But all Theresa said was, “I don’t know what I mean. I just know they’re not whole. All of them. All of us.”
“Ummm.”
“There’s something wrong inside us. I believe that, Jackson. I do.”
She didn’t sound as if she believed it. She sounded unsure as always, with her hesitant soft speech and loose flowered dress. It occurred to Jackson that in an enclave where dinner parties often ended up naked for communal feeding, he hadn’t actually seen the shape of his sister’s body for years.
But then Theresa spoke in a sudden rush. “I read something evil today. Actually evil. I sent Thomas into the library deebees, for my book. Because of something Leisha Camden wrote in 2045.”
Jackson braced himself. Theresa often sent her personal system, Thomas, trawling through historical databases, and she often misinterpreted what she found there. Or she became indignant over it. Or she cried.
“Thomas brought me a sentence from a famous doctor who knew Leisha. Hans Dietrich Lowering. He said, ‘There is no such thing as the mind. There is only a collection of electrical and physiological operations we collectively call the brain.’ He said that!”
Pity flooded Jackson. She looked so distressed, so ineffectually indignant, at this piece of old and nonstartling non-news. But his pity was laced with disquiet. As soon as Theresa had said the word “evil,” Jackson had a sudden flash of Ellie Lester, taller than he was, teeth bared in a fury that she could not allow into the official medical comlink. She had looked evil—an evil, beautiful giantess, and under the unwrapping of sunshine Jackson could admit what he had denied before: he had wanted her. Even though she was not really evil, only greedy. Not really beautiful, only obvious. And no more a giant than the sinking miniature holo of the Pequod beside the dead goldfish in the atrium pool.
He shifted uneasily on his chair and took another sip of his drink.
“It’s evil to deny the mind,” Theresa was saying. “Let alone the soul.”
“Tessie—”
She leaned forward, a pale insubstantial blur in the gloom, her voice close to tears. “It is evil, Jackson. We aren’t just sensors and processors and wiring, like ’bots. We’re humans, all of us.”
“Calm down, honey. It was just a sentence written a long time ago. Musty data in an old file.”
“Then people don’t believe it’s true anymore? Doctors don’t?”
Of course they did. Only Theresa could get this upset over a clichéd statement seventy-five years old, based on other clichés two hundred years old.
“Tessie, sweetheart…”
“We have souls, Jackson!”
Another voice: “Oh, Christ, not another babble-on about souls!”
She came in smiling, mocking, filling the large room with her larger, five-foot-three, utterly vital presence. Cazie Sanders. His ex-wife. Who refused to depart his life, the divorce she’d taken from him just one more thing she casually disregarded now that she had it. On the excuse that she was Theresa’s friend, Cazie came and went in the Aranows’ apartment as she pleased, took up and discarded the Aranows as she pleased, pleased herself always.
With her were two men Jackson didn’t know—was one of them her current lover? Both of them? One glance at the older man and Jackson knew he was on something stronger than sunshine or Endorkiss. Sleek, long, unmuscled, he had the deliberately androgynous body of a vid star, dressed in a rough brown cotton tunic like a pillowcase, already eaten into small holes by the feeding tubules on his skin. The younger man, whose genemod handsomeness uncomfortably reminded Jackson of Ellie Lester’s slave holo, wore an opaque holosuit that appeared to be made of thousands of angry, crawling bees. His mouth curved in a permanent sneer. Would Cazie actually sleep with either of these diseases? Jackson didn’t know.
It was difficult to explain why he’d married Cazie, but not very. She was beautiful, with her dark short curls, honey-gold skin, and elongated golden eyes flecked with pale green. But all genemod women were beautiful. Certainly Cazie wasn’t as lovely or loyal or kind as Theresa—who, next to her ex-sister-in-law, faded. Nearly disappeared, flickered weakly like a malfunctioning holo.
Cazie burned with some vital, ungenemod force, darkly intelligent, primal and erotic as driving rain. Whenever she’d touched him—feverishly, or languorously, or tenderly, with Cazie there was no predicting—Jackson had felt something iron and cold dissolve in his center, something he usually didn’t even know he was carrying around. He’d felt connected to nameless, powerful, very old longings. Sometimes during sex with Cazie, her fingernails raking him and his penis moving blind within her like a hot living missile, he would be amazed to hear himself weeping, or shouting, or chanting—another person entirely, the memory of which embarrassed him afterward. Cazie was never embarrassed. Not by anything. After two years of marriage, she had divorced Jackson for being “too passive.”
He had been afraid, during the messy weeks of her moving out, that nothing in his life would ever again be as good as those two years. And nothing had.
Looking at her now, dressed in a short green-and-gold drape that left one shoulder bare, Jackson felt the familiar tightening in his neck, his chest, his scrotum, a complex of desire, and rage, and competitiveness, and humiliation that he had somehow not been strong enough to swim in the dark currents of Cazie’s inner sea. He put down his drink. He needed his head clear.
“How are you feeling, Tess?” Cazie said kindly. She sat down, unasked, beside Theresa, who both shrank back minutely and put out one hand, as if to warm herself at Cazie’s glow. Their friendship was inexplicable to Jackson; they were so different. But once someone had come into Theresa’s life, she clung to that person forever. And Theresa brought out the protective, tender side of Cazie—as if Tess were a helpless kitten. Jackson looked away from his ex-wife, and then refused to allow himself that weakness, and looked back.
“I’m fine,” Theresa whispered. She glanced at the door. Strangers increased her agitation.
“Tess, these are my friends, Landau Carson and Irv Kanzler. Jackson and Theresa Aranow. We’re on our way to an exorcism.”
“To a what?” Jackson said. Immediately he wished he hadn’t. Irv drew an inhaler from a pocket of his consumable tunic and sniffed more of whatever was rearranging his neural chemistry. That was the problem with the more toxic recreational drugs: the Cell Cleaner busily removed them almost as soon as they entered the body, so users had to keep renewing every few minutes.
“An ex-or-cissssm,” Landau drawled in a phony accent. He was the one wearing bees. “Haven’t you heard of them? You must have heard of them.”
“Jackson never hears of anything,” Cazie said. “He doesn’t leave the enclave and go down and dirty among Livers.”
“I leave the enclave sometimes,” Jackson said evenly.
“I’m delighted to hear it,” Cazie said, helping herself to a glass of sunshine. The fingernail on her left ring finger was sheathed in a holo of a tiny chained butterfly frantically beating its wings.
“An ex-or-cisssm,” Landau said with exaggerated patience, “is simply nova. A genuine brain trot. You’d die laughing.”
“I doubt it,” Jackson said, and vowed that was the last thing he’d say to this toxin. He folded his arms across his chest, realized that probably made him look as stuffy as Cazie had implied, and unfolded them.