by Jerry
“You’re absolutely right,” he said, quickly. “It was uncalled for, and untrue. Tree, I’m going crazy, I’m not myself. It was a childish insult and you know it was without basis in fact.”
She decided that was enough in the way of apology. She touched the projection button and joined him in the room. So beautiful, so alive, and so imaginary he wanted to cry again. Jordan and Treemonisha were the system’s most frustrated lovers. They had never met in the flesh, but had spent a year together by holo projection.
Jordan knew every inch of Treemonisha’s body, every pore, every hair. When they got unbearably horny, they would lie side by side on the floor and look at each other. They would strip for each other, taking hours with each garment. They developed the visual and oral sex fantasy to a pitch so fine that it was their own private language. They would sit inches apart and pass their hands close to each other, infinitely careful never to touch and spoil the illusion. They would talk to each other, telling what they would do when they finally got together in person, then they would sit back and masturbate themselves into insensibility.
“You know,” Treemonisha said, “you were a lousy choice for this job. You look like shit, you know that? I worry about you, this isolation is . . . well, it’s not good for you.”
“Driving me crazy, right?” He watched her walk to one of the taped-off areas on his floor and sit; as she touched the chair in her room, the holo projector picked it up and it winked into existence in his world. She was wearing a red paper blouse but had left off the pants, as a reproach, he thought, and a reminder of how baseless his gibe had been. She raised her left index finger three times. That was the signal for a scenario—“Captain Future Meets the Black Widow,” one of his favorites. They had evolved the hand signals when they grew impatient with asking each other “Do you want to play ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ ?” one of her favorites.
He waved his hand, negating his opening lines. He was impatient with the games and fantasies. He was getting impatient with everything. Besides, she wasn’t wearing her costume for the Black Widow.
“I think you’re wrong,” he said. “I think I was the perfect choice for this job. You know what I did after you shut off? I went looking for a way to kill myself.”
For once, he noticed the pause. She sat there in her chair, mouth slightly open, eyes unfocused, looking like she was about to drool all over her chin. Once they had both been fascinated with the process by which their minds suspended operations during the time-lag that was such a part of their lives. He had teased her about how stupid she looked when she waited for his words to catch up to her. Then once he had caught himself during one of the lags and realized he was a slack-jawed imbecile, too. After that, they didn’t talk about it.
She jerked and came to life again, like a humanoid robot that had just been activated.
“Jordan! Why did you do that?” She was half out of the chair in a reflex comforting gesture, then suppressed it before she committed the awful error of trying to touch him.
“The point is, I didn’t. Try it sometime. I found nine dozen ways of killing myself. It isn’t hard to do, I’m sure you can see that. But, you see, they have gauged me to a nicety. They know exactly what I’m capable of, and what I can never do. If I could kill myself painlessly, I would have done it three months ago, when I first started looking. But the most painless way I’ve doped out yet still involves explosive decompression. I don’t have the guts for it.”
“But surely you’ve thought of . . . ah, never mind.”
“You mean you’ve thought of a way?” He didn’t know what to think. He had been aware for a long time that she was a better synthesist than he; the production figures and several heated communications from the home office proved that. She could put nothing and nothing together and arrive at answers that astounded him. What’s more, her solutions worked. She seldom sent anything over her laser that didn’t bear fruit and often saw things he had overlooked.
“Maybe I have,” she evaded “but if I did, you don’t think I’d tell you after what you just said. Jordan, I don’t want you to kill yourself. That’s not fair. Not until we can get together and you try to live up to all your boasting. After that, well, maybe you’ll have to kill yourself.”
He smiled at that, and was grateful she was taking the light approach. He did get carried away describing the delights she was going to experience as soon as they met in the flesh.
“Give me a hint,” he coaxed. “It must involve the life system, right? It stands to reason, after you rule out the medical machines, which no one, no one could fool into giving out a dose of cyanide. Let’s see, maybe I should take a closer look at that air intake. It stands to reason that I could get the CO2 count in here way up if I could only . . .”
“No!” she exploded, then listened to the rest of his statement. “No hints. I don’t know a way. The engineers who built these things were too smart, and they knew some of us would get depressed and try to kill ourselves. There’s no wrenches you could throw into the works that they haven’t already thought of and countered. You just have to wait it out.”
“Six more months,” he groaned. “What does that come to in seconds?”
“Twenty less than when you asked the question, and didn’t that go fast?”
Looked at that way, he had to admit it did. He experienced no subjective time between the question and the answer. If only he could edit out days and weeks as easily as seconds.
“Listen, honey, I want to do anything I can to help you. Really, would it help if I tried harder to stay out of your furniture?”
He sighed, not really interested in that anymore. But it would be something to do.
“All right.”
So they got together, and she carefully laid out strips of tape on her floor marking the locations of objects in his room. He coached her, since she could see nothing of his room except him. When it was done, she pointed out that she could not get into her bedroom without walking through his auxiliary coelostat. He said that was all right as long as she avoided everything else.
When they were through, he was as depressed as ever. Watching her crawl around on her hands and knees made him ache for her. She was so lovely, and he was so lonely. The way her hair fell in long, ashen streams over the gathered materials of her sleeves, the curl of her toes as she knelt to peel off a strip of tape, the elastic give and take of the tendons in her legs . . . all the myriad tiny details he knew so well and didn’t know at all. The urge to reach out and touch her was overpowering.
“What would you like to do today?” she said when they were through with the taping.
“I don’t know. Everything I can’t do.”
“Would you like me to tell you a story?”
“No.”
“Would you tell me a story?” She crossed her legs nervously. She didn’t know how to cope with him when he got in these unresponsive moods.
Treemonisha was not subject to the terrors of loneliness that were tearing Jordan apart. She got along quite well by herself, aside from the sometimes maddening sexual pressures. But masturbation satisfied her more than it did Jordan. She expected no problems waiting out the six months until they were rotated back to Pluto. There was even a pleasurable aspect of the situation for her: the breathless feeling of anticipation waiting for the moment when they would finally be in each other’s arms.
Jordan was no good at all at postponing his wants. Those wants, surprisingly to him, were not primarily sexual. He longed to be surrounded by people. To be elbow to elbow in a crowd, to smell the human smell of them around him, to be jostled, even shoved. Even to be punched in the face if necessary. But to be touched by another human being. It didn’t have to be Treemonisha, though she was his first choice. He loved her, even when he yelled at her for being so maddeningly insubstantial.
“All right, I’ll tell you a story.” He fell silent, trying to think of one that had some aspect of originality. He couldn’t, and so he fell back on “The Further E
xploits of the Explorers of the Pink Planet.” For that one, Treemonisha had to take off all her clothes and lie on her back on the floor. He sat very close to her and put the trio of adventures through their paces.
Captain Rock Rogers, commander of the expedition, he who had fearlessly led the team over yawning wrinkles and around pores sunk deep into the treacherous surface of the pink planet. The conqueror of Leftbreast Mountain, the man who had first planted the flag of the United Planets on the dark top of that dangerously unstable prominence and was planning an assault on the fabled Rightbreast Mountain, home of the savage tribe of killer microbes. Why?
“Because it’s there,” Treemonisha supplied.
“Who’s telling this story?”
Doctor Maryjane Peters, who single-handedly invented the epidermal polarizer that caused the giant, radioactive, mutated crab lice to sink into the epithelium on the trio’s perilous excursion into the Pubic Jungle.
“I still think you made that up about the crab lice.”
“I reports what I sees. Shut up, child.”
And Trog, half man, half slime mold, who had used his barbarian skills to domesticate Jo-jo, the man-eating flea, but who was secretly a spy for the Arcturian Horde and was working to sabotage the expedition and the hopes of all humanity.
As we rejoin the adventurers, Maryjane tells Rock that she must again venture south, from their base at the first sparse seedlings of the twisted Pubic Jungle, or their fate is sealed.
“Why is that, my dear?” Rock says boyishly.
“Because, darling, down at the bottom of the Great Rift Valley lie the only deposits of rare musketite on the whole planet, and I must have some of it to repair the burnt-out de-noxifier on the overdrive, or the ship will never . . .” Meanwhile, back at reality, Treemonisha caused her Left Northern Promontory to move southwards and rub itself lightly through the Great Rift Valley, causing quite an uproar among the flora and fauna there.
“Earthquake!” Trog squeaks, and runs howling back toward safety in the great crater in the middle of the Plain of Belly.
“Strictly speaking, no,” Maryjane points out, grabbing at a swaying tree to steady herself. “It might more properly be called a Treemonisha-qua—”
“Treemonisha. Must you do that while I’m just getting into the story? It plays hell with the plot line.”
She moved her hand back to her side and tried to smile. She was willing to patronize him, try to get him back to himself, but this was asking a lot. What were these stories for, she reasoned, but to get her horny and give her a chance to get some relief?
“All right, Jordan. I’ll wait.” He stared silently down at her. And a tear trembled on the tip of his nose, hung there, and fell down toward her abdomen. And of course it didn’t get her wet. It was followed by another, and another, and still she wasn’t wet, and he felt his shoulders begin to shake. He fell forward onto the soft, inviting surface of her body and bumped his head hard on the deck. He screwed his eyes shut tight so he couldn’t see her and cried silently.
After a few helpless minutes, Treemonisha got up and left him to recover in privacy.
Treemonisha called several times over the next five days. Each time Jordan told her he wanted to be alone. That wasn’t strictly true; he wanted company more than he could say, but he had to try isolation and see what it did to him. He thought of it as destructive testing—a good principle for engineering but questionable for mental equilibrium. But he had exhausted everything else.
He even called up The Humanoid, his only other neighbor within radio range. He and Treemonisha had named him that because he looked and acted so much like a poorly constructed robot. The Humanoid was the representative of Lasercom. No one knew his name, if he had one. When Jordan had asked passing holehunters about him, they said he had been out in that neighborhood for over twenty years, always refusing rotation.
It wasn’t that The Humanoid was unfriendly; he just wasn’t much of anything at all. When Jordan called him, he answered the call promptly, saying nothing. He never initiated anything. He would answer your questions with a yes or a no or an I-don’t-know. If the answer required a sentence, he said nothing at all.
Jordan stared at him and threw away his plan of isolating himself for the remainder of his stay at the station.
“That’s me in six months,” he said, cutting the connection without saying good-by, and calling Treemonisha.
“Will you have me back?” he asked.
“I wish I could reach out and grab you by the ears and shake some sense back into you. Look,” she pointed to where she was standing. “I’ve avoided your tape lines for five days, though it means threading a maze when I want to get to something. I was afraid you’d call me and I’d pop out in the middle of your computer again and freak you.”
He looked ashamed; he was ashamed. Why did it matter?
“Maybe it isn’t so important after all.”
She lay down on the floor.
“I’ve been dying to hear how the story came out,” she said. “You want to finish it now?”
So he dug out Rock Rogers and Maryjane and sent them into the bushes and, to enliven things, threw in Jo-jo and his wild mate, Gi-gi.
For two weeks, Jordan fought down his dementia. He applied himself to the computer summaries, forcing himself to work at them twice as long as was his custom. All it did was reconfirm to him that if he didn’t see something in three hours, he wasn’t going to see it at all.
Interestingly enough, the computer sheets were getting gradually shorter. His output dwindled as he had less and less to study. The home office didn’t like it and suggested he do some work on the antennas to see if there was something cutting down on the quality of the reception. He tried it, but was unsurprised when it changed nothing.
Treemonisha had noticed it, too, and had run an analysis on her computer.
“Something is interfering with the signal,” she told him after studying the results. “It’s gotten bad enough that the built-in redundancy isn’t sufficient. Too many things are coming over in fragmentary form, and the computer can’t handle them.”
She was referring to the fact that everything that came over the Hotline was repeated from ten to thirty times. Little of it came through in its totality, but by adding the repeats and filling in the blanks the computer was able to construct a complete message ninety percent of the time. That average had dropped over the last month to fifty per cent, and the curve was still going down.
“Dust cloud?” Jordan speculated.
“I don’t think it could move in that fast. The curve would be much shallower, on the order of hundreds of years before we would really notice a drop-off.”
“Something else, then.” He thought about it. “If it’s not something big, like a dust cloud blocking the signal, then it’s either a drop-off in power at the transmitter, or it could be something distorting the signal. Any ideas?”
“Yes, but its very unlikely, so I’ll think about it some more.”
She exasperated him sometimes with her unwillingness to share things like that with him. But it was her right, and he didn’t probe.
Three days later Treemonisha suddenly lost a dimension. She was sitting there in the middle of his room when her image flattened out like a sheet of paper, perpendicular to the floor. He saw her edge-on and had to get up and walk around the flat image to really see it.
“I’ll call it ‘Nude Sitting in a Chair,’ ” he said. “Tree, you’re a cardboard cutout.”
She looked up at him warily, hoping this wasn’t the opening stanza in another bout with loneliness.
“You want to explain that?”
“Gladly. My receiver must be on the fritz. Your image is only two-dimensional now. Would you like to stand up?”
She grinned, and stood. She turned slowly, and the plane remained oriented the same way but different parts of her were now flattened. He decided he didn’t like it, and got out his tools.
Two hours of checking circuitry told
him nothing at all. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the receiver, and when she checked her transmitter, the result was the same. Midway through the testing she reported that his image had flattened out, too.
“It looks like there really is something out there distorting signals,” she said. “I think I’ll sign off now, I want to check something.” And with that she cut transmission.
He didn’t care for the abruptness of that and was determined that she wouldn’t beat him to the punch in finding out what it was. She could only be searching for the source of the distortion, which meant she had a good idea of what to look for.
“If she can figure it out, so can I.” He sat down and thought furiously. A few minutes later, he got up and called her again.
“A black hole,” she said, when she arrived. “I found it, or at least a close approximation of where it must be.”
“I was going to say that,” he muttered. But he hadn’t found it. He had only figured out what it must be. She had known that three days ago.
“It’s pretty massive,” she went on. “The gravity waves were what fouled up our reception, and now it’s close enough to ruin our transmissions to each other. I thought at first I might be rich, but it looks far too big to handle.”
That was why she hadn’t said anything earlier. If she could locate it and get a track on it, she could charter a ship and come back to get it later. Black holes were fantastically valuable, if they were small enough to manipulate. They could also be fantastically dangerous. . . .
“Just how big?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet, except that it’s too big to chase. I. . . .”
Her image, already surreal enough from the flattening, fluttered wildly and dissolved. He was cut off.
He chewed his nails for the next hour, and when the call bell clanged, he almost injured himself getting to the set She appeared in the room. She was three-dimensional again, wearing a spacesuit, and she didn’t look too happy.
“What the hell happened? You didn’t do that on purpose, did you? Because . . .”