s
dharma.

Obu Itubi remembers the bee: a million identical larvae pupating within the privacy of their waxen cells—one million identical dreams. All share a common destiny, all but a dozen or so selected at random by the workers in charge of the hatchery cells. These fortunate few are fortified with an infusion of Royal Jelly, an extract that transforms any ordinary larva into a Queen. A drop is all it takes. Instant royalty. And the new Queen is wise in the ways of monarchy from the moment of her birth. Her first official act is political assassination. Even before her wings have dried, the newly hatched Queen seeks out the cells of potential rivals and quickly stings them to death while they drift in embryonic sleep.

A sweet thought: Obu Itubi would like to be so chosen. He imagines an Amco-pak Mark X adding some magic elixir to the electrolyte solution in his cranial container and emerging from the Depository a king, all-powerful and absolute. He would roam the aisles until he found the deposit drawer containing his new Auditor. Let the bastard enjoy his spiritual superiority while he has the chance, Itubi thinks. My triumph will be complete when I puncture the sanctity of his computerized dreams and skewer him like a shish kebab on the tip of my envenomed blade. A fitting final lesson in the Illusion of Identity.

A Unistat Magnetic Calculator, series 3000, assigned to the Census Division of Center Control, has discovered an error so incredible that the machine suspects a short circuit and turns itself in for an overhaul and parts checkup. But Maintenance and Repair can find nothing amiss and a doublecheck by the Census Division verifies the Unistat’s findings: a resident of Level I (the lowest in the System) has been misfiled.

For a time it seems this alarming discovery will necessitate a review of the entire filing system. Any calculator error is considered inexcusable by Center Control and an order consigning the Unistat Series 3000 to the junkheap is immediately issued. The controversial series 4000A, which has languished on the drawing boards for seventy-five years, is hurried into production.

The indirect cause of all this turmoil is Skeets Kalbfleischer. In his Auditor’s opinion, Skeets’ failure to advance spiritually is the result of being trapped in Eternal adolescence. His fantasies are purely masturbatory. His phobias the result of puberty. In short, the boy needs to get laid.

Skeets, of course, has already experienced orgasm. It can be induced electronically in the cranial container at the flip of a switch. Special electrodes are directly wired to the appropriate nerve endings. A resident only has to dial the corresponding code key on his telescript console. Technology has improved upon nature; a biological orgasm lasts a few seconds; the electronic version continues until the current is switched off.

Acting on the advice of Philip Quarrels, Skeets endures a climax lasting almost three days. Shock treatment to satisfy the voracious sexual demands of his adolescent mind. The experiment is a failure. Skeets enjoys the pornographic memory-files, but, all in all, it is a run-of-the-mill wet dream. Spontaneity and imagination are preferable to long-distance mileage.

But the Auditing Commission is undaunted. Mere sensation obviously isn’t the answer. What the boy needs is actual experience, his own private love affair. An easy matter to arrange. A two-party memory-merge requires only the most basic rewiring, nothing like the multiple hookups needed for more sophisticated group experience. The only problem is locating the correct partner. The Census Division is asked to find a resident female, born in the middle of the twentieth century, who had sexual relations with a twelve-year-old boy.

The twentieth century has the lowest population in the Depository System and it takes a Unistat 3000 less than an hour to run through all the female files. It comes up with the numbers of nearly fifty women who had amused themselves with long-dead delivery boys. Three are ex-school teachers who centuries before had seduced precocious students in coat rooms and under desks. None of these will do. They had all been middle-aged (some nearly sixty) when they developed a taste for prepubescence and it is feared the age discrepancy might prove too traumatic for Skeets. In order to satisfy the Auditors, the female merge-partner has to be nearly the same age as the boy: an eager virgin with undeveloped breasts and slim athletic hips, seasoned by nothing stronger than puppy-love.

The Unistat 3000 tries again and draws a blank. The Census Division recommends an early twenty-first-century female; increased Depository population allows for a wider choice and, owing to the liberal mores of the age, a twelve-year-old without sexual experience is a rarity. Again, the Auditors say no. The time difference is too great; memories are liable to be disparate and the resulting merge would seem more like fantasy than reality. What Skeets needs is a strong dose of reality.

The Auditing Commission is insistent. Top priority must be given the Kalbfleischer affair. Center Control is firmly behind the project and the methodical examination of all possible channels officially encouraged. It is suggested to the Deltron Unistat Coordinator (a machine whose singular lack of humor and fanatic concern for detail make it the most efficient Director of Census in over a century) that a cross-reference check with the files of other divisions might prove productive. The Unistat goes to work immediately and five hours later, while running through a routine batch of old auditing reports, a Series 3000 makes the astonishing discovery. Sometime late in the twenty-second century, when the last private depositories were incorporated, the brain of a mid-twentieth-century cinema actress was inadvertently misfiled.

To throw the Auditing Commission off track, in case they should be monitoring his telescript console, Obu Itubi submits a study plan along with his new batch of memory-file requests. The plan includes an elaborate apology for his unfortunate philanthropy together with a resolution to overcome a basic prejudice toward machines. As part of his program for achieving tolerance and understanding, Itubi requests the complete plans and wiring diagrams for all of the Amco-pak series above Mark V. If he can learn to appreciate the complexities of even a simple machine like the Amco-pak, Itubi is certain it won’t be long before he is filled with admiration for his cybernetic superiors.

Memory-merge. The term has always disgusted Vera Mitlovic. There is something repulsive about the blend of mechanics and sentiment. Vera remembers certain drooling lovers (handfuls of ashes in lonesome marble urns), impossible romantics who interpreted a few minutes of pleasant friction and the discharge of a tablespoon of semen as something cosmic, a union of souls. How had she ever endured such fools? In her prime Vera had been an accomplished sexual athlete and if she screamed a bit during orgasm it wasn’t in celebration of the primordial pagan pieties. She paid no homage to the dark gods of the blood. What Vera craved was technique and innovation. She much preferred the skillful application of whip and harness to the attentions of any man who felt his penis was an extension of the Infinite. In fact, of all the young gallants who showed up at her dressing room with expensive bouquets and elegant flattery, the one she remembers best is a wall-eyed count who lashed her naked breasts with his gift offering of long-stemmed roses.