The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (27 page)

“Read it!”

“Uncle Orville! I want Uncle Orville!”

My throat constricted, my stomach went sour. Uncle: such a strange sound. I really was one, wasn’t I? “You’re doing pretty swell, Dixon,” I said, taking the mike.
“I think you’ll like your present.”

“Uncle Orville, I want to go home!”

“I got you a fine toy.”

“What is it?”

“Here’s a hint. It has – ”

“Dixon!” Merrick grabbed the mike. “Dixon, if you don’t do this, you’ll never get well. They’ll take you away from your mother.” A threat, but wholly
accurate. “Understand? They’ll take you away.”

Dixon balled his face into a mass of wrinkles. “Grass!” he screamed, spitting blood. “Is!” he persisted. “Purple!” He jerked like a gaffed flounder, spasm
after spasm. A broad urine stain blossomed on his crotch, and despite the obligatory enema a brown fluid dripped from the hem of his smock.

“Excellent!” Merrick increased the punishment to four hundred volts. “Your cure’s in sight, lad!”

“No! Please! Please! Enough!” Sweat encased Dixon’s face. Foam leaked from his mouth.

“You’re almost halfway there!”

“Please!”

The war continued, five more pain-tipped rockets shooting through Dixon’s nerves and veins, detonating inside his mind. He asserted that rats chase cats. He lied about money, saying that
it grew on trees. Worms taste like honey, he said. Snow is hot. Rain is red.

He fainted just as the final lie arrived. Even before Gloria could scream, Merrick was inside the cubicle, checking the boy’s heartbeat. A begrudging admiration seeped through me. The
doctor had a job, and he did it.

A single dose of smelling salts brought Dixon around.

Guiding the boy’s face toward the screen, Merrick turned to me. “Ready with the switch?”

“Huh? You want me – ” Ridiculous.

“Let’s just get it over with. Hit the switch when I tell you.”

“I’d rather not.” But already my finger rested on the damn thing. Doctor’s orders.

“Read, Dixon,” muttered Merrick.

“I c-can’t.”

“One more, Dixon. Just one more and you’ll be a citizen.”

Blood and spittle mingled on Dixon’s chin. “You all hate me! Mommy hates me!”

“I love you as much as myself,” said Gloria, leaning over my shoulder. “You’re going to have a wonderful party. Almost certainly.”

“Really?”

“Highly likely.”

“Presumably wonderful,” I said. The switch burned my finger. “I love you too.”

“Dogs can talk,” said Dixon.

And it truly was a wonderful party. All four of Dixon’s grandparents showed up, along with his teacher and twelve of his friends, half of whom had been cured in recent months, one on the
previous day. Dixon marched around Room 117 displaying the evidence of his burn like war medals. The brand, of course – performed under local anesthesia immediately after his cure –
plus copies of his initial cerebroscan, voicegram, and fingerprint set.

Brand, scan, gram, prints: Sherry Urquist’s had all been in perfect order. She had definitely been burned. And yet there was fiction in her garbage.

The gift-opening ceremony contained one bleak moment. Pulling the train from its wrapping, Dixon blanched, garroted by panic, and Gloria had to rush him into the bathroom, where he spent several
minutes throwing up. I felt like a fool. To a boy who’s just been through a brainburn, an electric train has gruesome connotations.

“Thanks for coming,” said Gloria. She meant it.

“I
do
like my present,” Dixon averred. “A freight train would have been nicer,” he added. A citizen now.

I apologized for leaving early. A big case, I explained. Very hot, very political. “Good-bye, Uncle Orville.”

Uncle. Great stuff.

I spent the rest of the day tracking my adorable Dissembler, never letting her get more than a mile from me or closer than two blocks. What agonizing hopes that dot on the map
inspired, what rampant expectations. With each flash my longing intensified. Oh, Sherry, Sherry, you pulsing red angel, you stroboscope of my desire. No mere adolescent infatuation this. I dared to
speak its name. “Neurotic obsession,” I gushed, kissing the dot as it crossed Aquinas Avenue. “Mixed with bald romantic fantasy and lust,” I added. The radio shouted at me:
a hot-blooded evangelist no less enraptured than I. “Does faith tempt you, my friends? Fear not! Look into your metaphoric hearts, and you will discover how subconscious human needs project
themselves onto putative revelations!”

For someone facing a wide variety of deadlines, my quarry didn’t push herself particularly hard. Sherry spent the hour from four to five at the Museum of Secondary Fossil Finds. From five
to six she did the Imprisoned Animals Garden. From six to seven she treated herself to dinner at Danny’s Digestibles, after which she went down to the waterfront.

I cruised along Third Street, twenty yards from the Pathogen River. This was the city’s frankest district, a gray mass of warehouses and abandoned stores jammed together like dead cells
waiting to be sloughed off. Sherry walked slowly, aimlessly, as if. . . could it be? Yes, damn, as if arm-in-arm with another person, as if meshing her movements with those of a second, intertwined
body. Probably she had met the guy at Danny’s, a conceited pile of muscles named Guido or something, and now they were having a cozy stroll along the Pathogen. I pressed the dot, as if to
draw Sherry away. What if she spent the night in another apartment? That would pretty much cinch it. I wondered how their passion would register. I pictured the dot going wild, love’s red
fibrillation.

After pausing for several seconds on the bank, the dot suddenly began prancing across the river. Odd. I fixed on the map. The Saint Joan Tunnel was half a mile away, the Thomas More Bridge even
farther. I doubted that she was swimming – not in this weather, and not in the Pathogen, where the diseases of the future were born. Flying, then? The dot moved too slowly to signify an
airplane. A hot-air balloon? Probably she was in a boat. Sherry and Guido, off on a romantic cruise.

I hung a left on Beach Street and sped down to the docks. Moonlight coated the Pathogen, settling into the waves, figuratively bronzing a lone, swiftly moving tugboat. I checked the map. The dot
placed Sherry at least ten yards from the tug, in the exact middle of the river and heading for the opposite shore. I studied her presumed location. Nothing. Submerged, then? I knew she
hadn’t committed suicide; the dot’s progress was too resolute. Was she in scuba gear?

I abandoned the car and attempted to find where she had entered the water, a quest that took me down concrete steps to a pier hemmed by pylons smeared with gull dung. Jagged odors shot from the
dead and rotting river; water lapped over the landing with a harsh sucking sound, as if a pride of invisible lions was drinking here. My gaze settled on a metal grate, barred like the ribcage of
some promethean robot. It seemed slightly askew . . . Oh, great, Orville, let’s go traipsing through the sewers, with rats nipping at our heels and slugs the size of bagels falling on our
shoulders. Terrific idea.

The grate yielded readily to my reluctant hands. Had she truly gone down there? Should I follow? A demented notion, but duty called, using its shrillest voice, and, besides, this was Sherry
Urquist, this was irrational need. I secured a flashlight from the car and proceeded down the ladder. It was like entering a lung. Steamy, warm. The flashlight blazed through the blackness. A
weapon, I decided. Look out, all you rats and slugs. Make way. Here comes Orville Prawn, the fastest flashlight in Veritas.

I moved through a multilayered maze of soggy holes and dripping catacombs. So many ways to descend: ladders, sloping tunnels, crooked little stairways – I used them all, soon moving beyond
the riverbed into other territories, places not on the OIA map.

All around me Veritas’s guts were spread: its concrete intestines, gushing lead veins, buzzing nerves of steel and gutta-percha. Much to my surprise, the city even had its parasites
– shacks of corrugated tin leaned against the wet brick walls, sucking secretly on the power cables and water mains. This would not do. No, to live below Veritas like this, appropriating its
juices, was little more than piracy. Overt Intelligence would hear of it.

My astonishment deepened as I advanced. I could understand a few hobos setting up a shantytown down here, but how might I explain these odd chunks of civilization? These blazing streetlamps,
these freshly painted picket fences, these tidy grids of rose bushes, these fountains with their stone dolphins spewing water? Paint, flowers, sculpture: so many lies in one place! Peel back the
streets of any city and do you find its warped reflection, its doppelgänger mirrored in distorting glass? Or did Veritas alone harbor such anarchy, this tumor spreading beneath her
unsuspecting flesh?

A sleek white cat shot out of the rose bushes and disappeared down an open manhole. At first I thought that its pursuer was a dog, but no. Wrong shape. And that tail.

The shudder began in my lower spine and expanded.

A rat.

A rat the size of an armadillo.

Chasing a cat.

I moved on. Vegetable gardens now. Two bright yellow privies. Cottages defaced with gardenia plots and strings of clematis scurrying up trellises. A building that looked suspiciously like a
chapel. A park of some kind, with flagstone paths and a duck pond. Ruddy puffs of vapor bumped against the treetops.

Rain is red . . .

I entered the park.

A pig glided over my head like a miniature dirigible, wheeling across the sky on cherub wings. At first I assumed it was a machine, but its squeal was disconcertingly organic.

“You!”

A low, liquid voice. I dropped my gaze.

Sherry shared the bench with an enormous dog, some grotesque variation on the malamute, his chin snugged into her lap. “You!” she said again, erecting the word like a barrier, a
spiked vocable stopping my approach. The dog lifted his head and growled.

“Correct,” I said, stock still.

“You followed me?”

“I cannot tell a lie.” I examined the nearest tree. No fruit, of course, only worms and paper money.

“Dirty spy.”

“Half true. I am not dirty.”

She wore a buttercup dress, decorated with lace. Her thick braid lay on her shoulder like a loaf of challah. Her eyes had become cartoons of themselves, starkly outlined and richly shaded.
“If you try to return” – she patted the malamute – “Max will eat you alive.”

“You bet your sweet ass,” said the dog.

She massaged Max’s head, as if searching for the trigger that would release his attack. “I expected better of you, Mr. Prawn.”

We were in a contest. Who could act the more betrayed, the more disgusted? “I’d always assumed the Dissemblage was just a group.” Spit dripped off my words. “I
didn’t know it was . . . all this.”

“Two cities,” muttered Sherry, launching her index finger upward. “Truth above, dignity below.” The finger descended. Her nails, I noticed, were a fluorescent green.

“Her father built it,” explained the dog.

“His life’s work,” added Sherry.

“Are there many of you?” I asked.

“I’m the first to reach adulthood,” said Sherry.

“The prototype liar?”

Her sneer evolved into a grin. “Others are hatching.”

“How can you betray your city like this?” I drilled her with my stare. “Veritas, who nurtured you, suckled you?”

“Shall I kill him now?” asked the dog.

Sherry chucked Max under the chin, told him to be patient. “Veritas did not suckle me.” Her gesture encompassed the entire park and, by extension, the whole of Veritas’s
twisted double. “
This
was my cradle – my nursery.” She took a lipstick from her purse. “It’s not hard to make a lie. The money trees are props. The rats and
pigs trace to avant-garde microbiology.”

“All I needed were vocal cords,” said the dog.

She began touching up her lips. “Thanks to my father, I reached my eighth birthday knowing that pigs had wings, that snow was hot, that two and two equaled five, that worms tasted like
honey . . . all of it. So when my burn came – ”

“You were incurable,” I said. “You walked away from the hospital ready to swindle and cheat and – ”

“Write fiction. Four novels so far. Maybe you’d like to read them. You might be a bureaucratic drudge, but I’m fond of you, Orville.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“You don’t. And when my cadre takes over and the burn ends – it won’t be hard, we’ll lie our way to the top – when that happens, you won’t know when
anybody’s
telling the truth.”

“Right,” said the dog, leaping off the bench.

“Truth is beauty,” I said.

Sherry winced. “My father did not mind telling the truth.” Here she became an actress, that consummate species of liar, dragging out her lines. “But he hated his inability to
do otherwise. Honesty without choice, he said, is slavery with a smile.”

A glorious adolescent girl rode through the park astride a six-legged horse, her skin dark despite her troglodytic upbringing, her eyes alive with deceit. The
gift
of deceit, as Sherry
would have it. I wondered whether Dixon was playing with his electric train just then. Probably not. Past his bedtime. I kept envisioning his cerebrum, brocaded with necessary scars.

Sherry patted the spot where the dog had been, and I sat down cautiously. “Care for one?” she asked, plucking a worm off a money tree.

“No.”

“Go ahead. Try it.”

“Well . . .”

“Open your mouth and close your eyes.”

The creature wriggled on my tongue, and I bit down. Pure honey. Sweet, smooth, but I did not enjoy it.

Truth above, dignity below. My index finger throbbed, prickly with that irrevocable little tug of the switch in Room 145. Five hundred volts was a lot, but what was the alternative? To restore
the age of thievery and fraud?

History has it I joined Sherry’s city that very night. A lie, but what do you expect – all the books are written by Dissemblers. True, sometime before dawn I did push my car into the
river, the better to elude Overt Intelligence. But fully a week went by before I told Sherry about her internal transmitter. She was furious. She vowed to have the thing cut out. Go ahead, I told
her, do it – but don’t expect my blessing. That’s another thing the historians got wrong. They say I paid for the surgery.