Carved in Stone
by J. Steven York
Illustration by Steve Cavallo
The door of the smart cab hissed open, and Juanita was half out onto the cemetery sidewalk before the smell of the place washed over her. The overwhelming smell was of honeysuckle and sweet, freshly-mown grass, but somewhere under it all, Juanita imagined, and perhaps it was just her imagination, the rancid smell of death.
She looked out across the expanse of manicured lawn, broad shade trees, and carefully tended islands of flowers in red, purple, and white. It might have been a park or a garden, but for the ranks of marble headstones, and the corruption and decay she knew lay only a few feet beneath the perfect surface. Harvey was down there, rotting. Bastard. If anyone deserved to be buried in the cold earth and eaten by worms, it was Harvey.
Juanita had queried the cemetery computer on the way from the airport and transferred a map to her hand-link. She knew the way to Harvey’s grave. So, why couldn’t she move? She considered getting back in the cab and returning to the airport. That would be stupid.
She made a fist and thumped it gently against the side of the cab in frustration. “What am I doing here?”
Two of the cab’s eyes swiveled to watch her from a little turret in the cab roof. She wondered if it had heard her rhetorical question, and was trying to decide if it should respond, or if it was merely concerned that she’d damage the cab. She had asked it to bring her here, paid it to do so. Now she was paying it to wait, watching her silently with its crystal teddy-bear eyes.
“Is there a problem?” The cab’s little-boy voice was gentle and polite. She wished it were coarse and rude. Then she’d have an excuse to get out of the cab. Or to get back in, return to the airport, and leave this place forever.
She’d planned to go to the grave and—what? Dance? Spit? Gloat? It had seemed so clear when she’d finally heard about the car accident—learned Harvey was dead. She’d boarded the boostliner in Seattle feeling such a sense of purpose and satisfaction. She’d maxed all her credits to afford the cross-country ticket, and it had seemed a good investment at the time. Now it had all wilted like a cut flower too long in the Sun.
All she knew was that she and Harvey had unfinished business. She’d never confronted him for the way he’d treated her, or what he’d done to her. She’d filed a police report at the emergency room while they were getting ready to set her arm. While he’d spent the night in jail, she’d had friends pack her things. By the time he had gotten home, she was already on the way to Seattle and a new life. She’d later heard that, without her to testify, the assault charges had been dropped. She’d never had to face him again, and at the time, she’d considered it a victory. Now, she wasn’t so sure.
“Wait there,” she finally told the cab. “I won’t be long.”
She was away from the car before she could change her mind, wading out among the headstones, lined up like soldiers at attention. The sound of distant voices caused her to hesitate. She wasn’t the only visitor to the cemetery today. Half a dozen rows over, she could see three people standing in front of a grave, an elderly man and woman, both dressed in black, and a scruffy teenage boy dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket, a red bandanna tied around his long dark hair. It seemed curious to her that the boy was standing directly on the grave, leaning against the headstone, arms crossed over his chest. He seemed comfortable there, chatting with the old couple.
Things seemed to wrap up, and the couple lowered their heads and turned to walk away. The teen held up his open hand, rotating the wrist in an understated wave good-bye. Then he dissolved. Juanita blinked her eyes just to be sure she wasn’t imagining it. The boy turned into a cloud of particles that swirled like a dust devil for a moment before fading away. She held her hand to her chest, feeling her heart pounding beneath the white silk of her blouse. Then she laughed nervously, knowing that the teenager must have only been a Dead Ringer.
She turned to the nearest headstone, examining it closely. It seemed conventional enough, an elaborately carved slab of speckled gray granite, engraved with a name and the years of birth and death. There was no other inscription, but that would have been redundant. She stepped closer, spotting the array of lenses skillfully blended into the pattern of the carvings, like the eyes of a camouflaged desert spider.
She edged nearer to the grave, flinching in spite of herself as an elderly black woman materialized in front of her, wrapped in an elaborately patterned shawl of purple and white. The woman lifted her head and spread her arms, like a blooming flower or a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. She looked at Juanita, with eyes the color of chocolate, and smiled.
The effect was startling in its realism, and Juanita felt compelled to say something, even though she knew the woman was just a computer-generated projection. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Ms. Thomas,” she had read the name on the headstone, “it’s just that I’ve never been to a place like this before. I’ve heard about them, seen them on the vids, but never…”
She was afraid somehow that she’d upset Ms. Thomas, as absurd as that seemed. Ms. Thomas was only a sophisticated artificial intelligence, programmed with the voice and appearance of the woman when she was alive, provided with enough information to recognize and respond to family members. She’d heard some of them had more complex programming based on diaries, biographies, interviews with relatives and friends, old vids and photographs, and other information that could be dredged up. But the programming was more expensive than the DeadRinger hardware, so most started out quite simple, learning about themselves from conversations with visitors they recognized as having known them in life.
Thomas leaned toward her, squinting slightly. “I don’t know you, do I, honey?”
“No, ma’am. I realized what kind of place this was, and I just went to the closest headstone to see. I’ve never met a DeadRinger before.”
Ms. Thomas drew back and frowned. “We don’t like that word here, honey. That’s just what they say on the vids. We’re called ‘life memorials.’” The smile returned to her face, and she somehow reminded Juanita of a child who had just done a successful recitation. Then the smile took on a bemused twist. “Did I say that? Darned if they don’t put the funniest things in our heads. When Harvey Mendez sold me this plot he never said they’d be putting these things in my head. I don’t mind DeadRinger at all. I think it’s kind of funny, myself.”
“Wait a minute. Harvey sold you this plot?”
“Oh, yes. We have to be reminded of a lot of things, out here in the graveyard, but that’s one thing they made sure we remembered, just in case anyone asked.” She giggled. “Harvey hated it when I called it a graveyard. ‘Memorial park,’ he’d say to me. ‘Memorial park.’ ”
Well, it figured. Harvey had always been a salesman, always a hustler. Selling high-tech funeral plots to old ladies who couldn’t afford them would have been just like him. “Bastard,” she said unconsciously.
Ms. Thomas shook her head. “You don’t mean Harvey, do you, honey? It’s not nice to speak ill of the dead.” Juanita nodded.
“But he was always such a nice young man. Very serious. He’d come by to talk to me sometimes. He’d talk to all of us down here. I kept telling him he should stop spending so much time down here and find himself a girlfriend.”
Juanita flinched at the last suggestion, and found herself rubbing her forearm. “Harvey didn’t have much luck with women.”
“You don’t mean—? Were you and Harvey involved? You did know that—”
“He was here? Yes, I knew. That’s why I came here today. And Harvey and I were married once. But things didn’t work out. Harvey broke my arm, and I left him.”