“The Panther Engine is worthless,” Mary said, “as a technological artifact. This is a standard test we use on each student, no matter what study course he is assigned.”
“They all got a readout on the Panther Engine?” Bibleman said with disbelief. He stared at the girl.
“They will, one by one. Yours came very quickly. First you are told that it is classified; you are told the penalty for releasing classified information; then you are leaked the information. It is hoped that you will make it public or at least try to make it public.”
Major Casals said, “You saw on the third page of the printout that the engine supplied an economical source of hydroelectric power. That was important. You knew that the public would benefit if the engine design was released.”
“And legal penalties were waived,” Mary said. “So what you did was not done out of fear.”
“Loyalty,” Bibleman said. “I did it out of loyalty.”
“To what?” Mary said.
He was silent; he could not think.
“To a holoscreen?” Major Casals said.
“To you,” Bibleman said.
Major Casals said, “I am someone who insulted you and derided you. Someone who treated you like dirt. I told you that if I ordered you to piss purple, you—”
“Okay,” Bibleman said. “Enough.”
“Goodbye,” Mary said.
“What?” Bibleman said, startled.
“You’re leaving. You’re going back to your life and job, what you had before we picked you.”
Bibleman said, “I’d like another chance.”
“But,” Mary said, “you know how the test works now. So it can never be given to you again. You know what is really wanted from you by the College. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Major Casals said.
Bibleman said nothing.
Holding out her hand, Mary said, “Shake?”
Blindly, Bibleman shook hands with her. Major Casals only stared at him blankly; he did not offer his hand. He seemed to be engrossed in some other topic, perhaps some other person. Another student was on his mind, perhaps. Bibleman could not tell.
Three nights later, as he wandered aimlessly through the mixture of lights and darkness of the city, Bob Bibleman saw ahead of him a robot food vendor at its eternal post. A teenage boy was in the process of buying a taco and an apple turnover. Bob Bibleman lined up behind the boy and stood waiting, his hands in his pockets, no thoughts coming to him, only a dull feeling, a sense of emptiness. As if the inattention which he had seen on Casal’s face had taken him over, he thought to himself. He felt like an object, an object among objects, like the robot vendor. Something which, as he well knew, did not look you directly in the eye.
“What’ll it be, sir?” the robot asked.
Bibleman said, “Fries, a cheeseburger, and a strawberry shake. Are there any contests?”
After a pause the robot said, “Not for you, Mr. Bibleman.”
“Okay,” he said, and stood waiting.
The food came, on its little throwaway plastic tray, in its little throwaway cartons.
“I’m not paying,” Bibleman said, and walked away.
The robot called after him, “Eleven hundred dollars. Mr. Bibleman. You’re breaking the law!”
He turned, got out his wallet.
“Thank you, Mr. Bibleman,” the robot said. “I am very proud of you.”
Chains of Air, Web of Aether
The planet on which he was living underwent each day two mornings. First CY30 appeared and then its minor twin put in a feeble appearance, as if God had not been able to make up His mind as to which sun He preferred and had finally settled on both. The domers liked to compare it to sequential settings of an old-fashioned multifilament incandescent bulb. CY30 gave the impression of getting up to about 150 watts and then came little CY30B, which added 50 more watts of light. The aggregate luminae made the methane crystals of the planet’s surface sparkle pleasantly, assuming you were indoors.
At the table of his dome, Leo McVane drank fake coffee and read the newspaper. He felt anxiety-free and warm because he had long ago illegally redesigned his dome’s thermostat. He felt safe as well because he had added an extra metal brace to the dome’s hatch. And he felt expectant because today the food man would be by, so there would be someone to talk to. It was a good day.
All his communications gear fumbled along on autostasis, at the moment, monitoring whatever the hell they monitored. Originally, upon being stationed at CY30 II, McVane had thoroughly studied the function and purpose of the complexes of electronic marvels for which he was the caretaker—or rather, as his job coding put it, the “master homonoid overseer.” Now he had allowed himself to forget most of the transactions which his charges engaged in. Communications equipment led a monotonous life until an emergency popped up, at which point he ceased suddenly to be the “master homonoid overseer” and became the living brain of his station.
There had not been an emergency yet.
The newspaper contained a funny item from the United States Federal Income Tax booklet for 1978, the year McVane had been born. These entries appeared in the index in this order:
Who Should File
Widows and Widowers, Qualifying
Winnings—Prizes, Gambling, and Lotteries
Withholding—Federal Tax
And then the final entry in the index, which McVane found amusing and even interesting as a commentary on an archaic way of life:
Zero Bracket Amount
To himself, McVane grinned. That was how the United States Federal Income Tax booklet’s 1978 index had ended, very appropriately, and that was how the United States, a few years later, had ended. It had fiscally fucked itself over and died of the trauma.
“Food ration comtrix,” the audio transducer of his radio announced. “Start unbolting procedure.”
“Unbolting under way,” McVane said, laying aside his newspaper.
The speaker said, “Put helmet on.”
“Helmet on.” McVane made no move to pick up his helmet; his atmosphere flow rate would compensate for the loss; he had redesigned it, too.
The hatch unscrewed, and there stood the food man, headbubble and all. An alarm bell in the dome’s ceiling shrilled that atmospheric pressure had sharply declined.
“Put your helmet on!” the food man ordered angrily.
The alarm bell ceased complaining; the pressure had restabilized. At that, the food man grimaced. He popped his helmet and then began to unload cartons from his comtrix.
“We are a hardy race,” McVane said, helping him.
“You have amped up everything,” the food man observed; like all the rovers who serviced domes, he was sturdily built and he moved rapidly. It was not a safe job operating a comtrix shuttle between mother ships and the domes of CY30II. He knew it, and McVane knew it. Anybody could sit in a dome; few people could function outside.
“Stick around for a while,” McVane said after he and the food man had unloaded and the food man was marking the invoice.
“If you have coffee.”
They sat facing each other across the table, drinking coffee. Outside the dome the methane messed around, but here neither man felt it. The food man perspired; he apparently found McVane’s temperature level too high.
“You know the woman in the next dome?” the food man asked.
“Somewhat,” McVane said. “My rig transfers data to her input circuitry every three or four weeks. She stores it, boosts it, and transmits it. I suppose. Or for all I know—”
“She’s sick,” the food man said.
McVane said, “She looked all right the last time I talked to her. We used video. She did say something about having trouble reading her terminal’s displays.”
“She’s dying,” the food man said, and sipped his coffee.
In his mind, McVane tried to picture the woman. Small and dark, and what was her name? He punched a couple of keys on the board beside him, her name
came up on its display, retrieved by the code they used. Rybus Rommey. “Dying of what?” he said.
“Multiple sclerosis.”
“How far advanced is it?”
“Not far at all,” the food man said. “A couple of months ago, she told me that when she was in her late teens she suffered an—what is it called? Aneurysm. In her left eye, which wiped out her central vision in that eye. They suspected at the time that it might be the onset of multiple sclerosis. And then today when I talked to her she said she’s been experiencing optic neuritis, which—”
McVane said, “Both symptoms were fed to M.E.D.?”
“A correlation of an aneurysm and then a period of remission and then double vision, blurring… you ought to call her up and talk to her. When I was delivering to her, she was crying.”
Turning to his keyboard, McVane punched out and punched out and then read the display. “There’s a thirty to forty percent cure rate for multiple sclerosis.”
“Not out here. M.E.D. can’t get to her out here.”
“Shit,” McVane said.
“I told her to demand a transfer back home. That’s what I’d do. She won’t do it.”
“She’s crazy,” McVane said.
“You’re right. She’s crazy. Everybody out here is crazy. You want proof of it? She’s proof of it. Would you go back home if you knew you were very sick?”
“We’re never supposed to surrender our domes.”
“What you monitor is so important.” The food man set down his cup. “I have to go.” As he got to his feet, he said, “Call her and talk to her. She needs someone to talk to and you’re the closest dome. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you.”
McVane thought, I didn’t ask.
After the food man had departed, McVane got the code for Rybus Rommey’s dome, and started to run it into his transmitter, and then hesitated. His wall clock showed 1830 hours. At this point in his forty-two-hour cycle, he was supposed to accept a sequence of high-speed entertainment audio– and videotaped signals emanating from a slave satellite at CY30 III; upon storing them, he was to run them back at normal and select the material suitable for the overall dome system on his own planet.
He took a look at the log. Fox was doing a concert that ran two hours. Linda Fox, he thought. You and your synthesis of old-time rock and modern-day streng. Jesus, he thought. If I don’t transcribe the relay of your live concert, every domer on the planet will come storming in here and kill me. Outside of emergencies—which don’t occur—this is what I’m paid to handle: information traffic between planets, information that connects us with home and keeps us human. The tape drums have got to turn.
He started the tape transport at its high-speed mode, set the module’s controls for receive, locked it in at the satellite’s operating frequency, checked the wave-form on the visual scope to be sure that the carrier was coming in undistorted, and then patched into an audio transduction of what he was getting.
The voice of Linda Fox emerged from the strip of drivers mounted above him. As the scope showed, there was no distortion. No noise. No clipping. All channels, in fact, were balanced; his meters indicated that.
Sometimes I could cry myself when I hear her, he thought. Speaking of crying.
“Wandering all across this land,
My band.
In the worlds that pass above,
I love.
Play for me, you spirits who are weightless.
I believe in drinking to your greatness.
My band.”
And behind Linda Fox’s vocal, the syntholutes which were her trademark. Until Fox, no one had ever thought of bringing back that sixteenth-century instrument for which Dowland had written so beautifully and so effectively.
“Shall I sue? shall I seek for grace?
Shall I pray? shall I prove?
Shall I strive to a heavenly joy
With an earthly love?
Are there worlds? are there moons
Where the lost shall endure?
Shall I find for a heart that is pure?”
What Linda Fox had done was take the lute books of John Dowland, written at the end of the sixteenth century, and remastered both the melodies and the lyrics into something of today. Some new thing, he thought, for scattered people as flung as if they had been dropped in haste: here and there, disarranged, in domes, on the backs of miserable worlds and in satellites—victimized by the power of migration, and with no end in sight.
“Silly wretch, let me rail
At a trip that is blind.
Holy hopes do require”
He could not remember the rest. Well, he had it taped, of course.
“…no human may find.”
Or something like that. The beauty of the universe lay not in the stars figured into it but in the music generated by human minds, human voices, human hands. Syntholutes mixed on an intricate board by experts, and the voice of Fox. He thought, I know what I must have to keep on going. My job is delight: I transcribe this and I broadcast it and they pay me.
“This is the Fox,” Linda Fox said.
McVane switched the video to holo, and a cube formed in which Linda Fox smiled at him. Meanwhile, the drums spun at furious speed, getting hour upon hour into his permanent possession.
“You are with the Fox,” she said, “and the Fox is with you.” She pinned him with her gaze, the hard, bright eyes. The diamond face, feral and wise, feral and true; this is the Fox speaking to you. He smiled back.
“Hi, Fox,” he said.
Sometime later he called the sick girl in the next dome. It took her an amazingly long time to respond to his signal, and as he sat noting the signal register on his own board he thought, Is she finished? Or did they come and forcibly evacuate her?
His microscreen showed vague colors. Visual static, nothing more. And then there she was.
“Did I wake you up?” he asked. She seemed so slowed down, so torpid. Perhaps, he thought, she’s sedated.
“No. I was shooting myself in the ass.”
“What?” he said, startled.
“Chemotherapy,” Rybus said. “I’m not doing too well.”
“I just now taped a terrific Linda Fox concert; I’ll be broadcasting it in the next few days. It’ll cheer you up.”
“It’s too bad we’re stuck in these domes. I wish we could visit one another. The food man was just here. In fact, he brought me my medication. It’s effective, but it makes me throw up.”
McVane thought, I wish I hadn’t called.
“Is there any way you could visit me?” Rybus asked.
“I have no portable air, none at all.”
“I have,” Rybus said.
In panic, he said, “But if you’re sick—”
“I can make it over to your dome.”
“What about your station? What if data come in that—”
“I’ve got a beeper I can bring with me.”
Presently he said, “Okay.”
“It would mean a lot to me, someone to sit with for a little while. The food man stays like half an hour, but that’s as long as he can. You know what he told me? There’s been an outbreak of a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on CY30 VI. It must be a virus. This whole condition is a virus. Christ, I’d hate to have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This is like the Mariana form.”
“Is it contagious?”
She did not directly answer. Instead she said, “What I have can be cured.” Obviously she wanted to reassure him. “If the virus is around… I won’t come over; it’s okay.” She nodded and reached to shut off her transmitter. “I’m going to lie down,” she said, “and get more sleep. With this you’re supposed to sleep as much as you can. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Goodbye.”
“Come over,” he said.
Brightening, she said, “Thank you.”
“But be sure you bring your beeper. I have a hunch a lot of telemetric confirms are going to—”
“Oh, fuck the telemetric confirms!” Rybus said
, with venom. “I’m so sick of being stuck in this goddam dome! Aren’t you going buggy sitting around watching tape drums turn and little meters and gauges and shit?”
“I think you should go back home,” he said.
“No,” she said, more calmly. “I’m going to follow exactly the M.E.D. instructions for my chemotherapy and beat this fucking M.S. I’m not going home. I’ll come over and fix your dinner. I’m a good cook. My mother was Italian and my father is Chicano so I spice everything I fix, except you can’t get spices out here. But I figured out how to beat that with different synthetics. I’ve been experimenting.”
“In this concert I’m going to be broadcasting,” McVane said, “the Fox does a version of Dowland’s ‘Shall I Sue.’ ”
“A song about litigation?”
“No. ‘Sue’ in the sense of to pay court to or woo. In matters of love.” And then he realized that she was putting him on.
“Do you want to know what I think of the Fox?” Rybus asked. “Recycled sentimentality, which is the worst kind of sentimentality; it isn’t even original. And she looks like her face is on upside down. She has a mean mouth.”
“I like her,” he said stiffly; he felt himself becoming mad, really mad. I’m supposed to help you? he asked himself. Run the risk of catching what you have so you can insult the Fox?
“I’ll fix you beef stroganoff with parsley noodles,” Rybus said.
“I’m doing fine,” he said.
Hesitating, she said in a low, faltering voice, “Then you don’t want me to come over?”
“I—” he said.
“I’m very frightened, Mr. McVane,” Rybus said. “Fifteen minutes from now, I’m going to be throwing up from the IV Neurotoxite. But I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to give up my dome and I don’t want to be by myself. I’m sorry if I offended you. It’s just that to me the Fox is a joke. I won’t say anything more; I promise.”
“Do you have the—” He amended what he intended to say. “Are you sure it won’t be too much for you, fixing dinner?”
The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories Page 44