Needle in a Timestack

by Robert Silverberg

  This is unreal and dreamlike to me. I have revealed myself, thinking to drive her away in terror; she is no longer aghast, and smiles at my strangeness. She kneels to get a better look. I move back a short way. Eyestalks fluttering: I am uneasy, I have somehow lost the upper hand in this encounter.

  She says, “I knew you were unusual, but not like this. But it’s all right. I can cope. I mean, the essential personality, that’s what I fell in love with. Who cares that you’re a crab-man from the Green Galaxy? Who cares that we can’t ever be real lovers? I can make that sacrifice. It’s your soul I dig, David. Go on. Close yourself up again. You don’t look comfortable this way.” The triumph of love. She will not abandon me, even now. Disaster. I crawl back into Knecht and lift his arms to his chest to seal it. Shock is glazing my consciousness: the enormity, the audacity. What have I done? Elizabeth watches, awed, even delighted. At last I am together again. She nods. “Listen,” she tells me. “You can trust me. I mean, if you’re some kind of spy, checking out the Earth, I don’t care. I don’t care. I won’t tell anybody. Pour it all out, David. Tell me about yourself. Don’t you see, this is the biggest thing that ever happened to me. A chance to show that love isn’t just physical, isn’t just chemistry, that it’s a soul trip, that it crosses not just racial lines but the lines of the whole damned species, the planet itself—”

  It took several hours to get rid of her. A soaring, intense conversation, Elizabeth doing most of the talking. She putting forth theories of why I had come to Earth, me nodding, denying, amplifying, mostly lost in horror at my own perfidy and barely listening to her monologue. And the humidity turning me into rotting rags. Finally: “I’m down from the pot, David. And all wound up. I’m going out for a walk. Then back to my room to write for a while. To put this night into a poem before I lose the power of it. But I’ll come to you again by dawn, all right? That’s maybe five hours from now. You’ll be here? You won’t do anything foolish? Oh, I love you so much, David! Do you believe me? Do you?”

  When she was gone I stood a long while by the window, trying to reassemble myself. Shattered. Drained. Remembering her kisses, her lips running along the ridge marking the place where my chest opens. The fascination of the abomination. She will love me even if I am crustaceous beneath.

  I had to have help.

  I went to Swanson’s room. He was slow to respond to my knock; busy transmitting, no doubt. I could hear him within, but he didn’t answer. “Swanson?” I called. “Swanson?” Then I added the distress signal in the Homeworld tongue. He rushed to the door. Blinking, suspicious. “It’s all right,” I said. “Look, let me in. I’m in big trouble.” Speaking English, but I gave him the distress signal again.

  “How did you know about me?” he asked.

  “The day the maid blundered into your room while you were eating, I was going by. I saw.”

  “But you aren’t supposed to—”

  “Except in emergencies. This is an emergency.” He shut off his ultrawave and listened intently to my story. Scowling. He didn’t approve. But he wouldn’t spurn me. I had been criminally foolish, but I was of his kind, prey to the same pains, the same lonelinesses, and he would help me.

  “What do you plan to do now?” he asked. “You can’t harm her. It isn’t allowed.”

  “I don’t want to harm her. Just to get free of her. To make her fall out of love with me.”

  “How? If showing yourself to her didn’t—”

  “Infidelity,” I said. “Making her see that I love someone else. No room in my life for her. That’ll drive her away. Afterwards it won’t matter that she knows: who’d believe her story? The FBI would laugh and tell her to lay off the LSD. But if I don’t break her attachment to me I’m finished.”

  “Love someone else? Who?”

  “When she comes back to my room at dawn,” I said, “she’ll find the two of us together, dividing and abstracting. I think that’ll do it, don’t you?”

  So I deceived Elizabeth with Swanson.

  The fact that we both wore male human identities was irrelevant, of course. We went to my room and stepped out of our disguises—a bold, dizzying sensation!—and suddenly we were just two Homeworlders again, receptive to one another’s needs. I left the door unlocked. Swanson and I crawled up on my bed and began the chanting. How strange it was, after these years of solitude, to feel those vibrations again! And how beautiful. Swanson’s vibrissae touching mine. The interplay of harmonies. An underlying sternness to his technique—he was contemptuous of me for my idiocy, and rightly so—but once we passed from the chanting to the dividing all was forgiven, and as we moved into the abstracting it was truly sublime. We climbed through an infinity of climactic emptyings. Dawn crept upon us and found us unwilling to halt even for rest.

  A knock at the door. Elizabeth.

  “Come in,” I said.

  A dreamy, ecstatic look on her face. Fading instantly when she saw the two of us entangled on the bed. A questioning frown. “We’ve been mating,” I explained. “Did you think I was a complete hermit?” She looked from Swanson to me, from me to Swanson. Hand over her mouth. Eyes anguished. I turned the screw a little tighter. “I couldn’t stop you from falling in love with me, Elizabeth. But I really do prefer my own kind. As should have been obvious.”

  “To have her here now, though—when you knew I was coming back—”

  “Not her, exactly. Not him exactly either, though.”

  “—so cruel, David! To ruin such a beautiful experience.” Holding forth sheets of paper with shaking hands. “A whole sonnet cycle,” she said. “About tonight. How beautiful it was, and all. And now—and now—” Crumpling the pages. Hurling them across the room. Turning. Running out, sobbing furiously. Hell hath no fury like. “David!” A smothered cry. And slamming the door.

  She was back in ten minutes. Swanson and I hadn’t quite finished donning our bodies yet; we were both still unsealed. As we worked, we discussed further steps to take: he felt honor demanded that I request a transfer back to Homeworld, having terminated my usefulness here through tonight’s indiscreet revelation. I agreed with him to some degree but was reluctant to leave. Despite the bodily torment of life on Earth I had come to feel I belonged here. Then Elizabeth entered, radiant.

  “I mustn’t be so possessive,” she announced. “So bourgeois. So conventional. I’m willing to share my love.” Embracing Swanson. Embracing me. “A menage a trois,” she said. “I won’t mind that you two are having a physical relationship. As long as you don’t shut me out of your lives completely. I mean, David, we could never have been physical anyway, right, but we can have the other aspects of love, and we’ll open ourselves to your friend also. Yes? Yes? Yes?”

  Swanson and I both put in applications for transfer, he to Africa, me to Homeworld. It would be some time before we received a reply. Until then we were at her mercy. He was blazingly angry with me for involving him in this, but what choice had I had? Nor could either of us avoid Elizabeth. We were at her mercy. She bathed both of us in shimmering waves of tender emotion; wherever we turned, there she was, incandescent with love. Lighting up the darkness of our lives. You poor lonely creatures. Do you suffer much in our gravity? What about the heat? And the winters. Is there a custom of marriage on your planet? Do you have poetry?

  A happy threesome. We went to the theater together. To concerts. Even to parties in Greenwich Village. “My friends,” Elizabeth said, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that she was living with both of us. Faintly scandalous doings; she loved to seem daring. Swanson was sullenly obliging, putting up with her antics but privately haranguing me for subjecting him to all this. Elizabeth got out another mimeographed booklet of poems, dedicated to both of us. Triple Tripping, she called it. Flagrantly erotic. I quoted a few of the poems in one of my reports of Homeworld, then lost heart and hid the booklet in the closet. “Have you heard about your transfer yet?” I asked Swanson at le
ast twice a week. He hadn’t. Neither had I.

  Autumn came. Elizabeth, burning her candle at both ends, looked gaunt and feverish. “I have never known such happiness,” she announced frequently, one hand clasping Swanson, the other me. “I never think about the strangeness of you any more. I think of you only as people. Sweet, wonderful, lonely people. Here in the darkness of this horrid city.” And she once said, “What if everybody here is like you, and I’m the only one who’s really human? But that’s silly. You must be the only ones of your kind here. The advance scouts. Will your planet invade ours? I do hope so! Set everything to rights. The reign of love and reason at last!”

  “How long will this go on?” Swanson muttered.

  At the end of October his transfer came through. He left without saying goodbye to either of us and without leaving a forwarding address. Nairobi? Addis Ababa? Kinshasa?

  I had grown accustomed to having him around to share the burden of Elizabeth. Now the full brunt of her affection fell on me. My work was suffering; I had no time to file my reports properly. And I lived in fear of her gossiping. What was she telling her Village friends? (“You know David? He’s not really a man, you know. Actually inside him there’s a kind of crab-thing from another solar system. But what does that matter? Love’s a universal phenomenon. The truly loving person doesn’t draw limits around the planet.”) I longed for my release. To go home; to accept my punishment; to shed my false skin. To empty my mind of Elizabeth.

  My reply came through the ultrawave on November 13. Application denied. I was to remain on Earth and continue my work as before. Transfers to Homeworld were granted only for reasons of health.

  I debated sending a full account of my treason to Homeworld and thus bringing about my certain recall. But I hesitated, overwhelmed with despair. Dark brooding seized me. “Why so sad?” Elizabeth asked. What could I say? That my attempt at escaping from her had failed? “I love you,” she said. “I’ve never felt so real before.” Nuzzling against my cheek. Fingers knotted in my hair. A seductive whisper. “David, open yourself up again. Your chest, I mean. I want to see the inner you. To make sure I’m not frightened of it. Please? You’ve only let me see you once.” And then, when I had: “May I kiss you, David?” I was appalled. But I let her. She was unafraid. Transfigured by happiness. She is a cosmic nuisance, but I fear I’m getting to like her.

  Can I leave her? I wish Swanson had not vanished. I need advice.

  Either I break with Elizabeth or I break with Homeworld. This is absurd. I find new chasms of despondency every day. I am unable to do my work. I have requested a transfer once again, without giving details. The first snow of the winter today.

  Application denied.

  “When I found you with Swanson,” she said, “it was a terrible shock. An even bigger blow than when you first came out of your chest. I mean, it was startling to find out you weren’t human, but it didn’t hit me in any emotional way, it didn’t threaten me. But then, to come back a few hours later and find you with one of your own kind, to know that you wanted to shut me out, that I had no place in your life—Only we worked it out, didn’t we?” Kissing me. Tears of joy in her eyes. How did this happen? Where did it all begin? Existence was once so simple. I have tried to trace the chain of events that brought me from there to here, and I cannot. I was outside of my false body for eight hours today. The longest spell so far. Elizabeth is talking of going to the islands with me for the winter. A secluded cottage that her friends will make available. Of course, I must not leave my post without permission. And it takes months simply to get a reply.

  Let me admit the truth: I love her.

  January 1. The new year begins. I have sent my resignation to Homeworld and have destroyed my ultrawave equipment. The links are broken. Tomorrow, when the city offices are open, Elizabeth and I will go to get the marriage license.

  Chip Runner

  In the summer of 1987 the energetic publisher and book packager Byron Preiss, having produced a pair of magnificent illustrated anthologies to which I had been a contributor—The Planets and The Universe—now turned his attention the other way, to the world of the infinitely small. The Microverse was his new project, and Byron asked me to write something for this one too.

  The scientific part of the story was easy enough to put together: required by the theme of the book to deal with the universe on the subatomic level, I rummaged about in my file of Scientific American to see what the current state of thinking about electrons and protons and such might be. In the course of my rummaging I stumbled upon something about microchip technology, and that led me to the fictional component of the story. All about me in the San Francisco Bay area where I live are bright boys and girls with a deep, all-consuming, and spooky passion for computers. I happen to know something, also, about the prevalence of such eating disorders as anorexia and bulimia in Bay Area adolescents—disorders mainly involving girls, but not exclusively so. Everything fit together swiftly: an anorexic computer kid who has conceived the wild idea of entering the subatomic world by starving down to it. The rest was a matter of orchestrating theme and plot and style—of writing the story, that is. Byron had Ralph McQuarrie illustrate it with a fine, terrifying painting when he published it in The Microverse in 1989. Gardner Dozois bought the story also for the November 1989 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Donald A. Wollheim selected it for his annual World’s Best SF anthology.

  He was fifteen, and looked about ninety, and a frail ninety at that. I knew his mother and his father, separately—they were Silicon Valley people, divorced, very important in their respective companies—and separately they had asked me to try to work with him. His skin was blue-gray and tight, drawn cruelly close over the jutting bones of his face. His eyes were gray too, and huge, and they lay deep within their sockets. His arms were like sticks. His thin lips were set in an angry grimace.

  The chart before me on my desk told me that he was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 71 pounds. He was in his third year at one of the best private schools in the Palo Alto district. His I.Q. was 161. He crackled with intelligence and intensity. That was a novelty for me right at the outset. Most of my patients are depressed, withdrawn, uncertain of themselves, elusive, shy: virtual zombies. He wasn’t anything like that. There would be other surprises ahead.

  “So you’re planning to go into the hardware end of the computer industry, your parents tell me,” I began. The usual let’s-build-a- relationship procedure.

  He blew it away instantly with a single sour glare. “Is that your standard opening? ‘Tell me all about your favorite hobby, my boy’? If you don’t mind I’d rather skip all the bullshit, doctor, and then we can both get out of here faster. You’re supposed to ask me about my eating habits.”

  It amazed me to see him taking control of the session this way within the first thirty seconds. I marveled at how different he was from most of the others, the poor sad wispy creatures who force me to fish for every word.

  “Actually I do enjoy talking about the latest developments in the world of computers, too,” I said, still working hard at being genial.

  “But my guess is you don’t talk about them very often, or you wouldn’t call it ‘the hardware end.’ Or ‘the computer industry.’ We don’t use mondo phrases like those any more.” His high thin voice sizzled with barely suppressed rage. “Come on, doctor. Let’s get right down to it. You think I’m anorexic, don’t you?”

  “Well—”

  “I know about anorexia. It’s a mental disease of girls, a vanity thing. They starve themselves because they want to look beautiful and they can’t bring themselves to realize that they’re not too fat. Vanity isn’t the issue for me. And I’m not a girl, doctor. Even you ought to be able to see that right away.”

  “Timothy—”

  “I want to let you know right out front that I don’t have an eating disorder and I don’t belong in a shrink’s
office. I know exactly what I’m doing all the time. The only reason I came today is to get my mother off my back, because she’s taken it into her head that I’m trying to starve myself to death. She said I had to come here and see you. So I’m here. All right?”

  “All right,” I said, and stood up. I am a tall man, deep-chested, very broad through the shoulders. I can loom when necessary. A flicker of fear crossed Timothy’s face, which was the effect I wanted to produce. When it’s appropriate for the therapist to assert authority, simpleminded methods are often the most effective. “Let’s talk about eating, Timothy. What did you have for lunch today?”

  He shrugged. “A piece of bread. Some lettuce.”

  “That’s all?”

  “A glass of water.”

  “And for breakfast?”

  “I don’t eat breakfast.”

  “But you’ll have a substantial dinner, won’t you?”

  “Maybe some fish. Maybe not. I think food is pretty gross.”

  I nodded. “Could you operate your computer with the power turned off, Timothy?”