Roman pressed his nose against the screen, smelling its forgotten rust. Work gloves protecting her hands, his wife snipped flowers with a pruner and placed them in a basket on her arm. A blue ribbon accented the sun hat. Beyond her stretched the perennial bed, warmed by its reflecting stone wall, and the crazy-paving walk that led to the carp pond. White anemones and lilies glowed amid the ferns, Abigail’s emulation of Vita Sackville-West’s white garden. A few premature leaves, anxious for the arrival of autumn, flickered through the sun and settled in the grass.
“I’ll have lunch ready in a minute.” She didn’t look up at him, so what spoke was the bobbing and amused sun hat. “I could hear your stomach all the way from the white garden.” She stripped off the gardening gloves.
“I’ll make lunch.” Roman felt nettled. Why should she assume he was staring at her just because he was hungry?
As he regarded the white kitchen cabinets, collecting his mind and remembering where the plates, tableware, and napkins were, Abigail swept past him and set the table in a quick flurry of activity. Finding a vase and putting flowers into it would have been a contemplative activity of some minutes for Roman. She performed the task in one motion.
She was a sharp-featured woman. Her hair was completely white and she usually kept it tied up in a variety of braids. Her eyes were large and blue. She looked at her husband.
“What are you doing up there in your office? Did you invent a robot confessor or something?”
“You haven’t been—”
“No, Roman, I haven’t been eavesdropping.” She was indulgent. “But you do have a piercing voice, particularly when you get excited. Usually you talk to your computer only when you’re swearing at it.”
“It’s my new project.” Roman hadn’t told Abigail a thing about it and he knew that bothered her. She hated big-secret little-boy projects. She was the kind of girl who’d always tried to break into the boys’ clubhouse and beat them at their games. He really should have told her. But the thought made him uncomfortable.
“It’s kind of egomaniacal, actually. You know that computer I’m beta testing for Hyperneuron?”
“That thing it took them a week to move in? Yes, I know it. They scratched the floor in two places. You should hire a better class of movers.”
“We’d like to. It’s a union problem, I’ve told you that. Anyway, it’s a wide-aspect parallel processor with a gargantuan set of field memories. Terabytes worth.”
She placidly spread jam on a piece of bread. “I’ll assume all that jargon actually means something. Even if it does, it doesn’t tell me why you’re off chatting with that box instead of with me.”
He covered her hand with his. “I’m sorry, Abigail. You know how it is.”
“I know, I know.” She sounded irritated but turned her hand over and curled her fingers around his.
“I’m programming the computer with a model of a human personality. People have spent a lot of time and energy analyzing what they call ‘computability’: how easily problems can be solved. But there’s another side to it: what problems should be solved. Personality can be defined by the way problems are chosen. It’s an interesting project.”
“And whose personality are you using?” She raised an eyebrow, ready to be amused at the answer.
He grimaced, embarrassed. “The most easily accessible one: my own.”
She laughed. Her voice was still-untarnished silver. “Can the computer improve over the original?”
“Improve how, I would like to know.”
“Oh, just as a random example, could it put clothes, books, and magazines away when it’s done with them? Just a basic sense of neatness. No major psychological surgery.”
“I tried that. It turned into a psychotic killer. Seems that messiness is an essential part of healthy personality. Kind of an interesting result, really.…”
She laughed again and he felt embarrassed that he hadn’t told her before. After all, they had been married over thirty years. But he couldn’t tell her all of it. He couldn’t tell her how afraid he was.
* * *
“So what’s the problem with it?” Roman, irritated, held the phone receiver against his ear with his shoulder and leafed through the papers in his file drawer. His secretary had redone it all with multi-colored tabs and he had no idea what they meant. “Isn’t the paperwork in order?”
“The paperwork’s in order.” The anonymous female voice from Financial was matter-of-fact. “It just doesn’t look at all like your signature, Dr. Mart-land. And this is an expensive contract. Did you sign it yourself?”
“Of course I signed it.” He had no memory of it. Why not? It sounded important.
“But this signature—”
“I injured my arm playing tennis a few weeks ago.” He laughed nervously, certain she would catch the lie. “It must have affected my handwriting.” But was it a lie? He swung his arm. The muscles weren’t right. He had strained his forearm, trying to change his serve. Old muscles are hard to retrain. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. If only he could figure out what she was talking about.
“All right then, Dr. Maitland. Sorry to bother you.”
“That’s quite all right.” He desperately wanted to ask her the subject of the requisition but it was too late.
After fifteen minutes he found it, a distributed network operating system software package. Extremely expensive. Of course, of course. He read over it. It made sense now. But was that palsied scrawl at the bottom really his signature?
Roman stared at the multiple rolling porcelain boards on the wall, all of them covered with diagrams and equations in many colors of magic marker. There were six projects up there, all of which he was juggling simultaneously. He felt a sudden cold, sticky sweat in his armpits. He was juggling them, but had absolutely no understanding of them. It was all meaningless nonsense.
The previous week he had lost it in the middle of a briefing. He’d been explaining the operation of some cognitive algorithms when he blanked, forgetting everything about them. A young member of his staff had helped him out. “It’s all this damn management,” Roman had groused. “It fills up all available space, leaving room for nothing important. I’ve overwritten everything.” The room had chuckled, while Roman stood there feeling a primitive terror. He’d worked those algorithms out himself. He remembered the months of skull sweat, the constant dead ends, the modifications. He remembered all that, but still the innards of those procedures would not come clear.
The fluorescent light hummed insolently over his head. He glanced up. It was dark outside, most of the cars gone from the lot. A distant line of red and white lights marked the highway. How long had he been in this room? What time was it? For an instant he wasn’t even sure where he was. He poked his head out of his office. The desks were empty. He could hear the vacuum cleaners of the night cleaning crew. He put on his coat and went home.
* * *
“She seemed a lovely woman, from what I saw of her.” Roman peered into the insulated takeout container. All of the oyster beef was gone. He picked up the last few rice grains from the china plate Abigail had insisted they use, concentrating with his chopsticks. Abigail herself was out with one of her own friends, Helen Tourmin. He glanced at the other container. Maybe there was some chicken left.
Gerald Parks grimaced slightly, as if Roman had picked a flaw in his latest lady friend. “She is lovely. Roman, leave the Szechuan chicken alone. You’ve had your share. That’s mine.” Despite his normal irritation, he seemed depressed.
Roman put the half-full container down. His friend always ate too slowly, as if teasing him. Gerald leaned back, contemplative. He was an ancient and professional bachelor, dressed and groomed with razor sharpness. His severely brushed hair was steel gray. For him, eating Chinese takeout off Abigail’s Limoges china made sense, which was why she had offered it.
“Anna’s a law professor at Harvard.” Gerald took on the tone of a man about to state a self-created aph
orism. “Women at Harvard think that they’re sensible because they get their romantic pretensions from Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters rather than from Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steel.”
“Better than getting your romantic pretensions from Jerzy Kosinski and Vladimir Nabokov.”
Sometimes the only way to cheer Gerald up was to insult him cleverly. He snorted in amusement. “Touché, I suppose. It takes Slavs to come up with that particular kind of over-intellectualized sexual perversity. With a last name like Parks, I’ve always been jealous of it. So don’t make fun of my romantic pretensions.” He scooped out the last of the Szechuan chicken and ate it. Leaving the dishwasher humming in the kitchen they adjourned to Roman’s crowded study.
Gerald Parks was a consulting ethnomusicologist who made a lot of money translating popular music into other idioms. His bachelor condo on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston had gotten neater and neater over the years. To Roman, Gerald’s apartment felt like a cabin on a ocean liner. Various emotions had been packed away somewhere in the hold with the old Cunard notice NOT WANTED ON THE VOYAGE.
Gerald regarded the black field memories, each with its glowing indicator light. “This place seems more like an industrial concern every time I’m in here.” His own study was filled with glass-fronted wood bookcases and had a chaise longue covered with yellow-and-white striped silk. It also had a computer. Gerald was no fool.
“Maybe it looks that way to you because I get so much work done here.” Roman refused to be irritated.
But Gerald was in an irritating mood. He took a sip of his Calvados and listened to the music, a CD of Christopher Hogwood’s performance of Mozart’s great G Minor Symphony. “All original instrumentation. Seventeenth century Cremona viols, natural horns, Grenser oboes. Bah.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Roman loved the clean precision of Mozart in the original eighteenth century style.
“Because we’re not hearing any of those things, only a computer generating electronic frequencies. A CD player is just a high-tech player piano, those little laser spots on the disk an exact analog of the holes in a player piano roll. Do you think Mozart composed for gadgets like that? And meant to have his symphonies sound exactly the same every time they’re heard? These original music fanatics have the whole thing bassackwards.”
Roman listened to an oboe. And it was distinguishable as an oboe, Grenser or otherwise, not a clarinet or basset horn. The speakers, purchased on Gerald’s recommendation, were transparent. “This performance will continue to exist after every performer on it is dead. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a recording of Mozart’s original version?”
“You wouldn’t like it. Those gut-stringed instruments went out of tune before a movement was over.” Gerald looked gloomy. “But you don’t have to wait until the performers are dead. I recently listened to a recording I made of myself when I was young, playing Szymanowski’s Masques. Not bad technically, but I sound so young. So young. Naive and energetic. I couldn’t duplicate that now, not with these old fingers. The man who made that recording is gone forever. He lived in a couple of little rooms on the third floor in a bad neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago. He had a crummy upright piano he’d spent his last dime on. Played the thing constantly. Drove the neighbors absolutely nuts.” Gerald looked at his fingers. He played superbly, at least to Roman’s layman’s ear, but it had never been good enough for a concert career.
“Did you erase the tape?”
Gerald shook his head. “What good would that do?”
They sat for a long moment in companionable silence. At last Gerald bestirred himself. “How is your little electronic brain doing? Does it have your personality down pat yet?”
“Test it out.”
“How? Do you want me to have an argument with it?”
Roman smiled. “That’s probably the best way. It can talk now. It’s not my voice, not quite yet.”
Gerald looked at the speakers. “If it’s not sitting in a chair with a snifter of Calvados, how is it supposed to be you?”
“It’s not me. It just thinks and feels like me.”
“The way you would if you were imprisoned in a metal box?”
“Don’t be absurd.” Roman patted one of the field memories. “There’s a universe in these things. A conceptual universe. The way I used to feel on our vacations in Truro is in here, including the time I cut my foot on a fishhook and the time I was stung by a jellyfish. That annoyed me, being molested by a jellyfish. My differential equations prof, Dr. Yang, is in here. He said ‘theta’ as ‘teeta’ and ‘minus one’ as ‘mice wa.’ And ‘physical meaning’ as ‘fiscal meaning’. For half a semester I thought I was learning economics. The difference in the way my toy car rolled on the linoleum and on the old rug. The time I got enough nerve to ask Mary Tomkins on a date and she told me to ask Helga Pilchard from the Special Needs class instead. The clouds over the Cotswolds when I was there with Abigail on our honeymoon. It’s all there.”
“How the hell does it know what cloud formations over the Cotswolds look like?”
Roman shrugged. “I described them. It went through meteorological data bases until it found good cumulus formations for central England at that season.”
“Including the cloud you thought looked like a power amplifier and Abigail thought looked like a springer spaniel?” Gerald smiled maliciously. He’d made up the incident but it characterized many of Roman and Abigail’s arguments.
“Quit bugging me. Bug the computer instead.”
“Easier said than done.” Roman could see that his friend was nervous. “How did we meet?” Gerald’s voice was shaky.
“The day of registration.” The computer’s voice was smoothly modulated, generic male, without Roman’s inflections or his trace of a Boston accent. “You were standing against a pillar reading a copy of The Importance of Being Earnest. Classes hadn’t started yet, so I knew you were reading it because you wanted to. I came up and told you that if Lady Bracknell knew who you were pretending to be this time, you’d really be in trouble.”
“Quite a pickup line,” Gerald muttered. “I never did believe that an engineering student had read Wilde. What was I wearing?”
“Come on.” The computer voice actually managed to sound exasperated. “How am I supposed to remember that? It was forty-five years ago. If I had to guess I’d say it was that ridiculous shirt you liked, with the weave falling apart, full of holes. You wore it until it barely existed.”
“I’m still wearing it.” Gerald looked at Roman. “This is scary.” He took a gulp of his Calvados. “Why are you doing this, Roman?”
“It’s just a test, a project. A proof of concept.”
“You’re lying.” Gerald shook his head. “You’re not much good at it. Did your gadget pick up that characteristic, I wonder?” He raised his voice. “Computer Roman, why do you exist?”
“I’m afraid I’m losing my mind,” the computer replied. “My memory is going, my personality fractionating. I don’t know if it’s the early stages of Alzheimer’s or something else. I, here, this device, is intended to serve as a marker personality so that I can trace—”
“Silence!” Roman shouted. The computer ceased speaking. He stood, shaking. “Damn you, Gerald. How dare you?”
“This device is more honest than you are.” If Gerald was afraid of his friend’s anger he showed no sign of it. “There must be some flaw in your programming.”
Roman went white. He sat back down. “That’s because I’ve already lost some of the personality I’ve given it. It remembers things I’ve forgotten, prompting me the way Abigail does.” He put his face in his hands. “Oh my God, Gerald, what am I going to do?”
Gerald set his drink down carefully and put his arm around his friend’s shoulders, something he rarely did. And they sat there in the silent study, two old friends stuck at the wrong end of time.
* * *
The pursuing, choking darkness had almost gotten him. Roman sat bolt upright
in bed, trying desperately to drag air in through his clogged throat.
The room was dark. He had no idea of where he was or even who he was. All he felt was stark terror. The bedclothes seemed to be grabbing for him, trying to pull him back into that all-consuming darkness. Whimpering, he tried to drag them away from his legs.
The lights came on. “What’s wrong, Roman?” Abigail looked at him in consternation.
“Who are you?” Roman shouted at this ancient, white-haired woman who had somehow come to be in his bed. “Where’s Abigail? What have you done with her?” He took the old woman by her shoulders and shook her.
“Stop it, Roman. Stop it!” Her eyes filled with tears. “You’re having a nightmare. You’re here in bed. With me. I’m Abigail, your wife. Roman!”
Roman stared at her. Her long hair had once been raven black and was now pure white.
“Oh, Abigail.” The bedroom fell into place around him, the spindle bed, the nightstands, the lamps—his green-glass shaded, hers crystal. “Oh, pookie, I’m sorry.” He hadn’t used that ridiculous endearment in years. He hugged her, feeling how frail she had become. She kept herself in shape, but she was old, her once-full muscles now like taut cords, pulling her bones as if she was a marionette. “I’m sorry.”
She sobbed against him, then pulled away, wiping at her eyes. “What a pair of hysterical old people we’ve become.” Her vivid blue eyes glittered with tears. “One nightmare and we go all to pieces.”
It wasn’t just one nightmare, not at all. What was he supposed to say to her? Roman freed himself from the down comforter, carefully fitted his feet into his leather slippers, and shuffled into the bathroom.
He looked at himself in the mirror. He was an old man, hair standing on end. He wore a nice pair of flannel pajamas and leather slippers his wife had given him for Christmas. His mind was dissolving like a lump of sugar in hot coffee.
The bathroom was clean tile with a wonderful claw-footed bathtub. The floor was tiled in a colored parquet-deformation pattern that started with ordinary bathroom-floor hexagons near the toilet, slowly modified itself into complex knotted shapes in the middle and then, by another deformation, returned to hexagons under the sink. It had cost him a small fortune and months of work to create this complex mathematical tessellation. It was a dizzying thing to contemplate from the throne and it now turned the ordinarily safe bathroom into a place of nightmare. Why couldn’t he have picked something more comforting?
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 15