Robert Silverberg - The Second Trip

And if an outsider tried to make an assessment of Lissa based on what we told him?

—He’d have to make parallax adjustments to compensate for our differences in perspective.

But which is the real Lissa? Yours or mine?

—Both. She can be passive and weak and still be a monster and a vampire.

You really believe, though, that she deliberately sets out to drain vitality from people?

—Not necessarily deliberately, Macy. She may not even realize what she’s doing. I’m sure she didn’t realize it until her inputs got too intense to cope with. It was just a thing she had, a telepathic thing, a need, a hunger. Which had the incidental effect of destroying people who came close to her.

I don’t feel that she’s been destroying me.

—You’re welcome to her, pal.

Twenty minutes to ten. Another shot of bourbon. Smo-o-oth. Another Acapulco special, long and luscious, in the all-new, improved, negative-ion-filter format. The good haziness happening now. Perhaps Lissa’s dismembered body has by this time been scattered throughout the six boroughs of the city. She seems remote and unreal to him. For the past ten minutes he has allowed himself to indulge in a mood of intense nostalgia. A curious species of nostalgia for the life he did not live. Meditating on the fragments of Hamlin’s experience that have bled through to him across the boundaries that separate their identities. And yearning for more.

Hamlin?

—Yes.

How hard would it be to merge our memory files entirely?

—I don’t follow you. What do you mean?

So that I’d have access to everything you can remember. And you’d have access to all that had happened to me.

—I imagine it wouldn’t be hard.

I’m willing if you are.

—It would amount to a merging of identities, you realize. We wouldn’t be sure where one of us ends and the other begins. We’d blend, after a while. Frankly, I’d wipe you out.

You think so?

—A pretty good chance of it.

What makes you so sure?

—Because I’d bring to the blending thirty-five years of genuine experience. Your thirty-five years of synthetic memories would overlay that like a film of dirt, and after a time I’d polish it away, leaving my real life blended to your four years in the Rehab Center, with some interplays from your ersatz existence coloring my recollections of the things I actually did. What would emerge would be a Nat Hamlin somewhat polluted by Paul Macy. Is that what you want? I’m willing if you are, Macy.

I didn’t mean such a complete joining. Just an exchange of memory banks.

—I already have as much access to what the Rehab Center gave you as I need.

But I don’t have any access to your past, except some stuff that came floating through the barrier while I was asleep. And I want more.

—What for?

Because I’m starting to recognize it as my own identity. Because I feel cut off from myself. I want to know what this body did, where it traveled, what it ate, who it slept with, what it was like to be a psychosculptor. The need’s been growing in me for a couple of hours now. Or maybe longer. It frustrates me to know that I was somebody important, somebody vital, and that I’m completely cut off from his life.

—But you weren’t anybody important, Macy. I was. You weren’t anybody at all. A Rehab doctor’s wet dream.

Don’t rub it in.

—You admit it?

I never denied I was only a construct, Hamlin.

—Then why don’t you just step aside and let me have the body, then?

I keep telling you. My past may be a fake, but my present is real as hell, and I’m not giving it up.

—So you want to add my past to yours, to give you that extra little dimension of reality. You want to go on being Paul Macy, but you want to be able to think you used to be Nat Hamlin, too?

Something like that.

—Up yours, Macy. My memories are my own property. They’re all I’ve got. Why should I let you muck around in them? Why should I sweat to make you feel realer?

Ten-fifteen. How quiet it is at this time of night Somehow went without dinner and never even noticed. Sleepy. Sleepy. Phone the police? Tomorrow, maybe. She must have gone back to her own place. I guess. Mmmm. Mmmmmm.

—I have a new proposition for you.

Eh? Huh?

—Wake up, Macy.

What’s the matter?

—I want to talk to you. You’ve been dozing.

Okay. So talk. I’m listening.

—Let’s make a deal. Let’s share the body on an alternating basis. First you run it, then me, then you again, then me again, and so on indefinitely. Operating it under the Paul identity, naturally, so we don’t get into legal difficulties.

You mean we switch every day? Monday Wednesday Friday it’s me in charge, Tuesday Thursday Saturday it’s you, Sunday we hold dialogs?

—Not exactly like that. You need the body four days a week to do your job, right? Those four days it’s yours. Saturdays and Sundays and holidays are mine. Weekday evenings we divide in such a way that you get some, I get some. We can work out ad-hoc arrangements for swapping time back and forth as the occasion demands.

I don’t see why I have to give you any time at all, Hamlin. The court awarded your body to me.

—But I’m still in it. And I’m prepared to be a mammoth pain in the ass unless I’m allowed to take charge some of the time.

You want me to yield half my lifespan to you under duress.

—I want you to be sensible and cooperative, that’s all. Can you function freely with me playing games inside your nervous system? Do you enjoy being harassed? I can cripple your life, Macy. And what about me? Must I be condemned to be bottled up without any autonomy, with my gifts? Listen, even if you run the body for half the time, that’s three and a half days a week more than fate originally intended. By rights you shouldn’t be here at all. So why not accept a reasonable compromise? Half the time you’ll be you, and you can do any fucking thing you please. The other half you’ll surrender autonomy and ride as a passenger while I go about my business. Sculpting, screwing, eating, whatever I feel like doing. We’ll both benefit. I’ll get to live again, a little, and you’ll be free from the annoyance of having me constantly interfering with you.

Well—

—Another incentive. I’ll give you the free run of my memory bank. What you were asking for a little while ago. You can find out who you really were, before you became you.

Get thee behind me, Satan!

—Will you tell me what’s wrong with the goddam deal?

Nothing wrong with it. It’s too damned tempting, that’s what.

—Then why not go along with it?

A taut uneasy moment. Considering, weighing, mulling. Blinking his eyes a lot. Aware that his head is really too foggy now for such perilous negotiations. Why surrender a chunk of his life to a condemned criminal? Wouldn’t it be better to fight it out, to try to expel Hamlin altogether, to break his grip once and for all? Maybe I can’t. Maybe when the showdown comes he’ll expel me. Perhaps it makes more sense to accept the half-and-half. But even so—a flood of suspicions, suddenly—

How would we work this switch?

—Easy. I’d penetrate the limbic system. You know what that is? Down underneath, in the depths of the folds. Controls your pituitary, your olfactory system, a lot of other things, blood pressure, digestion, and so forth, Also the seat of the self, so far as I can tell. You have it pretty well guarded, whether you know it or not. A wall of electrical charge sealing it off. But I could come in by way of the thalamus, reverse the charge—if we cooperate, it would be just a matter of a few seconds and we’d have our shift of identity polarity—I’ve worked out the mechanisms, I know where the levers are—