Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [32]
“Great, “she said, desolate. “That’s just great.”
Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, you guys! You are so weird. It’s always the same story. Can’t live with you, can’t live without you… You can’t go on this way, you know. Its getting ridiculous. You want some real advice, ‘Sonja’? Go home. Change your attitudes, and start some hard peace talks with that husband of yours.”
“I don’t want to change,” she said coldly, staring with open distaste at his smooth profile, his soft effeminate hands. Who was he to call her abnormal? “I like my sexuality just the way it is.”
Dr Hamilton returned her look, a glint of human malice breaking through his doctor-act. “Listen. I’ll tell you something for free.” A weird sensation jumped in her crotch. For a moment she had a prick: a hand lifted and cradled the warm weight of her balls. She stifled a yelp of shock. He grinned. “I’ve been looking for a long time, and I know. There is no tall, dark man…”
He returned to her notes. “You say you were ‘raped,’ ” he continued, as if nothing had happened. “Yet you chose to continue the virtual session. Can you explain that?”
She thought of the haunted darkness, the cold air on her naked body; the soreness of her bruises; a rag of flesh used and tossed away. How it had felt to lie there: intensely alive, tasting the dregs, beaten back at the gates of the fortunate land. In dreamland, even betrayal had such rich depth and fascination. And she was free to enjoy, because it didn’t matter.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Out in the lobby there were people coming and going. It was lunchtime, the lifts were busy. “Sonja” noticed a round-shouldered geek of a little man making for the entrance to the clinic. She wondered idly if that could be “Lessingham.”
She would drop out of the group. The adventure with “Lessingham” was over, and there was no one else for her. She needed to start again. The doctor knew he’d lost a customer, that was why he’d been so open with her today. He certainly guessed, too, that she’d lose no time in signing on somewhere else on the semi-medical fringe. What a fraud all that therapy-talk was! He’d never have dared to play the sex-change trick on her, except that he knew she was an addict. She wasn’t likely to go accusing him of unprofessional conduct. Oh, he knew it all. But his contempt didn’t trouble her.
So, she had joined the inner circle. She could trust Dr Hamilton’s judgment. He had the telltales: he would know. She recognised with a feeling of mild surprise that she had become a statistic, an element in a fashionable social concern: an epidemic flight into fantasy, inadequate personalities, unable to deal with the reality of normal human sexual relations… But that’s crazy, she thought. I don’t hate men, and I don’t believe “Lessingham” hates women. There’s nothing psychotic about what we’re doing. We’re making a consumer choice. Virtual sex is easier, that’s all. Okay, it’s convenience food. It has too much sugar, and a certain blandness. But when a product comes along, that is cheaper, easier and more fun to use than the original version, of course people are going to buy it.
The lift was full. She stood, drab bodies packed around her, breathing the stale air. Every face was a mask of dull endurance. She closed her eyes. The caravanserai walls rose strangely from the empty plain…
Sterling to Kessel, 7 April 1985:
“I once read some remark of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s in which he spoke of wrenching his stories from his emotional wounds — in this case, it was some busted affair from which he was ‘still bleeding like a haemophiliac.’ It was from a letter he sent to some writing hopeful, a young woman begging him for advice, and one suspects he laid it on a bit thick with the Ever-Popular Tortured Artist Effect.
But this sort of ‘writer’s paradigm’ has stuck with me and caused me many moments of doubt. It makes me wonder to what extent science fiction is ‘fiction’ at all. Perhaps it is based on emotion,