by James Gunn
But he was a surgeon in a time when no one was a surgeon anymore, when no one studied the old skills and arts. In this capsule culture maintained by self-repairing machines directed by omniscient computers, everyone did just what he or she wanted to do; people pursued pleasures in their own peculiar ways, and if something had to be done that the computers and their tools could not do, a volunteer would inject a capsule and the synthesized proteins would provide instant memory of how that action could be accomplished and of how the muscles and the nerve endings felt when they were doing it. That was the miracle of chemical learning.
The only problem was that not many volunteers were left. Everyone had succumbed to the capsule-popping craze that made available every kind of sensation. Men and women with vivid imaginations were dreaming experiences, episodes, and even entire sequences of episodes; the machines would synthesize the proteins manufactured in the bloodstreams of the dreamers, and the computers offered memories to everybody who wanted to be somebody else. And that included everybody; everybody, it seemed, but him.
He had something else. He had his work, the surgery he had studied with only the most casual capsule assistance—coronoid, condyloid, styloid, mastoid, zygomatic arch, coronal suture—that brought him a steadily increasing number of patients as new ailments arose among the poppets, ailments whose diagnosis and treatment were not programmed into the computers. When he asked the console about the curious rise in such conditions, the computers were evasive.
“Perhaps,” the console said with an unusual lack of certainty, “these conditions may be due to the increase in the life-span of humanity."
When he pressed it, the console said, “Perhaps the memory capsules contain cellular memories of once-prevalent but now forgotten conditions."
When he asked again, the console said, “The conditions under which humanity is living are new and unpredictable. Something may be underway that we will not be able to define for another thousand years."
And when he asked a final time, the computer said, “Perhaps the process of evolution has not been completed for the human species."
He shrugged and forgot it. Even with the prospect of a life-span of a century and a half, he would never know the reason, and these days, with memories available at every console, there was so much to forget. Forgetting was an art. Men can drown in memories, and reality can become as elusive as a dream.
But all of these thoughts, like the memory of his half day of surgery, dropped from him as he returned to the paradise he had left. He sealed the lift shaft behind him with a word and called, “Love!"
The room swallowed the word as though it had never been spoken. The pink seemed to darken.
“Lora,” he called.
No answer. The room turned to rose.
There was no place for her to hide. The single, all purpose room was empty. The circular bed was part of the floor again. The lavatory was empty; the kitchenette was bare.
Everything in the room spoke of her, but Lora was not there.
The chambers of his heart—superior vena cava, right atrium, right ventricle, left ventricle, left atrium, pulmonary vein, pulmonary artery, aorta—squeezed together. His heart pounded to drive his blood through his contracted arteries.
“Lora!” he said.
“Jeri,” the console said. It spoke in his wife's voice. She had left a message. Of course, of course. He should have felt relief, but the word only increased his apprehension, even before he heard what followed. “I have gone. Do not try to follow me. There is no point in seeking me out. I have sought my final happiness. Everyone has a right to that. Don't cry; don't grieve; don't be angry. Be glad for me. It is not that I love you less but that love—the limited kind that we can know in the real world—no longer is enough."
“I don't understand,” he said. Blood pounded in his head.
“Of course you don't. You couldn't be expected to understand.” She had recorded it all, and the console triggered the answers to his questions. “While you have been gone, every day—I loved you for it, Jeri, don't blame yourself—I sampled capsules. Just a little at first and then a bit more. It was glorious, Jeri. Don't be angry, but this was what I had always been looking for. Neither of us were poppets, so how could we know?"
Angry. How could he help but be angry? How could he not be angry when the love that had nourished him had been withdrawn—not because it had changed, not because of anything he had done or not done, but because it wasn't enough.
The room was the color of blood; it was like being inside a throbbing heart. “You should have let me talk to you. I would have changed. I would have been more."
“It's not that, Jeri,” the console said. “Don't think it was that. You were everything you could be, everything anyone could want. But don't you see? What the capsules offer is beyond human capability. What the capsules offer is bliss, tailored to my needs, not adjusted to them."
Hope stirred. If she were on capsules he could find her, he could bring her back to this room, from dreams to reality, he could keep her with him, and if he couldn't make her happy alone...
“We could have shared you,” he said, trying to be reasonable. “I would have been hurt, yes, but I would have shared you. You could have had your capsules, and I could have had—"
“It wouldn't have worked,” the console said, “because by now I'm not me anymore. The me you knew was unsatisfied, one person with one set of memories. It isn't just capsules I want, not just temporary relief, but a complete hookup, total immersion."
He had heard of that; the consoles were capable of complete physical maintenance while the poppets went deeper and deeper into their programmed worlds of preselected memories.
“I'll find you,” he muttered. His voice felt harsh; his throat hurt. His surgeon's hands were trembling. “Wherever you are, I'll find you."
“I'm sorry, Jeri. I've placed an absolute hold on my privacy. There's no way to find me, and if you did, you'd never get me back. I'm as good as dead. But think of me as being in paradise.” The console clicked. The finality of the sound was terrible, but the silence that followed was even worse.
He went through the entire urban center looking, looking, looking, invading privacy, offending everyone he met, seeking everywhere, against all common decency. And all the while his anger grew, and the pain went deeper. But even anger and pain eventually must recognize defeat, and finally he surrendered. He returned to the pink room. No longer did it remind him of love; the color and the odor were the hue and smell of hate.
She was gone. Gone for good. Never to return. The love he had felt had turned to something else, something dark and unpleasant, something that sought a different kind of release. If she had been here now, he would have taken his surgeon's tools, his saws and his scalpels, and dissected the creature that once had been Lora. Lora, who had been taken from him. But she was gone. He could not get satisfaction from her. But there was another way.
Coldly, containing his rage, focusing his bitterness, he programmed the console with the skill of long experience with the surgical computers and the equipment they controlled. Soon it was ready, and he lowered himself into the tepid fluid that filled the bath in the lavatory. Tubes that once had proffered sprays and brushes found his nostrils and his veins, his bowels and his bladder. A clear plastic lid lowered itself over him to fit snugly against the rim of the tub. Momentary discomfort ended as fluids began to seep into his system, anesthetizing, feeding, monitoring, protecting, taking command. His last conscious thoughts as he slipped completely into the dark dreams he had summoned were of revenge.
Or was there, just before he went under, a moment of sanity, a flicker of doubt?
* * * *
The voices penetrated his uterine stronghold long before they reached his brain, murmurs and isolated words and incomprehensible sounds and silences.
“Is there a chance?"
“I'm just a volunteer."
“But what do you think?"
“I've never seen
anyone come back after being so far under."
He kept slipping back into someone else's memories or diving for protection from the intruding world into dark pools and deep shadows.
The Man Who Hunts Alone returned through the forest with the deer across his shoulders, its legs dangling against his chest on either side of his broad neck. He could feel the soft hide of the young animal against his shoulders....
“Somewhere there is a person who can help me."
“Not this one."
“You can't be sure."
“Let him be."
“I can't."
He was being pulled into consciousness, into awareness. It wasn't fair. He didn't want it. He slipped away again, evading them, sliding between incidents in lives he never led.
The stone floor was cold and hard beneath his feet but not as cold nor as hard as the face of the man who sat upon the throne.... The smell of the burnt offerings was strong; the odor of fear was stronger....
“Can't you get another volunteer?"
“This is the only one."
“Then I think you have lost. Give up."
“Never!"
The world constricted around him. He was being squeezed into existence. He fought against it, fought to get back into the safety and security of his rocking, floating dreams. His lives began to flash before his eyes with all their sensory data and emotional content.
He should have returned with squires and men-at-arms, bedecked in shining armor with banners floating above, but all the men he had taken with him were dead on the battlefields of the Holy Land or lost to plague along the way. There was no one to welcome him as he came across the lowered drawbridge into the castle, admitted for the night like any wandering stranger who looked as if he would not kill them as they slept....
He felt the weight of her presence behind him, and he wondered if she had a knife in her hand and he should brace his shoulders for the blow that would send the blade through his back seeking his heart....
The pink room rose comfortingly around him like a promise of eternal love as he ascended the lift shaft....
The Man Who Hunts Alone returned through the forest....
The smell of the burnt offerings was strong....
...kill them as they slept...
...seeking his heart....
And he was born. He was expelled into the cold, bright world, and he returned to life croaking hoarsely through disused vocal cords, coughing, objecting. Something soft was under him, but not as soft as the sea, and he was pulled down into it with cruel hands. He raised an arm in front of his eyes. It was difficult to focus upon it, but when he did, it looked like the belly of a corpse, dead-white and wrinkled.
“You're awake,” someone said.
He croaked something that meant “yes” or “maybe” or “what?” And he slept. It was not the sleep he had known for so long, but a troubled sleep, weighed down by human cares, a descent into aching darkness, an ascent close to the brutal reality, and a drop back into depths disturbed by fugitive dreams and a pervading feeling of grief and terror.
The bodies were small and fragile beside the old fire, smaller even than the deer he had carried back for their meal, and they were dead....
...she came struggling in the hands of priests, cursing them, unbelieving and blasphemous....
...they had been his sons, his hopes, innocent children learning to be men....
...and almost choked on the lump of grief that rose in his throat....
Everything in the room spoke of her, but Lora was not there....
He came awake to warm liquids struggling down a reluctant throat, arousing unused taste buds and old reflexes, to cloths washing a body he wasn't sure was his, so distant did it feel, to hands kneading muscles that were wasted almost to nothing, to words issuing from some distant voice like that of God.
“Drink a little more...."
“You're getting better...."
“We'll get some flesh on that skeleton...."
“Soon you'll be walking again...."
“You're getting better...."
“You'll walk again...."
“You will, you will...."
He began to wonder, vaguely, with a trace of irritation, who this person was who pestered him with demands and injunctions, who lifted this and touched that and made him drink. And with that infantile concern he crossed the border of the haunted nightland into the day. He slipped back frequently into the world of nightmares and confusion, for he was very weak, but increasingly he was awake and conscious and accumulating real-life experience. If this was real life and not another dream.
He was like an infant being educated once more, gradually learning to distinguish between himself and his environment, then to differentiate the sense impressions that came to him, to tell warm from cool, soft from hard, hand from foot or flank or forehead. For there were no words for these things, only vague concepts that were hard to focus upon. Loud noises startled him, and soft sounds soothed him. Odors pleased him, the odors of milk and broth and the more mysterious and delicate scents that came to his nose when God was with him.
And one day he opened his eyes and saw her.
At first the world was only a blur. After that first, freakish view of his arm, his vision had regressed to the infantile, and he had been unable to focus his eyes in the few moments when they were open. Gradually they remained open longer, always to approving sounds from the person who was constantly with him. Finally his vision sharpened, the world came into focus, and he saw a face above him, round and ridiculous at this strange angle.
He laughed. It was the first happy sound he had made that he could recall, but then he could not remember much, and nothing with certainty. But the noise brought more approval from the person, and in that happiness he laughed again.
The second time, he saw her from farther away, and the realization came to him like revelation that she was beautiful. She was tall and slender and she moved gracefully as she crossed the carpeted floor toward him. Her hair was pale—he could not tell the exact color because the pink ceiling tinted it; later he would decide that it was a curious cross between gold and silver—and her eyes were dark.
They saw him studying her, and the lips smiled, transfiguring the face with an inner light. Her beauty had been passive; now it glowed. “You're conscious,” she said. Her voice was gentle and low. He had known that all along, but he had not known he knew it. “You're going to be all right."
Was this a clever new dream? he wondered. Did it play upon the subconscious awareness of the dreamer that he was dreaming, to provide a greater feeling of reality? Was this sensation of waking, of coming back to life, only the start of another grim episode?
The others had seemed as real as real, too. They had supplied sensory stimulation, details, memories of a past, consciousness of a present, but this was different. He felt no sense of hatred for this woman; he had no premonition of betrayal; he planned no vengeance.
This memory of having lived a thousand lives was new as well. He did not know which of them was real. He did not know for sure if this was real—what if it was not?—but he would live it as if it were real.
“Yes,” he said, and then more clearly, “Yes. I'm back. Who are you? Why did you bring me back?"
* * * *
He did not get an answer to his questions then, and the days that followed were filled with the slow business of recuperation, as if he were recovering from a long illness that had wasted his body and disarranged all his autonomic processes. They were filled with the small triumphs of recovery—the first time he was able to chew and swallow solid food or lift his head or sit up cushioned by the responsive pneumatic apparatus of the bed. And they were disturbed by the little defeats—the rebellion of his disused stomach that spewed stinking vomit across the bed and himself, the dizziness with which his head dropped back to the cushions, the weakness that followed every attempt at something new.
Through everything the woman was there with her c
omfort, her encouragement, her tireless patience, her smile, and slowly he improved. Setbacks were frequent. Sometimes memories would come flooding over him—a knife, blood spurting, screams of pain, the joy of vengeance—and he would stop in the midst of saying something to drift with them for minutes or hours or days. Sometimes, mostly when the room was darkened for sleep, he would run a fever and cry out in delirium; and sometimes he would wake in her arms, she beside him in the bed, although she did not sleep with him, he with his head upon her comfortable breast, crying weakly against her from the agony of the other lives he lived again. And once, when the lives seemed as if they would take him over once more, when fever turned to chills that shook him like a mechanical vibrator, he found himself warmed by her bare skin as she sat half-naked in the bed beside him, caressing him, soothing him with comforting sounds that had no meaning. He cried again because he was weak and not a man.
Finally he passed a crisis of sorts, and from this point he progressed steadily without setbacks. Soon he was sitting up regularly and talking. He had no more desire to return to his capsule experiences; indeed, he thought of them with a growing distaste, and except for brief flashes, like déjà vu, they bothered him very little, and they steadily receded beyond recall until all that was left was only a vague feeling that he had been singled out for some unusual form of punishment.
Within days he began to walk, first a few tottering steps on legs that felt as if they were made of wood and then as if they were made of jelly, then a child's staggering fall, which progressed into an old man's uncertain weave and finally, much later, into a young man's confident stride.
He began to eat. He exercised. He gained weight. His legs and arms filled out with flesh and then with muscle. He watched the woman a lot, and he talked. At first she put off his questions with friendly evasions that he lacked the strength to break through, and then she promised to tell him everything when he was stronger. She had told him nothing but her name. Her name was Sara, and he watched her as she moved easily around the room, memorizing her face from every angle, the body that moved so lithely beneath the disposable robe, the look in her eyes, the way her hand extended to him when she brought him food, the feel of her fingers upon his back and arms and legs as she rubbed strength back into them or relief when they were tired with exercise. Particularly she worked with his hands and his fingers as if she wanted them to be supple and strong. She would stare at them as if they held some extra meaning for her, and when she saw him watching her, she would smile and kiss the fingers one by one. He melted inside when she did that.