I sat there for an indeterminate time after Karen had left, paralyzed by internal confusion: the slipping-transmission phenomenon mentioned earlier, except that now there were several thought loops cycling simultaneously. Intuitively I felt that something urgent needed doing, but I could not for the life of me imagine what it might be.
No matter how many times I ran it through, I got the same answer: I had discharged all my moral obligations to Karen Scholz. She and I were square, all debts paid. I had meddled in her suicide, an immoral act. In reparation I had done all I could to ease her transition back into living. I had made her a present of my most essential secrets, given her the power to tamper with my own obituary date if she so chose. I had supported and maintained her at the absolute peak of creature comfort while she took stock and decided what to do next. When what she came up with was a more elaborate form of suicide, I had done my best to talk her out of it. Perhaps I had been small in refusing to get the computer readings she wanted, but the procedure really was uniquely dangerous for me, and any of a dozen other professionals in New York could oblige her with less risk.
She would have her crusade, and perhaps she would manage to die with joy, and perhaps it would be better than dying with pleasure.
In my case, it was her choice and my responsibility was ended. It saddened me that she intended to kamikaze, but I had no rights in the matter. She had made it plain that she did not want my advice or assistance. Case closed. Exit Karen, urinating.
Exit Karen.
Yes, that was the way of it; she would surely fall. As a fighter she was all heart and no style at all; they would crush her like a bug. More likely sooner than later. Doña Quixote on a spavined horse, armored in rust, fielding a balsa lance against a twenty-megawatt, high-torque Wind Energy Module, in defense of righteousness. In defense of the right of people not to be tempted to their deaths. She wanted to slay the Sirens, she who had heard their Song and lived.
She was welcome to try. If she saw herself as Doña Quixote, that was her business. I saw no percentage in playing Pancho Sanza. I am not capable of that kind of love. I think I was once, but something happened to me in a jungle. Enough brushes with death will permanently inhibit your urge to place your life on the line for any cause. When that final day came, when I heard the click-snap-spung! and saw the mine pop up to head height and ducked to try and take it on the helmet, I had a very clear idea of the sacrifice I had made for my country. When, much later, I discovered that I had survived the event, and the war, it left a lasting impression. As Monsieur Rick said, I stick my neck out for nobody. (And I never burgle veterans.)
Furthermore, I was not at all certain that I approved of her crusade. If I had been wrong to meddle in her suicide, what right had she to tamper with the suicides of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, who would plug themselves in over the next few years? People wanted juice rigs. It seemed to me a self-correcting problem: in a few generations all the people who could be tempted by pushbutton ecstasy would be bred out of the race.
People like Karen . . .
Who, let's face it, was a loser. The term loser does not necessarily denote incompetence, stupidity, or major personality defect. It says that you lose a lot. She had been, through no fault of hers that I could discern, consistently unlucky all her life long. That can break even the toughest fighting spirit.
Perhaps wireheading bred the race not just for competence and survival drive . . . but for luck?
If so, was I that strict a Malthusian? Misfortune was no stranger to me, and might remember me at any moment. Out there in the jungle I had smoked opium admixed with heroin, though I had known it was insane. What would I have done if someone had offered me a juice rig then? What would any of us in my unit have done?
This was stupid. Stipulating that the existence of the wirehead trade was undesirable, Karen's silly secret-agent stunt was the wrong way to go about abolishing it. Lone operators do not bring down big multinationals. At best she would bring about a restructuring of personnel, a redivision of the pie. I did not see any effective way to put the egg back into the shell. Certainly, prohibiting wireheading could accomplish nothing useful, and I couldn't design an effective way to regulate it.
Regardless of whether or not I could see any right answer, I knew Karen's way was a wrong answer. So I certainly did not want to chase after her to join her. There was no point in chasing after her to try and dissuade her; I'd had one fair try at that and failed. And there was no way in hell I was going to chase after her and forcibly restrain her. I had, in short, no visible motive to chase after her.
And I wanted to get up from my chair and track her. It scared me to death.
If we had even once made love, or even fucked, I could have attributed it to my glands. I had never so much as had an erection over her.
What in Hell's name was wrong with me?
After a time I got tired of running it through, and decided to snap out of it. Find something useful to do.
It was not hard. As soon as I let my eyes see what they were looking at, my search was ended. My television was a total loss. Its gaping glassfanged face had long since ceased to drool good gin on the carpet beneath. The air conditioning had left only a memory of a very bad smell.
I got up and dried the carpet, cleaned up the glass, and disconnected the tube from the system, not bothering to reset all the tripped circuit breakers. The way I had it wired, not only had I lost phone, commercial and cable TV programming, computer display and storyscreen, but I would not have stereo until I could scare up some more patchcords. The most efficient system design is not necessarily the best. All I had left was books and booze.
So the first thing to do . . . no, the first was to dispose of the dead telly. That took me fifteen minutes. The second was to steal another.
It was a good plan. It steadied my mind, for while I am working I do not chew over my problems. I give it my full attention, by long habit.
First I had my computer ask the power company computer for a list of customers whose power-consumption profile had been identical for more than five consecutive days, just as usual save that I had to work with printouts instead of display. When the list was filed down to a twenty-block radius from my home turf, it contained eighteen possibles. I had the computer dial all eighteen phone numbers and strike from the list those that had a record-a-message program active. Those absentee tenants probably planned to be home soon. The no-answers numbered seven. I asked the NYPD computer for information on defensive structures of those seven buildings, and selected the one that was hardest to crack. That tenant would have the most expensive TV. Standard procedure would then have been to tell that building's security cameras to recognize me as a bona fide tenant, and take it from there. But this particular building also employed live guards in the lobby. Still no problem: the pigeon had recorded a message-program in his own voice, it just wasn't in service. I hooked in the voder and had my computer use his phone and a fair imitation of his voice to call downstairs. It told the door guard to expect a TV repairman from TH Electronics. The guard welcomed it home, and it thanked him. It hung up and printed out a work order for me.
My computer has so many interesting capabilities that to use it for something as trivial as grand larceny is almost a crime. But to exploit anything like its full potential I would have to compromise an even greater asset: invisibility. I am the man no one is looking for, and I like that a lot.
I am deeply curious to know more about the extraordinary person who had that machine built and programmed. Almost I yearn to meet him or her. My recurring fear is that I shall: intuitively I know I would not survive the encounter.
But surely he or she must be long dead. That's what I tell myself when I wake up sweaty.
I wiped all records of my transactions at both ends, stood up, and got disguise number four from the closet. Faded green coveralls, a GI jungle cap, grimy work boots laced with speaker cable, a tool belt that would have made Batman laugh out loud, and a stained shoulder satchel bulging with assorted electronic testing gear. I checked the picture ID in the wallet that went with the outfit, and corrected my facial appearance to match. It is a part of my job I really enjoy: trying on new faces. None of them, even the one I start and end with, ever looks familiar. I can't imagine what would.
I spilled coffee on the work order, blotted it with a dirty cloth, wadded it up and stuffed it in my breast pocket, and left. I was back within two hours with the tube and a couple of interesting audiocassettes from the van I'd clouted. I wired the new glass teat into the system, ran a few tests, and made a few adjustments. I punched for news display and sat down in front of it. I had the chair make me a bourbon and distilled water. After two sips I killed the news readout and concentrated on the drink. I had nearly finished it before I allowed myself to ask me:
What is the next thing to do?
(Follow Karen, of course. Do what you said earlier: play along and wait for her own momentum to falter, then give her something to distract her attention. Once she gets the readings she wants from someone else, the immediate danger to you is past.)
Yeah, but getting those readings from anybody could make her hot. I could catch something meant for her.
(Yeah, you're really hooked on a safe, sedentary lifestyle. I can see that.)
All right, I find a moderate amount of risk stimulating . . .
(And you won't do something stimulating to save a friend's neck?)
But how do I know she'd let me—
(She's used to you meddling in her life. For some reason she doesn't mind.)
Yeah. Father figure.
(Okay, jerk. You adopted her. Be a responsible father. You're in loco parentis, just like—)
Hiatus.
I was sitting at the keyboard, fingers at rest on my lap. I didn't recall resolving the internal debate, but evidently my subconscious thought it was settled. I even had some idea what I intended to program. Instead I swore, spun the chair around, hugged myself, and folded over until I hit the floor. My mouth was wide open, my teeth clenched tight, my forehead knotted, and I snarled softly in the back of my throat. When I could, I pounded the rug with my fist and wept.
I hate them. Those sudden gaps in my life, those sudden jump-cuts like slipshod editing, like little bits of tape snipped out of my recording. It must be much like this to have epilepsy, except that I never seem to convulse, or hurt myself while I'm blacked out. Some sort of automatic pilot cuts in; other people rarely even notice. But I resent those missing bits of tape. One of them is six years long.
It all comes of being careless in jungles, I guess.
I was pretty used to it by now. I rarely threw that kind of frustration tantrum anymore, never when I was not alone. But I was about to involve myself in something that I could sense was much more dangerous than my average heist and it was maddening to be reminded that I did not have guaranteed access to my own brains.
But eventually I had cursed and cried out all the fury and frustration. I got up off the rug and sat back down at the keyboard. I had wasted enough time.
Karen's credit account showed no activity, either savings or charge, since she had left her apartment to move in with me. She had left my place with enough cash to rent a flop, but she had not yet paid a deposit to a keyboard man. I set up a monitor on her credit, so that when she did pay I would know who she hired. I knew, or knew of, perhaps half the boys in town, and I could locate the rest and pick up her trail. If she paid in advance, as she almost certainly would have to, there was an excellent chance I could "tap the line" and listen in on whatever her operator found out. That would be less dangerous than initiating the probe myself—although more dangerous than simply trying to trail her physically from the site. If her operator did trip a guard program, it might be sophisticated enough to notice me "listening on the extension." I wondered if it was worth the risk. If I knew what she knew, I could figure the first place she'd go and get there first, be waiting for her. It would be a good argument for taking me on as a partner.
I realized something and cursed. Karen didn't have to touch her credit. If no friend was willing to lend her a couple hundred, she would surely know how to locate at least a few of her regular customers. They would be happy to make any requested donation, and they would prefer to use cash. I wasn't thinking clearly.
Damn it, that left me flat. There was nothing she had to do that had to appear somewhere in the network. She could get her sightings, pick a target, and skip town without leaving a trace in the system. She couldn't get through a dragnet, but I am not a dragnet. I could not find Karen if she did not wish to be found, not quickly anyway.
Perhaps I would after all have to run the inquiry program she had asked me for.
That decision could be postponed. "If she did not wish to be found . . ." That was the key. I suddenly recalled the wording of the goodbye message she had scrawled on my toilet seat; she had not written, "Don't bother to try and come after me." Could I assume that she was trying to prevent me from trailing her?
I decided to see how the hand played out. I left my watchdog program monitoring her credit account, wired to light and sound alarms. Any withdrawal or deposit would bring me out of a sound sleep. If she wanted to be found, or didn't care one way or the other, she'd trip that alarm. If she was actively trying to shake me off, if she hadn't touched her credit or reentered her apartment within, say, twenty-four hours . . . well, then I could sit down and decide whether I wanted to catch up with her badly enough to stick my neck out. I told her apartment terminal to notify me if it was used.
I nodded and got up from my terminal, rotating my head to pop my neck. What's the next thing to do?
It was a tight contest between go to sleep and get piefaced drunk. I didn't feel remotely sleepy, and I didn't want to answer that alarm drunk or hung over. But finally I was forced to admit that I was so wound up I would probably be more effective hung over. And I might not have to answer any alarm . . .
Nor did I. The hangover was somewhere between average and classic. I could find no music that would soothe it. Finally I gave up and took aspirin. It muted the headache and increased the queasiness. I let the Lounger rub my neck for almost an hour, and as my strength came trickling back I used it to get agitated again. After a while I became aware that I had for the past ten minutes been composing variations on the expression "hair of the dog." Puppy fuzz. Cur fur. Pug rug. Toupé du chien. I said a powerful word out loud and went out for a walk. I knew I would not drink among strangers—and I wanted to go see some people, in the same way that other people infrequently feel like going to the zoo.
And on the streets I found signs and wonders, things strange and different. I saw a man with one leg walking a dog with three. I saw two women dancing together on the roof of a station wagon; oddly, neither one seemed to be enjoying it. I passed three young toughs in leather and mylar, cheeks tattooed and noses pierced, the oldest of them perhaps fourteen. (This is the first generation of "juvenile delinquents" whose resignation from society is irrevocable. They cannot change their minds when they get older. It will be interesting to see how that works out.) I saw a pimp feeding cocaine to his golden retriever. On a sloping street I saw a short squat ancient woman in a black print dress and babushka stop on the opposite sidewalk, sigh, squat a little more, and begin urinating copiously. A vast puddle gathered at her feet and rushed down the hill. I stood frozen, as though at some personal religious revelation, vouchsafed to me alone. It was not that everyone else on that street ignored the woman. They literally did not see her. People sidestepped the rushing river without noticing it. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and my head throbbed. The old woman urinated for a full minute; then the flood cased, she straightened, sighed again, and resumed walking uphill, leaving damp footprints of orthopedic shoes. A few minutes later I shook off my trance and resumed my own walk.
I passed a sidewalk cockfight; noticed that they were betting Old dollars. I passed an alley in which a young whore was on her knees before a cop, paying her weekly insurance premium. He was looking at his watch. I passed six pawnshops in a row, then a political party's precinct headquarters, then four pornshops in a row. I rounded a corner and nearly tripped over a wirehead sitting on the sidewalk in front of a hole-in-the-wall hardware store.
He was new to it: the hair had not yet grown in around his droud, and he had obviously just learned the one about wiring in a third battery to produce a threshold overdose. He grinned at me and I saw Karen in his face. I hurried past; almost immediately my stomach knotted and I had to sit down on a stoop with my face in my hands. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the hardware shop proprietor stick his head out of his shop, look around furtively. He bent over the wirehead and extracted his wallet. The boy blinked up at him, grinning, then suddenly understood and roared with laughter. "Right, man," he said, "square deal," and he laughed and laughed.
I found myself walking toward the proprietor with no idea why. He flinched when he saw me, flinched again when he saw my face, then became aggressive. "This man owes me money—you just heard him say so. Mind your own—" He shifted gears, held out the wallet, and said "please," and then I jacked one up under his ribs, his gut should feel like mine.
As he went down and backwards the wallet flew into my hands. I took all the money that was in it and tore it into tiny shreds, tossed the shreds down a sewer. The wirehead laughed and laughed. I threw the wallet in his face and walked away. Behind me I could hear him, ripping up all his identification and photos and giggling.
I bought a Coke at a dog-stand. It tasted like burned sugar. I used it to wash down four drugstore aspirins and decided to go home and check my alarms. Automatically I took a different route toward home, and so passed something genuinely unique:
A wirehead shop with a large sign taped in its window saying "FREE SAMPLES."
I stopped in my tracks and stared at that sign.
Free samples? How in God's name could you give free samples of radical neurosurgery? And what if it were true?
I entered the shop.
The shock doc was old and thin and red-nosed. His clothes were baggy everywhere they weren't shiny. His hands shook at rest. They were almost the only sign of life; his face and eyes looked newly dead. A potential customer was gibbering and gesticulating at him like a speed freak, babbling something about installment plans, and he was not reacting in any way at all, not laughing or anything. Eventually the customer realized he was wasting his time and went for his gun. It was a sure sign that he was stone crazy—was he going to hold a gun on the doc through surgery?—and I started to backflip out the door. But the doc stood his ground; one of those shaking hands shot up and slapped the man, crack, crack, forehand and backhand. They stared at each other over the gun. The excited man was no longer excited, he was quite calm. He put his piece away, spun, and brushed past me on his way out. His expression made me think of Moses traveling away from the Promised Land. When I turned back to the doc he was giving me precisely the same dead stare he had given my predecessor.
Now I noticed that his other hand was in his pocket. It was not alone in there. He looked me over very carefully before he took it out, empty.
I was doing my best to look like a man at the very end of his rope; con man's chameleon reflex. The room helped. Surely to God his operating theater was bright and well lit, but this office-anteroom was dingy and dark and depressing as hell. Unnaturally depressing; I suspected subsonics at high gain. The predominant color was black, and it's not true that a black wall can't look dirty. Even the storefront window was blacked over; the only illumination came from a forty-watt bulb on the ceiling. There was no decor. Behind the doc an L-shaped affair that might have been either a counter or a desk grew out of the wall, a chair on either side. One had to pass the thing to get to the door that must lead to the operating theater. On the opposite side of the doorway from the desk was a tall steel cabinet with a good lock. A black box sat on top of the desk, and connected to it by telephone cord was what looked like an oversized black army helmet.
I shuffled my feet. "I, uh . . . good, uh . . ."
"You saw the new sign and you want to ask me some questions," he said. His voice was flat, sepulchral. "That sign is going to make me rich."
I have known cripples and cops and killers, people who must learn how to get numb and stay that way, and I have never met anyone remotely so inhuman as that man. It was impossible to picture him as a child.
"I, uh, always understood there was no way to . . ."
"Until this year that was correct," he agreed. "It still can't be done anywhere but here. Yet. The device that makes it possible is my own invention." He displayed no visible sign of pride. Or, for that matter, shame.
"How does it, uh . . . ?"
"It is based on inductance principles. I do not intend to discuss it further. My patent application went in this week; that sign has only been up for an hour."
"Well, but I mean, how would I . . ." I trailed off.
He stared at me for a long time, hands shaking. "Step over there against that wall. Behind the sonoscope."
Hesitantly, heavily, I obeyed. The sonoscope looked just like the one in every emergency room, rather like an old fluoroscope, except that the face of the display had a fine-mesh grid inscribed on it. I stood in the proper spot while he candled my head with ultrasonics. He grunted at his first look. "Trauma there. And there."
I nodded. "War wound."
"Hold your head still. I will have to offset the droud a bit—"
"Hey, listen," I interrupted, "I'm not sure I'm going to do this. I just—"
His shoulders slumped a little more. "Of course. The sample first. This way."
He led me to the desk counter, sat me down, and went around behind it. He made three adjustments to the black box, one to the inside of the "army helmet." He passed it to me. "Put this on. That way front."
I eyed it dubiously.
He did not sigh. "When I activate this unit, it will set up a localized inductance field in the area where I calculate your medial forebrain bundle to be. For a period of five seconds you will experience intense pleasure. The effect will be almost precisely half as strong as that produced by a conventional droud from standard house current."
"What if my medial thing isn't where everybody else's is?"
"That is unlikely. If so, the most probable result would be that you would feel nothing, and I would recalibrate and try again."
"What about least probable? Are there any potentially dangerous near-misses?"
"Not lethal ones, no. There is a chance, which I compute as less than five percent, that you might experience a feeling of either intense heat or intense cold. If so, tell me and I'll disconnect."
"This thing has been tested a lot?" I temporized. "I mean, you said your patent thing just went in this week."
"Exhaustively tested, by me, for a year at Bellevue."
I raised an eyebrow. "Volunteers?"
"Mental patients." No, in other words.
I kept on looking at the damned helmet.
What was I doing here? Research? Investigating the subject of Karen's crusade, so that I could understand it better, understand her better? What was to be gained here that was worth sticking my head into a giant homemade light socket?
Was it really that tempting? To know pure pleasure for once, for just this once, to let go all the way and find out what happens when you let go? If I did let go, could I find my way back?
"Doctor, do you consider conventional wireheading addictive?"
He didn't flinch. "Yes."
"Is this addictive?"
"No."
"Is it habituating?"
"It can't be. One free sample per customer. I am not a candy store."
I had a thought. "Can you cut it back to one-quarter droud strength?"
"Yes. That would still be your only sample."
Still I waited and debated. He was making no slightest effort to influence my decision either way, or to hurry it along. He was dead. I thought of Karen in the harsh light of her living room lamp, and of the young wirehead I had left shredding his identification. I thought of what Karen wanted to do. She wanted to commit financial and/or physical violence on the people who ran this industry. She wanted to abolish this practice. I intended to try and con her out of it. I had to know what it was like.
I put my hands on the helmet, and I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what ecstasy would feel like, and—
Hiatus.
I was halfway out of my chair, rising, spinning toward the door, all in slow motion. The helmet was in mid-bounce. Just before the shock doc's face slid out of my peripheral vision, I thought I saw the mildest, most feeble trace of relief flicker across it. I was conscious of every muscle-action of running toward the exit. Someone was screaming; I didn't know his name. My time sense was so stretched out that I was able to open the door at a dead run, leaning out to pull it towards me, yanking my torso back away from it as it opened, pivoting on the handle so that I flung myself into the street. I hit the pavement feet first, perfectly banked for my turn; after three skidding steps I had my stride back and within ten I was settled into it. Shortly I had to brake for a busy intersection. As I did, my time sense suddenly snapped back to normal. I sat down on the curb, rushing traffic a meter from my shoes, and bent over and puked and puked into the gutter. The nausea lasted, off and on, through four or five light-changes. When it passed I sat there for another couple, and then I heard cat feet approaching and looked up to see who was desperate enough to roll a drunk in broad daylight. So I happened to be looking in the direction of the wireshop, a full block behind me, when its front wall danced across the street, hotly pursued by brightness intolerable, and struck the vacant storefront opposite like some monstrous charge of Brobdingnagian buckshot.
I flung myself back and sideways, away from traffic and into blast shadow, and the sound reached me as my face hit the pavement. I stayed down until it seemed like everything that was in the air had landed, then rolled to my feet fast.
My would-be mugger was glancing back and forth from me to the smoking wreckage, clearly of two minds. I put my hand on my gun butt. "Not today," I said, and he licked his lips and sprinted for the shop. He had delayed too long; five or ten people were already gingerly entering the store, wrapping various things around their hands so they wouldn't burn their fingers. They were a gang; two of them stood guard.
I joined the rest of the crowd. We stayed a half-block away on either side and stared and cursed the looters for getting there first and swapped completely bogus eyewitness reports. I decided it probably had not been an accidental explosion. It had taken artistry and skill to place a charge that would utterly wreck the wireshop without bringing down the floors above or seriously damaging the adjoining buildings. God is an iron, but He is seldom that finicky in his irony. That left me in three simultaneous states of mind. I was impressed. I was scared. And, strongest of all—
I was enormously intrigued.
I made my way home quickly, and when I smiled at President Kennedy he winked his left eye. I had a guest. One that Kennedy had recognized and admitted, or he would have winked both eyes several times. I am allergic to surprises, and never more so than that afternoon. My first thought was that anyone smart enough to crack my house was smart enough to tell the President which eye to wink. I wondered why I had never thought of that. I pulled my gun and made sure the collar wasn't in the way of the knife and told myself that it was purest paranoia to think the wireshop bombing could have anything to do with me. The hypothesis yielded a bomber of infinite resources, great ingenuity, and complete incompetence. More likely my guest was the Fader, who was about due. Or Old Jake, come with his guitar to play me a new song . . .
And when the door raised itself, music did indeed come drifting up the stairs. But it wasn't Old Jake. It was the Yardbird, these fifty-six years dead.
Whoever was down there was a friend.
It was Karen who sat in my living room, crosslegged on her usual chair. Even if the music had masked the sounds of my arrival she could not have helped seeing me peripherally, but she gave no sign, kept staring at the place where the far wall met the ceiling. I sat down quietly in the other Lounger, dialing for tea.
She was listening to one of the last Dial sessions at WOR, in '47, when Bird finally got the band he wanted in New York. Miles and Max Roach and Duke Jordan. And all the smack he wanted. There's a Mingus piece, usually called "Gunslingin' Bird," whose full title is "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Lot of Dead Copycats." As my tea arrived, the thought jumped into my head: if Charlie Parker had been a wirehead, all those copycats would have had to work for a living.
When the last note of "Bird of Paradise" cut off, and not a moment before, Karen turned the stereo not down, but off. I remembered that the Fader had liked her.
"Hi, Joe."
"Hello, Karen."
"Anticlimax. The runaway child comes back home."
"Why?"
She took her time answering. "I don't know if I can put it into words. You . . . you've done . . . a lot for me, and, that means that you must . . . care about me some and I'm gonna go do something that's gonna get sticky and you wanted to talk me out of it and I didn't give you a chance, I got defensive and took it personal and cut you right off." She paused for air. "I mean, I'm gonna do this anyway but I just thought you'd feel better if you did your best to talk me out of it first, you know, like you'd be easier in your mind. It was wrong of me to leave like that, it was . . . it was like . . ." She was slowing down again. ". . . like not caring about you."
I was looking at my hands. "And you're not afraid I'll try to prevent you?"
"No. You're not my father."
"Have you hired a reader yet?"
"Not yet. I've been thinking."
I looked up and met her gaze. I had decided on the way home. "Good. You don't need one anymore."
She twitched her shoulders violently. "I—you—but—" She stopped herself and closed her eyes. She drew in a big lungful of air, pursed her lips, and blew it sl-o-owly through her teeth, ssshhhooooooo, did it again slower. Then she opened her eyes and said, "Thank you, Joe."
My hangover was gone.
"When do we start?" she asked after a moment.
"Have you eaten?"
"I brought cornbread, and some pretty good preserves, and some Java coffee."
"We start after brunch."
As we were setting the table she took me by the shoulders and looked at me for a long moment. Her expression was faintly quizzical. Suddenly she closed in and came up on tiptoe and was kissing me thoroughly, her fingers digging into the back of my head. I had salad bowls in either hand and could neither resist nor cooperate. She did not kiss me the way a whore kisses her biggest spender. She kissed me the way a wife kisses a husband who remembered their fifth anni—
Hiatus.
She was two meters away, leaning back against the wall with her hands outspread. Her eyes were round. Salad dressing stained her blouse and dripped from her cheek, and there was lettuce all to hell and gone between us. I looked up at the ceiling. "Dammit," I cried bitterly, "that one wasn't fair!"
"Joe, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't—"
"I wasn't talking to you!" I stopped myself. I tried her exhaling trick and it helped a lot. "Karen, I'm sorry. That had nothing to do with you, nothing at all. It was—"
"I know. Somebody in your past."
I shrugged. "It could be. I honestly don't know." I told her about my blackout condition. I had never told anyone before—but she and I were going to go to war together, and she had a right to know.
When I was done explaining, all she said was, "Let me see if there's a safe dosage," and then she came into my arms and hugged me and kissed me, the way a friend kisses a friend, and that was just fine.
And we ate, and that was just fine too, and then we adjourned to the living room. Where I pulled the keyboard out of the wall recess and heated it up. And the next two hours were interesting indeed.
There are many better keyboard men than me. I came quite late to hacking, and will never have the genius level of aptitude that some are born with. On my good days I consider myself a talented amateur. There are enormous holes in my knowledge of computers, and probably always will be. But blind chance gifted me with a computer the equal of any in North America, with programmed-in owner's manual, at a point in my life during which I had nothing better to do than study it. It is so supple and flexible a machine that I have never been tempted to anthropomorphize it. It can interface with almost any network while remaining effectively invisible. Its own capacity is four terabytes, four times ten to the twelfth bytes.
Karen watched for the first half hour, but after the first ten minutes she was just being polite. Finally I told her to go dig Bird on the headphones, and she did. At that point I was only puzzled. Subsequently I did some things with that most versatile of computers that would have shocked the IRS, a few that would have fascinated the CIA, and even one or two that might have surprised the computer's original owner if he or she were still alive. I went from puzzled through intrigued to mystified, stayed there for about an hour, then moved on to baffled, proceeding almost at once to frustrated. Karen heard me swearing and came over to sit wordlessly beside me with her hand at the base of my neck. Within another fifteen minutes, frustrated modulated into vaguely alarmed, and stayed there.
Finally I ordered hard copy printout and cleared. "'You got it, buddy,'" I growled in my best Tom Waits imitation. "'The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.'"
"What is it, Joe?"
"I'm damned if I know, and I'm sure I can't explain it very well. You haven't studied economics, let alone business economics. It's—" I broke off, groping for an analogy within her experience. "Like a motorcycle. You can break down what a motorcycle does, chart the path and interaction of different forces and materials, follow the power flow. If you can visualize the motorcycle as a series of power relationships, you can locate its weak points—where it can be most disabled with least effort. That's what I've been trying to do with the wirehead industry. But I can't get a computer-model that works. If you built a motorcycle like this it would whistle 'Night In Tunisia,' make a pot of coffee, and explode. I can't make sense of the power flow . . . and it seems to have only the most peripheral relationship to the money flow . . . damn it, there's nothing the IRS could object to. Stupidity isn't illegal. But it just . . . feels wrong, feels like something is being juggled. But I can't understand how or why or by whom. That makes me highly nervous."
"So, since you can't diagram out this motorcycle, you can't find the weak points?"
"I can't be sure. We've got to get inside and nose around, learn things that aren't in any computer. Field work."
She nodded. "Fine. Where?"
"That's another problem. There are three major corporations, as your source told you—and by the way, if two of them are really the same outfit, I can't prove it. We might get useful information at any of three places."
"Where?"
"Germany, Switzerland, Nova Scotia."
"Which is better?"
"The biggest outfit is the West German one, in Hamburg. That'd be the hardest to crack. I don't speak German—"
"I do."
"Point. The smallest of the three, and that ain't small, is in Geneva. We can get by with English in Switzerland but I think there's the least information to be had there. The middle-size bear is in Halifax—"
". . . and the Canadian border is a joke. That settles that. My stuff's still where I left it? I'll pack."
"Yes, do that," I said, and set immediately to making my own preparations for departure. I wasn't sure why she was impatient to be going, but I knew why I was. I could not shake the nagging fear that I had tripped some subtle watchdog program without knowing it. There are ways to avoid being backtracked, and I believed I knew the best ones.
But I wasn't positive.
We took four days getting to Halifax. We had to keep changing vehicles, and one does not want to enter a strange city exhausted from travel. Especially not if one wishes to vanish as quickly as possible into the shadows of that strange city. We found a cheap apartment house that still accepted cash in the old part of town, on a sorry, broken-down sin-strip called Gottingen Street. If you went up on the roof you could see the harbor and the bridge to Dartmouth. You could also leave the building in any of three directions without special equipment, which was what closed the deal. We took a year's lease on a two bedroom as Mr. and Mrs. Something-or-Other, and by the time I hitchhiked back from where I'd dumped our final car, Karen had us unpacked and food in the fridge, coffee made.
"Oh, Joe, this is exciting. This town is so strange; I think I'm going to like it. Let's go for a walk and plan our first move."
"Wait," I said. "I don't think we should do either one just yet. I haven't needed to bring this up until now, but . . . let me tell you what happened to me on my last walk in New York." I did not do that, but I did give a brief outline of the wireshop incident. Her eyes were wide when I was done. "Do you see what I mean? It has the same wrong feel as I got when I took the readouts. That zombie was no genius inventor. When I saw that homemade helmet of his, I couldn't believe someone else hadn't thought of it five years ago. Hell, they could have built one of those in the eighties. But he had the only one I ever heard of. And he got blown away, along with the Mark I, the week his patent application went in—" I broke off and frowned. "You can't burgle the Patent Office's computer files. But maybe I can find out whether anyone has made official inquiries through channels about that particular patent. That's public record."
Before I had left my home I'd had my computer select three different acceptable but unused phone numbers in Halifax, diddle the Atlantic Tel computer into believing they were high-credit subscribers in good standing, initiate conference calls from all three, and leave those circuits open, on standby. Why not? I wasn't paying for it. I dialed one of those numbers now, and when I was put through I got out the portable terminal I travel with and clipped its squeaker to the phone. I was interfaced with my home computer.
I asked it my questions, frowned, and rephrased my questions. This time I got an answer, and it couldn't have been on screen for more than three seconds before I was ordering the computer to break circuit, wasting that means of access. I was scared enough to wet my pants.
"There is no such application on file," I said in a shaky voice. "No patent remotely related to wireheading or inductance or anything to do with the goddam brain has been sought by anybody in the last year. Current to three o'clock this afternoon."
"So either that shock doc was stone crazy—"
"Or someone can subvert the U.S. Patent Office. And we know about it. God's teeth. The only people with interest enough and leverage enough are the big wirehead outfits—and why the hell would they take risks like that to suppress something that would probably triple their income or better?"
"Jesus."
"It's wrong, it feels wrong, it's all just . . . off. And I'm getting very nervous. Let's not go for that walk."
We watched TV instead, curled up in the master bedroom, until we fell asleep. I slept poorly. Bad dreams.
When a week had gone by without incident or alarm, I began to relax. Until that time we made believe that we had never heard of wireheading, and kept to ourselves. We talked a lot. The entertainment facilities of our room were a joke, and I was not going to call home again until and unless I had to. Part of our talk involved practical matters of planning, a good many hours inasmuch as we had almost nothing to go on. We were able to kill much time inventing new contingencies. But there was a limit to how far we could stretch that, and finally there was nothing left for us to talk about except the stories of our lives.
Karen started it. She talked about her childhood, starting with the happy parts because they came first chronologically. They didn't last long. Her father had been a monster in almost a biological sense. She told me a great deal about him over the course of perhaps a week, first in a two-hour monologue she ended by vomiting to exhaustion, and then in a series of long conversations that wandered everywhere but always led back sooner or later to that extraordinary man. I use that last word reluctantly, but I can find no legitimate excuse to disown him. I wish I could. His death should have been celebrated. Well, it had been—by Karen surely, and likely many others—but I mean nationally. Planetarily.
But although he had never been especially intelligent, Wolfgang Scholz had always had the animal cunning never to hurt anyone who could effectively complain about it.
About her mother, Ilse, Karen told me little, and most of that simply involved incidents at which the woman had been present. Apparently she was one of those cipherlike people that true sadists keep around. Having no personality to destroy, they cannot be used up.
The telling of her life was good for Karen. She had told most of these anecdotes to others over the years—but she had never told anyone all of them. In telling them all together, perhaps she was able to perceive some kind of gestalt pattern she had previously missed. Perhaps by replaying every minute of her life with her father she was better able to exorcise him, one step closer to being able to accept and forget him. Every time you play the record, the signal-to-noise ratio gets worse. Her consumption of alcohol dropped steadily to zero. She cut way back on tobacco. She actually began to display signs of neatness, become more careful in personal grooming.
And finally it was my turn.
And of course there was nowhere to start but at the beginning.
I remember, as an infant remembers womb dreams, the click and the sight of the mine coming up like a featureless jack-in-the-box and very bright light and then very dark dark. And then I was born.
When I realized that I was alive, my first thought was that VA hospitals were better than I'd heard. I was in a powered bed in what looked like the bedroom of a captain of industry, with no medical equipment in sight. My head did not hurt nearly as badly as I thought it should, and nothing else hurt at all. Well, I said to myself, you've managed to come up smelling like a rose again, Corporal—
And paused.
Because what I intended to end that sentence with was my name. And I did not know it anymore.
It was not really that much of a shock, then. In all the books and movies, amnesia is always temporary. But I yelled. A man came in the door with an icebag. A man so completely nondescript that I could not tell whether I knew him or not. I thought that was symptomatic too at the time, but of course it was the Fader. He sat down and put the ice on my head and told me that he had gotten the son of a bitch.
I'm not sure which questions I asked first, but within a couple of days I had as much information as the Fader could give me. By the end of a month I knew almost all I was ever going to know.
When the mine went off in the jungle I was, as best I can reconstruct it, twenty-four or thereabouts. When I woke up in that bed under the offices of that deserted warehouse, for what I believed was the first time, I was—again, best guess—about thirty.
Of what I did, where I was, during the intervening six years, I have no slightest recollection.
Of my life before the mine went off I have only random shards of memory, disordered, fragmentary, incomplete. I do not for instance know my name, nor have I been able to discover it.
It's like a million file cards scattered across a great field, more than half of them facedown. Random bits of information are clear and sharp, but there is no context. I remember a family, remember childhood incidents involving three vividly recalled people, but I do not know their names or what has become of them. I remember growing up in a small town; if I ever see it I'll know it, but I doubt I'll ever find it. I remember that we moved to New York in my early adolescence, but in the four years since the Fader put that icebag on my head I have walked through most of the five boroughs without finding that street. Ten years is a long time in New York. It may not exist anymore.
I remember enlisting and bits of Basic and there's a lot of chaotic, badly edited video footage of the horrors of war—in fact, the army days are probably the period I retain most of. But to my sour amusement I cannot recall my serial number.
What the Fader had to say was mighty interesting. We had met a couple of months before in a bar. I had busted a stein over the head of someone who was attempting to knife him. We had become friends, and a couple of weeks ago I had invited him home, and a week ago I had showed him my real home. The Fader stated that he was a composer—who, the times being what they were, dabbled in the small-time con (mostly variations on the classic Man in the Street) and an occasional mugging. He told me that I was a burglar, apparently for the sheer love of it since I obviously had, as he put it, adequate resources.
How had I found my home? How would he know? He had been too polite to ask, and I had not volunteered the information. Or, unfortunately, much else.
One guess suggests itself. One of the two emergency exits from the underground apartment is a long tunnel, which at its far end is camouflaged, quite realistically, as an abandoned sewage outfall, malodorous and unattractive to inspection. Could I have been so afraid of someone or something that I tried to hide in there, and found myself in Wonderland?
The Fader said that we had been coming back from a large "mutual adventure" when a hijacker tried to take its proceeds from us. The hijacker had laid a sock full of potting soil against my skull, and the Fader had killed him with his hands. Then he had dragged me the rest of the way home, and since he knew the dislock sequence but had not been filed in the perms yet, he had a hell of a time propping me up in front of Kennedy to get the door open. (I added the weight-activated explosives later.) He had been nursing me for the past few days, through delirium and nausea, had run several medical texts through the reader before he decided he could safely refrain from taking me to a hospital.
This last because I had told him my secret: that I did not exist, that I was an invisible man.
At some point during my missing six years, and after I had stumbled upon my home, I must have seen the possibilities of its computer, and decided to resign from the human race. I had done a hellishly efficient job. God is an iron.
In between talking with the Fader, I watched and read a lot of news—and I heard nothing that made that decision seem like a bad idea.
I could, to my only mild surprise, think of no better place for me in the world than the one I seemed to have made and lucked into. Every goal or dream I ever had that I can recall was destroyed in the jungle. I looked around me and found it good, or at least tolerable. And I could imagine no other occupation or lifestyle that was.
The Fader showed me what ropes he knew, helped me relearn what life was like in the underworld, steeled me to the rogue. He helped me comb through the ragbag of my mind for scattered bits of memory; helped me try, with the aid of the computer, to find out who I was; helped me get drunk enough on the night that I finally accepted, emotionally, that I might never know. He had done for me what I later did for Karen, and when he had finished it he politely made his excuses and left me alone, visiting frequently for a while and then tapering off. He even found me women, until it became clear that it was a waste of everyone's time. According to my memory shards I had nothing against sex—but now I found myself as asexual as Karen herself.
"Jesus," Karen said at this point in my narrative, speaking for the first time in hours. "How could I read it so wrong? You never wake up hard in the morning, you never get hard at all, and so I figure you must be gay. What a jerk."
I looked away. "To be totally accurate," I said tightly, "I'm a little bit more than asexual. Maybe antisexual is closer."
"How do you mean?"
"Arousal frightens me. Angers me. I can remember enjoying sex in the past, but now on the rare occasions that I become aroused, I—I usually have one of those blackouts."
Karen shook her head. "Different with me. I just don't get anything at all. Not since I was a kid."
Suddenly I was crying, explosively, convulsively, and she was holding me, holding my head against her breast and rocking me in her lap, and I was hanging on to her for dear life. "I thought I had it tough," I heard her whisper, and I wept and wept. It was the first time in a long while that I had wept for anything but rage, and it drained away an enormous amount of pain and fear and left me spent. Karen half-carried me to bed, and it was like leaning on a rock with a soft surface.
There was a new bond between us the next day, and so it was late that afternoon that Karen had her own blowout, that her own psychic kettle came to a boil. I think it was that night that she finally forgave God for creating her father, and I ended up holding her until she fell asleep. A deep and profound sleep, complete exhaustion plus successful catharsis. She never felt me undress her, never noticed me leave the bed, never heard the TV I watched as I mixed myself a drink and finished it. I took another one to the corner chair with the directional reading light, and I sipped while rereading computer printouts for the thirtieth time, trying to make a sensible pattern out of them.
The drink was long gone when I heard the first sensual moan.
I looked up and dropped the printout. She had worked the sheet off in her sleep and lay writhing on the bed. She was obviously having a deeply erotic dream. I had never known this to happen to her before, had never expected it to. I felt a trace of the faint distaste that sexual arousal usually elicits in me and wanted to look away.
But Karen—scarred, frigid little Karen, my true friend Karen—was whimpering with lust. Perhaps for the first time in years.
Something had finally unlocked, some door in her mind was opening. If it could happen in sleep it could happen in waking life. My patient was at a crisis. But was it happening? She thrashed on the bed, clenching and unclenching her thighs, making small sounds as she searched for release. Her hands flexed and grasped at her sides; she had never learned to masturbate, could not work it into whatever fantasy was stimulating her.
Surely a lifetime of deprivation would provide enough back pressure to allow release without any physical stimulus. But what if it didn't? If this attempt at sexuality ended in frustration, would it be repeated? When would conditions ever be better? Or as good?
I got up and approached her. She did not seem to feel my weight come on the bed. I looked her over from head to toe, dispassionately, as an intellectual problem. I thought it out. The more input I gave her, the more she had to work into the script of her dream; eventually the effort might bring at least partial awareness and failure. Her arousal was coming in slow waves that built to a peak, ebbed, then caught again. When I sensed a peak coming I reached out carefully. With infinite gentleness I put the tip of an index finger just above the top of her vulva, so slowly that for her there was probably no defined border between not feeling it and feeling it. As the peak arrived I moved my finger delicately down the shaft of her clitoris toward the glans. She was breathing in gasps, whistling on the exhale. As I approached the nub I began using a little fingernail, and when I had reached it my thumb was beneath it, trapping it, and she groaned and went over the edge.
It was not the spectacular, backbreaking orgasm I had rather expected. It was a mild thing, a gentle upwelling. But it was definite and unmistakable, and it left her soft and buttery and totally unconscious, all angles rounded, all edges softened. It left me with tears on my face and awe in my heart and a hollow feeling that hurt as bad as anything I've ever known. My sleep that night was an endless round of nightmares, and when I woke the sheet was pasted to me.
Two nights later the sequence essentially repeated. Except that she woke up after orgasm, and figured out what had just happened. We hugged and cried then. I had no nightmares that night. The next day she taught herself to masturbate while I was out shopping. She reported her success proudly, and I smiled and congratulated her, and was jovial as hell all that day, but I believe she caught on because she never again mentioned it or did it in my presence.
But she stared spending a lot of time in the bathroom.
I was confused about my own feelings. For her I felt genuinely happy and gratified. And relieved: I never again remembered that there was still a droud in her skull, which she could still use.
For me I felt nothing.
Then came the day when our impatience overcame our paranoia and it was time to begin our campaign. Karen had more than one motive to return to her profession now. Oh, she had cautioned herself not to expect too much. Sex with a random stranger whose only known attribute is that he or she has to pay for it is not liable to be great. But whatever happened, she could definitely abandon her former specialty and switch to straight whoring. She now knew, at least, how to pretend enjoyment. And as it turned out she was third-time-lucky, came several times, and refunded his money. From then on she went about one for three, as near as I could tell.
My own cover identity was pimp, part-time second-story man, and occasional dope runner. If I was home when she brought a client home, I remained discreetly out of sight in the other bedroom, with my eyes on the TV and my ears cocked for trouble. I wasn't always there; I had fish of my own to fry and she could handle herself. A good part of what I was doing was running down exactly how, after we had established our personae, we would begin expanding her client list to include the people we wanted to get to know better, without its being too obvious that we were moving in that direction. I had to tail a couple of them to the homes of the whores they did patronize, learn what kind of women they liked and what they liked to do with them. I was able to get some information from three women by pretending to be looking for recruits for my own stable. With one of them it was necessary to express horror and shame at my unprecedented attack of impotence, and be laughed scornfully out of her room. I tried a fourth woman, and her man put a notch in my ear and a trivial slice on the back of my arm before I could apologize sincerely enough to suit him.
It was going well. We were both acquiring authentic reputations in the Halifax underworld, and I was learning just what class of johns our targets represented, so that we could specialize in that type and acquire them in the natural course of events.
I had decided to actually move a little coke for the sake of my cover, and I returned from a negotiating session in a pool hall with a tentative commitment and a good deal of optimism. When I got home, two coats were on the living room couch and the door to the working bedroom was closed, so I took coffee into the other room and watched a TV special about a zero-gravity dancer, in orbit. Very interesting stuff, very beautiful. I wondered why no one had ever thought of it before. After a while I heard the phone start to ring, but Karen must have picked up the extension at once because it cut off before I could move. Shortly I heard her door open, then the apartment door, then a male voice in brief conversation with Karen's, then the door closing. I put my coffee down; Karen's customer had gone and I wanted to ask her some things.
Only the customer wasn't gone. She and Karen sat at the kitchen table, both dressed, portioning out the pizza I had just heard being delivered. I stopped and waited diplomatically for my cue.
Karen looked up and brightened. I could tell that this had been one of the good ones. "Hi, baby. I didn't know you were home. Want some pizza? This is my old man," she said, turning to the client, and then her smile vanished.
The woman was not a regular. She was about my age, blond and tall and slim, quite beautiful by conventional standards. In my first glimpse of her, bending over the pizza, I had noted in her face and carriage small trace indicators of self-indulgence and bitterness, but I had also sensed strength and courage and will. She wore a starched white uniform, quite unwrinkled and spotless except for where it had been stained when the pizza leaped from her fingers.
She was staring at me, mouth open, eyes bulging with shock, hands gripping her elbows so tightly that the knuckles were turning white. She was looking at me as if I were death, as if I were all horror and all evil, and I could not for the life of me imagine why.
"Lois," Karen cried, "what's wrong?"
Her mouth worked. She swallowed. "Norman," she rasped and swallowed again. "Oh, my sweet Jesus fucking Christ you are alive." She tilted her head as if she had heard something, and fainted dead away.