Causality

Written for the Machine Of Death anthology (for which it was not selected):
Write a story set in a world where people can undergo a cheap and easy blood test to find out how they are going to die.

She would die of cancer, just like her mother and mother's mother before her, it was certain.

When she was younger she had smoked anyway, because if cancer was inevitable then why not smoke, but she had never really taken to the habit and when it had become socially awkward she had given up. Nevertheless, cancer, sure and certain, and never any more details than just that one word no matter how many times she checked. Just Cancer, capitalised like a proper noun, spat out hard and definite, black and white, sure and certain. Cancer.

At forty she had quit the business and gone back to her original name, moved back to London and bought a house with the last of her money, let a room to her brother and taken a part time job in a coffee shop.

She devoted one room only to mementos, props, costumes, and framed posters, the name she no longer used spelled out in bold letters against garish painted backgrounds of leering monsters and swooping spaceships and occasionally herself, sometimes in the arms of a chisel jawed hero, always scantily clad and bustier ... even bustier, than in real life. Testaments to a career on the bottom rung of entertainment, schlock bawdy gaudy gory fun for drive-ins and for the popcorn strewn back rows of two-for-one matinée double bills, b-movies. Her brother did not approve.

Her movie name had been Melinda Quigly, these days she called herself Linda Hanley. Her brother's name was Sebastian. Sebastian was a Geography teacher by day but by night was writing a book.

Sebastian took the back bedroom but his stuff spread out from there like a bad rash, novels he never finished reading collected dust on their broken spines on the kitchen table, piles upon piles of unmarked marking piled up on the living room floor, lumps of damp clothing rotted in the washing machine. Linda put up with it because she did not want to live alone but could not face living with a stranger, and because he was writing a book and she still, after all those years of hack directors and coke addict actors and lecherous money-grubbing producers, still believed in the magic of being a creative artist, and she put up with it because she was not a whole lot better herself.

Sebastian's book was a self help book. It was titled 'How Not To Be A Twat.'

They tried again at the machine, Linda and Sebastian, tried again because Linda longed for more details than just 'Cancer,' and because Sebastian's answer was too interesting not to hope for more details. Sebastian's answer was 'gored by a rhino.'

You could not imagine a man less likely to die from being gored by a rhino than Sebastian, he never even went to the zoo ... well, for obvious reasons, but even if there had been no rhinos in his death he would probably never have gone to the zoo.

The answer for Linda was the same as ever, 'Cancer.' She exhaled and screwed the piece of paper up and threw it away. Sebastian peered at his curiously, raised his eyebrows and said 'oh.'

He handed the piece of paper to Linda. Instead of 'gored by a rhino' it said, simply, unemphatically, 'Suicide.'

'Suicide!' shouted Sebastian's girlfriend, her voice rising well over the sound of the television in Linda's bedroom. Linda sat cross legged on the bed and tried to work out what had changed but could only ever find one answer, that she had come home. Sebastian's girlfriend was called ... no, hang it, Linda did not care what she was called and only ever thought of her as Sebastian's girlfriend, a role that the woman in question probably considered the least of her many roles in life. She had a face as hard and sharp and pale as coral, and Linda had already made it her mission to provide Sebastian with the things his girlfriend denied him, including chocolate biscuits and wine on week-nights.

Even if she had not mentioned it yet, it was certain that Sebastian's girlfriend had already reached the same conclusion, that the only thing which had changed in Sebastian's life was that he was now living with Linda.

'Do you feel suicidal?' demanded the girlfriend. Sebastian's answer could not be heard above How Clean Is Your House but Linda knew it anyway because she had already asked the same question. Sebastian did not feel suicidal, in fact Sebastian was quite happy at the moment - or at least as happy as Sebastian ever got.

Somewhere, in everything that had happened since he had last been told he would be gored to death by a rhino, there was a reason, causality. Their mother's death had been appallingly specific, 'complications following surgery for bowel cancer.' She had put the surgery off for as long as possible, until it was the only chance she had, and it was probably that delay that had caused a relatively routine operation to kill her. Causality. Perhaps if she had bravely opted for surgery earlier she would have survived to go back under the knife again when she was elderly and infirm and then not come through that time, but who would dare do that?

Where was the causality? We are all born under a death sentence. Sebastian would not die of 'suicide,' he would die of a drug overdose, or a fall from a great height, or (God!) slitting his wrists. Linda would not die of cancer, she would die because her heart gave up beating, she would die because she was born, she would die of cancer because she was born with genetics prone to the disease, she would die of cancer only because she would survive long enough for it to claim her, she might even die of cancer because she used to smoke. Somewhere along the causal chain the machine chose to stick its stake in the ground and say 'here, here is the reason,' and where it chose, or why, remained a mystery.

Why had Sebastian's reason changed?

Linda, Melinda Quigly then, had seen a thousand deaths faked for the camera, lain prone for hours while diligent effects men carefully arranged gruesome animated ends for her characters, rigging squibs and bloodbags to her often naked or part naked body. The corn syrup and offal never bothered her, only the deaths that could be likened to being gored by a rhino made her squeamish. She nearly always died in films, she never had the virginal good looks to get her through to the final reel of a horror movie. It was better to die, the job was shorter and you could guarantee at least one good scene, although the effects work was sometimes a pain.

When she was young, barely out of college, Linda had been working with a small experimental theatre group in a piece that required her to appear naked in front of an audience every evening. To her surprise the nudity had not bothered her, it was after all justified by the sheer awful ponderously earnest pretentiousness of the play. She was approached by a young and very talented film director bearing a script that cleverly used the standard horror trope of werewolves as an allegory for a troubled young woman's sexual awakenings. The script required nudity on the part of the female lead which she did not mind because it was a good script, and in the end a good film. She garnered some critical acclaim and offers came in from Hollywood. The scripts were not quite as good but the offers were much better, and the rest, as they say, was history. Her career had not gone the way she had expected it to but she had no regrets, on that she was adamant, she had grown to love b-movies. She could imagine worthier lives, critically lauded but financially destitute on the stage, but she could not imagine one that would have been more fun.

When she looked back Linda could see the chain of causality clearly, it wound across two continents and around hundreds of different people without seeming to require a great deal of intervention from her part. She had made a few tricky decisions, ones that could have gone either way, but the vast majority of choices she had made had been the obvious ones to make. Her chances had come and she had taken them - perhaps she could have held out for better things but it would have seemed wrong to turn down work. You have to seize your opportunities when you can and ride them where they take you.

Yet ...

Yet somewhere along the line she had made some move that had brought her back here and damned her brother to killing himself and she had to somehow undo that.

'We're going to change things,' she told him over dinner once his girlfriend had gone home, gone home because she never stayed the night on a week-night, 'we're going to change things one by one until you no longer kill yourself.'

'What if,' said Sebastian pushing his glasses back up the ridge of his nose, 'you won't make me kill myself, but rather prevent me from being gored by a rhino. Perhaps I will live longer now.'

'That's ... that's not the point,' she said, 'it can't be good to kill yourself, by definition.'

'Oh I don't know, at least it demonstrates a degree of choice that rhinos never allowed for.'

'But you should never even want to make that choice.'

'You could cripple me,' said Sebastian, 'that would pretty much rule out suicide as an option.'

Linda stared at her brother as he meticulously peeled every last bit of the pith from a satsuma before eating it segment by segment. She felt a mixture of disgust and confusion at his attitude. Who could be so blasé about the knowledge that they would one day take their own life?

'What?' asked Sebastian, noticing he was being stared at, 'what was it? Was I being a twat? I was wasn't I? Tell me exactly in what way I was being a twat.' He picked up his notebook and clicked a biro open expectantly.

Linda slid back her chair and left.

The following weeks she did what she could to change her brother's life for the better. She started by looking after Sebastian more, tidying up his stuff after him, doing his laundry, putting more effort in to cooking him dinner in the evening. At the end of the week, to her great relief, the card still said 'Suicide,' and she gave that up. She tried persuading Sebastian out more, took him with her for a walk in town where he complained endlessly that it was too cold, and then persuaded one of her male friends to take him to the pub after which he did not get out of bed the entire following day. The card did not change. She made herself scarce, finding excuses to go out evenings leaving Sebastian some time alone. It was tiring and expensive and it did not work. She tried to cut down on the chocolate biscuits and the week-night wine but it was hard because she enjoyed them herself. She even took down all her beloved mementos of her time as a B-movie actress, all her posters and costumes, and turned the room into a study for Sebastian to work in if he wanted to. He did not, and it made no difference anyway.

'Maybe,' she said over a glass of wine one Saturday night, 'you should get a dog.'

'No,' said Sebastian, 'I hate animals,' and then, half to himself, 'is that something a twat would say?' He made a note in his notebook.

'Oh stop that,' said Sebastian's girlfriend, all but swiping the book out of his hand.

'Maybe you just shouldn't live with me,' said Linda.

'Well you're not living with me,' said the girlfriend.

'Hell no,' said Sebastian.

Everybody froze. The girlfriend's expression, never all that warm, frosted over and there was an audible crack as her teeth ground together. Linda picked up her wineglass and the bottle and glided wordlessly out of the room, the door clicking shut behind her just as the argument started.

The following day she took the now single Sebastian to have his death read again. 'Gored to death,' it said, 'by a herd of rhinos.'

'Why a herd now?' said Linda.

'Who knows,' said Sebastian, screwing up the piece of paper and throwing it in the bin, 'I suppose we will see.'

Linda checked her own. It was still Cancer.

Causality. Apparently there was a man in France who just had that one word, 'Causality.' One thing would happen that would lead to another that would lead to his death. A chain of events was already in motion, an arcane clockwork machine slowly winding down, things moving into place, events triggering events, slowly ticking away even as this one Frenchman slept, and one day it would kill him and even that, that event, would just be the trigger for other events that would go on to kill other people. One thing results in another. Everything we do leaves the world in some way affected. Causality.

He had been asked, the Frenchman, what he thought it meant. He had shrugged and said 'we will see.'