The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson

by Johnathan Strahan

  The mousetrap was gone. They knew that I knew.

  I don't know how long I stood there thinking; it couldn't have been long, though my thoughts spun madly through scores of plans. Then I went to my desk and got the scissors from the top drawer. I followed the power cord of the desk computer to its wall socket beside the file cabinet. I pulled out the plugs there, opened the scissors wide, fitted one point into a socket, jammed it in, and twisted it hard.

  Crack. The current held me cramped down for a moment—intense pain pulsed through me—I was knocked away, found myself on my knees slumping against the file cabinets.

  (For a while, when I was young, I fancied I was allergic to novocaine, and my dentist drilled my teeth without anesthetic. It was horribly uncomfortable, but tangent to normal pain: pain beyond pain. So it was with the shock that coursed through me. Later I asked my brother, who is an electrician, about it, and he said that the nervous system was indeed capable of feeling the sixty cycles per second of the alternating current: "When you get hit you always feel it pumping like that, very fast but distinct." He also said that with my wet shoes I could have been killed. "The current cramps the muscles down so that you're latched onto the source, and that can kill you. You were lucky. Did you find blisters on the bottoms of your feet?" I had.)

  Now I struggled up, with my left arm aching fiercely and a loud hum in my ear. I went to my desk. As they beeped fairly loudly, I took my glasses off and put them on a bookshelf facing the door. I tested the radio—it had no power. Wondering if the whole floor was dead, I went into the hall briefly to look into a ceiling light. Nothing. Back at the desk I took stapler and water tumbler, put them beside the file cabinet. Went to the bookshelves and gathered all the plastic polyhedral shapes (the sphere was just like a big cue ball) and took them to the file cabinet as well. Then I found the scissors on the floor.

  Out in the hall the elevator doors opened. "It's dark—" "Shh." Hesitant steps, into the hall. I tiptoed to the doorway. Here it was possible to tell for sure that there were only three of them. There would be light from the elevator, I recalled: it wouldn't do to be illuminated. I stepped back.

  (Once Max Carrados was caught in a situation similar to mine, and he simply announced to his assailants that he had a gun on them and would shoot the first person to move. In his case it had worked; but now I saw that the plan was insanely risky.)

  "Down here," one whispered. "Spread out, and be quiet." Rustling, quiet footsteps, three small clicks (gun safeties?). I retreated into the office, behind the side of the file cabinet. Stilled my breathing and was silent in a way they'd never be able to achieve. If they heard anything it would be my glasses…

  "It's here," the first voice whispered. "Door's open, watch it." Their breathing was quick. They were bunched up outside the door, and one said, "Hey, I've got a lighter," so I threw the pulled-open scissors overhand.

  "Ah! Ah—" Clatter, hard bump against the hall wall, voices clashing. "What—" "Threw a knife—" "Ah—"

  I threw the stapler as hard as I could, wham—the wall above, I guessed—and threw the dodecahedron as they leaped back. I don't know what I hit. I jumped almost to the doorway and heard a voice whisper, "Hey." I threw the cue-ball sphere right at the voice. Ponk. It sounded like—like nothing else I have ever heard. (Although every once in a while some outfielder takes a beepball in the head, and it sounded something like that, wooden and hollow.) The victim fell right to the hall floor, making a heavy sound like a car door closing; a metallic clatter marked his gun skidding across the floor. Then CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! another of them shot into the office. I cowered on the floor and crawled swiftly back to the file cabinet, ears ringing painfully, hearing wiped out, fear filling me like the smell of cordite leaking into the room. No way of telling what they were doing. The floor was carpet on concrete, with no vibrations to speak of. I hung my mouth open, trying to focus my hearing on the sound of my glasses. They would whistle up if people entered the room quickly, perhaps (again) more loudly than the people would be on their own. The glasses were still emitting their little beep, now heard through the pulsing wash of noise the gunshots had set off in my ears.

  I hefted the water tumbler—it was a fat glass cylinder, with a heavy bottom. A rising whistle, and then, in the hall, the rasp of a lighter flint being sparked.

  I threw the tumbler. Crash, tinkle of glass falling. A man entered the office. I picked up the pentahedron and threw it—thump of it against far wall. I couldn't find any of the other polyhedrons—somehow they weren't there beside the cabinet. I crouched and pulled off a shoe.

  He swept my glasses aside and I threw the shoe. I think it hit him, but nothing happened. There I was, without a weapon, utterly vulnerable, revealed in the glow of a God-damned cigarette lighter…

  When the shots came I thought they had missed, or that I was hit and couldn't feel it; then I realized some shots had come from the doorway, others from the bookcase. Sounds of bodies hit, staggering, falling, writhing—and all the while I cowered in my corner, trembling.

  Then I heard a nasal groan from the hall, a groan like a viola bowed by a rasp. "Mary," I cried, and ran into the hallway to her, tripped on her. She was sitting against the wall—"Mary!" Blood on her. "Carlos," she squeaked painfully, sounding surprised.

  Fortunately, it turned out that she had only been wounded; the bullet had entered just under the shoulder, wrecking it but doing no fatal damage.

  I learned all this later, at the hospital. An hour or more after our arrival a doctor came out and told me, and the sickening knot of tension in my diaphragm untied all at once, making me feel sick in another way, dizzy and nauseated with relief, unbelievably intense relief.

  After that I went through a session with the police, and Mary talked a lot with her employers, and after that we both answered a lot of questions from the FBI. (In fact, that process took days.) Two of our assailants were dead (one shot, another hit in the temple with a sphere), and the third had been stabbed: What had happened? I stayed up all through that first night explaining, retrieving and playing my tapes, and so on, and still they didn't go for Jeremy until dawn; by that time he was nowhere to be found.

  Eventually I got a moment alone with Mary, about ten the following morning.

  "You didn't stay at my place," I said.

  "No. I thought you were headed for Blasingame's apartment, and I drove there, but it was empty. So I drove to your office and came upstairs. The elevator opened just as shots were being fired, so I hit the deck and crawled right over a gun. But then I had a hell of a time figuring out who was where. I don't know how you do it."

  "Ah."

  "So I broke my promise."

  "I'm glad."

  "Me too."

  Our hands found each other and embraced, and I leaned forward until my forehead touched her shoulder (the good one), and rested.

  A couple of days later I said to her, "But what were all those diagrams of Desargues' theorem about?"

  She laughed, and the rich timbre of it cut through me like a miniature of the current from my wall socket. "Well, they programmed me with all those geometrical questions for you, and I was roboting through all that, you know, and struggling underneath it all to understand what was going on, what they wanted. And later, how I could alert you. And to tell you the truth, Desargues' theorem was the only geometry of my own that I could remember from school. I'm a statistician, you know, most of my training is in that and analysis… So I kept drawing it to try to get your attention to me. I had a message in it, you see. You were the triangle in the first plane, and I was the triangle in the second plane, but we were both controlled by the point of projection—"

  "But I knew that already!" I exclaimed.

  "Did you? But also I marked a little J with my thumbnail by the point of projection, so you would know Jeremy was doing it. Did you feel that?"

  "No. I Xeroxed your drawings, and an impression like that wouldn't show up." So my indented copy, ironically enough, had missed the cr
ucial indentation.

  "I know, but I was hoping you would brush it or something. Stupid. Well, anyway, between us all we were making the three collinear points off to the side, which is what they were after, you see, determined in this case by point J and his projection…"

  I laughed. "It never occurred to me," I said, and laughed again, "but I sure do like your way of thinking!"

  I saw, however, that the diagram had a clearer symbolism than that.

  When I told Ramon about it, he laughed too. "Here you're the mathematician, and you never got it! It was too simple for you!"

  "I don't know if I'd call it too simple—"

  "And wait—wait—you say you told this here girlfriend of yours to stay behind at your house, when you knew you were going to run into those thugs at your office?"

  "Well, I didn't know they'd be there right then. But…"

  "Now that was superblink."

  "Yeah." I had to admit it; I had been stupid, I had gone too far. And it occurred to me then that in the realm of thought, of analysis and planning, I had consistently and spectacularly failed. Whereas in the physical continuum of action, I had (up to a point—a point that I didn't like to remember [ponk of sphere breaking skull, cowering revealed in a lighter's glare]) done pretty well. And though it was disturbing, in the end this reflection pleased me. For a while there, anyway, I had been almost free of the world of texts.

  Naturally it took a while for Mary to regain her health; the kidnapping, the behavior programming, the shooting, and most of all the repeated druggings her captors and she had subjected herself to had left her quite sick, and she was in the hospital for some weeks. I visited every day; we talked for hours.

  And, naturally, it took quite a while for us to sort things out. Not only with the authorities, but with each other. What was real and permanent between us, and what was a product of the strange circumstances of our meeting—no one could say for sure which was which, there.

  And maybe we never did disentangle those strands. The start of a relationship remains a part of it forever; and in our case, we had seen things in each other that we might never have otherwise, to our own great good. I know that years later, sometimes, when her hand touched mine, I would feel that primal thrill of fear and exhilaration that her first touches had caused in me, and I would shiver again under the mysterious impact of the unknown other… And sometimes, arm in arm, the feeling floods me that we are teamed together, in an immense storm of trouble and threat that cracks and thunders all around us. So that it seems clear to me, now, that loves forged in the smithy of intense and dangerous circumstances are surely the strongest loves of all.

  I leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.

  Our Town

  I found my friend Desmond Kean at the northeast corner of the penthouse viewing terrace, assembling a telescope with which to look at the world below. He took a metal cylinder holding a lens and screwed it into the side of the telescope, then put his eye to the lens, the picture of concentrated absorption. How often I had found him like this in recent months! It made me shiver a little; this new obsession of his, so much more intense than the handmade clocks, or the stuffed birds, or the geometric proofs, seemed to me a serious malady.

  Clearing my throat did nothing to get his attention, so I ventured to say, "Desmond, you're wanted inside."

  "Look at this," he replied. "Just look at it!" He stepped back, and I put my eye to his device.

  I have never understood how looking through two pieces of curved glass can bring close distant sights; doesn't the same amount of light hit the first lens as would hit a plain circle of glass? And if so, what then could possibly be done to that amount of light within two lenses, to make it reveal so much more? Mystified, I looked down at the lush greenery of Tunisia. There in the shimmery circle of glass was a jumble of wood and thatch in a rice paddy, pale browns on light green. "Amazing," I said.

  I directed the telescope to the north. On certain days, as Desmond once explained to me, when the temperature gradients layer the atmosphere in the right way, light is curved through the air (and tell me how that works!) so that one can see farther over the horizon than usual. This was one of those strange days, and in the lens wavered a black dot, resting on top of a silver pin that stuck up over the horizon. The black dot was Rome, the silver pin was the top of the graceful spire that holds the Eternal City aloft. My heart leaped to know that I gazed from Carthage to Rome.

  "It's beautiful," I said.

  "No, no," Desmond exclaimed angrily. "Look down! Look what's below!"

  I did as he directed, even leaning a tiny bit over the railing to do so. Our new Carthage has a spire of its own, one every bit the equal of Rome's, or that of any other of the great cities of the world. The spire seemed to the naked eye a silver rope, a thread, a strand of gossamer. But through the telescope I saw the massy base of the spire, a concrete block like an immense blind fortress.

  "Stunning," I said.

  "No!" He seized the spyglass from me. "Look at the people camped there on the base! Look what they're doing!"

  I looked through the glass where he had aimed it. Smoky fires, huts of cardboard, ribs perfectly delineated under taut brown skin… "See," Desmond hissed. "There where the bonfires are set. They keep the fires going for days, then pour water on the concrete. To crack it, do you see?"

  I saw, there in the curved glass surface; it was just as he had said. "At that pace it will take them ten thousand years," Desmond said bitterly.

  I stood back from the railing. "Please, Desmond. The world has gotten itself into a sorry state, and it's very distressing, but what can any one person do?"

  He took the telescope, looked through it again. For a while I thought he wouldn't answer. But then he said, "I… I'm not so sure, friend Roarick. It's a good question, isn't it. But I feel that someone with knowledge, with expertise, could make a bit of a difference. Heal the sick, or… give advice about agricultural practices. I've been studying upon that pretty hard. They're wrecking their soil. Or… or just put one more shoulder to the wheel! Add one more hand to tend that fire!… I don't know. I don't know! Do we ever know, until we act?"

  "But Desmond," I said. "Do you mean down there?"

  He looked up at me. "Of course."

  I shivered again. Up at our altitude the air stays pretty chill all the time, even in the sun. "Come back inside, Desmond," I said, feeling sorry for him. These obsessions…. "The exhibition is about to open, and if you're not there for it Cleo will press for the full set of sanctions."

  "Now there's something to fear," he said nastily.

  "Come on inside. Don't give Cleo the chance. You can return here another day."

  With a grimace he put the telescope in the big duffel bag, picked it up and followed me in.

  Inside the glass wall, jacaranda trees showered the giant curved greenhouse-gallery with purple flowers. All the tableaux of the exhibit were still covered by saffron sheets, but soon after we entered the sheets were raised, all at once. The human form was revealed in all its variety and beauty, frozen in place yet still pulsing with life. I noted a man loping, a pair of women fighting, a diver launched in air, four drunks playing cards, a couple stopped forever at orgasm. I felt the familiar opening-night quiver of excitement, caused partly by the force fields of the tableaux as they kept the living ectogenes stopped in place, but mostly by rapture, by a physical response to art and natural beauty. "At first glance it seems a good year," I said. "I already see three or four pieces of merit."

  "Obscene travesties," said Desmond.

  "Now, now, it isn't as bad as all that. Some imitation of last year, yes, but no more than usual."

  We walked down the hall to see how my entry had been placed. Like Desmond, before he quit sculpting, I was chiefly interested in finding and isolating moments of dance that revealed, by themselves, all the grace of the whole act. This year I had stopped a pair of ballet dancers at the end of a pas de deux, the ballerina just off the base
of the display as her partner firmly but delicately returned her to the boards. How long I had worked with the breeders, to get ectogenes with these lean dancers' bodies! How many hours I had spent, programming their unconscious education, and training and choreographing them in their brief waking hours! And then at the end, how very often I had had them dance on the tableau base, and stopped them in the force field, before I caught them in the exact moment that I had envisioned! Yes, I had spent a great deal of time in my sculpting chamber, this year; and now my statue stood before us like the epitome of all that is graceful in the human spirit. At a proper angle to the viewers, too, I was pleased to see, and under tolerable lighting. On the two faces were expressions that said that for these two, nothing existed but dance; and in this case it was almost literally true. Yes, it was satisfactory.

  Desmond only shook his head. "No, Roarick. You don't understand. We can't keep doing this—"

  "Desmond!" cried Cleo, flowing through the crowd of sculptors and their guests. Her smile was wide, her eyes bright with malice. "Come see my latest, dear absent one!"

  Wordlessly Desmond followed her, his face so blank of expression that all his thoughts showed clear. A whole crew followed us discreetly, for Desmond and Cleo's antipathy was legendary. How it had started none remembered, although some said they had once been lovers. If so, it was before I knew them. Others said Desmond hated Cleo for her success in the sculpture competitions, and some of the more sharp-tongued gossips said that this envy explained Desmond's new, morbid interest in the world below—sour grapes, you know. But Desmond had always been interested in things no one else cared about—rediscovering little scientific truths and the like—and to me it was clear that his fascination was simply the result of his temperament, and of what his telescope had newly revealed to him. No, his and Cleo's was a more fundamental hatred, a clash of contrary natures.