by Vernor Vinge
Xiu smiled around a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly. It had taken her some time to realize what a genius Lena was. After all, psychiatry was such a soft specialty. Lena said little Miri loved to view her grandmother as some kind of female wizard. She claimed to know that even though the girl never announced the fact. Now Xiu had realized Lena was everything Miri imagined, at least metaphorically. I’ve never understood other people, but with Lena seeing out of my eyes and chatting in my ear, I am learning.
There were still mysteries: “I don’t understand why your granddaughter is pushing Juan away. Sure, the kids don’t remember what really happened in Pilchner hall, but we know they were coming to be friends. If we could only get Miri’s logs”—what the government was still withholding.
Lena didn’t answer directly. “You know Alice is home from hospital?”
“Yes! I caught the fact from you, no details.”
“There won’t be any details. ‘Alice was sick and now she’s better.’ In fact, I’ve known for a long time that Alice plays dice for her own soul. She nearly lost it this time, and somehow that’s related to my ex-husband’s grand screwup at UCSD. I think Alice will recover. That should help Juan with Miri.” Lena sat back in her chair. Or rather, she let the chair tilt into a different posture. On her own, Lena couldn’t really straighten up. “We’ve talked about this before. Miri can be stubborn to the point of being an asshole. She inherited that trait from the SOB, skipping a generation over Bob. And now that stubbornness has latched onto some deep-down guilt: subconsciously Miri feels that she and Juan messed up and did this terrible thing to Alice.”
“Um, that doesn’t really sound like science, Lena.”
“I’m sparing you the technicalities.”
Xiu nodded. “You get results. There are people at Fairmont High who think I’m some sort of human-relations genius. Me!”
Lena reached her hand a few inches across the table, as far as her twisted bones could go. Xiu took the hand gently in her own. “We’ve made a good team, haven’t we?” said Lena.
“Yes.” It wasn’t just Lena’s way with people. It wasn’t just saving Tommie and his friends. There had been those dark days at the beginning of her time at Fairmont, when she was sure she could never come back—and Lena wasn’t so happy-go-lucky either. Together they had climbed into the daylight. Xiu looked at the little old lady who was ten years younger than herself. Together, Lena and I have become something rather remarkable. Apart…?
“Lena, do you think I’ll ever be good at seeing into people the way you do?”
Lena shrugged and gave a little smile. “Oh, I don’t know.”
Xiu cocked her head, remembering little incidents here and there across the last few months. Lena Gu almost never lied outright. She seemed to realize what that would do to her credibility. But Lena could deceive, even in the face of a direct question. “Do you know, Lena, when you say ‘oh, I don’t know’ and shrug—that means you’re thinking ‘not in a million years’?”
Lena’s eyes widened. She gave Xiu’s hand a squeeze. “Um. Well, there you go. Maybe in this case it won’t take a million years!”
“Good. Because I want to tell you, Lena…I don’t think Robert is the SOB you remember. I think he’s really changed.”
Lena’s hand slipped away from hers. “I take it back. In your case, a million years may not be enough.”
Xiu reached out, but Lena’s hand was back in her lap. Never mind. There were things that had to be said. “Robert was brutal in the beginning, but look how he has helped Juan. I have a theory.” She flicked the Nature citation across the table at Lena. This wasn’t really her own theory. “Robert has had the equivalent of major trauma, the sort of thing that rebuilds a personality’s worldview.”
“You read too much crap science, Xiu. Leave that to us professionals.”
“It’s as if he’s been all unwound. He has his memories, but physically he’s just a young man. He has a second chance to get things right. Can’t you see that, Lena?”
Lena flinched at the words, then hunched forward even more. She was silent for a long moment, staring down at her twisted body, her head swaying in gentle negation. Finally she cranked her gaze up to Xiu’s. Something that might have been a tear glinted in her eye. “You have a lot to learn, my girl.”
And with that Lena backed away from the table, her chair making an agile rise and turn. “’Fraid I’m done for the evening.” She rolled off toward her bedroom.
Xiu took care of the dishes. Usually Lena insisted on doing the kitchen work. “That’s something I can still do with my own hands,” she often said. Not tonight. And if I were just a little more clever about people, thought Xiu, I might know why.
35
THE MISSING APOSTROPHE
Zulfikar Sharif was no longer in the graduate program at Oregon State. Robert encountered a very old-fashioned error message: “No longer a registered student, no longer at OSU.” Even Sharif’s enum was a stub labeled “vacated.” That was a little scary. Robert hunted around. Worldwide, there were about a thousand matches for “Z* Sharif.” None of the accessible ones were a good match. The rest were people trying with various degrees of competence to keep their privacy.
But the Zulfi Sharif whom Robert sought was still a techno-bumpkin. After an hour or two, Robert had tracked him down to the University of Kolkata.
Sharif was very subdued. “Professor Blandings dismissed me.”
“From the OSU graduate program? In my time, we professors were not so powerful.”
“Professor Blandings had help from your authorities. I spent several weeks trying to explain myself to some very insistent U.S. government agents. They couldn’t believe that I was an innocent who had succeeded in being multiply hijacked.”
“Hmm.” Robert looked away from Zulfi Sharif, at the city all around them. The day looked hot and muggy. Just beyond their small table, crowds swirled, young people laughing and smiling. The skyline had its share of tall and ivory towers. It was the Kolkata of modern Indian vision. For a moment he was tempted to open a second, naysayer channel and try to figure out what was real and what was hype. No, concentrate on figuring what part of Zulfi Sharif is real and what is hype. “I suppose the best evidence the cops think you’re innocent is that they let you return to India.”
“Indeed so, though sometimes I wonder if I’m not just a fish on a very long line.” He gave a wan smile. “I really did want to do my thesis about you, Professor Gu. In the beginning, it was academic desperation. You were the trophy I could sell to Annie Blandings. But the more we talked, the more I—”
“How much was you, Sharif? How many—?”
“I wondered that too! There were at least two besides myself. It was a most frustrating experience, Sir, especially at the beginning. I would be in the middle of speaking with you, going through the questions that I knew would impress Professor Blandings—and then at a whack I was a mere bystander!”
“So you could still hear and see?”
“Yes, often that was so! So often that I think the others were using me to generate some questions for inspiration, and then warping them to their own purposes. In the end—and my confessing this to your police was a great mistake—in the end, I came to treasure these bizarre interventions. My dear hijackers were asking questions I would never have conceived. So I hung around throughout your Librareome conspiracy, and in the end I looked the perfect foreign provocateur.”
“And if you hadn’t been there the night of the riot, my Miri would have died. What did you see, Zulfi?”
“What? Well, I had been most thoroughly locked out that evening. The other players on my persona had agendas that did not include any discussion of literature. But I kept trying to get through. The police claimed I never would have succeeded without terrorist assistance. In any case, for a few seconds I could see you lying there on the floor. You asked for my help. The lava was creeping up against your arm…” He shivered. “In truth, I couldn’t see any more than
that.”
Robert remembered that conversation. It was one of the sharpest fragments in the jumble.
The two of them, eight thousand miles apart, sat in silence for a few moments. Then Sharif cocked his head quizzically. “Now I am well quit of my perilous literary research. And yet, I cannot resist asking: You are at the beginning of your new life, Professor. Can we expect something new under the sun? For the first time in human history, a new Secret of the Ages?”
Ah. “You’re right, there is room for something more. But you know—some secrets are beyond the expression of those who experience them.”
“Not beyond you, Sir!”
Robert found himself smiling back. Sharif deserved the truth. “I could write something, but it would not be poetry. I got a new life, but the Alzheimer’s cure…it destroyed my talent.”
“Oh no! I had heard of Alzheimer failures, but I honestly never suspected you. Thinking there might be another canto of the Secrets was about the only good thing I still hoped to come out of this adventure. I am so sorry.”
“Don’t be too sorry. I wasn’t…a very nice person.”
Sharif looked down and then back at Robert. “I had heard that. In the days I couldn’t get through to you, I interviewed your former colleagues at Stanford, even Winston Blount when he wasn’t making conspiracies.”
“But—”
“It doesn’t matter, Sir. I eventually realized that you had lost your sadistic edge.”
“Then surely you would have guessed the rest!”
“Do you think so? Do you think your talent and your malevolence were a package deal?” Sharif leaned forward, engaged in a way that Robert had not seen since their interviews of weeks before. “I…doubt that. But researching the issue would be intriguing. For that matter, I have long wondered—and been too timid to ask—what really changed in you? Were you a decent fellow from the time of your dementia cure? Or was the change as in Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol,’ with new experience making you kindlier?” He rocked back. “I could make such a splendid thesis out of this!” His eyes swept back to Robert, questioning.
“No way!”
“Yes, yes,” said Sharif, nodding. “It is such a great opportunity that I almost forgot my resolutions. And the first of those resolutions is no more activities that get me mixed up with the security authorities.” He looked up, as if at unseen watchers. “Do you hear that? I am clean, clean in body and soul and even in my fresh fried clothes!” And then addressing Robert once more: “In fact, I have a new academic major.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. It will take several semesters of prerequisite fulfillment, but that will be worth it. You see, the University of Kolkata is starting a new department with new faculty, real go-getters. We have a long way to go considering the competition from the universities in Mumbai—but the people here have funding, and they’re willing to take on fresh faces such as myself.” He grinned enthusiasm at Robert’s puzzled look. “It’s our new Institute of Bollywood Studies! A combination of cinema and literature. I’ll be studying the influence of twentieth-century lit on the latest Indian arts. And much as I regret our lost opportunities, Professor Gu, I am so happy to be in a major that will keep me out of further trouble with the authorities!”
ROBERT WAS ACTUALLY busy between semesters. His contrived synch hack had raised him to the lowest level of guru-hood. He’d been noticed by a small company called Comms-R-Us. In a way it was a traditional firm. It was old (five years old), and it had three full-time employees. So it wasn’t as nimble as some operations, but it had managed several innovations in concurrent communications. Comms-R-Us had paid Robert to consult for a period of three weeks. And though it was clear that the “consult” was mainly an opportunity for Comms-R-Us to decide if Robert Gu had any future, Robert jumped at the chance.
For the first time since he lost his marbles, he was creating something that others valued.
Otherwise, things were not going entirely smoothly. Juan Orozco was gone; his parents had taken him on vacation to Puebla, where they were visiting his mother’s grandfather. Juan still showed up occasionally, but Miri was not talking to him.
“I’m trying not to care, Robert. Maybe if I stop bothering her, Miri will let me start over with her.” Nevertheless, Robert had the feeling the boy might have camped out on their front steps if his parents had not dragged him away.
“I’ll talk to her, Juan. I promise.”
Juan had looked at him doubtfully. “But don’t make her think I put you up to it!”
“I won’t. I’ll choose the time carefully.”
Robert had decades of experience in choosing the right time to strike. This should have been easy. Miri had wangled an Incomplete grade on her demo project. That meant that when she finally did perform, at the end of the next semester, she would have even higher standards to meet. For now, she was a busybody around the house, mainly taking care of her mother. Alice Gu was a ghost of her former self. The steel of the last fifteen weeks of their acquaintance had been torn out of her. The result was…charming. More evenings than not, Alice and Miri were down in the kitchen, attempting to make hard work out of modern cookery. His daughter-in-law was distant, but her smile wasn’t the meaningless reflex it had often seemed before.
Then Bob was out of town again, and Miri seemed to be busier than ever. Every day, she had some news for him about her searches on burns and limb rehabilitation. Real soon now he should use that as an excuse to set her straight about Juan…and about himself.
MAYBE TONIGHT WAS the right night. Bob was still out of town. Alice had retired to the ground-floor den shortly after dinner. None of Miri’s “board games” tonight. They were fun, one of the nicer things about life since that terrible night at UCSD—but tonight Robert had finally seen his way through some of his Comms-R-Us problems. Working on them, he lost track of the time. When he came up for air, he had some results, maybe things worth showing his employers. What a good night!
Downstairs, a door slammed. His eyes were still on his work, but he heard Miri come pounding up the stairs. She raced down the hallway and into her bedroom.
A few minutes later she came out. There was a knock on his bedroom door. “Hi Robert, can I show you some things I discovered today?”
“Sure.”
She bounced into the room and grabbed a chair. “I found three more projects that could help your arm.”
In fact, the medical condition of Robert Gu’s left arm was best characterized by its absence. It was completely burned off at the lower forearm. There were two places near the shoulder where all that was left was a strip of flesh. His “prosthesis” was more like an old-style plaster cast. But interestingly, the medics had passed on the opportunity to whack the thing off and fit him with some modern miracle. Reed Weber—the physician’s assistant had resurfaced now that the MDs needed someone to front for them—had explained the situation, though perhaps not in quite the way the doctors would like: “You’re a victim of the new field of ‘prospective medicine,’ Robert. You see, we have prosthetics with five-finger motor control, and with almost the durability of a natural arm. But they’re a little heavy and the sensor system is nowhere near the real thing. On the other hand, there are clear trends in nerve- and bone-regeneration tech. Even though no one knows quite how it will happen—or if it will happen—the odds are that in eighteen months they’ll be able to grow out from what you have now, into an effective natural arm. And the MDs are afraid that debriding what’s left of your arm for a prosthesis might make the later solution much more expensive. So for a while you are stuck with a solution that wouldn’t have impressed your own grandfather.”
And Robert had nodded and not complained. Every day with this dead weight on his shoulder was a small penance, a reminder of how close his foolishness had come to destroying lives.
Miri was oblivious of all that. In fact, she had dismissed “prospective medicine” as stupidity. Miri believed in making her own medical solutions. “So there are
these three teams, Robert. One of them has grown a complete monkey’s paw, another is into whole-limb prosthesis, but very light weight, and the third has some improvements in neurocoding. I bet your Comms-R-Us friends would put you up as a fast-track guinea pig. What do you think?”
Robert touched the plastic shell that held the remains of his arm. “Ah, I think a deal involving a monkey’s paw is too risky for me.”
“No, no, you wouldn’t have a monkey’s paw. The monkey’s paw was just—” Then she got a Googling look. “Robert! I’m not talking about some old story. I’m trying to help you. I want to more than ever. I owe you.”
Yeah, tonight was definitely the night to set her straight. “You don’t owe me.”
“Hey, I can’t remember it, but Bob told me what he saw. You put your arm in the way of molten rock. You held it there.” Her face twisted with imagined pain. “You saved me, Robert.”
“I saved you, kiddo. Yes. But I created the problem. I played ball with something evil.” Or something very strange.
“You were desperate. I knew that. I just didn’t know how deep things would get. So we both made a mess.”
It really was time to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness. But first let her know why this was beyond forgiveness. The words were hard to say: “Miri, you made a mess trying to fix things. But I…I was the guy who set up your mother for what practically killed her.” There. It was said.
Miri sat very still. After a moment, her gaze fell. She said softly, “I know.”
Now they both were very still. “Bob told you?”
“No. Alice did.” She looked up. “And she told me they still can’t figure out how what you did could have brought her down. It’s okay, Robert.”
Then abruptly, she was crying. And Robert did get on his knees. His granddaughter threw her arms around his neck. She was in full bawl now, her body shaking. She pounded his back with her fists.
