Blue Shifting (5 page)

She became aware that he had been staring at her for a time in silence. She looked up and saw that his gaze was fixed on her forehead just below the hairline.

"I didn't see that last night," he said.

"Oh." She raised a hand to the tattoo.

He smiled tipsily. "I'm sorry – I don't keep up with the latest Augmented shorthand." His tone was sarcastic. "But doesn't that denote a second body?"

Abbie nodded, watching him.

"I must admit... to a Primitivist, the thought of having a second body – I mean, not content with your first... I find it rather amusing... and pathetic."

"To many an Augmented out there in the real world," she said, "your reactionary attitude would be considered pathetic. Bodychange is established practice, Mr Wellard. This," she gestured from head to foot, "is a somatic simulation."

He was staring. "You're a computer?"

"I'm wholly biological, I assure you."

He shook his head. "Who were you before... before the change?"

"The same person I am now, of course. All that is different is the body and the name."

"But
why
did you change?" He seemed to find it hard to believe that anyone should want to discard the body with which they were born. "Were you diseased?"

She shook her head. "I... I found myself in an intolerable situation. I had to get away without being traced."

He seemed to have sobered a little. He cleared his throat. "I find it hard to imagine how someone so... so Augmented can possibly appreciate my art, as you claim to."

"I am still human," she replied. "Your work speaks to me."

They ate in silence for a while.

Abbie changed the subject. "Do you intend to enter the Contest?"

Wellard snorted. "As if they'd look twice at anything I submitted! And anyway, the Omegas have a bias for dramatic presentations, plays and tragedies of old."

"I was told that immortality is the reward for the winners."

He laughed. "What hell! Do you really think I desire all eternity in which to contemplate and regret the deeds of my past?" He cast her a stricken look. "And anyway, how might I spend eternity, unable to create?"

"Immortals have no
reason
to create," Abbie said. "They have time to answer every question; they're no longer slaves to psychological conflict. Imagine being free of the devil that drives you..."

"I can imagine other ways," he said, more to himself than to Abbie. Then it was his turn to change the subject. "Come. It's time for you to meet my daughter."

Abbie followed him through the studio to the third dome, sick with apprehension.

The dead woman lay naked and very still, cocooned in a crystal catafalque above the computer system. Subdermal electrode implants showed as raised discs beneath her pale skin. She was very much like the hologram of her mother, and just as beautiful. Her chest rose and fell with measured breaths. Wellard stood beside her, stroking hair from her brow, and Abbie almost cried aloud at the poignancy of the father and daughter tableau and all it represented.

Wellard emerged from his reverie. "Technically, Zoe is dead. This system has kept her body alive for fifteen years. Her mind is empty, blank." He smiled. "Thanks to the system, she is capable of limited motion."

He hit a command key; the electrodes fired and Zoe spasmed. The contrast between the sleeping woman as she was and this helplessly jerking corpse was painful to behold. Abbie winced, turned away.

Through her fingers she watched the woman sit up, drag her legs from the catafalque and stand clumsily. She took half a dozen faltering steps, her father in close attendance. What was so tragic about this woeful parody of a marionette was that the technology at Wellard's command was over a decade old. A modern system could fit unobtrusively at the base of her skull and give her he swinging gait of a mannequin. There was such a thing as respect for the dead.

And there were Pilots...

Wellard returned his daughter to her resting place and glanced at Abbie. "Well?"

"If you could leave us alone for a time..."

When Wellard had finally departed, after lovingly arranging his daughter's hair, Abbie approached the dead woman and stared down at her. A regime of regular, computer-assisted exercises had maintained her muscle tone, but her moribund eyes suggested a similar deterioration of mind. Abbie kissed the woman on the lips, fighting to control her emotions, and slipped into a sitting position on the floor. She reached behind her head and activated her occipital system.

The sensation was as if she had suddenly switched off her senses. She existed in a lightless limbo, unaware of her own physicality. What happened next had a perfectly rational scientific explanation, but the process always came to Abbie in the image of a dispossessed awareness (her own) floating into a vacated seat of consciousness (her subject's). She insinuated herself into the derelict neural pathways of Zoe's brain, exploring the intricate matrix of the dead woman's nervous system. She was aware of an extreme weariness, the leaden weight of a body fifteen years dead. There would be much that she would be unable to do with Zoe, and more that she would only be able to make function at a much reduced capacity. In normal circumstances her subjects were newly dead and easily manageable. Zoe would be a test of her abilities.

She opened Zoe's eyes, made out the sunlight beyond the dome as if through a fathom of ocean. With care she flexed the right leg, then the left. She sat up, and her misted vision swung from the upper curve of the dome to the far wall. She was swamped with nausea, dizziness. She gripped the edge of the catafalque and pushed herself to her feet. Swaying, she took a tentative first step, then a second. She glanced down and noticed herself sprawled across the tiles, her eyes vellicating behind closed lids, a soft moan escaping her lips. Then she looked down at Zoe's body, the small breasts, the curving thighs, and although she wanted more than anything to cry, the dead woman's tear ducts would not oblige. She walked across the dome, her first faltering steps giving way to a more confident stride. She moved her arms, fingers and neck in the prescribed routine of rehabilitation, not unlike the precise choreography of a Balinese dancer. Sounds came to her, but distant, muffled. Likewise the sense of touch relayed objects to her as if they were wrapped in fleece. She stared at the dead woman's reflection in the dome. She opened her mouth, expelled air, then a scrap of sound. "Hell... hell... hello. Hello. I... am... Zoe. Wellard is... insane." The words came one by one, creaking from a larynx redundant for years. She experimented with complex sentences, wry observations, obscenities directed at Wellard, and then she relented: "Wellard cannot help... himself. He is a victim of... circumstance. I am Zoe Wellard. How do you... do?"

She returned to the catafalque, sat carefully and lay down. She closed her eyes, allowed her awareness to drain slowly from the body.

Abbie opened her own eyes and found herself lying on the floor. She lay blinking up at the dome, disoriented at the shift back to her own body. She stood wearily, touched the Zoe's brow and wept.

She had known, when her agency had received the commission, what Wellard required, but his precise motives now, as then, were a mystery.

~

Wellard was seated on the patio, staring out across the ocean, when Abbie stepped from the studio and joined him. He looked up. "Well?"

She did not realise, until she sat down opposite him, how much the transfer had drained her. She felt physically weak, emotionally unstable. She had the urge to snap: "Well, what?" But it was obvious what he wanted to know.

"I can pilot her," she replied. "She can walk, talk, hear, see. I could maintain control for an hour, maybe more." She watched him closely.

Wellard smiled, a paradoxically boyish grin on a face so rugged. "That should be quite long enough."

"For what?" she asked.

He reached out to the table and picked up a sheaf of paper, an antique medium appropriate to Wellard's Primitivism. He passed it to Abbie.

She leafed through the sheaf. It was an old fashioned play-script, a dialogue between two characters. She scanned the top sheet, bearing the title
Atonement
, and the opening. Time: fifteen years ago. Setting: the patio of an artist's dome, Mikonos, Earth. Dramatis personae: Benedict Wellard, an artist; Zoe Wellard, his daughter.

Wellard: The love I had for your mother was unique.

Zoe: Please, father...

Abbie looked up from the script and stared at Wellard.

His smile, the light in his eyes, suggested more than just enthusiasm for the entertainment he had planned. "It is the transcription of my final meeting with my daughter. It's verbatim up to a certain point, at which I have allowed myself a degree of artistic licence. Please, read on..."

Abbie regarded the opening lines, a constriction in her throat, then slowly read her way through the following pages. Her heart hammered and gradually she became less aware of herself; she was wholly captivated by the words on the page as the drama unfolded its terrible logic.

She was only peripherally aware of Wellard, watching her.

She lowered the last page and stared at the artist, seeing only the tragic finale, the denouement that Wellard had himself fashioned to stand as testament to his overwhelming guilt.

"Well?" he smiled.

She shook her head. "It's sick..."

His expression became grim. "Whether it is sick or not does not detract from its fundamental truth. Tonight's re-enactment will bring the cycle to a close with my fitting punishment-"

"But you don't deserve...
this
."

"Who are you to say what I do not deserve?" he snapped. He stood and paced to the edge of the patio, then sat side-saddle on the rail and regarded her. "What I did fifteen years ago – and it isn't in the script – was... unforgivable. It brought about my daughter's demise and plagued me ever since."

Abbie sat without moving, shocked at the thought of the role Wellard wanted her to play. "But even so-"

"Please, allow me to explain." The artist drew a long breath and stared into the ocean. "My daughter, Zoe, was a telenaut. Fifteen years ago the science was still in its initial stages – the telemass process was crude, compared with the system as we know it today. The only people who 'massed were the telenauts, and the incidence of fatalities was high. Back then, the body of a telenaut was duplicated and fired to its destination, the planet under investigation. Then the telenaut's cerebral identity was beamed after it. This way, even if the duplicated doppelganger was injured or killed, the telenaut's identity could be retrieved and restored to its original body. At fifteen, Zoe was a veteran of some dozen missions to the planets of stars within a radius of twenty light years from Earth. On the occasion of our final meeting she was contemplating the commission to be 'massed here, Nea Kikládhes, then an unexplored world. No one had ever before been telemassed thousands of light years through space. It was highly dangerous, and needless to say I did not want her to go."

Abbie whispered, "You can't hold yourself responsible."

Wellard ignored her. "We had an argument, more or less as set down in the script. Then I did something terrible. I was desperate at the time – some might say unbalanced – though I'm not pleading this as an excuse... Zoe fled, vowing that she intended to take the commission and saying that she hoped she died. She was my only daughter, so much like my wife..." Wellard took a breath, glanced from the sea to Abbie. "Less than one week later I heard from her private clinic in Athens that her body was awaiting collection. She had bequeathed it to me in the event of an accident. It was kept alive – if you can call it that – by a sophisticated computer system. I had her moved to my studio..."

"What do you think happened to her?" Abbie murmured.

The sun was beginning its long fall towards the horizon, bringing to a close the short Kikládhean day. Overhead, the Core stars were coming out. Wellard returned to his seat across the table from Abbie and smiled to himself. "Zoe never said much about her work, but I do recall something she told me once. She said that one of the exercises involved entering the mind of a hummingbird, viewing the world through its consciousness. She told me that for the period of an hour, she
was
that hummingbird." He shrugged. "This appealed to my primitive imagination...

"A number of years after receiving my daughter's body, I learned that Nea Kikládhes was being opened up as a resort complex for artists. I had my studio duplicated and moved here with my daughter." He poured more wine, took a mouthful and paused before continuing. "During my first year here I used my launch to ferry provisions from the telemass station to my studio, and on every trip I was followed by a leviathan – a deep sea monster like a shark, though larger. It attacked me several times. I know it was the same monster – I once scarred it's flank with an ill-aimed harpoon, and the distinguishing mark was clearly visible. It struck me as obvious," Wellard said, staring at Abbie with total conviction, as if to forestall her incredulity, "that, when she was beamed here fifteen years ago, the consciousness of my daughter had found itself somehow trapped in the monstrous form of the sea creature."

Abbie wanted to laugh, and then to cry, but Wellard stared at her with frightening certitude, his knuckles white where they gripped the goblet.

He indicated the script. "Now, you appreciate the symmetrical perfection of my final work?"

Abbie stood and moved to the rail, her back to Wellard so that he could not see her tears. Across the curve of the ocean, a sparkling troupe of Supra-sapiens performed pyrotechnic aerobatics above the largest island, entertaining the gathered artists.

"Well?" Wellard said. "Will you take part in my little finale?"

Abbie gripped the rail. On the horizon, the will-o-the wisps described symbols of infinity.

She nodded. "Very well... yes."

They drank a toast, and Abbie hurriedly excused herself and retired with the script to her dome. For a long time she lay on the sunken sleeping pad, memorizing the stilted dialogue. Later she stood and walked to the clear wall of the dome, stared out across the ocean to the island on which she had arrived the night before. Lights illuminated the length of the sea-front boulevard. The Supra-sapiens played – or communicated universal verities, meaningless to her – in the darkening sky. Abbie reached beneath her hair, opened the communication channel and arranged to meet the fish-boy. Then she returned to the sleeping pad and with a stylus struck out Wellard's original title and replaced it with her own:
Redemption
. Then she turned to the final pages, where the scenario diverged from the original dialogue, and rewrote the ending to her own satisfaction.