Diffusion Box Set

by Stan C. Smith

  Many people claim their partner is perfect. What they mean is, their partner is perfect for them, or their partner is a perfect dancer, or a perfect cook. Peter was none of those things. But he was physically perfect. He had come home with no imperfections. His appendectomy scar was gone. His moles and birthmarks were gone. He was no longer circumcised.

  Like I said, he was a new man.

  Love is blind, they say. I would add that love is also numb. It is particularly numb to fear and suspicion. I saw and felt in those first months exactly what I wanted to, and I avoided asking too many questions. Who was I to question good fortune?

  On the first anniversary of Peter’s return, I had intended to get up early to surprise him with breakfast. But I was too late. I put on a long t-shirt and left the bedroom. Light under the office door indicated he was working. I opened the door and squinted.

  “I thought we were sleeping in, Peter.”

  His eyes were wide when he looked up. “Couldn’t sleep. I know it’s a special day, but I thought I’d work on this until you got up.”

  I smelled stale coffee. “You ran water through yesterday’s grounds again?”

  “Saves time. I need your thoughts on this.” He waved me over to look at the pad of paper in his lap.

  I rubbed my eyes and tried to focus on it. In a column on the left were hand-drawn symbols, each of them unique. There were spirals, ovals, and a circle. There were sharp angles and zigzagging lines. Some of the symbols looked almost like letters of the alphabet, but not quite. The page I could see contained about thirty of the symbols, so I suspected there would be more on the next few pages. There would be a total of 128, because that’s how many symbols Peter claimed to have seen in the jungle.

  On the paper, to the right of each symbol, he had written a person’s name. The first was Linda, and then Margaret, Tom, Sheila, Jason, and so on.

  “You’re naming the symbols?”

  He flipped the page, showing that the names continued. “Working on it. Got the idea this morning. Here’s what I’m thinking.” He turned to the Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 on the desk. It was a computer that used a cassette tape drive and could execute simple commands in BASIC code, displayed in white text. He said, “We can’t use the actual symbols, right? There are no corresponding characters on the keyboard, and we’ve already decided it’s impractical to produce a new keyboard with all 128 symbols.”

  I picked up his mug and swallowed some of the awful coffee. “Right.”

  “So we give each symbol a name.” He tapped the pad of paper. “And we make sure folks have a printed index of the names paired with the symbols. Folks can group the symbols by typing the names, separated by a space.” Four names appeared on the TS-80’s tiny screen as he typed. He pressed Return, and the names disappeared. The flashing cursor waited for him to type more names. He leaned back in his chair and looked at me.

  I swiveled the second chair around and sat next to him. I appreciated that he consistently included me in the process. He had done so from the day he’d come home the year before. But I hadn’t been able to provide much help. In fact, there were times I had thought Peter was delusional. He claimed to have found something strange in the wilderness, something guarded by an ancient aboriginal tribe. It sounded like a story from an old Tarzan novel. At one point he had even implied that the object had come from a distant alien civilization. But after I had laughed at this, he stopped mentioning the possibility. Yet he swore the thing he’d found was some kind of computer, and that it had communicated with him using 128 symbols. He even remembered every one of the symbols. He had spent months trying to develop some kind of software application that would teach people to communicate with the mysterious computer, or whatever it was. He was convinced the object would eventually be discovered again, and his software would then become useful.

  I plucked the pad of paper from his lap and flipped through the pages. “You’ve given them people’s names. You expect folks to remember these? Why not just give them each a number?”

  He shook his head. “I’m thinking ahead. When I was there with it, the process began with me sorting the symbols into groups based on their shapes or features. And you’re right—that part would be easier if we just used numbers to designate them. But then later it guided me on to sorting tasks that resulted in assigning numeric values to the symbols. It would confuse folks if the symbols already had numerical names.”

  “God forbid we confuse folks.”

  Peter chuckled. Because he loved me, not because he actually thought it was funny. This endeavor had become his new obsession, and it’s not easy to laugh at your own obsessions. Peter was convinced the object he’d found was important. Not I-discovered-a-new-species-of-butterfly important. More like, I-discovered-a-medical-miracle-that-will-make-doctors-obsolete important. But I had my doubts, even though I had seen Peter’s body, somehow stripped of its imperfections.

  I dropped the pad of paper onto the desk. “Okay, I’m up now, so no more work for you. Today’s a special day, and we’re celebrating.”

  Peter sighed. Then he smiled and slapped his knee. “Right you are, Mrs. Wooley! That’s precisely why we are going out.”

  “Peter, I was going to—”

  “Oh, but you’re not. I have already stuffed a pack with tucker, and we are going to sit and enjoy it from atop Lumley Hill. We’re going for a picnic, sweet Rose.”

  This was how Peter was. He knew I adored Lumley Hill, and he knew I fancied prawn salad and fritters, which he had secretly made while I was at the shop the previous day.

  So we drove to Flecker Botanical Gardens, climbed the Red Arrow track then the Blue Arrow track into Mount Whitfield Park, and then we climbed the side trail to the top of Lumley Hill. This was a combined trek of over two hours, and in 1978 the trails were crude at best. We sat in the shade of a mango tree as we ate. The air was clear and we could see the turquoise water of the reef around Green Island, nearly thirty kilometers out in the Coral Sea. Peter pulled a bottle of wine from his pack, and I sniggered when he realized he’d forgotten the corkscrew.

  Peter talked endlessly. He said the mango tree was there at the top of the hill because a cassowary had carried the seed in its gut until it shat it out. The giant birds were still common on Mount Whitfield and Lumley Hill, which was one reason I loved the place. Peter then did an impersonation of a cassowary shitting a mango seed, making me laugh. I listened to him talk and told a few stories of my own.

  Late in the afternoon the sun cast a spellbinding hue over the Coral Sea. Peter wandered off to relieve himself somewhere in the trees. When he returned he sat beside me and held his cupped hands out. Resting in them was a long but delicate feather that sparkled with indigo iridescence in the sun’s light.

  “You found a cassowary feather!” I said.

  “It’s a surprise for you, sweet Rose.”

  I plucked the feather from his hands. Something that had been hidden beneath it caught my eye. “Peter!”

  “That’s the rest of your surprise,” he said. He grabbed the object by two fingers and offered it to me. “I figured it was time I got you a proper wedding ring.”

  I slid the ring onto my finger and gazed at it. It was a gold band with a single diamond, large enough to catch the eye but small enough to be tasteful and practical. It was the first time in my life I had worn a wedding ring. We hadn’t exchanged rings when we had married twelve years before, thinking at the time it was a frivolous tradition and a waste of money.

  “It’s lovely,” I said. “Now I’ll have to find one for you.”

  He wrapped his arm around me and gazed out toward Green Island. “No worries, love. Plenty of time for that.”

  I rested my head on his shoulder and stared at the horizon, where blue sky blended with the emerald water and white breakers of the Great Barrier Reef. Two gulls flew side-by-side over the mouth of the Barron River, squawking as if they were bickering with each other. But then they parted ways, and one of them flew north whi
le the other flew south.

  I was forty-two, and at that time it was the best day of my life. A year before, when Peter had come home, we were both forty-one. I didn’t know it, but on that day on Lumley Hill a year later, Peter was still forty-one.

  3

  Yonks Day – Year 13 – 1990

  Every relationship has its challenges. Typically they are you’re-spending-too-much-money-at-the-pub kinds of challenges. At the risk of being dramatic, the challenges we faced were unique. They were for-years-I-doubted-you-and-thought-you-might-be-cracked challenges. And you-weren’t-cracked-after-all-but-the-truth-scares-me-even-more challenges. I have come to realize that my psychological scale tips gradually. Although I rarely talked to Peter about what had happened to him in New Guinea for fear of what he might say, there were certain unavoidable observations that incrementally tipped my scale from believing Peter might be delusional to believing I might be intolerant and small minded for having doubted him. Perhaps some people might argue that if the evidence is before your eyes, you must succumb to it. But I’m pretty sure those people have not faced evidence of what they had previously thought to be impossible. Miracles may sound good in stories, but they are hard to swallow in real life. For me, the tipping of this scale took many years.

  And there was the little issue of the promise. Peter had made it the day he’d come home, the day my bags were packed. I was going to move out, so I suppose he would have promised anything. He had promised he would never leave me again and that we would grow old together.

  By our thirteenth Yonks Day, we both knew he could keep only half of the promise.

  On this day, as on every other Yonks Day, Peter was up before me. He had fallen into a pattern of dwelling excessively on his Kembalimo project in the days leading up to Yonks Day. As Peter described it, Kembalimo was a word used by the aboriginal tribe he had stayed with before coming home. It meant, to return. He insisted that the project’s name was symbolic of the architecture of the computer program he was creating and did not reveal a secret desire to return to the tribe. He endeavored to recreate the functions of the object he had found in the wilderness—the computer or whatever it was. If he could figure out how, his creation might help prepare others for when the object would be found again. And all his efforts were contingent upon his memory of this thing he had seen only a few times during only a few days thirteen years past. But apparently this wasn’t a problem, because his memory was just one more thing about him that had somehow become perfect while he was in the wilderness of New Guinea.

  Many times over, he had shown me indisputable evidence of his perfect memory, but still my scale tipped at a glacial pace.

  After getting out of bed I pulled on some clothes and gazed at my aging face in the mirror. I straightened my back and held my chin up, feigning courage. Today would be a Yonks Day like no other, because I was tired of hiding from the truth. Whatever that truth may be. Too many years had been spent not discussing what should have been discussed.

  I took a deep breath and went straight to Peter’s office. All four of his computers were on, but he was huddled before his new Macintosh IIfx. I could hear the chuckity-chuck of its hard drive as it worked. Peter liked to say the IIfx was “wicked fast.” The damn thing had cost more than I made at Sylvia’s shop in five months.

  He didn’t turn around when I walked in, so I sighed loudly.

  “I know you’re there,” he said. “And I’m fine. I’ve had ample rest.”

  I sat down next to him. When he finally turned to me, I said, “Happy Yonks Day.”

  His eyes grew wide. Pretending he’d forgotten. “Uh…was that today?”

  I slapped his shoulder. “Funny. I know you bought prawns, and I smell the fritters.” I nodded at the Macintosh. “You going to be able to leave this behind?”

  He twisted his mouth in thought. “Every few months a new technology is announced somewhere. It’s as if I’m watching the pieces to this puzzle appear, one at a time.” He raised his hands as if trying to connect two objects. “If only I could put them together. Now the United States has managed to create the potential to bring the Internet to every living soul through telephone lines. They call it The World. Appropriate name, wouldn’t you say?”

  “How is that going to help you with your Kembalimo software?”

  “It might eliminate the need for distribution. Watch this.” He put a hand on the computer’s mouse and moved the virtual arrow about on a screen that displayed all 128 of the Kembalimo symbols. One at a time, he clicked on four symbols. The symbols disappeared and then reappeared in a box in the corner of the screen. He was sorting them into categories.

  I waited for him to explain. Instead, he did the same thing with four more symbols.

  I said, “I don’t see what’s so—”

  “What’s so exciting about it is that I created this in a markup language called HTML Tags. Very few people even know it exists. It’s a hypertext system that is Internet-based. You don’t have to physically deliver a program to people. They can get to it using any computer connected to the Internet with a telephone line. This is where things are going, Rose!”

  I frowned at him. On any other day I might have just nodded and let it go. But it was a day for breaking long-standing barriers. “You’ve spent years creating a program you can mail to people on disks. Now you want to put it on the Internet instead. You’re ignoring the real issue. Why would someone even want to go through all of the tasks? It’s not easy, and it’s not fun. And if you tell them the real reason you want them to learn to use your symbols, they’ll think you’re crackers.”

  Peter put his hands on his knees and gazed at me. For a moment I saw desperation in his eyes, and I thought perhaps I’d pushed too hard. Kembalimo was so important to him. But his features gradually softened as he looked at me. His eyes seemed to wander over the landscape of my face, and I couldn’t help but feel that he was appraising the loose skin under my eyes, or perhaps the permanent lines framing my mouth. I was fifty-four, and he was the same age as the day he had come home.

  I looked away and pretended to smooth my hair with one hand. “Don’t stare at me like that, Peter.” A discomforting idea suddenly accosted my thoughts. I turned to him. “Why is this so important to you now?”

  He frowned. “It’s always been important.”

  “Why do you want people to communicate with this thing so badly?”

  “You know why. It’s important. Sometime soon, it’ll be discovered again. People need to know how to understand it. Then they can bring it to civilization and learn from it, perhaps use it.”

  “Use it for what?”

  He held both hands out, palms up, and shook his head. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  I looked him in the eye. “Do you want to use it on me?”

  He blinked.

  “Do you want it to make me stop growing older?”

  He sighed and pursed his lips.

  “You’re trying to save me, aren’t you?”

  “Why would you say it that way?”

  For the first time in years I felt tears coming. “Because I’m fifty-four and you’re not! At some point I’ll wither and die, and apparently you’re still going to look exactly the way you do now.”

  “You don’t know that! Maybe I’m just aging a little slower. And maybe I’d like us to age at the same rate.” His eyes were wide. He hadn’t seen me cry very often. “Am I supposed to just wait for you to wither and die? Shouldn’t I want to save you?”

  “Maybe you should ask me if I want to be saved.”

  “Okay. Do you?”

  I was trembling at that point, and I glowered at him. I don’t know why, but I suddenly laughed. Maybe I just wanted to startle him one more time. It seemed to work.

  Finally, I said, “I guess. Who wouldn’t?”

  After all, who wouldn’t want immortality? For countless ages people had believed immortality would be the solution to their problems.

  Two hou
rs later we were hiking to Lumley Hill. Our picnic there had become a Yonks Day ritual. It was only mid-morning, but the day promised to be a December scorcher. The rainforest air smelled of eucalyptus. Locusts were already trilling, and this was punctuated by the occasional ‘walk-to-work’ call of noisy pitta birds. We had still seen no other hikers when we entered the branch off the Blue Arrow track that would take us up the last twenty-five meters to Lumley Hill’s summit. Reluctantly, I requested a rest stop. My endurance and balance weren’t what they used to be.

  Peter looked fresh, even though he carried the pack. He eased it onto the ground, fished out a water bottle, and handed it to me. I was still flustered about my outburst that morning and needed to verbally process it. I was not typically a cry-because-I-feel-sorry-for-myself kind of girl.

  “Damn you,” I said. “You’re not even breathing hard. You haven’t been sick in twelve years, and you haven’t aged a day.” I sat on the ground.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know how to respond to that.”

  I sighed and gazed up the trail to Lumley Hill. A certain dread began creeping into my mind, because I was about to delve into a subject that frightened me. And this time I wasn’t going to shut the discussion down. “So here we are. I am now forced to believe you that the object you found in Irian Jaya somehow gave you this perfect health.”

  “For how long have you not believed me?”

  “That’s not important.” Actually, it was important, and it was the reason I feared the subject. What kind of woman would go years harboring serious doubts about the subject that mattered most to the man she loved?

  I took a long drink of water. “Let’s consider the possibilities. What if someone found it again? Today, for instance.”