Are You There and Other Stories (27 page)

When I came to on the floor, the eye was staring at me, trailing a spaghetti string of optic nerve. My left orbit throbbed like mad but had already filled in with a damp membrane that signaled the beginning of regeneration.

I brought my hand down flat on the severed eye. I’d miney-moed wisely. Threaded into the goo was an organic transponder with, I’d bet, about a ten year life span. Laird must have been seeding these things into my eye re-gens for decades. That bastard.

I used the little scissors from one of the first-aid kits to cut an oval of black fabric from my shirt. A fastidious traveler had left a partial roll of dental floss on the shelf over the sink. I poked holes on two sides of the patch and used a length of the floss to hold the patch in place.

When I emerged from the lavatory Alice stared at the eye patch and said, “I don’t like it here.”

The light was stark. Delilah looked like a wet corpse on the bench. Rain blew against the shelter’s walls. I checked Delilah’s pulse again and found it steady. I’m hell on pulse-checking, I thought, remembering the not-dead man behind the Bedford Falls Hotel. Delilah’s eyes didn’t flutter, and a craven part of me was grateful for that. I touched her damp cheek then turned to Alice.

“Is my Mom okay?” she said.

“Yeah. You want to come with me?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” I said.

The kid looked relieved, and I recognized her for what she was: an anchoring strand in the web of human attachments I’d recklessly begun to spin from my guts. Some people never learn, I guess.

*

Daytime dialed up hot after the brief and violent night. Steam rose off everything, even our clothes. An exploded curbside terminal burned merrily on a Waukegan street corner, the flames nearly invisible in the glare of the false sun. Broken glass glittered in the street, trash hustled around in hot, little whirlwinds. The air had thickened, and I almost had to swallow every breath like thin soup. Alice had taken hold of my hand again and was squeezing it hard. A couple of times during the long walk from the Oxygen Forest my stomach had moved in queasy undulations. Which could have been guilt, or—much worse—an indication George had begun to tamper with the County’s gravity field.

“Here,” Alice said, tugging me toward the double doors of a chalk-white and very official-looking building, like maybe the place where Mickey Mouse planned all the parades and stuff. On our way to the stairs I drew some unfriendly looks from people who appeared wrung out and pissed off. One guy did more than look. He seized my arm and spun me around to face him. “You bastard,” he said. Bared teeth, blood crusted on flared nostril. I braced myself for a blow I probably deserved. But a couple of other men pulled him off, and Alice tugged urgently at my hand. I didn’t bother telling her not to be scared.

“This one,” she said, once we’d attained the second floor, and she pushed her finger against a door marked by a simple plaque: “Mayor.”

I knocked.

The old man who answered was short and stooped, what little hair remaining on his pate was wispy as cobwebs. The wrinkly face brightened slightly at the sight of Alice. He kissed her cheek then rubbed her hair with a palsied hand. She put up with it.

When he turned his attention to me all he said was, “You’re Herrick.” And his eyes were like a pair of peeled grapes staring moistly from nests of papyrus skin. I didn’t hold my breath for a kiss.

“And you’re—”

“Ben Roos. Alice’s father.”

“Gene father,” Alice said.

Roos scowled at her. “Where’s Delilah?”

Alice looked at me. Delilah had called Roos before we departed Bedford Falls. She had assured him that I could put things right if given a chance.

“We had to split up,” I said.

He grunted. “You can fix this mess?”

“Possibly.”

He grunted again, eloquently, and turned his back. We followed him into the office. He pointed at the Core Access Interface, which looked a little like an old-fashioned barber chair with an even older-fashioned hair dryer attachment. “There you go,” Roos said. “People could die, Mr. Herrick. I’m hoping when you say ‘possibly’ you’re just being coy.”

“Me, too.”

I sat down and performed a soft interface with the CAI. The old man and Alice and the room and the world slipped away. The superquantum environment read me and produced an analog. George. Mr. George, actually. My seventh grade history teacher was an Ichabod Crane knock-off, only not as handsome. I’d left him in an empty classroom “correcting” student papers with a liar’s red pen, disbursing a stickman army of D’s and F’s to papers deserving of better. This was my unconscious symbolic language for the smidgen of chaos I’d intended to introduce and which, apparently, had morphed into something much more serious.

I looked over George’s shoulder. He was drawing smiley faces on the endlessly replenishing stack of papers. Huh?

“You can’t outfox me with my own toys,” Laird Ulin said, speaking through the mouth of Ichabod George, not looking up from his endless scribble of smilies.

I backed away. The room lacked windows and doors. Laird had isolated my virus and was letting me know as much. I pressed into a corner and found myself folded over to my parent’s bedroom, the way it had looked when I was a thirteen-year-old boy. There was another analog: Me, this time. I was rummaging through my mother’s purse. I came up with Mom’s wallet and started plucking bills out while sneaking looks over my shoulder. Sneaky. Repeat.

I fled from that scene and passed through a complex chain of interconnected vandalisms. My various analog selves set fires, kicked some kid in the balls, tortured insects and small animals, etc. Anyone else seeking problems in the superquantum environment would witness their own versions of various malicious acts—but
my
individual stamp would be on every single one.

“It’s quite out of control,” Laird Ulin said.

I turned. He was sitting behind a free-floating ebony slab the thickness of a wafer, fiddling with cut glass chess pieces.

“I thought George would catch you off guard,” I said.

“You forgot about shadows,” Laird said. “Or gambled one wouldn’t occur.”

“Shit. I gambled.”

Ulin grinned.

A quirk of superquantum technology is the occasional quantum shadow—a future ghost in the machine. Laird must have seen my tampering before I even did it, which gave him time to do a little tampering of his own and stamp it with my personal signature—conferring upon me instant persona non grata status in the County.

I felt a weird combination of relief and resignation.

“So now I’ll come back to surgery and you’ll make things right,” I said.

Laird smiled.

The chessboard turned into a crystal display of complex quantum language: the reality behind the dramatic analogs.

“The errors are self-perpetuating,” Laird said. “I constructed it that way. Couldn’t help myself, Ellis. You made me mad this time.” He waved his hand and the chessboard returned.

“Definitely mad,” I said, picking up a knight. It was slightly tempting. Retreat was my fatal flaw and I knew it. Besides there was nothing I could do about the quantum errors Laird had unleashed. Only he could spare the County. Hell, returning to my cozy, emotionally remote cocoon on the Command Level was practically an act of noble self-sacrifice.

“Maybe we should skip the game for now,” I said.

“Nonsense,” Laird said, taking the knight from my fingers and replacing it in its proper position on the chessboard.

“Shouldn’t you be getting busy?” I nodded toward my delinquent analogs.

“There’s plenty of time,” he said. “All the time in the world. Besides, correcting these errors will be very difficult, and I’m not inclined to do it. The more miserable life is in the County, the less likely you will be to find safe haven. Ever. There will be
no more running away
, Ellis. Now why don’t we relax and have a game while the environment sustains?”

I quoted Ben Roos: “People could die.”

Laird shrugged. He tapped a pawn on the chessboard. “Shall we play?”

“We shall not.”

Laird scowled. I inhaled deeply, withdrew from the interface, and leaned forward in the chair, rubbing my good eye. The patch had slipped a little on the other one, and I adjusted it.

Alice was gone. Ben Roos sat on the small sofa by himself with a cup of tea or something that he didn’t appear inclined to drink.

Two men flanked me. They didn’t look friendly. Something ticked against the window. The ticking increased and subsided, in waves. Rain. Wind. I looked up at the man on my right and said, “Not guilty.” He pulled a frown.

Ben Roos was staring daggers at me from the sofa. He was a pretty good dagger starer, too. Welcome back to the land of the living. Actually, I was glad to be there.
No more running away
.

“Where’s Alice?” I asked.

“She’s gone off,” he said. “And if anything happens to her it will be on your head, like the rest of this mess.”

“I can explain some things,” I said.

Roos snorted. “Save your explanations.” He stood. “I’ll check the uplink. Keep Herrick here until they arrive.”

He went out.

I got up but my flankers crowded me.

“I’ll just be on my way,” I said. “I have uplinks to check, and miles to go before I sleep.”

The slightly older man shook his head. “You’re staying right here until the Command authority comes for you.”

“Hmmm,” I said.

When I started for the door, the younger guy stood in front of me, rather beefishly.

“Have a seat, Mr. Herrick.” He grinned. “What are you supposed to be, anyway, a pirate?”

How does one while away the years before and between stars? I mean, after you’ve read everything and honed your saboteur skills. Study Jeet Kune Do, of course!

I found Mr. Beefy’s carotid artery and invited him to unconsciousness. He looked surprised, then slack, then he fell.

His friend took about as much trouble. I guess they hadn’t been expecting a fight. Good. There were two sets of hooded raingear hanging in the corner, dripping on the carpet. I appropriated the larger set, put it on, and exited by the window. In eighty-eight percent gravity, one story is doable if you’re fussy about landing.

On the sidewalk, I pulled the hood up and kept my head down. A pair of biomechanical men entered the building I’d just exited. I’d have to avoid their type and God only knew what else for a while. Maybe for a long while. But if I could manage to remain at large in the Country, Laird would have no choice but to correct the quantum errors. He wouldn’t want me to get stomped by lightning or torn apart by pissed-off citizens. Would he?

*

On the path beyond the suburbs of Waukegan a small girl’s voice squealed after me.

I turned around and smiled. “Hey, kid.”

“Hi,” Alice said. “I ran away.”

“What a coincidence.”

“Are you going to see my Mom?”

“Yeah.”

“Me, too.”

I thought of Delilah out there, certainly awake by now, perhaps on the path to meet us. I thought of hugs and tears, and the tightening web of relationship. I thought of letting her in through the open door in my heart, which was really an unsutured wound.

The top-heavy oxygen trees tossed wildly in the wind. Dark clouds scudded overhead, dumping rain below a holographic flicker of summer. The great black gash in the sky was visible, and Alice stared upward, her lips puckered tensely.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said.

“I’m not afraid.”

I picked up her little hand. “Me neither, kid,” I said. But I was a liar.

Here’s Your Space

T
he aliens tasted like tofu, kind of bland. At least that’s what Delilah told him; Ernest wasn’t having any. He sat on the ship’s (apparently) severed fin and watched her red and pink mouth. It worked and flexed, a rubbery thing, the lips greasy. Delilah’s mouth had often appeared lovely to Ernest but that was back when it was attached to her face. And anyway the lovely period of their marriage had ended long before the Rift effect began.

Ernest looked away. His vision accordioned then caught up and splintered again. More like playing cards fired between a dealer’s hands, only slow it down and put a woman image on each card. Delilah in rapid flickering vision. A flipbook person.

The last time Ernest had seen anything other than himself as a whole picture he’d been reaching for his bulb of coffee, leaning forward in the pilot’s couch, careful not to sever numerous transdermal linking points. The Rift was a thousand klicks distant, a black fold in space. A Class One star vector advisory recommended avoidance. Ernest had gone far in his profession by ignoring such advisories. He conspired with his ship,
Amelia
, and they eased closer. A thrill traveled through Ernest’s body.
Amelia
, intimately bonded with his psyche and a perfect feminine reflection of his anima, always thrilled him. Especially when they were doing something forbidden, like violating rules of approach. The ship
was
Ernest at such moments, reading his desire, accommodating it, feeding his impulse back with fake but inspired feminine energy; Ernest was fully erect. Then the Rift sucked them in, and he slammed back, bulb rubber-balling off his face, his links to
Amelia
jerked loose. The thing about anomalous Rifts is you can’t trust them for safe distances.

Anyway they crashed. Sort of.

The weirdest crash landing ever. There was no sense of sudden deceleration. Ernest seemed at once to be inside and outside
Amelia
. Bulkheads, screens, gauges, panels all split and tilted like a mad cubist painting. Ernest slapped the engine cut-off while he could still see it. Then everything exploded but not with a bursting concussion. More like an engineer’s drawing, an exploded view depicting the starship
Amelia
and all her contents. Only dice those contents up and sling them in a chaotic sprawl over a vast area. If vast meant anything. Or area. To Ernest only his own body appeared unmolested by the Rift effect. Something to do with his self-absorbed ego perception. Delilah, too, could see herself as a whole person. Everything else, for both of them, was chaos. And it was all Ernest’s fault, of course. Wasn’t everything?

*

Well it’s not
my
fault,” Delilah’s nose said.

Ernest had been searching for the pilot’s couch. A fruitless hunt of four days, so far, according to his implanted chronometer. He was starving, though not starving enough to eat the aliens, the Tofudians, as Delilah had dubbed them.

“I was thinking it was
both
our faults,” he said.

Delilah’s left nostril twitched. “You would think that.”

He hadn’t found the couch but he kept encountering pieces of his wife, and all of them could talk.

“I’m just trying to be fair,” Ernest said.

“That’s typical. Why is it ‘fair’ for me to take half the blame for an accident you are solely responsible for?”

“I guess it all depends on how you interpret things.”

“Yes,” Delilah’s nose replied. “I interpret things honestly and you interpret them according to your pathological need to be
right
all the time.”

“It’s not my fault if I happen to be right more often than not.”

Delilah’s nose snorted. “You crashed us.”

“You have no curiosity.”

“You’re
too
damn curious. You and your girlfriend. By the way, would it kill you to let me interface with
Amelia?
”

“I drive the ship.”

“Yes I know.”

“And it was my damn curiosity that won me the Vega Award,” he pointed out.

“Funny. I thought the Vega was presented to both of us.”

“It’s a team award,” Ernest said.

“Meaning?”

“Nothing. It’s
our
Vega, okay? And our Vega is why we got offered the Tau Boo vector, and Tau Boo yielded the hive minders, and if
we
can demonstrate their etheric mindchain we will get any vector we want. So please for God’s sake stop eating them.”

“Mind is a big word for Tofudians. They’re too rudimentary to think. But I do wish they tasted better.”

“Dee! I need at least ten to demonstrate their hive mind.”

“I’d stop if I could find the comestibles. But I can’t, and I don’t intend to starve. You can if you want to.”

“How many have you eaten?”

“Twenty or so.”

“Jesus!”

“They’re not very filling. But you know, Ernest? They’re making me feel funny.”

“Funny how?”

“Like I’m spread out, but I’m not talking about the Rift effect. I’m picking up on all the other Tofudians. I kind of know where they are and what they’re seeing.”

“Really? That’s interesting. Maybe you could use them to find the couch. Or hadn’t you thought of that? But I still want you to stop eating them.”

Delilah’s nose sniffed. “It’s nice to know what you want, isn’t it?”

*

Ernest walked away. It was hard to conduct a serious conversation with a disconnected nose. Of course he knew the nose wasn’t really disconnected, that Delilah was a whole person. It was some kind of dimensional distortion, an intersection of different space-time templates, tectonic realities crossing each other, grinding out a new view of
Amelia
and her contents.

So he walked away, but walking wasn’t easy, either. Imagine ten thousand mirrors shattered and pulverized, the glinty splinters and powder (Rift captured starlight?) cast over a landscape of clear syrup, the integument that bound the exploded view of
Amelia
. Every step Ernest took he sank into the integument. Strewn around were the various hunks and pieces of the ship and Delilah, some of them floating in the air (recycling hiss indicating it was
Ameila
’s oxygen they were still breathing), some of them imbedded in the glinty syrup.

*

Okay, Ernest loved
Amelia
.

He craved the pilot’s couch and not just because it might save them. Patched in, Ernest sampled
Amelia
’s deepest recesses, where her data flowed sweetly and together they drove through space, a perfect fit. The more Ernest interfaced with the ship the more
Amelia
accommodated his psyche and became a reflection of his mind, his conscious and unconscious. She understood him because she
was
him, a reflection of him, with a feminine sensibility built in. It was the only way to drive a starship, by making it an extension and compliment to the complexity of a human mind. The intimacy factor was a side benefit, one not appreciated by Ernest’s wife.

And the pilot’s couch really might save them. Ernest reasoned that if he and Delilah were existing in concurrent cross-dimensional space then Amelia probably was, too. If Delilah’s mouth could chew up a Tofudian in one “place” and process it through her bowels in some other “place,” then perhaps a command issued through
Amelia
’s couch would successfully activate her engine nacelles and boost them out of the Rift. Where, one hoped,
Amelia
and her contents would resume their contiguous existence. To be on the safe side of that equation he would make sure Dee was securely anchored to an interior hunk of the ship before he powered up. That is if she wasn’t too busy eating his next Vega Award.

*

But after four days he’d all but given up. Jigsaw puzzle pieces of
Amelia
were everywhere, but—then he saw it! Way off in the glinty junk-strewn distance (if distance meant anything). He quickened his slogging pace, until Delilah stopped him and he sank to his knees.

Not her eyes or the back of her head or even her elbow or small intestine. Ernest was down on his knees addressing an old but rarely seen friend: Delilah’s vulva. The more time Ernest had spent wrapped in intimate communication with
Amelia
the more ignored Delilah had felt. When he took his conversation and attention away she responded by taking from him something
he
needed. Since Delilah started withholding sex Ernest found he had even less to say to her. And it wasn’t fair! Starship teams were supposed to be ship
mates
in a literal sense; that was the whole point, the way of enduring these long voyages. It was Delilah who was cheating! All he had wanted was a little breathing space. He
told
her that.

*

“What’s your hurry,” Dee’s vulva said.

“I think I see the couch.”

“Don’t worry about the couch. Why don’t you rest?”

“Rest!”

“Ernest, I feel something.”

“What?”

“It’s your breath, I think.”

Ernest swallowed. Delilah’s vulva had always exerted a cobra-like fascination. Hypnotize the prey then . . . strike! Only this cobra hadn’t struck in a long while.

He looked up, hunger sharpening his senses. That
was
the pilot’s couch over there. And some kind of movement. Ernest began to struggle back to his feet.

“Remember when you used to tease me?” Delilah said.

“Tease you?”

“Your cheek on my thigh and your warm breath . . .”

“Oh, yes.” He let himself sink back.

“Sometimes you didn’t shave, and your cheek was all whiskery. Those two sensations, the breath and your rough cheek. It really drove me crazy.”

His face subsided into starglint, inches from Delilah’s vulva, which presented itself complete with copper furred mons veneris. The newly moistened eye of the cobra glistened. Ernest grinned and reached out.

“I see you still like a good tease,” he said and he moved a little closer.

“I do indeed,” she replied, and her tone had shifted to hard and gleeful.

He stopped. “What’s wrong?”

“Now I know why you spent so much time with
Amelia
.”

Ernest put it together and tried to stand up, forgetting his weakness. A string of Tofudians tracked by on little ant legs. They were everywhere. He needed a piece of the ship, preferably an interior piece, to anchor himself. But there were none within slogging distance.

“Here’s your damn breathing space,” Delilah said.

There occurred a great sucking
whoosh
. Ernest tumbled like a grain in the wake of a speedboat. Then he had his space. But Delilah and
Amelia
took the oxygen with them.