Jenna Starborn (39 page)

“And she was elusive too. I kept thinking—if I can pin her down, make her stand still, I will get to the heart of her, I will dissect her seductive charms. For I could not do it during that brief courtship phase. I would say something—she would look at me sideways, and laugh, and skip away—I don't believe she ever fully met my eyes while we stood face to face. I don't believe we ever gazed at each other, as even the most casual acquaintances will do if only for an uncomfortable moment. And there was something damned attractive about her unapproachability—she led me on with those backward glances and those little trills of laughter floating back to me from wherever she had run ahead.

“So—call me a fool—I
was
a fool, and not just because I was young and greedy. I knew little about women, little about love, little about anything except the injustices that I perceived had been done to me. So I flirted with Beatrice Merrick for two weeks while her mother finalized the plans for the wedding, and then the day arrived. Hundreds of people were invited to the event, for the Merricks wanted to be sure that all their acquaintances saw the coup they had scored. The ceremony was held outdoors on an oppressively hot day, and Beatrice was dressed in the most lavish, multilayered dress I had ever seen, and veiled with yards and yards of lace. I felt certain she must faint from the combination of heat and inappropriate clothing, but when, during the ceremony, I took her hand, it was cool as ice water. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that I had not touched any part of her body before this.

“The ceremony was endless, the following reception about as you would imagine, and I was impatient for the night to come. Well, this was my shy bride, and this was my wedding night! Of course I was impatient! And the hour finally came, and someone brought us to the spaceport, to the fancy hotel where we would stay until our commercial cruiser departed in two days' time.”

He paused, and put a hand to his forehead. I was trying to understand, without being undone by sympathy, so I noticed with a rather clinical detachment that his hand was actually shaking. This story must be difficult to tell—not that I was surprised. I could already guess at the denouement, which was harrowing enough to make the buildup chilling.

“Our first few nights together,” he said, in a voice that seemed steady only through iron determination, “were ecstatic. Beatrice was not, in this situation, shy—for which I was grateful, for my own experiences had been limited and not particularly fulfilling. I did not let myself wonder how she had learned what she knew. I merely appreciated it.

“We left on our honeymoon, taking the cruiser for the pleasure ports of Hyverg and Corbramb. But once we arrived on Hyverg, Beatrice began to change. She became fretful and erratic, and her beautiful, graceful motions grew spasmodic and jerky. I was alarmed, I was frightened—I was afraid that she had developed some neurological disorder that was wreaking all sorts of havoc inside her skull. But every time I pressed her to seek help, or at least go to our hotel's PhysiChamber, she adamantly refused. I began to scheme to find ways to get her, all unawares, to a doctor, because I really was quite frightened. And I had, during these weeks, imagined myself to have fallen in love with her—though now, looking back, I realize it was more a combination of desire and possessiveness that made me believe I was deeply attached to her.

“Things got worse. Sometimes when we were out in public, she would exhibit the most bizarre behavior. In the middle of an ordinary conversation, she would begin screaming, and could not be quieted, and I had to forcibly remove her from shopping centers and restaurants before the guards were summoned. A few times, in the middle of the night, she slipped out while I was asleep, and when I woke and found her gone I would leap up in a pure stage of panic. Once I found her swimming quietly—but completely nude—in the hotel pool. Once I found her walking through the streets of Hyverg Major, accosting strangers in a pitiful, incomprehensible voice—in a language that sounded foreign if not completely invented. Once I found her—well—she was negotiating a price with a tourist who believed she planned to reward him with sexual favors, and when I dragged her away from him, the curses she spewed at me were mortifying and terrifying to hear.”

He stopped again, as if to compose himself, though his voice still sounded absolutely steady to me. “During what period of time did this transpire?” I asked.

“The events I am about to relate occurred within two weeks of our arrival in the city of Hyverg Major.”

“So it was a rapid deterioration.”

“Very. Clearly, things could not be permitted to continue as they were. One afternoon while she slept, I made arrangements for a prominent local doctor to come to us at the hotel. He warned me that, without his neurological equipment, there would not be much he could tell me about her condition, but he agreed that her behavior might be explained by some kind of tumor of the brain. He arrived, with a satchel full of tools, and I admitted him to the sitting room that I shared with my wife. The minute I introduced him, she began shrieking like a disordered child, hurling objects at him from across the room, and trying to escape out to the hallway. I grabbed her from behind and exerted all my force to keep her in check—and she nearly flung me across the room with one furious gesture of her arm. I had never felt such strength in anyone before—woman
or
man—and I was shaken in spirit and body when I scrambled to my feet. The doctor was busy readying some chemical compound, and when I dove for her again, wrestling her to the ground and rendering her momentarily still, he administered it. After a few moments of thrashing, she lay quiet.

“The doctor commenced his investigation while I hovered nearby, dreading to learn what news he might have to impart. He pulled apart her lids to examine her eyes, he dug out various instruments that he held over her pulse points, he touched her skin with some strange pad and drew out a few droplets of blood. And then he looked at me and said, ‘I am sorry, Mr. Ravenbeck, I don't believe I can help you. I was under the impression that your wife was a human, which is all that I am qualified to treat.' ”

Again, Everett stopped speaking, but this time I had been able to detect the tremor in his voice—and this time, despite all my resolution not to be melted by his recitation, my heart nearly unraveled itself in its desire to slip from my body and wrap itself protectively around his.

“I said, ‘Excuse me? But my wife is human.' The doctor was putting his tools away. ‘Half human. If that much,' he corrected. ‘The android quotient is high in her. Though the reconstruction job was superb. I would not have suspected anything merely by looking at her, and I normally have a good eye for a cyborg.' I was too stunned to think of pretending ignorance and so preserving some of my own dignity. I cried, ‘Cyborg! My wife is not a cyborg!' And the doctor looked at me very gravely and said, ‘Indeed she is. And a malfunctioning cyborg at that. If you do not get yourself immediately to a robotics center, she will no doubt experience complete meltdown. She will—well, I don't know
what
she'll do. Things much worse than those you have already described to me.'

“Once he finished speaking, we stared at each other a moment in silence. He realized—he had to realize—that I had not, until this moment, known the truth of my wife's condition. Which he no doubt found incredible in the extreme! Yet his face was compassionate, and he looked as though he sincerely pitied me. I finally spoke. I said, ‘Doctor, I do not know what to do or where to take her. Is there a place you can recommend?' And he wrote down the name of a nearby clinic, and wished me luck, and refused to be paid for his services. And he left.”

Everett was now staring down at his folded hands, or at the carpet visible beneath them, but I was sure he was seeing instead that bridal hotel room, that sleeping girl, and the ruination of all his dreams.

“I could have contacted my father at this point,” he said slowly. “I could have contacted
her
father, and demanded—well, at some point demanded explanations, but first demanded what it was I should be doing for her, for clearly there were ways to keep her imbalances in check or she would never have appeared as an ordinary woman. But I was too proud. I understood now, completely, how they had betrayed me—deliberately, maliciously, even gleefully. Old man Merrick had wanted his troublesome half-human daughter taken off his hands, and my father had known I would be fool enough to sell my liberty for a few plots of land. But I was not the only victim in their trap. They had treated Beatrice just as cruelly, for they had given an unstable creature over into the hands of a man who did not know how to care for her, and they had risked her utter destruction.

“I was not willing to be as cruel as they. I called the number the doctor had given me, and I had Beatrice taken to a local robotics center, and I had her stabilized. It was the saddest thing I had ever seen, Jenna, the morning I arrived to check on her and found the girl I had thought I loved lying in her hospital bed, strapped in place. For days she had not known me or anybody else, but finally they had discovered the flawed circuit, and repaired it, and the neurons in her brain were again firing in the patterns of recognition. I came in to see her, and her face lit up, and she exclaimed, ‘Everett! Where have you been? I woke this morning and you were nowhere in sight, and there were only strangers here. I was so afraid.' ”

“She did not remember the preceding days?”

“No. Not only that, she did not remember her own history—in fact, she did not
know
her own history. I had had time to do a little research, and I found the old news accounts of Fordyce Merrick's daughter and the spectacular aeromobile crash that nearly killed her when she was eleven years old. She had been saved, though it required a high percentage of robotic reconstruction to make her whole. But Beatrice refused to believe me when I repeated that tale to her. She started weeping so hysterically that I had to call in the technicians, who sent me from the room and sedated her. Later, one of the technicians told me it was a wonder she could remember anything at all—even her own name—let alone any of her bizarre behavior. For it was his theory that the human portion of her brain was rejecting some of its electronic implants, and the implants were damaging the brain. There was no way to reverse the process, he said, and no way to stop it, and over time her mind would totally degrade. So I was told by the specialists on Hyverg Major, and so I have found to be true.”

He paused again and seemed to review the following months and years of his life, editing them down into a concise few paragraphs with which to conclude his story. “I did what I could for her, even so,” he said. “The head of this institution recommended that I take Beatrice to Dorser, where they have the most advanced cyborg research facility in the universe. And so we went, though I had to conceal from her the precise nature of the institution we were visiting and our reasons for visiting it. And they did manage to—to upgrade the implant—some such thing—to make her more stable for a relatively long period of time. By that, I mean nearly two years, during which time she seemed an almost normal human being who was gradually deteriorating into a form of madness. She had happy, lucid days, and she had days of raging panic, and I never knew from day to day or hour to hour whether I would be dealing with the rational or the manic Beatrice. I just did my best for her as long as I could.”

“It sounds—it must have been completely dreadful,” I stammered, the words sounding so inadequate I almost wished them unsaid.

He nodded. “And the worst of it—truly the worst—was the fact that Beatrice herself did not understand what was happening to her or why I had ceased to love her. On her good days—and, at the beginning, there were many of those—she thought we were still lovers, honeymooners, ready to fall affectionately into each other's arms at a moment's notice. But I . . . I could not do it. I was so repulsed and horrified by what she actually was that I could not bring myself to love her, or even to pretend to love her. It broke her heart—and her heart, at least, was quite human. I can still recall the hopefulness with which she would approach me, in those early days, and the hurt and rejection on her face when I would turn away from her. But I could not love her. I could only be kind to her, and care for her, and wait for the moment of her absolute disintegration.”

Now a peculiar feeling came over me—a selfish, unworthy emotion at such a place and such a time!—and yet it suffused me and made me speak when I should not have. “There are many people who cannot love synthetics,” I said in a hollow voice. “My aunt, for one. I believe it is the reason she could not love me. And I wonder how—feeling as you do about created life and knowing my history—I wonder how you could have brought yourself to love someone such as myself. For I am in many ways as artificial as your wife.”

He looked up at me quickly and keenly. “Yes, but you are the exception to the rule, Jenna,” he said. “Manufactured—synthetic—even virtual, if that is what you turned out to be—I would love you. There is about you, at your core, such a bright fire of will and passion that I would want to warm myself at it no matter how that blaze had been ignited. It is
you
I love, your habits of thought and your strictness of soul and your serious face, and it is you I would love if all your systems were to turn out to be metal and rubber, and all those systems were in turn to malfunction. I would guard you close on your bad days, and on your rational days, I would walk with you through the grounds and delight in the observations you would make. Generated human—halfcit—cyborg—whatever you were would be precious to me, because it would be
you
in the heart of your body, and it is you I love.”