“You’d better do it, Saul.”
So he slips two cool wires over my ears, presses another against the side of my nose and drops the box onto the rug that covers my lap. He touches a button. As yet, nothing happens.
“Papa, can you hear me?”
“Yes.…”
“Can you see?”
I nod without thinking, but all I’m getting is the stepped green lawns of my overly neat garden, the sea unfolding the horizon. Plain old actual reality.
Then, Blam!
Saul says, “This is us coming in on the moonshuttle.”
I’m flying over black and white craters. The stars are sliding overhead. I’m falling through the teeth of airless mountains. I’m tumbling toward a silver city of spires and domes.
“And this is Lunar Park.”
Blam! A midnight jungle strung with lights. Looking up without my willing it through incredible foliage and the geodome, I see the distant Earth; a tiny blue globe.
“Remember, Ag? That party.”
From somewhere, Agatha chuckles. “And you in that getup.”
Faces. Dancing. Gleaming bodies. Parakeet colors. Someone leaps ten, fifteen feet into the air. I shudder as a hand touches me. I smell Agatha’s scent, hear her saying something that’s drowned in music. I can’t tell whether she’s in VR or on the patio.
“This goes on for ages. You know, Papa, fun at the time, but … I’ll run it forward.”
I hear myself say, “Thanks.”
Then, Blam! I’m lying on my back on the patio. The deckchair is tipped over beside me.
“You’re okay? Papa?”
Agatha’s leaning down over me out of the sky. Strands of hair almost touching my face, the fall of her breasts against her white cotton blouse.
“You sort of rolled off your chair.…”
I nod, pushing up on my old elbows, feeling the flush of stupid embarrassment, the jolt on my back and arse and the promise of a truly spectacular bruise. Black. Crimson. Purple. Like God smiling down through tropical clouds.
Agatha’s helping me as I rise. I’m still a little dizzy, and I’m gulping back the urge to be sick. For a moment, as the endorphins advance and re-group in my bloodstream, I even get a glimpse beyond the veil at the messages my body is really trying to send. I almost feel pain, for Chrissake. I blink slowly, willing it to recede. I can see the patio paving in shadow and sunlight. I can see the cracked, fallen box of the little VR machine.
“Hey, don’t worry.”
Strong arms place me back in my deckchair. I lick my lips and swallow, swallow, swallow. No, I won’t be sick.
“Are you okay? You…”
“I’m fine. Is that thing repairable? Can I have a look?”
Saul immediately gives the VR box back to me, which makes me certain it’s irretrievably busted. I lift the cracked lid. Inside, it’s mostly empty space. Just a few silver hairs reaching to a superconductor ring in the middle.
“These machines are incredible, aren’t they?” I find myself muttering.
“Papa, they turn out this kind of crap by the million now. They make them fragile ’cos they want them to break so you go out and buy another. It’s no big deal. Do you want to go inside? Maybe it’s a bit hot for you out here.”
Before I can think of an answer, I’m being helped back inside the house. I’m laid on the sofa in the cool and the dark, with the doors closed and the shutters down, propped up on cushions like a doll. Part of me hates this, but the sensation of being cared for by humans instead of machines is too nice for me to protest.
I close my eyes. After a few seconds of red darkness, my corneas automatically blank themselves out. The first time they did this, I’d expected a sensation of deep, ultimate black. But for me at least—and Doc Fanian tells me it’s different for all of his patients—white is the color of absence. Like a snowfield on a dead planet. Aching white. Like hospital sheets in the moment before you go under.
* * *
“Papa?”
“What time is it?”
I open my eyes. An instant later, my vision returns.
“You’ve been asleep.”
I try to sit up. With ease, Agatha holds me down. A tissue appears. She wipes some drool from off my chin. The clock in the room says seven. Nearly twilight. No need to blink; my eardrums are still on. Through the open patio doors comes the sound of the tide breaking on the rocks, but I’m also picking up a strange buzzing. I tilt my head like a dog. I look around for a fly. Could it be that I’ve blinked without realizing and reconfigured my eardrums in some odd way? Then movement catches my eye. A black-and-silver thing hardly bigger than a pinhead whirs past my nose, and I see that Saul’s busy controlling it with a palette he’s got on his lap at the far end of the sofa. Some new game.
I slide my legs down off the sofa. I’m sitting up, and suddenly feeling almost normal. Sleeping in the afternoon usually leaves me feeling ten years older—like a corpse—but this particular sleep has actually done me some good. The nausea’s gone. Agatha’s kneeling beside me, and Saul’s playing with his toy. I’m bright-eyed, bushy tailed. I feel like a ninety-year-old.
I say, “I was speaking this morning to Antonio.”
“Antonio, Papa?” Agatha’s forehead crinkles with puzzlement.
“He’s a man in a shop,” I say. “I mean, you don’t know him. He runs a bakery in the port.”
“Anyway, Papa,” Agatha prompts sweetly, “what were you saying to him?”
“I told him that you were staying—my grandchildren—and he asked how old you were. The thing is, I wasn’t quite sure.”
“Can’t you guess?”
I gaze at her. Why do she and Saul always want to turn everything into a game?
“I’m sorry, Papa,” she relents. “I shouldn’t tease. I’m twenty-eight and a half now, and Saul’s thirty-two and three-quarters.”
“Seven-eighths,” Saul says without taking his eyes off the buzzing pinhead as it circles close to the open windows. “And you’d better not forget my birthday.” The pinhead zooms back across the room. “I mean you, Ag. Not Papa. Papa never forgets.…”
The pinhead buzzes close to Agatha, brushing strands of her hair, almost touching her nose. “Look, Saul,” she snaps, standing up, stamping her foot. “Can’t you turn that bloody thing off?”
Saul smiles and shakes his head. Agatha reaches up to grab it, but Saul’s too quick. He whisks it away. It loops the loop. She’s giggling now, and Saul’s shoulders are shaking with mirth as she dashes after it across the room.
Nodding, smiling palely, I watch my grandchildren at play.
“What is that thing, anyway?” I ask as they finally start to tire.
“It’s a metacam, Papa.” Saul touches a control. The pinhead stops dead in the middle of the room. Slowly turning, catching the pale evening light on facets of silver, it hovers, waiting for a new command. “We’re just pissing around.”
Agatha flops down in a chair. She says, “Papa, it’s the latest thing. Don’t say you haven’t seen them on the news?”
I shake my head. Even on the old flatscreen TV I keep in the corner, everything nowadays comes across like a rock music video. And the endless good news just doesn’t feel right to me, raised as I was on a diet of war and starving Africans.
“What does it do?” I ask.
“Well,” Saul says, “this metacam shows the effects of multiple waveform collapse. Look…” Saul shuffles toward me down the length of the sofa, the palette still on his lap. “That buzzing thing up there is a multilens, and I simply control it from down here—”
“—that’s amazing.” I say. “When I was young they used to have pocket camcorders you couldn’t even get in your pocket. Not unless you had one made specially. The pockets, I mean. Not the cameras.…”
Saul keeps smiling through my digression. “But it’s not just a camera, Papa, and anyway you could get ones this size fifteen years ago.” He touches the palette on his lap, and suddenly a well of b
rightness tunnels down from it, seemingly right through and into the floor. Then the brightness resolves into an image. “You see? There’s Agatha.”
I nod. And there, indeed, she is: three-dee on the palette screen on Saul’s lap. Agatha. Prettier than a picture.
I watch Agatha on the palette as she gets up from the chair. She strolls over to the windows. The pinhead lens drifts after her, panning. I’m fascinated. Perhaps it’s my new corneas, but she seems clearer in the image than she does in reality.
Humming to herself, Agatha starts plucking the pink rose petals from a display on the windowledge, letting them fall to the floor. As I watch her on Saul’s palette screen, I notice the odd way that the petals seem to drift from her fingers, how they multiply and divide. Some even rise and dance, seemingly caught on a breeze although the air in the room is still, leaving fading trails behind them. Then Agatha’s face blurs as she turns and smiles. But she’s also still in profile, looking out of the window. Eyes and a mouth at both angles at once. Then she takes a step forward, while at the same time remaining still. At first, the effect of these overlays is attractive, like a portrait by Picasso, but as they build up, the palette becomes confused. Saul touches the palette edge. Agatha collapses back into one image again. She’s looking out through the window into the twilight at the big yacht with white sails at anchor out in the bay. The same Agatha I see as I look up toward her.
“Isn’t that something?” Saul says.
I can only nod.
“Yes, incredible, isn’t it?” Agatha says, brushing pollen from her fingers. “The metacam’s showing possible universes that lie close to our own. You do understand that, Papa?”
“Yes. But…”
Agatha comes over and kisses the age-mottled top of my head.
Outside, beyond the patio and the velvety neat garden, the sea horizon has dissolved. The big white-sailed yacht now seems to be floating with the early stars. I can’t even tell whether it’s an illusion.
“We thought we’d go out on our own this evening, Papa,” she murmurs, her lips ticklingly close to my ear. “See what’s going on down in the port. That is, if you’re feeling okay. You don’t mind us leaving for a few hours, do you?”
* * *
A flyer from the port comes to collect Saul and Agatha. I stand waving on the patio as they rise into the starry darkness like silver twins of the moon.
Back inside the house, even with all the lights on, everything feels empty. I find myself wondering what it will be like after my grandchildren have gone entirely, which can only be a matter of days. I fix some food in the kitchen. Usually, I like the sense of control that my old culinary tools give me, but the buzzing of the molecular knife seems to fill my bones as I cut, slice, arrange. Saul and Agatha. Everything about them means happiness, but still I have this stupid idea that there’s a price to pay.
I sit down at the kitchen table, gazing at green-bellied mussels, bits of squid swimming in oil, bread that’s already going stale. What came over me this morning, buying all this crap? I stand up, pushing my way through the furniture to get outside. There. The stars, the moon, the faint lights of the port set down in the scoop of the darkly gleaming coast. If I really knew how to configure these eardrums, I could probably filter out everything but distant laughter in those lantern-strung streets, music, the clink of glasses. I could eavesdrop on what Saul and Agatha are saying about Papa as they sit at some café table, whether they think I’ve gone downhill since the last time, or whether, all things considered, I’m holding up pretty well.
They’ll be taking clues from things around this house that I don’t even notice. I remember visiting a great aunt back in the last century when I was only a kid. She was always punctilious about her appearance, but as she got older she used to cake her face with white powder, and there was some terrible discovery my mother made when she looked through the old newspapers in the front room. Soon after that, auntie was taken into what was euphemistically called a Home. These days, you can keep your own company for much longer. There are machines that will do most things for you: I’ve already got one in my bedside drawer that crawls down my leg and cuts my toenails for me. But when do you finally cross that line of not coping? And who will warn you when you get close?
Unaided, I climb down from the patio and hobble along the pathways of my stepped garden. Since Bill decided that I wasn’t up to maintaining it any longer and bought me a mec-cultivator, I really only wander out here at night. I’ve always been a raggedy kind of gardener, and this place is now far too neat for me. You could putt on the neat little lawns, and the borders are a lesson in geometry. So I generally make do with darkness, the secret touch of the leaves, the scents of hidden blooms. I haven’t seen the mec-cultivator for several days now anyway, although it’s obviously still keeping busy, trundling along with its silver arms and prettily painted panels, searching endlessly for weeds, collecting seedheads, snipping at stray fingers of ivy. We avoid each other, it and I. In its prim determination—even in the flower displays that it delivers to the house when I’m not looking—it reminds me of Bill. He tries so hard, does Bill. He’s a worrier in an age when people have given up worrying. And he’s a carer, too. I know that. And I love my son. I truly love him. I just wish that Hannah was alive to love him with me. I wish that she was walking the streets of the port, buying dresses from the stalls down by the harbor. I just wish that things were a little different.
I sit down on the wall. It’s hard to remember for sure now whether things were ever that happy for me. I must go back to times late in the last century when I was with Hannah, and everything was so much less easy then. We all thought the world was ending, for a start. Everything we did had a kind of twilit intensity. Of course, I was lucky; I worked in engineering construction—all those Newtonian equations that are now routinely demolished—at a time when rivers were being diverted, flood barriers erected, seas tamed. I had money and I had opportunity. But if you spend your life thinking Lucky, Lucky, Lucky, you’re really simply waiting for a fall. I remember the agonies Hannah and I went through before we decided to have Bill. We talked on and on about the wars, the heat, the continents of skeleton bodies. But we finally decided as parents always do that love and hope is enough. And we made love as though we meant it, and Bill was born, and the money—at least for us—kept on coming in through the endless recessions. There were even inklings of the ways that things would get better. I remember TV programs where academics tried to describe the golden horizons that lay ahead—how unraveling the edges of possibility and time promised predictive intelligence, unlimited energy. Hannah and I were better equipped than most to understand, but we were still puzzled, confused. And we knew enough about history to recognize the parallels between all this quantum magic and the fiasco of nuclear power, which must once have seemed equally promising, and equally incomprehensible.
But this time the physicists had got it largely right. Bill must have been ten by the time the good news began to outweigh the bad, and he was still drawing pictures of burnt-out rainforest, although by then he was using a paintbox PC to do it. I remember that I was a little amazed at his steady aura of gloom. But I thought that perhaps he just needed time to change and adjust to a world that was undeniably getting better, and perhaps he would have done so, become like Saul and Agatha—a child of the bright new age—if Hannah hadn’t died.
I totter back through the garden, across the patio and into the house. Feeling like a voyeur, I peek into Saul and Agatha’s bedroom. They’ve been here—what?—less than a day, and already it looks deeply lived in, and smells like a gym. Odd socks and bedsheets and tissues are strewn across the floor, along with food wrappers (does that mean I’m not feeding them enough?), shoes, the torn pages of the in-flight shuttle magazine, the softly glowing sheet of whatever book Agatha’s reading. I gaze at it, but of course it’s not a book, but another game; Agatha’s probably never read a book in her life. Whatever the thing is, I feel giddy just looking at it. Like f
alling down a prismatic well.
Putting the thing down again exactly where I found it, I notice that they’ve broken the top off the vase on the dresser, and then pushed the shards back into place. It’s a thing that Hannah bought from one of those shops that used to sell Third World goods at First World prices; when there was a Third and First World. Thick blue glaze, decorated with unlikely looking birds. I used to hate that vase, until Hannah died, and then the things we squabbled over became achingly sweet. Saul and Agatha’ll probably tell me about breaking it when they find the right moment. Or perhaps they think Papa’ll never notice. But I don’t mind. I really don’t care. Saul and Agatha can break anything they want, smash up this whole fucking house. I almost wish they would, in fact, or at least leave some lasting impression. This place is filled with the stuff of a lifetime, but now it seems empty. How I envy my grandchildren this dreadfully messy room, the way they manage to fill up so much space from those little bags and with all the life they bring with them. If only I could program my vacuum cleaner not to tidy it all up into oblivion as soon as they go, I’d leave it this way forever.
Saul’s stuffed the metacam back into the top of his traveling bag on the floor. I can see the white corner of the palette sticking out, and part of me wants to take a good look, maybe even turn it on and try to work out if he really meant that stuff about showing alternate realities. But I go cold at the thought of dropping or breaking it—it’s obviously his current favorite toy—and my hands are trembling slightly even as I think of the possibilities, of half worlds beside our own. I see an image: me bending over the metacam as it lies smashed on the tiled floor. Would the metacam record its own destruction? Does it really matter?
I leave the room, close the door. Then I open it to check that I’ve left things as they were. I close the door again, then I pull it back ajar, as I found it.
I go to my room, wash, and then the bedhelper trundles out and lifts me into bed, even though I could have managed it on my own. I blink three times to turn off my eardrums. Then I close my eyes.
The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Page 8