Morticians Don’t Wear Plaid
“I see you’ve killed another viewpoint character,” the mortician said.
“He isn’t dead,” Bergamo replied. “Memphis shot out his box without any lethal damage to his root programming. I’m sure there’s a shock factor.
“You can’t have a chunk of programming blast off the front of your head without being at least silly for a few days.”
“I am unconcerned with his reptilian brain.” The mortician spoke with an affected drawl, seeming by effort to keep a straight face, as if beneath the apparent simplicity of his statements there was a humor so subtle and yet so robust, his overlay of calm indifference might explode at any moment. The top of his head might pop open and a jack-in-the-box spring crazily toward you.
He was shaping the skull from flesh-colored putty. He worked without concentration, as if his hands worked best without interference from his head. “I am concerned as to how you have come to have a modified copy of his circuit board, because that is clearly against the law, and I don’t want to end up as an accomplice.” He put emphasis on modified.
Bergamo looked directly at the mortician. His eyes moved in a rapid pattern. The mortician froze. His eyes moved in a responding pattern. It lasted no longer than a reflexive blink. The mortician resumed with the repair to the SomaCorpse, who every minute or so repeated resignedly, as if from far away:
“Thirsty me.”
The mortician was matching a sample of Somando’s hair to a weave. He didn’t consciously know that Bergamo had brought him to Ash Fork with the others. A cover story, or history, was installed in him to give him an identity based in patterned responses requiring existing patterns which matched him to fit into and navigate his environment, such as knowing and obeying laws. When a behavior, such as this one, did not match the template, he had to get instructions from a higher authority to proceed.
He knew the SomaCorpse was the private property of Somatic Corporation, Space Enterprises. He knew also that Bergamo was replacing the board, and that the new board would not be calling home, ever again. Bergamo was repurposing the assassin to his own use.
Bergamo was of higher authority than the mortician had ever before encountered.
It was one of the laws of Ash Fork that you cannot hear what you do not know. There has to be some pattern of consistency, some ground prepared for the seeds of new information to fall on, some water of truth that is transparent, substantial, and with good taste.
Bergamo was the only being in this location in space who had begun life as an organic human being. The rest of them were copies of volunteer counterparts on earth who had no direct knowledge of Ash Fork. They volunteered to let SomaCorpse make a copy of them. They were staying in their ordinary reality. They were adapted components in an energy field which was not an extension of human technology. Ash Fork was was already there, but nobody else could get there in an organic body without the shock factor causing the muscles to break most of the bones in the body, an agonizing death.
Bergamo was the only human being on the space station.
Bergamo discovered Ash Fork without suffering even a charley horse. He was accused of holding back information, of holding mankind for ransom, but he insisted he had given them all the information he had about how he got there.
In an address to the UN Security Council, he told the story of a young doctor who thought he was curing warts on a young boy, when in reality it was an incurable disease. But the doctor was certain it was warts, and, confident that hypnosis cures warts, he hypnotized the boy and told him they would go away. The condition got better rather quickly. A colleague told the doctor what he was actually dealing with, and he could never repeat his initial success.
“In other words, madams and sirs, I didn’t know it wasn’t possible, which is how I did it.”
The mortician could not move outside the parameters of a personal history installed to protect him from disintegration, but he knew that he was in Ash Fork and that there was another place, an ordinary reality, where he was created and sent to a different universe. He believed in his creation story as a matter of faith.
It was real because he was told it was real, like everything else.
The mortician said, “I have to wait for at least another hour before I can glue down the weave.” He felt a surge of anger at the other man’s superiority. He didn’t mind a pretense toward superiority, but real superiority seemed too much an affront to be borne. “I thought you didn’t ever go anywhere in the daytime,” he drawled, without looking at Bergamo.
“Who told you that?”
“I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve heard said now and then, that you don’t like coming out in the daytime. You do look pale, like you spend a lot of time in the dark.”
Had he known that he was following the script Bergamo had created … but he could not know this. His desires shifted and changed constantly, and his satisfaction was secreted inside, behind his wish to be cruel, a wish thwarted by the soft roundness of his form, even of his eyes, everything about him was soft except his judgements on other people. He wanted them dead.
