The Beloved of My Beloved

by Ian Watson, Roberto Quaglia

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Tattooed on a woman-sized tumour, these tales, told to it as bedtime stories, are by turns surreal, satiric, erotic, obscene, ingenious, hilarious, and quite, quite brilliant. Together, they combine to create a weird and wonderful love story, unlike anything told before.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 288

Sample

Cancer of the womb had ravaged my beloved Amanda. Not until far too late were she, nor I, aware of the vile malignancy which had taken root inside her. By the time we did realize the truth, the swelling tumour had sowed lethal seeds elsewhere in her bones and even in her brain – so she was doomed.

We’d noticed no symptoms. Slightly surprising but not totally so. A womb exists to be occupied by a sort of intruder growing within it – the embryo which becomes a foetus which becomes a baby. A foreign sperm goes inside a woman and produces a kind of parasite that feeds upon her. The womb is designed to expand to accommodate this. Being occupied by a foreign body doesn’t necessarily interfere with the womb’s function in quite the same way as a tumour of the kidney or the liver interferes with those organs. It’s possible not to notice anything amiss until the fifth month of pregnancy, or rather tumour-acy.

A foreign body! What am I saying? It was as if Amanda was having a baby which was her own self. An undifferentiated baby, true! A cell in her body reproducing itself uncontrollably. No arms nor legs nor head, simply a mass of identical tissue. But identical to her.

Immediately after diagnosis Amanda’s wayward womb was promptly removed by a private surgeon, Mr Moravec, who was rather a connoisseur of tumours. However, nothing could be done about the secondary tumours in her brain.

It was Moravec who gave me my idea – while Amanda was “recovering” from the hysterectomy and tumourectomy. Recovering, in a very limited sense – I would lose her within three months.

“If only you could clone my beloved Amanda for me!” I had exclaimed.

Cloning a human being was strictly forbidden worldwide, mainly because of the Americans and their superstitions. Most people in that God-fearing country of tele-evangelists believe that only God creates a human being. Effectively God is present in bed with a married couple (and with an unmarried couple too, I suppose), and He inserts an immaterial finger to bless the union of sperm with egg. Personally I think this is quite pornographic, but Americans thought it was sacred. Consequently, if scientists cloned a person, that would be an insult to God. God might retaliate by means of more rapid global warming or a stock market collapse. American influence is so powerful that breach of the cloning ban in, say, Tadjikistan or Indonesia could well lead to military intervention to bring about regime change, so as to restore respect for the miracle of conception; and nobody would risk that. The Vatican backed this policy. The Chinese didn’t, but they had a big enough population anyway, so they wouldn’t make an issue of it.

“You can always have her plastinated,” Moravec pointed out.

I was perfectly aware that grieving relatives quite often paid for a loved one to be plastinated in a characteristic pose – sitting in a favourite chair reading a newspaper (which could be renewed each day), digging the garden, or watching television.

Over the years, as more loved ones died, a house could become a bit crowded with plastinated dead bodies. Those who deeply cared about their departed relatives might themselves die. Younger family members would wish to dispose of their plastinated elders. So the younger relatives would take the relics of their elders to the various Plastination Recycling Centres which are very like supermarkets except that customers themselves stock the shelves with plastinated bodies, although of course they can also buy bodies. Leave your plastinated grandparent there; in due course he or she would sell to a landscape gardener, or to a senior citizen department store as a mannequin, or to a civic architect who wanted his plaza to look populated. Did Moravec think I was oblivious to all this? I felt revulsion at the idea of myself dying one day with the result that a total stranger acquired plastinated Amanda for any purpose he or she had in mind. But irrespective of this…

“I’m not sure if a plastinated body is flexible enough.”

“If you want flexible,” said Moravec, “how about a silicone model of her? Fully poseable with a fleshlike feel. Check out realdoll.com.“

“But that is not herself. I want herself!”

“I can assist her tumour to carry on cloning itself, but herself I cannot clone. I’d be crucified. In a manner of speaking. US Special Forces, who knows?”

Moravec was a portly, dignified chap. I suspected his neat wavy brown hair of being a wig. I’d hate to think of him being crucified, squirming tubbily and maybe losing his wig in his agony. Only slim muscular people ought to be crucified. Though of course Moravec was speaking metaphorically.

A model would need to be formed in a mould. A mould – not the stuff that forms on cheese, but a receptacle the exact size and shape of… my Beloved.

I asked, “Can you continue growing the tumour inside a full-size transparent mould of Amanda’s body? Could you accelerate its growth so that the tumour fills the mould completely in, say, three months?”

Thus my Beloved would continue without interruption, in a manner of speaking, her DNA in every cell of the tumour.

“Can you? Could you?”

This would be innovative, cutting-edge work, and the idea excited Moravec, who loved tumours – although not literally. Yet, as we talked, the possibility of literally loving a tumour which enshrined the DNA of my Beloved – and which even immortalised that unique DNA deathlessly – dawned upon me…

A tumour which copied her shape perfectly because of the mould – her face, her limbs, her belly, her breasts – would superficially be identical with Amanda, apart from the colours of the outer surface and of course the absence of a mind. Or a heart. But this is a post-Cartesian era, is it not? Speaking of superficialities, when do we ever look within a human Beloved, at her lungs or intestines? Do we love and desire the lungs and intestines as passionately as we love the breasts? Arguably a Beloved may just as well be solid throughout.

Although equipped with entrances, and exits…

The tumour would need to take in liquid nutrient to feed itself – and it would need not only to excrete waste products but also to extrude its own self, for when Tumour-Amanda reached full size she would keep on growing irrespective. Surplus tumour must be expelled from a sort of anus like a string of sausages from a sausage machine, each sausage to be pruned as it emerged under the pressure of growth. Rather like going to the toilet.

One entrance could be designed for love, namely a tumour-vagina.

“Hmm,” said Moravec, “once the mould is full I shall use nanotechnology to inject a smart membrane around the shaped tumour.”

“A smart membrane?”

“As in smart plastics or fabrics. They resume their original shapes after being twisted or whatnot. Smartness should keep her in shape so long as there’s a vent for excess growth.”

“Will she be able to stand?”

“I doubt it. You might be able to lean her against a wall. I think she’ll sit without slumping, and of course if she’s lying in bed…” He shrugged suggestively.

“And her smart sheath can be tinted, so that she looks less like a tumour?”

“But tumours can be beautiful. The mottling effects. Let me show you.”

“I’d rather not. Ah, but what about her tattoo?”

My Beloved boasted a magnificent huge tattoo of a bird’s wings upon her back, green and gold feathers outspread from her spine. She’d been intending to have both her legs tattooed – with a leopard descending her right leg, a flowery tropical plant ascending her left leg. Amanda loved the paintings of Douanier Rousseau.

“Can the smart skin be tattooed?”

Although Moravec shook his head, a mischievous smile played upon his lips.

“Yes?” I asked eagerly.

“The nano-skin can probably be programmed with patterns.”

“Ah! Pre-programmed patterns. I see.”

Again came that mischievous smile. “I think that exposing part of the nano-sheath to a magnetic field could cause a pattern to express itself in that area – and to be erased if necessary! One of the problems with tattoos is that they’re for life. A person might change her mind about having a leg covered in orchids, but the tattoo is irrevocable…”

“Whereas a sheathed tumour can change its mind, supposing it had a mind.”

I described my inspiration about tumourisation to Amanda, and she sighed deeply.

“Beloved,” she declared – we called each other by the same name since we experienced the same sentiment for one another. “Beloved, oh how much happier it makes me to imagine you making love in the future to the tumour of me than to other women! This is such a consolation – it’s so romantic of you, so devoted, so ingenious! I admire you so much. Of course I’ll let a mould be made of me. How can you doubt it?”

So I also explained about the patterns, and Amanda clapped her hands with glee.

“Beloved, forget about the bird and the leopard! You know how much I like you to tell me a story after we make love.”

Indeed, our love-making resembled the 1001 nights of Scheherazade, except the other way round.

“Why not cartoon stories on my back and my belly and my legs and my arms? Different stories everywhere? Could a speech-recognition program mated with Photoshop design the cartoons while you tell my tumour the stories? You end off by exposing part of my sheathed tumour to the magnetic field?”

“Wow,” I said.

True, these were early days yet, but my Beloved was certainly entering into the spirit of the concept. The very idea seemed to be giving her far more comfort than would weeks in a hospice for the terminally ill, attended by banalities.

“I think,” she said, “when I am dead in heaven I will dream the stories you tell to my tumour!”

“And I, listening to the silence in which you’ll listen to my stories, will hear the echo of all the marvellous things that you have said to me during all the life we shared together.”

“I love you.”

I love you echoed in my brain and I love you in the tones of my Beloved would have echoed within myself for all of my remaining future each time I would watch, caress, kiss and love her tumour in her shape, illustrated by the dreams that my fantasy would transmit to her in the afterlife. Oh if only, beyond the bounty of her appearance, her tumour could also have the gift of words!

I had an idea.

I consulted a friend who’s an insider in the mysteries of artificial intelligence, and he didn’t disappoint me.

“The problem would be a serious one if the human subject to be simulated was already dead. But since she’s alive, we can easily model her linguistic behaviour and fully reproduce the illusion of eloquence later.”

We attached to my Beloved a set of excellent microphones which henceforth would record every word of hers, every sentence, every laugh and every moan. All of these sonic inputs would be transmitted to a computer, interpreted by a voice and semantic recognition system, and catalogued.

“The variety of our utterances,” my friend explained to me, “is even more of a sophisticated illusion than that of free will. With some rare exceptions, when people talk they all more or less repeat the same things, and the sequence of utterances is basically random, partly influenced by what others around you are saying or expecting to hear from you just then. We’re all much more banal and predictable than we like to believe.”

“My Beloved isn’t a banal woman. I wouldn’t have married her if she were.”

“That merely means we’ll need to assign a slightly higher value to the variable of eccentricity in the A.I. algorithm simulating your Beloved.”

My Beloved spoke without difficulty for another two months. Throughout this period she strove to say as many things as possible, to express every least thought, to develop arguments sparked by whatever pretext, well knowing that upon this would depend the quality of representation of her that the tumour would exhibit after she was dead. In the third month, words were often replaced by groans. Just like MacDonald’s spreading throughout the world, the tumour had installed an embassy in every vital part of my Beloved.

All this while, the clone of the tumour was growing rapidly inside the mould of my Beloved before her very eyes. We’d put the mould in the same room where she was preparing to die, right beside her bed. It was she who had wanted this. The tumour in its transparent mould was providing her with that sense of continuity of one’s own DNA which human beings care so much about, and ever have. Even if now it was aberrant DNA, this was a great consolation to my Beloved.

Due to the physical pain she was feeling, the love for her own tumour – with which I would live and couple in future – now and then turned into hatred or jealousy. Yet she never called for the execution of the tumour, or its burning at the stake, as others in her position might have done. Her hatred seemed more spiritual in its symbolism.

For instance she insisted, “Promise me you’ll sodomize my tumour.”

“If that’s your wish, I’ll do so, even against my will.”

“You have to humiliate it, the way it’s humiliating me. I want you to fuck it in the arse.”

During our life together, my Beloved and I hadn’t dedicated ourselves to anal sex – not due to moralistic taboos, but simply because this activity always seemed to us silly.

“I want you to put it in chains, whip it and ejaculate on its face and piss in its mouth. I want you to do to it all the filthy things you never did to me.”

Was this really hatred? Or was it instead that, since she herself couldn’t do so any more, she wanted her tumour to complete for her the whole repertoire of fringe sexual variants of which we had never had need? I promised everything she asked of me. But I also told her that I would do all those things with love, with no trace of hatred. Hearing my words, she calmed and fell asleep peacefully, smiling.

The time came when my Beloved was scheduled to die – but she didn’t die. Despite enriched growth promoter, that exogenous tumour hadn’t filled the mould yet, and Amanda confided to me that she couldn’t die without seeing her tumourous alter ego fully formed, ready to replace her beside me in our bed.

“You won’t get any window of opportunity to betray me with another woman on the excuse that my tumour isn’t sexually mature yet!” Amanda was even able to joke at the time when she ought to have died, instead.

“Good thinking!” I answered. “For the moment, don’t die.”

Several more weeks passed before the tumour of my Beloved grew to fill the mould completely. Then the mould was opened to finalize and stabilize the body-shape within that smart sheath, and the chip was implanted containing all the digitalized utterances and noises that Amanda had emitted during the months of her disease – together with the A.I. program to assemble those at their best, plus some microspeakers hidden inside the throat which would perfectly reproduce the sound of her voice.

When the moment came, my Beloved gazed into my eyes with a light I will never forget.

“Kiss me,” she asked in a tiny voice.

I kissed her.

She whispered sweetly, “Now kiss my tumour.”

Turning to where the tumour now lay on the bed behind me attached to its nutrient supply, I did so.

“Hold my hand.”

Which I did. As she stared from the pillows towards her tumour, instinctively I also took its hand.

Then there was only silence, and I began to cry, for I realized that in that room of a sudden there was nobody other than me.

That very same evening I made love to the tumour of my Beloved. First I moved the tumour next door for a candlelit dinner, me feeding myself in the usual oral way – a tagliatelle carbonara, which my Beloved used to adore – while the tumour obliviously sucked the regular liquid that kept it alive. Then I transported it back to the bed, and after several months of sexual abstinence I could finally experience once more the intoxication of passion and the heat of a body against my skin. Unlike a banal sexdoll, the tumour of My Beloved was as warm as Amanda had been.

“It’s so beautiful to make love with you again after so long,” the tumour told me without moving its lips. It sounded sincere, though a little ventriloqual. Rationally I knew that this sweet sentence was only the product of a program of artificial intelligence, but the emotion I was feeling wasn’t affected by consciousness of the deception. What’s reality, after all?

After the first pleasuring – short, intense, and passionate – the tumour insisted on a repeat, just as my Beloved would typically have done, at least when we were younger. Unfortunately, unlike my Beloved, her tumour couldn’t help restore the needful erection with the old but always efficient trick of oral sex, since – even though it was alive – it was inert. So I explained that it needed to be patient a while longer. The tumour of my Beloved proved to be patient, and could wait. Could it be that tumours are the most patient creatures in the universe? When we pleasured again a while later, that was even more beautiful than the first time. In one regard at least this was our first night of marriage, start of a long honeymoon. Time for buggering it, whipping it and humiliating it – as my Beloved required of me – would come later, much later in time.

In the depths of the night I felt that the moment was ripe to complete my spiritual union with my Beloved, who was beholding me from up there in paradise and certainly was proud of me. This was the moment to tell the tumour the first of the stories that would decorate its skin with ephemeral tattoos, a new species of mandala destined to disappear every time a new story generated a new picture. We’d had to discard the idea of accumulating a multiplicity of illustrations. The body of the tumour of my Beloved would retain each picture indefinitely on its skin until I told a new story, which would generate a new picture to replace the first, and so on. This was like life. This was like love. Ultimately, everything in the whole universe is merely one form or other of ephemeral mandala.

For as long as each picture endured on the new and immortal body of her tumour, my Beloved would dream time and again the story that I told – a story which would speak of a Beloved, for from that day on I would only tell stories about Beloveds. And because my own Beloved had just died, my first story would need to be that of the Grave of my Beloved.

So, my heart swelling with love and my eyes overflowing with tears of joy, I began to tell the following tale…

I do not wish to say how my beloved Mirabelle died, but when that terrible misfortune first happened I contemplated a veritable mausoleum for her, a place where I could sit of an evening to commune with her. I imagined marble and lilies in vases and an alabaster sarcophagus, for her skin was so white.

Unfortunately I did not have enough money for a mausoleum, consequently Mirabelle must be buried in an ordinary grave.

Yet then I thought to myself: the body below ground will forever be out of my reach. It is beside the gravestone that I would place, and replace, lilies. Thus in a sense the body is displaced into the gravestone. Just as, by being dead, the real Mirabelle was entirely displaced out of her precious body.

And then I realized that thanks to cyberspace a further, more consoling displacement was possible. I had not previously given much attention to this because my Beloved was so real to me. But her grave need not be in the physical world at all. It could be in the virtual world. Indeed, this etherial realm might be a more appropriate location – for was my Beloved not an angel? I would arrange for Mirabelle’s body to be cremated. I would scatter the ashes in a lake. And from within my own home I could visit her cyber-grave constantly.

Nothing material survives beyond the grave. In cyberspace nothing is material. Therefore cyberspace must be the real kingdom of spirit on Earth! Surely the whole of mankind would realize this sooner or later. Old-style physical cemeteries will come to seem relics of a primitive era, of concern only to archeologists.

What’s more, the inscription on the gravestone could be as outspoken as I wished, since it would be totally private, and I could incorporate a picture of her face without fear that this might be defaced or prised loose and stolen.

I swiftly discovered that several cyber-companies offered this service, and I obtained on-line brochures. Definitely the cream of the companies was Undying Love. Undying Love served film stars and rock stars and such – or rather the estates of dead film and rock stars. Imitators of Undying Love charged less money but apparently none possessed the same cachet.

I couldn’t possibly economise in my devotion! Yet I couldn’t afford to pay all at once (the interest from that lump sum funding the permanent maintenance of the virtual grave). Apparently most customers of Undying Love recouped the payment by charging fans to visit the virtual grave of the star in question – which fans did in their droves. A hundred thousand hits, and payments, per day was not unusual. Such numbers of devotees could never visit a physical grave in a fixed location, so this made good business sense.

My Beloved did not have a retinue of fans to fund a virtual grave. She had not been the Beloved of millions of people worldwide, but only of me.

Nevertheless it was possible to pay, month by month, a sum which I could afford. This option was discouraged. A lifetime “subscription” (perhaps I should say a deathtime subscription) was equivalent to thirty years’ worth of monthly payments. During this period a star’s fame might very easily go into eclipse if one was funding the grave site solely from payments made by visiting fans – besides, that tactic seemed mean, failing to honour the star sufficiently. Most stars, in any case, were quite rich and wrote into their wills an insistence upon lump-sum payment all at once.

Still, monthly payment was possible.

Accordingly I made arrangements with Undying Love for my Beloved’s burial in cyberspace. I signed an on-line contract for the permanent upkeep of Mirabelle’s grave, and for additional realism supplied details about the body to be interred. The grave would be tended virtually. As per my requirements, virtual lilies would be placed in a vase once a week, programmed to wither, it is true, exactly as natural lilies wither, but then each week fresh lilies would appear. The miniature rectangular lawn of the grave would be trimmed regularly. Weeds, programmed to grow, would be removed.

Alas, within two years financial difficulties overtook me so that I could not afford those monthly payments.

I watched the lilies wither one final time and knew that they would not be replaced. The grave still looked serene to my eye, albeit melancholy, as I continued to visit it. Naturally I did so, every day. How could I not? My Beloved was there, nowhere else.

Very soon I received an automated payment reminder from Undying Love, tactfully phrased. The next reminder was still quite tactful, but the third conveyed a note of vague menace.

I did respond to the initial demands with an explanation and a plea for patience, but evidently only a computer was reading (or failing to read) my comments and either failing to understand them or ignoring them. There was nothing I could do except hope for a change in my personal fortune, or lack of it.

Undying Love did not threaten to delete the grave of my Beloved, but presently an obscene item of graffiti appeared on the gravestone. It would disgust me too much to quote the words. The next demand for payment, plus arrears plus interest, threatened that “worse will happen.”

I attempted to phone a human being, but only succeeded in speaking unsatisfactorily to synthesized voices.

More vile graffiti appeared until I shuddered to visit the grave. What a torment to see on my screen, only inches away, the defaced gravestone, and nothing I could do to scrub it clean!

Soon the grave bore so many graffiti that they were mutually illegible, which was one small consol. . .