by Vernor Vinge
Every day he was awash with ideas for new poetry, but not the smallest piece of concrete verse. He had told himself that his genius was coming back with his other faculties, that it was coming back slowly, in his little poems. All that was a mirage. And now he knew it for a mirage. He was dead inside, his gifts turned into vaporous nothingness and random mechanical curiosity.
You can’t know that! He rolled out of bed and went into the bathroom. The air was cool and still. He stared out the half-open bathroom window at the little gardens and twisted conifers, the empty street. Bob and Alice had given him an upstairs room. It had been fun to be able to run up and down stairs again.
In truth nothing had changed about his problems. He had no new evidence that he was permanently maimed. It was just that suddenly—with the full authority of a Morning Insight—he was certain of it. But hell. For once this could be just panic without substance! Maybe obsessing on Lena’s death was spilling over, making him see death in all directions.
Yes. No problem. There was no problem.
HE SPENT THE morning in a panicked rage, trying to prove to himself that he could still write. But the only paper was the foolscap, and when he wrote on it, his scrawling penmanship was re-formed into neat, fontified lines. That had been an irritation in days past, but never enough to force him to dig up real paper. Today, now…he could see that his soul was sucked out of the words before he could make them sing! It was the ultimate victory of automation over creative thought. Everything was beyond the direct touch of his hand. That was what was keeping him from finally connecting with his talents! And in the entire house there were no real paper-and-ink books.
Aha. He rushed to the basement, pulled down one of the moldering cartons that Bob had brought from Palo Alto. Inside, there were real books. When he was a kid, he had practically camped out on the living-room sofa the whole summer. They had no television, but every day he’d bring home a new pile of books from the library. Those summers, lying on the sofa, he had read his way through frivolous trash and deep wisdom—and learned more about truth than in an entire school year. Maybe that was where he had learned to make words sing.
These books were mostly junk. There were school catalogs from before Stanford went all online. There were handouts that his TAs had painfully Xeroxed for the students.
But, yes, there were a few books of poetry. Pitifully few, and read only by silverfish these last ten years. Robert stood up and stared at the boxes farther back in the basement dimness. Surely there were more books there, even if selected by brute chance, whatever was left after Bob auctioned off the Palo Alto place. He looked down at the book in his hand. Kipling. Damned jingoistic elevator music. But it’s a start. Unlike the libraries that floated in cyberspace, this was something he could hold in his hands. He sat down on the boxes and began to read, all the while pushing his mind ahead of the words, trying to remember—trying to create—what should rightly be the rest of the poem.
An hour passed. Two. He was vaguely aware that Alice came down to announce lunch, and that he waved her off impatiently. This was so much more important. He opened more boxes. Some contained Bob and Alice’s own junk, even more vacuous than what they had retrieved from Palo Alto. But he found a dozen more books of poetry. Some of them were…good stuff.
The afternoon passed. He could still enjoy the poetry, but the enjoyment was also pain. I can’t write a jot of the good stuff, except where I happen to remember it. And his panic grew. Finally, he stood and threw Ezra Pound into the basement wall. The spine of the old book split and it sprawled on the floor, a broken paper butterfly. Robert stared for a moment. He had never harmed a book before, not even if it bore the ugliest writing in the world. He walked across the room and knelt by the ruin.
Miri chose that moment to come bouncing down the stairs. “Robert! Alice says I can call an air taxi! Where would you like to go?”
The words were noise, scraping on his despair. He picked up the book and shook his head. “No.” Go away.
“I don’t understand. Why are you digging around here? There are easier ways to get what you want.”
Robert stood, his fingers trying to put Ezra Pound back together again. His eyes found Miri. Now she had his attention. She was smiling, so sure of herself, in maximum bossiness mode. And for the moment she didn’t understand the light in his eyes. “And how is that, Miri?”
“The problem is that you can’t access what’s all around us. That’s why you’re down here reading these old books, right? In a way you’re like a little kid—but that’s good, that’s good! Grown-ups like Alice and Bob have all sorts of bad habits that hold them back. But you’re starting almost fresh. It’ll be easy for you to learn the new things. But not from dumbhead vocational classes. See? Let me teach you how to wear.” It was the same wearisome nag as always, but she thought she’d found a clever new angle.
This time, he would not let it pass. Robert took a step toward her. “So you’ve been watching me down here?” he said mildly, building up to what he intended.
“Um, just in a general way. I—”
Robert took another step toward her and shoved the mutilated book toward her face. “Have you ever heard of this poet?”
Miri squinted at the broken spine. “’E,’ ‘z’—oh, ‘Ezra Pound’? Well…yes, I’ve got all her stuff. Let me show you, Robert!” She hesitated, then saw the foolscap lying atop a box. She picked it up and it came to life. Titles streamed down the page, the cantos, the essays—even, God help us, later criticism from the mindless depths of the twenty-first century. “But seeing it on this page is like looking through a keyhole, Robert. I can show you how to see it all around you, with—”
“Enough!” said Robert. He slid his voice down till it was quiet, cutting, overtly reasonable. “You simpleton. You know nothing and yet you presume to run my life, just as you run the lives of your little friends.”
Miri had backed up a step. There was shock on her face, but that had apparently not yet connected with her mouth. “Yes, that’s what Alice says, that I’m too bossy—”
Robert took another step, and Miri was against the stairs. “You’ve spent your whole life playing video games, convincing yourself and your friends that you’re worth something, that you’re some kind of beautiful thing. I’ll bet your parents are even foolish enough to tell you how clever you are. But it’s not a pretty thing to be bossy when you’re a fat, brainless brat.”
“I—” Miri’s hand rose to her mouth and her eyes grew wide. She took an awkward step backwards, up the steps. His words were connecting now. He could see the veneer of self-confidence and bright cheeriness collapsing.
And Robert pursued: “‘I,’ ‘I’—yes, that’s probably what your self-centered little mind thinks about most. It would be hard to bear your worthlessness otherwise. But think about that before you come again trying to run my life.”
Tears welled in the girl’s eyes. She turned and sprinted up the stairs, her footsteps not a pounding of childish force, but soft—almost as if she didn’t want anything about herself to be sensed.
Robert stood for a moment, looking up the empty stairway. It was like standing at the bottom of a well, with a patch of daylight across the top.
He remembered. There had been a time, when he was fifteen and his sister Cara was about ten…when Cara became independent, bothersome. At the time Robert had had his own problems—totally trivial from the altitude of seventy-five years, but they’d seemed significant at the time. Getting past his sister’s newfound ego, making her realize how little she counted in the general scheme of things, that had given him such a rush of pleasure.
Robert stared up into the patch of daylight and waited for the rush.
BOB GU GOT out of debrief late on Saturday. He had been delinquent about tracking events at home; the Paraguay operation had been all-absorbing. Okay, that was an excuse. But it was also the truth. There had been hot launchers under that hostage orphanage. There in Asunción, he had seen the abyss.
So it wasn’t until he arrived home that he got the local bad news…
His daughter was too big and grown-up to sit on his lap, but she sat close on the sofa and let him take her hands in his. Alice sat on the other side; she looked calm, but he knew she was totally freaked. Training jitters plus this problem at home were almost too much for her.
So it was past time to face up to family responsibilities:
“It’s nothing you did, Miri.”
Miri shook her head. There were dark rings around her eyes; Alice said she had stopped crying only an hour ago. “I was trying to help him and…” The sentence dribbled off. Her voice held none of the confidence that had grown in it over the last two or three years. Damn. In the corner of his eye, Bob could see that his father was still ensconced in his room upstairs, silently sticking it to them all. Visiting Dad was next on the agenda. The old man was going to have a surprise.
For now, there was something more important to set right. “I know you were, Miri. And I think you have helped Grandpa a lot since he came to live with us.” The old man would still be trying to find his shoes if she hadn’t. “You remember, we talked about this when Grandpa came? He is not necessarily a nice fellow”—except when he wants a favor, or he’s setting you up for a fall; then he can charm almost any human ever born.
“Y-yes. I remember.”
“What he says when he’s trying to hurt you doesn’t have any connection with whether you’ve been good or bad, clever or stupid.”
“B-but maybe I was too pushy. You didn’t see him this morning, Bob. He was so sad. He thinks I don’t notice, but I do. His pulse was way up. He’s so afraid that he can’t write anymore. And he misses Grandma, I mean Lena. I miss Lena! But I—”
“It’s not your responsibility to solve this problem, Miri.” He glanced over Miri’s head at Alice. “It’s mine, and till now I’ve messed up. Your job, well, that’s at Fairmont Junior High.”
“Actually, we call it Fairmont High.”
“Okay. Look. Before Grandpa came, school was just about all you thought about. That and your friends and your projects. Didn’t you tell me you’re going to transform the place this Halloween?”
Some shred of her past enthusiasm lit Miri’s face. “Yeah. We’ve got the backstory on all the SpielbergRowling stuff. Annette’s going to—”
“Then that and your regular school work is what you should concentrate on. That’s your mission, kiddo.”
“But what about Robert?”
Robert can go to hell. “I’ll talk to him. I think you’re right that he’s got a problem. But, you know sometimes, well…there’s something you have to learn as you grow up. Some people make their own problems. And they never stop hurting themselves and messing up the people around them. When that’s the case, then you shouldn’t keep hurting yourself for them.”
Miri’s head bowed and she looked very sad. And then she looked back at him. Her jaw came up in that familiar, stubborn way. “Maybe that’s true about other people…but this is my grandfather.”
08
NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS WITHIN
After that remarkable Saturday, Robert Gu spent considerably less time at his son’s home. He slept there, still in the upstairs room. Sometimes he even ate in the dining room. Miri was always somewhere else. Alice was as impassive as stone. When Bob was around, the hospitality was even more sparse. Robert was living on borrowed time, and it had nothing to do with his medical condition.
He hung out in empty rooms at school, reading from his old books. He surfed the web more than ever. Chumlig showed him some modern utilities that hid in his view-page, things that could not even pretend to be WinME programs.
And he drove around town. That was as much to play with the automatic cars as it was to see what San Diego had become; in fact, the suburban sprawl was just as drab as in the past. But Robert discovered that his new, maimed personality had a thing about gadgets. Cryptic machines were everywhere nowadays. They lurked in walls, nestled in trees, even littered the lawns. They worked silently, almost invisibly, twenty-four hours a day. He began to wonder where it all ended.
One day after school, Robert drove into the far East County, past the endless, ordinary suburbs. The housing didn’t thin out until he was well into the mountains. But twenty miles beyond El Cajon, he came to a gap in the housing and what looked like a war in progress. Dust plumes spouted from buildings several hundred yards back from the highway. When he rolled down the window, he heard what might have been artillery fire. A frontage road ran along a high fence. A rusted sign said “UP/Express” something or other.
And then the strange firing range was behind him.
The highway was a long straight climb now, up past four thousand feet. It was farther and farther between off-ramps. The auto slowly accelerated. According to the awkward little dashboard display that he’d found in his WinME game folder, they were doing better than 120 miles per hour. The boulders and scrub along the shoulder were a blur, and the window rolled itself closed. He passed the manual vehicles in far right lanes as though they were standing still. Someday, I have to learn to drive again.
Then he was over the crest. The auto slowed, taking the curves at a mere fifty miles per hour. He remembered driving this way with Lena, on a much smaller Highway 8, maybe in 1970. Lena Llewelyn was new to California, new to the U.S.A. She had boggled at the size of the place compared with her native Britain. She’d been so open then, so trusting. That was even before she decided to specialize in psychiatry.
The hills shed their faded green and stood as piles of rounded boulders. The desert spread endlessly below and beyond. He came down from the mountains, turned off Highway 8, and drove slowly along old desert roads toward Anza Borrego State Park. The last of the suburbs were up on the ridgeline. Down here, things were as they had been when he’d been in grad school—even as they had been for centuries before that.
There were plenty of traffic signs on these smaller roads. Some were rusted and tilted, but they were real. His gaze turned to watch a bullet-punctured stop sign dwindle behind him. It was beautiful. A little farther on he came upon a dusty path that ran off across endless desert. The automobile balked at following it: “Sorry, sir, there’s no guidance that way, and I notice you don’t have a driver’s license.”
“Ha. In that case, I’m taking a little walk.” Surprisingly, there was no objection to that. He opened the door and stepped out into the breezy afternoon. He could feel his spirit unlimber. He could see forever. Robert walked east along the rutted dirt road. Here at last he had reached the natural world.
His foot kicked something metallic. A spent round? No. The gray lump had a triple antenna sticking out of the top. He tossed it into the bushes. He was not beyond the web even here. He pulled out his magic foolscap, surfed the local area. The picture showed the ground around him, from some kind of camera built into the paper; little signs floated above every weed—Ambrosia dumosa this and Encelia farinosa that. Ads for the park’s gift shop scrolled across the top of the page.
Robert pressed 411. The expense meter at the corner of the page was running now, almost five dollars a minute. That sort of money meant there was a human at the other end. Robert talked to the paper, “So how far am I from—” from the natural world “—how far am I from unimproved land?”
A tag changed color; his request had been subcontracted. A woman’s voice replied, “You’re almost there; it’s another…two miles in the direction you are heading. If I might suggest, Sir, you don’t really need 411 to answer questions like this. Just—”
But Robert had already stuffed the paper back in his pocket. He set out eastward, his shadow breaking the trail ahead of him. It had been a very long time since he had walked two miles. Even before the Alzheimer’s, walking two miles would have been the stuff of an emergency. But today he was not even out of breath, and the pain in his joints was muted. The most important thing about me is broken, while almost everything else works. Reed Weber was right
, it was a heavenly minefield. I am so lucky.
Over the wind, he heard the sound of electric motors torquing up. His car was driving off to do business elsewhere. Robert did not look back.
His shadow grew longer, the air cooler. And finally he had reached the beginning of nature. A little voice spoke in his ear, announcing that he was leaving the tagged section of the park. Beyond this point, only “low-rate emergency wireless” was guaranteed. Robert walked on, across the unlabeled wilderness. So this is the closest thing to being alone these days. It felt good. A cold, clean purity.
For a moment, the recollection of Saturday’s confrontation with Bob swept over him, more real than the desert evening. There had been times, years ago, when he raged at his son, trying to shame him for wasting his talents in the military. But last Saturday, the rage had flowed in the other direction.
“Sit!” the boy grown up had said to his father, in a tone that Robert had never heard from him before.
And Robert had dropped onto the sofa. His son towered over him for a moment. Then Bob sat down opposite him and leaned close. “Miri won’t talk about the details, but it’s clear what you did this afternoon, mister.”
“Bob, I was just—”
“Shut up. My little girl has enough problems, and you will not add to them!” His glare was long and steady.
“…I didn’t mean any harm, Bob. I had a bad day.” Some distant part of him realized that he was whining, and that he couldn’t stop. “Where is Lena, Bob?”
Bob’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve asked me that before. I wondered if it was an act.” He shrugged. “Now I don’t care. After today, I just want you out of here, but…have you looked at your finances, Dad?”
It was going to come down to that. “Yes…there’s a finance package in my WinME. My savings, I was a multimillionaire in 2000.”
“That’s three bubbles back, Dad. And you guessed wrong on every one. But at this point you’re nearly certified as self-sufficient. You’d have a hard time scaring up any public assistance. The taxpayers are not kind to seniors; old people run too much of the country already.” He hesitated. “And after today, my generosity has run out. Mom died two years ago—and dumped you decades before that. But maybe you should wonder about other things. For instance, where are all your old pals from Stanford?”