Woman on the Edge of Time

“When we get done playing with you, you will wish you could disappear. And then you will.” A grin of bright enamel teeth, whiter than scrubbed bathroom tiles. “She’s just a chica, exactly like you look to be. Cosmetically fixed for sex use. Like you find in any knockshop.”

“How would you know?” Gildina drew herself up in fussy, impotent fury. “What would you do in a knockshop? You don’t even have the equipment.”

“No appendix either.” The guard grinned his mirthless flashing white smile. “That’s why we don’t need many of you useless cunts now‑on. Nothing inessential. Pure, functional, reliable. We embody the ideal. We can be destroyed–not by you duds–but never verted, never deflected, never distracted. None of us has ever been disloyal to the multi that owns us.”

Connie asked, “What’s a multi?”

He looked shocked now, serious. “The multi is everything.”

“What does ‘multi’ stand for?”

“For what is,” he said hollowly.

“Like states, countries?”

“That was before,” Gildina said. “Multis own everybody–”

“Was irrational,” the guard said. “Overlapping jurisdictions. Now we all belong to a corporate body. Multis. Like that contracty soon to be dismantled into the organ bank, I belong to Chase‑World‑TT. The multi that owns us.” He bowed his head briefly. Then his head jerked upright, his eyes narrowed. “Why are you not afraid?”

She was trying to work her arm loose without success. His metal grip dug into her skin. “How do you know I’m not scared?”

“My sensing devices monitor your outputs. I reg adrenaline but no sympathetic nervous system involvement. You feel anger but not fear?” The hand squeezed harder. “A dud could not react so, after coring and behavior mod. You have no monitor implant. Are you on a drug I cannot scan? Not acetylcholine. Something is wrong. You look me in the eyes, unlike a fem. All duds are brain damaged and modded. Therefore you’re only disguised as a dud!” His other hand groped toward his belt.

She decided she’d better vanish. Shutting her eyes, she let go of Gildina and tried to shove off. But his grip still ate into her arm. Come on, come on! She pushed with her mind, pushed against the metal grip. She fixed her mind on her own bed–that she should ever call a hospital bed her own! She thrust herself roughly back, and the grip began to fade.

Dizzy, sweating from every pore, she lay on her back in bed. Sybil, Tina, and Valente were leaning over her. Her arm hurt. Her head ached horribly. She was being punished for the anger she had felt; that thing in her head was punishing her with sharp pain and spurts of dulling drug. She felt her head was going to break open like a coconut struck with a hammer. She could feel the line where her skull was about to split.

She would not answer them, but seeing she was conscious, Valente left. She winked at Sybil and Tina then, who stared at her, puzzled but relieved. Connie had to lie back, breathe deeply, relax herself. So that was the other world that might come to be. That was Luciente’s war, and she was enlisted in it.

SIXTEEN

Connie was an object. She went where placed and stayed there. She caught the phrase “passive aggressive” from Acker to his girlfriend Miss Moynihan. Exactly, she thought. You got it, Waggle‑Beard–now run with it. She would not get up until gotten up. She ate only if fed. She sat in a chair when placed there and got up when hauled up.

Although she was proud of time traveling on her own, she was afraid to try again. She did not want to end up in that other future. All the time the drug leaking into her head was clogging her, slowing her, and whenever she got angry, her head turned her off. Something hurt in her then; a dreadful anxiety out of nowhere beset her with a small seizure and she had to remain still. Covertly she watched the ward and learned what she could about the hospital.

She felt distanced from her own life, as if it had ended with the implantation of the dialytrode. She could not resume her life, Therefore Connie was no more. Yet she lived on. Detached, wakeful, brooding inside the heaviness of the drug, she kept still. She had given up smoking. For the first time in her life she stopped smoking. The craving for a cigarette was a left‑over itch from being Connie. At least it kicked up sand on the desert of the hours, that old itch.

She could never guess when Dolly would appear. A couple of times her niece promised she was coming and never showed up, and then without warning she sailed in, bright as a parakeet, sharply dressed in something new with her hair that gaudy red, her sunglasses on, her hands wet with the perspiration of speed. The staff encouraged Dolly to come because Connie talked to her. Dolly slipped her money but would not bring Nita. When she asked about Nita, Dolly’s answers were vague. “She’s doing all right, all right. Just fine.”