The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson

by Johnathan Strahan

"Let me walk you to your office," Jeremy said, taking me by the arm. "Listen, maybe I can give you a lift home?"

  "That's all right," I said, shrugging him off. I found the door by accident, it seemed, and left him. Down to my office, wondering if I would get the right door. My blood was hot Turkish coffee. My head spun. The key worked, so I had found the right door. Locked in, I went to my couch and lay down. I was as dizzy there as standing, but found I couldn't move again. I spun in place helplessly. I had read that the designer drugs used for such purposes had almost no somatic effect, but perhaps this was true only for subjects less sensitive to their kinetic reality—otherwise, why was I reacting so? Fear. Or Jeremy had put something beyond the truth drug in me. A warning? Against? Suddenly I was aware of the tight boundaries of my comprehension, beyond it the wide manifold of action I did not understand—and the latter threatened to completely flood the former, so that there would be left nothing at all that I understood about this matter. Such a prospect terrified me.

  Some time later—perhaps as much as an hour—I felt I had to get home. Physically I felt much better, and it was only when I got outside in the wind that I realized that the psychological effects of the drug were still having their way with me. Rare, heavy waft of diesel exhaust, a person wearing clothes rank with old sweat: these smells overwhelmed any chance I had of locating Ramon's cart by nose. My cane felt unusually long, and the rising and falling whistles of my sonar glasses made a musical composition like something out of Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux. I stood entranced by the effect. Cars zoomed past with their electric whirrs, the wind made more sound than I could process. I couldn't find Ramon and decided to give up trying; it would be bad to get him mixed up in any of this anyway. Ramon was my best friend. All those hours at Warren's throwing together, and when we played beeper ping-pong at his apartment we sometimes got to laughing so hard we couldn't stand—what else is friendship than that, after all?

  Distracted by thoughts such as these, and by the bizarre music of wind and traffic, I lost track of which street I was crossing. The whoosh of a car nearly brushing me as I stepped up from a curb. Lost! "Excuse me, is this Pennsylvania or K?" Fuckyouverymuch. Threading my way fearfully between broken bottles, punji-stick nails poking up out of boards on the sidewalk, low-hanging wires holding up tree branch or street sign, dog shit on the curb waiting like banana peel to skid me into the street under a bus, speeding cars with completely silent electric motors careening around the corner, muggers who didn't care if I was blind or paraplegic or whatever, manholes left open in the crosswalks, rabid dogs with their toothy jaws stuck out between the rails of a fence, ready to bite… Oh, yes, I fought off all these dangers and more, and I must have looked mad tiptoeing down the sidewalk, whapping my cane about like a man beating off devils.

  By the time I got into my apartment I was shaking with fury. I turned on Steve Reich's Come Out (in which the phrase "Come out to show them" is looped countless times) as loud as I could stand it, and barged around my place alternately cursing and crying (that stinging of the eyes), all under the sound of the music. I formulated a hundred impossible plans of revenge against Jeremy Blasingame and his shadowy employers. I brushed my teeth for fifteen minutes to get the taste of coffee out of my mouth.

  By the next morning I had a workable plan: it was time for some confrontation. It was a Saturday, and I was able to work in my office without interruption. I entered the office and unlocked a briefcase, opened my file cabinet and made sounds of moving papers from briefcase to cabinet. Much more silently, I got out a big mousetrap that I had bought that morning. On the back of it I wrote, You're caught. The next trap kills. I set the trap and placed it carefully behind the new file I had added to the cabinet. This was straight out of one of my adolescent rage fantasies, of course, but I didn't care; it was the best way I could think of to both punish them and warn them from a distance. When the file was pulled from the cabinet, the trap would release onto the hand pulling the file out, and it would also break tape set in a pattern only I would be able to feel. So if the trap went off, I would know.

  The first step was ready.

  In Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, a moment of deadly stillness, strings humming dissonant strokes as the whole world waits.

  Cut shaving; the smell of blood.

  Across the road, a carpenter hammering nails on a roof, each set of seven strokes a crescendo: tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap! Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap!

  In that mathematics of emotion, stress calculations to measure one's tension: already there for us to use. Perhaps all of math already charts states of consciousness, moments of being.

  She came to me again late at night, with the wind swirling by her through the doorway. It was late, the wind was chill and blustery, the barometer was falling. Storm coming.

  "I wanted to see you," she said.

  I felt a great thrill of fear, and another of pleasure, and I could not tell which was stronger, or, after a time, which was which.

  "Good." We entered the kitchen, I served her water, circled her unsteadily, my voice calm as we discussed trivia in fits and starts. After many minutes of this I very firmly took her by the hand. "Come along." I led her into the pantry, up the narrow musty stairs, out the roof door into the wind. A spattering of big raindrops hit us. "Carlos—" "Never mind that!" The whoosh of the wind was accompanied by the rain smell of wet dust and hot asphalt and a certain electricity in the air. Off in the distance, to the south, a low rumble of thunder shook the air.

  "It's going to rain," she ventured, shouting a bit over the wind.

  "Quiet," I told her, and kept her hand crushed in mine. The wind gusted through our clothes, and mixed with my anger and my fear I felt rising the electric elation that storms evoke in me. Face to the wind, hair pulled back from my scalp, I held her hand and waited: "Listen," I said, "watch, feel the storm." And after a time I felt—no, I saw, I saw—the sudden jerk of lightness that marked lightning. "Ah," I said aloud, counting to myself. The thunder pushed us about ten seconds later. Just a couple of miles away.

  "Tell me what you see," I commanded, and heard in my own voice a vibrancy that could not be denied.

  "It's—it's a thunderstorm," she replied, uncertain of me in this new mood. "The clouds are very dark, and fairly low at their bottoms, but broken up in places by some largish gaps. Kind of like immense boulders rolling overhead. The lightning—there! You noticed that?"

  I had jumped. "I can see lightning," I said, grinning. "I have a basic perception of light and darkness, and everything flashes to lightness for a moment. As if the sun had turned on and then off."

  "Yes. It's sort of like that, only the light is shaped in jagged white lines, extending from cloud to ground. Like that model you have of subatomic particles breaking up—a sort of broken wire sculpture, white as the sun, forking the earth for just an instant, as bright as the thunder is loud." Her voice rasped with an excitement that had sparked across our hands—also with apprehension, curiosity, I didn't know what. Light… BLAM, the thunder struck us like a fist and she jumped. I laughed. "That was off to the side!" she said fearfully. "We're in the middle of it!"

  I couldn't control a laugh. "More!" I shouted. "Pick up the pace!" And as if I were a weathermonger, the lightning snapped away the darkness around us, flash-BLAM… flash-BLAM… flash-BLAM!!

  "We should get down!" Mary shouted over the wind's ripping, over the reverberating crashes of thunder. I shook my head back and forth and back and forth, gripped her by the arm so hard it must have hurt.

  "No! This is my visual world, do you understand? This is as beautiful as it ever—" flash-crack-BLAM.

  "Carlos—"

  "No! Shut up!" Flash-flash-flash-BOOM! Rolling thunder, now, hollow casks the size of mountains, rolling across a concrete floor.

  "I'm afraid," she said miserably, tugging away from me.

  "You feel the exposure, eh?" I shouted at her, as lightning flashed and the wind tore at us, and raindrops pum
meled the roof, throwing up a tarry smell to mix with the lightning's ozone. "You feel what it's like to stand helpless before a power that can kill you, is that right?"

  Between thunderclaps she said, desperately, "Yes!"

  "Now you know how I've felt around you people!" I shouted. BLAM! BLAM!! "Goddammit," I said, pain searing my voice as the lightning seared the air, "I can go sit in the corner park with the drug dealers and the bums and the crazies and I know I'll be safe, because even those people still have the idea that it isn't right to hurt a blind man. But you people!" I couldn't go on. I shoved her away from me and staggered back, remembering it all. Flash-BLAM! Flash-BLAM!

  "Carlos—" Hands pulling me around.

  "What?"

  "I didn't—"

  "The hell you didn't! You came in and gave me that story about the moon, and talked backwards, and drew stuff, and all to steal my work—how could you do it? How could you do it?"

  "I didn't, Carlos, I didn't!" I batted her hands away, but it was as if a dam had burst, as if only now, charged to it in the storm, was she able to speak: "Listen to me!" Flash-BLAM. "I'm just like you. They made me do it. They took me because I have some math background, I guess, and they ran me through more memory implants than I can even count!" Now the charged, buzzing timbre of her desperate voice scraped directly across my nervous system: "You know what they can do with those drugs and implants. They can program you just like a machine. You walk through your paces and watch yourself and can't do a thing about it." BLAM. "And they programmed me and I went in there and spouted it all off to you on cue. But you know"—BLAM—"was trying, you know there's the parts of the mind they can't touch—I fought them as hard as I could, don't you see?"

  Flash-BLAM. Sizzle of scorched air, ozone, ringing eardrums. That one was close.

  "I took TNPP-50," she said, calmer now. "That and MDMA. I just made myself duck into a pharmacy on my way to meet you alone, and I used a blank prescription pad I keep and got them. I was so drugged up when we went to the Tidal Basin that I could barely walk. But it helped me to speak, helped me to fight the programming."

  "You were drugged?" I said, amazed. (I know, Max Carrados would have figured it out. But me… )

  "Yes!" BOOM. "Every time I saw you after that time. And it's worked better every time. But I've had to pretend I was still working on you, to protect us both. The last time we were up here"—BOOM—"you know I'm with you, Carlos, do you think I would have faked that?"

  Bassoon voice, hoarse with pain. Low rumble of thunder in the distance. Flickers in the darkness, no longer as distinct as before: my moments of vision were coming to an end. "But what do they want?" I cried.

  "Blasingame thinks your work will solve the problems they're having getting sufficient power into a very small particle-beam weapon. They think they can channel energy out of the microdimensions you've been studying." BLAM. "Or so I guess, from what I've overheard."

  "Those fools." Although to an extent there might be something to the idea. I had almost guessed it, in fact. So much energy… "Blasingame is such a fool. He and his stupid Pentagon bosses—"

  "Pentagon!" Mary exclaimed. "Carlos, these people are not with the Pentagon! I don't know who they are—a private group, from Germany, I think. But they kidnapped me right out of my apartment, and I'm a statistician for the defense department! The Pentagon has nothing to do with it!"

  Blam. "But Jeremy…" My stomach was falling.

  "I don't know how he got into it. But whoever they are, they're dangerous. I've been afraid they'll kill us both. I know they've discussed killing you, I've heard them. They think you're onto them. Ever since the Tidal Basin I've been injecting myself with Fifty and MDMA, a lot of it, and telling them you don't know a thing, that you just haven't got the formula yet. But if they were to find out you know about them…"

  "God I hate this spy shit," I exclaimed bitterly. And the oh-so-clever trap in my office, warning Jeremy off…

  It started to rain hard. I let Mary lead me down into my apartment. No time to lose, I thought. I had to get to my office and remove the trap. But I didn't want her at risk; I was suddenly frightened more for this newly revealed ally than for myself.

  "Listen, Mary," I said when we were inside. Then I remembered, and whispered in her ear, "Is this room bugged?"

  "No."

  "For God's sake." All those silences—she must have thought me deranged! "All right. I want to make some calls, and I'm sure my phones are bugged. I'm going to go out for a bit, but I want you to stay right here. All right?" She started to protest and I stopped her. "Please! Stay right here. I'll be right back. Just stay here and wait for me, please."

  "Okay, okay. I'll stay."

  "You promise?"

  "I promise."

  Down on the street I turned left and took off for my offices. Rain struck my face and I automatically thought to return for an umbrella, then angrily shook the thought away. Thunder still rumbled overhead from time to time, but the brilliant ("brilliant!" I say—meaning I saw a certain lightness in the midst of a certain darkness) the brilliant flashes that had given me a momentary taste of vision were gone.

  Repeatedly I cursed myself, my stupidity, my presumption. I had made axioms out of theorems (humanity's most common logical-syntactic flaw?), never pausing to consider that my whole edifice of subsequent reasoning rested on them. And now, having presumed to challenge a force I didn't understand, I was in real danger, no doubt about it; and no doubt (as corollary) Mary was as well. The more I thought of it the more frightened I became, until finally I was as scared as I should have been all along.

  The rain shifted to an irregular drizzle. The air was cooled, the wind had dropped to an occasional gust. Cars hissed by over wet 21st Street, humming like Mary's voice, and everywhere water sounded, squishing and splashing and dripping. I passed 21st and K, where Ramon sometimes set up his cart; I was glad that he wouldn't be there, that I wouldn't have to walk by him in silence, perhaps ignoring his cheerful invitation to buy, or even his specific hello. I would have hated to fool him so. Yet if I had wanted to, how easy it would have been! Just walk on by—he would have had no way of knowing.

  A sickening sensation of my disability swept over me, all the small frustrations and occasional hard-learned limits of my entire life balling up and washing through me in a great wave of fear and apprehension, like the flash-boom of the lightning and thunder, the drenching of the downpour: Where was I, where was I going, how could I take even one step more?

  This fear paralyzed me. I felt as though I had never come down from the drugs Jeremy had given me, as though I struggled under their hallucinatory influence still. I literally had to stop walking, had to lean on my cane.

  And so I heard their footsteps. Henry Cowell's The Banshee begins with fingernails scraping repeatedly up the high wires of an open piano; the same music played my nervous system. Behind me three or four sets of footsteps had come to a halt, just a moment after I myself had stopped.

  For a while my heart hammered so hard within me that I could hear nothing else. I forced it to slow, took a deep breath. Of course I was being followed. It made perfect sense. And ahead, at my office…

  I started walking again. The rain picked up on a gust of wind, and silently I cursed it; it is difficult to hear well when rain is pattering down everywhere, so that one stands at the center of a universal puh-puh-puh-puh. But attuned now to their presence, I could hear them behind me, three or four (likely three) people walking, walking at just my pace.

  Detour time. Instead of continuing down 21st Street I decided to go west on Pennsylvania, and see what they did. No sound of nearby cars so I stood still; I crossed swiftly, nearly losing my cane as it struck the curb. As casually, as "accidentally" as I could, I turned and faced the street; the sonar glasses whistled up at me, and I knew people were approaching though I could not hear their footsteps in the rain. More fervently than ever before I blessed the glasses, turned and struck off again, hurrying as much as seemed natur
al.

  Wind and rain, the electric hum and tire hiss of a passing car. Washington late on a stormy spring night, unusually quiet and empty. Behind me the wet footsteps were audible again. I forced myself to keep a steady pace, to avoid giving away the fact that I was aware of their presence. Just a late-night stroll to the office…

  At 22nd I turned south again. Ordinarily, no one would have backtracked on Pennsylvania like that, but these people followed me. Now we approached the university hospital, and there was a bit more activity, people passing to left and right, voices across the street discussing a movie, an umbrella being shaken out and folded, cars passing… Still the footsteps were back there, farther away now, almost out of earshot.

  As I approached Gelman Library my pulse picked up again, my mind raced through a network of plans, all unsatisfactory in different ways. Outdoors, I couldn't evade pursuit. Given. In the building…

  My sonar whistled up as Gelman loomed over me, and I hurried down the steps from the sidewalk to the foyer containing the elevator to the sixth and seventh floors. I missed the door and adrenaline flooded me, then there it was just to my left. The footsteps behind me hurried down the sidewalk steps as I slipped inside and stepped left into the single elevator, punched the button for the seventh floor. The doors stood open, waiting… then mercifully they slid together, and I was off alone.

  A curious feature of Gelman Library is that there are no stairways to the sixth and seventh floors (the offices above the library proper) that are not fire escapes, locked on the outside. To get to the offices, you are forced to take the single elevator, a fact I had complained about many times before—I liked to walk. Now I was thankful, as the arrangement would give me some time. When the elevator opened at the seventh floor I stepped out, reached back in and punched the buttons for all seven floors, then ran for my office, jangling through my keys for the right one.

  I couldn't find the key.

  I slowed down. Went through them one by one. Found the key, opened my door, propped it wide with the stopper at its base. Over to the file cabinet, where I opened the middle drawer and very carefully slid one hand down the side of the correct file.