Dancing With Myself

by Charles Sheffield

  I was watching the performance of the other three combines only a little less intently that I was watching our own. At five hours from contact time, NETSCO apparently suffered a communications loss with their asteroid control system. Instead of heading for Io impact, the asteroid veered away, spiraling in towards the bulk of Jupiter itself.

  BP Megation lost it at impact minus three hours, when a vast explosion on one of their asteroid forward boosters threw the kilometer-long body into a rapid tumble. Within an hour, by some miracle of improvisation, their engineering team had found a method of stabilizing the wobbling mass. But by then it was too late to return to nominal impact time and place. Their asteroid skimmed into the surface of Io an hour early, sending up a long, tear-shaped mass of ejecta from the moon’s turbulent surface.

  That left just two of us, MMG and Romberg AG. We both had our hands full. The Jovian system is filled with electrical, magnetic, and gravitational energies bigger than anything in the Solar System except around the Sun itself. The two remaining combines were trying to steer their asteroid in to a pinpoint landing through a great storm of interference that made every control command and every piece of incoming telemetry suspect. In the final hour, I didn’t even follow the exchanges between my trouble-shooters. Oh, I could hear them easily enough. What I couldn’t do is comprehend them, enough to know what was happening.

  Pauli would toss a scrap of comment at von Neumann, and while I was trying to understand that, von Neumann would have done an assessment, keyed in for a data bank status report, gabbled a couple of questions to Fermi and an instruction to Edison, and at the same time be absorbing scribbled notes and diagrams from those two. I don’t know if what they were doing was potentially intelligible to me or not; all I know is that they were going about fifty times too fast for me to follow. And it didn’t much matter what I understood—they were getting the job done. I was still trying to divide all problems into my Category One—Category Two columns, but it got harder and harder.

  In the final hour I didn’t look or listen to what my own team was doing. We had one band of telemetry trained on the MMG project, and more and more that’s where my attention was focused. I assumed they were having the same kind of communications trouble as we were—that crackling discharge field around Io made everything difficult. But their team was handling it. They were swinging smoothly in to impact.

  And then, with only ten minutes to go, the final small adjustment was made. It should have been a tiny nudge from the radial jets; enough to fine-tune the impact position a few hundred meters, and no more. Instead, there was a joyous roar of a radial jet at full, uncontrolled thrust. The MMG asteroid did nothing unusual for a few seconds (a billion tons is a lot of inertia) then began to drift lazily sideways, away from its nominal trajectory.

  The jet was still firing. And that should be impossible, because the first thing that the MMG team would do was send a POWER-OFF signal to the engine.

  The time for impact came when the MMG asteroid was still a clear fifty kilometers out of position, and accelerating away. I saw the final collision, and the payload scraped along the surface of Io in a long, jagged scar that looked nothing at all like the neat, punched hole that we were supposed to achieve.

  And we did achieve it, a few seconds later. Our asteroid came in exactly where and when it was supposed to, driving in exactly vertical to the surface. The plume of ejecta had hardly begun to rise from Io’s red-and-yellow surface before von Neumann was pulling a bottle of bourbon from underneath the communications console.

  I didn’t object—I only wished I were there physically to share it, instead of being stuck in my own pod, short of rendezvous with our main ship. I looked at my final list, still somewhat incomplete. Was there a pattern to it? Ten minutes of analysis didn’t show one. No one had tried anything—this time. Someday, and it might be tomorrow, somebody on another combine would have a bright idea; and then it would be a whole new ball game.

  While I was still pondering my list, my control console began to buzz insistently. I switched it on expecting contact with my own trouble-shooting team. Instead, I saw the despondent face of Brunel, MMG’s own team leader—the man above all others that I would have liked to work on my side.

  He nodded at me when my picture appeared on his screen. He was smoking one of his powerful black cigars, stuck in the side of his mouth. The expression on his face was as impenetrable as ever. He never let his feelings show there. “I assume you saw it, did you?” he said around the cigar. “We’re out of it. I just called to congratulate you—again.”

  “Yeah, I saw it. Tough luck. At least you came second.”

  “Which as you know very well is no better than coming last.” He sighed and shook his head. “We still have no idea what happened. Looks like either a programing error, or a valve sticking open. We probably won’t know for weeks. And I’m not sure I care.”

  I maintained a sympathetic silence.

  “I sometimes think we should just give up, Al,” he said. “I can beat those other turkeys, but I can’t compete with you. That’s six in a row that you’ve won. It’s wearing me out. You’ve no idea how much frustration there is in that.”

  I had never known Brunel to reveal so much of his feelings before.

  “I think I do understand your problems,” I said.

  And I did. I knew exactly how he felt—more than he would believe. To suffer through a whole, endless sequence of minor, niggling, mishaps was heartbreaking. No single trouble was ever big enough for a trouble-shooting team to stop, isolate it, and be able to say, there’s dirty work going on here. But their cumulative effect was another matter. One day it was a morass of shipments missing their correct flights, another time a couple of minus signs dropped into computer programs, or a key worker struck down for a few days by a random virus, permits misfiled, manifests mislaid, or licenses wrongly dated.

  I knew all those mishaps, personally. I should, because I invented most of them. I think of it as the death of a thousand cuts. No one can endure all that and still hope to win a Phase B study.

  “How would you like to work on the Europan Metamorph?” I asked. “I think you’d love it.”

  He looked very thoughtful, and for the first time I believe I could actually read his expression. “Leave MMG, you mean?” he said. “Maybe. I don’t know what I want any more. Let me think about it. I’d like to work with you, Al—you’re a genius.” Brunel was wrong about that, of course. I’m certainly not a genius. All I can do is what I’ve always done—handle people, take care of unpleasant details (quietly!), and make sure things get done that need doing. And of course, do what I do best: make sure that some things that need doing don’t get done.

  There are geniuses in the world, real geniuses. Not me, though. The man who decided to clone me, secretly—there I’d suggest you have a genius.

  “Say, don’t you remember, they called me Al…”

  Of course, I don’t remember. That song was written in the 1930’s and I didn’t die until 1947, but no clone remembers anything of the forefather life. The fact that we tend to be knowledgeable about our original’s period is an expression of interest in those individuals, not memories from them. I know the Chicago of the Depression years intimately, as well as I know today; but it is all learned knowledge. I have no actual recollection of events. I don’t remember.

  So even if you don’t remember, call me Al anyway. Everyone did.

  afterword: out of copyright

  The question, “Where do you get your story ideas?” is a hardy perennial for science fiction writers. It is asked all the time, and most of us have some standard answer more plausible or at least more interesting than the honest, “Don’t know.”

  Saucers of milk set out at night; small, still voices that whisper in our ears while we are watching baseball games; an anonymous correspondent in Akron, Ohio; dreams, stimulated by late night consumption of large
quantities of Stilton cheese.

  In this case I can actually offer a more specific answer. I got the idea for “Out of Copyright” at the “Anglers’ Inn” on Macarthur Boulevard, a few miles north and west of Washington, D.C. I can even say when I got it: June 25, 1987. That’s my birthday. The weather was really hot, and I rode my bike about five miles to reach the inn and have lunch alone there. I also, reprehensibly, drank four beers. Towards the end of the meal I was hit with the idea for the story.

  I have eaten lunch there on other occasions. I have even drunk beer there. But I have never again had a story come to me while at the inn. It does not seem to be that writers’ heaven, a place where you can go and automatically receive a new idea.

  As to the point of the story: writers are a little different from most other people, because part of us does not expire when we do. The copyright to our written work hangs on, a faint ectoplasmic shade of our bodily selves, for half a century or more after we are gone. Then our copyrights finally die, and what we have produced during our lifetimes becomes public property.

  I had the thought, suppose that copyright was granted not just for written work, but for all the rest of a person, too?

  Eventually that copyright would lapse; and you would have this story.

  ——————————————————————————————————

  story: tunicate, tunicate, wilt thou be mine?

  Curly locks, curly locks, wilt thou be mine?

  Thou shalt not wash dishes, nor yet feed the swine.

  But sit on a sofa and sew a fine seam,

  And dine upon strawberries, sugar, and cream.

  —English Nursery rhyme

  This has to be set down accurately, perfectly accurately; otherwise not one of you, whoever you are, will understand the truth—the truth about Master Tunicate, I mean, and why all the people died. I never expected to be the survivor—never wanted to be the survivor. But some choices you don’t get to make.

  If it were less noisy, maybe I could put everything onto the little tape recorder—it’s here, with all Jane’s blank tapes that she never used, and all the little spare batteries. But there’s the roaring, and the drums, and the shaking, and the water, and tape recorders are terrible for picking up every bit of background noise. You wouldn’t hear me at all.

  So it will have to be Walter’s notebook; and what is left out is left out.

  All right.

  So there we were, in the middle of Africa; and I defy you to find a more improbable quartet for an expedition. Walter, and Jane, and Wendy, and me, the terrible four. All of them such seasoned African travelers, and me a-gaping at everything I saw, and not knowing half the time if they were joking or not. Don’t drink that water, Steven, they’d say. Don’t eat the eggs and the bread. It was all a big joke. As Wendy used to say, the closest I had been to Africa was stories from mad Uncle George.

  That’s not the place to start. I can’t handle that. Let’s go back, back to the beginning. Let’s try Washington, last December.

  Winter came hard, and it came quickly. The Wednesday before Christmas it was like late fall. But on Christmas Eve, when we set off for Walter and Jane’s place in Great Falls, we had eight inches of snow over an icy road. We went slithering and sliding along in the Toyota, not sure we would make it up the next hill, and every two minutes we talked of turning around and heading back home for Bethesda.

  We kept going. Of course we did. Not all the animals are equal. For some friends we take ridiculous risks to keep a purely social appointment, for others Wendy or I would be on the phone making our apologies at the first sign of a snow flake.

  We kept going, even though I knew we were heading for a three-hand evening with me playing dummy. They were all Africa freaks. We’d have dinner, then I would drink too much Bristol Cream, while the rest of them rattled on about Africa. Bloody Africa.

  And when Walter told Wendy he had slides of his last trip, and that he had been to Zaire, did I complain? No. I even helped him set up the carousel projector—even though Zaire was just a name to me, along with Zambia and Zimbabwe, and all the other bloody zzz’s like Zanzibar and Mozambique that filled up the middle of Africa. And I took the worst seat, with my back to the fire, so that after fifteen minutes I was roasted.

  I’m not that obliging with everyone. Wendy could tell you that. When we went over last spring to see Sheila, one of Wendy’s childhood friends, and her husband, Max, and they started to show us slides of their last summer’s trip to England, I’m proud to say that I fell asleep on the floor, in the middle of their exposition. They deserved it. “This, is Westminster Abbey”—a dwarfed, out of focus shot of some anonymous building, with two hideous, grinning figures in the foreground. “This is Hadrian’s Wall.” A low, obscure something in the misty background, and the same two people. Sheila has a figure like a sack of potatoes, and Max’s parents never heard of the word “orthodontist.”

  Let’s be fair. Walter’s slides weren’t all like that. He had an artist’s eye, and he’d no more put himself in a picture than he’d photograph his bare bottom. And he’s conscientious—was, was—about scale and focus. A pity. If he hadn’t been, none of this would have started.

  His slides were in strict logical order. He was doing a vegetation study for the World Bank, and he brought us inland from the coast, past a couple of hundred kilometers of white water rapids, to Kinshasa, where the Zaire River was broad and placid. Wendy kept up a running commentary on the soils and rock types, as a sort of counterpoint to Walter’s botany. And after Jane noticed my glassy-eyed look, and explained to me that Zaire used to be called the Belgian Congo, and the river we were looking at used to be known as the Congo River, my old childhood geography lessons stirred in my brain and everything began to make sense to me as well.

  Congo. Magic word. Just say it to yourself. Cong-go. It’s the mightiest river in Africa. Don’t you feel the primitive power of the word? Congo. Africa. Heart of darkness. Enough to make you shiver.

  Perhaps I ought to explain how Wendy and I met. It may seem logical to you anyway, she a geologist and I a paleontologist. We could have run into each other while she was rock-hunting and I was digging up old bones. Logical, maybe, but quite wrong. I don’t dig up old bones. I work for the Smithsonian, and I arrange exhibits, and I write learned papers on taxonomy, and I spend three hundred and sixty nights of the year in the same bed. I am what Wendy’s family call a stick-at-homer, not quite to my face. They are all crazy, every one of them, and like mad Uncle George they swarm all over the world, looking for oil in the Java Sea or copper in southern Argentina. I’ll say it again, they’re all crazy.

  But Wendy and I did meet, and not in the Gobi Desert. We met at the Kennedy Center, at a concert. My neighbor had a season ticket, and he couldn’t attend, and Yo-Yo Ma was playing the Dvorák Cello Concerto, which is one of my favorites. So that accounts for my presence. And Wendy was in the next seat, on a date with a new boyfriend who looked human but turned out to be a total prick. She suspected it at the beginning, during the Overture to Die Meistersinger, but the extent of his prickishness didn’t fully emerge until he twice tried to grope her under cover of his jacket during the adagio of the concerto. The second time she riposted with a pair of nail scissors, and moved as close to me as the seat permitted.

  I had noticed all this, and thought that she looked gorgeous, in a white flared skirt and a deep pink blouse that was just right for her complexion and dark-brown hair. But I was somewhat preoccupied. It was late May, and I had terrible hay fever, with itchy eyes and streaming nose. I couldn’t stop sniffing. And along the way I was actually trying to listen to the music. At the interval Wendy turned to me and asked if I would like to go out and have a drink with her during the intermission. I accepted, and she bought me an orange juice. She had to. I had left my wallet in the parking lot, on the front seat of my car. And it was orange juice
because I was so full of antihistamines that alcohol would have put me out for the whole second half of the concert. Schubert’s Ninth, another favorite.

  When we got back to our seats pricko had departed, leaving Wendy without transportation. After a second half in which she still sat as close to me as the seat permitted, I drove her home to Sumner (good news: my wallet was still in the car). She lived alone in a two-bedroom house, and invited me in for an explicitly non-alcoholic and non-sexual nightcap. The house was filled with mementos from her world travels—most of them hideous. I managed the non-alcohol, but I flunked the non-sex and eventually stayed the night. I think I made a big impression. I am sure that Wendy had had more skillful lovers, but never one whose nose ran all over her during lovemaking, the way that mine did.

  Lovemaking.

  Forgive me, Wendy. This is relevant, I have to tell it. But we re-lived and re-told parts of that night a hundred times, when people asked how we met, and now when I write of it I cannot make it sound more than a farce. My heart can break, but the words don’t show it—won’t show it. My poor Wendy, in an unmarked grave in eastern Zaire. We had a golden evening and night, but we could never reveal that side of it to others. It had to be told as a joke; and now I cannot describe it any other way.