V-Bill leaned back in his chair and made a steeple of his hands in the middle of his chest, a gesture that William lately had felt looked patronizing, so he’d quit doing it. The DT hadn’t picked up the change in his behavior yet, but it wouldn’t be long before v-Bill quit doing it too.
“I have bad days just like anyone else,” said v-Bill. “We could talk about it if you’d like.” He appeared concerned, as if William’s aggressiveness puzzled and hurt him. What was weird, William realized, was that even though he knew that v-Bill was only a construct, a brilliantly concocted amalgam of his own personality, mannerisms and DT augmented expertise, he found he almost wanted to tell him what was wrong: that he wasn’t positive that he should be a teacher anymore, or if he had ever been a teacher. He caught himself feeling sorry he’d been rude.
Suddenly angry, and unsure of why he’d called him in the first place, William said, “I’m not in the mood for this kind of self gratification.” He cut the connection. Instantly his earphone squeaked and a warning flag flashed in the corner of the work area. William tapped it, and the DT reported his own interaction with v-Bill as problematic and needing his personal attention. William smiled. The DT couldn’t handle his conferences with himself, which was probably why Central Education frowned on teachers communicating with their alter egos.
The shuttle lurched, and William raised the privacy shield. They had entered the park and had begun the long, winding climb to the visitor’s center on the rim of a canyon.
Naturally, all his students recognized him when he met them in the main lobby. They gathered around, DTs tucked under their arms or in backpacks, to shake his hand.
“William, at last, we meet face to face,” one said. William’s earphone whispered the student’s name and a personal fact that he could use to establish rapport, and William greeted him as if they were old friends, which, as far as the student was concerned, they were. As the rest made their hellos, the earphone prompted him continuously. All the time he shook hands, though, commenting about each student’s progress or asking about their hobbies, William scanned the crowd looking for Jonas Wynn. Hundreds of people filled the lobby: his own class and others, but also what looked like a couple of retirement groups, families and foreign tourists, all waiting patiently for their chance to walk one of the many guided trips into the canyon. The logistics of running a national park must be staggering, thought William. But he didn’t see his reluctant learner.
Finally, just as the visitor center dispatching officer announced his class’ departure gate, William spotted Jonas. Smaller than his picture implied, and much, much more frail, the boy moved uncertainly toward their gate, making labored progress as he squeezed between other people in his way.
“Over here, Jonas,” William shouted. The boy scanned the crowd blankly for a second, then his eyes settled on William. Some emotion flickered across Jonas’ face, an unreadable grimace. He pushed past the last intervening groups to join the class just as their gate whooshed open and the visitor center tour program started in their earphones.
William turned and followed his class out the door under the “STAY ON THE TRAIL” sign. He’d done this tour several times before, so he knew that they had to move rather smartly to keep up with the park’s description of where they were. He wouldn’t speak to them as a group until the first “meditation” rest a half mile farther along the canyon rim, just before the trail wound down into the canyon itself.
The sudden brightness of the noon sun made him blink away tears as he walked on the cement path. He wiped his eyes. To their left, a sandstone talus slope spotted with juniper, rose to the road they’d arrived on. Beyond that, a pale bluff of soft-curved rock marked the horizon. To their right, on the other side of a guard rail, the canyon, a thousand feet deep and a mile wide gaped invitingly. A pair of canyon swifts swooped in the updrafts. A bird called, a lovely trill of notes that died hauntingly away on the last tone, but he couldn’t tell if it were virtual through his earphone or if a real bird had made it.
Jonas walked just in front of him, his thin shoulders tightly bunched under his shirt. His glance darted to each side, as if he were afraid someone would catch him looking, and twice he turned back over his shoulder and caught William’s eyes.
“Nice day for this, isn’t it?” offered William.
Jonas jumped, and said nothing.
At the first rest stop, William gathered the class and recited some Edward Abbey and Thoreau from memory. He didn’t need the earphone to prompt him on this, but he felt programmed just the same. Behind him, he knew, sunlight danced in the canyon, and his students were reacting to the real-lesson by contrasting it to the v-lessons. Later, they’d all ooh and ah about how much more profound their moment with nature had been compared to the vids from their DTs. This was experiential knowledge and fit exactly into each of their DT driven I.E.P.s.
But he didn’t feel as if he were learning anything. Not only did he feel that he was indistinguishable from any prerecorded presentation, but the canyon itself felt virtual. He saw what the park determined he should see. He heard what the park determined he should hear. The tour controlled all of it, and he felt no hint of exploration any more, no hope for discovery.
As he reached the end of the Thoreau piece, and their attentive faces were focussed on him, he noticed Jonas at the back of the class, looking down at his shoes, scuffing some sand on the trail back and forth, and he felt exactly the same feeling about Jonas that he felt about the park. Where’s my chance to teach him? he thought. What can I do that the charts and diagnostics haven’t already told me? I am, he thought, predigested. My path has been determined.
The class applauded when he reached the end with Thoreau’s words, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” But William mouthed the words emptily, and realized that like v-Bill, he too was all form and no content.
His earphone pinged, and the park program urged them to proceed down the trail into the canyon. There, it said, they could see the “sands of time cut away” and that they’d “pass through million of millions of years with each downward step.”
His class turned away obediently and filed onto the narrow stairway with its protective handrails. William watched them leave. I can give you nothing, he thought. He knew that for the next twenty minutes, their earphones would direct their attention to the rock formations, to the pinion pine that clung precariously to tiny outcroppings, to the vistas beyond, and when they reached the next rest stop, where he was supposed to speak again, that the DT would recognize he was not there and fill in with something appropriate. The class wouldn’t know that he was supposed to accompany them the whole way. They’d never miss him.
Jonas, the last student, vanished down the trail, and William remained, leaning against the cool sandstone rock he’d lectured to them from. Within a minute, he heard the footsteps of the next group coming down the path, so he climbed over the low restraining fence and hurried out of sight up the canyon rim.
Within fifty yards of where he’d left the path, his earphone chirped, and an official sounding voice warned him that he was violating park rules and must return to the marked trail. William pulled the earphone out and placed it on top of his DT. His hand seemed strangely empty without it; a breath of air cooled the sweat in his ear. Then he continued walking the rim.
He thought about Leslie Franklin. They’d talked every morning for the last forty-four years, but they’d never met. She’d married twice during the years. He’d attended the ceremonies electronically. He’d consoled her when the first marriage fell apart, and then when her second husband passed away. They exchanged gifts on Christmas and birthdays. They’d co-authored papers together. He wondered what she smelled like. He wondered what it would have been like to have touched her hair.
In places, the rock slope fell gradually down in a confusio
n of crevices and boulders. He could see the deep fall in the gaps between them. In other places, long tables of rock, broken sharply away told him where the edge was. Further up canyon, some of them protruded beyond the cliff wall, so if he stood at the precipice, he might actually be dozens of feet over the drop already, with nothing between him and a thousand foot plummet except the lip of stone that supported him. He walked as close to the edge as he could; at times letting the edge of his shoe overlap, not really paying attention, feeling no vertigo, but his right hand waved airily over the nothingness beyond.
He blinked slowly, still walking, so for two or three steps at a time, he couldn’t see where he was going, but the breeze brushed his face, and he felt an almost bat-like sense of where he was, as if he was flying on the edge, not walking. Sand scrunched. Branches creaked. Leaves rustled. Real air! Real sand! Contact! he thought, and he pictured a stride into wind, into real stone.
William stopped and faced the canyon. He closed his eyes. Sunlight pressed warmly on his face. Stone rested solidly beneath his heels, and he could feel the naked pull of the canyon in his chest. He let the breeze sway him back and forth. This is good, he thought. This is real and proper. Tears rolled off his cheeks, but he didn’t feel sad right now, he felt better than he’d been all day.
After a while, feeling very centered, a long, long reach away from his class and the DTs and forty-four years of teaching, he looked where he faced. A dozen feet away, balanced on an updraft and as still as the rocks around him, a raven floated in the air. William stared back. Nothing moved, and for a spooky, surreal second, William thought that he’d slipped out of time; the world had stopped and he was the ghost in the eternal and unchanging now. Then the raven cocked its head from one side to the other seeming to examine him with shiny, black glass eyes.
Then it dropped a wing and glided swiftly away.
Leslie had said that she didn’t want to learn anything that she couldn’t learn by being there. And he wondered if she had meant by that that she wanted to learn the things that couldn’t be tested, measured or described. How do you evaluate seeing the raven? How do you teach it?
The tears began to dry on his cheeks, pulling at the skin, and he realized where he stood, toes suspended over the rocks far below. He stepped back.
“You’re not supposed to be there, are you?” a voice asked.
William didn’t turn immediately. He tried to hold onto the feeling that possessed him, but the immediacy of the question drove it back. Not completely. He could still sense it, a tinge of connection. Real world. Real lessons. Real learning.
He turned. Jonas stood beside a clump of sage, his serious face inscrutable. “This is off limits,” he said.
William sighed and pressed his hands into the small of his back. The muscles there ached suddenly, and it took a concentrated effort to make them relax.
“You’re not supposed to be here either,” said William.
“I know. What were you doing?”
In the canyon, William saw the raven, now just a black dot sliding along a cliff wall. “Well,” he said, “I’m not sure.” He thought about all the things he could say to the boy, all the things the DT had told him about learning style and modes of instruction, and he decided just to answer the question. “I think I was thinking about who I am.”
“Really?” said Jonas. He approached the edge and sat down, his feet dangling over the precipice. “What did you learn?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Jonas seemed to absorb that for a moment. The floor of the canyon spread out beneath their feet. William let his heels bounce off the unyeilding wall. In DT conferences, William always answered questions quickly, or formulated advice for his students even as the student spoke so there would be no wasted time, but here, with Jonas on the edge of a cliff, he didn’t want to speak. He had nothing to say.
Finally, as if to fill the silence, Jonas said, “Did you see that crow?”
“Crows have fan shaped tails.” William scrunched his fingertips against the rock. Gritty bits rolled beneath them, and he knew that if he sat there forever and kept rubbing his fingers back and forth in the same spot, he’d eventually wear away grooves in the stone. He would leave a mark. “That bird’s tail was like a wedge. It was a raven.”
“Oh,” said Jonas. “I didn’t know.”
They talked for a half hour more. Cloud shadows moved across the floor of the canyon. Swifts dove by, cutting the air with abrupt rips. William’s legs grew cold against the stone, but he felt no urge to move.
Finally, an angry voice called from behind them, “Hey! You two are way out of bounds. What do you think you’re up to?” It was a park ranger.
Jonas said, “This is my teacher. He was teaching me something.”
William nodded.
WORKING THE MOON CIRCUIT
The problem with running full reality skin shell rentals is that everyone wants to try the vices. You’d think with so many other ways to get the experience of visiting remote archeological sites that booting into a rental wouldn’t hold much attraction, but there are kinds for every kind, as they say, so we keep a stock of fully functioning skin shells. It’s supposed to make the experience more “authentic,” whatever that means, but the real draw, as I said, is the vice.
As one of the curators, I’m booted into a shell semi-permanently, of course. Hands, face, feet, hair, teeth: the whole package. When I’m not interpreting the data the ancients left behind, I run tours and help customers orient themselves to the new equipment. Bipedal locomotion, for example, takes some time to master, and binocular vision with the eyes on top of the organism can also be confusing. Why the feet have to be so far from the sensing organs is beyond me, but that’s the way this species worked. No wonder there aren’t any of them around any more.
So, I took the first tour of the day down to the observation deck. What I wanted were questions about how the ancients who left their mark on the airless surface traveled, how they achieved so much in metallurgy and physics without the benefit of groupmeld or infinitely researchable infoquarries. What I wanted were questions about their thinking, about their spirits, and if I thought remnants of the dead lingered, but tourists never asked interesting questions. They came to see the remnants and to abuse the skin shells, and then they left. None of them stayed long enough to learn who I was, and I didn’t care about them. It’s lonely work.
These ancients were first tier primitives, discovering everything on their own, scrambling out of an impressive gravity well in canisters designed to carry the conditions their unmalleable bodies could tolerate. A truly impressive achievement, and although they have long since disappeared, they left footprints in the dust, and their machines mark the possibilities of persistent sentience.
Instead, the dilettantes spent a desultory hour touching each other, stumbling into walls, mangling the language, and occasionally shrieking just to see how much volume the vocal chords could manage. Hard to believe these were the masters of the universe. One, though, a dark-haired woman who had been coming to the lectures for weeks, hearing the same presentations over and over, stood almost comatose on the edge. As always, she caught my attention with stillness. The first time I saw her, I thought that the port hadn’t taken and the body was unoccupied, but she had moved away from a loud man who pulled at his lip, then laughed when it slapped against his teeth.
Ignoring tourist boorishness is easy, though. Except for the dark-haired woman who evidently had decided to be a permanent resident, they come and go. The gallery remains, like the footprints themselves.
I like the set up. In the morning, the perfectly clear floor hangs an inch above the airless surface, exactly duplicating the impressions in the dust, so the customers can study the several million-year old footprints up close. A couple hours later, the observation area is drawn thirty feet up to give a panorama. The ancient landing vessel rests on its four feet, surrounded by the detritus of the expedition. I explain what each piece is for customers wh
o want the full experience of wearing the skin shells. Instead of shooting the info straight into their storage centers, I tell how the main ship they see is just a landing stage, that the primitive explorers detached a second vessel to blast their way back to a meeting with orbiting transport, where the explorers abandoned the second ship to go home.
This took some explaining, and most of the tourists would port the facts later, once they figured out that “listening” to information, and then trying to process the audible signals was an incredibly tedious way to learn anything.
But they wanted the experience. At least that’s what they said.
The vices, though, caught most of their attention. Some drugs, for example, altered the shell’s perceptions in interesting ways. Eating, for others, entertained them for hours, particularly spicy foods or sweets. Part of my job involved purging the skin shells of the unnecessary calories and then exercising them remotely to maintain muscle tone after the tenants evacuated. And, naturally, most of the tourists grew interested in sexual possibilities. Since I had been wearing my skin shell for several years, and had become comfortable in it, tourists often approached me for help.
One of the women shells caught me after the morning tour, a red-haired model, a bit shorter than me. I had, while becoming acquainted with my skin shell in the first months, experimented with its sexual possibilities quite often. This red-haired one hadn’t been a favorite. They all feel slightly different, although, who is animating the skin is more interesting than the skin itself. As stimulating as sex in these shells can be, the personality interaction makes the encounter.
Red Hair said, “I’m only here for a few days, and the rest of my tour group is clumsy in this form, but I hear that procreation activities can be quite pleasant if you’re with someone who knows what they are doing. I have an hour before the next presentation. Would you mind helping?”
See what I mean?
I begged off without explaining to her that if she wanted real authenticity in her skin shell that she should wear the clothes we provided instead of running around the center naked.
Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille Page 8
