By Any Other Name

by Spider Robinson

  McLaughlin was glad to hear the profanity—it was the first sign of steam blowing off. “Well, she’s alive and healthy now.”

  “Yes. I’ve been thanking God for that for three months now, ever since Hoskins and Parvati announced the unequivocal success of spinal implants. I’ve thanked God over ten thousand times, and I don’t think He believed me once. I don’t think I believed me once. Now doesn’t that make me a selfish son of a bitch?”

  McLaughlin grinned. “Head of Department and you live like a monk, because you’re selfish. For years, every dime you make disappears down a hole somewhere, and everybody wonders why you’re so friendly with Hoskins and Parvati, who aren’t even in your own department, and only now, as I’m figuring out where the money’s been going, do I realize what a truly selfish son of a bitch you are, Higgins.”

  Higgins smiled horribly. “We talked about it a lot, that last month. I wanted to be frozen too, for as long as they had to freeze her.”

  “What would that have accomplished? Then neither of you would have remembered.”

  “But we’d have entered and left freeze at the same time, and come out of it with sets of memories that ran nearly to the day we met. We’d effectively be precisely the people who fell in love once before; we could have left notes for ourselves and the rest would’ve been inevitable. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She pointed out that the period in question could be any fraction of forever, with no warranty. I insisted, and got quite histrionic about it. Finally she brought up our age difference.”

  “I wondered about the chronology.”

  “She was thirty, I was twenty-five. Your age. It was something we kidded about, but it stung a bit when we did. So she asked me to wait five years, and then if I still wanted to be frozen, fine. In those five years I clawed my way up to head of section here, because I wanted to do everything I could to ensure her survival. And in the fifth year they thought her type of leukemia might be curable with marrow transplants, so I hung around for the two years it took to be sure they were wrong. And in the eighth year Hoskins started looking for a safe white-cell antagonist, and again I had to stay room temperature to finance him, because nobody else could smell that he was a genius. When he met Parvati, I knew they’d lick it, and I told myself that if they needed me, that meant she needed me. I wasn’t wealthy like her—I had to keep working to keep them both funded properly. So I stayed.”

  Higgins rubbed his eyes, then made his hands lie very still before him, left on right. “Now there’s a ten-year span between us, the more pronounced because she hasn’t experienced a single minute of it. Will she love me again or won’t she?” The bandaged right hand escaped from the left, began to tap on the desk. “For ten years I told myself I could stand to know the answer to that question. For ten years it was the last thing I thought before I fell asleep and the first thing I thought when I woke up. Will she love me or won’t she?

  “She made me promise that I’d tell her everything when she was awakened, that I’d tell her how our love had been. She swore that she’d love me again. I promised, and she must have known I lied, or suspected it, because she left a ten-page letter to herself in her file. The day I became Department Head I burned the fucking thing. I don’t want her to love me because she thinks she should.

  “Will she love me or won’t she? For ten years I believed I could face the answer. Then it came time to wake her up, and I lost my nerve. I couldn’t stand to know the answer. I gave her file to you.

  “And then I saw her on the monitor, heard her voice coming out of my desk, and I knew I couldn’t stand not to know.”

  He reached clumsily for the bottle, and knocked it clear off the desk. Incredibly, it contrived to shatter on the thick black carpet, staining it a deeper black. He considered this, while the autovac cleaned up the glass, clacking in disapproval.

  “Do you know a liquor store that delivers?”

  “In this day and age?” McLaughlin exclaimed, but Higgins was not listening. “Jesus Christ,” he said suddenly. “Here.” He produced a flask and passed it across the desk.

  Higgins looked him in the eye. “Thanks, Bill.” He drank.

  McLaughlin took a long swallow himself and passed it back. They sat in silence for a while, in a communion and a comradeship as ancient as alcohol, as pain itself. Synthetic leather creaked convincingly as they passed the flask. Their breathing slowed.

  If a clock whirs on a deskface and no one is listening, is there really a sound? In a soundproof office with opaqued windows, is it not always night? The two men shared the long night of the present, forsaking past and future, for nearly half an hour, while all around them hundreds upon hundreds worked, wept, smiled, dozed, watched television, screamed, were visited by relatives and friends, smoked, ate, died.

  At last McLaughlin sighed and studied his hands. “When I was a grad student,” he said to them, “I did a hitch on an Amerind reservation in New Mexico. Got friendly with an old man named Wanoma, face like a map of the desert. Grandfather-grandson relationship—close in that culture. He let me see his own grandfather’s bones. He taught me how to pray. One night the son of a nephew, a boy he’d had hopes for, got alone-drunk and fell off a motorcycle. Broke his neck. I heard about it and went to see Wanoma that night. We sat under the moon—it was a harvest moon—and watched a fire until it was ashes. Just after the last coal went dark, Wanoma lifted his head and cried out in Zuni. He cried out, ‘Ai-yah, my heart is full of sorrow.’”

  McLaughlin glanced up at his boss and took a swallow. “You know, it’s impossible for a white man to say those words and not sound silly. Or theatrical. It’s a simple statement of a genuine universal, and there’s no way for a white man to say it. I’ve tried two or three times since. You can’t say it in English.”

  Higgins smiled painfully and nodded.

  “I cried out too,” McLaughlin went on, “after Wanoma did. The English of it was, ‘Ai-yah, my brother’s heart is full of sorrow. His heart is my heart.’ Happens I haven’t ever tried to say that since, but you can see it sounds hokey too.”

  Higgins’s smile became less pained, and his eyes lost some of their squint. “Thanks, Bill.”

  “What’ll you do?”

  The smile remained. “Whatever I must. I believe I’ll take the tour with you day after tomorrow. You can use the extra gun.”

  The Orientator went poker-faced. “Are you up to it, Tom? You’ve got to be fair to her, you know.”

  “I know. Today’s world is pretty crazy. She’s got a right to integrate herself back into it without tripping over past karma. She’ll never know. I’ll have control on Thursday, Bill. Partly thanks to you. But you do know why I selected you for her Orientator, don’t you?”

  “No. I don’t think I do.”

  “I thought you’d at least have suspected. Personality Profiles are a delightful magic. Perhaps if we ever develop a science of psychology we’ll understand why we get results out of them. According to the computer, your PP matches almost precisely to my own—of ten years ago. Probably why we get along so well.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Is love a matter of happy accident or a matter of psychological inevitability? Was what ’Ginia and I had fated in the stars, or was it a chance of jigsawing of personality traits? Will the woman she was ten years ago love the man I’ve become? Or the kind of man I was then? Or some third kind?”

  “Oh, fine,” McLaughlin said, getting angry. “So I’m your competition.”

  “Aha,” Higgins pounced. “You do feel something for her.”

  “I…” McLaughlin got red.

  “You’re my competition,” Higgins said steadily. “And, as you have said, you are my brother. Would you like another drink?”

  McLaughlin opened his mouth, then closed it. He rose and left in great haste, and when he had gained the hallway he cannoned into a young nurse with red hair and improbably grey eyes. He mumbled apology and continued on his way, failing to notice her. He did not know Deborah M
anning.

  Behind him, Higgins passed out.

  Throughout the intervening next day Higgins was conscious of eyes on him. He was conscious of little enough else as he sleep-walked through his duties. The immense hospital complex seemed to have been packed full of grey Jell-O, very near to setting. He ploughed doggedly through it, making noises with his mouth, making decisions, making marks on pieces of paper, discharging his responsibilities with the least part of his mind. But he was conscious of the eyes.

  A hospital grapevine is like no other on earth. If you want a message heard by every employee, it is quicker to tell two nurses and an intern than it would be to assemble the staff and make an announcement. Certainly McLaughlin had said nothing, even to his hypothetical closest friend; he knew that any closest friend has at least one other closest friend. But at least three OR personnel knew that the Old Man had wakened one personally the other day. And a janitor knew that the Old Man was in the habit of dropping by the vaults once a week or so just after the start of the graveyard shift, to check on the nonexistent progress of a corpsicle named Harding. And the OR team and the janitor worked within the same (admittedly huge) wing, albeit on different floors. So did the clerk-typist in whose purview were Virginia Harding’s files, and she was engaged to the anesthetist. Within twenty-four hours, the entire hospital staff and a majority of the patients had added two and two.

  (Virginia Harding, of course, heard nary a word, got not so much as a hint. A hospital staff may spill Mercurochrome. It often spills blood. But it never spills beans.)

  Eyes watched Higgins all day. And so perhaps it was natural that eyes watched him in his dreams that night. But they did not make him afraid or uneasy. Eyes that watch oneself continuously become, after a time, like a second ego, freeing the first from the burden of introspection. They almost comforted him. They helped.

  I have been many places, touched many lives since I touched her, he thought as he shaved the next morning, and been changed by them. Will she love me or won’t she?

  There were an endless three more hours of work to be taken care of that morning, and then at last the Jell-O dispersed, his vision cleared and she was before him, dressed for the street, chatting with McLaughlin. There were greetings, explanations of some sort were made for his presence in the party, and they left the room, to solve the mouse’s maze of corridors that led to the street and the city outside.

  It was a warm fall day. The streets were unusually crowded, with people and cars, but he knew they would not seem so to Virginia. The sky seemed unusually overcast, the air particularly muggy, but he knew it would seem otherwise to her. The faces of the pedestrians they passed seemed to him markedly cheerful and optimistic, and he felt that this was a judgment with which she would agree. This was not a new pattern of thought for him. For over five years now, since the world she knew had changed enough for him to perceive, he had been accustomed to observe that world in the light of what she would think of it. Having an unconscious standard of comparison, he had marked the changes of the last decade more acutely than his contemporaries, more acutely perhaps than even McLaughlin, whose interest was only professional.

  Too, knowing her better than McLaughlin, he was better able to anticipate the questions she would ask. A policeman went overhead in a floater bucket, and McLaughlin began to describe the effects that force-fields were beginning to exert on her transportation holdings and other financial interests. Higgins cut him off before she could, and described the effects single-person flight was having on social and sexual customs, winning a smile from her and a thoughtful look from the Orientator. When McLaughlin began listing some of the unfamiliar gadgetry she could expect to see, Higgins interrupted with a brief sketch of the current state of America’s spiritual renaissance. When McLaughlin gave her a personal wrist-phone, Higgins showed her how to set it to refuse calls.

  McLaughlin had, of course, already told her a good deal about Civil War Two and the virtual annihilation of the American black, and had been surprised at how little surprised she was. But when, now, he made a passing reference to the unparalleled savagery of the conflict, Higgins saw a chance to make points by partly explaining that bloodiness with a paraphrase of a speech Virginia herself had made ten years before, on the folly of an urban-renewal package concept which had sited low-income housing immediately around urban and suburban transportation hubs. “Built-in disaster,” she agreed approvingly, and did not feel obliged to mention that the same thought had occurred to her a decade ago. Higgins permitted himself to be encouraged.

  But about that time, as they were approaching one of the new downtown parks, Higgins noticed the expression on McLaughlin’s face, and somehow recognized it as one he had seen before—from the inside.

  At once he was ashamed of the fatuous pleasure he had been taking in outmaneuvering the younger man. It was a cheap triumph, achieved through unfair advantage. Higgins decided sourly that he would never have forced this “duel with his younger self” unless he had been just this smugly sure of the outcome, and his self-esteem dropped sharply. He shut his mouth and resolved to let McLaughlin lead the conversation.

  It immediately took a turning he could not have followed if he tried.

  As the trio entered the park, they passed a group of teenagers. Higgins paid them no mind—he had long since reached the age when adolescents, especially in groups, regarded him as an alien life form, and he was nearly ready to agree with them. But he noticed Virginia Harding noticing them, and followed her gaze.

  The group was talking in loud voices, the incomprehensible gibberish of the young. There was nothing Higgins could see about them that Harding ought to find striking. They were dressed no differently than any one of a hundred teenagers she had passed on the walk so far, were quite nondescript. Well, now that he looked closer, he saw rather higher-than-average intelligence in most of the faces. Honor-student types, down to the carefully cultivated look of aged cynicism. That was rather at variance with the raucousness of their voices, but Higgins still failed to see what held Harding’s interest.

  “What on earth are they saying?” she asked, watching them over her shoulder as they passed.

  Higgins strained, heard only nonsense. He saw McLaughlin grinning.

  “They’re Goofing,” the Orientator said.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Goofing. The very latest in sophisticated humor.”

  Harding still looked curious.

  “It sort of grew out of the old Firesign Theater of the seventies. Their kind of comedy laid the ground-work for the immortal Spiwack, and he created Goofing, or as he called it, speaking with spooned tongue. It’s a kind of double-talk, except that it’s designed to actually convey information, more or less in spite of itself. The idea is to almost make sense, to get across as much of your point as possible without ever saying anything comprehensible.”

  Higgins snorted, afraid.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Harding said.

  “Well, for instance, if Spiwack wanted to publicly libel, say, the president, he’d Goof. Uh…” McLaughlin twisted his voice into a fair imitation of a broken-down prizefighter striving to sound authoritative. “That guy there, see, in my youth we would of referred to him as a man with a tissue-paper asshole. What you call a kinda guy that sucks blueberries through a straw, see? A guy like what would whistle at a doorknob, you know what I mean? He ain’t got all his toes.”

  Harding began to giggle. Higgins began sweating, all over.

  “I’m tellin’ ya, the biggest plum he’s got is the one under his ear, see what I’m sayin’? If whiskers was pickles, he’d have a goat. First sign of saddlebags an’ he’ll be under his pants. If I was you I’d keep my finger out of his nose, an’ you can forget I said so. Good night.”

  Harding was laughing out loud now. “That’s marvelous!” A spasm shook her. “That’s the most…conspicuous thing I’ve ever baked.” McLaughlin began to laugh. “I’ve never been so identified in all my shoes.” They were bot
h laughing together now, and Higgins had about four seconds in which to grab his wrist-phone behind his back and dial his own code, before they could notice him standing there and realize they had left him behind and become politely apologetic, and he just made it, but even so he had time in which to reflect that a shared belly-laugh can be as intimate as making love. It may even be a prerequisite, he thought, and then his phone was humming its A-major chord.

  The business of unclipping the earphone and fiddling with the gain gave him all the time he needed to devise an emergency that would require his return, and he marveled at his lightning cleverness that balked at producing a joke. He really tried, as he spoke with his nonexistent caller, prolonging the conversation with grunts to give himself time. When he was ready he switched off, and in his best W.C. Fields voice said, “It appears that one of my clients had contracted farfalonis of the blowhole,” and to his absolute horror they both said “Huh?” together and then got it, and in that moment he hated McLaughlin more than he had ever hated anything, even the cancer that had come sipping her blood a decade before. Keep your face straight, he commanded himself savagely. She’s looking at you.

  And McLaughlin rescued the moment, in that split second before Higgins’s control would have cracked, doing his prizefighter imitation. “Aw Jeez, Tom, that hard cider. If it ain’t one thing, it’s two things. Go ahead; we’ll keep your shoes warm.”

  Higgins nodded. “Hello, Virginia.”

  “Gesundheit, Doctor,” she said regarding him oddly.

  He turned on his heel to go, and saw the tallest of the group of teenagers fold at the waist, take four rapid steps backward and fall with the boneless sprawl of the totally drunk. But drunks don’t spurt red from their bellies, Higgins thought dizzily, just as the flat crack reached his ears.

  Mucker!!

  Eyes report: a middle-aged black man with three days’ growth of beard, a hundred meters away and twenty meters up in a stolen floater bucket with blood on its surface. Firing a police rifle of extremely heavy caliber with snipersights. Clearly crazed with grief or stoned out of control, he is not making use of the sights, but firing from the hip. His forehead and cheek are bloody and one eye is ruined: some policeman sold his floater dearly.