"Never do. I've got temporary total recall. Lasts about an hour. When I leave you I'll go back to the hotel and get it on tape before it fades."
"I see. Tell you what, I'll swap your temporary for permanent. No charge. On the house."
"You can do that?"
"Sure, if you want to. No sweat. I've got a beauty from an idiot savant. You know the type: I.Q. nowhere but a memory down to the finest minutiae. He traded in his recall."
"For intelligence?"
"No. You won't believe this. Instruments for a one-man band, come in for the Grand Tour. Hold the fort, Nan."
Most of us have seen a hockshop at one time or other, from the outside and even inside. I did a full feature on pawnshops for Rigadoon once. Their slogan is: If it isn't alive and you can get it through the door, you can hock it. The only word for them is clutter. They display everything from A-alembics to Z-zithers, but this Black Hole pawn-cum-psychshop . . . !
It was an endless black cavern piled with physical As to Zs and covered in a blizzard of New Year's Eve confetti and streamers. They weren't bits of colored paper, they were psychic moieties that had been pawned or sold.
They were particles of living souls charged with energies that try to make themselves known to us through our clumsy conscious senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, kinetics. This timeless Libido Exchange was a kaleidoscope of Man's rejections and desires, discontents and remedies.
Sexual images predominated: penis, vulva, buttocks, breasts—large, small, pointed, blunt—and scores of erogenous zones. Sexual acts: hetero, homo, bestial, nymphomania, satyriasis, and all the erotic postures of desire, passion, lust, love, and pleasure.
Strength and beauty: muscle, stature, form, grace, skin, hair, eyes, lips, color. Power: over men, over women, over events, over selves. Success: in love, life, career, leisure. Brilliance: intellectual, political, artistic, social. Status. Celebrity. Popularity. Perpetuity.
And a chaos of fears, fixations, hatreds, beliefs, superstitions, salvations, manias, plus fragments from the far future and dim past which had no meaning for me. All this I saw, felt, tasted, and touched. I was flayed by this shrapnel from the battle between Man's realities and yearnings. I was shattered.
Adam's voice came. "Spooky, isn't it?"
I could make him out through the dark turmoil; his crimson was curiously luminescent. All I could do was croak.
"You all right, Alf?"
I didn't respond. I couldn't. Something farther down the way had caught my attention, held it. Without thought or will I continued to move in that direction.
"This isn't real space, as you know it," said Adam. "We're protected by several layers of tricks. But even so, you are headed in the direction of the singularity. Go too far and it becomes dangerous. Go farther, and there's no turning back."
"Uh-huh," I said, and I kept going.
"You're still well within the safety margin, of course, or I'd have stopped you. In fact, you're only nearing the stripping field where I remove those traits or talents customers wish to dispose of. The adding field is off to the left—there's a kind of symmetry involved in the way I engineered it. That's where I install those things they're trading up to—or down to. We've got to bear a little to the left now to pass safely between them. Just follow the illuminated claw marks. Wouldn't want to be stripped indiscriminately. Not by a field, anyway."
I plodded on.
"The fields also grow stronger the farther you go," he continued. "I don't really work with them much beyond this point—"
I halted. I froze. I made some sort of noise in my throat.
They hung there, as I had detected them subliminally from much farther back: human forms, bodies suspended as if from meat hooks, swaying, turning, limp and lifeless, as in some steady breeze. There were seven of them.
"What," I croaked, "are they?"
"Seven guys," he said, "who traded everything they had."
"How? Why?"
"In each case, the man gained access here while I was out of the room. He wandered into the stripping field—you saw how easy it was to do—and it took away everything he'd added to himself since birth. What you see are the remains, breathing—albeit slowly—and with very faint heartbeats. The field's time-effects preserve them. As Shelley said, 'Nothing beside remains.'"
"When did it happen?"
"The first one, Lars, lived back when the Etruscans were in charge around here. Marcus came a few centuries later. Erik was a Germanic mercenary. And we've a Vandal and a Goth and a thirteenth-century Norman Crusader," he said, gesturing. "The last guy, Pietro, was sixteenth century. Claimed to be a painter."
"Why do you think they did it?"
He shrugged.
"Maybe simple curiosity. I can understand curiosity. More likely, they wanted more than they thought they could afford and figured they might find a way to rip me off. You want that memory job now?"
The nearest body was turning in that eerie breeze. Its profile began to come into view.
I screamed. I turned. I began to run.
"Alf! What's the matter?"
His hand fell upon my shoulder, steering me safely between the fields. His question rang in my head. But already I was blotting out—the horror.
"What is it, man?"
"It— It startled me. It was like— I don't know."
"Uh-huh. It's quite an experience the first time around. You'll get used to it."
"I'm not sure. I'm so damned empathic."
"That's the price the artist has to pay."
"And this is the real Black Hole?"
"Oh, you've been in it since the front door. The foyer and reception are decorated to put people at ease. This is the undisguised real thing."
"It's more of a Hellhole."
There was a dazzle of light as the door to reception opened and closed. Glory's voice came. "Client, Dammy."
"Great, Nan. Alf can watch us in action. Where from and when?"
"A college boy from the U.S. Early nineteenth century."
"What's his problem?"
"Something about asthma."
"I'm no M.D., but let's see what we can do."
The client was seated but stood up politely when we entered the reception room: a skinny college boy in his late teens, dark, pale skin, big head, melancholy eyes, dressed in the post-Federal style.
"How do, sir," Maser said pleasantly. "Nice of you to wish here. We're all on a first name basis. This is Nan, my assistant; Alf, my associate. I'm Adam. You?"
"They call me Gaffy in college," the boy said. His speech was unusual and quite charming; Southern spoken with a slight English accent.
"And you want to pawn or buy what?"
"I want to exchange my asthmatic wheeze for something endurable."
"Ah, you have rales, eh? What makes them unendurable, Gaffy? Are they too loud, too prolonged, painful, what?"
"They speak to me in a language I can't understand."
Adam's jet eyes widened. "Now that's a new one on me. Are you sure it's a language?"
"No, but it does sound like words in sentences."
"Most interesting, Gaffy. Permit me to listen." Without waiting for approval, Adam bent and put an ear to the boy's chest. "Deep breath, please, and let it out slowly."
Gaffy obliged. Maser listened intently, then straightened, smiling. "You're quite right, my dear boy. It is a language, early-eleventh-century Persian." He turned to me. "There's no end to fantastic phenomena, Alf. Our client is wheezing passages from the Shah Namah, the epic fantasy by the great poet, Firdausi. It was the source for Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights."
I stared. Gaffy stared.
"Now I'm not a physician, so I can't remove the wheeze," Adam continued briskly, "and I refuse to exchange it. It's a treasure you'll appreciate and thank me for some day. What I will do is sell you a knowledge of Persian so you can understand what you're hearing. Self-entertainment, as it were. Inside, please."