And maybe you can't. But you've got to try.
You place your hands against the papillae on either side of the closed eye, straighten your arms, then stretch your feet toward the other stump.
You don't reach. You extend to your fingertips and point your toes, and still you can't reach the other side.
Damn!
Frustrated, you rotate until you're upright, suspended between the stumps.
You need help, and there's only one person who can give it.
"Sam?"
You call out the name and it echoes in the volcano's chimney. You know that beyond your earphones, in the real world, your voice is filling the bedroom. Your words are entering Sam through her ears and via the memoryscape. She's got to hear.
"Sam! Sam, can you hear me? It's me, Julie. I don't know if you've been aware of me, but I've been traveling your mind, trying to bring you back."
You wonder how Sam, if she can hear you, will react to those words.
"Isn't that a laugh ... me wanting to do something for you? But it's the truth. I'm here to help you. I've been trying for weeks but haven't found a way to do it until now. Trouble is, I can't do it alone. You've got to work with me. Just a little. Do you hear me, Sam? Please ... give me a sign if you hear me."
You watch the closed lid. Not even a twitch. And on the other side ... an unbroken stare.
"Sam! Listen! Can you hear me or are you ignoring me? I know I've got no right to think you'll trust me. I know I've hurt you time and again, and I know I've crushed every olive branch you've extended until you ran out of branches, but this time is different. I'm here as a friend, Sam. As your sister, ready to act like a sister for the first time in our lives."
A beep from the physiologic ribbon. Sam's pulse is up to 118. Her respirations are 10. Damn ...
Is that the sign? No. Can't be. Her pulse was on the rise before you began talking to her. Then why is this happening? You haven't been in the memoryscape all that long. Is it because of first time you are?
Whatever the reason, it's not good. The program will automatically exit you when her pulse hits 130.
You hear a rumble. The walls of the volcano tremble. What was that?
And is it getting hotter, or is that just you?
"Listen to me, Sam. There's not much time. Some way, somehow, you've got to let these words through. Between the two of us, you were always the one who could love, and I know you loved me. And I know I killed that love over the years. If you hate me, Sam, you've got every right. But that was the other Julie. This is a different Julie talking. For the first time in my life I'm here for you, Sam. As a sister. As the missing part of you. I—"
Another beep. Pulse now 125.
And a louder rumble. The lava is bubbling more, and appears to be rising. .. slowly, perhaps, but you know its roiling surface is closer than before. No question—it's definitely hotter.
And you're almost out of time. You press on.
"We were betrayed, Sam. We were warped by a madman. The result is, neither of us is complete. You've got the rest of me, Sam. And I've got the rest of you. We can beat this, but neither of us can do it alone."
The WINDOW is blinking. A click brings Dr. S.'s worried face into view.
"Give it up, Julie. There's some sort of reaction going on. Get out before you hurt her and yourself as well."
"No. Not yet. I've got a feeling I'll never get this chance again. Please, not yet!"
"It's not up to me. The program will—"
"Override it."
"I can't. There is no override. And even if I could—"
"Type in 'P-H-Y-S-O-V-R-D-dot-E-X-E.'"
"What?"
"Now! Do it now! It's an override program I wrote. Just in case. And this is that case. Please. I'm begging you!"
"Very well." A few seconds later: "It's asking me for a password."
"E-I-L-U-J."
"What? Oh, 1 get it." Another pause. "There. It says 'Override Executed.'"
"Thank you!"
"I hope you know what you're doing."
I have no idea what I'm doing, you think. But it's getting too hot for thinking.
"I've learned a lot in here, Sam." You're shouting now, hoping it makes a difference. "I learned a lot about you I never knew, and a lot about me. Most of what I learned about me I don't like. But I've changed, Sam. Because of you. You're responsible. So don't leave me hanging here. Help me help you, Sam. All I need is a little. Stretch a little, Sam. You see these two cut ends on either side of me? Move them just a little closer together so I can bridge the gap. Come on, Sam! Just a little!"
"Give it up, Julie," Dr. S. says gently. "Her pulse is one-forty. You gave it your best shot, but, damn it, she's too far gone."
He's right. It's no use. The eye on the cortex side remains closed. Not even a twitch there. The heat sears you and the rumbling and shaking are beginning to rattle you.
This isn't going to work. You've got to get out.
Your throat constricts and a pressure builds again in your chest. But you don't fight it this time. This time you let the sob burst free.
With your eyes squeezed shut against the tears welling inside your goggles and your arms stretched to either side like a crucified martyr waiting for the last nail, you wail unashamedly into the heat and noise. Because you've got to let her know and you may not get another chance.
"I love you, Sam.... I hope you can hear me. And I'm sorry for all the hurt I caused you while we were growing up, but I... I never knew. I didn't understand. Couldn't understand. But I do now, and I do love you, Sam. I want you to know that, and I want you to take it with you wherever you're going. Maybe you want to go, and if that's the case I beg you to re-consider. You've given me something, Sam. You've given me back a bit of my missing part, and it's made me hunger for more. And I can give you back some of what you're missing. We're two cripples, Sam. But together we can help rebuild each other. I've got the tools right here. So come back to me, Sam. Let me make it up to you. I'm not a monster ... really I'm not. Don't give up on me, Sam. I just learned that I love my sister. Please don't leave me now."
And that's all you can say. You're sobbing uncontrollably now. Part of you feels like a damn fool, but another part, a newer part, doesn't give a damn. If only—
Something clamps around your left index finger. You glance over, and through the blur of tears you think you see ...
No. Can't be. You blink, and blink again, and you see that it's true.
One of the papillae from the open-eye side has stretched out from the stump and reached you. Its tip has taken the shape of an infant's tiny hand ... and its stubby, pudgy fingers are holding on for dear life. Others too are stretching toward you, undulating in the heat, reaching....
"Yes!" you cry and your voice sounds choked and you're afraid you're going to start sobbing again because the emotions surging through you are almost overwhelming and you can't allow yourself to be overwhelmed because you've got to keep a straight head here, got to stay focused and help Sam make this connection.
What about the other side, the cortex side?
You turn and see a single, blunt-tipped papilla reaching out from below the closed eye, stretching in your direction but not very far—no more than eighteen inches at best. So feeble, and already it appears to be weakening, sagging with the heat.
You stretch your arm toward it, but you're still a good six inches short.
"Come on, Sam! You can do it! Come on!"
But the papilla sags farther. Desperate, you wrap your fingers around the little hand from the other side, and pull it toward you, stretching the tendril behind it. As it elongates it begins to thin along its midsection.
"Don't break," you whisper. "Please don't break."
You give it a moment and it seems to thicken, or at least redistribute its mass, but still it appears dangerously thin.
You can't wait any longer. You stretch it farther, all the while extending your right arm toward the closed eye, just inches now.
"Come on... just a little farther..."
And then almost as if sensing your presence, the papilla rises and stretches and—
Contact is like an electric shock, a nerve-jittering, jaw-clenching, muscle-spasming jolt running up your left arm and down your right. You scream in pain but you won't let go, won't pull back. You must hold on.
And then the pain subsides to a tingle. You relax and open your eyes. The cortex eye is still closed but the papillae around it have sprung to life. They move with new energy, some of them shooting out toward you. On the other end, farther away, the same thing: hundreds of tendrils snaking toward you.
It's working! You've bridged the gap and you're conducting the impulses. They're flowing through you to Sam's cortex!
You can only hope it's enough.
You hear a loud, shuddering sob and realize it's you. Not again! Where's your fabled control? You haven't cried since you were a baby. What are you going to do, make up for all that time in one day?
The new tendrils from each side reach you then, their tips morphing into hands as soon as they make contact—baby hands, little-girl hands, teenager and adult hands, all the hands of Sam's life—-and they grasp you and crawl up your arms, and clutch at you, stretching to your shoulders and then to your chest and your breasts, the ones on the left pouring their impulses into you and the ones on the right drinking them up, and, God, you're crying like a baby and you feel like a mother nursing her firstborn, and some new hands move to your face to wipe your tears while others caress your hair before sliding past you to fuse with the members from the opposite side, and suddenly they're proliferating in a frenzy and you're engulfed in tendrils, almost smothering in conducting fibers that don't need you anymore so you struggle from the wild tangle, wriggling downward, extricating yourself from the snarled mess. And just before you pull free you glance at the cortex eye and see that it's open now, its iris as blue as the other eye's, as blue as Sam's, and it's watching you.
You smile and you know it's a tremulous, wavering thing. You can barely speak through the torrent of emotions cascading through you.
"Welcome back, sis."
And then you're half a dozen feet away, watching the connections thicken and multiply. You can almost see the impulses surging through to Sam's starved cortex. Her EEG readout is going wild.
You've done it! And it feels wonderful.
But then ... there's another rumble—the loudest yet. It cuts off your little celebration. A different rumble, deeper and longer than any before. The others seemed to come from the volcano itself. This one originates elsewhere. And suddenly everything is shaking.
You check the readout and see that Sam's pulse is 162. Is that the cause of the quake? Have you stayed in too—?
Something dark blurs past you on the left and splashes into the lava below. You look up and see other chunks of lava rock tumbling from the chimney wall as the rumbling continues.
"No!"
Your shout echoes in your headphones. Not now! This can't happen now. Sam's just got her chance to rejoin the living and now the whole mountain is collapsing on her. You've got to stop this, find some way to—
Pain lances up your arm as you're knocked back by a falling chunk of lava. You look at your virtual arm and see the skin is torn and bleeding. And it hurts.
The Window button is beeping and blinking. You know what he's going to say. And he's right. You've got to leave. Now. Or you'll both suffer.
Damn! Damn everything! You want to scream.
Instead you click EXIT.
Thirty-Three
People have asked if the memoryscape programs could be useful in treating or identifying False Memory Syndrome. I haven't 'scaped an FMS patient yet, but it's a fascinating challenge. To the sufferer, false memories are indistinguishable from true memories, but the memoryscape might offer clues.
—Random notes: Julia Gordon
1
Julie tore off her helmet and lay there gasping, drenched in sweat. And her arm was killing her. As her breathing slowed she heard an insistent pounding somewhere in the room. She sat up and looked around.
The afternoon sun had been swallowed by rain clouds, turning the room dim and gloomy. To her right the monitor beeped. Its flashing icon said Dr. S. wanted to talk. Fine, but that awful racket... where—?
The door. Someone was rattling and banging on the door.
Julie pushed herself from the chair, wiped her tears as she crossed the room, and unlocked the door.
The nurse stood in the hallway with cook and the maid clustered behind her. She stared at Julie in shock.
"Great heavens, miss! What's happened in there?"
"Why ... nothing. Just—"
"We heard terrible shouting and crying. We thought you were struggling with someone and—" She gasped as her wide-eyed gaze came to rest on Julie's right arm. "Oh—look at your arm! What happened to your'
Julie stared at her sleeve. The fabric was intact but glistening with blood. She rolled it up and stared at the inch-long tear in the skin beneath. It was much smaller than the wound to her virtual arm in the 'scape, but still... a wound.
She swallowed. "It's nothing. I'll be okay."
The nurse squeezed past her and hurried into the bedroom.
"I'll help you with that in a minute. Right now I've got to tend to my patient. She should be—oh! Great heavens! What's happened to her?"
Julie reached to the bedside. "What's wrong?"
"She's soaked!"
True enough. Sam's flannel nightgown was drenched with perspiration and plastered to her skin.
Julie removed Sam's headgear, then lifted her wrist and counted her pulse: 140. Down from a few moments ago. Her face, though, was as slack and expressionless as ever.
"Sam?" She grasped her shoulder and shook it. "Sam, can you hear me?"
No response. Not even a twitch of an eyelid.
She pulled up one of those lids: The blue eye within stared back at her, unseeing.
Crushed, Julie sank onto the edge of the bed, gazing at her sister.
"Sam?" she said plaintively. "After all that, aren't you coming back to me?"
What did I do in there? she wondered. I thought I brought you back. Why aren't you back?
"She must have run a fever," the nurse said.
''No... no fever."
"Well, something must have happened."
"No," Julie said, still gazing at Sam's face. "I'm afraid nothing happened . .. nothing at all."
The monitor beeped again.
The nurse said, "I've got to change her immediately before she takes a chill."
"Sure." Julie pushed herself up from the bed. "Go ahead. I'll be over here."
She dropped into the wooden chair by the monitor—Alma's old seat. And inside she felt as dead as Alma. Outside she felt like hell: damp, exhausted, and her arm throbbing with pain. She stared at the blood. Dr. S. had been right. She'd been in real physical danger in there. So what? It had all been for nothing.
She hadn't accomplished anything.
You failed her again, dammit.
She hit a couple of keys and Dr. Mordecai Siegal's face filled the screen.
"Finally!" he said. "1 was worried something had happened to you."
Reflexively Julie pulled her bloody arm behind her before remembering he couldn't see her.
"I'm okay. I was checking Sam."
"How is she? Any sign she's regaining;—"
"Nothing," Julie said. "No change at all, other than a sweat."
"A sweat?"
"Yeah. She was drenched."
"Hmmm." Dr. S. tapped his fingertips against his lips. "A burst of autonomic activity. That could mean something. How's her EEG? Her cortex showed such a tremendous response when you bridged that gap. Which, I must say, was a truly heroic effort on your part. You've changed, Julie. I don't know if you realize it, but—"
"Yeah, well... looks like it was all a waste of time. She was back to her usual eleven- to twelve-Hert
z when I removed her headset. Which means..."
She couldn't finish the sentence. She was filling up again.
"Easy, Julie. You did everything humanly possible."
"But not enough!" she yelled. "What happened in there, Dr. S.? I found the problem, repaired the connection, and that should have been it. Sam should have been on her way back to consciousness. Why did everything start to fall apart at the end? At first I thought the volcano was going to erupt again, but then came that earthquake or whatever it was ... the connection must have been torn apart again." She let out a great breath. "I'm missing something."
Julie squeezed her eyes shut, remembering the wonderful touch of those tendrils, those little hands, the impulses surging through her.
"We had her fixed! And now we're right back where we started. No, we're worse than when we started. Because after the cave-in, that chimney has to be completely choked with rubble. We won't get another chance to reconnect her. She's a goner."
"Wait, now," he said. "You don't know for sure that the repair was cut. That quake may have been her own doing, a way to block up the volcano chimney and bury the connection. Remember, it started off subterranean; maybe your sister wants it underground again."
Julie looked over at her limp, motionless twin.
"If she's still connected, why isn't she responding? Why isn't there some sign of improvement? I don't expect her to get up and start painting, but I was hoping maybe she'd move a toe or twitch a finger or blink her eyes. God, I'll take anything. But there is no change. Nothing. Nada."
Julie realized she sounded angry. And she was. Furious, in fact. Furious that she'd tried everything she knew and had come up empty-handed.
Good. Hold on to that. It's better than the crushing despair of a moment ago.
"Maybe even a twitch is too much to expect so soon. Who knows? It may take a while for her cortex to repair itself, for her consciousness to reorganize after such a catastrophic assault."
Julie barked a harsh laugh. "Usually I'm the optimist and you're the naysayer. How'd we get switched around?"
"Because I've never heard you sound so defeated. It's not like you."
F Paul Wilson - Novel 05 Page 30