Impossible!.—or not really impossible, he thought, looking across the field to where Wan’s lander had been ten days earlier and was no more. And when he took time to race over to the apartment he was not really surprised by what he found. Their bank account was gone. Dolly’s clothes were gone, the hand puppets were gone, and most gone of all was Dolly herself.
I was not thinking at all of Audee Walthers at that time. If I had been, I would surely have wept for him-or for myself. I would have thought that it was at least a good excuse for weeping. The tragedy of the dear, sweet lover gone away was one I knew well, my own lost love having locked herself inside a black hole years and years before.
But the truth is I never gave him a thought. I was concerned with self affairs. What occupied me most notably were the stabbings in my gut, but also I spent a lot of time thinking about the nastiness of terrorists threatening me and everything around me.
Of course, that was not the only nastiness around. I thought about my worn-out intestines because they forced me to. But meanwhile my store-bought arteries were slowly hardening, and every day six thousand cells were dying in my irreplaceable brain; and meanwhile stars slowed in their flight and the universe dragged itself toward its ultimate entropic death, and meanwhile-Meanwhile everything, if you stopped to think of it, was skidding downhill. And I never gave any of it a thought.
But that’s the way we do it, isn’t it? We keep going because we have schooled ourselves not to think of any of those “meanwhiles”-until, like my gut, they force themselves on us.
3 Senseless Violence
A bomb in Kyoto that incinerated a thousand thousand-year-old carved wooden Buddhas, a crewless ship that homed on the Gateway asteroid and released a cloud of anthrax spores when it was opened, a shooting in Los Angeles, and plutonium dust in the Staines reservoir for London- those were the things that were forcing themselves on all of us. Terrorism. Acts of senseless violence. “There’s a queerness in the world,” said I to my dear wife, Essie. “Individuals act sober and sensible, but in groups they are brawling adolescents-such childishness people exhibit when they form groups!”
“Yes,” said Essie, nodding, “that is true, but tell me, Robin. How is your gut?”
“As well as can be expected,” I said lightly, adding as a joke, “You can’t get good parts anymore.” For those guts were, of course, a transplant, like a sizable fraction of the accessories my body requires to keep itself moving along-such are the benefits of Full Medical Plus. “But I am not talking about my own sickness. I’m talking about the sickness of the world.”
“And is right that you should do so,” Essie agreed, “although is my opinion that if you got your gut relined you would talk about such things less often.” She came up behind me and rested her palm on my forehead, gazing abstractedly out at the Tappan Sea. Essie understands instrumentation as few people do and has prizes to prove it, but when she wants to know if I have a fever she checks it the way her nurse did to her when she was a toddler in Leningrad. “Is not very hot,” she said reluctantly, “but what does Albert say?”
“Albert says,” I said, “that you should go peddle your hamburgers.” I pressed her hand with mine. “Honestly. I’m all right.”
“Will ask Albert to be sure?” she bargained-actually, she was deeply involved in setting up a whole new string of her franchises and I knew it.
“Will,” I promised, and patted her still splendid bottom as she turned away to her own workroom. As soon as she was gone I called, “Albert? You heard?”
In the holoframe over my desk the image of my data-retrieval program swirled into visibility, scratching his nose with the stem of his pipe. “Yes, Robin,” said Albert Einstein, “of course I heard. As you know, my receptors are always functioning except when you specifically ask me to turn them off, or when the situation is clearly private.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, studying him. He is not any sort of pinup, my Albert, with his untidy sweatshirt gathered in folds around his neck and his socks down around his ankles. Essie would straighten him up for me in a second if I asked her to, but I liked him the way he was. “And how can you tell the situation is private if you don’t peek?”
He moved the stem of his pipe from his nose to his cheekbone, still scratching, still gently smiling; it was a familiar question and did not require an answer.
Albert is really more of a friend than a computer program. He knows enough not to answer when I ask a rhetorical question. Long ago I had about a dozen different information-retrieval and decision-making programs. I had a business-manager program to tell me how my investments were doing, and a doctor program to tell me when my organs were due for replacement (among other things-I think he also conspired with my chef program at home to slip the odd pharmaceutical into my food), and a lawyer program to tell me how to get out of trouble, and, when I got into too much of it, my old psychiatrist program who told me why I was screwing up. Or tried to; I didn’t always believe him. But more and more I got used to one single program. And so the program I spent most of my time with was my general science advisor and home handyman, Albert Einstein. “Robin,” he said, gently reproving, “you didn’t call me just to find out if I was a Peeping Tom, did you?”
“You know perfectly well why I called you,” I told him, and indeed he did. He nodded and pointed to the far wall of my office over Tappan Sea, where my intercom screen was-Albert controls that as well as about everything else I own. On it a sort of X-ray picture appeared.
“While we were talking,” he said, “I was taking the liberty of scanning you with pulsed sound, Robin. See here. This is your latest intestinal transplant, and if you will look closely-wait, I’ll enlarge the image-I think you’ll be able to see this whole area of inflammation. I’m afraid you’re rejecting, all right.”
“I didn’t need you to tell me that,” I snapped. “How long?”
“Before it becomes critical, you mean? Ah, Robin,” he said earnestly, “that is difficult to say, for medicine is not quite an exact science-“
“How long!”
He sighed. “I can give you a minimum and maximum estimate. Catastrophic failure is not likely in less than one day and almost certain in sixty days.”
I relaxed. It was not as bad as it might have been. “So I have some time before it gets serious.”
“No, Robin,” he said earnestly, “it is already serious. The discomfort you now feel will increase. You should start medication at once in any case, but even with the medication the prognosis is for quite severe pain rather soon.” He paused, studying me. “I think from the expression on your face,” he said, “that for some idiosyncratic reason you want to put it off as long as you possibly can.”
“I want to stop the terrorists!”
“An, yes,” he agreed, “I know you do. And indeed that is a valid thing to do, if! may offer a value judgment. For that reason you wish to go to Brasilia to intercede with the Gateway commission”-I did; the worst thing the terrorists were doing was done from a spaceship no one had been able to catch-“and try to get them to share data so that they can move against the terrorists. What you want from me, then, is assurance that the delay won’t kill you.”
“Exactly, my dear Albert.” I smiled.
“I can give you that assurance,” he said gravely, “or at least I can continue to monitor you until your condition becomes acute. At that time, however, you must at once begin new surgery.”
“Agreed, my dear Albert.” I smiled, but he didn’t smile back.
“However,” he went on, “it does not seem to me that that is your only reason for putting off the replacement. I think there is something else on your mind.”
“Oh, Albert”-! sighed-“you’re pretty tedious when you act like Sigfrid von Shrink. Turn yourself off like a good fellow.”
And he did, looking thoughtful; and he had every reason to look thoughtful, because he was right.
You see, somewhere inside me, in that unlocatable space where I keep the solid core of guilt Sigfrid von Shrink did not quite purge away, I carried the conviction that the terrorists were right. I don’t mean right in murdering and blowing up and driving people crazy. That’s never right. I mean right in believing that they had a grievance, a wickedly unjust grievance against the rest of the human race, and therefore they were right in demanding attention be paid to it. I didn’t want just to stop the terrorists. I wanted to make them well.