NAME & NUMBER : Wendy Wanders, Subject 117
Neurologically augmented empath approved for emotive engram therapy.
The pages blurred. I gripped the edge of my cot. Nausea exploded inside me, a fiery pressure building inside my head until I bowed to crack my forehead against the table edge, again and again, stammering for help until with a shout Dr. Harrow’s Aide ran to me and slapped an ampule to my neck. He stood above me until the drug took effect, his hands poised to catch me if I began head-banging again. After several minutes I breathed deeply and stared at the wall, then reported on my unsuccessful session with the poet.
That evening I walked to the riverside. A trio of retrofitted security sculls puttered down the river, colored yolk-yellow like dirty foam upon the water. I had always assumed the sculls kept watch over those of us at HEL ; but the Aide Justice had told me that their true business lay across the river, within the overgrown alleys and pleasure gardens of the dying City of Trees.
“Smugglers,” he had said, tugging at the bronze ear-cuffs that marked his rank and credit level. “The Ascendants trade with the City Botanists for opium and rare herbs. In return they give them precious metals and resins. And sometimes their generosity is overwhelming, and they leave us dying from some new plague.”
A tiny figure on one of the sculls raised an arm to wave at me. I waved back as the boat skidded across the water. Then I turned and wandered along the riverwalk, past rotting oak benches and the ruins of glass buildings, watching the sun sink through argent thunderheads.
A single remaining service ziggurat towered above the walk. It shadowed the charred ruins of a refugee complex built during the brief years of the Second Ascension. That was when there were still refugees and survivors, before the Governors began to fight the starveling rebels with the first generation of mutagens.
Or so the Aide Justice had said. He was from the City, and knew many strange things, although he spoke little of his people there.
“Do you miss them?” I asked him once. We were awaiting the results of a’ scan to determine if a woman I had been treating showed evidence of schizothymia.
He shook his head, then smiled ruefully and nodded. “Yes, of course I do,” he said. “But they are simple people, it’s not like here.…”
I could tell from his expression that he was a little ashamed of them. The idea excited me: shame was not an emotion I tapped often at the Human Engineering Laboratory.
“Are they smugglers?” I asked.
Justice laughed. “I guess some of them are.”
He told me about the City then, a history different from the one given us by Dr. Harrow and the sanctioned educational programs of the Fourth Ascension. Because at HEL we learned that after the Long Night of the First Ascension the abandoned capital had been resettled, set up as an outpost where a handful of researchers and soldiers stood guard over the Museums and Archives and Libraries of the fallen nation. But with the Second Ascension the City was forgotten. Those who had commanded the City’s few residents were killed or exiled to the Balkhash Commonwealth (even then its vast steppes and mountains saw the deaths of more prisoners than there were now people in the world). And those who lived in the City were forgotten, abandoned as the City itself had been after the First Ascension exterminated its inhabitants. They were not worth capturing or remanding, the few hundred researchers and soldiers and the prostitutes who had followed them to the City by the river. Their descendants were squatters now, living in the ruins of the capital, kept alive by cannibal rites and what they could wrest from the contaminated earth.
But the Aide Justice spoke with respect of the Curators. His own people he called the Children of the Magdalene. Only the lazars were to be feared, those who fell victim to the viral strikes of the rebels and the guerrillas of the Balkhash Commonwealth. Lazars and the geneslaves who haunted the forests and wastelands.
“It is beautiful, Wendy: even the ruins are beautiful, and the poisoned forest …”
But we had been interrupted then by Dr. Harrow, calling Justice to help her initialize the link between myself and another patient.
The riverwalk’s crumbling benches gave way to airy filigrees of rusted iron. At one of these tables I saw someone from the Human Engineering Laboratory.
“Anna or Andrew?” I called. By the time I was close enough for her to hear, I knew it was Anna this time, peacock feathers and long blue macaw quills studding the soft raised nodes on her shaven temples.
“Wendy.” She gestured dreamily at a concrete bench. “Sit.”
I settled beside her, tweaking a cobalt plume, and wished I’d worn the fiery cock-of-the-rock quills she’d given me last spring. Anna was stunning, always: brown eyes brilliant with octine, small breasts tight against her tuxedo shirt. She was the only one of the other empties I spoke much with, although she beat me at faro and Andrew had once broken my tooth in an amphetamine rage. A saucer scattered with broken candicaine straws sat before her. Beside it a fluted parfait glass held several unbroken pipettes. I did one and settled back, grinning.
“You had that woman today,” Anna hissed into my ear. Her rasping voice made me shiver with delight. “The poet. I think I’m furious.”
I shrugged. “Luck of the draw.”
“How was she?” She blinked and I watched golden dust powder the air between us. “Was she good, Wendy?” She stroked my thigh and I giggled.
“Great. She was great.” I lowered my eyes and squinted until the table disappeared into the steel rim of an autobus seat.
“Let me see.” Her whisper the sigh of air brakes. “Wendy—”
The rush was too good to stop. I let her pull me forward until my cheek grazed hers and I felt her mouth against mine. I tasted her saliva, the chemical bite of candicaine: then bile and summer air and exhaust.…
Too fast. I jerked my head up, choking as I pulled away from Anna. She stared at me with huge blank eyes.
“Ch-c-c-,” she gasped, spittle flying into the parfait glass. I swore and grabbed her chin, held her face close to mine.
“Anna,” I said loudly. “Anna, it’s Wendy—”
“Ahhh.” Her eyes focused and she drew back. “Wendy. Good stuff.” She licked her lips, tongue a little loose from the hit so that she drooled. I grimaced.
“More, Wendy …”
“Not now.” I grabbed two more straws and cracked one. “I have a follow-up with her tomorrow morning. I have to go.”
She nodded. I flicked a napkin at her. “Wipe your mouth, Anna. I’ll tell Harrow I saw you so she won’t worry.”
“Goodbye, Wendy.” A server arrived as I left, its crooked wheels grating against the broken concrete as it listed toward the table. I glimpsed myself reflected in its blank black face, and hurried from the patio as behind me Anna ordered more straws.
I recall nothing before Dr. Harrow. The drugs they gave me—massive overdoses for a three-year-old—burned those memories as well as scorched every neural branch that might have helped me climb to feel the sun as other people do. But the drugs stopped the thrashing, the head-banging, the screaming. And slowly, other drugs rived through my tangled axons and forged new pathways. A few months and I could see again. A few more and my fingers moved. The wires that had stilled my screams made me scream once more, and, finally, exploded a neural dam so that a year later I began to speak. By then the Ascendant funding poured through other conduits, scarcely less complex than my own, and led as well to the knot of electrodes in my brain.
In the early stages of her work, shortly after I arrived at HEL , Dr. Harrow attempted a series of neuroelectrical implants between the two of us. It was an unsuccessful effort to reverse the damage done by the biochemicals. Seven children died before the minimum dosage was determined: enough to change the neural pattern behind autistic behavior; not enough to allow the patient to develop her own emotional responses to subsequent internal or external stimuli. I still have scars from the implants: fleshy nodes like tiny ears trying to sprout from my temples.