Pat Cadigan - Fool to Believe

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FOOL TO BELIEVE
PAT CADIGAN
Sovay had dyed himself a delicate orange. It wasn't his color. He was
sitting nude on a floor mat with his legs folded and his hands resting on
the junction of his ankles. Someone had piled pillows between his back
and the wall for support—the regular police, probably. Suckers weren't
known to be that considerate. His long straight hair, a shade or two
darker than his skin, was pushed back from his slack face and there were
traces of blood beneath his unfocused jade eyes. A faint whistling sound
came from between his parted lips every time he exhaled.
I squatted in front of him and pulled gently at his lower eyelids. A thin
mixture of blood and tears spilled onto my thumbs. Poor Sovay. They
hadn't been any too gentle with him. There was no sign of a struggle in the
living room but Sovay and his wife Rowan still didn't bother with
furniture. It was the same loose scattering of pillows and mats I vaguely
remembered from a month ago, with indirect wall-well lighting. It was like
being in a tomb. Or maybe a womb.
Rowan's voice came to me from the hallway. "In there. Through that
door." I stood up and moved aside as three paramedics came in with a
stretcher.
"Dirty shame," said the chief paramed, kneeling down in front of Sovay
with a vitals kit. The other two unfolded the stretcher in silence, not
bothering with any facial expressions. "You the Brain Police, ma'am?"
I nodded, showing him the ID on my belt. He squinted at it briefly.
"Heya, Mersine. Regular police seen him yet?"
"Yah. He's all yours."
The paramed took Sovay's blood pressure with a Quik-Kuff. "Any idea
who did it?"
"I just got here myself."
"Dirty shame. Dirty shame." The paramed's bald, blue-tinted head
wagged from side to side. "Used to be that was the one thing they couldn't
take from you. And they're getting so bold."
I looked across the room at Rowan. She had pulled a hookah out of the
wall and was sucking contemplatively on the mouthpiece. Then she moved
her head, and in the lousy light, I could see the wet streak running down
her face from under her eye. As I watched, the skin there turned slightly
red, as if her tears contained some irritant that even she was sensitive to.
It would have figured, I thought, and turned back just in time to see the
paramed extract Sovay's eyes. I hadn't needed to see that just then. More
tears and blood dribbled down Sovay's face as the paramed shut down the
optic nerve connections.
"Mighty nice biogems," he said, pausing to examine the eyes.
"Brand-new, too. He didn't get much use out of them." He slipped them
into a jar in the kit, where they stared like unclaimed marbles. "Dirty
shame. I mean, those suckers." He stopped up Sovay's ears and gave
him an an intravenous pop. "In through the optic nerve like a vacuum
cleaner, suck you dry." He lifted Sovay's arm to test his pliability and then
maneuvered him into a supine position so the other parameds could slip
the stretcher under him. "They musta wanted him pretty bad to risk
coming in after him this way." His brow wrinkled nearly to his bald crown.
I looked over at Rowan again. She seemed not to have heard. The
perfumed smoke from the hookah had drifted across the room; it smelled
appetizing but not too dopey.
"Who was he?" said the paramed. "I mean, who did he used to be?"
"His name was Sovay. He was an actor."
"Oh." The paramed leaned close. "He musta been some hot
up-and-comer, but personally, I never hearda him." He waved at his two
assistants and they took Sovay out.
"Did you want to see his studio," Rowan said after a long moment of
silence. She was studying the pipe mouthpiece as if it were something
completely new. "They broke in there, too, but there wasn't anything to
take. Just mirrored walls and carpeting. Sovay kept it locked because he
said it shut his vibrations in and other people's out." She took another
drag on the pipe and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. "Does that make
sense if you're the Brain Police?"
Dealing with the family is something you never quite get used to, even
under much less complicated circumstances. Of course, it wasn't that
complicated for Rowan; she didn't know me and I wasn't going to tell her
who I'd been once. It made me feel a bit unsavory, as if I had some further
motive beyond preserving the confidentiality of the investigation that I
didn't even know about.
"I don't need to see his studio, not with the regular police checking it
out." I hesitated. "When they're done, I'll give you a lift to the hospital, if
you like."
She shook her head. "There wouldn't be much point in that." Her gaze
went to the mat where he'd been, as if she were just now noticing he was
gone. "Do you want coffee? All I have are cubes. They're good, though."
She blinked several times in that dazed way people do when they find
themselves in the middle of a catastrophe and aren't sure of the etiquette.
But her movements were unhesitating as she shut off the hookah and put
it away.
In appearance, she still matched the minor memory I had of her, small,
compact, a shade on the plump side and looking more so in a pouch suit.
Unlike Sovay, she wasn't much for dyejobs or other flash. Her skin was
untouched, and so was her ripply shoulder-length brown hair. Her only
affectation was the set of pearlized brown biogem eyes that gave her round
face an odd blind look.
Surprisingly, there was conventional furniture in the kitchen, a table
and four chairs. Or maybe that wasn't so surprising—even the most
dedicated floor-sitters probably craved a chair now and then. I sat down
and Rowan served me mechanically: cup of water, spoon, napkin, jar of
cubes.
"How do you take it?"
For a moment I wasn't sure what she meant. "Tan."
"The cubes in the gold wrappers're tan. The white are tan with sugar,
the pink are sweet black, the black ones are black." She shrugged and
deposited herself in a chair as I peeled a gold-wrapped cube and dropped
it into my cup. The water foamed up in an instant boil.
"Why did they do that to him?" she asked. "Take out his eyes, plug his
ears?"
"First aid." I stirred down the bubbles in the cup. "Too much sensory
input can be adverse for an involuntary mindwipe. The pop was a tactile
desensitizer as well as a sedative. It'll keep him out till they get him into
quarantine."
"Oh." She piled one hand on the other.
I've always thought murder must be easier in a way. The involuntary
mindwipe—mindsuck—is just as gone, except the trappings of a live body
remain to confound the survivors. A mindsuck is interred not in a grave
but in a special quarantine to allow the development of a new mind and
personality. Sometimes the new person is a lot like the old one. Most of the
time, however, it's only spottily reminiscent of the person that had been,
as though the suck had freed an auxiliary person that had always been
there, just waiting for the elimination of the primary personality. There
was still a lot of controversy between the behaviorists and the biologists
over that and plenty of theories but no clear-cut explanations.
Regardless, the new mind was definitely Somebody Else, a stranger
with no ties to the previous inhabitant of the brain. Someone told me once
it was a lot easier to accept if you had enough of a mystic bent toward a
belief in reincarnation, but I couldn't exactly tell Rowan to take comfort in
the study of the Great Wheel of Life.
"Well," she said after a bit. "Have the Brain Police ever recovered any,
ah, anyone? From mindsuck?"
A common question. You'd think in the Age of Fast Information there
wouldn't be blank spots or misconceptions. You have to tell them the
truth, but I hate it, even if lying is worse. "Never intact," I said, and took a
sip of coffee. She'd been right, they were good cubes. The damnedest
things make an impression on you at the damnedest times. "Most suckers
part out minds as quickly as possible. They—" I stopped.
Tell her about a chop shop? Sure—then follow up with a description of
how they'd dig out Sovay's self-contained memories with all the finesse of
a chimpanzee digging grubs with a pointed stick, working fast because a
hot mind wouldn't keep in a jury-rigged hold-box. Any excised memories
that could unambiguously identify the mind would be flushed and
whatever remained of his talent sold. There would still be a fair number of
associations clinging to it but people who buy from suckers don't fuss
about a few phantoms. Nor do they complain if the merchandise is
half-mutilated from rushed pruning.
Anything left over after that would be sold, too. It still surprised me
that there were lowlifes who would buy sucker leftovers but some people
will buy anything. Which meant that there might be someone with Sovay's
taste in clothes and someone else with his taste in decor and still someone
else with his taste in sex.
—Unless this was a bodysnatch and the suckers had somebody waiting
for a whole new personality. Some Very Nice People back in business,
under a new name or new management? Counterfeiters making the jump
to mindsucking and bodysnatching didn't happen often. Mindsucking was
a crime of violence, something counterfeiters normally avoided altogether.
But it wasn't unheard of, either. The money's good; people who want a
whole new personality pay a lot more than those who just want a persona
overlay. Maybe because they think if they throw enough money at it, they
can actually get a personality transplant, even though there's no evidence
that anybody's ever managed to transplant a personality successfully. No
evidence whatsoever. Just ask me.
I realized I was glaring at my coffee cup. "They, uh, they have to. Work
quickly, that is," I said lamely, finishing a sentence neither of us cared
about anymore.
"I see." Rowan exhaled noisily. "Then it hardly matters whether you
catch the mindsuckers or not, does it? I mean, for Sovay or for me. He
couldn't be restored even if you found him."
I should have made the parameds give her something for shock, I
thought. Seeing to the well-being of the family was really more the
province of the regular police; one of them should have been with us but
they were probably working shorthanded again. The budget being what it
was, I was working short-minded myself.
"No," I said slowly, "perhaps it doesn't matter. Unless we catch them
and keep them from doing someone else."
Rowan's mouth twitched. "You'll excuse me if I don't seem to care
about anyone but myself at the moment."
"Of course. Is there someone you can stay with?"
"You mean someone to look after the bereaved widow, spoon broth into
her mouth, cut up her meat for her, slip her tranquilizers?" The brown
pearl eyes slid away from me disinterestedly. "No. I'll manage on my own."
We sat in silence until we heard the regular police coming into the
living room.
The regular police had little to tell me. Sovay's attackers hadn't left
much in the way of traces. Most likely the B and E had been jobbed out to
specialists who had taken off as soon as the suckers were in. The B and E
pros seldom stole anything on these runs—too traceable. Burglars don't
usually want to turn into accessories to mindsuck. So there we were. The
Age of Fast Information meant we could find out we didn't know anything
five times faster than we could fifty years ago.
Rowan remained firm in her refusal to go to the hospital so I left her
my number and drove back to headquarters. I'm one of those people who
prefers driving manually both land and air. It's somewhere between a
game and therapy, clears my mind, helps me think better. Traffic was
fairly heavy so I had plenty of time to go over things.
Hanging above the river while I waited for the signal to descend and
merge into land traffic, I put a Gladney spike in the deck and turned on all
eight speakers. Gladney was another mindsuck and this spike was an old
one, music composed by his original personality, what they called a first
edition.
It was scary how so many artists of various kinds were getting sucked
these days. Since the breakthrough in myelin sheath restoration, it had
become possible for a brain to stand up to a greater number of complete
wipes than the former limit of two. It used to be that a third wipe left a
subject at about the level of an acorn squash, only not so long-lived. But
now you could have yourself wiped annually—or you could have if
government regulations hadn't been tightened. Even with the restrictions,
requests for voluntary mindwipe had quadrupled. So had involuntary
mindwipe—mindsuck.
My dash buzzer went off to tell me I had the right of descent and I
leaned gently on the stick. The fact that Sovay was the victim seemed to
indicate that we weren't done with the events of the previous month.
Retaliation, maybe, for what he'd done at Davy Jones' Locker, except
that was pretty extreme for counterfeiters. They were given more to things
along the lines of screwing up your credit rating, not crimes of violence.
Unless there was something really big at stake.
Maybe Sovay's glancing involvement with Some Very Nice People had
drawn someone's attention to him. Sovay had barely obtained a
reputation as a promising actor except among hard-core live-theatre
aficionados. An esoteric victim, but suckers made it their business to
scout out new talent. New talent was a hell of a lot easier to get at and
sucker customers liked the idea of acquiring a talent in the semirough,
with most of the failure supposedly sanded off. Then they could refine it to
suit themselves. Stardom the easy way, and better than a persona overlay.
In theory. In practice—
Well. You can warn people about buying from suckers, tell them horror
stories about what happens to you when you buy sucked merchandise only
to have it go rotten with trauma in a living brain, you can legislate and
overlegislate every angle, but you can't make people believe they won't get
around the problems of buying something not only out of their aptitudes
but unclean and taken by force. The legit Mind Exchange uses a procedure
that took anywhere from a few weeks to several months to clean out an
ability sold legally and even they couldn't guarantee there wouldn't be
some mild phantoms. A few years ago, my brother bought someone's
painting talent—he'd always wanted to fill out his arty streak and become
a full-fledged portrait painter—and found that every time he picked up a
brush, he craved to smell fresh cedar. Last time I'd seen him, he'd had a
pocket full of wood chips. Stunk like somebody's antique hope chest.
Well, if someone wanted to sell off a part of the mind as though it were
any old heirloom out of the attic, it wasn't my concern even if I couldn't
see the virtue of it. Maybe both seller and buyer were better off but so far,
no one had made history with secondhand talent. Even so, that was
voluntary. No one volunteered to get sucked.
Traffic came to a standstill in Commerce Canyon, so I requested
permission to go airborne again. Central Traffic Control took ten minutes
to get back to me and tell me I could underfly the crosstown air express at
my own risk and liability. I nearly got my hood crumpled but it saved me
an hour.
Salazar was having a chew-and-spit when I arrived at her office. No
drugs or surgery for her—she was too proud of her self-control. And none
of that edible polyester, either—Salazar was a real-food gourmet.
Chew-and-spit was her way of dealing with her lust for food versus her
belief that obesity was an antisocial act. In a crowded world, she was fond
of saying, it is obnoxious to take up more than your share of space. As far
as I was concerned, her philosophy was her problem; my quarrel was with
how she defined obesity, which was anyone who wasn't thirty pounds
underweight, me for certain. To her credit, she'd stopped hinting around
about diets and surgical pruning after the first month we worked together
and she did manage to keep a professional attitude in the face of my mass
that, next to hers, was True Bulk.
Today she had a pocket sandwich. All the time I was telling her about
Sovay, she would take a bite of her sandwich, chew it slowly and
sensuously enough to make masticate a dirty word, and when it was all
mashed to paste in her mouth, she'd lean forward and spit the mess into
the suckhole in her desk. In spite of the Sally Lazer debacle, I was still one
of the few who didn't gag openly at this routine, which was one reason she
was tolerant of me. The Sally Lazer debacle itself was another. Everyone
else in my department was on a diet or pretending to be.
"Any ideas on who did it?" she asked when I was finished. Her mouth
was full.
I shifted position in the overstuffed chair. All of Salazar's office
furniture was chubby. To make her feel that much thinner, I supposed.
"Some Very Nice People look good for it, if we could find them. Or it
might be grandstanding newcomers with something to prove. Or they
could be one and the same. The identities tend to get slippery in these
cases."
Salazar spat, took a drink of mineral water and spat that into the
suckhole, too. For practice, maybe. Her saggy garnet eyes stared at me
skeptically. "We've got nothing on Some Very Nice People. What about the
grieving widow?" Bite.
"She's not an actor so they couldn't have been competitors in the
strictest sense, and she has no history of personality disorders or identity
buying or selling. No chance we'd be able to get a search warrant for
cause. I didn't mention that possibility to her."
Salazar looked disappointed as she spat and took another bite. "If we
could justify search warrants on general principle, we'd probably clear up
half the unsolved sucks from the last five years."
That kind of talk always made me uncomfortable. Tempting as it is to a
Brain Police officer for the sake of all the victims like Sovay, I didn't like
the idea of access-on-demand to someone's memories and I never would.
Salazar never seemed to understand it as an atrocity. Maybe she'd
spent too much time in You Must Remember This.
"Sovay was a bit smaller than the stuff a really big operator might go
for," I went on. "He was just moving into Stage One prominence, where he
was classified as a talent to watch. The big operators seem to prefer
someone who's just a little more of a brand name but won't be too
traceable. Drives the price up. And they never make house calls. Someone
big could be behind it—whoever got Bateau's cut of the pie, since Bateau
himself is out of the question—but we'll never connect them with the ones
who did the actual suck. The trail will be covered by a lot of selective
memory wiping and coding, so the little fish probably think they're
working for themselves anyway."
Salazar spat again. "Sounds more complicated than it has to be."
"Suckers always make it more complicated, hoping we'll get lost in the
spaghetti."
"Spaghetti," Salazar murmured dreamily. "Did they take anything
else?"
"No, and not for lack of trying. They broke into his studio but there was
nothing transportable. Probably they were looking for artifacts, familiar
things the talent could relate to in its new home."
Spit. "The ancient Egyptians have nothing on us. How do you want to
handle it?"
"The way I usually do. Get into the Downs and look around."
She thought about that while she made love to the food in her mouth.
Salazar's never been comfortable with the idea that she can't know exactly
what the people under her are doing. She'd like to orchestrate everything
the same way she'd like to stick her nose into any mind she wanted to.
Fortunately, she was behind a desk—most of the time—where she could do
only minimal damage. Most of the time.
"If we start asking questions or pulling in likelies, it'll just alert our
suckers and maybe every other sucker we'd like to hotbox, and they'll just
have themselves wiped so we couldn't get anything on them even if we did
find them. The State v. Marto. I quote: 'A mindwipe's new personality
may not be held accountable for crimes—' "
Salazar spat forcefully and I shut up. "What about backup?"
I winced. She always did this to me and she should have known better.
But that's what happens when you promote administrators with no field
experience, or at least none that sticks. "Post them or don't post them, but
don't tell me either way. If I don't know, no one else can find out if
something goes wrong and I get sucked myself. Let's not discuss it
anymore, all right?"
Salazar nodded, brought the sandwich up to her face, and then paused.
"Say, you want the rest of this?" She thrust it at me. "I'm full."
"No. Thanks."
"You sure? It'll just go to waste."
"It's not on my diet."
She frowned at me accusingly. "You don't diet."
No sense of humor, that woman. She tossed the sandwich into the
suckhole, which seemed to choke on it briefly, unused to anything solid
after the pap she'd been feeding it. She had nothing further to add so I left
her searching her mouth for stray food particles and took myself over to
Wardrobe to pick out an appropriate Downs persona.
If Sovay's mind went anywhere at all, it would go to the Downs first,
where there was plenty of merchandise floating around in and among the
cheap dreamlands, memory lanes, trip parlors, pawnshops, storefront
摘要：

FOOLTOBELIEVEPATCADIGANSovayhaddyedhimselfadelicateorange.Itwasn'thiscolor.Hewassittingnudeonafloormatwithhislegsfoldedandhishandsrestingonthejunctionofhisankles.Someonehadpiledpillowsbetweenhisbackandthewallforsupport—theregularpolice,probably.Suckersweren'tknowntobethatconsiderate.Hislongstraighth...

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