by John Varley
I never did get a real good look at the remains of my face. But I can never erase that distorted image of myself from my memory. It was an image out of a horror movie. My nose was gone. The whole left side of my face was mostly missing. In places, the bare bone of my skull was exposed. The hair was scorched off on the left side. I was badly roasted meat.
I try to imagine what someone living in, say, the twentieth century would be going through, looking at a face like that. Knowing that it wasn’t going to ever get much better.
Then there is the question of pain.
I have said that the pain I suffered while in the emergency shelter was indescribable, and it was. But when I was finally taken out of the shelter and put into treatment, the pain was over. For our ancestors, the pain never stopped for the most severe cases.
For a while I thought Gretel was able to deal with the horror of my face, my burned-off arm, and my other terrible burns because, as a resident of Irontown, she sometimes came into contact with the disease and disfigurement junkies who lived there. That was not strictly true. Irontown was not a single bloc of people. In fact, many Heinleiners didn’t accept that they were in Irontown at all. And they could make a pretty good case since nowhere on city maps or regional maps does a place called Irontown appear. It was the same with Heinlein Town. The fact was that Heinleiners looked on the underclass population who were their neighbors—think of it as Lower Irontown—with the same contempt that everyone else did.
A bunch of losers, Gretel said to me once when we were talking about things to try to get my mind off the pain. She had seldom seen the people who had purposely disfigured their faces into things that would make the Phantom of the Opera recoil in terror. The few times she did, she was disgusted, not scared.
* * *
—
All my memories from that point on are mixed together even more badly than before the battle. I never did find out what stuff she had found on the outside, nor where she found it. I knew very little about what she was doing to me, except that most of it was very painful. Oddly, though, some of it didn’t hurt at all.
Later I put myself through a difficult course of learning about burns, stopping every ten minutes or so because I was having a panic attack.
I had the whole miserable spectrum of burns on various parts of my body, from first-degree all the way to fourth-degree. Before, I hadn’t even known there were degrees.
You would think that the worst burns, third and fourth, would be the most painful, but that’s not true. Thirds burn down through the whole of your skin, known as the dermis. Fourths burn down through the muscle, sometimes to the bone. In the past, few people survived fourths without immediate amputation.
But they don’t hurt because they destroy the nerves in the skin. If you look down at yourself and see massive burn damage and you don’t feel any pain, you are in deep trouble. Get yourself to a hospital, at once.
It’s the firsts and seconds that cause the agony. I had a lot of those.
* * *
—
I learned about the Big Glitch in stages, reported to me by Gretel when she had returned from one of her forays Outside. That’s how I began to think of it. Outside. The universe was divided into two more or less equal parts: my six-by-six-by-six cold universe of pain and everything else.
* * *
—
At first I cursed the lack of an air lock on the shelter. Gretel had to come and go as time went on. After the third or fourth time, though, I hardly noticed it. Not long after that she finally located one of the things she had been looking for from the start. She returned from one of her scrounging expeditions with a mask that covered my face, and some extra oxygen bottles to feed it. After that, her comings and goings were less of an ordeal, though I still wouldn’t recommend it the next time you go out into vacuum. She was able to improvise straps to hold the mask securely to my face—or what was left of it—for the fifteen seconds or so when there was no air for me to breathe. Though the pain of the mask was pretty bad, it was better than the sensation of air rushing from my lungs.
Eight days passed.
* * *
—
Eight days? You gotta be kidding, don’t you?
I wish I was.
For much of the first day, we waited to be rescued. But as the hours dragged by, it became more and more clear that we might be on our own, at least for a little while.
There was a small window in the pressure door, just a round bit of glass set into the metal.
The first time I noticed her looking, she quickly ducked down again.
“There’s guys in pressure suits out there,” she whispered. Whispering made no sense, of course, since even shouting through a bullhorn would not have carried through the vacuum outside.
“They’re part of your bunch,” she said. “Soldiers.” She spat out that word with contempt. I wanted to tell her I hadn’t signed up for anything like what actually went down, but who was I kidding? I had joined an invasion force, and it had not gone off according to plan.
“Are they looking this way?”
“I didn’t get a good look. Should I look again?”
Carefully, she edged upward and peered through the glass.
“Okay, I see three soldiers. They’re just standing around, it looks like. They’re holding rifles, I guess. Not like the big laser you had.” She looked back and down and glared at me. She looked back, and gasped.
“Two of them just picked up a body. He’s in a uniform like the one you’re wearing. They’re going away from us, and now they’re . . . oh, Chris, they just tossed the body on a stack of other ones. A lot of other ones. Soldiers. Civilians. Innocent bystanders, Chris. Are you happy?”
I had never been less happy but couldn’t think of anything to say.
I think this was a few hours after we entered the shelter. I know she had already made her first foray outside, and that time she had not seen anyone moving at all.
We know now that the soldiers had pulled back to regroup, and the Heinleiners had retreated to safety in places that appeared on no maps, pretty much beyond the reach of the invaders.
Gretel was getting increasingly antsy. There were things she needed to get, she told me. The air situation was not critical at that point. We debated whether or not to surrender to the people outside. She was in favor of it, in spite of their menacing appearance with the guns. And there was a risk that our refuge would be discovered anyway. We couldn’t hide in there forever.
I was against it. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Maybe it was something to do with the Uglies, the mercenary troops from the Outer Planets. There had been something fishy about this operation from the first, but I had been too stupid to smell it.
“I don’t care what you say, Chris. If I don’t get you to a hospital, you’re going to die. I’m going out there.”
“Please, Gretel. Just give it one more hour.” Something inside me was screaming to not let her leave as long as the soldiers were there. I even thought about trying physically to stop her, but clearly that would be impossible. She agreed, reluctantly, and sat down to pout about it. But the next time she looked outside, she found out how right I was.
“It’s a couple of those bigger gorillas. They’re walking up to the others . . . you said they were cops? There’s about . . . three, four . . . I see six of them. The big guys are gesturing to them to . . .”
She screamed, and fell from her perch on the metal first-aid box. For quite a long time she wasn’t able to find words. Finally she did.
“They’re . . . they’re killing them!” She screamed it over and over, approaching hysteria. I was utterly frustrated. There were so many things I wanted to do. Get up and look for myself. Go over and put my arm around her. Start screaming myself. But I had to keep my head if she was going to survive. After all she had done for me, it would be just the most t
errible thing in the world if she died now.
“Calm down a little, Gretel. Who is killing who?”
It took awhile, but she finally was able to speak again.
“The big gorillas. They just started shooting at the other guys. You said they were cops, like you?”
“They must be. The big guys aren’t part of us.”
“Then who are they? Besides murdering monsters!”
“I’m not completely sure of that myself.” There was no sense scaring her further by saying that they came from that legendary birthplace of monsters, Charon. “Look, Gretel, get up there and look again. See if they’re doing a search.” What we would be able to do about it if they were was a tough question. All I could come up with was for her to throw the door wide and make a run for it.
She didn’t want to get back on the box. Who could blame her? But her bravery continued unabated. She edged up to it and pressed her eye to the glass.
“I don’t see anything except . . .” She swallowed hard. “Some dead bodies. Six of them. Their suits are punctured, and there’s . . .” She turned aside and vomited. “There’s frozen blood all around them. They just executed them . . .” She began to lose it again. I managed to reach over and pat her leg. She calmed down a little.
“I don’t see any of the monsters. I guess they didn’t see us.”
“Maybe they don’t have the same kind of emergency shelters on Charon. Maybe they didn’t recognize what it was.”
“You think so?”
“I will if you will.”
Later we learned what was going on. It was standard procedure for the Charonese when things went belly-up. They were eliminating witnesses who might be able to testify against them in an Interplanetary Court.
Each day that went by, we figured it could not last much longer. And then it lasted another day. No air outside, and no one moving around.
The lack of any sightings of Irontowners was a growing concern. Gretel fretted, unable to understand why none of her friends and family had repaired the damage to the environment and repressurized it. We still had no inkling of what was going on in the larger society, remember. We didn’t know of the chaos that reigned everywhere, of the thousands and thousands of people who lost their lives because the CC became suicidal and went insane. There was no communication on either of our implanted techs. Mine could have been down because of the extensive damage to my head. We thought it was possible that the equipment had been fried, along with my face. But Gretel’s should have worked.
I have since adjusted to a life without being connected to the grid. I no longer can just think a request and have an image pop up in my virtual vision. It’s not as hard as you might imagine though I freely admit that it is inconvenient at times.
There was no food in the shelter, and very little water. We used up all the water on the first day, and were soon very thirsty. I stayed thirsty no matter how much water I drank. If I had more than a few sips, it would come right back up. The trouble was, with no air out there, much of the available water had boiled away. There had been a fountain not far from our shelter, but it was dry. The same with the spigots in the ice-cream parlor and other restaurants around the plaza. She was finally able to locate some five-gallon cans and schlep them back.
Finding food was easy enough. She was small and not very hungry. As the days went by, the stench of the two of us was enough to stun a brontosaurus. Or so she said. I smelled nothing. All I will say about our toilet arrangements was that she came back one day with a bucket. At least the bucket could be pretty much sterilized every time she went outside.
She couldn’t do that with the other source of the stench, which was me. My flesh was putrefying.
Every time she left, I wished she would not come back. And every time she came back, I wished I could just die. But I don’t seem to have suicide in me, and she was not a killer, even a mercy killer. And my body showed an amazing desire to cling to life.
The biggest problem in emergency situations though, as always in Luna, was air. The shelter had enough air for four to six people for about twenty-four hours. Do the math, and that’s somewhere between around one hundred and one hundred fifty man-hours of air. Which should sustain the two of us for forty-eight to seventy hours. In reality, this one hadn’t been serviced in a long time, and there was only about a third of full recommended pressure in the bottles. When Gretel discovered that, she used some words her mother probably wouldn’t have approved of. We only had between sixteen to twenty hours of breathing. It didn’t worry me, for myself, but I was desperate that Gretel should survive. And, of course, I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
There was another factor to consider. Though the nullsuits were superior to the old helmet-and-suit variety of pressure suit, there was this about them: Without a connection to an exterior bottle slung over the back or shoulder, they were only good for about an hour. That was because there was only so much pressurized air you could fit into the lung-shaped internal bottle that took the place of the lung that was removed when the damn thing was installed.
I never knew exactly what Herculean tasks Gretel performed to keep us in air. She would leave and go scavenging, and somehow she found enough stuff to keep her alive and me barely ticking over.
Of course, what we both wanted her to do was explore, range far and wide and find someone to rescue us. But she was too busy scrounging most of the time. She refused to go out until it was absolutely necessary because of the toll we both knew the repeated exposures to vacuum were taking on me. Under the best conditions, she would only be able to range about for half an hour before she had to return and fill her tank again.
Eight days. Eight days like that.
I became increasingly delirious. She talked a lot, mostly to keep herself sane. She told me many things about her life, her family, her hopes and dreams. I remember only a little of that, and I won’t share it with anybody, ever. That is between the two of us.
Then on the eighth day, someone knocked on the door. I don’t remember it, but I’m sure Gretel almost jumped out of her skin. Was this a savior, or a killer?
An ambulance backed up to the pressure door and sealed itself against it. The door popped open. I do remember that, the door opening, light spilling inside, both of us blinking like troglodytes exposed to the sun for the first time. Gretel burst into tears. I wished I could, but I was too far gone.
* * *
—
A nurse later told me that I was as near death as anyone he had ever seen. The only thing I remembered for a long time was waking up once and discovering that the pain was gone.
So was much of my body. The list of things that needed replacing would have stretched to Mars and back. When the repair work is that extensive they bring you back to awareness gradually, so the next two weeks passed in a dreamlike state.
The first lucid experience I had was looking up from the treatment cell, wires and tubes webbing my body from legs to head, to see Gretel looking down on me. She was cleaned up, of course, and wearing clothes for the first time in a long time.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“I just want to thank you, for everything, but I don’t know how I possibly could.”
She shrugged.
“You would have done the same for me.”
That’s all I remember. She left. Later, I tried to find her, but she had vanished back into the secret world of libertarian Irontown.
After the passage of quite a few years, I gave up my search and accepted that I would probably never see her again.
* * *
—
They put me back together, just as good as new. They tried to talk me into getting new cyber implants, but I was adamant on the subject. The CC, or whatever took its place, was never getting into my head again.
It was my body they put together again, of course. As for my mind . .
. that’s still an ongoing project. It will probably never be reassembled just like it was. But I have learned to live with that.
sixteen
SHERLOCK AGAIN
“You be a good dog while I’m away,” αChris said to me. I could smell that he was worried. I played dumb by letting my tongue hang out and pretending I did not know where he was going. Playing dumb is not easy for me because I am very smart. I have learned that being smart and being clever are not the same thing. But I am also very clever as well as smart. A dog must be clever to pretend. I have learned how to pretend. Other dogs cannot pretend. They always wag their tails when they are happy or hang their heads when they are sad. I can wag my tail when I am sad. I can even wag my tail when I am angry! I am so clever!
I listened to αChris as he galumphed down the stairs. I love αChris with all my heart, but he could not sneak up on a newborn puppy. I cannot sneak as well as a damn cat, but who would want to be a damn cat?
When he was down to the dark street I hurried down the back stairs. I did not need to see him. I kept a good distance behind αChris as he started out toward Irontown. The spoor of αChris is the scent most familiar to me of the shitload of scents I know.
Does that make scents to you? Ha-ha!
* * *
—
Some say that Irontown does not have a border. Some say that you gradually enter places that are more and more Irontown. This is like having your nose in the kitchen and your tail in the living room. Then you are in Irontown, and you did not even know you were there.
I have learned that this is not completely true. Maybe it is true for humans because humans are not very smart. There was a point in space that I passed and knew I was there. I marked that point in my mind. I began smelling things in combinations I had never smelled before. I began smelling things I had never smelled before at all. This was very interesting. I held my nose high, then low, and sucked up the smells.
