“Ah, Jesus.” Bart was poking at the sheet between his legs. His hand came up dripping. Bart pulled apart the top of his pyjama pants. He crossed his arms over his crotch, but he didn’t have the strength to resist. “You old bastard,” Bart shouted. “You’ve done it again. You’ve pulled out your fucking catheter again. You filthy old bastard.” Bart got a towel and began to swab away the piss.
He saw there was blood in the thick golden fluid. Goddamn surgeons. Always sticking a tube into one orifice or another. “I saw my buddy jumping around, and I thought he looked like a human-shaped beach ball, all white, bouncing across the sand…”
Bart slapped at his shoulder, hard enough to sting. “When are you going to get it into your head that nobody gives flying fuck about that stuff? Huh?” He swabbed at the mess in the bed, his shoulders knotted up. “Jesus. I ought to take you down to the happy booth right now. Old bastard.”
Like a beach. Funny how I never thought of that before. It had taken him fifty years, but he was finally making sense of those three days. More sense than he could make of where he was now, anyhow. Not that he gave a damn.
* * *
Bart cleaned him up, dressed him, and fed him with some tasteless pap. Then he dumped him in a chair in the dayroom. Bart stomped off, still muttering about the business with the catheter.
Asshole, he thought.
The dayroom was a long, thin hall, like a corridor. Nothing but a row of old people. Every one of them had his own tiny TV, squawking away at him. Or her. It was hard to tell. Every so often a little robot nurse would come by, a real R2-D2 type of thing, and it would give you a coffee. If you hadn’t moved for a while, it would check your pulse with a little metal claw.
You had to set the TV with voice commands, and he never could get the hang of that; he’d asked for a remote, but they didn’t make them anymore. So he just had his set tuned to the news channels, all day. Sometimes there was news about the program. Mostly about the dinky little unmanned rovers that the Agency was rolling around Mars these days, that you could work from earth, like radio-operated boats at Disney World. Now, that was pure bullshit, as far as he was concerned. But there wasn’t even anybody up in LEO nowadays. Not since Atlantis tore itself up in that lousy landing, and the Russians let what was left of Mir fall back into the atmosphere.
He tried to read. You could still get paper books, although it cost you to get them printed out. But by the time he’d gotten to the bottom of the page he would forget what was at the top; and he’d doze off, and drop the damn thing. Then the fucking R2-D2 would roll over to see if he was dead.
* * *
The door behind him was open, letting in dense, smoggy air. Nobody was watching him. Nobody but old people, anyhow.
He got out of his chair. Not so hard, if you watched your balance. He leaned on his frame and set off toward the door.
The dayroom depressed him. It was like an airport departure lounge. And there was only one way out of it. Unless you counted the happy booth. Funny how it had been a Democrat president who’d legalized the happy booths. A demographic adjustment, they called it. He couldn’t really blame them, Bart and the rest. Just too many old bastards like me, too few of them to look out for us, no decent jobs for them to do.
Sometimes, though, he wished he’d just taken a T-38 up high over the Mojave, and gone onto the afterburner, and augured in on those salt flats. Maybe after Geena had died, leaving him stranded here, that would have been a good time. It would have been clean. A few winter rains dissolving that ancient ocean surface; by now you wouldn’t even be able to tell where he’d come down.
Outside the light was flat and hard. He squinted up, the sweat already starting to run into his eyes. Not a shred of ozone up there. The home stood in the middle of a vacant lot. There was a freeway in the middle distance, a river of metal he could just about make out. Maybe he could hitch a ride into town, find a bar, sink a few cold ones. Screw the catheter. He’d pull it out in the john.
He worked his way across the uneven ground. He had to lean so far forward he was almost falling, just to keep going ahead. Like before. You’d had to keep tipped forward, leaning on your toes, to balance the mass of the PLSS. And, just like now, you were never allowed to take the damn thing off for a breather.
The lot seemed immense. There were rocks and boulders scattered about. Maybe it had once been a garden, but nothing grew here now. Actually the whole of the Midwest was dried out like this.
He reached the freeway. There was no fence, no sidewalk, nowhere to cross. He raised an arm, but he couldn’t keep it up for long. The cars roared by, small sleek things, at a huge speed: a hundred fifty, two hundred maybe. And they were close together, just inches apart. Goddamn smart cars that could drive themselves. He couldn’t even see if there were people in them.
He wondered if anyone still drove Corvettes.
Now there was somebody walking toward him, along the side of the road. He couldn’t see who it was.
The muscles in his hands were starting to tremble, with the effort of gripping the frame. Your hands always got tired first.
There were two of them. They wore broad-rimmed white hats. “You old bastard.” It was Bart, and that other one who was worse than Bart. They grabbed his arms and just held him up like a doll. Bart got hold of the walker, and incredibly strong, lifted it up with one hand. “I’ve had it with you!” Bart shouted.
There was a pressure at his neck, something cold and hard. An infuser.
The light strengthened, and washed out the detail, the rocky ground, the blurred sun.
* * *
He was in a big room, white walled, surgically sterile. He was sitting up in a chair. Christ, some guy was shaving his chest.
Then he figured it. Oh, hell, it was all right. It was just a suit tech. He was in the MSOB. He was being instrumented. The suit tech plastered his chest with four silver-chloride electrodes. “This won’t hurt a bit, you old bastard.” He had the condom over his dick already. And he had on his faecal containment bag, the big diaper. The suit tech was saying something. “Just so you don’t piss yourself on me one last time.”
He lifted up his arm. He didn’t recognize it. He was thin and coated with blue tubes, like veins. It must be the pressure garment, a whole network of hoses and rings and valves and pulleys that coated your body. Yeah, the pressure garment; he could feel its resistance when he tried to move.
There was a sharp stab of pain at his chest. Some other electrode, probably. It didn’t bother him.
He couldn’t see so well now; there was a kind of glassiness around him. That was the polycarbonate of his big fishbowl helmet. They must have locked him in already.
The suit tech bent down in front of him and peered into his helmet. “Hey.”
“It’s okay. I know I got to wait.”
“What? Listen. It was just on the TV. The other one’s just died. What was his name? How about that. You made the news, one more time.”
“It’s the oxygen.”
“Huh?”
“One hundred percent. I got to sit for a half hour while the console gets the nitrogen out of my blood.”
The suit tech shook his head. “You’ve finally lost it, haven’t you, you old bastard? You’re the last one. You weren’t the first up there, but you sure as hell are the last. The last of the twelve. How about that.” But there was an odd flicker in the suit tech’s face. Like doubt. Or, wistfulness.
He didn’t think anything about it. Hell, it was a big day for everybody, here in the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building.
“A towel.”
“What?”
“Will you put a towel over my helmet? I figure I might as well take a nap.”
The suit tech laughed. “Oh, sure. A towel.”
He went off, and came back with a white cloth, which he draped over his head. He was immersed in a washed-out white light. “Here you go.” He could hear the suit tech walk away.
* * *
In a few mi
nutes, it would start. With the others, carrying his oxygen unit, he’d walk along the hallways out of the MSOB, and there would be Geena, holding little Jackie up to him. He’d be able to hold their hands, touch their faces, but he wouldn’t feel anything so well through the thick gloves. And then the transfer van would take him out to Merritt Island, where the Saturn would be waiting for him, gleaming white and wreathed in cryogenic vapor: waiting to take him back up to the lunar beach, and his father.
All that soon. For now, he was locked in the suit, with nothing but the hiss of his air. It was kind of comforting.
He closed his eyes.
THE ROBOT’S TWILIGHT COMPANION
Tony Daniel
Here’s another bizarre and fascinating story by Tony Daniel, whose “A Dry, Quiet War” appears elsewhere in this anthology. This one is a powerful and powerfully strange novella that takes us from the woods of the Pacific Northwest to the center of the Earth itself, and from life to death and then back to an odd new sort of life again.…
Thermostatic preintegration memory thread alpha:
The Man
27 March 1980
The Cascade Range, Washington State, USA
Monday
Rhyolite dreams. Maude under the full moon, collecting ash. Pale andesite clouds. Earthquake swarms. Water heat pressure. Microscopy dates the ash old. Not magma. Not yet. Maude in the man’s sleeping bag, again.
“I’m not sure we’re doing the right thing, Victor. This couldn’t have come at a more difficult time for me.”
Harmonic tremors, though. Could be the big one. Maude, dirty and smiling, copulating with the man among seismic instruments.
“St. Helens is going to blow, isn’t it Victor?” she whispers. Strong harmonies from the depths of the planet. Magmas rising. “You know, don’t you, Victor? You can feel it. How do you feel it?”
Yes.
“Yes.”
18 May 1980
Sunday
8:32 A.M.
The man glances up.
Steam on the north slope, under the Bulge. Snow clarifies, streams away. The Bulge, greatening. Pale rhyolite moon in the sky.
“Victor, it’s out of focus.”
“It’s happening, Maude. It’s. She’s.” The Bulge crumbles away. The north slope avalanches. Kilotons of shieldrock. Steam glowing in the air—750 degrees centigrade and neon steam.
“You were right, Victor. All your predictions are true. This is going to be an incredibly violent affair.”
Maude flush and disbelieving. Pregnant, even then.
13 September 1980
Wednesday, Ash Wednesday
Rhyolite winds today, all day. Maude in tremors. Eclampsia.
“I can’t believe this is going to happen, Victor.”
Blood on her lips, where she has bitten them. Yellow, frightened eyes.
“I’m trying, Victor.”
The gravid Bulge, distended. The Bulge, writhing.
“Two-twenty-over-a-hundred-and-forty, doctor.”
“Let’s go in and do this quick.”
“I haven’t even finished.”
Pushes, groans. Something is not right.
A girl, the color of blackberry juice. But that is the blood.
“Victor, I haven’t even finished my dissertation.”
Maude quaking. The rattle of dropped instruments.
“Jesus-Christ-what-the-somebody-get-me-a-b.p.”
“Seventy-over-sixty. Pulse. One twenty-eight.”
“God-oh-god. Bring me some frozen plasma and some low-titer O neg.”
“Doctor?” The voice of the nurse is afraid. Blood flows from the IV puncture. “Doctor?”
Maude, no.
“Oh. Hell. I want some blood for a proper coag study. Tape it to the wall. I want to watch it clot. Oh damndamn. She’s got amniotic fluid in a vein. The kid’s hair or piss or something. That’s what. Get me.”
“Victor?” Oh Victor, I’m dying. Then, listening. “Baby?”
Maude dying. Blood flowing from every opening. Nose mouth anus ears eyes.
“Get me. I.”
“Victor, I’m so scared. The world’s gone red.” Maude, hemorrhaging like a saint. “The data, Victor, save the data.”
“Professor Wu, please step to the window if you would. Professor Wu? Professor?”
“Victor?”
The Bulge—the baby—screams.
Ashes and ashes dust the parking lot below. Powder the cars. Sky full of cinder and slag. Will this rain never stop? This gravity rain.
5 August 1993
Mt. Olympus, Washington State, USA
Thursday, bright glacier morning.
“Come here, little Bulge, I will teach you something.”
Laramie traipses lithe and strong over the snow, with bones like Maude. And her silhouette is Maude’s, dark and tan against the summit snow, the bergschrund and ice falls of the Blue Glacier, and the full outwash of the Blue, two thousand feet below. She is off-rope, and has put away her ice ax. She carries her ubiquitous Scoopic.
The man clicks the chiseled pick of a soft-rock hammer against an outcropping. “See the sandstone? These grains are quartz, feldspar, and—”
“—I know. Mica.”
“Good, little Bulge.”
Laramie leans closer, focuses the camera on the sandstone granules.
“The green mica is chlorite and the white is muscovite,” she says. “I like mica the best.”
The man is pleased, and pleasing the man is not easy.
“And these darker bands?”
She turns the camera to where he is pointing. This can grow annoying, but not today.
“I don’t know, Papa. Slate?”
“Slate, obviously. Pyllite and semischist. What do you think this tells us?”
She is growing bored. The man attempts to give her a severe look, but knows the effect is more comic than fierce. “Oh. All right. What?” she asks.
“Tremendous compression of the shale. This is deep ocean sediment that was swept under the edge of the continent, mashed and mangled, then rose back up here.”
She concentrates, tries harder. Good.
“Why did it rise again?”
“We don’t know for sure. We think it’s because the sedimentary rocks in the Juan de Fuca plate subduction were much lighter than the basalt on the western edge of the North Cascades microcontinent.”
The man takes off his glove, touches the rock.
“Strange and wonderful things happened on this part of the planet, Laramie. Ocean sediment on the tops of mountains. Volcanoes still alive—”
“—exotic terrains colliding and eliding mysteriously. I know, Papa.”
The man is irritated and very proud. He is fairly certain he will never make a geologist out of his daughter.
But what else is there?
“Yes. Well. Let’s move on up to the summit, then.”
28 February 2001
Wednesday
Age, and the fault line of basalt and sediment. Metamorphosis? The man is growing old, and there is very little of geology in the Olympic Peninsula that he has not seen. Yet he knows that he knows only a tiny fraction of what is staring him blankly in the face. Frustration.
Outcrops.
Facts lay hidden, and theories are outcroppings here and there, partially revealing, fascinating. Memories.
Memories are outcrops of his life. So much buried, obscured. Maude, so long dead. Laramie, on this, the last field trip she will ever accompany him. She will finish at the university soon, and go on to graduate school in California, in film. No longer his little Bulge, but swelling, avalanching, ready to erupt. Oh time.
The Elwha Valley stretches upstream to the switchbacks carved under the massive sandstone beds below the pass at Low Divide. After all these years, the climb over into the Quinault watershed is no longer one he is looking forward to as a chance to push himself, a good stretch of the legs. The man is old, and the climb is hard. But that will be two days he
nce. Today they are up the Lillian River, working a basalt pod that the man surveyed fourteen years before, but never substantially cataloged.
Most of his colleagues believe him on a fool’s errand, collecting rocks in the field—as out-of-date as Bunsen burner, blowpipe, and charcoal bowl. He cannot really blame them. Satellites and remote-sensing devices circumscribe the earth. Some clear nights, camped outside of tents, he can see their faint traces arcing through the constellations at immense speeds, the sky full of them, as many, he knows, as there are stars visible to the unaided eye.
Why not live in virtual space, with all those facts that are virtually data?
Rocks call him. Rocks and minerals have seeped into his dreams. Some days he feels himself no scientist, but a raving lunatic, a pilgrim after some geology of visions.
But there are those who trust his judgment still. His grads and post-graduates. Against better careers, they followed him to the field, dug outcrops, analyzed samples. Bernadette, Jamie, Andrew. The man knows that they have no idea what they mean to him, and he is unable to tell them. And little Bulge, leaving, leaving for artificial California. If the water from the Owens Valley and the Colorado were cut off, the Los Angeles basin would return to desert within three years. Such a precarious terrain, geographically speaking.
The man has always assumed this basalt to be a glacial erratic, carried deep into sedimentary country by inexorable ice, but Andrew has suggested that it is not oceanic, but a plutonic formation, native to the area. The lack of foraminifer fossils and the crystallization patterns seem to confirm this.
Back in camp, at the head of the Lillian, the man and Andrew pore over microgravimetric data.
“It goes so far down,” says Andrew.
“Yes.”
“You know this supports your Deep Fissure theory.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection Page 96