by Vernor Vinge
“Then let our Little General do her thing and don’t worry.” She turned and waved at someone beyond his vision. “Oops.” Her image flickered out and there was only silent messaging—
Alice --> Bob:
Bob sat for a moment in the quiet living room. Miri was upstairs, studying. Outside, the late afternoon slid into evening. A peaceful time. Back when he was a kid, this was when Dad would bring out the poetry books, and Dad and Mom and little Bobby would have a readalong. Actually, Bob felt a happy nostalgia for those evenings. He looked back at his father. “Dad?” No answer. Bob leaned forward and tried to shout diffidently. “Dad? Is there enough light for you? I can make it lots brighter.”
The old man shook his head distractedly. Maybe he even understood the question, but he gave no other indication. He just sat there, slumped to the side. His right hand rubbed again and again at the wrist of his left. And yet, this was a big improvement. Robert Gu, Sr., had been down to eighty pounds, a barely living vegetable, when UCSF Medical School took him on for their new treatment. It turned out the UCSF Alzheimer’s cure worked where the years of conventional treatment had failed.
Bob did a few errands on base, checked the plans for the upcoming Paraguay operation…and then sat back and just watched his father for a few minutes.
I didn’t always hate you.
As a child, he had never hated his old man. Maybe that wasn’t surprising. A kid has very little to compare to. Robert was strict and demanding, on that little Bobby had been very clear. For even though Robert Senior had often and loudly blamed himself for being such an easygoing parent, sometimes that seemed to contradict what Bob saw at his friends’ homes. But it had never seemed mistreatment to Bob.
Even when Mom left Dad, even that hadn’t turned Bob against the old man. Lena Gu had taken years of subtle abuse and she couldn’t take any more, but little Bobby had been oblivious of it all. It wasn’t till later, talking to Aunt Cara, that he realized how much worse Robert treated others than he had ever treated Bob.
For Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., this should be a joyous time. His father, one of America’s most beloved poets, was returning from an extended campout in the valley of the shadow of death. Bob took a long look at Robert’s still, relaxed features. No, if this were cinema, it would be a Western and the title would be The Return of the SOB.
03
A MINEFIELD MADE IN HEAVEN
My eyeballs are…fizzing!”
“This shouldn’t be painful. Do they actually hurt?”
“…No.” But the light was so bright that Robert saw fiery color even in the shadows. “It’s all still a blur, but I haven’t seen this well in…” he didn’t know how long; time itself had been a darkness “…in years.”
A woman spoke from right behind his shoulder. “You’ve been on the retinal meds for about a week, Robert. Today we felt we had a working population of cells present, so we decided to turn them on.”
Another woman’s voice: “And we can cure your blurred vision even more easily. Reed?”
“Yes, Doctor.” This voice came from the man-shaped blur directly in front of him. The figure leaned near. “Let me put this over your eyes, Robert. There’ll be a little numbness.” Big gentle hands slipped glasses across Robert’s face. At least this was familiar; he was getting new lenses fitted. But then his face went numb and he couldn’t close his eyes.
“Just relax and look to the front.” Relaxing was one thing, but there was no choice about looking to the front. And then…God, it was like watching a picture come up on a really slow computer, the blurs sharpening into finer and finer detail. Robert would have jerked back, but the numbness had spread to his neck and shoulders.
“The cell map in the right retina looks good. Let’s do the left.” A few more seconds passed, and there was a second miracle.
The man sitting in front of him eased the “glasses” off Robert’s head. There was a smile on his middle-aged face. He wore a white cotton shirt. The pocket was embroidered with blue stitching: “Physician’s Assistant Reed Weber.” I can see every thread of it! He looked over the man’s shoulder. The walls of the clinic were slightly out of focus. Maybe he’d have to wear glasses out-of-doors. The thought set him laughing. And then he recognized the pictures on the walls. This was not a clinic. Those wall hangings were the calligraphy that Lena had bought for their house in Palo Alto. Where am I?
There was a fireplace; there were sliding glass doors that opened onto a lawn. Not a book in sight; this was no place he had ever lived. The numbness in his shoulders was almost gone. Robert looked around the room. The two female voices—they weren’t attached to anything visible. But Reed Weber wasn’t the only person in sight. A heavyset fellow stood on his left, arms akimbo, a broad smile on his face. Robert’s look caught his, and the smile faltered. The man gave him a nod and said, “Dad.”
“…Bob.” It wasn’t so much that memory suddenly returned as that he noticed a fact that had been there all along. Bobby had grown up.
“I’ll talk to you later, Dad. For now I’ll let you wrap things up with Dr. Aquino and her people.” He nodded at the thin air by Robert’s right shoulder—and left the room.
The thin air said, “Actually, Robert, that’s about all we intended to do today. You have a lot to do over the next few weeks, but it will be less chaotic if we take things one step at a time. We’ll be keeping watch for any problems.”
Robert pretended to see something in the air. “Right. See you around.”
He heard friendly laughter. “Quite right! Reed can help you with that.”
Reed Weber nodded, and now Robert had the feeling that he and Weber were truly alone in the room. The physician’s assistant packed away the glasses, and various other pieces of loose equipment. Most were plain plastic boxes, prosaic throwaways except for the miracles they had made. Weber noticed his look, and smiled. “Just tools of the trade, the humdrum ones. It’s the meds and machines that are floating around inside you that are really interesting.” He stowed the last of the bricklike objects and looked up. “You’re a very lucky guy, do you know that?”
I am in daylight now, where before it was night since forever. I wonder where Lena is? Then he thought about the other’s question. “How do you mean?”
“You picked all the right diseases!” He laughed. “Modern medicine is kind of like a minefield made in heaven. We can cure a lot of things: Alzheimer’s, even though you almost missed the boat there. You and I both had Alzheimer’s; I had the normal kind, cured at earliest onset. Lots of other things are just as fatal or crippling as ever. We still can’t do much with strokes. Some cancers can’t be cured. There are forms of osteoporosis that are as gruesome as ever. But all your major infirmities are things we have slam-dunk fixes for. Your bones are as good as a fifty-year-old’s now. Today we did your eyes. In a week or so we’ll start reinforcing your peripheral nervous system.” Reed laughed. “You know, you’ve even got the skin and fat biochemistry that responds to Venn-Kurasawa treatments. It’s not one person in a thousand who steps on that heavenly landmine; you’re even going to look a lot younger.”
“Next you’ll be having me playing video games.”
“Ah!” Weber reached into his equipment bag and pulled out a slip of paper. “We can’t forget that.”
Robert took the paper and unfolded it all the way. It was really quite large, almost the size of foolscap. This appeared to be letterhead stationery. At the top was a logo, and in a fancy font the words “Crick’s Clinic, Geriatrics Division.” The rest was some kind of outline, the main categories being: “Microsoft Family,” “Great Wall Linux,” and “Epiphany Lite.”
“Eventually you’ll want to use ‘Epiphany Lite,’ but in the meantime, just touch the computer type you’re most familiar with.”
The items listed under “Microsoft Family” were the brand names of Microsoft systems al
l the way back to the 1980s. Robert stared uncertainly.
“Robert? You—you do know about computers, right?”
“Yes.” The memory was there, now that he thought about it. He grinned. “But I was always the last to get onboard. I got my first PC in 2000.” And that was because the rest of the English Department was brutalizing him for not reading his email.
“Whew. Okay, you can imitate any of those old styles with that. Just lay it out flat on the arm of your chair. Your son has this room set to play the audio, but most places you’ll have to keep your fingers touching the page if you want to hear output.” Robert leaned forward to get a close view of the paper. It didn’t glow; it didn’t even have the glassy appearance of a computer display. It was just plain, high-quality paper. Reed pointed at the outline items. “Now press the menu option that corresponds to your favorite system.”
Robert shrugged. Over the years, the department had upgraded through a number of systems, but—he pressed his finger to the line of text that said ‘WinME.’ There was no pause, none of the boot-up delays he recalled. But suddenly a familiar and annoying musical jingle was in the air. It seemed to come from all around, not from the piece of paper. Now the page was full of color and icons. Robert was filled with nostalgia, remembering many frustrating hours spent in front of glowing computer screens.
Reed grinned. “A good choice. WinME has been a simple rental for a long time. If you picked Epiphany, we’d be whacking through their licensing jungle…Okay, now the rest should be almost exactly what you know. Crick’s Clinic even has some of the modern services filtered down so they look like browser sites. This isn’t quite as good as what your son and I use, but you won’t have any more trouble with ‘invisible voices’; you’ll see Rachel and Dr. Aquino on the page here, if you want. Be cool, Robert.”
Robert listened to Weber’s mix of probably dated slang and tech talk, to the joviality and the phrase structures that might suggest sarcasm. Once upon a time, all that would have been enough for Robert to calibrate this fellow. Today, just out of the murk of senility, he couldn’t be sure. So he probed a little. “I’m all young again?”
Reed sat back, and gave an easy laugh. “Wish I could tell you that, Robert. You’re seventy-five years old, and there are a lot more ways for the body to break down than the MDs have even imagined. But I’ve been on your case for six months. You’ve come back from the dead, man. You’ve almost got the Alzheimer’s licked. It makes sense to try these other treatments on you now. You’re going to have some surprises, mostly for the good. Just take it easy, roll with the punches. For instance, I noticed that you recognized your son just now.”
“Y-yes.”
“I was here just a week ago. You didn’t recognize him then.”
It was strange to poke into that dimness, but…“Yes. I knew I couldn’t have a son. I wasn’t old enough. I just wanted to go home, I mean to my parents’ home in Bishop. And even now, I was surprised to see that Bob is so old.” Consequences were crashing down upon him. “So my parents are dead—”
Reed nodded. “I’m afraid so, Robert. There’s a whole lifetime that you’re going to start remembering.”
“As a patchwork? Or oldest memories first? Or maybe I’ll get stuck at some point—”
“The MDs can give you the best answers on that.” Reed hesitated. “Look, Robert. You used to be a professor, right?”
I was a poet! But he didn’t think Reed would appreciate which was the more valued rank. “Yes. Professor—well, Professor Emeritus—of English. At Stanford.”
“Okay then. You were a smart guy. You have a lot to learn, but I’m betting you’ll get those smarts back. Don’t panic if you can’t remember something. Don’t push too hard, either. Practically every day the docs are going to restore some additional capability. The theory is that this will be less disturbing for you. Whether that’s right or wrong won’t matter if you keep cool. Remember you have a whole loving family here.”
Lena. Robert lowered his head for a moment. Not a return to childhood, but a kind of second chance. If he could come all the way back from the Alzheimer’s, if, if…then he might have another twenty years left, time to make up for what he had lost. So two goals: his poetry, and…“Lena.”
Reed leaned closer. “What did you say, sir?”
Robert looked up. “My wife. I mean my ex-wife.” He tried to remember more. “I bet I’ll never remember what happened after I lost my marbles.”
“Like I say, don’t worry about it.”
“I remember being married to Lena and raising Bobby. We split up years ago. But then…I also remember her being with me when the Alzheimer’s really started to shut me down. And now she’s gone again. Where is she, Reed?”
Reed frowned, then leaned forward and zipped up his equipment case. “I’m sorry, Robert. She passed away two years ago.” He stood and gave Robert a gentle pat on the shoulder. “You know, I think we’ve made really good progress today. Now I’ve got to run.”
IN HIS FORMER life, Robert Gu had paid even less attention to technology than he had to current events. Human nature doesn’t change, and as a poet his job was to distill and display that unchanging essence. Now…well, I’m back from the dead! That was something new under the sun, a bit of technology somewhat too large to ignore. It was a new chance at life, a chance to continue his career. And where he should continue his art was obvious: with Secrets of the Ages. He had spent five years on the cantos of that sequence, poems such as “Secrets of the Child,” “Secrets of the Young Lovers,” “Secrets of the Old.” But his “Secrets of the Dying” had been an arrant fake, written before he really started to die—no matter that people seemed to think it was the most profound canto of the sequence. But now…yes, something new: “Secrets of the One Who Came Back.” The ideas were coming and surely verse would follow.
Every day there were new changes in himself, and old barriers suddenly removed. He could easily accept Reed Weber’s advice to be patient with his limitations. So much was changing and all for the better. One day he was walking again, even if it was a lurching, unstable gait. He fell three times that first day, and each time, he just bounced back to his feet. “Unless you fall on your head, Professor, you’ll be fine,” Reed said. But his walking got steadily better. And now that he could see—really see—he could do things with his hands. No more pawing around in the dark. He had never realized how important sight was to coordination. There are uncountable ways that things can lie and tangle and hide in three dimensions; without vision you’re condemned to compromise and failure. But not me. Not now.
And two days after that…
…he was playing ping-pong with his granddaughter. He remembered the table. It was the one that he’d bought for little Bobby thirty years ago. He even remembered Bob taking it off his hands when he finally gave up his home in Palo Alto.
Today Miri was pulling her punches, lobbing the ball high and slow across the table. Robert moved back and forth. Seeing the ball was no problem, but he had to be very careful or he’d swing too high. Careful, careful went the game—until Miri had him down fifteen to eleven. And then he won five points, each stroke a kind of spastic twitch that somehow smashed the white plastic into the far edge of the table.
“Robert! You were just fooling me!” Poor, pudgy Miri raced from one corner of the table to the other, trying to keep up with him. Robert’s slams had no spin, but she wasn’t an expert player. Seventeen to fifteen, eighteen, nineteen. Then his powerful swings got out of tune, and he was back to being a staggering spastic. But now his granddaughter showed no mercy. She racked up six straight points—and won the game.
And then she ran around the table to hug him. “You are great! But you’ll never fool me again!” It didn’t do any good to tell her what Aquino had said, that the reconstruction of his nervous system would cause randomly spiky performance. He might end up with the reflexes of an athlete; more likely the endpoint would be something like average coordination.
IT
WAS FUNNY, how he paid attention to the day of the week. That had stopped mattering even before he lost his marbles. But now, on the weekends, his granddaughter was around all day.
“What was Great-Aunt Cara like?” she asked him one Saturday morning.
“She was a lot like you, Miri.”
The girl’s smile was sudden and wide and proud. Robert had guessed that this was what she wanted to hear. But it’s true, except that Cara was never overweight. Miri was like Cara, right in those last years of preadolescence when her hero worship for her older brother had been replaced by other concerns. If anything, Miri’s personality was an exaggeration of Cara’s. Miri was very bright—probably smarter than her great-aunt. And Miri was already into the extreme independence and moral certainty of the other. I remember that persistent arrogance, thought Robert. That had been an enormous irritation; breaking her of it had been what drove them apart.
Sometimes Miri had her little friends over. The boys and girls mixed pretty indiscriminately at this age and in this era. For a few brief years they were almost matched for muscle. Miri loved to play doubles at Ping-Pong.
He had to smile at the way she bossed her friends around. She had them organized into a tournament. And though she was scrupulously honest, she played to win. When her side got behind, her jaw set in angry determination, and there was steel in her eyes. Afterward she was quick to acknowledge her own failures, and just as quick to critique her playmates.
Even when her friends were gone physically, they were often still around, invisible presences like Robert’s doctors. Miri walked around the backyard talking and arguing with nobody—a parody of all the cellphone discourtesy that Robert remembered from his later years at Stanford.
Then there were Miri’s grand silences. Those didn’t match anything in his recollection of Cara. Miri would push gently back and forth on the swing that hung from the only good-sized tree in the backyard. She would do that for hours, speaking only occasionally—and then to the empty air. Her eyes seemed to be focused miles away. And when he asked her what she was doing, she would start and laugh and say that she was “studying.” It looked much more like some kind of pernicious hypnosis to Robert Gu.
