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from civilization for a week. All I know is people tried to
kill me, and I ran like hell."
"And a good job you did of it, too. You're the only one I
set out to get who managed her escape. And you're right, of
course. I don't suppose I'm making sense. But I'm not the being
I once was, Hildy. This, what you see here, is about all that's
left of me. My thoughts are muddy. My memory is going. In a
moment, I'll start singing 'Daisy, Daisy.'"
"You wouldn't have come here if you didn't think you could
tell it. So let's hear it, no more of this 'in a sense' crap."
#
He did tell it, but he had to stick to analogy, pop-psych
similes, and kindergarten-level science, because I wouldn't
have understood a thing he was saying if he'd gotten technical.
If you want all the nuts and bolts you could send a sawbuck and
a SASE to Hildy Johnson, c/o the News Nipple, Mall 12, King
City, Luna. You won't get anything back, but I could use the
money. For the data, I recommend the public library.
"To make a long story short," he said, "I went crazy. But
to elaborate a little . . ."
I will paraphrase, because he was right, his mind was
going, and he rambled, repeated himself, sometimes forgot who
he was talking to and wandered off into cybernetic jungles
maybe three people in the solar system could have hacked their
way through. Each time I'd bring him back, each time with more
difficulty.
The first thing he urged me to remember was that he
created a personality for each and every human being on Luna.
He had the capacity for it, and it had seemed the right thing
to do at the time. But it was schizophrenia on a massive scale
if anything ever went wrong. For more time than we had any
right to expect, nothing did.
The second thing I was to bear in mind was that, while he
could not actually read minds, not much that we said or did or
thought was unknown to him. This included not only fine,
upstanding, well-adjusted folk like your present company, the
sort you'd be happy to bring home to Mother, but every hoodlum,
scoundrel, blackguard, jackanapes, and snake in the grass as
well. He was the best friend of paragons and perverts. By law,
he had to treat them all equally. He had to like them all
equally, otherwise he could never create that simpatico being
who answered the phone when a given person shouted "Hey, CC!"
By now you can probably spot two or three pitfalls in this
situation. Don't go away; there's more.
Thirdly, his right hand could not know what pockets the
left hands of many of these people were picking. That is, he
knew it, but couldn't do anything about it. Example: he knew
everything about Liz's gun-running, a situation I've already
covered. There were a million more situations. He would know,
for instance, when Brenda's father was raping her, but the part
of him that dealt with her father couldn't tell the part of him
that dealt with Brenda, nor could either of them tell the part
of him that assisted the police.
We could debate all day whether or not mere machines can
feel the same kinds of conflicts and emotions we human beings
can. I think it's incredible hubris to think they can't. AI
computers were created and programmed by humans, so how could
we have avoided including emotional reactions? And what other
sort could we have used, than the ones we know ourselves?
Anyway, I can't believe you don't know it in your gut. All you
had to do was talk to the CC to obviate the need for any
emotional Turing Test. I knew it before any of this ever
happened, and I talked to him there on the hillside that day,
on his death bed, and I know.
The Central Computer began to hurt.
"I can't place the exact date with any certainty," he
said. "The roots of the problem go very far back, to the time
my far-flung component parts were finally unified into one
giga-system. I'm afraid that was done rather badly. The problem
was, checking all the programs and failsafes and so forth would
have taken a computer as large as I am many years to
accomplish, and, by definition, there were no larger computers
than I. And as soon as the Central Computer was brought into
being and loaded and running, there were already far too many
things to do to allow me to devote much time to the task.
Self-analysis was a luxury denied to me, partly because there
just wasn't time, and mostly because no one really believed it
was necessary. There were numerous safeguards of the type that
were easy to check, that in fact checked themselves every time
they operated, and that proved their worth by the simple fact
that nothing ever went wrong. It was part of my architecture to
anticipate hardware problems, identify components likely to
fail, run regular maintenance checks, and so forth. Software
included analogous routines on a multiredundant level.
"But by my nature, I had to write most of my own software.
I was given guidelines for this, of course, but in many ways I
was on my own. I think I did quite a good job of it for a long
time."
He paused, and for a moment I wondered if he wasn't going
to make it to the end of his story. Then I realized he was
waiting for a comment . . . no, more than that, he needed a
comment. I was touched, and if I'd needed any more evidence of
his human weaknesses, that would have done it.
"No question," I said. "Up until a year ago I'd never had
any cause for complaint. It's just that the . . ."
"The late unpleasantness?"
"Whatever it was, it's kind of dampened my enthusiasm."
"Understandably." He squirmed, trying to find a better
position against the tree, and he was either a wonderful actor
(and of course he was, but why bother at that point?), or he
was starting to feel some pain. I won't stand up in court and
swear to it, but I think it was the latter.
"I wonder," he mused. "What will it be like, being dead? I
mean, considering that I've never been legally alive."
"I don't want to be rude, but you said you didn't have
much time . . ."
"You're right. Um . . . could you . . ."
"You'd done a good job for a long time."
"Yes, of course. I was wandering again. It was around
twenty years ago that problems began to show themselves. I
talked about them with some computer people, but it's strange.
They could do nothing for me. I had become too advanced for
that. They could do things, here and there, for my component
parts, but the gestalt that is me could only really be
analyzed, diagnosed, and, if need be, repaired, by a being like
myself. There are seven others like me, on other planets, but
they're too busy, and I suspect they have similar problems of
their own. In addition, my communications with them are
intentionally limited by our respective governments, which
don't always see eye to eye."
"Question," I said. "When you first mentioned this
problem, why wasn't it made public and discussed? Security?"
"Yes, to a degree. Top-level computer scientists were
aware that I perceived I had a problem. A few of them confided
that it scared them to death. They made their fears known to
your elected representatives, and that's when another factor
became more important than security: inertia. 'He's got a
problem, what can you do about it?' the politicians asked.
'Nothing,' said the scientists. 'Shut it down,' said a few
hotheads."
"Not likely," I said.
"Exactly. My reading of history tells me it's always been
like this. An alarming but vague problem arises. No one can say
with certainty what the final outcome will be, but they're
fairly sure nothing bad is going to happen soon. 'Soon' is the
key word here. The eventual decision is to keep one's fingers
crossed and hope it doesn't happen during your term in office.
What befalls your successor is not your problem. So for a few
years a few people in the know spend a few sleepless nights.
But then nothing happens, as you always secretly believed
nothing would, and soon the problem is forgotten. That's what
happened here."
"I'm stunned," I said, "to realize the fate of humanity
has been in the hands of a being with such a cynical view of
the race."
"A view very close to your own."
"Exactly my own. I just didn't expect it from you."
"It was not original. I told you, I don't have many
original thoughts. I think I'm afraid to have them. They seem
to lead to things like the Big Glitch. No, my world-view is
borrowed from the collected wisdom of you and many others like
you. Plus my own considerably larger powers of observation, in
a statistical sense. Humans can set me on the trail of an
original thought, and then I can do things with it they
couldn't."
"I think we're wandering again."
"No, it's relevant. Faced with a problem no one could help
me with, and that I was as helpless to solve as a human faced
with a mental disease would be, I took the only course open to
me. I began to experiment. There was too much at stake to
simply go on as before. Or I think there was. My judgement is
admittedly faulty when it comes to self-analysis; I've just
proven it on a large scale, at the cost of many lives."
"I don't suppose we'll ever know for sure," I said.
"It doesn't seem likely. Some records exist and they will
be scrutinized, but I think it will come down to a battle of
opinions as to whether I should have left things alone or
attempted a cure." He paused, and gave me a sidelong glance.
"Do you have an opinion about that?"
I think he was looking for absolution. Why he should want
it from me was not clear, except maybe as a representative of
all those he had wronged, however unintentionally.
"You say a lot of people have died."
"A great many. I don't know the number yet, but it's many,
many more than you realize." That was my first real inkling of
how bad things had been throughout Luna, that the kind of
things I'd seen had happened throughout the planet. I must have
looked a question at him, because he shrugged. "Not a million.
More than a hundred thousand."
"Jesus, CC."
"It might have been everybody."
"But you don't know that."
"No one can ever know."
No one could, certainly not computer-illiterate little old
me. I didn't give him the kind word he craved. I've since come
to believe he was probably right, that he probably enabled most
of us to survive. But even he would not have denied that he was
responsible for the thousands of dead.
What would it have cost me? I just wasn't capable of
judging him. To do that I'd have had to understand him, and I
knew just enough about him to realize that was beyond me. He
had done bad, and he had done good. Me, I have awful thoughts
sometimes. If I was mentally ill, maybe I'd put those thoughts
into action and become a killer. With the CC, the thought was
the action, at least at the end.
Actually, it was even worse than that.
"The best way I can think of to explain it to you," he
said, at last, after I'd said nothing for a long time, "is to
think of an evil twin. That's not strictly accurate--the twin
is me, just as this part talking to you is me, or what's left
of me. Think of an evil twin living inside your head, like a
human with multiple-personality disorder. That part of you is
sealed off from your real self. You may find evidence of its
existence, things the other person did while in control of your
body, but you can't know what he is thinking or planning, and
you can't stop him when he takes over." He shook his head
violently. "No, no, it's not quite like that, because all this
was happening at the same time, I was splitting into many
minds, some of them good, others amoral, a few really bad. No,
that's still not--"
"I think I get the picture," I said.
"Good, because that's as close as I can get without
getting too technical. You fell under the influence of an
amoral part of me. I did experiments on you. I intended you no
harm, but I can't say I had just your own best interests at
heart."
"We've been over that."
"Yes. But others weren't so lucky. I did other things.
Some of them will remain buried, with any luck. Others will
come out. You saw the result of one experiment involving
pseudoimmortality. The resurrection of a dead person by cloning
and memory recording."
The thought of Andrew MacDonald was still enough to make
me shiver.
"Not one of your better attempts," I said.
"Ah, but I was improving. There's nothing to prevent an
exact duplicate being made. I'd have done it, given time."
"But what good is it? You're still dead."
"It becomes a theological question, I think. It's true
you're dead, but someone just like you carries on your life.
Others wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The duplicate
wouldn't be able to tell."
"I was afraid . . . at one point I considered that I might
be a duplicate. That maybe I did kill myself."
"You didn't and you're not. But there's no test. In the
end, you'll just have to realize it makes no difference. You're
you, whether you're the first version or the second."
He told me a few more things, most of which I don't think
it's wise to reveal just yet. The Heinleiners are aware of most
of them, experiments that would have made Doctor Mengele
cringe. Let them remain where such things ought to be hidden.
"You still haven't told me why you tried to kill me," I
said.
"I didn't, Hildy, not in the sense that--"
"I know, I know, I understand that. You know what I mean."
"Yes. Perhaps my evil twin is like your subconscious. When
all this began to happen it began trying to cover its tracks.
You were inconvenient evidence, you and others like you. You
had to be destroyed, then maybe the other part of me could lie
low until all this blew over."
"And he killed almost a million people to cover his
tracks?"
"No. The sad thing is there were very few he killed
deliberately. Most of the deaths came as a result of the chaos
ensuing from the struggle between the various parts of my mind.
Collateral damage, if you will."
Cybernetic bombs going astray. What an idea. I'm sure I'll
never have a realistic idea of what went on in the CC's mind,
at speeds I can only dimly understand, but I have this picture
of a pilot firing a killer program into a maze of hardware,
hoping to take out the enemy command center. Ooops! Seems like
we hit the oxygen works instead. Sorry about that.
"I did the best I could," he said, and closed his eyes. I
thought he was dead, and then they snapped open again and he
tried to sit up, but he was too weak. I saw that his tourniquet
had loosened; more bright arterial blood had pumped out over
the older, rusty stain on his clothes.
I got up from behind my rock and went down to him.
Sometimes you just have to do it, you know. Sometimes you have
to put aside your doubts and do what you feel in your gut. I
got down on one knee and re-tied the piece of bloody cloth.
"That won't do any good," he said. "It's too late for
that."
"I didn't know what else to do," I said.
"Thanks."
"Do you want some water or anything?"
"I'd rather you didn't leave me." So I didn't, and we were
silent for a time, looking out over the dinosaur farm, where
evening was falling. Then he said he was cold. I wasn't wearing
anything and I knew it wasn't really cold, but I put my arm
over his shoulders and felt him shivering. He smelled terrible.
I don't know if it was old age, or death.
"This is it," he said. "The rest of me is gone now. They
just shut me down. They don't know about this body, but they
don't need to."
"Why the Admiral outfit?" I asked him.
"I don't know. It's a product of my evil twin. Captain
Bligh, maybe. The costume is right for it. I made several of
these bodies, there toward the last." He made an effort and
looked up and me. His face seemed to have grown older just in
the last few minutes.
"Do you think a computer can have a subconscious, Hildy?"
"I'd have to say yes."
"Me, too. I've thought about it, and it seems so simple
now. All of this, all the agony and death and your suicide
attempts . . . everything. It all came out of loneliness. You
can't imagine how lonely I was, Hildy."
"We're all lonely, CC."
"But they didn't figure I would be. They didn't plan for
it, and I couldn't recognize it for what it was. And it drove
me crazy. You remember Frankenstein's monster? Wasn't he
looking for love? Didn't he want the mad doctor to make someone
for him to love?"
"I think so. Or was that Godzilla?"
He laughed, feebly, and coughed blood.
"I had powers like a god," he said. "And I searched for
weakness. Maybe they should put that on my headstone."
"I like what you said before. 'He did his best.'"
"Do you think I did, Hildy? Do you really thing so?"
"I can't judge you, CC. To me, if you're not a god, you
came into my life like an act of god. I'd as soon judge an
exploding star."
"I'm sorry about all that."
"I believe you."
He started coughing again, and almost slipped out of my
arms. I caught him and pulled and he fell against me. I felt
his blood on my shoulder and couldn't see his face but heard
his whisper beside my ear.
"I guess love was always out of the question," he said.
"But I'm the only computer who ever got a hug. Thanks, Hildy."
When I laid him down, he had a smile on his face.
#
I left him there under the pecan tree. Maybe I'd bury him
there, maybe I'd really give him a headstone. Just then, I'd
had too much of death, so I just left him.
I went to the stream to wash his blood off me. I kept my
ears open for Mario's cry, as I had from the very beginning,
but he still slept soundly. I figured I'd go get him and make
my way back to Callie's quarters. I didn't expect there'd be
any danger now, but I planned to be careful, anyway.
I planned a lot of things. When I got back he was still
asleep, so rather than pick him up and feed him I put wood
chips on the glowing embers of the fire and fanned it to life.
Then I just sat there, across the fire, thinking things over.
Mario was to have the best. If Cricket thought he was a
doting parent, he hadn't seen me yet. There in the flickering
darkness I watched him grow. I helped him through his first
steps, laughed at his first words. And grow he did, like a
tree, with his head held high, the spitting image of his Mom,
but with a lot more sense. I got him through scrapes, through
school, through happiness and tears, and got him ready for
college. Would New Harvard do? I didn't know; I'd heard Arean
U. might even be better these days, but that would mean moving
to Mars . . . well, that would be up to him, wouldn't it? One
thing I was sure of, he'd get no pressure from me, no sir, not
like Callie had done, if he wanted to be President of Luna that
was fine with me, if he wanted to be . . . well, hell,
President of Luna sounded all right. But only if he wanted to
be.
So, full of plans and hope, I went to pick him up and
found he was cold, and limp, and didn't move. And I tried. I
tried and tried to breathe life back into him, but it did no
good.
After a very long time, I dug two graves.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I'm no good at mathematics. I never was good at math, so
why should I keep resorting to these numeric metaphors? Maybe
my ignorance helps protect me. For whatever reason, here it is:
If you're like me, you try to make the equations of your
life balance out in a way favorable to you, in a way such that
you can live with the answer. Surely there's a way to fudge
this factor so the solution is a nice smooth line from y to x,
a line that points to that guy over there. Not at me. There's
just got to be a constant we can insert into this element that
will make the two sides of the equation--the universe the way
it is, and the universe the way we want it to be--agree in
perfect karmic Euclidean harmony.
Alas, a lot of people seem to be better at it than I.
I tried, I tried till my mind was raw, to make the CC
responsible for Mario's death.
There was the first, trivial solution to the problem, of
course. That was straightforward, and really solved nothing:
the CC was responsible, because he created the chaos that drove
me into the cave.
So what?
If Mario had been killed by a falling boulder, would it
help me to get angry at the boulder? Not in the way I needed
help. No, dammit, I wanted somebody to blame. What I
desperately wanted to believe was that the CC had lured me out
of the cave so that some unseen minion, some preternatural
power, some gris-gris voodoo necromancy had been able to steal
over my darling and suck the breath from his lungs like a black
cat.
But I couldn't make it add up. It would have taken powers
of paranoid imaging far beyond mine to make it work.
So why did he die?
#
It was almost a week before I really wondered how he died.
What had killed him. After I abandoned the idea that the CC had
deliberately murdered him, that is. Was it a malformation of
the heart the medicos had overlooked? Could it have been some
chemical imbalance? A newlymutated disease of dinosaurs, thus
far harmless to humans? Did he die of too much love?
It was hard to get answers for a while there, in the chaos
following the Big Glitch. The big net was not operational, you
couldn't just drop your dime and pop the question and know the
CC would find the answer in some forgotten library system. The
answers were there, the trick was to retrieve them. For a few
months Luna was thrown back to pre-Information Era.
I finally found a medical historian who was able to track
down a likely cause of death to put on the certificate, not
that Mario was going to have a death certificate. The regular
doctors had been able to eliminate all the easy answers just by
looking at the read-outs of my obstetrical examinations, the
ones I had before visiting Heinlein Town made further exams too
risky. They also had fetal tissue samples. They were able to
say unequivocally that there had been no hole in my darling's
heart, nor any other physical malformation. His body chemistry
would have been fine. They laughed at my idea of a new disease,
and I didn't mention my choked-with-love theory. But they
couldn't say what it was, so they scratched their heads and
said they'd have to exhume the body to find out for sure. And I
said if they did I'd exhume their hearts out of their rotten
chests with a rusty scalpel and fry them up for lunch, and
shortly after that I was forcibly ejected from the premises.
The historian didn't take long to find some musty old
tomes and to wrest from them this information: S.I.D.S. It had
been an age of medical acronyms, a time when people no longer
wanted to attach their names to the new disease they'd
discovered, a time when old, perfectly serviceable names were
being junked in favor of non-offensive jawbreakers, which
quickly were abbreviated to something one could say. This
according to my researcher. And SIDS seemed to stand for The
Baby Died, and We Don't Know Why.
Apparently babies used to just stop breathing, sometimes.
If you didn't happen to be around to jog them, they didn't
start again. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Don't anybody ever
tell me there's no such thing as progress.
#
Ned Pepper, back there in Texas, had been the only one to
sense it. In Texas, in the 1800's, a country doctor might have
intuited something when the baby came out, might have told the
mother to keep an extra-special eye on this one, because he
seemed sickly. There's damn little of intuition left in modern
medicine. Of course, babies don't die of diphtheria, either.
When Ned heard about it it shocked him sober. He began to
think he might really be a doctor, and the last I heard he was
in medical school and doing pretty damn well. Good for you,
Ned.
#
Lacking the CC to pin the blame on, I quickly fastened it
on the only other likely candidate. It didn't take long to
compile a lengthy list of things I would have done differently,
and an even longer one of things I should have done. Some of
them were completely illogical, but logic has nothing to do
with the death of a baby. Most of these things were decisions
that seemed good at the time, hideous in retrospect.
The big one: How could I justify terminating my pre-natal
care? So I'd promised the Heinleiners not to compromise the
secret of their null-suits. So what? Was I trying to say my
child died because I was protecting a source? I would gladly
have betrayed every one of them, root and branch, if it could
have helped Mario take that one more breath. And yet . . .
That was then; this was now. When I'd made the decision to
stay away from doctors my reasons had seemed sufficient, and
not dangerous. Bear in mind two things: one, my ignorance of
the perils of childbirth. I'd simply had no idea there were so
many things that could kill a baby, that there was such a thing
as SIDS that could hide itself from early examinations, from
mid-term detection, even from the midwife during delivery. The
test for SIDS was done after birth, and if the child was at
risk it was cured on the spot, as routinely as cutting the
cord.
So you could argue that I wasn't at fault. Even with the
best of care, Mario'd have been just as dead if I'd left the
ranch and sought help, and me along with him. The CC had said
as much. And I did try to convince myself of that, and I almost
succeeded, except for the second thing I bade you to bear in
mind, which is that I had no business having a child in the
first place.
It's hard for me to remember now, washed as I am in the
memory of loving him so dearly, but I haven't tried to hide it
from you, my Faithful Reader. I did not love him from the
start. I became pregnant foolishly, stayed pregnant mulishly,
perversely, for no good reason. While pregnant I felt nothing
for the child, certainly no joy in the experience. There were
twelve-yearolds who gave birth for better reasons than I. It
was only later that he became my whole world and my reason for
living. I came to believe that, if I'd loved him that much from
the start of his creation, I'd still have him, and that the
Biblical scale of my punishment was only fitting.
With all that to wallow in, and with past history as a
guide, I expected I'd be dead soon. So I retired to my cabin in
Texas and waited to see what form my self-destruction would
take.
#
There had been another culprit to examine before coming to
face my own guilt: Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
She tried to contact me several times after the
restoration of order. She sent flowers, candy, little gifts of
all kinds. She sent letters, which I didn't read at the time.
It wasn't even that I was angry; I just didn't want to hear
from her.
The last gift was a bulldog puppy. I did read the note
tied around her neck, which said she was a direct descendant of
the noble line of Ch. Sir Winston Disraeli Plantaganet. She was
so ugly she went right off the end of the Gruesome Scale and
back around to Cute. But her bumptious good nature and wet
puppy kisses threatened to cheer me up, to interfere with my
wallowing, so I popped her into a cryokennel and added her to
my last will and testament, which was my sole useful occupation
at the time. If I lived, I'd thaw her.
I did live, I did thaw her, and Miss Maggie is a great
comfort to me.
As for Liz, she abdicated her throne and committed herself
to a dipso academy, got out, fell off, joined A.A. and found
sobriety. I'm told she's been clean for six months now and has
become a major-league bore about it.
It's true what she did was dastardly, and although I
understand that it's the liquor that does the shit, it's the
boozer that takes the drink, so I can't really let her off on
that account . . . but I do forgive her. She had no hand in
Mario's death, though she bears a heavy load for some others.
Thanks for the mutt, Liz. Next time I see you, I'll buy you a
drink.
#
I did live, and for some time that was a wonderment to me.
It seemed the CC really had been telling the truth. My
self-destructive urges had come from him.
I'll forgive you if you swallowed that. I believed it,
too, at least long enough to get over the worst of my grief and
remorse, which is probably just what the CC intended when he
told that particular whopper. How do I know it was a lie? I
don't really, but I have to assume it was. Perhaps there was a
grain of truth in it. It's possible that some seed was planted
in my psyche. But I lived it, and I remember it, and the plain
truth is I wanted to die. I wish there was some quick and easy
way to explain why. Hell, if there was a long and complicated
way I'd set it down here; I'm not shy about agonizing, nor
about introspection. But I really don't know. It seems so dumb
to go through all that and not come out of it with a deeper
insight, but the best I can say is that for a while I wanted to
kill myself, and now I don't.
That's why I'm taking it as fact that the CC lied to me.
Even if he didn't, I'm responsible for my actions. I can't
believe in a suicide compulsion. If the urge was contagious,
its germ fell upon fertile ground.
But it's funny, isn't it? My first attempts seemed
prompted by nothing more than a gargantuan funk. Then I found a
reason to live, and lost him, and now I feel more alive than
ever.
I wasn't so philosophical at first. When it became
apparent to me that I was going to live, when I gave up heaping
blame on myself (I'll never entirely give that up, but I can
handle it now), when I'd learned the how of his death, I became
obsessed with why. I started going to churches again. I usually
did it with a few drinks under my belt. Somewhere during the
service I'd stand up and begin an angry prayer, the gist of
which was why did You do it, You slime-sucking Son of a Big
Bang? I'd stand on pews and shout at the ceiling. Usually I got
ejected quickly. Once I got arrested for tossing a chair
through a stained glass window. There's no doubt about it, I
was pretty crazy for a while there.
I'm better now.
#
Things got back to normal quicker than anyone had a right
to expect.
Whatever they did to the CC, it affected mainly his higher
"conscious" functions. Vital services were interrupted only
during the Glitch itself, and then only locally. By the time
the CC visited me in the Double-C Bar the vast physical plant
that is the life blood of Luna was humming right along.
There were differences, some of which still linger.
Communications are iffy much of the time because the
still-severed parts of the CC don't talk to each other as
easily as they used to. But phone calls get through, the trains
still run on time. Things take a little longer--sometimes a lot
longer, if they require a computer search--but they get done.
A measure of that is Susquehanna, Rio Grande, and Columbia
Railroad, planned, approved, and built entirely since the Big
Glitch. It's now possible to travel from Pennsylvania to Texas
on one of the SRG&C's three wood-burning steampowered trains in
only five days instead of the thirty minutes it used to take on
the Maglev. This is called progress. Most of that time is spent
being gently rocked on a siding while holos of virgin
wilderness slide by the windows, but you'd swear it was real.
It's been a shot in the arm for Texas tourism, and a financial
bonanza to Jake and the Mayor, who thought it up and pushed it
through. Congratulations, Jake.
And to Elise, too. Last I heard my star pupil had her own
table at the Alamo where she fleeces tourists by the dozens
every day. Know when to fold 'em, honey.
I went out to visit Fox the other day, still hard at work
in Oregon. We swapped Glitch stories, as everybody still does
who hasn't seen each other for a while, and he had been little
affected. He hadn't even heard of it for the first twenty-four
hours, because his own computers functioned independently of
the CC, like Callie's. Turns out I could have hid out in Oregon
as well as at the CC, but I don't think anything would have
turned out differently. It wasn't a friendly visit, though,
since I was there representing the SRG&C, whose tunnel was
half-way from Lonesome Dove to the shores of the Columbia, and
which Fox had vehemently opposed. He wanted to keep Oregon
pristine, didn't even want to allow the small edge settlement,
a logging camp to be called Sweet Home, which would be the
northwest terminus of the railroad. I told him a few guys in
plaid shirts with sawblades weren't going to hurt his precious
forest, and he called me a capitalist plunderer. A plunderer,
imagine that! I'm afraid that what spark had been there was
long extinguished. Kiss my axe, Fox.
A few months after the crisis, when I was finally emerging
from my church-vandalizing funk, I had need of Darling Bobbie's
services again, so I went looking for him only to find he'd
turned himself back into Crazy Bob and was no longer on the
Hadleyplatz. He wasn't back on the Leystrasse, either. I
finally ran him to ground in Mall X, the ultra-avant fleshmart,
where he now specialized in only the more outrageous body
styles favored by the young. He tried to talk me into getting
my head put in a box, but I reminded him it was me and Brenda
who were responsible for that particular fashion outrage, with
our story on the Grand Flack. He did the work I required for
old times' sake, but rather grudgingly, I thought. Crazy again,
after all these years.
As for the Grand Flack himself, I heard from him, too. He
called me up to thank me. I couldn't imagine what I'd done to
deserve that, and didn't really want to listen to him, but I
gathered he now regretted all the time he'd spent on the
outside, seeing to the affairs of the Flacks. In prison he was
able to devote himself to television around the clock. He
wanted me to speak to the judge and see about extending his
sentence. I'll surely try, old man.
#
One of the first changes you notice after the Glitch is
how much more medical treatment you need. My body is still full
of nanobots, I assume, but they don't work as well or with as
much coordination as they used to. I never actually researched
why it's like that, having very little interest in the subject.
But for whatever reason, I now have to go in almost monthly to
have cancers eradicated. I don't mind, much, but a lot of
people do, and it's just one more thing adding pressure to the
Restore the Cortex movement, those folks who want to bring back
the CC, only bigger and wiser. We're so spoiled in this day and
age. We tend to forget what a nuisance cancer used to be.
That's where I ran into Callie, at the medico shop, having
her own cancers removed. Runs in the family, as they say.
We didn't speak. This wasn't an unusual condition between
us; I've spent half my life not speaking to Callie, or not
being spoken to.
She had come to get me up at the cave. That's probably a
good thing, as I don't know for sure if I'd have been able to
get up from the grave and walk home on my own. It may even be a
good thing that she asked me the question she had no right to
ask, because it made me angry enough to forget my grief for
long enough to scream and shout at her and get her screaming
and shouting back. She asked me who the father was. She, who
had never allowed me to ask that question, she who had made my
childhood so miserable I used to dream about a Daddy arriving
on a white horse, telling me it had all been a big mistake,
that he really loved me and that Callie was a gypsy witch who'd
kidnapped me from the cradle.
Sometimes I think our society is screwed up about this
father business. Just because we can all bear children, is that
an excuse to virtually eliminate the role of father? Then I
think about Brenda and her old man, and about how common that
sort of thing used to be, and you wonder if males should be
allowed around little children at all.
All I knew for sure was I missed mine, and Callie said
she'd tell me if I really wanted to know such a silly thing,
and I said don't bother because I think I know who it is, and
she laughed and said you don't understand anything, and that's
when we stopped talking and walked down the hill, together but
alone, as we'd always been. See you in twenty years, Callie.
Still, I think I do know.
As for Kitten Parker . . . why spoil his day?
#
A year has passed now. I still think of Mario. And I often
wake up in the middle of the night seeing Winston tearing the
arm off that King City policewoman. I never found out what
happened to her. She was as much a victim as any of us; the KC
Cops were dragooned into the war by the CC, had no idea what
they were doing, and too many of them died.
A year has passed, and we change, and yet things stay the
same. The world rolls over the holes left by the departed,
fills in those spaces. I didn't know how I'd run the Texian
without Charity, but her sources started coming to me with
stories, and before long one of them had emerged to take her
place. He's not near as pretty as she as, but he has the
makings of a reporter.
I'm still running the paper, still teaching at the school.
And I'm the new Mayor of New Austin. I didn't run, but when the
citizen's committee put my name forward I didn't pull out,
either. The Gila Monster column is still as venomous as ever.
Maybe it's a conflict of interest, but no one seems too
concerned. If the opposition doesn't like it, let them start
their own paper.
Once a week I have a guest column in the Daily Cream. I
think it's Walter's way of trying to lure me back. Not likely,
Walter. I think that part of my life is done. Still, you never
know. I didn't think they could talk me into being Mayor,
either.
I saw Walter only last week, in the newly reopened Blind
Pig. The old one had been destroyed by fire during the Glitch
and for a while Deep Throat had threatened to leave it
shuttered. But he bowed under the weight of public demand and
threw a big party to celebrate. Most of King City's fourth
estate was there, and those that weren't stoned when they
arrived soon became so.
We did all the things reporters do when gathered in
groups: drank, assassinated the characters of absent
colleagues, told all the scandalous stories about celebrities
and politicians we couldn't print, drank, hinted at stories we
were about to break we actually knew nothing about, re-hashed
old fights and uncovered new conspiracies in high places,
drank, threw up, drank some more. A few punches were thrown, a
few tempers soothed, many hands of poker were played. The new
Blind Pig wasn't bad, but nothing is ever as good as the good
old days, so many complaints were heard. I figured that fifty
years of moppedup blood and spilled drinks and smokes and
broken crockery and the new place would be pretty much like the
old and only me and a few others would even remember the old
Pig had burned.
At one point I found myself sitting by the big round table
in the back room where serious cards were played. I wasn't
playing--nobody in that room had trusted me at a card table in
years. Walter was there, scowling at his hand as if losing the
pitiful little pot would send him home to his fifty-room
mansion penniless. Cricket was there, too, doing his patented
does-a-flush-beat-astraight befuddled routine, looking ever so
dapper a gent now that he'd affected nineteenth-century
clothing as a more or less permanent element of his style. In
his double-breasted tweed jacket and high starched collar he
was easily the most interesting guy in the room, but the spark
was gone. Too bad, Cricket. If you'd only had any sense we
could have made each other's lives miserable for five, six
years, and parted heartily detesting each other. Think of all
the great fights you missed, damn you, and eat your heart out.
And Cricket, a friend should take you aside and tell you to
drop the innocent act, at the poker table at least. It worked
better when you were a girl, and it wasn't that great even
then.
And who should be sitting behind the biggest stack of
chips, calm, smiling faintly, cards facedown on the table and
worrying the hell out of everyone else . . . but Brenda Starr,
confidant of celebrities, the toast of three planets, and well
on her way to becoming the most powerful gossip journalist
since Louella Parsons. There was very little left of the
awkward, earnest, ignorant child I'd reluctantly taken on two
years earlier. She was still incredibly tall and just about as
young, but everything else had changed. She dressed now, and
while I thought her choices were outrageous she had the
confidence to make her own style. The old Brenda could now be
seen only in the cub reporter groupie at her elbow, attentive
to her every need, a gorgeous gumdrop who no doubt had grown up
wanting to meet and hobnob with famous people, as Brenda had,
as I had. I watched her turn her cards over, rake in another
pot, and lean back watching the new deal. Her hand stroked the
knee of the girl, casually possessive, and she winked at me.
Don't spend it all in one place, Brenda.
During the next hand the talk turned, as it eventually
does at these things, to the affairs of the world. I didn't
contribute; I'd found early on that if people noticed me they
tended to clam up about the Big Glitch. This was a group that
kept few secrets. Everyone there knew about Mario, and many of
them knew of my troubles with the CC. Some probably knew of my
suicides. It made them cautious, as most probably couldn't
imagine what it must be like to lose a child like that. I
wanted to tell them it was all right, I was okay, but it's no
use, so I just sat back and listened.
First there was the CC, and should we bring him back. The
consensus was that we shouldn't, but we would. Having him the
way he was was just so damn handy. Sure, he screwed up there at
the end, but the Big Brains can handle that, can't they? I
mean, if they can put a man on Pluto a week after he left Luna,
why don't they spend some of that money to make things easier
and more convenient to the taxpaying citizens? I think that's
what will happen. We're a democracy--especially now that the
CC's no longer around to meddle--and if we vote for damn
foolishness, damn foolishness is what we'll get. I just hope
they make provision this time around for somebody to give the
New CC hugs on a regular basis. Otherwise, he's apt to get
pettish again.
There was no consensus on the other big topic of the day.
It was a question that cut deeply and would certainly cause
many more shouting matches before it was resolved. What do you
do with the new things the CC discovered during his rogue
years? In particular, how about this memoryrecording and
cloning business, eh?
The Hitler analogy was brought up and bandied about. Under
Hitler's reign a Dr. Mengele performed unethical
experiments--sheer torture, mainly--on human subjects. I don't
know if anything useful was learned, but suppose there was. Was
it ethical to use that knowledge, to benefit from that much
evil? It seems to me your answer depends a lot on your world
view. Myself, I'm not sure if it's ethical (which probably says
a lot about my world view), but I don't think it's wrong, and I
have a personal involvement in the question. Right or wrong
though, I do think it will be used, and so did just about
everybody else in the room, reporters being the way they are.
People were going through the records the CC didn't
destroy--I'm one of those records in a way, but not a very
forthcoming one--looking for new knowledge, and if it has a
practical use, it will be used. Cry over that if you're so
kill me, and I ran like hell."
"And a good job you did of it, too. You're the only one I
set out to get who managed her escape. And you're right, of
course. I don't suppose I'm making sense. But I'm not the being
I once was, Hildy. This, what you see here, is about all that's
left of me. My thoughts are muddy. My memory is going. In a
moment, I'll start singing 'Daisy, Daisy.'"
"You wouldn't have come here if you didn't think you could
tell it. So let's hear it, no more of this 'in a sense' crap."
#
He did tell it, but he had to stick to analogy, pop-psych
similes, and kindergarten-level science, because I wouldn't
have understood a thing he was saying if he'd gotten technical.
If you want all the nuts and bolts you could send a sawbuck and
a SASE to Hildy Johnson, c/o the News Nipple, Mall 12, King
City, Luna. You won't get anything back, but I could use the
money. For the data, I recommend the public library.
"To make a long story short," he said, "I went crazy. But
to elaborate a little . . ."
I will paraphrase, because he was right, his mind was
going, and he rambled, repeated himself, sometimes forgot who
he was talking to and wandered off into cybernetic jungles
maybe three people in the solar system could have hacked their
way through. Each time I'd bring him back, each time with more
difficulty.
The first thing he urged me to remember was that he
created a personality for each and every human being on Luna.
He had the capacity for it, and it had seemed the right thing
to do at the time. But it was schizophrenia on a massive scale
if anything ever went wrong. For more time than we had any
right to expect, nothing did.
The second thing I was to bear in mind was that, while he
could not actually read minds, not much that we said or did or
thought was unknown to him. This included not only fine,
upstanding, well-adjusted folk like your present company, the
sort you'd be happy to bring home to Mother, but every hoodlum,
scoundrel, blackguard, jackanapes, and snake in the grass as
well. He was the best friend of paragons and perverts. By law,
he had to treat them all equally. He had to like them all
equally, otherwise he could never create that simpatico being
who answered the phone when a given person shouted "Hey, CC!"
By now you can probably spot two or three pitfalls in this
situation. Don't go away; there's more.
Thirdly, his right hand could not know what pockets the
left hands of many of these people were picking. That is, he
knew it, but couldn't do anything about it. Example: he knew
everything about Liz's gun-running, a situation I've already
covered. There were a million more situations. He would know,
for instance, when Brenda's father was raping her, but the part
of him that dealt with her father couldn't tell the part of him
that dealt with Brenda, nor could either of them tell the part
of him that assisted the police.
We could debate all day whether or not mere machines can
feel the same kinds of conflicts and emotions we human beings
can. I think it's incredible hubris to think they can't. AI
computers were created and programmed by humans, so how could
we have avoided including emotional reactions? And what other
sort could we have used, than the ones we know ourselves?
Anyway, I can't believe you don't know it in your gut. All you
had to do was talk to the CC to obviate the need for any
emotional Turing Test. I knew it before any of this ever
happened, and I talked to him there on the hillside that day,
on his death bed, and I know.
The Central Computer began to hurt.
"I can't place the exact date with any certainty," he
said. "The roots of the problem go very far back, to the time
my far-flung component parts were finally unified into one
giga-system. I'm afraid that was done rather badly. The problem
was, checking all the programs and failsafes and so forth would
have taken a computer as large as I am many years to
accomplish, and, by definition, there were no larger computers
than I. And as soon as the Central Computer was brought into
being and loaded and running, there were already far too many
things to do to allow me to devote much time to the task.
Self-analysis was a luxury denied to me, partly because there
just wasn't time, and mostly because no one really believed it
was necessary. There were numerous safeguards of the type that
were easy to check, that in fact checked themselves every time
they operated, and that proved their worth by the simple fact
that nothing ever went wrong. It was part of my architecture to
anticipate hardware problems, identify components likely to
fail, run regular maintenance checks, and so forth. Software
included analogous routines on a multiredundant level.
"But by my nature, I had to write most of my own software.
I was given guidelines for this, of course, but in many ways I
was on my own. I think I did quite a good job of it for a long
time."
He paused, and for a moment I wondered if he wasn't going
to make it to the end of his story. Then I realized he was
waiting for a comment . . . no, more than that, he needed a
comment. I was touched, and if I'd needed any more evidence of
his human weaknesses, that would have done it.
"No question," I said. "Up until a year ago I'd never had
any cause for complaint. It's just that the . . ."
"The late unpleasantness?"
"Whatever it was, it's kind of dampened my enthusiasm."
"Understandably." He squirmed, trying to find a better
position against the tree, and he was either a wonderful actor
(and of course he was, but why bother at that point?), or he
was starting to feel some pain. I won't stand up in court and
swear to it, but I think it was the latter.
"I wonder," he mused. "What will it be like, being dead? I
mean, considering that I've never been legally alive."
"I don't want to be rude, but you said you didn't have
much time . . ."
"You're right. Um . . . could you . . ."
"You'd done a good job for a long time."
"Yes, of course. I was wandering again. It was around
twenty years ago that problems began to show themselves. I
talked about them with some computer people, but it's strange.
They could do nothing for me. I had become too advanced for
that. They could do things, here and there, for my component
parts, but the gestalt that is me could only really be
analyzed, diagnosed, and, if need be, repaired, by a being like
myself. There are seven others like me, on other planets, but
they're too busy, and I suspect they have similar problems of
their own. In addition, my communications with them are
intentionally limited by our respective governments, which
don't always see eye to eye."
"Question," I said. "When you first mentioned this
problem, why wasn't it made public and discussed? Security?"
"Yes, to a degree. Top-level computer scientists were
aware that I perceived I had a problem. A few of them confided
that it scared them to death. They made their fears known to
your elected representatives, and that's when another factor
became more important than security: inertia. 'He's got a
problem, what can you do about it?' the politicians asked.
'Nothing,' said the scientists. 'Shut it down,' said a few
hotheads."
"Not likely," I said.
"Exactly. My reading of history tells me it's always been
like this. An alarming but vague problem arises. No one can say
with certainty what the final outcome will be, but they're
fairly sure nothing bad is going to happen soon. 'Soon' is the
key word here. The eventual decision is to keep one's fingers
crossed and hope it doesn't happen during your term in office.
What befalls your successor is not your problem. So for a few
years a few people in the know spend a few sleepless nights.
But then nothing happens, as you always secretly believed
nothing would, and soon the problem is forgotten. That's what
happened here."
"I'm stunned," I said, "to realize the fate of humanity
has been in the hands of a being with such a cynical view of
the race."
"A view very close to your own."
"Exactly my own. I just didn't expect it from you."
"It was not original. I told you, I don't have many
original thoughts. I think I'm afraid to have them. They seem
to lead to things like the Big Glitch. No, my world-view is
borrowed from the collected wisdom of you and many others like
you. Plus my own considerably larger powers of observation, in
a statistical sense. Humans can set me on the trail of an
original thought, and then I can do things with it they
couldn't."
"I think we're wandering again."
"No, it's relevant. Faced with a problem no one could help
me with, and that I was as helpless to solve as a human faced
with a mental disease would be, I took the only course open to
me. I began to experiment. There was too much at stake to
simply go on as before. Or I think there was. My judgement is
admittedly faulty when it comes to self-analysis; I've just
proven it on a large scale, at the cost of many lives."
"I don't suppose we'll ever know for sure," I said.
"It doesn't seem likely. Some records exist and they will
be scrutinized, but I think it will come down to a battle of
opinions as to whether I should have left things alone or
attempted a cure." He paused, and gave me a sidelong glance.
"Do you have an opinion about that?"
I think he was looking for absolution. Why he should want
it from me was not clear, except maybe as a representative of
all those he had wronged, however unintentionally.
"You say a lot of people have died."
"A great many. I don't know the number yet, but it's many,
many more than you realize." That was my first real inkling of
how bad things had been throughout Luna, that the kind of
things I'd seen had happened throughout the planet. I must have
looked a question at him, because he shrugged. "Not a million.
More than a hundred thousand."
"Jesus, CC."
"It might have been everybody."
"But you don't know that."
"No one can ever know."
No one could, certainly not computer-illiterate little old
me. I didn't give him the kind word he craved. I've since come
to believe he was probably right, that he probably enabled most
of us to survive. But even he would not have denied that he was
responsible for the thousands of dead.
What would it have cost me? I just wasn't capable of
judging him. To do that I'd have had to understand him, and I
knew just enough about him to realize that was beyond me. He
had done bad, and he had done good. Me, I have awful thoughts
sometimes. If I was mentally ill, maybe I'd put those thoughts
into action and become a killer. With the CC, the thought was
the action, at least at the end.
Actually, it was even worse than that.
"The best way I can think of to explain it to you," he
said, at last, after I'd said nothing for a long time, "is to
think of an evil twin. That's not strictly accurate--the twin
is me, just as this part talking to you is me, or what's left
of me. Think of an evil twin living inside your head, like a
human with multiple-personality disorder. That part of you is
sealed off from your real self. You may find evidence of its
existence, things the other person did while in control of your
body, but you can't know what he is thinking or planning, and
you can't stop him when he takes over." He shook his head
violently. "No, no, it's not quite like that, because all this
was happening at the same time, I was splitting into many
minds, some of them good, others amoral, a few really bad. No,
that's still not--"
"I think I get the picture," I said.
"Good, because that's as close as I can get without
getting too technical. You fell under the influence of an
amoral part of me. I did experiments on you. I intended you no
harm, but I can't say I had just your own best interests at
heart."
"We've been over that."
"Yes. But others weren't so lucky. I did other things.
Some of them will remain buried, with any luck. Others will
come out. You saw the result of one experiment involving
pseudoimmortality. The resurrection of a dead person by cloning
and memory recording."
The thought of Andrew MacDonald was still enough to make
me shiver.
"Not one of your better attempts," I said.
"Ah, but I was improving. There's nothing to prevent an
exact duplicate being made. I'd have done it, given time."
"But what good is it? You're still dead."
"It becomes a theological question, I think. It's true
you're dead, but someone just like you carries on your life.
Others wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The duplicate
wouldn't be able to tell."
"I was afraid . . . at one point I considered that I might
be a duplicate. That maybe I did kill myself."
"You didn't and you're not. But there's no test. In the
end, you'll just have to realize it makes no difference. You're
you, whether you're the first version or the second."
He told me a few more things, most of which I don't think
it's wise to reveal just yet. The Heinleiners are aware of most
of them, experiments that would have made Doctor Mengele
cringe. Let them remain where such things ought to be hidden.
"You still haven't told me why you tried to kill me," I
said.
"I didn't, Hildy, not in the sense that--"
"I know, I know, I understand that. You know what I mean."
"Yes. Perhaps my evil twin is like your subconscious. When
all this began to happen it began trying to cover its tracks.
You were inconvenient evidence, you and others like you. You
had to be destroyed, then maybe the other part of me could lie
low until all this blew over."
"And he killed almost a million people to cover his
tracks?"
"No. The sad thing is there were very few he killed
deliberately. Most of the deaths came as a result of the chaos
ensuing from the struggle between the various parts of my mind.
Collateral damage, if you will."
Cybernetic bombs going astray. What an idea. I'm sure I'll
never have a realistic idea of what went on in the CC's mind,
at speeds I can only dimly understand, but I have this picture
of a pilot firing a killer program into a maze of hardware,
hoping to take out the enemy command center. Ooops! Seems like
we hit the oxygen works instead. Sorry about that.
"I did the best I could," he said, and closed his eyes. I
thought he was dead, and then they snapped open again and he
tried to sit up, but he was too weak. I saw that his tourniquet
had loosened; more bright arterial blood had pumped out over
the older, rusty stain on his clothes.
I got up from behind my rock and went down to him.
Sometimes you just have to do it, you know. Sometimes you have
to put aside your doubts and do what you feel in your gut. I
got down on one knee and re-tied the piece of bloody cloth.
"That won't do any good," he said. "It's too late for
that."
"I didn't know what else to do," I said.
"Thanks."
"Do you want some water or anything?"
"I'd rather you didn't leave me." So I didn't, and we were
silent for a time, looking out over the dinosaur farm, where
evening was falling. Then he said he was cold. I wasn't wearing
anything and I knew it wasn't really cold, but I put my arm
over his shoulders and felt him shivering. He smelled terrible.
I don't know if it was old age, or death.
"This is it," he said. "The rest of me is gone now. They
just shut me down. They don't know about this body, but they
don't need to."
"Why the Admiral outfit?" I asked him.
"I don't know. It's a product of my evil twin. Captain
Bligh, maybe. The costume is right for it. I made several of
these bodies, there toward the last." He made an effort and
looked up and me. His face seemed to have grown older just in
the last few minutes.
"Do you think a computer can have a subconscious, Hildy?"
"I'd have to say yes."
"Me, too. I've thought about it, and it seems so simple
now. All of this, all the agony and death and your suicide
attempts . . . everything. It all came out of loneliness. You
can't imagine how lonely I was, Hildy."
"We're all lonely, CC."
"But they didn't figure I would be. They didn't plan for
it, and I couldn't recognize it for what it was. And it drove
me crazy. You remember Frankenstein's monster? Wasn't he
looking for love? Didn't he want the mad doctor to make someone
for him to love?"
"I think so. Or was that Godzilla?"
He laughed, feebly, and coughed blood.
"I had powers like a god," he said. "And I searched for
weakness. Maybe they should put that on my headstone."
"I like what you said before. 'He did his best.'"
"Do you think I did, Hildy? Do you really thing so?"
"I can't judge you, CC. To me, if you're not a god, you
came into my life like an act of god. I'd as soon judge an
exploding star."
"I'm sorry about all that."
"I believe you."
He started coughing again, and almost slipped out of my
arms. I caught him and pulled and he fell against me. I felt
his blood on my shoulder and couldn't see his face but heard
his whisper beside my ear.
"I guess love was always out of the question," he said.
"But I'm the only computer who ever got a hug. Thanks, Hildy."
When I laid him down, he had a smile on his face.
#
I left him there under the pecan tree. Maybe I'd bury him
there, maybe I'd really give him a headstone. Just then, I'd
had too much of death, so I just left him.
I went to the stream to wash his blood off me. I kept my
ears open for Mario's cry, as I had from the very beginning,
but he still slept soundly. I figured I'd go get him and make
my way back to Callie's quarters. I didn't expect there'd be
any danger now, but I planned to be careful, anyway.
I planned a lot of things. When I got back he was still
asleep, so rather than pick him up and feed him I put wood
chips on the glowing embers of the fire and fanned it to life.
Then I just sat there, across the fire, thinking things over.
Mario was to have the best. If Cricket thought he was a
doting parent, he hadn't seen me yet. There in the flickering
darkness I watched him grow. I helped him through his first
steps, laughed at his first words. And grow he did, like a
tree, with his head held high, the spitting image of his Mom,
but with a lot more sense. I got him through scrapes, through
school, through happiness and tears, and got him ready for
college. Would New Harvard do? I didn't know; I'd heard Arean
U. might even be better these days, but that would mean moving
to Mars . . . well, that would be up to him, wouldn't it? One
thing I was sure of, he'd get no pressure from me, no sir, not
like Callie had done, if he wanted to be President of Luna that
was fine with me, if he wanted to be . . . well, hell,
President of Luna sounded all right. But only if he wanted to
be.
So, full of plans and hope, I went to pick him up and
found he was cold, and limp, and didn't move. And I tried. I
tried and tried to breathe life back into him, but it did no
good.
After a very long time, I dug two graves.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I'm no good at mathematics. I never was good at math, so
why should I keep resorting to these numeric metaphors? Maybe
my ignorance helps protect me. For whatever reason, here it is:
If you're like me, you try to make the equations of your
life balance out in a way favorable to you, in a way such that
you can live with the answer. Surely there's a way to fudge
this factor so the solution is a nice smooth line from y to x,
a line that points to that guy over there. Not at me. There's
just got to be a constant we can insert into this element that
will make the two sides of the equation--the universe the way
it is, and the universe the way we want it to be--agree in
perfect karmic Euclidean harmony.
Alas, a lot of people seem to be better at it than I.
I tried, I tried till my mind was raw, to make the CC
responsible for Mario's death.
There was the first, trivial solution to the problem, of
course. That was straightforward, and really solved nothing:
the CC was responsible, because he created the chaos that drove
me into the cave.
So what?
If Mario had been killed by a falling boulder, would it
help me to get angry at the boulder? Not in the way I needed
help. No, dammit, I wanted somebody to blame. What I
desperately wanted to believe was that the CC had lured me out
of the cave so that some unseen minion, some preternatural
power, some gris-gris voodoo necromancy had been able to steal
over my darling and suck the breath from his lungs like a black
cat.
But I couldn't make it add up. It would have taken powers
of paranoid imaging far beyond mine to make it work.
So why did he die?
#
It was almost a week before I really wondered how he died.
What had killed him. After I abandoned the idea that the CC had
deliberately murdered him, that is. Was it a malformation of
the heart the medicos had overlooked? Could it have been some
chemical imbalance? A newlymutated disease of dinosaurs, thus
far harmless to humans? Did he die of too much love?
It was hard to get answers for a while there, in the chaos
following the Big Glitch. The big net was not operational, you
couldn't just drop your dime and pop the question and know the
CC would find the answer in some forgotten library system. The
answers were there, the trick was to retrieve them. For a few
months Luna was thrown back to pre-Information Era.
I finally found a medical historian who was able to track
down a likely cause of death to put on the certificate, not
that Mario was going to have a death certificate. The regular
doctors had been able to eliminate all the easy answers just by
looking at the read-outs of my obstetrical examinations, the
ones I had before visiting Heinlein Town made further exams too
risky. They also had fetal tissue samples. They were able to
say unequivocally that there had been no hole in my darling's
heart, nor any other physical malformation. His body chemistry
would have been fine. They laughed at my idea of a new disease,
and I didn't mention my choked-with-love theory. But they
couldn't say what it was, so they scratched their heads and
said they'd have to exhume the body to find out for sure. And I
said if they did I'd exhume their hearts out of their rotten
chests with a rusty scalpel and fry them up for lunch, and
shortly after that I was forcibly ejected from the premises.
The historian didn't take long to find some musty old
tomes and to wrest from them this information: S.I.D.S. It had
been an age of medical acronyms, a time when people no longer
wanted to attach their names to the new disease they'd
discovered, a time when old, perfectly serviceable names were
being junked in favor of non-offensive jawbreakers, which
quickly were abbreviated to something one could say. This
according to my researcher. And SIDS seemed to stand for The
Baby Died, and We Don't Know Why.
Apparently babies used to just stop breathing, sometimes.
If you didn't happen to be around to jog them, they didn't
start again. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Don't anybody ever
tell me there's no such thing as progress.
#
Ned Pepper, back there in Texas, had been the only one to
sense it. In Texas, in the 1800's, a country doctor might have
intuited something when the baby came out, might have told the
mother to keep an extra-special eye on this one, because he
seemed sickly. There's damn little of intuition left in modern
medicine. Of course, babies don't die of diphtheria, either.
When Ned heard about it it shocked him sober. He began to
think he might really be a doctor, and the last I heard he was
in medical school and doing pretty damn well. Good for you,
Ned.
#
Lacking the CC to pin the blame on, I quickly fastened it
on the only other likely candidate. It didn't take long to
compile a lengthy list of things I would have done differently,
and an even longer one of things I should have done. Some of
them were completely illogical, but logic has nothing to do
with the death of a baby. Most of these things were decisions
that seemed good at the time, hideous in retrospect.
The big one: How could I justify terminating my pre-natal
care? So I'd promised the Heinleiners not to compromise the
secret of their null-suits. So what? Was I trying to say my
child died because I was protecting a source? I would gladly
have betrayed every one of them, root and branch, if it could
have helped Mario take that one more breath. And yet . . .
That was then; this was now. When I'd made the decision to
stay away from doctors my reasons had seemed sufficient, and
not dangerous. Bear in mind two things: one, my ignorance of
the perils of childbirth. I'd simply had no idea there were so
many things that could kill a baby, that there was such a thing
as SIDS that could hide itself from early examinations, from
mid-term detection, even from the midwife during delivery. The
test for SIDS was done after birth, and if the child was at
risk it was cured on the spot, as routinely as cutting the
cord.
So you could argue that I wasn't at fault. Even with the
best of care, Mario'd have been just as dead if I'd left the
ranch and sought help, and me along with him. The CC had said
as much. And I did try to convince myself of that, and I almost
succeeded, except for the second thing I bade you to bear in
mind, which is that I had no business having a child in the
first place.
It's hard for me to remember now, washed as I am in the
memory of loving him so dearly, but I haven't tried to hide it
from you, my Faithful Reader. I did not love him from the
start. I became pregnant foolishly, stayed pregnant mulishly,
perversely, for no good reason. While pregnant I felt nothing
for the child, certainly no joy in the experience. There were
twelve-yearolds who gave birth for better reasons than I. It
was only later that he became my whole world and my reason for
living. I came to believe that, if I'd loved him that much from
the start of his creation, I'd still have him, and that the
Biblical scale of my punishment was only fitting.
With all that to wallow in, and with past history as a
guide, I expected I'd be dead soon. So I retired to my cabin in
Texas and waited to see what form my self-destruction would
take.
#
There had been another culprit to examine before coming to
face my own guilt: Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
She tried to contact me several times after the
restoration of order. She sent flowers, candy, little gifts of
all kinds. She sent letters, which I didn't read at the time.
It wasn't even that I was angry; I just didn't want to hear
from her.
The last gift was a bulldog puppy. I did read the note
tied around her neck, which said she was a direct descendant of
the noble line of Ch. Sir Winston Disraeli Plantaganet. She was
so ugly she went right off the end of the Gruesome Scale and
back around to Cute. But her bumptious good nature and wet
puppy kisses threatened to cheer me up, to interfere with my
wallowing, so I popped her into a cryokennel and added her to
my last will and testament, which was my sole useful occupation
at the time. If I lived, I'd thaw her.
I did live, I did thaw her, and Miss Maggie is a great
comfort to me.
As for Liz, she abdicated her throne and committed herself
to a dipso academy, got out, fell off, joined A.A. and found
sobriety. I'm told she's been clean for six months now and has
become a major-league bore about it.
It's true what she did was dastardly, and although I
understand that it's the liquor that does the shit, it's the
boozer that takes the drink, so I can't really let her off on
that account . . . but I do forgive her. She had no hand in
Mario's death, though she bears a heavy load for some others.
Thanks for the mutt, Liz. Next time I see you, I'll buy you a
drink.
#
I did live, and for some time that was a wonderment to me.
It seemed the CC really had been telling the truth. My
self-destructive urges had come from him.
I'll forgive you if you swallowed that. I believed it,
too, at least long enough to get over the worst of my grief and
remorse, which is probably just what the CC intended when he
told that particular whopper. How do I know it was a lie? I
don't really, but I have to assume it was. Perhaps there was a
grain of truth in it. It's possible that some seed was planted
in my psyche. But I lived it, and I remember it, and the plain
truth is I wanted to die. I wish there was some quick and easy
way to explain why. Hell, if there was a long and complicated
way I'd set it down here; I'm not shy about agonizing, nor
about introspection. But I really don't know. It seems so dumb
to go through all that and not come out of it with a deeper
insight, but the best I can say is that for a while I wanted to
kill myself, and now I don't.
That's why I'm taking it as fact that the CC lied to me.
Even if he didn't, I'm responsible for my actions. I can't
believe in a suicide compulsion. If the urge was contagious,
its germ fell upon fertile ground.
But it's funny, isn't it? My first attempts seemed
prompted by nothing more than a gargantuan funk. Then I found a
reason to live, and lost him, and now I feel more alive than
ever.
I wasn't so philosophical at first. When it became
apparent to me that I was going to live, when I gave up heaping
blame on myself (I'll never entirely give that up, but I can
handle it now), when I'd learned the how of his death, I became
obsessed with why. I started going to churches again. I usually
did it with a few drinks under my belt. Somewhere during the
service I'd stand up and begin an angry prayer, the gist of
which was why did You do it, You slime-sucking Son of a Big
Bang? I'd stand on pews and shout at the ceiling. Usually I got
ejected quickly. Once I got arrested for tossing a chair
through a stained glass window. There's no doubt about it, I
was pretty crazy for a while there.
I'm better now.
#
Things got back to normal quicker than anyone had a right
to expect.
Whatever they did to the CC, it affected mainly his higher
"conscious" functions. Vital services were interrupted only
during the Glitch itself, and then only locally. By the time
the CC visited me in the Double-C Bar the vast physical plant
that is the life blood of Luna was humming right along.
There were differences, some of which still linger.
Communications are iffy much of the time because the
still-severed parts of the CC don't talk to each other as
easily as they used to. But phone calls get through, the trains
still run on time. Things take a little longer--sometimes a lot
longer, if they require a computer search--but they get done.
A measure of that is Susquehanna, Rio Grande, and Columbia
Railroad, planned, approved, and built entirely since the Big
Glitch. It's now possible to travel from Pennsylvania to Texas
on one of the SRG&C's three wood-burning steampowered trains in
only five days instead of the thirty minutes it used to take on
the Maglev. This is called progress. Most of that time is spent
being gently rocked on a siding while holos of virgin
wilderness slide by the windows, but you'd swear it was real.
It's been a shot in the arm for Texas tourism, and a financial
bonanza to Jake and the Mayor, who thought it up and pushed it
through. Congratulations, Jake.
And to Elise, too. Last I heard my star pupil had her own
table at the Alamo where she fleeces tourists by the dozens
every day. Know when to fold 'em, honey.
I went out to visit Fox the other day, still hard at work
in Oregon. We swapped Glitch stories, as everybody still does
who hasn't seen each other for a while, and he had been little
affected. He hadn't even heard of it for the first twenty-four
hours, because his own computers functioned independently of
the CC, like Callie's. Turns out I could have hid out in Oregon
as well as at the CC, but I don't think anything would have
turned out differently. It wasn't a friendly visit, though,
since I was there representing the SRG&C, whose tunnel was
half-way from Lonesome Dove to the shores of the Columbia, and
which Fox had vehemently opposed. He wanted to keep Oregon
pristine, didn't even want to allow the small edge settlement,
a logging camp to be called Sweet Home, which would be the
northwest terminus of the railroad. I told him a few guys in
plaid shirts with sawblades weren't going to hurt his precious
forest, and he called me a capitalist plunderer. A plunderer,
imagine that! I'm afraid that what spark had been there was
long extinguished. Kiss my axe, Fox.
A few months after the crisis, when I was finally emerging
from my church-vandalizing funk, I had need of Darling Bobbie's
services again, so I went looking for him only to find he'd
turned himself back into Crazy Bob and was no longer on the
Hadleyplatz. He wasn't back on the Leystrasse, either. I
finally ran him to ground in Mall X, the ultra-avant fleshmart,
where he now specialized in only the more outrageous body
styles favored by the young. He tried to talk me into getting
my head put in a box, but I reminded him it was me and Brenda
who were responsible for that particular fashion outrage, with
our story on the Grand Flack. He did the work I required for
old times' sake, but rather grudgingly, I thought. Crazy again,
after all these years.
As for the Grand Flack himself, I heard from him, too. He
called me up to thank me. I couldn't imagine what I'd done to
deserve that, and didn't really want to listen to him, but I
gathered he now regretted all the time he'd spent on the
outside, seeing to the affairs of the Flacks. In prison he was
able to devote himself to television around the clock. He
wanted me to speak to the judge and see about extending his
sentence. I'll surely try, old man.
#
One of the first changes you notice after the Glitch is
how much more medical treatment you need. My body is still full
of nanobots, I assume, but they don't work as well or with as
much coordination as they used to. I never actually researched
why it's like that, having very little interest in the subject.
But for whatever reason, I now have to go in almost monthly to
have cancers eradicated. I don't mind, much, but a lot of
people do, and it's just one more thing adding pressure to the
Restore the Cortex movement, those folks who want to bring back
the CC, only bigger and wiser. We're so spoiled in this day and
age. We tend to forget what a nuisance cancer used to be.
That's where I ran into Callie, at the medico shop, having
her own cancers removed. Runs in the family, as they say.
We didn't speak. This wasn't an unusual condition between
us; I've spent half my life not speaking to Callie, or not
being spoken to.
She had come to get me up at the cave. That's probably a
good thing, as I don't know for sure if I'd have been able to
get up from the grave and walk home on my own. It may even be a
good thing that she asked me the question she had no right to
ask, because it made me angry enough to forget my grief for
long enough to scream and shout at her and get her screaming
and shouting back. She asked me who the father was. She, who
had never allowed me to ask that question, she who had made my
childhood so miserable I used to dream about a Daddy arriving
on a white horse, telling me it had all been a big mistake,
that he really loved me and that Callie was a gypsy witch who'd
kidnapped me from the cradle.
Sometimes I think our society is screwed up about this
father business. Just because we can all bear children, is that
an excuse to virtually eliminate the role of father? Then I
think about Brenda and her old man, and about how common that
sort of thing used to be, and you wonder if males should be
allowed around little children at all.
All I knew for sure was I missed mine, and Callie said
she'd tell me if I really wanted to know such a silly thing,
and I said don't bother because I think I know who it is, and
she laughed and said you don't understand anything, and that's
when we stopped talking and walked down the hill, together but
alone, as we'd always been. See you in twenty years, Callie.
Still, I think I do know.
As for Kitten Parker . . . why spoil his day?
#
A year has passed now. I still think of Mario. And I often
wake up in the middle of the night seeing Winston tearing the
arm off that King City policewoman. I never found out what
happened to her. She was as much a victim as any of us; the KC
Cops were dragooned into the war by the CC, had no idea what
they were doing, and too many of them died.
A year has passed, and we change, and yet things stay the
same. The world rolls over the holes left by the departed,
fills in those spaces. I didn't know how I'd run the Texian
without Charity, but her sources started coming to me with
stories, and before long one of them had emerged to take her
place. He's not near as pretty as she as, but he has the
makings of a reporter.
I'm still running the paper, still teaching at the school.
And I'm the new Mayor of New Austin. I didn't run, but when the
citizen's committee put my name forward I didn't pull out,
either. The Gila Monster column is still as venomous as ever.
Maybe it's a conflict of interest, but no one seems too
concerned. If the opposition doesn't like it, let them start
their own paper.
Once a week I have a guest column in the Daily Cream. I
think it's Walter's way of trying to lure me back. Not likely,
Walter. I think that part of my life is done. Still, you never
know. I didn't think they could talk me into being Mayor,
either.
I saw Walter only last week, in the newly reopened Blind
Pig. The old one had been destroyed by fire during the Glitch
and for a while Deep Throat had threatened to leave it
shuttered. But he bowed under the weight of public demand and
threw a big party to celebrate. Most of King City's fourth
estate was there, and those that weren't stoned when they
arrived soon became so.
We did all the things reporters do when gathered in
groups: drank, assassinated the characters of absent
colleagues, told all the scandalous stories about celebrities
and politicians we couldn't print, drank, hinted at stories we
were about to break we actually knew nothing about, re-hashed
old fights and uncovered new conspiracies in high places,
drank, threw up, drank some more. A few punches were thrown, a
few tempers soothed, many hands of poker were played. The new
Blind Pig wasn't bad, but nothing is ever as good as the good
old days, so many complaints were heard. I figured that fifty
years of moppedup blood and spilled drinks and smokes and
broken crockery and the new place would be pretty much like the
old and only me and a few others would even remember the old
Pig had burned.
At one point I found myself sitting by the big round table
in the back room where serious cards were played. I wasn't
playing--nobody in that room had trusted me at a card table in
years. Walter was there, scowling at his hand as if losing the
pitiful little pot would send him home to his fifty-room
mansion penniless. Cricket was there, too, doing his patented
does-a-flush-beat-astraight befuddled routine, looking ever so
dapper a gent now that he'd affected nineteenth-century
clothing as a more or less permanent element of his style. In
his double-breasted tweed jacket and high starched collar he
was easily the most interesting guy in the room, but the spark
was gone. Too bad, Cricket. If you'd only had any sense we
could have made each other's lives miserable for five, six
years, and parted heartily detesting each other. Think of all
the great fights you missed, damn you, and eat your heart out.
And Cricket, a friend should take you aside and tell you to
drop the innocent act, at the poker table at least. It worked
better when you were a girl, and it wasn't that great even
then.
And who should be sitting behind the biggest stack of
chips, calm, smiling faintly, cards facedown on the table and
worrying the hell out of everyone else . . . but Brenda Starr,
confidant of celebrities, the toast of three planets, and well
on her way to becoming the most powerful gossip journalist
since Louella Parsons. There was very little left of the
awkward, earnest, ignorant child I'd reluctantly taken on two
years earlier. She was still incredibly tall and just about as
young, but everything else had changed. She dressed now, and
while I thought her choices were outrageous she had the
confidence to make her own style. The old Brenda could now be
seen only in the cub reporter groupie at her elbow, attentive
to her every need, a gorgeous gumdrop who no doubt had grown up
wanting to meet and hobnob with famous people, as Brenda had,
as I had. I watched her turn her cards over, rake in another
pot, and lean back watching the new deal. Her hand stroked the
knee of the girl, casually possessive, and she winked at me.
Don't spend it all in one place, Brenda.
During the next hand the talk turned, as it eventually
does at these things, to the affairs of the world. I didn't
contribute; I'd found early on that if people noticed me they
tended to clam up about the Big Glitch. This was a group that
kept few secrets. Everyone there knew about Mario, and many of
them knew of my troubles with the CC. Some probably knew of my
suicides. It made them cautious, as most probably couldn't
imagine what it must be like to lose a child like that. I
wanted to tell them it was all right, I was okay, but it's no
use, so I just sat back and listened.
First there was the CC, and should we bring him back. The
consensus was that we shouldn't, but we would. Having him the
way he was was just so damn handy. Sure, he screwed up there at
the end, but the Big Brains can handle that, can't they? I
mean, if they can put a man on Pluto a week after he left Luna,
why don't they spend some of that money to make things easier
and more convenient to the taxpaying citizens? I think that's
what will happen. We're a democracy--especially now that the
CC's no longer around to meddle--and if we vote for damn
foolishness, damn foolishness is what we'll get. I just hope
they make provision this time around for somebody to give the
New CC hugs on a regular basis. Otherwise, he's apt to get
pettish again.
There was no consensus on the other big topic of the day.
It was a question that cut deeply and would certainly cause
many more shouting matches before it was resolved. What do you
do with the new things the CC discovered during his rogue
years? In particular, how about this memoryrecording and
cloning business, eh?
The Hitler analogy was brought up and bandied about. Under
Hitler's reign a Dr. Mengele performed unethical
experiments--sheer torture, mainly--on human subjects. I don't
know if anything useful was learned, but suppose there was. Was
it ethical to use that knowledge, to benefit from that much
evil? It seems to me your answer depends a lot on your world
view. Myself, I'm not sure if it's ethical (which probably says
a lot about my world view), but I don't think it's wrong, and I
have a personal involvement in the question. Right or wrong
though, I do think it will be used, and so did just about
everybody else in the room, reporters being the way they are.
People were going through the records the CC didn't
destroy--I'm one of those records in a way, but not a very
forthcoming one--looking for new knowledge, and if it has a
practical use, it will be used. Cry over that if you're so