by Nisi Shawl
The lobby had held only one patient when she left. Now three more sat beside the closed door to Dr. Thompson’s office, and another four leaned on the counter, talking earnestly to Ali.
Before she clocked in to help them, though, she had to call her mom. She squeezed past the waiting patients and scooted a wheeled stool in front of the screen. Her fingers drummed impatiently on the touchpad as her cursor swam through the city’s directory. Dr. Thompson claimed voice rec caused problems with the infirmary’s patient monitors. Finally, after what seemed like forever, she reached her home room.
Ivorene was logged on. Kressi got her to activate the live feed. Her mother sat in bed, propped up on pillows, working on a tray of food. She ate methodically, absent-mindedly. Her dark eyes, so different from her daughter’s hazel, shifted between the camera and two screens. Kressi could see text on one, but the resolution wouldn’t quite let her read it.
“I’m starting my shift early, I guess,” Kressi wrote.
“You guess?” Ivorene disliked sloppy statements.
“If it’s all right with you. There are so many patients. Lots of them as bad as Edde….”
“Fine. Will you be home on time?”
Kressi glanced at the line of incomers, managing not to catch anyone’s eye. “I’m not sure. Maybe.”
The screen behind Ivorene showed what looked like an elongated brown bowling ball rotating in three dimensions. With each pass, a new three- or four-armed cross appeared on its oblong surface. “Get home as quickly as you can, sweetheart. I have lots more work for us to do.”
Kressi signed off, a little disturbed. It sounded like Ivorene wanted to go under again. If only she’d stick to more useful topics…. But Kressi had to put her personal concerns aside.
When her break came, Kressi did a few stretches and went right on working. Three days on, she’d had now, and the patient load heavier than ever. She wondered how she’d adjust to full adult status and the doubling of her hours requirement. One more year. She could hardly wait. She headed for the nearest blinking call light.
“To hold and display the accepted view of reality in all its detail and at the same time to program another state of consciousness is difficult; there just isn’t enough human brain circuitry to do both jobs in detail perfectly. Therefore special conditions give the best use of the whole computer for exploring, displaying, and fully experiencing new states of consciousness….”
Ivorene lowered herself slowly into her tank. Its refrigerator clicked on immediately. She’d been running a little hot lately—maybe coming down with Edde’s mysterious ailment, like a major portion of the colony seemed bent on doing.
The tank was small, but held her without cramping. She hooded herself and checked the breathing apparatus. Like most of the colony’s equipment, it was solidly put together, though based on dated technologies, “breakthroughs” discarded years before their departure.
She’d expected her daughter home almost an hour ago. The fail-safes were fine, but she wished Kressi had come back from her shift on schedule and helped her with this part.
Off with the hood for a moment so she could set the timer on the tank’s lid. How many hours? Three. Good Boy had an affinity for that number.
About to re-hood, she remembered to check the water’s salinity. A little on the low side. Shivering, she climbed out and grabbed a scoop of crystals from the bucket she kept beside the tank.
Salt was not a problem. Renaissance’s seas had left behind plenty of pans and flats. Water was a little more expensive, dug up frozen from deep crevices, melted, and purified. Power was cheaper, about as easily available as salt. The cloudless skies of Renaissance did little to dim the light of its yellow-white star, Horus. The McKenna’s unconventional surface dwelling gave them a great opportunity to convert that constant flood of photons to electricity.
She strapped on her hood again and let the blood-warm waters of the isolation tank lap over her, and the buoyant fluid lifted her and let her lose all connection with her physical surroundings. But her consciousness clung stubbornly to mundane concerns. Why was Kressi so late? Had she come down with this mysterious ailment, this Edde-Berkner-illness?
Ivorene’s calls to the infirmary had all been answered by loops. Everyone was to remain calm. No contagious agents had been isolated. Infirmary beds were reserved for those in serious condition, and most complaints could be dealt with on an outpatient basis, no appointments necessary, first come, first served. The main thing, really, was to remain calm….
Which was what Ivorene would do if it killed her. She would not leap from the tank and rush to the infirmary, streaming salt water along the City’s corridors. She would not embarrass her daughter with overprotectiveness, with the same overreactions her own parents had fallen ridiculous prey to. At fifteen, Kressi was as independent and self-sufficient as Ivorene had been able to make her.
And what if she was sick? She was at the infirmary, right? What better place? Dr. Thompson and his crew would do what they could for her. Ivorene would stay here and find out what else was possible.
Uselessly, she strove to still her thoughts. Then she stopped striving and let a million details wash over her mind, the way the waters of the tank covered her body. This had happened before, in the early stages of her research, the sessions where she’d made first contact with Aunt Lona and Uncle Hervey, the mechanic. She’d prepared for it. She’d stacked the deck, cramming for the last five hours, filling herself up with facts and speculations, clues for her wayward will to follow in the search for Good Boy, Exu, Papa Legba, Ellegua…his names strung themselves out before her in a mocking procession. Grasp one, gain none. The names grew brilliant feathers and flew off with raucous cries, but they went only a short distance. How to catch them? Salt their tails? But no, Good Boy preferred sweet things.
Candy. Visions of sugar plums danced in her head. Sticky and glistening, striped with pink and green. Ivorene concentrated on a hypnotic looking swirl of red and white, a gigantic lollypop with loads of projectability.
Sure enough, she was able to slow its swirling. The spinning disk resolved itself into a three-legged eye, then sped back up and streaked away.
Ivorene followed it. The disk’s thin edge flickered as images imposed themselves over it at a rate too fast for her to perceive. She strove impatiently to focus beyond their interference. Suddenly, her perspective shifted and she was beside the disk—no, above it. The spinning spread, then slowed and stopped.
The disk’s three legs were now composed of art-nouveau curves of thin red plastic. Its eye was gone, and its center pierced by a tall, silver pole. Legs and pole sat at the center of a papery circle of black and red, surrounded by a large, intricately grooved platter of thicker plastic, shiny black alternating with a duller, deep, dark grey.
She’d seen this sort of thing before. In an antique shop on Earth, during one of her expeditions to uncover portable cultural treasures. She’d decided against this particular one, then changed her mind in its favor, only to find it gone on her return to the shop.
It was a record. On a record player. She raised her gaze to the stone face before her. Shell eyes squeezed half shut, a shell mouth pursed in an amused smile.
“Laroye, ago Elegba!” Stay cool, trickster, the Yoruban greeting ran in translation. Coolness having a very high value in equatorial Africa. Ivorene launched into her prepared petition for Good Boy’s assistance in healing her godson Edde of his strange affliction. She stopped abruptly as the image before her faded and threatened to break apart. Hard to hold abstractions in her current state. She tightened down on her desire. Squeezed. The enormous face before her brightened, though it remained amorphous. Encouraged, she produced for him the lump of her longing. It shone like a milky diamond, lustrous yet clear, then flew off toward him of its own accord. On impact, her prayer spread in ripples that seemed to sharpen and set the stone face, rather than disturbing it.
Shell eyes twinkled. The great head moved. A nod yes? Or instructi
on, a wish to be imitated? Ivorene looked down again, reading the label on the record. Atlantic. Chic. “Good Times.”
So what did that mean? So Good Boy would help her if she played a record she knew she didn’t have?
The spinning began again. Ivorene seemed now to stand on the record’s surface, swinging around the silver pole as a scratchy song rose from below. Beyond the pole, white walls with gigantic murals pursued a stately rotation. Mushroom-haired women with impossibly long legs raised shapely brown hands against invisible enemies. Bald, athletic young men in flowing furs saluted crowds of admiring children with casual waves of large, lethal-looking side-arms.
Actually, there were a lot of weapons.
“Boys will be boys,” a nasal voice advised her. “Better let them have their toys.”
Well, there weren’t any firearms on Renaissance. Explosives seemed like a pretty bad idea in a contained and pressurized atmosphere. Maybe the miners…. No. “No, sorry.” She shook her head firmly. “No guns.”
The world screeched backwards in its tracks, jerked violently forward with a wheezing shriek. Ivorene fell on her figurative ass as the process repeated itself. She clung to the record’s ridges, shooting back and forth around its axis without warning. An eery choir wailed in time to the wild stops and starts.
The disturbance ended as suddenly as it had begun, and the world’s smooth spin resumed. A new number played, a steady march. “On guard! Defend yourself!” its singers admonished her.
No doubt.
A flash of brilliance at the pole’s tip drew her attention. It grew into a humming globe, an irregularly-rayed ball of slowly coruscating light. Flickering arms of color drew her closer—her prayer? So much bigger, now. So strong—it had to be more, more than she’d asked for. It had to be—
She resisted. But the pole loomed larger and larger. If she touched it—if she grasped it firmly, with both hands, she could call down that ball of lightning on her head. She could know Good Boy in her heart, as her personal savior. She could cure the colony of its mysterious non-epidemic and get the respect she deserved, the respect she’d already more than earned. She could fill herself with the power, the glory—
She could get herself possessed while she was alone, without anyone to help or protect her, or see to it that she ever came back to normal.
On guard. Defend yourself.
She made an effort. A step backward. It turned into a lunge forward. Off-balance, she caught herself on the silver pole and clung there as the light descended, swift and slow.
“…There may be other controls and controllers, which, for convenience, I call supraself metaprograms. These are many or one depending on current states of consciousness in the single self-metaprogrammer. These may be personified as if entities….”
Kressi walked slowly home, leaning heavily on the handle of the flatbed. Maybe she should just lie right down on it. She could have pushed herself along the walls if they weren’t so far apart. She felt very, very tired. A shift and a half she’d worked. The infirmary was now completely out of pulp sheets, which was just as well. The plastic bed pads might be less comfortable, but they cleaned up efficiently.
She hoped her mother wouldn’t be too mad. Ivorene hadn’t said not to work late, not exactly…. And Dr. Thompson wanted her back early, too.
At the top of the ramp she hesitated. The yurt’s familiar hollow was filled with darkness. The only light filtered in behind her, shining up the ramp. Power out? She shifted cautiously to her left. No. Two red tell-tales glowed in her field of vision like the mismatched eyes of some squat monster: Ivorene’s isolation tank. Her mother had gone under. Alone. Guilt tweaked at her; she should have come home earlier.
But Ivorene ought to have called her.
The yurt’s polarized glass panels showed blankness. No stars. Not for the next few hours. Horus was setting now, triggering the glass’s reflective properties. Why was she standing there in the dark? “Light one. Light two,” she commanded.
Her stomach grumbled at her loudly. Hungry and tired. Tired and hungry. And she had to talk to her mother about going back early.
She shoved the cart into place next to the ramp and went to the tank to see how much longer Ivorene would be inside. The timer was counting up, not down. Ivorene had been due out of isolation half an hour ago.
Anxiously, she activated the mike. “Ivorene, I’m home. Can you come out now? It’s Kressi,” she added. No telling what state her mother’s mind was in. How could Ivorene have missed the alarm?
A long pause, then her mother’s voice came through the speaker, a bit odd. “Right.”
“Okay.” Kressi eyed the tank suspiciously till Ivorene emerged dripping from its depths. “Rough session?” she asked her.
Ivorene stared around the yurt absently. Kressi assumed she was looking for a towel and brought one over. “Mom?” Ooops. Ivorene hated for Kressi to call her that. But she seemed not to notice the slip-up. Or the towel. Kressi laid it over Ivorene’s shoulders. “I’ll get you a robe.”
When she turned back from the closet, Ivorene was walking around the yurt in great strides, toweling herself off vigorously. But shivering, Kressi saw as she draped her mother in soft red fabric. It must have been bad. Why hadn’t Ivorene waited?
Why hadn’t she come home on time?
She picked the damp towel up from the floor where Ivorene had dropped it. “Let me get your hair for you.” A loud, hoarse cackle made her start.
“Ha! I have my hair already where it belongs, here upon my head!”
“But—I—but it’s wet!” Kressi protested, confused.
Her mother frowned. A drop of water slid down her forehead and trickled along one slanted brow. “You are correct. Remedy this.”
She let Kressi lead her to her chair at the kitchen table and towel dry her short locks, then got up and strolled restlessly around the yurt’s perimeter. She picked up random objects and examined them, then lost interest. A loud crash sounded as Ivorene emptied a jar of trade beads onto the floor. After watching the tiny cylinders of colored glass roll away from her, she moved on, slipping and unconcernedly righting herself whenever she stepped on one.
Kressi was pretty sure by this time that she understood what had happened.
From her mother’s perspective, Ivorene had become possessed. From the perspective of everyone else on the planet, she was insane.
Only temporarily, of course. All Kressi had to do was—
Was remember her instructions. What to do if things went wrong. And believe they’d work.
Her mother stood holding a cube of her ex-husband, Kressi’s father, the white man she’d left behind when she became a Neo-Negro. Her face wore a remote, detached expression.
Kressi’s first memories were of quarantine. She’d never really known her father. She wondered if he’d have been able to help her, if he were here.
Resolutely, she removed the cube from her mother’s hands, held both of them in her own, and stepped firmly on Ivorene’s right foot. Two sharp jerks down on both arms at once—like that—
Laughing, the face in front of her split wide into a most un-Ivoreneish grin. “What, you want for me to leave already? Is your mother’s body, though, and she invited me to come, to solve your mystery. So I am going to stay!”
“…one cannot know as a result of this kind of solitudinous experiment whether or not the phenomena are explicable only by non-biocomputer interventions or only by happenings within the computer itself, or both.”
Light receded, poured out of her like water from a strainer, left her sitting in her own chair, dressed in her red robe. She knew how she’d gotten there, knew Kressi had come home and roused her from the tank. Nothing was lost. What happened while Good Boy rode her remained in her memory, only faded, thinned of all immediacy. And her body felt so heavy now that she had to lift it on her own. But she made her hand rise, reached out to touch her daughter’s cheek.
“Don’t worry, Kressi. I’m still here. This is
right, what Good Boy’s trying to do—”
“Ivorene? You’re okay?” Tears filled her daughter’s eyes and voice.
“Yes.” She wanted to sound surer. “Listen, I’m going to let him come back again, I just didn’t want—”
“‘Him?’ Ivorene, why won’t you—Good Boy’s not real! Admit it!” Kressi stood and stormed away from the table so Ivorene had to turn to see her. Now the tears were of anger.
“Define real,” Ivorene said, then sagged in her seat. She was too tired to argue. “No, never mind. Don’t. Whether Good Boy or Aunt Lona or any of them are ‘real’ doesn’t matter in the end. Just act like they are and everything will work out fine.”
“But—”
“For three days, that’s all. That’s how long I asked him to stay.” Stubborn silence. At the edge of Ivorene’s vision, whiteness flickered. With each pulse it grew, drawing in, a bright tunnel down which her daughter’s once-more-worried face receded. Saying words she couldn’t hear. Apologies? Ivorene overrode them with her own instructions: “Three days. Promise me that.”
“…each computer has a certain level of ability in metaprogramming others-not-self.”
Posted on Citynet 01.18.2065, 08:18:14
FROM: [email protected]
TO: ALL USERS:
Subject: Be a Souldier in the Army of Uncle Jam!
Body:
PARTY UP!
You are hereby notified that in accordance with the wishes of the Supreme Funkmeister,
you are required to bring your Waggity Asses on over to
McKenna’s Mothership
for the
CELEBRATION!
of our Grand Ascension to the status of
Chocolate City, Capitol of the Known Negro Universe, said
CELEBRATION!
to commence on the evening of 01.21.2065, promptly at