The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (52 page)

W
hen she awakes, it seems as if she's not alone. Many arms are around her, and she's filled with a roaring chorus of voices. Consciousness follows in a series of ragged flickers, and the voices fade, and soon she inhabits her own thoughts, and knows that she is Martha Chauhan, and nothing has changed. But the air, the light, the sounds which reach this morning to her room fifteen floors up in Baldwin Towers, all feel different today…

Lumbering from bed, she clears a space in the frost, peers blearily down, and sees from the blaze of white that it's snowed heavily in the night, and that many of the entangled are already up and about. Kids, but adults as well. Either throwing snowballs, or dragging handmade toboggans, or building snowmen, or helping clear the pathways between the tower blocks. The small shadows of their movements seem impossibly balletic.

Still climbing from the fuzz of night, she counts and dry-swallows the usual immune suppressants from her palm. The water isn't entirely cold, the hob puts out just enough heat to turn her coffee lukewarm, and she's grateful she doesn't have to use the commune toilets. In so many ways, she's privileged. Fumbling with yesterday's clothes, she swipes the mirror for glimpses of a woman in late middle age with something odd about the left side of her skull, then picks up her carpetbag and heads down the pell-mell stairs with other commune residents in their flung coats, sideways bobble hats and unmatched gloves.

Shouts and snowballs criss-cross the air as she crunches to her readapted Mini, another great privilege, which has already been cleared of snow. She clambers in. Shivers and hugs herself as she waits for the fuel cell to warm. Finally, she drives off. Along with the 1960s tower blocks, there are houses and maisonettes in other parts of this estate that were once occupied by individual families. Now, they have all been reshaped and knocked through, joined by plastic-weld polysheets, raggedlyangled sheds and tunnels of tarpaulin, with the gardens and other open spaces used for communal planting and grazing. Everything's white this morning, but all the roads have been cleared, and braziers already blaze in the local market where the communes come to barter. Strangers smile to each other as they pass. Acquaintances hug. Co-workers sing gusty songs as they shovel the paths. Lovers walk hand in hand. Even the snowmen are grinning.

T
his isn't how I imagined my life would be.

I grew up in this same city, not far from these streets. Dad was of Indian birth, and came here to England with my brother in his arms and me clinging to the strap of his suitcase and our mother dead from a terrorist dirty bomb back in Calcutta. He changed my name from Madhur to Martha, and Daman's to Damien, and honed his cultural knowledge to go with his excellent English, and had all the certificates and bio-tags to prove he was a doctor, and was determined to make his mark.
Money is important, and so is security, and status is something to be cherished
– that was what Martha Chauhan learned at her father's knee. That, and all the stories he told me as he sat by my bed. Tenali Ramakrishna and the gift of the three dolls who all seemed the same, but only one of which knew how to feel. Artful imps who danced about the flames in a hidden heart of a forest to the secret of their own name. But maybe I was too cosseted, for I could never get the point. The world was clearly collapsing. You could see that merely by switching screens from the kiddie channels he tried to sit Damien and me in front of in our secure house in our gated and protected estate. A wave of my chubby hand, and the Technicolor balloon things dissolved and you were looking down at people clinging to trees as the helicopters flew on, or bomb blast wreckage surrounded by wailing women, and then Damien started crying, and that was that.

S
t James' schoolhouse is like something from Dickensian old times, even without today's gingerbread icing of snow. A great, paternally white oak looms across the trampled playground. Martha heads inside past the tiny rows of dripping coats into a room filled with rampaging four year olds. The walls hang with askew potato prints and cheery balloon-style faces. There's a sandpit and a ballpool and something else that hovers in midair that fizzes and buzzes as the kids dive.

Tommy the teacher lies somewhere at the bottom of the largest piles of waving limbs, and it's some time before he or anyone else notices Martha's presence. When they do, it's as if she's left the doors open and is a cold draft the kids feel on their necks. Once the unease is there, it spreads impossibly fast. Tommy, who's lying on his back like a tickled dog, is almost the last to pick up the change of mood.

He clambers to his feet in a holed jumper and half the contents of the sandpit bulging his pockets. The kids cluster around him, exchanging looks, half-words, mumbles, grunts, nudges, gestures and silences. Tommy does as well until he remembers how rude that is.

"It's okay, it's
okay
…! We have a visitor, and I want everyone to simply
talk
when Martha's with us. Right?" Kids give metronomic nods as Martha's introduced as the nice lady who's going to be seeing them individually over the next few hours. Then a hand then goes up, then another. "So why…" asks a small voice, before a different one takes over until the question finishes in chorus. "…isn't she…
HERE
…?"

Followed by a rustle of giggles. After all, Martha obviously
is
here. But, in another, deeper, sense she's clearly not. Martha understands their curiosity. After all, she can remember how she used to stare at fat people and paraplegics when she was young until her father told her it was impolite. She can't help but smile as hands sneak out to touch the snow-melting tips of her boots, just to check she's not some weird kind of ghost.

"I
am
here," she says. "But the thing is, not everyone has the same gift that all of you have. I can
see
you, and I can
hear
you as well. But there was an accident – perhaps you can see where it was…" She turns so they can admire the odd shape of her skull. "I lost…" she pauses, "…part of my mind. Truth is, I'm very lucky to be here at all. What my disability means is that I'm not entangled. Not part of the gestalt. I can't share and feel as you do. But I'm as real as all of you are. Look, this is my hand…" She holds it out. Slowly, slowly, tentatively, little fingers encircle her own like new shoots enclosing old roots. Then, and at the same instant, and as if by some hidden decision, they withdraw. As they settle back, the face of one of the boys blurs and tries to reshape itself into Damien's.

D
ad always was an industrious man. Not only had he managed to qualify as a doctor back in India, but he'd studied what was then called biomechanical science. He also had a practical business eye. He'd worked out that the most secure jobs in medicine at a time of collapsing insurance and failing state healthcare were to be found in the developing technologies of neural enhancement.

I remember him taking Damien and me along with him one day to the private hospital where he did much of his work. It was probably down to some failure in the child-minding arrangements that all single parents have to make, although Damien must have been about five by then and I was nearly twelve, so perhaps he really had wanted to show us what he did.

"Here we are…"

The rake of a handbrake in his old-fashioned car that smelled of leather and Damien's tendency to get travelsick. We'd already passed through several security systems and sets of high walls, and were now outside this big old castle of a building that looked like something out of Harry Potter or Tolkien – all turrets and pointy windows. Then doors swished, and suddenly everything turned busy and modern, with people leaning down and dangling their unlikely smiles and security passes toward us to ask who we were – at least, until Damien began to cry. Then we were inside a bright room, and this creature was laid at its centre surrounded by wires and humming boxes and great semi-circular slabs of metal.

Damien sat over in a far corner, pacified by some game. But apparently it was important that I stand close and listen to what he had to say. You see, Martha, this patient – her name's Claire, by the way – is suffering from a condition that is slowly destroying her mind. Can you imagine what that must be like? To forget the names of your best friends and the faces of your family? To get confused by simple tasks and slowly lose any sense of who you really are? A terrible, terrible thing. But we now have a procedure that helps combat that process. What we do, you see… he'd called up a display which floated between us like a diseased jellyfish… is to insert these incredibly clever seeds which are like little crystals into her skull that we then stimulate with those big magnets you can see around her head so they slowly take over the damaged bits of her mind…

The jellyfish quivered.

Dad doubtless went on in this way for some time, probably covering all sorts of fascinating moral and philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness, and how this withered relic would come to use all this new stuff in her head in much the same way that someone who's lost their hand might use a re-grown one. But not quite. Nothing in medicine is ever perfect, you see, Martha, and bits of people's brains can't be persuaded to regenerate in the way that other parts of their body can, and rejection – that means, Martha, when the body doesn't recognise something as part of itself – is still a problem, and a great deal of practise and continued medication is going to be needed if Claire's to make the most of this gift of half a new mind. Meanwhile, I was staring at the creased and scrawny flesh that emerged from all that steel and plastic like the neck of a tortoise, and thinking, why is something so old and horrid still even
alive?

M
artha's given her usual "room" at the school – actually little more than a cupboard – and says no to an offer of coffee. Then she opens up her carpetbag and puts the field cap with its dangle of controls and capillaries on the radiator to warm. The entanglement virus is generally contracted naturally soon after birth, but it's the job of her and many others like her to deal with any problems which may arise during the short fever which follows. She often looks in again on toddlers, but it's at this age, when the children have joined the gestalt as individual personalities, that's the next major watch-out. Then, if it all goes as well as it almost always does, there are some final checks to be made during the hormone surge of adolescence. In some cultures and other parts of the globe, she'd be thought of as a shaman, priest, imam or witch doctor. But the world had changed, and the differences really aren't that great.

"This is where I… Should be?"

Martha looks up, slightly surprised by the way this kid has simply stepped into this tiny room. Most hang around outside and wait to be invited, or rub and scratch at the door like kittens, seeing as, even though her disability has been explained to them, they still find it difficult to believe that she's actually inside. "Yes. That's perfect. You're…" She glances at Tommy's execrably written list. "Shara, right? Shara of Widney Commune. Am I getting your name right, by the way? Shara? Such a pretty name, but I don't think I've heard it much before. Or is it Shar-ra?"

"I think it's just Shara," she says as she settles on the old gym mat. She has bright blue eyes. Curly, almost reddish, hair. "Some people say it different but it doesn't matter. The other mums and most of the dads sometimes just call me Sha. I think Shara was just a name they made up for me when I was born."

Shara of the Widney Commune really is an extraordinarily composed creature. Pretty with it, with those dazzling eyes and the fall around her cheeks of that curly hair, which Martha longs to touch, just to see if it really is as soft and springy as it looks. If ever there was a subject for whom her attentions might seem irrelevant, it's Shara. And yet… There's
something
about this girl… Martha blinks, swallows, kicks her mind back into focus and reminds herself that she's taken her usual handful of immune suppressants, just as Shara's features threaten to dissolve.

"Are you alright?"

"Oh…? Absolutely, Shara. Now, I want you to put this on."

Shara takes the field cap and puts it on in the right way without the usual prompting, even tightening the chinstrap against the pressure of those lovely curls. She lies down.

"I want you to close your eyes."

Unquestioningly, she does so.

"Can you see anything?"

She shakes her head.

"How about now?" Martha lifts the ends of the capillaries and touches the controls.

"It's all kind of fizzy."

"And now?"

"Like
lines
…"

"And now?"

This time, Shara doesn't respond. Her fingers are quivering. Her cheeks have paled. The rhythm of her breathing has slowed. Sometimes, although Martha tries to insist that they use the toilet beforehand, the kids wet themselves. But not Shara. The girl's in a fugue state now, lost deep inside the gestalt. Always a slight risk at this point that they won't come back, and Martha's trained in CPR and has adrenalin and antipsychotic shots primed and ready in her carpetbag just in case they need to be quickly woken up or knocked out, but the rigidity fades just as soon as she cuts the signal back. Shara stretches. Blinks. Sits up. Smiles.

"How was that?" Martha helps unclip the field cap and feels the spring of those lovely curls.

Shara thinks. "It was
lovely
. Thank you Martha," she says. Then she kisses her cheek.

* * *

I
t wasn't all famine, tribal wars, economic collapse back in the day. Life mostly went on as it always did, and I suppose Dad did his best to try to keep us going as some kind of family as well. I remember a summer West Country beach – it wasn't all floods and landslips, either – that he must have driven us down to from the Midlands in that creaky old car between regular stops at the roadside for Damien to vomit. There we were, Dad and me, sat on an old rug amid our sandwiches and samosas whilst dogs flung themselves after Frisbees and Damien and some other lads attempted to play cricket. Kites stuck like hatpins into a pale sky and a roaring in my ears that could be the sea, but often comes when I chase too hard after memories.