Multiples (1983-87)

by Robert Silverberg

  I felt his eyes burning me. I looked away, halfway across the lounge, and caught sight of Elisandra’s long golden hair drifting in free float. She saw me at the same moment, and waved. We usually got together in here this time of night. I shook my head, trying to warn her off, but it was too late. She was already heading our way.

  “Who’s that?” Fazio asked. “Your girlfriend?”

  “A friend.”

  “Nice,” he said. He was staring at her as though he had never seen a woman before. “I noticed her last night too. You live together?”

  “We work the same shift on the wheel.”

  “Yeah. I saw you leave with her last night. And the night before.”

  “How long have you been at the Station, Fazio?”

  “Week. Ten days, maybe.”

  “Came here looking for me?”

  “Just wandering around,” he said. “Fat disability pension, plenty of time. I go to a lot of places. That’s a really nice woman, Chollie. You’re a lucky guy.” A tic was popping on his cheek and another was getting started on his lower lip. He said,

  “Why the fuck didn’t you kill me when that thing first jumped me?”

  “I told you. I couldn’t. The paramedics were on the scene too fast.”

  “Right. You needed to say some Hail Marys first, and they just didn’t give you enough time.”

  He was implacable. I had to strike back at him somehow or the guilt and shame would drive me crazy. Angrily I said, “What the hell do you want me to tell you, Fazio? That I’m sorry I didn’t kill you ten years ago? Okay, I’m sorry. Does that do any good? Listen, if the synsym’s as bad as you say, how come you haven’t killed yourself? Why go on dragging yourself around with that thing inside your head?”

  He shook his head and made a little muffled grunting sound. His face abruptly became gray, his lips were sagging. His eyeballs seemed to be spinning slowly in opposite directions. Just an illusion, I knew, but a scary one.

  “Fazio?”

  He said, “Chollallula lillalolla loolicholla. Billillolla.”

  I stared. He looked frightening. He looked hideous.

  “Jesus, Fazio!”

  Spittle dribbled down his chin. Muscles jumped and writhed crazily all over his face. “You see? You see?” he managed to blurt. There was warfare inside him. I watched him trying to regain command. It was like a man wrestling himself to a fall. I thought he was going to have a stroke. But then, suddenly, he seemed to grow calm. His breath was ragged, his skin was mottled with fiery blotches. He collapsed down into himself, head drooping, arms dangling. He looked altogether spent. Another minute or two passed before he could speak. I didn’t know what to do for him. I floated there, watching. Finally a little life seemed to return to him.

  “Did you see? That’s what happens,” he gasped. “It takes control. How could I ever kill myself? It wouldn’t let me do it.”

  “Wouldn’t let you?”

  He looked up at me and sighed wearily. “Think, Chollie, think! It’s in symbiosis with me. We aren’t independent organisms.” Then the tremors began again, worse than before. Fazio made a desperate furious attempt to fight them off—arms and legs flung rigidly out, jaws working—but it was useless. “Illallomba!” he yelled. “Nullagribba!” He tossed his head from side to side as if trying to shake off something sticky that was clinging to it. “If I—then it—gillagilla! Holligoolla! I can’t—I can’t—oh—Jesus—Christ—!

  His voice died away into harsh sputters and clankings. He moaned and covered his face with his hands.

  But now I understood.

  For Fazio there could never be any escape. That was the most monstrous part of the whole thing, the ultimate horrifying twist. The symbiont knew that its destiny was linked to Fazio’s. If he died, the symbiont would also; and so it could not allow its host to damage himself. From its seat in Fazio’s brain it had ultimate control over his body. Whatever he tried—jump off a bridge, reach for a flask of poison, pick up a gun—the watchful thing in his mind would be a step ahead of him, always protecting him against harm.

  A flood of compassion welled up in me and I started to put my hand comfortingly on Fazio’s shoulder. But then I yanked it back as though I were afraid the symbiont could jump from his mind into mine at the slightest touch. And then I scowled and forced myself to touch him after all. He pulled away. He looked burned out.

  “Chollie?” Elisandra said, coming up beside us. She floated alongside, long-limbed, beautiful, frowning. “Is this private, or can I join you?”

  I hesitated, fumbling. I desperately wanted to keep Fazio and Elisandra in separate compartments of my life, but I saw that I had no way of doing that. “We were—well—just that—”

  “Come on, Chollie,” Fazio said in a bleak hollow voice. “Introduce your old war buddy to the nice woman.”

  Elisandra gave him an inquiring glance. She could not have failed to detect the strangeness in his tone.

  I took a deep breath. “This is Fazio,” I said. “We were in the Servadac campaign together during the Second Ovoid War. Fazio—Elisandra. Elisandra’s a traffic-polarity engineer on the turnaround wheel—you ought to see her at work, the coolest cookie you can imagine—”

  “An honor to meet you,” said Fazio grandly. “A woman who combines such beauty and such technical skills—I have to say—I—I—” Suddenly he was faltering. His face turned blotchy. Fury blazed in his eyes. “No! Damn it, no! No more!” He clutched handfuls of air in some wild attempt at steadying himself. “Mullagalloola!” he cried, helpless. “Jillabongbong! Sampazozozo!” And he burst into wild choking sobs, while Elisandra stared at him in amazement and sorrow.

  “Well, are you going to kill him?” she asked.

  It was two hours later. We had put Fazio to bed in his little cubicle over at Transient House, and she and I were in her room. I had told her everything.

  I looked at her as though she had begun to babble the way Fazio had. Elisandra and I had been together almost a year, but there were times I felt I didn’t know her at all.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Are you serious?”

  “You owe it to him. You owe him a death, Chollie. He can’t come right out and say it, because the symbiont won’t allow him to. But that’s what he wants from you.”

  I couldn’t deny any of that. I’d been thinking the same thing for at least the past hour. The reality of it was inescapable: I had muffed things on Weinstein and sent Fazio to hell for ten years. Now I had to set him free.

  “If there was only some way to get the symbiont out of his brain—”

  “But there isn’t.”

  “No,” I said. “There isn’t.”

  “You’ll do it for him, won’t you?”

  “Quit it,” I said.

  “I hate the way he’s suffering, Chollie.”

  “You think I don’t?”

  “And what about you? Suppose you fail him a second time. How will you live with that? Tell me how.”

  “I was never much for killing, Ellie. Not even Ovoids.”

  “We know that,” she said. “But you don’t have any choice this time.”

  I went to the little fireglobe she had mounted above the sleeping platform, and hit the button and sent sparks through the thick coiling mists. A rustle of angry colors swept the mist, a wild aurora, green, purple, yellow. After a moment I said quietly, “You’re absolutely right.”

  “Good. I was afraid for a moment you were going to crap out on him again.”

  There was no malice in it, the way she said it. All the same, it hit me like a fist. I stood there nodding, letting the impact go rippling through me and away.

  At last the reverberations seemed to die down within me. But then a great new uneasiness took hold of me and I said, “You know, it’s totally idiotic of us to be discussing this. I’m involving you in something that’s none of your business. What we’re doing is making you an accomplice before the fact.”

  Elisandra ignored me. Som
ething was in motion in her mind, and there was no swerving her now. “How would you go about it?” she asked. “You can’t just cut someone’s throat and dump him down a disposer chute.”

  “Look,” I said, “do you understand that the penalty could be anything up to—”

  She went on, “Any sort of direct physical assault is out. There’d be some sort of struggle for sure—the symbiont’s bound to defend the host body against attack—you’d come away with scratches, bruises, worse. Somebody would notice. Suppose you got so badly hurt you had to go to the medics. What would you tell them? A barroom brawl? And then nobody can find your old friend Fazio who you were seen with a few days before? No, much too risky.” Her tone was strangely businesslike, matter-of-fact. “And then, getting rid of the body—that’s even tougher, Chollie, getting fifty kilos of body mass off the Station without some kind of papers. No destination visa, no transshipment entry. Even a sack of potatoes would have an out-invoice. But if someone just vanishes and there’s a fifty-kilo short balance in the mass totals that day—”

  “Quit it,” I said. “Okay?”

  “You owe him a death. You agreed about that.”

  “Maybe I do. But whatever I decide, I don’t want to drag you into it. It isn’t your mess, Ellie.”

  “You don’t think so?” she shot right back at me.

  Anger and love were all jumbled together in Elisandra’s tone. I didn’t feel like dealing with that just now. My head was pounding. I activated the pharmo arm by the sink and hastily ran a load of relaxants into myself with a subcue shot. Then I took her by the hand. Gently, trying hard to disengage, I said, “Can we just go to bed now? I’d rather not talk about this any more.”

  Elisandra smiled and nodded. “Sure,” she replied, and her voice was much softer.

  She started to pull off her clothes. But after a moment she turned to me, troubled. “I can’t drop it just like that, Chollie. It’s still buzzing inside me. That poor bastard.” She shuddered.

  “Never to be alone in his own head. Never to be sure he has control over his own body. Waking up in a puddle of piss, he said. Speaking in tongues. All that other crazy stuff. What did he say? Like feeling an ant wandering around inside his skull? An itch you can’t possibly scratch?”

  “I didn’t know it would be that bad,” I said. “I think I would have killed him back then, if I had known.”

  “Why didn’t you anyway?”

  “He was Fazio. A human being. My friend. My buddy. I didn’t much want to kill Ovoids, even. How the hell was I going to kill him?”

  “But you promised to, Chollie.”

  “Let me be,” I said. “I didn’t do it, that’s all. Now I have to live with that.”

  “So does he,” said Elisandra.

  I climbed into her sleeptube and lay there without moving, waiting for her.

  “So do I,” she added after a little while.

  She wandered around the room for a time before joining me. Finally she lay down beside me, but at a slight distance. I didn’t move toward her. But eventually the distance lessened, and I put my hand lightly on her shoulder, and she turned to me.

  An hour or so before dawn she said, “I think I see a way we can do it.”

  We spent a week and a half working out the details. I was completely committed to it now, no hesitations, no reservations. As Elisandra said, I had no choice. This was what I owed Fazio; this was the only way I could settle accounts between us.

  She was completely committed to it too: even more so than I was, it sometimes seemed. I warned her that she was needlessly letting herself in for major trouble in case the Station authorities ever managed to reconstruct what had happened. It didn’t seem needless to her, she said.

  I didn’t have a lot of contact with him while we were arranging things. It was important, I figured, not to give the symbiont any hints. I saw Fazio practically every day, of course—Betelgeuse Station isn’t all that big—off at a distance, staring, glaring, sometimes having one of his weird fits, climbing a wall or shouting incoherently or arguing with himself out loud; but generally I pretended not to see him. At times I couldn’t avoid him, and then we met for dinner or drinks or a workout in the rec room. But there wasn’t much of that.

  “Okay,” Elisandra said finally. “I’ve done my part. Now you do yours, Chollie.”

  Among the little services we run here is a sightseeing operation for tourists who feel like taking a close look at a red giant star. After the big stellar-envelope research project shut down a few years ago we inherited a dozen or so solar sleds that had been used for skimming through the fringes of Betelgeuse’s mantle, and we began renting them out for three-day excursions. The sleds are two-passenger jobs without much in the way of luxury and nothing at all in the way of propulsion systems. The trip is strictly ballistic: we calculate your orbit and shoot you out of here on the big repellers, sending you on a dazzling swing across Betelgeuse’s outer fringes that gives you the complete light-show and maybe a view of ten or twelve of the big star’s family of planets. When the sled reaches the end of its string, we catch you on the turnaround wheel and reel you in. It sounds spectacular, and it is; it sounds dangerous, and it isn’t. Not usually, anyhow.

  I tracked Fazio down in the gravity lounge and said, “We’ve arranged a treat for you, man.”

  The sled I had rented for him was called the Corona Queen. Elisandra routinely handled the dispatching job for these tours, and now and then I worked as wheelman for them, although ordinarily I wheeled the big interstellar liners that used Betelgeuse Station as their jumping-off point for deeper space. We were both going to work Fazio’s sled. Unfortunately, this time there was going to be a disaster, because a regrettable little error had been made in calculating orbital polarity, and then there would be a one-in-amillion failure of the redundancy circuits. Fazio’s sled wasn’t going to go on a tour of Betelgeuse’s far-flung corona at all. It was going to plunge right into the heart of the giant red star.

  I would have liked to tell him that, as we headed down the winding corridors to the dropdock. But I couldn’t, because telling Fazio meant telling Fazio’s symbiont also; and what was good news for Fazio was bad news for the symbiont. To catch the filthy thing by surprise: that was essential.

  How much did Fazio suspect? God knows. In his place, I think I might have had an inkling. But maybe he was striving with all his strength to turn his mind away from any kind of speculation about the voyage he was about to take.

  “You can’t possibly imagine what it’s like,” I said. “It’s unique. There’s just no way to simulate it. And the view of Betelgeuse that you get from the Station isn’t even remotely comparable.”

  “The sled glides through the corona on a film of vaporized carbon,” said Elizandra. “The heat just rolls right off its surface.” We were chattering compulsively, trying to fill every moment with talk. “You’re completely shielded so that you can actually pass through the atmosphere of the star—”

  “Of course,” I said, “Betelgeuse is so big and so violent that you’re more or less inside its atmosphere no matter where you are in its system—”

  “And then there are the planets,” Elisandra said. “The way things are lined up this week, you may be able to see as many as a dozen of them—”

  “—Otello, Falstaff, Siegfried, maybe Wotan—”

  “—You’ll find a map on the ceiling of your cabin—”

  “—Five gas giants twice the mass of Jupiter—keep your eye out for Wotan, that’s the one with rings—”

  “—and Isolde, you can’t miss Isolde, she’s even redder than Betelgeuse, the damndest bloodshot planet imaginable—”

  “—with eleven red moons, too, but you won’t be able to see them without filters—”

  “—Otello and Falstaff for sure, and I think this week’s chart shows Aida out of occultation now too—”

  “—and then there’s the band of comets—”

  “—the asteroids, that’s where we thi
nk a couple of the planets collided after gravitational perturbation of—”

  “—and the Einsteinian curvature, it’s unmistakable—”

  “—the big solar flares—”

  “Here we are,” Elisandra said.

  We had reached the dropdock. Before us rose a gleaming metal wall. Elisandra activated the hatch and it swung back to reveal the little sled, a sleek tapering frog-nosed thing with a low hump in the middle. It sat on tracks; above it arched the coils of the repeller-launcher, radiating at the moment the blue-green glow that indicated a neutral charge. Everything was automatic. We had only to put Fazio on board and give the Station the signal for launch; the rest would be taken care of by the orbital-polarity program Elisandra had previously keyed in.

  “It’s going to be the trip of your life, man!” I said.

  Fazio nodded. His eyes looked a little glazed, and his nostrils were flaring.

  Elisandra hit the pre-launch control. The sled’s roof opened and a recorded voice out of a speaker in the dropdock ceiling began to explain to Fazio how to get inside and make himself secure for launching. My hands were cold, my throat was dry. Yet I was very calm, all things considered. This was murder, wasn’t it? Maybe so, technically speaking. But I was finding other names for it. A mercy killing; a balancing of the karmic accounts; a way of atoning for an ancient sin of omission. For him, release from hell after ten years; for me, release from a lesser but still acute kind of pain.