by Jack Dann
She screamed, twisted, hurled herself sideways into Big R.
And her world exploded. The ocean raced up the beach, a black tidal wave that screeched and rattled as though some monstrous mechanical beast were being demolished by giant pistons.
Black water engulfed her. She coughed and it filled her lungs. She flayed; her right fist slammed painfully against the side of the container, making it hum.
She clambered out of the exercise vat, placed conveniently next to the bed, stumbled, and sprawled on the floor in naked triumph.
“Hello Big R,” she said, tasting blood on her lips.
DR. MARX had let the system ease him back into Big R. The sessions room dimmed to glittering black, then the light returned. He was back in the bright control room. He removed the neuronet, swung his legs to the side of the flatbed, stretched. It had been a good session. He had learned something about distinguishing (behaviorially) the transitory feedback psychosis called frets from the organic v-disease, Viller’s Pathway.
This Halfway House was proving to be a remarkable instructional tool. In retrospect, his fear of its virtual form had been pure superstition. He smiled at his own irrationality. HE would have slept that night in ignorance, but he decided to give the perimeter of his makeshift compound a last security check before retiring.
To that effect, he dressed and went outside.
In the flare of the compound lights, the jungle’s purple vegetation looked particularly unpleasant, like the swollen limbs of long-drowned corpses. The usual skittering things made a racket. There was nothing in the area inclined to attack a man, but the planet’s evolution hadn’t stinted on biting and stinging vermin, and…
And one of the vermin was missing.
He had, as always, been frugal in his breathing, gathering into his lungs as little of the noxious atmosphere as possible. The cloying mint scent never failed to sicken him.
But the odor was gone.
It had been there earlier in the evening, and now it was gone. He stood in jungle night, in the glare of the compound lights, waiting for his brain to process this piece of information, but his brain told him only that the odor had been there and now it was gone.
Still, some knowledge of what this meant was leaking through, creating a roiling fear.
If you knew what to look for, you could find it. No vee was as detailed as nature.
You only had to find one seam, one faint oscillation in a rock, one incongruent shadow.
It was a first-rate sim, and it would have fooled him. But they had had to work fast, fabricating and downloading it, and no one had noted that a nasty alien-bug filled the Big-R air with its mating fragrance.
DR. MARX knew he was still in the vee. That meant, of course, that he had not walked outside at all. He was still lying on the flat. And, thanks to his blessed paranoia, there was a button at the base of the flat, two inches from where his left hand naturally lay. Pushing it would disrupt all current and activate a hypodermic containing twenty cc’s of hapotile-4. Hapotile-4 could get the attention of the deepest V-diver. The aftereffects were not pleasant, but, for many v-devotees, there wouldn’t have been an “after” without hapotile.
Dr. Marx didn’t hesitate. He strained for the Big R, traced the line of his arm, moved. It was there; he found it. Pressed.
Nothing.
Then, out of the jungle, a figure came.
EIGHT feet tall, carved from black steel, the vee soldier bowed at the waist. Then, standing erect, it spoke: “We deactivated your failsafe before you embarked, Doctor.”
“Who are you?” He was not intimidated by this military mockup, the boom of its metal voice, the faint whine of its servos. It was a virtual puppet, of course. Its masters were the thing to fear.
“We are concerned citizens,” the soldier said. “We have reason to believe that you are preventing a client of ours, a client-in-good-credit, from satisfying her constitutionally sanctioned appetites.”
“Keel Benning came to us of her own free will. Ask her and she will tell you as much.”
“We will ask her. And that is not what she will say. She will say, for all the world to hear, that her freedom was compromised by so-called caregivers.”
“Leave her alone.”
The soldier came closer. It looked up at the dark blanket of the sky. “Too late to leave anyone alone, Doctor. Everyone is in the path of progress. One day we will all live in the vee. It is the natural home of gods.”
The sky began to glow as the black giant raised its gleaming arms.
“You act largely out of ignorance,” the soldier said. “The god-seekers come, and you treat them like aberrations, like madmen burning with sickness. This is because you do not know the virtual yourself. Fearing it, you have confined and studied it. You have refused to taste it, to savor it.”
The sky was glowing gold, and figures seemed to move in it, beautiful, winged humanforms.
Virtvana, Marx thought. Ape and Angels.
It was his last coherent thought before enlightenment.
“I give you a feast,” the soldier roared. And all the denizens of heaven swarmed down, surrounding Dr. Marx with love and compassion and that absolute, impossible distillation of a hundred thousand insights that formed a single, tear-shaped truth: Euphoria.
KEEL found she could stand. A couple of days of inaction hadn’t entirely destroyed the work of all that exercise. Shakily, she navigated the small room. The room had the sanitized, hospital look she’d grown to know and loathe. If this room followed the general scheme, the shelves over the bed should contain… They did, and Keel donned one of the gray, disposable client suits.
SHE found Dr. Marx by the noise he was making, a kind of huh, huh, huh delivered in a monotonous chant and punctuated by an occasional Ah! The sounds, and the writhing, near-naked body that lay on the table emitting these sounds, suggested to Keel that her doctor, naughty man, might be auditing something sexual on the virtual.
But a closer look showed signs of v-overload epilepsy. Keel had seen it before and knew that one’s first inclination, to shut down every incoming signal, was not the way to go. First you shut down any chemical enhances-and, if you happened to have a hospital handy (as she did), you slowed the system more with something like clemadine or hetlin-then, if you were truly fortunate and your spike was epping in a high-tech detox (again, she was so fortunate), you plugged in a regulator, spliced it and started running the signals through that, toning them down.
Keel got to it. As she moved, quickly, confidently, she had time to think that this was something she knew about (a consumer’s knowledge, not a tech’s, but still, her knowledge was extensive).
DR. MARX had been freed from the virtual for approximately ten minutes (but was obviously not about to break the surface of Big R), when Keel heard the whine of the security alarm. The front door of the unit was being breached with an Lsaw.
Keel scrambled to the corridor where she’d seen the habitat sweep. She swung the ungainly tool around, falling to one knee as she struggled to unbolt the barrel lock. Fizzing pocky low-tech grubber.
The barrel-locking casing clattered to the floor just as the door collapsed.
The man in the doorway held a weapon, which, in retrospect, made Keel feel a little better. Had he been weapon-less, she would still have done what she did.
She swept him out the door. The sonic blast scattered him across the cleared area, a tumbling, bloody mass of rags and unraveling flesh, a thigh bone tumbling into smaller bits as it rolled under frayed vegetation.
She was standing in the doorway when an explosion rocked the unit and sent her crashing backward. She crawled down the corridor, still lugging the habitat gun, and fell into the doorway of a cluttered storage room. An alarm continued to shriek somewhere.
The mobile now lay on its side. She fired in front of her. The roof rippled and roared, looked like it might hold, and then flapped away like an unholy, howling v-demon, a vast silver blade that smoothly severed the leafy tops of
the jungle’s tallest sentinels. Keel plunged into the night, ran to the edge of the unit and peered out into the glare of the compound lights.
The man was crossing the clearing.
She crouched, and he turned, sensing motion. He was trained to fire reflexively but he was too late. The rolling sonic blast from Keel’s habitat gun swept man and weapon and weapon’s discharge into rolling motes that mixed with rock and sand and vegetation, a stew of organic and inorganic matter for the wind to stir.
Keel waited for others to come but none did.
Finally, she reentered the mobile to retrieve her wilson, dragging him (unconscious) into the scuffed arena of the compound.
Later that night, exhausted, she discovered the aircraft that had brought the two men. She hesitated, then decided to destroy it. It would do her no good; it was not a vehicle she could operate, and its continued existence might bring others.
THE next morning, Keel’s mood improved when she found a pair of boots that almost fit. They were a little tight but, she reasoned, that was probably better than a little loose. They had, according to Dr. Marx, a four-day trek ahead of them.
Dr. Marx was now conscious but fairly insufferable. He could talk about nothing but angels and the Light. A long, hard dose of Apes and Angels had filled him with fuzzy love and an uncomplicated metaphysics in which smiling angels fixed bad stuff and protected all good people (and, it went without saying, all people were good).
Keel had managed to dress Dr. Marx in a suit again, and this restored a professional appearance to the wilson. But, to Keel’s dismay, Dr. Marx in virtual-withdrawal was a shameless whiner.
“Please,” he would implore. “Please, I am in terrible terrible Neeeeeeed.”
He complained that the therapy-v was too weak, that he was sinking into a catatonic state. Later, he would stop entirely, of course, but now, please, something stronger…
No.
He told her she was heartless, cruel, sadistic, vengeful. She was taking revenge for her own treatment program, although, if she would just recall, he had been the soul of gentleness and solicitude.
“You can’t be in virtual and make the journey,” Keel said. “I need you to navigate. We will take breaks, but I’m afraid they will be brief. Say goodbye to your mobile.”
She destroyed it with the habitat sweep, and they were on their way. It was a limping, difficult progress, for they took much with them: food, emergency camping and sleeping gear, a portable, two-feed v-rig, the virtual black box, and the security image grabs. And Dr. Marx was not a good traveler.
It took six days to get to the Slash, and then Dr. Marx said he wasn’t sure just where the halfway house was.
“What?”
“I don’t know. I’m disoriented.”
“You’ll never be a good v-addict,” Keel said. “You can’t lie.”
“I’m not lying!” Dr. Marx snapped, goggle-eyed with feigned innocence.
Keel knew what was going on, of course. He wanted to give her the slip and find a v-hovel where he could swap good feelings with his old angel buddies. Keel knew.
“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she said.
The Slash was a squalid mining town with every vice a disenfranchised population could buy. It had meaner toys than New Vegas, and no semblance of law.
Keel couldn’t just ask around for a treatment house. You could get hurt that way.
But luck was with her. She spied the symbol of a triangle inside a circle on the side of what looked like an abandoned office. She watched a man descend a flight of stairs directly beneath the painted triangle. She followed him.
“Where are we going?” Dr. Marx said. He was still a bundle of tics from angel-deprivation.
Keel didn’t answer, just dragged him along. Inside, she saw the “Easy Does It” sign and knew everything was going to be okay.
An old man saw her and waved. Incredibly, he knew her, even knew her name. “Keel,” he shouted. “I’m delighted to see you.”
“It’s a small world, Solly.”
“It’s that. But you get around some too. You cover some ground, you know. I figured ground might be covering you by now.”
Keel laughed. “Yeah.” She reached out and touched the old man’s arm. “I’m looking for a house,” she said.
IN Group they couldn’t get over it. Dr. Max Marx was a fizzing client. This amazed everyone, but two identical twins, Sere and Shona, were so dazed by this event that they insisted on dogging the wilson ’s every move. They’d flank him, peering up into his eyes, trying to fathom this mystery by an act of unrelenting scrutiny.
Brake Madders thought it was a narc thing and wanted to hurt Marx.
“No, he’s one of us,” Keel said.
And so, Keel thought, am I.
WHEN Dr. Max Marx was an old man, one of his favorite occupations was to reminisce. One of his favorite topics was Keel Benning. He gave her credit for saving his life, not only in the jungles of Pit Finitum but during the rocky days that followed when he wanted to flee the halfway house and find, again, virtual nirvana.
She had recognized every denial system and thwarted it with logic. When logic was not enough, she had simply shared his sadness and pain and doubt.
“I’ve been there,” she had said.
THE young wilsons and addiction activists knew Keel Benning only as the woman who had fought Virtvana and Mind-Slip and the vast lobby of Right to Flight, the woman who had secured a resounding victory for addicts’ rights and challenged the spurious thinking that suggested a drowning person was drowning by choice. She was a hero, but, like many heroes, she was not, to a newer generation, entirely real.
“I WAS preoccupied at the time,” Dr. Marx would tell young listeners. “I kept making plans to slip out and find some Apes and Angels. You weren’t hard pressed then-and you aren’t now-to find some mind-flaming vee in the Slash. My thoughts would go that way a lot.
“So I didn’t stop and think, ‘Here’s a woman who’s been rehabbed six times; it’s not likely she’ll stop on the seventh. She’s just endured some genuine nasty events, and she’s probably feeling the need for some quality downtime.’
“What I saw was a woman who spent every waking moment working on her recovery. And when she wasn’t doing mental, spiritual, or physical push-ups, she was helping those around her, all us shaking, vision-hungry, fizz-headed needers.
“I didn’t think, ‘What the hell is this?’ back then. But I thought it later. I thought it when I saw her graduate from medical school.
“When she went back and got a law degree, so she could fight the bastards who wouldn’t let her practice addiction medicine properly, I thought it again. That time, I asked her. I asked her what had wrought the change.”
Dr. Marx would wait as long as it took for someone to ask, “What did she say?”
“It unsettled me some,” he would say, then wait again to be prompted.
They’d prompt.
“ ‘Helping people,’ she’d said. She’d found it was a thing she could do; she had a gift for it. All those no-counts and dead-enders in a halfway house in the Slash. She found she could help them all.”
Dr. Marx saw it then, and saw it every time after that, every time he’d seen her speaking on some monolith grid at some rally, some hearing, some whatever. Once he’d seen it, he saw it every time: that glint in her eye, the incorrigible, unsinkable addict.
“People,” she had said. “What a rush.”
HER OWN PRIVATE SITCOM by Allen Steele
The Reality TV craze has helped to generate the idea that anybody and everybody can be a television star, but as the sly story that follows indicates, it’s not always as easy as it looks…
Allen Steele made his first sale to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in 1988, soon following it up with a long string of other sales to Asimov’s, as well as to markets such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Science Fiction Age. In 1990, he published his critically acclaimed first novel, Orbita
l Decay, which subsequently won the Locus Poll as Best First Novel of the year, and soon Steele was being compared to Golden Age Heinlein by no less an authority than Gregory Benford. His other books include the novels Clarke County Space, Lunar Descent, Labyrinth of Night. The Weight, The Tranquillity Alternative, A King of Infinite Space, Oceanspace, Chronospace, Coyote, and Coyote Rising. His short work has been gathered in two collections, Rude Astronauts and Sex and Violence in Zero G. His most recent book is a new novel in the Coyote sequence, Coyote Frontier. He won a Hugo Award in 1996 for his novella “The Death of Captain Future,” and another Hugo in 1998 for his novella “Where Angels Fear to Tread.” Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he has worked for a variety of newspapers and magazines, covering science and business assignments, and is now a full-time writer living in Whately, Massachusetts with his wife, Linda.
***
RAY’S Good Food Diner was located on the outskirts of town near the interstate, across a gravel parking lot from a Union 76 truckstop. The town only had 1,300 residents, so it supported only two restaurants, the other of which was a pizzeria which served up what was universally acknowledged to be the world’s most indigestible pizza. This left Ray’s Good Food Diner as the only place within fifteen miles where you could get a decent breakfast twenty-four hours a day.
Every Friday morning at about nine o’clock, Bill drove out to Ray’s for the weekly meeting of the Old Farts Club. No one remembered who first started calling it that, but it pretty well described the membership: a half-dozen or so men, each and every one of whom qualified for the senior citizen discount, who liked to get together and chew the fat, both literally and figuratively. There weren’t any rules, written or unspoken, against women or children attending the meetings, but since no one had ever brought along any family members-their wives didn’t care and their kids were all adults now and, for the most part, living away from home-the issue had never really been raised. Which was just as well; in a world where seemingly everything had been made accessible to all ages and both genders, Ray’s Good Food Diner was one of the few places left where a handful of white male chauvinists could safely convene without fear of being picketed.