Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

A smile played about her lips. “Touché.”

There’s a lot of bad blood between the Programme Pour Femmes Fermes and Maureen Havers.

When she was young and cared nothing about cars, Maureen Havers revived Psyche et Po, Antoinette Fouque’s 1972 outfit which dominated the French women’s liberation movement into the eighties—all red jumpsuits and internecine foulness and right-wing religious overtones.

The Programme grew up at the same time Havers was wiring Psyche et Po’s corpse to the lightning conductor. Ensuing battles levelled the tactical gulf between the two movements till the main differences were intellectual ones. Psyche et Po read Lacan; the Programme read Lévi-Strauss. Psyche et Po were crypto-Capitalist; the Programme were retro-Structuralist. Psyche et Po played the system; the Programme deconstructed it.

The Programme won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Without intending it, they became not unlike Psyche et Po: an élite with no popular support.

Catharine drained her wineglass. “Ms. Havers is not our prime concern. I don’t suppose she will like what we have in mind but—” She shrugged. “What do you know of the language of dance?”

The link between Danseuses Nouvelles and the Programme wasn’t known then. I was thrown. I muttered something vague about semiotics and felt like an idiot.

She told me about Danseuses. I was privileged: some weeks passed before they leaked the news to La Monde.

“Are they the revolution?” I asked.

“A small part.”

I toyed with my food. “Top ratings eight weeks running. Small?”

She was silent for some while, staring at me. I’d touched something important. “Since when did the man uninterested in publicity read ratings?”

“I don’t. My manager does. Danseuses pushed my profile out of prime time last week. TVP wouldn’t negotiate.”

Catharine said: “ Danseuses’s dancer/choreographer is Helene Ritenour. In ’41 she had a curbside altercation with a heavy goods vehicle. Surgeons in São Paulo rebuilt her. Nanotech CNS upgrades saved her from spending the rest of her life in a wheelchair.”

I nodded. “And some.” Helene was—and still is—a good dancer.

I thought about it.

Forty-one. In ’42, Helene and Danseuses went on TV. “Quick work. Programme money?” I knew rushing the São Paulo technique cost a great deal.

“We look after our own,” Catharine replied. “So does Havers. Doesn’t she?”

The jack behind my arse itched.

We catch a train to Nice. It was twinned with Cape Town, once. It boasts a sand beach (imported) and no public telephones.

We eat at Le Safari. Angèle is pissed off and she won’t tell me why. I’d show her the town, God knows I have sufficient plastic in my wallet, but hers is righteous anger, not to be bought off. She’s sitting with her back to the window. Her face is in shadow. I can’t see her eyes.

We haven’t been together long. Catherine gave her to me—a contact and Woman Friday—not two months back. I find it hard to predict her moods.

Maybe it was Catharine’s idea she sleeps with me; maybe she’s got tired of playing the whore. It’s not a thought I want to go to bed with so I try to get her talking.

Like an idiot I mention the Programme.

She screws up her face like she’s swallowed something fatty. “I’ve no time for that,” she snaps. “It’s just play to them. Can’t you just see them wanking off to the press reports after each sadistic little outing?”

“They’re pointing up the language of repression,” I say, wondering all the while at my own arrogance. Angèle doesn’t know these kinds of words. She’s an Arab street kid who was kicked once too often to stay lying down, not a semiotics graduate. “They’re targeting metagrammatic nodes in the cultural matrix—”

Her look is enough to shut me up. Even against the light it’s unmistakable.

“Don’t talk to me about language!” She’s the first woman I’ve met growls when she’s angry. “What do I care that this word and this color and this dress mark the boundaries of chauvinism? What comfort is that to the mother with a drunk for a husband? Or the rape victim or the dyke or the pensioner? Go tell your good news to every lacerated clit in Africa then look me in the eye and say this is worth the money!”

She slams her hand down on the table, lifts it, and there’s a tiny gold wafer winking up at me like the promise of El Dorado, from the marble tabletop.

I pick it up and weigh it gingerly in my hand. It’s a ROM wafer—a packet of hardwired information. It slips into the port between my shoulders—the same kind of port they fitted to Helene Ritenour.

It’s strange how Angèle can read me so well, even in anger. She leans over and strokes my hand with dark fingers. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I don’t, but it’s the only way I can thank her for tacitly forgiving me.

“It was bad,” I say. “I slid off the track sideways—the near side of the monocoque took the impact. The whole thing failed in tension at the rear bulkhead. The engine and avionics went one way, the rear wheels the other. The heat exchanger was torn off. The steering column broke. The monocoque got crushed on the front offside. All the underbelly ceramics sheared—”

“I didn’t mean the car.”

“So—” Something misfires inside me and the old anger is back. “Tabloids have back numbers.”

She starts back like I’d slapped her. “That wasn’t fair. I’m not a ghoul. I didn’t mean the accident, anyway. I meant the treatment. How you got better. What it did to you.” She rubs her face with her hands. “I want to know you. What am I to you? A friend or a whore?”

Maybe this playboy bullshit is rubbing off on me because I really don’t know. Sorry is the best answer I can come up with.

We sleep in the same bed but we don’t touch.

I want to tell her what she wants to know. I want to tell her about São Paulo, and what they did to me. And why.

I want to tell her it hurt like hell.

She’s asleep.

The Monaco Grand Prix is two days away.

Maureen Havers honestly believed she was doing me a favor. No one spends eight figures sterling on one man without some feeling behind it. She could have left me in a wheelchair. It wasn’t her fault I was in that state, after all—I was the one who crashed.

Instead she saved me, after a fashion.

But she had other ideas too. I remember how flushed she became when Dr. Antonioni showed her the jack in my spine. I swear she made eyes at it. As far as she was concerned then, I was just the meat it plugged into.

Did I resent that? Not at the time. I was still in shock from the accident. I still couldn’t quite get my head round the fact I could walk again—walk with a spine shot in five places.

Imagine you’re lying there with a hospital bed your only future. Then they plug ROM cartridges into your back. On them are programs which teach your brain how to access and control a whole new nervous system. You can walk again, even shit when you want to. It’s a miracle—and it takes a while to adjust.

Then, but too late for it to make a difference, it occurs to you—All that expensive tech, just to get you toilet trained again?

Of course not.

At least when the Programme paid for Helene they let her be her own boss—or so the popular science programs tell us. She uses an expert system, writing her prize-winning solo choreography direct to a ROM cartridge.

Me? I get fresh ROMs sent me every month from Achebi CyberPARC, where they analyze my race data. It helps me drive better. Only they went one stage further.