Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

By the time Anna got back to the cemetery the grave had been filled in. The gravedigger had arranged the wreaths in a pretty pattern on the freshly turned earth, which was carefully mounded so that it wouldn’t sink into a hollow as it settled beneath the spring rains. Anna studied the floral design very carefully before deciding exactly how to modify it to incorporate her own wreath.

She was a little surprised to note that her earlier impression had been mistaken; there were several wreaths made up of genetically engineered exotics. She quickly realized, however, that this was not a calculated expression of xenophilia so much as an ostentatious gesture of conspicuous consumption. Those of Alan’s friends and relatives who were slightly better-off than the rest had simply taken the opportunity to prove the point.

When she had rearranged the wreaths she stood back, looking down at her handiwork.

“I didn’t want any of this to happen,” she said. “In Paris, it might almost pass for romantic—man becomes infatuated with whore, recklessly smashes himself up in his car when she becomes infected with some almost-unprecedented kind of venereal disease—but in Pinner it’s just absurd. You were a perfect fool, and I didn’t even love you… but my mind got blown to hell and back by the side effects of my own mutated psychotropics, so maybe I would have if I could have. Who knows?”

I didn’t want it to happen either, he said, struggling to get the words through the cloying blanket of her medication, which was deeply prejudiced against any and all hallucinations. It really was an accident. I’d got over the worst of the withdrawal symptoms. I’d have been okay. Maybe I’d even have been okay with Kitty, once I’d got it all out of my system. Maybe I could have begun to be what everybody wanted and expected me to be.

“Conformist bastard,” she said. “You make it sound like it was all pretense. Is that what you think? Just a phase you were going through, was it? Just a mad fling with a maddening whore who went completely mad?”

It was the real thing, he insisted, dutifully.

“It was a lot realer than the so-called real thing,” she told him. “Those expert systems are a hell of a lot cleverer than Old Mother Nature. Four billion years of natural selection produced Spanish fly and rhino horn; forty years of computerized protein design produced me and a thousand alternatives you just have to dilute to taste. You couldn’t expect Mother Nature to take that kind of assault lying down, of course, even if she always has been the hoariest whore of them all. Heaven only knows what a psycho-chemical wilderness the world will be when all the tailored pheromones and augmentary psychotropics have run the gamut of mutational variation. You and I were just caught in the evolutionary cross fire. Kitty and Isabel too, I guess. No man is an island, and all that crap.”

I don’t think much of that as a eulogy, he said. You could try to be a little more earnest, a little more sorrowful.

He was right, but she didn’t dare. She was afraid of earnestness, and doubly afraid of sorrow. There was no way in the world she was going to try to put it the way Ecclesiastes had— in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge in-creaseth sorrow and all that kind of stuff. After all, she had to stay sane enough to get safely back to the hospital or they wouldn’t let her out again for a long time.

“Good-bye, Alan,” she said, quietly. “I don’t think I’ll be able to drop in again for quite a while. You know how things are, even though you never once came to see me in the hospital.”

I know, he said. You don’t have any secrets from me. We’re soul mates, you and I, now and forever. It was a nicer way of putting it than saying he was addicted to her booby-trapped flesh, but it came to the same thing in the end.

She went away then: back to the tube station, across zones three, two, and one, and out again on the far side of the river. She wanted to be alone, although she knew that she never would be and never could be.

The receptionist demanded to know why Isabel hadn’t brought her back in the car, so Anna said that she’d asked to be dropped at the end of the street. “I wanted to walk a little way,” she explained. “It’s such a nice evening.”

“No it isn’t,” the receptionist pointed out. “It’s cloudy and cold, and too windy by half.”

“You don’t notice things like that when you’re in my condition,” Anna told her, loftily. “I’m drugged up to the eyeballs on mutated euphories manufactured by my own cells. If it weren’t for the medication, I’d be right up there on cloud nine, out of my mind on sheer bliss.” It was a lie, of course; the real effects were much nastier.

“If the way you’re talking is any guide,” the receptionist said, wryly, “you’re almost back to normal. We’ll soon have to throw you back into the wide and wicked world.”

“It’s not as wide or as wicked as all that,” Anna said, with due kindness and consideration, “and certainly not as worldly. One day, though, all the fallen angels will learn how to fly again, and how to soar to undiscovered heights—and then we’ll begin to find out what the true bounds of experience are.”

“I take it back,” the receptionist said. “I hope you haven’t been plaguing your poor sister’s ears with that kind of talk—she won’t want to take you out again if you have.”

“No,” said Anna, “I don’t suppose she will. But then, she’s not really my sister, and never was. I’m one of a kind.” And for once, there was no inner or outer voice to say Don’t flatter yourself, or Better be grateful for what you’ve got, or We’re all sisters under the skin, or any of the other shallow and rough-hewn saws whose cutting edges she had always tried so very hard to resist.

I suppose the seed of this story was sown in 1983, on the rainy day when I met Norman Macrae at Ascot to discuss some background material on possible developments in biotechnology that I was to provide for his futurology book The 2024 Report. He wondered whether the roads might become safer if we developed methods of getting high that didn’t have the undesirable side effects of alcohol; I wondered whether sex might become more exciting once nature’s ludicrously inefficient aphrodisiacs were replaced by all those which ingenious science could produce; Pusey Street won the big sprint at good odds by virtue of being drawn on the outside (Ascot drains toward the stands, so if it ever starts raining heavily when you’re there, avoid horses drawn low on the straight course). The 2024 Report was an upbeat book—it suggested, among other things, that the Russians would simply give up Communism in disgust in the late 1980s—so my contribution to it concentrated on rewarding possibilities, but the time inevitably comes when one is tempted to turn such brightly minted coins over, just to see what might be lurking on the other side.

Martha Soukup is a Nebula Award–winning short story writer and playwright who lives in San Francisco, California.

IN THE AFTERMATH OF the affair I decide to grow a beard.

“Susan,” my roommate Lelana says, warningly. Her skin is very dark and perfect; she would not risk its flawlessness. But she has seven tiny holes in her left ear. By day she wears seven small hoops of metal in them: copper, brass, bronze, pewter, silver, platinum, and gold. When she dresses to go out, seven gem studs spark her ear’s rim: ruby, amber, topaz, emerald, sapphire, amethyst, and diamond. The diamond cost her two months’ pay, and though she keeps it in a matchbox in the back of the tool drawer, she makes nervous remarks about burglars when she is not wearing it. A beard cannot be stolen.