Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (20 page)

“Have you seen Georgiana this morning?” he asked.

No, the cook told him, he had not.

Back to his own quarters, where he found his marital bed empty. He looked up and saw Courteous sitting
in the chair he had vacated, wrapped in a robe of flawless white, her long, bare legs, equally flawless, stretched out in front of her. He steadied himself with a few deep breaths before joining her.

“Good morning, my darling.” With a kiss upon her perfect cheek.

“Beneficent. I thought you had gone to work.”

“I’m not feeling very well today.”

“Did you have a bad dream?”

“Why … no. Not that
I can remember, why?”

“I thought I heard you cry out in your sleep. It’s been happening quite a bit lately.”

“Has it?”

She was sitting in the sun, he in the shade. She leaned her head toward him.

“Be a dear and rub my head, will you? I have a terrible headache.”

He scooted his chair behind hers and gently rubbed her temples.

“Hmmmm. That feels delicious.”

“Neither one of us has been feeling
well lately,” he said. “It’s the doldrums. We can’t afford to get into a rut, darling.”

He was referring to the last terminal human malady: boredom. Extreme cases could be deadly,
permanently
deadly, since they might lead to suicide, the ultimate taboo in the age of immortality. Sibyls, they were called, after the myth. Sometimes the word was used as a verb, as in, “Did you hear about Gracious?
She sibylled yesterday.”

“Let’s get away,” he continued. “Have you ever been to Antarctica? It’s the perfect time of year to visit.”

“We just came back from the Alps,” she reminded him.

“Antarctica is nothing like the Alps.” He traced his fingers down her neck and began to massage her shoulders.

“I meant we just took a trip.”

“I know it’s rather primitive by your standards, but we’ll spare
no expense. We’ll bring along the entire staff, your stylist included, that insufferable Carl or Kenneth or whatever his name is … ”

“Kent, darling.”

“Yes, Kent, even him, and Georgiana, of course … ” He took a deep breath and asked, as if he’d just noticed, “but where is Georgiana this morning? I don’t believe I’ve seen her.”

“Georgiana? Oh, I dismissed her.”

His fingers froze, but for an
instant, and he said casually, “Oh, really? Dismissed her?” His mind was racing; his fingers were not. They slowly and lovingly caressed her perfect neck. “That’s a surprise. I thought her family had been with you for two hundred years or more.”

Courteous shrugged. Shrugged! A spasm went through his hands. He closed his eyes.
Hold still!

“What … when precisely did you dismiss her?”

“Yesterday
afternoon. I thought I told you.”

“No. Or if you did, I’ve forgotten it. What was the cause?”

“I caught her stealing.”

“Stealing?” His throat was tightening up. Breathe. Breathe!

“Or conspiring to steal. I confronted her, and she confessed. So I dismissed her.”

“I see. Well. I didn’t know her very well—hardly at all, actually—but thievery didn’t strike me as part of her character.”

“Oh,
at your age you should know that the smallest sins are the hardest to hide.”

“But now you’re left without a persist. You should have told me before you sacked her. I could have procured another for you.”

“Why do I need a persist, darling, when I have you?” she purred, rubbing her palms over the backs of his hands. “You will be my persist from now on, and wait on me hand and foot!”

“Nothing
would bring me greater joy, my love,” he said, and kissed her forehead. “Nothing at all.”

He waited until the afternoon to escape, telling her he had a meeting down at the Research Center. On board the tram, he dropped a message tagged
urgent
into his persist’s cogbox.

Meet me at my office. B. P.

“Georgiana is gone,” Beneficent informed him the moment his personal assistant arrived. “I want
her found.”

“Have you dropped a message into her cogbox?” his persist asked.

“I don’t have her address. And I can’t ask Courteous for it, and do not ask me why I cannot ask. She is missing.”

“Courteous?”

“Georgiana! Courteous dismissed her. Now, I know she has family in the East Quarter … ”

“The East Quarter?” The persist’s face bled of all color. The East Quarter was a notoriously dangerous
section of the ghetto. Even Omniscient’s private police, the dreaded CRC, the Captains of the Review Committee, refused to venture into the East Quarter after sunset.

“She shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Beneficent said. “A persist from the house of Spool hasn’t been dismissed in any of their memories. It will be the talk of the ghetto. Follow the whispers to her front door.”

“And once I find
it? What would you have me do?”

“Bring her back to me, of course!”

“Bring her … ?”

“Well, not
literally
to me. That wouldn’t do. Bring her back here. Yes. Find her and bring her here and once she’s here drop me a message. I’ll find some excuse to come down. If not, stay here with her till morning. Don’t let her out of your sight.”

“And if she refuses?”

“What do you mean? What if she prefers
squalor and disease and starvation to the lap of luxury? If she even bothers to ask, tell her you were sent by Candid Sheet, who is looking for a new persist for his wife.”

“And what if I can’t find her?”

“You are not to return until you do.”

The persist was aghast. “I can’t stay in the East Quarter past sunset! It would be suicide!”

“Here.” Beneficent handed him a device slightly smaller
than the palm of his hand. “If you find yourself in a tight spot, press the button.”

“What happens when I press the button?”

“Anyone within a hundred feet will be neutralized.”

“What will keep
me
from being neutralized?”

“The device itself. It insulates whoever’s holding it. Make certain you don’t use it anywhere near Georgiana!”

He pushed the man toward the door. The day was waning. “Hurry!
And you better put on some sort of disguise. You’re easy prey with that uniform on. Report to me immediately when you find her. Go!”

Beneficent had lived many lifetimes, but none seemed longer than the rest of that day. Or that night. For the sun drew low in the sky and the shadow of the tower stretched across the river and
fell over the East Quarter, and the trash fires glowed a hellish red
in the darkening day. Dinner with Courteous was a particular agony. To be forced to sit through seven courses, and afterward to join her for her favorite programs inside the televerse, insipid melodramas about the insipid lives of the insipid 3Fs in which nothing really mattered because there was no real risk, even the risk of a broken heart. And then, the worst of all, lying with her in the utter
dark, a blind man groping in a lightless void, where her lightest caress was scorchingly painful. After midnight now, and still no word. What has happened? Where could his persist be? Where could
she
be? Dropping an urgent message into his missing persist’s cogbox:
Where are you? Reply at once!
And hearing nothing, nothing at all. Tuning into the breaking-news stream, because surely, if his persist
had used the device, word of it would leak out, even from the no-man’s-land of the East Quarter. But there was nothing, nothing. And then, with less than an hour till dawn, actually considering going into the ghetto himself. Not to find his missing persist, damn him, but to find her.

He slept not at all that night—missing the auto-backup to his psyche-card, but that hardly mattered to him—and
he rose with the sun. His eyes were red and swollen, as if he had cried his way through the night. He ordered up some coffee and waited for it on the balcony, watching the sunrise. Another message to his persist, and more silence in reply.

The door slid open behind him. He smelled coffee.

And muffins.

“Georgiana … ?” He wondered if he might be hallucinating. How could she be standing there
in that same drab uniform, holding a plate of muffins, as if nothing had happened? How was it possible?

She placed the tray on the table, set down his cup. When she leaned over, he could smell her perfume, and his head swam.

“Beneficent?” she asked. “Is something the matter?”

“I thought … Courteous said … Georgiana, where have you been?”

“In the kitchen, making muffins. Oh, you mean yesterday?
Mrs. Page gave me the day off. I was visiting my grandmother at the Retired Persists’ Home.”

“You were visiting … ?”

“Didn’t Mrs. Page tell you?”

“Of course. I must have forgotten.” He made an attempt to pick up a muffin. His hand was shaking violently.

“Is everything all right, Beneficent?”

“Well, yes. Everything is fine, Georgiana. Everything is … ”

He could not go on. With any of it.
He hurled the crushed pastry over the railing and cried out, “I thought I had lost you! Never do that to me again, do you understand? I cannot bear it, Georgiana. I cannot bear it!”

Before she could escape, he threw his arms around her and pressed his face against the rough material of her uniform. Startled, she pushed against his shoulders, trying to free herself, but he had locked his hands
behind her back.

“Mr. Page! Beneficent! What are you doing?”

“I love you. I have loved you for a very long time, and I don’t know what to
do
about it. I’ve never loved anyone, not in six hundred years, Georgiana, and never will again, not in six billion or six
trillion
. If I lost you, I would destroy my psyche-card and throw myself off this balcony—I would pull a sibyl, I swear I would! It would
be better to die than live a single day without you.”

Pressing his face against her uniform, staining it with his tears.

“You cannot love me, Mr. Page.”

“Exactly the problem!”

“No. I mean, you
cannot
. I am a
finitissium
.”

“I don’t care if you’re a turtle! It doesn’t matter to me.”

“It matters to me.”

He gasped. Her words weakened his grip and she broke free. Holding up her hands, as if
to say
Stop! No farther!

“You’re in love with someone else,” he said. It was not a question.

“There is no one else.”

“Then why does it … ?”

She shook her head. “There
is
no one else,” she said. “Only you.”

She fell into his arms, her face shining in the first light of the finite sun, and he told her he knew her down to the last eyelash and she smiled as if she understood.

What had Courteous
said?
The smallest of sins are the hardest to hide
. No wonder he had missed it.

The body of his persist was recovered in a steaming trench of raw sewage three days later. His throat had been slashed from ear to ear. The loss raised several uncomfortable questions in the minds of the CRC investigators, questions they shared with Beneficent. Why was his persist in the East Quarter after dark? How
had he come into the possession of a neural neutralizer? Beneficent confessed ignorance on both matters, except to say his neutralizer was missing and he had long suspected his persist was addicted to metacoke, a deadly habit that Beneficent nevertheless
tolerated because it greatly increased the man’s energy and efficiency. He supposed the poor fellow had gone to the Quarter to fuel his habit.
Beyond that, he knew as much as they did. The file was closed that day. Beneficent was, after all, the husband of Omniscient Spool’s favorite daughter.

Beneficent met Georgiana that afternoon in a little cottage at the western edge of the Spool compound. Years ago, the cottage had been a guesthouse, then converted into a gardener’s shed, then finally abandoned. They made love on a pile of old
blankets in an atmosphere of moist earth and old fertilizer.

“Is it safe?” he had asked her.

“You know it isn’t,” she answered as they tore off each other’s clothes.

Afterward, he held her in his arms, her head resting on his chest, and he watched the dust motes spin in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the cracks between the rotting boards. He thought of the CRC pulling his persist’s
bloated corpse from the trench reeking of human waste. The image had been mass broadcast, and he had inadvertently opened the message in his cogbox. He deleted it immediately, but it was too late, he had seen it.

Rot. Decay. He saw it everywhere lately, though it had surrounded him for generations. Even the beautiful flowers of the Spool gardens growing in abundance reminded him of the finiteness
of all life—except his own. One day a strong wind would come and the walls of the old cottage would collapse. The wood would break down to its unrecognizable essence. Winter would come and the flowers would die. And the girl in his arms? She, too. She, too.

But he would go on and on. Young, ancient, blessed, cursed. The time was coming, as sure as the sun would one day swallow the Earth in its
fiery maw, when every atom of her body, all seven
billion billion billion of them, would be scattered and diffused. Nothing would remain but his memory of her, to torment him for eternity.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked. “Your heart is beating very fast.”

“I’m wondering if she suspects.”

“Of course she suspects. That’s why she played that trick on you, told you I was sacked.”

“She
cannot find out, Georgiana. Where does she think you are?”

“I told her my brother was sick.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“You don’t know many things about me.”

“I want to know everything. Your favorite color, what sort of music you like, what you dream about, the secret things you’ve never told anyone … ”

“I don’t have secrets. Well, just one, and that one you already know.”

They
could run away. Flee the city. It would be absurdly easy. There were still remote places in the world where they could hide. He could fake a suicide—the master files of all sibyls were erased, their psyche-cards destroyed. They could grow old together and, when they died, his atoms would scatter and mix with hers, like a flock of fourteen billion billion billion birds twirling in the sky.