Taboo

by Jerry Oltion

Customs arise for reasons— but what happens when the reasons change?

* * * *

When Edward saw the woman trace her fingers through the swirls of Starry Night, he knew he had to meet her. He had been watching her for several minutes as their paths crossed and crossed again in the crowded gallery, and he had worked up a healthy interest based solely on her choice of paintings to pause before, but her little against-the-rules dip into Van Gogh’s masterpiece tipped the balance.

It didn’t hurt that she was pretty. She had an oval face, with cheekbones that called just enough attention to themselves, a small, perfect nose, and her hair was dark, thick, and wavy. He had always been attracted to women like her, for longer than he could remember.

She could have been anywhere from thirty to seventy, at first glance. When she moved it became obvious that she wasn’t a day under a hundred. She had that ageless grace that comes with a lifetime of experience. Some women learned to hide it, to stumble occasionally and reach awkwardly for things so they appeared younger, but she was clearly beyond all that. She was comfortable in her own skin, as was Edward.

He walked up beside her and said softly, “If this had been the original, you’d be in jail by now.”

She gave him an appraising look. He resisted the urge to suck in his stomach. “If this were the original,” she said in a rich, melodic voice, “admission would have cost ten times as much.”

“A very good point,” he conceded. “My name’s Edward.”

“McKenna.”

“Are you fond of Starry Night?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Who wouldn’t be?” She reached forward again and pushed the glowing Moon as if it were an “on” button for an interactive demo. Edward winced instinctively at her transgression, but when her finger sank up to the first knuckle he realized the reproduction was a hologram.

Apparently it was more than that. McKenna yanked her finger back with a startled “Oh! It shocked me.” She stuck the wounded finger in her mouth.

“Serves you right.”

“Mmmm. There’s nothing wrong with touching a hologram. Shouldn’t be, anyway.”

“Touching art displays is a bad habit to get into. One of these days you’ll actually be standing in front of the original, and you won’t be able to help yourself.”

She made a face. “Bill Gates has the original. Not likely I’ll be invited to his house anytime soon.”

He shrugged. “‘Soon’ is a subjective term these days, isn’t it?”

She gave him the appraising look again. She was about to violate another taboo, he could tell, so he beat her to it. “Closing in on two hundred. And no, I’ve never met him, but I haven’t made it a goal.”

“Me either,” she replied. “Even though I’ve had over a hundred and fifty years myself to do it.”

He laughed. So refreshingly open! He hadn’t met anyone like her in, well, in a very long time. “You’re a child,” he said.

“Hah. Not many people say that.”

“Then they don’t understand longevity, do they?” Edward inclined his head toward the gallery’s cafeteria. “Would you care to share a cup of something with a slightly older child?”

A few minutes later, over steaming mugs of maté, they went through the ritual. He lived right there in San Francisco; she was visiting from Seattle. He did volunteer work for the Red Cross; she worked a paying job assembling aircraft. He wasn’t partnered, and neither was she. Nor were either of them married.

“I don’t think many people over a hundred do marry anymore,” he said. “‘‘Til death do us part’ becomes kind of ominous when that could be centuries in the future.”

“I’ve always heard it was religious bigots who killed marriage,” said McKenna. “They wouldn’t let gays or lesbians get married, so states established domestic partnerships instead, but they couldn’t forbid heterosexuals from registering. After word got around that partners could have all the benefits without the religious connotations, only religious people got married.”

“That’s a good theory.” He laughed. “It’s odd that I can’t just say, ‘Yes, that’s how it was.’ I was there, after all. I was married in my thirties. And forties and fifties, too, I think. But anything beyond about fifty years in the past is a blur. It’s like it happened to somebody else.”

She nodded. “It’s that way for me, too. I have flashes of memory from farther back, but nothing really connects. The brain can only hold so much.”

“I thought we’d have augments by now,” he said.

“We do.”

“I meant ones that worked.”

“Right.” She smiled wryly. She’d obviously tried them and found them lacking just as he had. Exterior memory was fine for looking stuff up, but lousy for spontaneous connections. And the memories were such pale imitations of the real thing, it was like being haunted by ghosts. One of the most liberating moments in his life was the time he had taken off his augment and fed its data port two hundred and forty volts straight out of the wall. It had actually caught fire. He remembered that as clearly as if it were yesterday. But then it had only happened thirty or forty years ago.

“So we drift through life at the leading edge of a fifty-year spotlight,” he said. “I have to admit, it has its advantages.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t feel any older than I ever did. Which is to say I feel like I’m about twenty-five. And I don’t get bored, or jaded, or depressed. Not more than usual, anyway.”

She laughed. “We didn’t get wisdom, but we didn’t get ennui, either. Fair trade, I guess.”

“It’s refreshing to talk about it with someone who understands. It’s the elephant in the room most times with people over a hundred. I think we all expect each other to be superhuman, and we’re secretly embarrassed to be simply human.”

“Here’s to simple humanity,” McKenna said. She lifted her mug and took a sip.

They looked at one another with the frank appreciation of people who had already decided to spend more time together, and were imagining where it might lead.

“So you like poking your fingers into art displays,” Edward said. “I know a place just a few blocks from here where you’re actually encouraged to do that.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Or joyously, or howeverly you want to.”

“Let’s go.”

They turned off their shoes and walked down the center of the street, enjoying the grass between their toes. Ad holos fluttered around them like autumn leaves until Edward took his pod from his pocket and entered an opt-out. They drifted reluctantly away to their five-meter legal boundary, but boosted their image brightness to compensate.

“I keep thinking we ought to reintroduce skeet shooting as a sport,” he said.

“Skeet shooting?”

He raised his right hand, made a pistol with thumb and forefinger, and pointed it at a Cokesi ad. “Bang.”

“Weapons are only legal for self-defense,” she said.

“My point exactly.”

“I think you’d have a hard time arguing in court that a soft drink ad threatened your life.”

“Probably so. Alas.” He picked up a pine cone and tossed it at one of the hovering projectors. It dodged and glowed with renewed vigor now that it knew it was being noticed. So Edward ignored it and concentrated on the grass beneath his feet and the rustle of air in the trees.

“Remember ground cars?” he asked.

“A little,” said McKenna. “I remember getting in a wreck once. My father was driving and somebody hit us. I can still hear the sound of metal crumpling.”

“Funny what sticks with you. I still remember my mother baking cookies when I was about ten. That’s fresher than most of my memories between then and now.”

“Do you ever see her anymore?”

“She died before the treatment was invented.”

“Ah. Sorry.” McKenna fell silent. Another taboo violated, and this time one that did actually sting a bit. Edward had lost a lot of friends and family along the line, most through the simple haze of time, but far too many to death. No amount of medical advances could prevent accidents.

They walked a block or so in silence before Edward asked, “So what brought you to San Francisco?”

“I’m going to watch them use one of our sky-cranes to lift a redwood.”

“Lift a redwood?”

“The tree? Hundred meters tall? Big, heavy—”

“I know what a redwood is. I had no idea any were scheduled to be cut.”

“Apparently somebody’s got a contract for ten of them. They’re using one of the cranes I helped build to lift them out of the grove.”

“Ten redwoods? At once?” Edward couldn’t remember the last time such a harvest had been done.

“Not at once. The crane can barely lift one.”

“That’s not what I meant. I mean—”

“I get it. Yeah, probably all ten within a couple of weeks. However quickly the mill can process the wood. Want to come watch one of the lifts with me?”

“If you don’t mind me carrying a protest sign.”

She looked at him askance. “Why?”

“Ten redwoods at once? That’s insane. They haven’t even begun to recover from the damage we did to them in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We shouldn’t cut another redwood for five hundred years.”

McKenna shook her head sadly. “Nobody would wait that long. Not even you. A hundred years from now you could be the guy running the crane.”

“Ouch.” But he had to admit she was right. A hundred years could witness a change from Liberal to Democrat if the right sequence of events triggered it. People lived in the moment.

They reached the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s monument to science and technology. Edward hadn’t been inside the place for a couple of decades, but it didn’t look any different than he remembered. It was big, cavernous, echoey, and full of the coolest stuff on the planet, all of which you could play with as much as you liked. Provided you signed the waiver at the entrance, of course. Edward read it carefully: you essentially admitted that there were dangers inherent in playing with scientific gadgetry, and you agreed that you wouldn’t sue for damages if you lost digits, limbs, or your life while doing so.

Children ran around underfoot, pushing every button they could reach and screaming at the top of their lungs, trying to defeat the antiphase noise cancellers that reduced their voices to tolerable levels. Edward and McKenna waded through them to interactive displays of optical illusions, chemical trickery, electrical wonders, even antigravity.

“That’s what I work with on the lifter line,” said McKenna, pointing at a modular agrav generator in the middle of a roped-off demonstration area. “I install those in the outriggers.”

“Why?” The question came out before he could stop it.

“Because that’s how cars fly?” she said. “But that’s not what you meant. You meant why do I work a production job? Don’t I have investments that I can live off?”

“None of my business,” he said.

“It’s okay. I could get by fine without a job if I wanted to. I got bored. I decided I wanted to work with my hands again.”

He nodded. “I’ve done that periodically. Usually not in a factory setting, but yes. Work can be gratifying.”

“It needs doing, too,” she said. “I figured it was my turn to be productive for a while.”

How productive had Edward been lately? He volunteered at the Red Cross, keeping track of humanitarian aid shipped to countries in need. A piece of software could do his job, and would if he quit. It was just busywork.

Two kids climbed atop the antigravity unit, laughing while another kid punched the button that sent it to the ceiling. Predictably, one of the kids pushed the other off when they were about twenty feet up, and Edward instinctively reached over the rope to break his fall, but the safety field caught the kid in mid-shriek and bounced him up and down like a ball for a moment, just as he and his friends undoubtedly knew it would. The field threw Edward’s hands upward as well, wrenching his shoulders.

“Ow!” he said, wincing. The kids laughed and ran away.

“You okay?” McKenna asked.

He windmilled his arms experimentally. “Nothing broken. But they’ll be sore tonight.”

“Here.” She turned him around and began rubbing his shoulders.

She certainly was forward with strangers, thought Edward, but he wasn’t about to tell her to stop. And as she kneaded his trapezius muscles, he felt a sense of familiarity beyond the immediate physicality of her actions. He’d used to love back rubs when he was in his forties and fifties, before the immortality treatments had brought his body back to its perpetual state of youthful vigor. In the intervening century and a half he’d nearly forgotten how good it felt.

Eyes closed, face tilted down to arch his back, he said, “I’ll give you until next Tuesday to stop that.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” said a deep voice in front of him, “but you’ll both have to stop much sooner than that.”

He looked up to see a security ‘bot standing before them, its arms held slightly outward and its glistening metal body leaning forward in a no-nonsense threat. Its humanoid face looked stern. McKenna stopped rubbing, but she kept one hand on Edward’s left shoulder.

“Beg your pardon?” Edward said.

“This is a completely inappropriate place for making sexual advances,” the robot said.

“I don’t really think a back rub is a sexual advance,” Edward replied.

“It certainly looks like one, sir,” said the robot. “I’m going to have to ask both of you to leave the building.”

Edward felt himself blush. “You’re kidding.”

“No, sir, I’m not. Please leave now.” The robot took a step forward.

Edward considered his options. There was no beating a robot in a physical struggle. Complaining to the management would tie both him and McKenna up for at least an hour, and probably ruin whatever chance he had of actually making sexual advances with her.

He turned to look at McKenna. She was grinning like one of the kids on the agrav unit. Okay, then.

“Learning all the time,” he said, taking her hand and leading her out of the echoing building. People stared as they left, and when they stepped out into the afternoon sunlight, both he and McKenna burst into laughter.

“Kicked out of the science museum for PDAs!” she said. “My god, that hasn’t happened to me in decades.”

“You mean it has happened to you before?” Edward asked.

“Oh, I’m sure it must have. I was a pretty wild kid.”

He tried to remember his own youth, the first kisses and clumsy gropings in movie theaters and back seats of cars. Even though the details were lost in the mist of time, he was pretty sure he wasn’t “wild” by anybody’s definition. One or two of his children might have been, but he was hardly the one to judge. All fathers thought their children were too wild.

“Well,” he said. “That was certainly an interesting experience. Now what?” The ever-present ad projectors were starting to collect, so he reached for his pod to enter another opt-out.

McKenna took his hands in hers before he could finish and turned him to face her, then leaned forward and upward, her lips pursed for a kiss. “How about an unambiguous sexual advance?”

The advertising screens swooped in as he bent down to meet her lips. They were undoubtedly in reporting mode now, and thousands of people were receiving pings to alert them to a potentially interesting scene. He didn’t care. Nor, apparently, did she.

She had a hotel room. He had a house in Woodside, up on a hill in the south end of the city. They took BART to the terminal closest to his house, Edward pointing out the sights along the way, then walked the last few blocks hand in hand. The eucalyptus trees dotting the street gave the air a wonderfully sweet aroma. McKenna’s mood had mellowed on the train, and they walked quietly, just enjoying each other’s company and the promise of intimacy to come. They ignored the trio of ad projectors that drifted along ahead of them, no doubt recording their walk for any voyeurs who still cared. Edward was surprised they were so interested. A couple of old-timers hooking up was hardly news.

He held his house door for her, then turned and flipped the addies a centuries-old one-finger salute before he stepped inside himself and closed off their prying eyes. He left the windows undimmed. He would search the web later for any trace of privacy invasion and sue the pants off the ‘bots’ owners if any of them violated his personal space.

McKenna took in his living room like a traveler at a shrine, turning once around to see it all: the simple couch and chairs facing the fireplace, bookshelves lining the walls, paintings and holograms taking up the remaining space. When she saw “Starry Night” she smiled and reached for it, grinning mischievously.

“Go ahead,” Edward told her. “It’s a reproduction.”

“Spoilsport.” She turned once more around, then nodded in apparent satisfaction. “You don’t collect stuff,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“You’re not a hoarder. So many people can’t part with things they care about, so their houses become warehouses.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Been there, done that. About a hundred years ago I gave it all away and started over. Now I use the breadbox rule: If anything the size of a breadbox or larger comes into the house, something of equal size has to go.”

She laughed. “I’m bigger than a breadbox. What do you intend to throw out?”

What did she mean by that? Was she hinting that she’d move in with him? He’d never met someone this forward, at least not that he could remember. “How about my equilibrium?” he answered. “It’s halfway out the door anyway.”

She looked at him with a sideways tilt to her head, then smiled and went over to the fireplace mantel. “Ah, family pho—What?” She picked up a framed flat print of Edward and his first wife—Sally? Sara?—and their teenage daughter, Diane. He’d hung onto it as a memento of his distant past, although he hadn’t seen either of them in nearly a century.

“Where did you get this?” McKenna demanded. “More to the point, how did you get this so quickly? Or have you been stalking me?”

He struggled to understand her meaning. Stalking her? He’d just met her this afternoon. Then he realized what she had to be getting at. “Sally?” he asked.

Now it was her turn to look confused. “What?”

“By your reaction, you must be in that picture. That would make you Sally. Or... Diane.”

“Diane McKenna Templeton.” She squinted at the photo, then looked up at Edward. “Oh my god. You’re my father.”

They looked at one another for a few seconds. “Well,” said Edward, “this certainly is awkward.”

They went into the kitchen, where Edward made tea and put out a plate of cookies. He struggled to remember anything about Diane—McKenna—but time had worn away all but the most generic memories. They had drifted apart when he was in his one-twenties or so, and despite his occasional intention to look her up someday, he had never gotten around to doing it. Out of sight, out of mind, quite literally.

They caught up on each other’s history now, but it was like listening to a co-worker describe her life. He felt no connection, other than the normal curiosity about someone he was interested in as a person.

Nor, apparently, did she. “It’s like a book I read a long time ago,” she admitted. “I don’t even remember how it went anymore.”

They shared a wry grin. “Now what?” she asked.

“Well, I’d suggest we not go to bed together,” he replied.

She nodded, then tilted her head sideways, obviously puzzled by a new thought. “Why not?”

“Er... because it’s incest?”

“And why is that bad?” Before he could answer, she said, “The incest taboo exists because genetic reinforcement of recessive traits is generally a bad thing, and also to prevent parents from exploiting their children. We’re not talking about having babies together, and we’re both old enough to be our own parents. Hell, we’re old enough to be our own grandparents. Why should we care about the incest taboo?”

“Because.”

She laughed, and he said, “Okay, that was an instinctive Dad response, wasn’t it? Let’s try again. Because it’s instilled pretty deeply in my psyche that it’s wrong. I’m feeling uncomfortable just talking about it, to be honest.”

“I’m not. And you’re a good kisser,” she said. “You didn’t put your tongue anywhere near my tonsils, the way so many guys do.”

He put his hands to his ears. “La, la, la.”

She took a cookie from the plate and ate it slowly, lasciviously, leaving crumbs on her lips. Edward wanted to look away, wanted to tell her to stop, wanted... hell, he wanted her. He wanted her to be someone, anyone, other than his daughter, but his body knew what his brain was only now admitting.

“You’re incorrigible,” he said.

“That’s possible, I suppose. But I could be right, too.”

She could. One of Edward’s clear early memories was of the turmoil he’d felt when he realized that he no longer believed in God. He’d had to rethink practically everything that went with the assumption of a higher power. Had to decide on his own moral principles, rather than those imposed on him from some distant authority. He’d thought he’d covered all his bases long ago, but obviously not.

“Let’s sleep on it,” he said. “Separately. We need time to think.”

“Can I at least stay the night here?” she asked.

“If you promise not to sneak into my bedroom in the middle of the night.”

She laughed. “If I come to your bedroom, I won’t be sneaking.” She held up her hands to forestall his reaction. “Okay, okay, I promise.”

They sent for her things from the hotel, and he gave her the tour of the rest of the house while they waited for the courier to arrive. When it did, there were at least a dozen addies circling around the air taxi. The driver looked at Edward when he came out to pick up the bags and said, “I don’t know what you’ve got in there, but if it’s contra, I’m guessin’ you’re in some deep squank.”

Edward looked at the addies. They knew. “Must be a case of mistaken identity,” he told the driver. “They’ll go away when they figure it out.” He slipped him an extra fifty with his tip and added quietly, “But if you could have a little trouble on takeoff, that would be okay with me.”

The courier’s spiral liftoff scattered the adbots like leaves, but it did no real damage. Back inside the house, Edward found McKenna kneeling on the couch, looking over its back out the window while the addies regrouped and clustered around to look back at her. They were undoubtedly getting a cleavage shot. He was glad they couldn’t see her from his perspective, with her pants stretched tight around the curve of her butt.

“We’re apparently news now,” he said, looking away. He went to the side of the window and polarized it to block the addies’ view inward. He and McKenna could still see out, and they watched the addies swoop for different windows. “Somebody must have run an ID on us from the video of us kissing in front of the Exploratorium and figured out the family connection,” Edward said. “Getting kicked out for sexual advances in public was probably enough to qualify us as deviants, so now they can invade our privacy all they want so long as they don’t trespass. Do you want to deal with all that?”

She looked at him. “Will what we do change anything they do?”

“Only for the worse.”

“You mean like blanking the window?”

She had a point. He said, “You think we should open it up again and just sit in the living room reading books all night?”

She shook her head. “Have you seen some of the programs on the net lately? If we so much as look at one another, that would be the top download for the next three weeks.”

“So we leave the window closed.”

“And fuel speculation.”

That seemed like the lesser of two evils, so they blanked the windows throughout the house. That didn’t discourage the addies. They would hang out until there was no chance of anything newsworthy happening.

Edward and McKenna settled into the living room and made plans. “Come watch the redwood removal with me tomorrow,” she said. “That’ll completely outweigh our little drama.”

“What if I carry a ‘Save the Trees’ sign?”

She considered it. “That would probably divert the father-daughter incest thing into a father-daughter ideological thing.”

“Thus killing two birds with one stone. Good.” He took his pod from his pocket and ordered a sign to be delivered by morning. While he was at it he sent an environmental alert to Sierra First.

She watched him with a bemused expression. “You’re really going to protest my job site?”

“If you’re really going to cut down ten redwoods, I am.”

“Not me personally.”

“Then I’m not protesting you personally. But I’ll be there with a sign.”

“You’re not going to scare me away that easily,” she said.

“It’s not you I want to scare away,” he replied. “It’s the logging company.”

They stared at each other, each waiting for the other to blink. After half a minute, Edward said, “I bet you were a problem child.”

“And I’ll bet you were a domineering father.”

“You want to call your mother and find out?”

“Like she’d remember any better than we do.”

They left it at that. When it came time for bed, Edward showed her to the guest room. He thought about propping a chair in front of his own door in case she got ideas in the night, but decided that would be a violation of trust. And she stayed in her own room all night, so far as he knew. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, and he stayed awake most of the night trying to decide how he felt about that.

Cutting trees down was a misnomer, it turned out. The sky-crane slid into place overhead, lowered cables that attached to a couple of dozen branches in the top two-thirds of the redwood, then a truck at the base sliced the trunk with a particle beam and the entire tree lifted upward, shedding bugs and bark and rotted heartwood from its hollow center like rain as it accelerated into the sky. The whole procedure was eerily silent, just as the entire redwood grove had been since they got there.

Edward felt ridiculous with his sign. It was a meter across with “Save the Trees” in bold black letters, but against the immensity of the forest it might as well have been a postage stamp stuck to his forehead. Besides, the tree was so hollowed out in the middle, it was clearly not being cut for its timber. The mediabots gave his sign a cursory scan, then focused on his face as he watched the tree rise.

They weren’t displaying ads now. They weren’t asking questions, either. You knew you were news when they shut up and turned off their projectors and concentrated on getting unobstructed shots of you in your surroundings. Those surroundings included maybe twenty protesters and twice as many foresters, agrav techs, and merely curious bystanders.

McKenna stood next to him, defiantly scowling at the ‘bots and at his sign, while just as defiantly holding his free hand in hers. A particularly large chunk of bark fluttered down right toward them and Edward shielded her with his sign, only to have the bark bounce off and clip him on the side of the head.

“Ow,” he said, and she turned to examine his wound.

“You’re bleeding,” she announced after a few seconds.

“Oh, great.” He fished in his pockets for something to stanch the flow, but she beat him to it with a napkin from her own pocket. As she dabbed at him, he realized most of the mediabots were focusing on them rather than the tree receding into the sky. Wonderful. At least she wasn’t kissing him.

She must have been reading his mind, because he had barely had the thought before she stood on tiptoe and smooched him noisily on the temple. “There, that’ll make it better,” she said.

“McKenna,” he said sternly. “This is—”

“They don’t know we know,” she whispered into his ear. “Let’s have some fun with this.”

“Let’s not.”

But she put her arm around him and leaned her head against his chest as she tilted her face upward to watch the tree clear the tops of its neighbors and drift off to the east.

He lowered his sign. The tree was rotten and full of bugs. It was a danger to the other trees, as undoubtedly were the other nine scheduled to be cut.

“I’m sorry about the protest,” he said. “I was wrong.”

She turned her head sideways so she could look into his eyes. “Kiss and make up?” she asked.

Her impish grin was infectious. He was pretty sure he loved this woman, loved her like he hadn’t loved anyone in years. She’d been a total stranger a day ago, but now she was a delight wrapped in a conundrum inside a taboo. She pursed her lips, waiting for him to decide.

The forest was silent. So were the people all around them. So were the mediabots.

“I’d love to,” he said, and he bent down to meet her kiss.

Copyright © 2010 Jerry Oltion