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by John Varley

  "Kluge once had an account in a New York bank with nine trillion dollars in it," she told me after one of Osborne's visits. "I think he did it just to see if he could. He left it in for one day, took the interest and fed it to a bank in the Bahamas, then destroyed the principal. Which never existed anyway."

  In return, Osborne told her what was new on the murder investigation-which was nothing-and on the status of Kluge's property, which was chaotic. Various agencies had sent peo­ple out to look the place over. Some FBI men came, wanting to take over the investigation. Lisa, when talking about com­puters, had the power to cloud men's minds. She did it first by explaining exactly what she was doing, in terms so ab­struse that no one could understand her. Sometimes that was enough. If it wasn't, if they started to get tough, she just moved out of the driver's seat and let them try to handle Kluge's contraption. She let them watch in horror as dragons leaped out of nowhere and ate up all the data on a disc, then printed "You Stupid Putz!" on the screen.

  "I'm cheating them," she confessed to me. "I'm giving them stuff I know they're gonna step in, because I already stepped in it myself. I've lost about forty percent of the data Kluge had stored away. But the others lose a hundred per­cent. You ought to see their faces when Kluge drops a logic bomb into their work. That second guy threw a three thou­sand dollar printer clear across the room. Then tried to bribe me to be quiet about it."

  When some federal agency sent out an expert from Stan­ford, and he seemed perfectly content to destroy everything in sight in the firm belief that he was bound to get it right sooner or later, Lisa showed him how Kluge entered the IRS main computer in Washington and neglected to mention how Kluge had gotten out. The guy tangled with some watchdog pro­gram. During his struggles, it seemed he had erased all the tax records from the letter S down into the W's. Lisa let him think that for half an hour.

  "I thought he was having a heart attack," she told me. "All the blood drained out of his face and he couldn't talk. So I showed him where I had-with my usual foresight- arranged for that data to be recorded, told him how to put it back where he found it, and how to pacify the watchdog. He couldn't get out of that house fast enough. Pretty soon he's gonna realize you can't destroy that much information with anything short of dynamite because of the backups and the limits of how much can be running at any one time. But I don't think he'll be back."

  "It sounds like a very fancy video game," I said.

  "It is, in a way. But it's more like Dungeons and Dragons. It's an endless series of closed rooms with dangers on the other side. You don't dare take it a step at a time. You take it a hundredth of a step at a time. Your questions are like, 'Now this isn't a question, but if it entered my mind to ask

  this question-which I'm not about to do-concerning what might happen if I looked at this door here-and I'm not touching it, I'm not even in the next room-what do you suppose you might do?' And the program crunches on that, decides if you fulfilled the conditions for getting a great big cream pie in the face, then either throws it or allows as how it might just move from step A to step A Prime. Then you say, 'Well, maybe I am looking at that door.' And sometimes the program says 'You looked, you looked, you dirty crook!' And the fireworks start."

  Silly as all that sounds, it was very close to the best explanation she was ever able to give me about what she was doing.

  "Are you telling everything, Lisa?" I asked her.

  "Well, not everything. I didn't mention the four cents."

  Four cents? Oh my god.

  "Lisa, I didn't want that, I didn't ask for it, I wish he'd never-"

  "Calm down, Yank. It's going to be all right."

  "He kept records of all that, didn't he?"

  "That's what I spend most of my time doing. Decoding his records."

  "How long have you known?"

  "About the seven hundred thousand dollars? It was in the first disc I cracked."

  "I just want to give it back."

  She thought that over, and shook her head.

  "Victor, it'd be more dangerous to get rid of it now than it would be to keep it. It was imaginary money at first. But now it's got a history. The IRS thinks it knows where it came from. The taxes are paid on it. The State of Delaware is convinced that a legally chartered corporation disbursed it. An Illinois law firm has been paid for handling it. Your bank has been paying you interest on it. I'm not saying it would be impossible to go back and wipe all that out, but I wouldn't like to try. I'm good, but I don't have Kluge's touch."

  "How could he do all that? You say it was imaginary money. That's not the way I thought money worked. He could just pull it out of thin air?''

  Lisa patted the top of her computer console, and smiled at me.

  "This is money, Yank," she said, and her eyes glittered.

  * * *

  At night she worked by candlelight so she wouldn't disturb me. That turned out to be my downfall. She typed by touch, and needed the candle only to locate software.

  So that's how I'd go to sleep every night, looking at her slender body bathed in the glow of the candle. I was always reminded of melting butter dripping down a roasted ear of corn. Golden light on golden skin.

  Ugly, she had called herself. Skinny. It was true she was thin. I could see her ribs when she sat with her back impossi­bly straight, her tummy sucked in, her chin up. She worked in the nude these days, sitting in lotus position. For long periods she would not move, her hands lying on her thighs, then she would poise, as if to pound the keys. But her touch was light, almost silent. It looked more like yoga than pro­gramming. She said she went into a meditative state for her best work.

  I had expected a bony angularity, all sharp elbows and knees. She wasn't like that. I had guessed her weight ten pounds too low, and still didn't know where she put it. But she was soft and rounded, and strong beneath.

  No one was ever going to call her face glamorous. Few would even go so far as to call her pretty. The braces did that, I think. They caught the eye and held it, drawing attention to that unsightly jumble.

  But her skin was wonderful. She had scars. Not as many as I had Expected. She seemed to heal quickly, and well.

  I thought she was beautiful.

  I had just completed my nightly survey when my eye was caught by the candle. I looked at it, then tried to look away.

  Candles do that sometimes. I don't know why. In still air, with the flame perfectly vertical, they begin to flicker. The flame leaps up then squats down, up and down, up and down, brighter and brighter in regular rhythm, two or three beats to the second-

  -and I tried to call out to her, wishing the candle would stop its regular flickering, but already I couldn't speak-

  -I could only gasp, and I tried once more, as hard as I could, to yell, to scream, to tell her not to worry, and felt the nausea building…

  * * *

  I tasted blood. I took an experimental breath, did not find the smells of vomit, urine, feces. The overhead lights were on.

  Lisa was on her hands and knees leaning over me, her face very close. A tear dropped on my forehead. I was on the carpet, on my back.

  "Victor, can you hear me?"

  I nodded. There was a spoon in my mouth. I spat it out.

  "What happened? Are you going to be all right?"

  I nodded again, and struggled to speak.

  "You just lie there. The ambulance is on its way."

  "No. Don't need it."

  "Well, it's on its way. You just take it easy and-"

  "Help me up."

  "Not yet. You're not ready."

  She was right. I tried to sit up, and fell back quickly. I took deep breaths for a while. Then the doorbell rang.

  She stood up and started to the door. I just managed to get my hand around her ankle. Then she was leaning over me again, her eyes as wide as they would go.

  "What is it? What's wrong now?"

  "Get some clothes on," I told her. She looked down at herself, surprised.

  "Oh. Righ
t."

  She got rid of the ambulance crew. Lisa was a lot calmer after she made coffee and we were sitting at the kitchen table. It was one o'clock, and I was still pretty rocky. But it hadn't been a bad one.

  I went to the bathroom and got the bottle of Dilantin I'd hidden when she moved in. I let her see me take one.

  "I forgot to do this today," I told her.

  "It's because you hid them. That was stupid."

  "I know." There must have been something else I could have said. It didn't please me to see her look hurt. But she was hurt because I wasn't defending myself against her at­tack, and that was a bit too complicated for me to dope out just after a grand mal.

  "You can move out if you want to," I said. I was in rare form.

  So was she. She reached across the table and shook me by the shoulders. She glared at me.

  "I won't take a lot more of that kind of shit," she said, and I nodded, and began to cry.

  She let me do it. I think that was probably best. She could have babied me, but I do a pretty good job of that myself.

  "How long has this been going on?" she finally said. "Is that why you've stayed in your house for thirty years?''

  I shrugged. "I guess it's part of it. When I got back they operated, but it just made it worse."

  "Okay. I'm mad at you because you didn't tell me about it, so I didn't know what to do. I want to stay, but you'll have to tell me how. Then I won't be mad anymore."

  I could have blown the whole thing right there. I'm amazed I didn't. Through the years I'd developed very good methods for doing things like that. But I pulled through when I saw her face. She really did want to stay. I didn't know why, but it was enough.

  "The spoon was a mistake," I said. "If there's time, and if you can do it without risking your fingers, you could jam a piece of cloth in there. Part of a sheet, or something. But nothing hard." I explored my mouth with a finger. "I think I broke a tooth."

  "Serves you right," she said. I looked at her, and smiled, then we were both laughing. She came around the table and kissed me, then sat on my knee.

  "The biggest danger is drowning. During the first part of the seizure, all my muscles go rigid. That doesn't last long. Then they all start contracting and relaxing at random. It's very strong."

  "I know. I watched, and I tried to hold you."

  "Don't do that. Get me on my side. Stay behind me, and watch out for flailing arms. Get a pillow under my head if you can. Keep me away from things I could injure myself on." I looked her square in the eye. "I want to emphasize this. Just try to do all those things. If I'm getting too violent, it's better you stand off to the side. Better for both of us. If I knock you out, you won't be able to help me if I start strangling on vomit."

  I kept looking at her eyes. She must have read my mind, because she smiled slightly.

  "Sorry, Yank, I am not freaked out. I mean, like, it's totally gross, you know, and it barfs me out to the max, you could-"

  "-gag me with a spoon, I know. Okay, right, I know I was dumb. And that's about it. I might bite my tongue or the inside of my cheek. Don't worry about it. There is one more thing."

  She waited, and I wondered how much to tell her. There wasn't a lot she could do, but if I died on her I didn't want her to feel it was her fault.

  "Sometimes I have to go to the hospital. Sometimes one seizure will follow another. If that keeps up for too long, I won't breathe, and my brain will die of oxygen starvation."

  "That only takes about five minutes," she said, alarmed.

  "I know. It's only a problem if I start having them fre­quently, so we could plan for it if I do. But if I don't come out of one, start having another right on the heels of the first, or if you can't detect any breathing for three or four minutes, you'd better call an ambulance."

  "Three or four minutes? You'd be dead before they got here."

  "It's that or live in a hospital. I don't like hospitals."

  "Neither do I."

  The next day she took me for a ride in her Ferrari. I was nervous about it, wondering if she was going to do crazy things. If anything, she was too slow. People behind her kept honking. I could tell she hadn't been driving long from the exaggerated attention she put into every movement.

  "A Ferrari is wasted on me, I'm afraid," she confessed at one point. "I never drive it faster than fifty-five."

  We went to an interior decorator in Beverly Hills and she bought a low-watt gooseneck lamp at an outrageous price.

  I had a hard time getting to sleep that night. I suppose I was afraid of having another seizure, though Lisa's new lamp wasn't going to set it off.

  Funny about seizures. When I first started having them, everyone called them fits. Then, gradually, it was seizures, until fits began to sound dirty.

  I guess it's a sign of growing old, when the language changes on you.

  There were rafts of new words. A lot of them were for things that didn't even exist when I was growing up. Like software. I always visualized a limp wrench.

  "What got you interested in computers, Lisa?" I asked her.

  She didn't move. Her concentration when sitting at the machine was pretty damn good. I rolled onto my back and tried to sleep.

  "It's where the power is, Yank." I looked up. She had turned to face me.

  "Did you pick it all up since you got to America?"

  "I had a head start. I didn't tell you about my Captain, did I?"

  "I don't think you did."

  "He was strange. I knew that. I was about fourteen. He was an American, and he took an interest in me. He got me a nice apartment in Saigon. And he put me in school."

  She was studying me, looking for a reaction. I didn't give her one.

  "He was surely a pedophile, and probably had homosexual tendencies, since I looked so much like a skinny little boy."

  Again the wait. This time she smiled.

  "He was good to me. I learned to read well. From there on, anything is possible."

  "I didn't actually ask you about your Captain. I asked why you got interested in computers."

  "That's right. You did."

  "Is it just a living?"

  "It started that way. It's the future, Victor."

  "God knows I've read that enough times."

  "It's true. It's already here. It's power, if you know how to use it. You've seen what Kluge was able to do. You can make money with one of these things. I don't mean earn it, I mean make it, like if you had a printing press. Remember Osborne mentioned that Kluge's house didn't exist? Did you think what that means?"

  "That he wiped it out of the memory banks."

  "That was the first step. But the lot exists in the county plat books, wouldn't you think? I mean, this country hasn't entirely given up paper.''

  "So the county really does have a record of that house."

  "No. That page was torn out of the records."

  "I don't get it. Kluge never left the house."

  "Oldest way in the world, friend. Kluge looked through the L.A.P.D. files until he found a guy known as Sammy. He sent him a cashier's check for a thousand dollars, along with a letter saying he could earn twice that if he'd go to the hall of records and do something. Sammy didn't bite, and neither did McGee, or Molly Unger. But Little Billy Phipps did, and he got a check just like the letter said, and he and Kluge had a wonderful business relationship for many years. Little Billy drives a new Cadillac now, and hasn't the faintest notion who Kluge was or where he lived. It didn't matter to Kluge how much he spent. He just pulled it out of thin air."

  I thought that over for a while. I guess it's true that with enough money you can do just about anything, and Kluge had all the money in the world.

  "Did you tell Osborne about Little Billy?"

  "I erased that disc, just like I erased your seven hundred thousand. You never know when you might need somebody like Little Billy."

  "You're not afraid of getting into trouble over it?"

  "Life is risk, Victor. I'm keeping th
e best stuff for myself. Not because I intend to use it, but because if I ever needed it badly and didn't have it, I'd feel like such a fool."

  She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, which made them practically disappear.

  "Tell me something, Yank. Kluge picked you out of all your neighbors because you'd been a Boy Scout for thirty years. How do you react to what I'm doing?"

  "You're cheerfully amoral, and you're a survivor, and you're basically decent. And I pity anybody who gets in your way."

  She grinned, stretched, and stood up.

  " 'Cheerfully amoral.' I like that." She sat beside me, making a great sloshing in the bed. "You want to be amoral again?"

  "In a little bit." She started rubbing my chest. "So you got into computers because they were the wave of the future. Don't you ever worry about them… I don't know, I guess it sounds corny… do you think they'll take over?"

  "Everybody thinks that until they start to use them," she said. "You've got to realize just how stupid they are. With­out programming they are good for nothing, literally. Now, what I do believe is that the people who run the computers will take over. They already have. That's why I study them."

  "I guess that's not what I meant. Maybe I can't say it right."

  She frowned. "Kluge was looking into something. He'd been eavesdropping in artificial intelligence labs, and reading a lot of neurological research. I think he was trying to find a common thread."

  "Between human brains and computers?"

  "Not quite. He was thinking of computers and neurons. Brain cells." She pointed to her computer. "That thing, or any other computer, is light-years away from being a human brain. It can't generalize, or infer, or categorize, or invent. With good programming it can appear to do some of those things, but it's an illusion.

  "There's an old speculation about what would happen if we finally built a computer with as many transistors as the human brain has neurons. Would there be a self-awareness? I think that's baloney. A transistor isn't a neuron, and a quintil-lion of them aren't any better than a dozen.

  "So Kluge-who seems to have felt the same way-started looking into the possible similarities between a neuron and an 8-bit computer. That's why he had all that consumer junk sitting around his house, those Trash-80's and Atari's and TI's and Sinclair's, for chrissake. He was used to much more powerful instruments. He ate up the home units like candy."