by John Varley
"Are you all right?"
Cooper was holding his face in his hands. He looked up, and shook his head, realized that she would misinterpret the gesture, and nodded.
"A touch of vertigo. It's been a while."
"We could wait. Do it another time."
"No. Let's go."
He was sitting in the wheelchair, dressed in a fine lace gown that covered him from his neck to his toes. The toes were already beginning to look different. There was no more muscle tone in them.
Most important, he could no longer feel them.
He felt very little sensation. There was a gray area just above his breasts where everything began to fade. He was a floating awareness, suspended above the wheelchair and the body attached to it.
He was aware of all this, but he was not thinking about it. It was already a common thing. The awful novelty was long gone.
Spring had arrived outside his window. (Where was he? This was not Mexico, he was sure, but his precise location eluded him. No matter.) He watched a squirrel climbing a tree just outside his window. It might be nice to be a squirrel.
Someone was coming to visit real soon. It would only be a few more hours. He felt good about that.
He was looking forward to it. Nothing much had happened today. There had been therapy (his shoulders still ached from it) and a retraining session (without thinking about it, he made the vast, numb mittens that used to be his hands close together strongly—which meant he had exerted almost enough force to hold a sheet of paper between thumb and bunched fingers). Pretty soon there would be lunch. He wondered what it would be.
Oh, yes. There had been that unpleasantness earlier in the day. He had been screaming hysterically and the doctor had come with the needle. That was all still down there. There was enough sadness to drown in, but he didn't feel it. He felt the sunlight on his arm and was grateful for it. He felt pretty good. Wonder what's for lunch?
"You still okay?"
"I'm fine." He rubbed his eyes, trying to uncross them. It was the transition that always made him dizzy; that feeling as though a taut rubber band had snapped and he had popped out of the set and back into his own head, his own body. He rubbed his arms, which felt as though they had gone to sleep. On the screen, Megan still sat in her wheelchair, looking out the window with a vague expression. The scene changed.
He sat as still as he could so he wouldn't disturb the sutures in the back of his neck, but it was worth a little pain. On the table in front of him, the tiny metal bug shuddered, jerked forward, then stopped.
He concentrated, telling it to make a right turn. He thought about how he would have turned right while driving a car. Foot on the accelerator, hands on the wheel. Shoulder muscles holding the arms up, fingers curled, thumbs... what had he done with his thumbs? But then he had them, he felt the muscles of his arms as he began turning the wheel. He tapped the brake with his foot, trying to feel the tops of his toes against the inside of his shoe as his foot lifted, the steady pressure on the sole as he pushed down. He took his right hand off the wheel as his left crossed in front of him...
On the table, the metal bug whirred as it turned to the right. There was applause from the people he only vaguely sensed standing around him. Sweat dripped down his neck as he guided the device through a left turn, then another right. It was too much. The bug reached the edge of the table and try as he might, he could not get it straightened out. One of the doctors caught it and placed it in the center of the table.
"Would you like to rest, Megan?"
"No," he said, not allowing himself to relax. "Let me try again." Behind him, an entire wall flashed and blinked as the computer found itself taxed to its limits, sorting the confusing neural impulses that gathered on the stump of his spinal cord, translating the information, and broadcasting it to the servos in the remotalog device. He made it start, then stopped it before it reached the edge of the table. Just how he had done it was still mostly mysterious, but he felt he was beginning to get a handle on it. Sometimes it worked best if he tried to trick himself into thinking he could still walk and then just did it. Other times the bug just sat there, not fooled. It knew he could not walk. It knew he was never going to—
A white-sheeted form was being wheeled down the corridor toward the door to the operating room.
Inside, from the gallery, he saw them transfer the body onto the table. The lights were very bright.
He blinked, confused by them. But they were turning him over now, and that made it much better.
Something cool touched the back of his neck—
"A thousand pardons, sir," Megan said, briskly fast-forwarding the tape. "You're not ready for that.
I'm not ready for that."
He was not sure what she was talking about. He knew he needed the operation. It was going to improve the neural interfaces, which would make it easier for him to operate the new remotes they were developing. It was exciting to be involved in the early stages of...
"Oh. Right. I'm..."
"Q.M. Cooper," she said, and looked dubiously into his eyes. "Are you sure you wouldn't rather wait?"
"No. Show me more."
The nights were the worst. Not all of them, but when it was bad it was very bad. During the day there was acceptance, or some tough armor that contained the real despair. For days at a time he could be happy, he could accept what had happened, know that he must struggle but that the struggle was worth it. For most of his life he knew that what had happened was not the end of the world, that he could lead a full, happy life. There were people who cared about him. His worst fears had not been realized. Pleasure was still possible, happiness could be attained. Even sexual pleasures had not vanished. They were different and sometimes awkward, but he didn't mind.
But alone at night, it could all fall apart. The darkness stripped his defenses and he was helpless, physically and emotionally.
He could not move. His legs were dead meat. He was repulsive, disgusting, rotting away, a hideous object no one could ever love. The tube had slipped out and the sheets were soaked with urine. He was too ashamed to buzz for the nurse.
He wept silently. When he was through, he coldly began plotting the best way to end his life.
She held him until the worst of the shaking passed. He cried like a child who cannot understand the hurt, and like a weary old man. For the longest time he could not seem to make his eyes open. He did not want to see anything.
"Do I... do I have to see the next part?" He heard the whine in his voice.
She covered his face with kisses, hugging him, giving him wordless reassurance that everything would be all right. He accepted it gratefully.
"No. You don't have to see anything. I don't know why I showed you as much as I have, but I can't show you that part even if I wanted to because I destroyed it. It's too dangerous. I'm no more suicidal now than anybody else, but transing that next tape would strip me naked and maybe drive me crazy, or anybody who looked at it. The strongest of us is pretty fragile, you know. There is so much primal despair just under our surfaces that you don't dare fool around with it."
"How close did you come?"
"Gestures," she said, easily. "Two attempts, both discovered in plenty of time." She kissed him again, looked into his eyes and gave him a tentative smile. She seemed satisfied with what she saw, for she patted his cheek and reached for the transer controls again.
"One more little item," she said, "and we'll call it a night. This is a happy tape. I think we could both use it."
There was a girl in a sidekick. This machine was to the Golden Gypsy what a Wright Brothers Flyer was to a supersonic jet. Megan was almost invisible. Chromed struts stuck out all over, hydraulic cylinders hissed. There were welds visible where the thing had been bashed into shape. When she moved, the thing whined like a sick dog. Yet she was moving, and under her own control, placing one foot laboriously in front of the other, biting her tongue in concentration as she pondered her next step. Quick cut to—
�
��next year's model. It was still ponderous, it poked through her clothes, it was hydraulic and nononsense orthopedic. But she was moving well. She was able to walk naturally; the furrows of concentration were gone from her brow. This one had hands. They were heavy metal gauntlets, but she could move each finger separately. The smile she gave the camera had more genuine warmth than Cooper had seen from her since the accident.
"The new Mark Three," said an off-camera voice, and Cooper saw Megan running. She did high kicks, jumped up and down. And yet this new model was actually bulkier than the Mark Two had been. There was a huge bulge on her back, containing computers which had previously been external to the machine. It was the first self-contained sidekick. No one would ever call it pretty, but he could imagine the feeling of freedom it must have given Megan, and wondered why she wasn't playing the trans-track. He started to look away from the screen but this was no time to worry about things like that. He was free!
He held his hands before his face, turning them, looking at the trim leather gloves he would always have to wear, and not caring, because they were so much better than the mailed fists, or the fumbling hooks before that. It was the first day in his new sidekick, and it was utterly glorious. He ran, he shouted and jumped and cavorted, and everyone laughed with him and applauded his every move. He was powerful! He was going to change the world. Nothing could stop him. Some day, everyone would know the name of Me(Q.M.)gan Gallo (Cooper)way. There was nothing, nothing in the world he couldn't do. He would—
"Oh!" He clapped his hands to his face in shock. "Oh! You turned it off!"
"Sort of coitus interruptus, huh?" she said, smugly.
"But I want more!"
"That would be a mistake. It's not good to get too deeply into someone else's joy or sadness. Besides, how do you know it stays that good?"
"How could it not? You have everything now, you—" He stopped, and looked into her face. She was smiling. He would come back to the moment many times in days to come, searching for a hint of mockery, but he would never find it. The walls were gone. She had showed him everything there was to know about her, and he knew his life would never be the same.
"I love you," he said.
Her expression changed so slightly he might have missed it had he not been so exquisitely attuned to her emotions. Her lower lip quivered, and sadness outlined her eyes. She drew a ragged breath.
"This is sudden. Maybe you should wait until you've recovered from—"
"No." He touched her face with his hands and made her look at him. "No. I could only put it into words just now, in that crazy moment. It wasn't an easy thing for me to say."
"Oh boy," she said, in a quiet monotone.
"What's the matter?" When she wouldn't talk, he shook her head gently back and forth between his hands. "You don't love me, is that it? I'd rather you came out and said it now."
"That's not it. I do love you. You've never been in love before, have you?"
"No. I wondered if I'd know what it would feel like. Now I know."
"You don't know the half of it. Sometimes, you almost wish it was a more rational thing, that it wouldn't hit you when you feel you can least cope with it."
"I guess we're really helpless, aren't we?"
"You said it." She sighed again, then rose and took his hand. She pulled him toward the bed.
"Come on. You're going to have to learn to make love."
He had feared it would be bizarre. It was not. He had thought about it a great deal in the last weeks and had come up with no answers. What would she do? If she could feel nothing below the collarbone, how could any sexual activity have any meaning for her?
One answer should have been obvious. She still felt with her shoulders, her neck, her face, lips, and ears. A second answer had been there for him to see. but he had not made the connection. She was still capable of erection. Sensation from her genitals never reached her brain, but the nerves from her clitoris to her spinal cord were undamaged. Complex things happened, things she never explained completely, involving secondary and tertiary somatic effects, hormones, transfer arousal, the autonomic and vascular systems of the body.
"Some of it is natural adaptation," she said, "and some of it has been augmented by surgery and microprocessors. Quadraplegics could do this before the kind of nerve surgery we can do today, but not as easily as I can. It's like a blind person, whose sense of hearing and touch sharpen in compensation. The areas of my body I can still feel are now more sensitive, more responsive. I know a woman who can have an orgasm from having her elbow stimulated. With me, elbows are not so great."
"With all they can do, why can't they bridge the gap where your spinal cord was cut? If they can make a machine to read the signals your brain sends out, why can't they make one to put new signals into the rest of your body, and take the signals that come from your lower body and put them into—"
"It's a different problem. They're working on it. Maybe in fifteen or twenty years."
"Here?"
"More around here. All around my neck, from ear to ear... that's it. Keep doing that. And why don't you find something for your hands to do?"
"But you can't feel this. Can you?"
"Not directly. But nice things are happening. Just look."
"Yeah."
"Then don't worry about it. Just keep doing it."
"What about this?"
"Not particularly."
"This?"
"You're getting warmer."
"But I thought you—"
"Why don't you do a little less thinking? Come on, put it in. I want this to be good for you, too. And don't think it won't do something for me."
"Whatever you say. Oh, lord, that feels... hey, how did you do that?"
"You ask a lot of questions."
"Yeah, but you can't move any muscles down there."
"A simple variation on the implants that keep me from making a mess of myself. Now, honestly, Q.M. Don't you think the time for questions is over?"
"I think you're right."
"You want to see something funny?" she asked.
They were sprawled in each other's arms, looking at the smoke belching from her ridiculous bedposts. She had flipped on the holo generators, and her bedroom had vanished in a Mark Twain illusion. They floated down the Mississippi River. The bed rocked gently. Cooper felt indecently relaxed.
"Sure."
"Promise you won't laugh?"
"Not unless it's funny."
She rolled over and spread her arms and legs, face down on the bed. The sidekick released her, stood up, found the holo control, and turned off the river. It put one knee on the bed, carefully turned Megan onto her back, crossed her legs for her, then sat beside her on the edge of the bed and crossed its own legs, swinging them idly. By then he was laughing, as she had intended. It sat beside her and encased her left forearm and hand, lit a cigarette and placed it in her mouth, then released her hand again. It went to a chair across the room and sat down.
He jumped when she touched him. He turned and saw a thin hand on his elbow, not able to grasp him, not strong enough to do more than nudge.
"Will you put this out?" She inclined her head toward him. He carefully removed the cigarette from her lips, cupping his hand under the ash. When he turned back to her, her eyes were guarded.
"This is me, too," she said.
"I know that." He frowned, and tried to get closer to the truth, for his own sake as well as hers. "I hadn't thought about it much. You look very helpless like this."
"I am very helpless."
"Why are you doing it?"
"Because nobody sees me like this, except doctors. I wanted to know if it made any difference."
"No. No difference at all. I've seen you this way before. I'm surprised you asked."
"You shouldn't be. I hate myself like this. I disgust myself. I expect everyone else to react the way I do."
"You expect wrong." He hugged her, then drew back and studied her face. "Do you... would you like t
o make love again? Not this second, I mean, but a little later. Like this."
"God, no. But thanks for offering." When she was inside the sidekick again she touched his face with her be-ringed hand. Her expression was an odd mixture of satisfaction and uncertainty.
"You keep passing the tests, Cooper. As fast as I can throw them at you. I wonder what I'm going to do with you?"
"Are there more tests?"
She shook her head. "No. Not for you."
"You're going to be late for work," Anna-Louse said, as Cooper lifted one of her suitcases and followed her out of the shuttleport waiting room.
"I don't care." Anna-Louise gave him an odd look. He knew why. When they had been together he had always been eager for his shift to begin. By now he was starting to hate it. When he worked he could not be with Megan.
"You've really got it bad, don't you?" she said.
He smiled at her. "I sure do. This is the first time I've been away from her in weeks. I hope you aren't angry."
"Me? No. I'm flattered that you came to see me off. You... well, you wouldn't have thought of something like that a month ago. Sorry."
"You're right." He put the suitcase down beside the things she had been carrying. A porter took them through the lock and into the shuttle. Cooper leaned against the sign that announced "New Dresden, Clavius, Tycho Under." "I didn't know if you'd be angry, but I thought I ought to be here."
Anna-Louise smiled wryly. "Well, she's certainly changed you. I'm happy for you. Even though I still think she's going to hurt you, you'll gain something from it. You've come alive since the last time I saw you."
"I wanted to ask you about that," he said, slowly. "Why do you think she'll hurt me?"
She hesitated, hitching at her pants and awkwardly scuffing her shoes on the deck.
"You don't like your work as much as you did. Right?"
"Well... yeah. I guess not. Mostly because I'd like to spend more time with her."
She looked at him, cocking her head.