From Fomalhaut, where the Plasma drifted, he received back a positive response. The team which handled traffic for the Plasma was agreeing to sell him fifteen minutes of the Plasma's time.
At the rate at which he was being metered, he was motivated to feed the Plasma his data very skillfully and very rapidly. He told the Plasma who Rybus was -- which gave the AI System access to her complete files, including her psychological profile -- and he told it that his dome was the closest dome to her, and he told it of her fierce determination to live and her refusal to accept a medical discharge or even transfer from her station. He cupped his head into the shell for psychotronic output so that the Plasma at Fomalhaut could draw directly from his thoughts, thus making available to it all his unconscious, marginal impressions, realizations, doubts, ideas, anxieties, needs.
"There will be a five-day delay in response," the team signaled him. "Because of the distance involved. Your payment has been received and recorded. Over."
"Over," he said, feeling glum. He had spent everything he had. A vacuum had consumed his worth. But the Plasma was the court of last appeal in matters of problem-solving. WHAT SHOULD I DO? he had asked the Plasma. In five days he would have the answer.
During the next five days, Rybus became considerably weaker. She still fixed her own meals, however, although she seemed to eat the same thing over and over again: a dish of high-protein macaroni with grated cheese sprinkled over it. One day he found her wearing dark glasses. She did not want him to see her eyes.
"My bad eye has gone berserk," she said dispassionately. "Rolled up in my head like a window shade." Spilled capsules and tablets lay everywhere around her on her bed. He picked up one of the half-empty bottles and saw that she was taking one of the most powerful analgesics available.
"M.E.D. is prescribing this for you?" he said, wondering, Is she in that much pain?
"I know somebody," Rybus said. "At a dome on IV. The food man brought it over to me."
"This stuff is addictive."
"I'm lucky to get it. I shouldn't really have it."
"I know you shouldn't."
"That goddam M.E.D." The vindictiveness of her tone was surprising. "It's like dealing with a lower life-form. By the time they get around to prescribing, and then getting the medication to you, Christ, you're an urn of ashes. I see no point in them prescribing for an urn of ashes." She put her hand up to her skull. "I'm sorry; I should keep my wig on when you're here."
"It doesn't matter," he said.
"Could you bring me some Coke? Coke settles my stomach."
From her refrigerator he took a liter bottle of cola and poured her a glass. He had to wash the glass first; there wasn't a clean one in the dome.
Propped up before her at the foot of her bed, she had her standard-issue TV set going. It gabbled away mindlessly, but no one was listening or watching. He realized that every time he came over she had it on, even in the middle of the night.
When he returned to his own dome, he felt a tremendous sense of relief, of an odious burden being lifted from him. Just to put physical distance between himself and her -- that was a joy which raised his spirits. It's as if, he thought, when I'm with her I have what she has. We share the illness.
He did not feel like playing any Fox recordings so instead he put on the Mahler Second Symphony,The Resurrection. The only symphony scored for many pieces of rattan, he mused. A Ruthe, which looks like a small broom; they use it to play the bass drum. Too bad Mahler never saw a Morley wah-wah pedal, he thought, or he would have scored it into one of his longer symphonies.
Just as the chorus came in, his in-dome audio system shut down; an extrinsic override had silenced it.
"Transmission from Fomalhaut."
"Standing by."
"Use video, please. Ten seconds till start."
"Thank you," he said.
A readout appeared on his larger screen. It was the AI System, the plasma, replying a day early.
SUBJECT: RYBUS ROMMEY
ANALYSIS: THANATOUS
PROGRAM ADVICE: TOTAL AVOIDANCE ON YOUR PART
ETHICAL FACTOR: OBVIATED
**THANK YOU**
Blinking, McVane said reflexively, "Thank you." He had dealt with the Plasma only once before and he had forgotten how terse its responses were. The screen cleared; the transmission had ended.
He was not sure what "thanatous" meant, but he felt certain that it had something to do with death. It means she is dying, he pondered as he punched into the planet's reference bank and asked for a definition. It means that she is dying or may die or is close to death, all of which I know.
However, he was wrong. It meantproducing death.
Producing, he thought. There is a great difference betweendeath andproducing death. No wonder the AI System had notified him that the ethical factor was obviated on his part.
She is a killer thing, he realized. Well, this is why is costs so much to consult the Plasma. You get -- not a phony answer based on speculation -- but an absolute response.
While he was thinking about it and trying to calm himself down, his telephone rang. Before he picked it up he knew who it was.
"Hi," Rybus said in a trembling voice.
"Hi," he said.
"Do you by any chance have any Celestial Seasonings Morning Thunder tea bags?"
"What?" he said.
"When I was over at your dome that time I fixed beef stroganoff for us, I thought I saw a canister of Celestial Seasonings --"
"No," he said. "I don't. I used them up."
"Are you all right?"
"I'm just tired," he said, and he thought, She said "us." She and I are an "us." When did that happen? he asked himself. I guess that's what the Plasma meant; it understood.
"Do you have any kind of tea?"
"No," he said. His in-dome audio system suddenly came back on, released from its pause mode now that the Fomalhaut transmission had ended. The choir was singing.
On the phone, Rybus giggled. "Fox is doing sound on sound? A whole chorus of a thousand --"
"This is Mahler," he said roughly.
"Do you think you could come over and keep me company?" Rybus asked. "I'm sort of at loose ends."
After a moment, he said, "Okay. There's something I want to talk to you about."
"I was reading this article in --"
"When I get there," he broke in, "we can talk. I'll see you in half an hour." He hung up the phone.
When he reached her dome, he found her propped up in bed, wearing her dark glasses and watching a soap opera on her TV. Nothing had changed since he had last visited her, except that the decaying food in the dishes and the fluids in the cups and glasses had become more dismaying.
"You should watch this," Rybus said, not looking up. "Okay; I'll fill you in. Becky is pregnant, but her boyfriend doesn't --"
"I brought you some tea." He set down four tea bags.
"Could you get me some crackers? There's a box on the shelf over the stove. I need to take a pill. It's easier for me to take medication with food than with water because when I was about three years old. . . you're not going to believe this. My father was teaching me to swim. We had a lot of money in those days; my father was a -- well, he still is, although I don't hear from him very often. He hurt his back opening one of those sliding security gates at a condo cluster where. . ." Her voice trailed off; she had again become engrossed in her TV. McVane cleared off a chair and seated himself.
"I was very depressed last night," Rybus said. "I almost called you. I was thinking about this friend of mine who's now -- well, she's my age, but she's got a class 4-C rating in time-motion studies involving prism fluctuation rate or some damn thing. I hate her. At my age! Can you feature that?" She laughed.
"Have you weighed yourself lately?" he asked.
"What? Oh no. But my weight's okay. I can tell. You take a pinch of skin between your fingers, up near your shoulder, and I did that. I still have a fat layer."
"You look thin," he sai
d. He put his hand on her forehead.
"Am I running a fever?"
"No," he said. He continued to hold his hand there, against her smooth damp skin, above her dark glasses. Above, he thought, the myelin sheath of nerve fibers which had developed the sclerotic patches which were killing her.
You will be better off, he said to himself, when she is dead.
Sympathetically, Rybus said, "Don't feel bad. I'll be okay. M.E.D. has cut my dosage of Vasculine. I only take itt.i.d. now -- three times a day instead of four."
"You know all the medical terms," he said.
"I have to. They issued me a PDR. Want to look at it? It's around here somewhere. Look under those papers over there. I was writing letters to several old friends because while I was looking for something else I came across their addresses. I've been throwing things away. See?" She pointed and he saw sacks, paper sacks, of crumpled papers. "I wrote for five hours yesterday and then I started in today. That's why I wanted the tea; maybe you could fix me a cup. Put a whole lot of sugar in it and just a little milk."
As he fixed her the tea, fragments of a Linda Fox adaptation of a Dowland song moved through his mind.
"Thou mighty God
That rightest every wrong. . .
Listen to Patience In a dying song."
"This program is really good," Rybus said, when a series of commercials interrupted her TV soap opera. "Can I tell you about it?"
Rather than answering, he asked, "Does the reduced dosage of Vasculine indicate that you're improving?"
"I'm probably going into another period of remission."
"How long can you expect it to last?"
"Probably quite a while."
"I admire your courage," he said. "I'm bailing out. This is the last time I'm coming over here."
"My courage?" she said. "Thank you."
"I'm not coming back."
"Not coming back when? You mean today?"
"You are a death-dealing organism," he said. "A pathogen."
"If we're going to talk seriously," she said, "I want to put my wig on. Could you bring me my blonde wig? It's around somewhere, maybe under those clothes in the corner there. Where that red top is, the one with the white buttons. I have to sew a button back on it,if I can find the button."
He found her her wig.
"Hold the hand mirror for me," she said as she placed the wig on her skull. "Do you think I'm contagious? Because M.E.D. says that at this stage the virus is inactive. I talked to M.E.D. for over an hour yesterday; they gave me a special line."
"Who's maintaining your gear?" he asked.
"Gear?" She gazed at him from behind dark glasses.
"Your job. Monitoring incoming traffic. Storing it and then transferring it. The reason you're here."
"It's on auto."
"You have seven warning lights on right now, all red and all blinking," he said. "You should have an audio analog so you can hear it and not ignore it. You're receiving but not recording and they're trying to tell you."
"Well, they're out of luck," she responded in a low voice.
"They have to take into account the fact that you're sick," he said.
"Yes, they do. Of course they do. They can bypass me; don't you receive roughly what I receive? Aren't I essentially a backup station to your own?"
"No," he said. "I'm a backup station to yours."
"It's all the same." She sipped the mug of tea which he had fixed for her. "It's too hot. I'll let it cool." Tremblingly, she reached to set down the mug on a table beside her bed; the mug fell, and hot tea poured out over the plastic floor. "Christ," she said with fury. "Well, that does it; that really does it. Nothing has gone right today. Son of a bitch."
McVane turned on the dome's vacuum circuit and it sucked up the spilled tea. He said nothing. He felt amorphous anger all through him, directed at nothing, fury without object, and he sensed that this was the quality of her own hate: it was a passion which went both nowhere and everywhere. Hate, he thought, like a flock of flies. God, he thought, how I want out of here. How I hate to hate like this, hating spilled tea with the same venom as I hate terminal illness. A one-dimensional universe. It has dwindled to that.
In the weeks that followed, he made fewer and fewer trips from his dome to hers. He did not listen to what she said; he did not watch what she did; he averted his gaze from the chaos around her, the ruins of her dome. I am seeing a projection of her brain, he thought once as he momentarily surveyed the garbage which had piled up everywhere; she was even putting sacks outside the dome, to freeze for eternity. She is senile.
Back in his own dome, he tried to listen to Linda Fox, but the magic had departed. He saw and heard a synthetic image. It was not real. Rybus Rommey had sucked the life out of the Fox the way her dome's vacuum circuit had sucked up the spilled tea.
"And when his sorrows came as fast as floods,
Hope kept his heart till comfort came again."
McVane heard the words, but they didn't matter. What had Rybus called it? Recycled sentimentality and crap. He put on a Vivaldi concerto for bassoon. There is only one Vivaldi concerto, he thought. A computer could do better. And be more diverse.
"You're picking up Fox waves," Linda Fox said, and on his video transducer her face appeared, star-lit and wild. "And when those Fox waves hit you," she said, "you have beenhit !"
In a momentary spasm of fury, he deliberately erased four hours of Fox, both video and audio. And then regretted it. He put in a call to one of the relay satellites for replacement tapes and was told that they were back-ordered.
Fine, he said to himself. What the hell does it matter?
That night, while he was sound asleep, his telephone rang. He let it ring; he did not answer it, and when it rang again ten minutes later he again ignored it.
The third time it rang he picked it up and said hello.
"Hi," Rybus said.
"What is it?" he said.
"I'm cured."
"You're in remission?"
"No, I'm cured. M.E.D. just contacted me; their computer analyzed all my charts and tests and everything and there's no sign of hard patches. Except, of course, I'll never get central vision back in my bad eye. But other than that I'm okay." She paused. "How have you been? I haven't heard from you for so long -- it seems like forever. I've been wondering about you."
He said, "I'm okay."
"We should celebrate."
"Yes," he said.
"I'll fix dinner for us, like I used to. What would you like? I feel like Mexican food. I make a really good taco; I have the ground meat in my freezer, unless it's gone bad. I'll thaw it out and see. Do you want me to come over there or do you --"
"Let me talk to you tomorrow," he said.
"I'm sorry to wake you up, but I just now heard from M.E.D." She was silent a moment. "You're the only friend I have," she said. And then, incredibly, she began to cry.
"It's okay," he said. "You're well."
"I was so fucked up," she said brokenly. "I'll ring off and talk to you tomorrow. But you're right; I can't believe it, but I made it."
"It is due to your courage," he said.
"It's due to you," Rybus said. "I would have given up without you. I never told you this, but -well, I squirreled away enough sleeping pills to kill myself, and --"
"I'll talk to you tomorrow," he said, "about getting together." He hung up and lay back down.
He thought, When Job had lost his children, lands, and goods, Patience assuaged his excessive pain. And when his sorrows came as fast as floods, Hope kept his heart till comfort came again. As the Fox would put it.
Recycled sentimentality, he thought. I got her through her ordeal and she paid me back by deriding into rubbish that which I cherished the most. But she is alive, he realized; she did make it. It's like when someone tries to kill a rat. You can kill it six ways and it still survives. You can't fault that.
He thought, That is the name of what we are doing here in this star system on these fr
ozen planets in these little domes. Rybus Rommey understood the game and played it right and won. To hell with Linda Fox. And then he thought, But also to hell with what I love.
It is a good trade-off, he thought: a human life won and a synthetic media image wrecked. The law of the universe.
Shivering, he pulled his covers over him and tried to get back to sleep.
The food man showed up before Rybus did; he awoke McVane early in the morning with a full shipment.
"Still got your temp and air illegally boosted," the food man said as he unscrewed his helmet.
"I just use the equipment," McVane said. "I don't build it."
"Well, I won't report you. Got any coffee?"
They sat facing each other across the table drinking fake coffee.
"I just came from the Rommey girl's dome," the food man said. "She says she's cured."
"Yeah, she phoned me late last night," McVane said.
"She says you did it."
To that, McVane said nothing.
"You saved a human life."
"Okay," McVane said.
"What's wrong?"
"I'm just tired."
"I guess it took a lot out of you. Christ, it's a mess over there. Can't you clean it up for her? Destroy the garbage, at least, and sterilize the place; the whole goddam dome is septic. She let her garbage disposal get plugged and it backed up raw sewage all over her cupboards and shelves, where her food is stored. I've never seen anything like it. Of course, she's been so weak --"
McVane interrupted, "I'll look into it."
Awkwardly, the food man said, "The main thing is, she's cured. She was giving herself the shots, you know."
"I know," McVane said. "I watched her." Many times, he said to himself.
"And her hair's growing back. Boy, she looks awful without her wig. Don't you agree?"
Rising, McVane said, "I have to broadcast some weather reports. Sorry I can't talk to you any longer."
Toward dinnertime Rybus Rommey appeared at the hatch of his dome, loaded down with pots and dishes and carefully wrapped packages. He let her in, and she made her way silently to the kitchen area, where she dumped everything down at once; two packages slid off onto the floor and she stooped to retrieve them.
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