Just the knowledge that I was here, in Columbus, was enough to bring Thurber out of inforam. My laughter echoed through the large empty room, bounced off the pipes. My mission, so sharp when I left L.A. (you must understand I was second in my class and they were extremely annoyed that I chose to leave; they had other uses in mind for me) was faint and hazy in my mind, like an almost-forgotten dream, when I opened my eyes. But not entirely forgotten. No, not entirely.
And so I rolled out of the cocoon after twenty-four hours, alone. Light came in through a high frosted window and I felt at home in this new place and thanked the sheets, for they had historied me into everything. I knew the past of the region and the medical history of all Don and Mildred's patients as well as that of their parents and grandparents. I knew how to grow corn on the flood plain in the spring. If an Iroquois had shown up, by God, I would have been able to speak her native language with her, though without that stimulus I never would or could utter a word of it.
I took a shower in the small dank concrete-floored stall. There were at least fifty lockers there so I surmised that there had been a time when the cocoons had heavy use. I dried myself, pulled on my skinsuit, and covered it with the native clothing someone had thoughtfully left--overalls. I wear trousers now which do not cling, and plaid shirts from the broken nan ski shop in Flin Flon, which was fortunately well-stocked before the fluid dried up after the townsfolk fled. Ah, what did I know of the fears of the people who lived outside the domes? Sure I used to be an MD once but what did I know? I could cure fear with the proper pheromones but you had to have the receptors first, and I had to have diagnostic equipment, and the pher-pak. Such is life. I can set broken bones now, I couldn't have then. I only knew how to use a computer, that's all, thought I could block the plague but it took me as easily as anyone. Only much more brief ly. It left me with respect.
And I like living here, save for the loneliness. It's all for the best and that optimism comes direct from those Columbus sheets. Because of them I am able to be amused though not at the vagaries of others for there aren't any others here. I am just generally amused, and I'm always ready to be further amused, though not at your expense of course. You would find me pretty amusing too I am sure.
You?
I am really here, really, concrete, flesh. Believe it. If You are kind, we could have children; I am fully functional. Kindness is not really programmable, unfortunately; it's largely an environmental thing. Don was not kind because he thought it wouldn't help him get results, but people who are kind are so under almost all circumstances, save for certain extremes when they may get snappish and that's always understandable when it happens. But if you have turned out kind, children would be interesting. Now if that doesn't tempt you you just aren't the one I'm looking for. There's a fifty percent chance they would have receptors; I don't know whether that sounds good or bad to you, that germ line stuff. Who knows what tomorrow may bring. I'm ever so glad I have mine it makes me more versatile. I am not so lonely as sometimes the fitful satellite gives me Grand dad, I told you that, and we can talk. Other than that I have delusions of recreating civilization, only better and in a foolproof way, so now you know that I am insane and incapable of learning from history. So what? I'm human. If you are kind, you will like that. Don't come if you don't. I am armed, I tell you.
I fell in love with Mildred, and if you are Mildred I don't know what you will think about that, though I did not sleep with her. With You. Oh, I'm getting confused now. I blush. Well, actually, I barely thought of it, though later I did, and plenty, after I'd shrugged off her touch and made her cry. I am sorry about that it is my one regret. All the others are for myself only and therefore silly as errant neutrinos, as meaningless, yet as powerful in the disruption of communications. Her feelings were real and she needed me. Maybe just once. Who else was there, for her? Mildred? You would know why I named my most valuable ally after you. You would like that. I know you. After a year of life with you, my dear, I know you. Apparently that was the most important year of my life. And though I look young, and though I think I could have children, I am old. Old and very, very amused. How good it would be to have company. Especially yours.
#
Perhaps it was the Ohio sheets which made Mildred and I so close. Without them it all might have been so foreign to me that I would have run screaming back to smooth surfaces, information at a touch.
She and Don lived in her mother's house. It was a three- story white frame house with tilting oak floors. The foundation was surrounded by rose bushes which had been mature when Mildred was a child; she tended them with great care and they yielded overblown blossoms which filled the house with color and fra grance from spring to fall. She gave me thorny bouquets for my own little room on 5th Street, a room with high ceilings and a steam-heat vent, utterly unlike anything in the dome.
The three of us visited one another's houses in the evenings and cooked for one another and had the same vision, I thought, combating the plague. Except that we had endless arguments about the best way to do it. Don found it hard to trust inoculation. This was not entirely irrational on his part, but it was the best stopgap we had and better than nothing. Isolation, what they were trying in Columbus, was simply impossible. He tolerated me because he knew he had to. Sometimes I found him staring at me with an unreadable expression after a particularly fierce ex change. I did not find this pleasant. But I was trying to forge some connection with him, because he was my link to his patients. Perhaps he misunderstood my attempts.
We sat in kitchens with wide windows thrown open to the scents of a struggling herb garden and pedestrian footsteps at my house and to the sweet heavy scents of various roses at yours, and battled over how we would save those who legally refused antidotes. Both of you, the medical examples for the community, had done so. Stranger than strange, I thought, and tried hard to get through to you somehow. Though my vision was often disrupted by those funny, round line drawings, some of whom occasionally spoke to me, I could tell that they were not real; I'm sure that Don was disappointed that I had not been seriously disabled. For all that he could tell, the sheets had not worked at all, yet they had. To me it all fell into the category of Dealing With The Natives.
As I said, I set up my nan lab, and from my precious seeds began to synthesize antidotes to all the possible disasters which had been identified. I grew them as crystals, which would keep well, and I had been told to use what was around me and so I built a large shelf of oak boards in my lab--planed and stained them, chuckling once in awhile about Thurber's great-uncle, the only person who had died of the Chestnut Blight. Little had he known, now people probably actually could die of it.
Mildred's mother and grandmother had hoarded jars in their basement for preserving, tinged faintly green with the letters "Ball" sweeping across one side, and I filled several hundred of them and carefully arranged them. Every once in awhile Don would drop by and I would eagerly show him my programs, which I'd brought in several mediums--disks, crystals, spheres--and happily they had a computer there which was crystal-based, so after I got everything running I explained to him in some detail the biochem istry of it all. It puzzled me somewhat to find him so indiffer ent, yet I thought that was because these were things that he must know, already. And he did, of course; he knew enough to prepare the sheets but that didn't take a lot of skill; they were largely self-explanatory. At any rate he pretended ignorance, said that he was too busy with the regular medical emergencies of the community to have devoted as much study to nanplagues as he ought to have--that was why, he said, he welcomed my presence. He said. He always stood uncommonly far from me, and avoided any touch. I noticed this, and it suited me, except that his eyes were often pained and stoic, as if an elephant were standing on his foot and it would be in poor taste to mention it.
I kept backups in several places around town, of course--the top floor of an old bank building, which had an iron door I kept carefully locked; the basement of the old rooming house in which I l
ived, with an amusing old man, Keefer, who lived upstairs. He never joined us for dinner, no matter how often we entreated him, and would never touch our delicious leftovers.
We met unavoidably in the kitchens in the mornings. He smoked cigarettes--grew the tobacco himself and sold it--and had a hacking cough. I can fix that I told him the second day, innocently, and he turned quite pale and his coffee cup shook in his hand. He left by carefully edging around the table and rushed from the room when he got near the door. It took me a week to tempt him back into the same room with me, and I assured him I was proscribed from using nan on anyone who did not cons ent. I told him to stay out of the basement, though, and by God he did. I suppose I ought to have been more careful with all that nan except it was all cures, you see, it was something that those people ought to have had to keep them from getting the other stuff; it was like locking up vitamins but I took my con tract seriously because mutations were possible should one mix them the wrong way.
Once a week I hiked or biked on an old deserted Interstate Highway to the dam and took samples of the deep, clear water. During the winter I carried an ax to chop through the ice. Below the dam, which was ancient, I always felt frightened of that towering concrete V, perfectly curved to control stress and the plague-filled water in which the assemblers had time to work through to their pre-set limits and dead-end while held in a ser ies of locks. Plagues came mostly by rain in those days, and were virulent for only a short period of time--usually, a few hours, sometimes days. I never found anything in the first lock to which I did not have an antidote. In an emergency, I would not have hesitated to administer one. If I had found a new virus, I would have created an antidote. It would have been interesting. Like school again. But I found nothing. After one rain I did find something rather frightful, the Fascist Plague, with a concentration of seven. But it had vanished before the second lock filled.
Don called the general population of Columbus Stupids, and I thought him rude at the time but he was right. I most fear a company of Stupids finding me out, hiking up the mountain and getting me, blaming me as a representative of those who caused all these problems. That is why, take note Stupids, not that you even have the means of picking this up, I am well-armed, with plagues far beyond your ignorant dreams. My weapon is my heart, have I said that? I could infuse you with so much inforam that you would soon abandon your old goals and dreams, which is the dearest fear of Stupids: change. Sorry. I am unkind. My com passion has all leaked out, I suppose, or perhaps that is just the way of old women.
They were truly sick in Columbus; the world sickened them. I was surprised to find this out though they had warned me in L.A. They had no immunities to nanplagues and they lacked receptors, so they could not live in the domed cities or even net in from one of the still-functioning nodes scattered about the country, just for news and suchlike. Legally, we could not give them receptors without their informed consent. They would not consent, though I did make some converts: one rough young man who took the magrail to L.A. soon thereafter, a gentle older woman who was killed by a gang of young religionists when they found out--she told them, the fool, standing on a streetcorner, yelling forth the glories of inforam after all her long dark years. The small community was shocked; a conflicted vigilante group assembled. The religionists fled, of course, but I wanted to kill the lot of those young men and women, or--or--horror of horrors, sheet them. Without their consent. Yes, think me horrible. I was. I still am. I suppose I was lucky the citizens did not turn on me, then, but they did not believe I coerced either of these two people. There was a healthy respect for the individual there, precisely why they so feared nan.
Thurber was upon me, and I often laughed hysterically as one or another of his telling vignettes flashed through me. One day doing medical exams I turned into Thurber in Draft Board Days, when he was erroneously called to be examined for the WWI draft every week, and finally, bored, pretended to be a doctor. He heard a watch someone had swallowed; I heard the pain of extinc tion ticking inside every one of my poor proud citizens of Colum bus, refusing inoculations despite the deadly rains which held the only virulent form of the nanplagues; they lost their potency after going to ground. Everyone stayed inside if rain was merely predicted. They eschewed filter masks, and why not? A drop on the skin could be enough. You have to understand. All those who truly believed in the power of the plagues had long since left for the domed cities, and the ones left behind pretty much ig nored the whole problem, as easily as so many people had ignored the threat of nuclear war, the hole in the ozone, the destruction of the rain forests.
I think that Thurber was an hysteric, like me. Or that he made me one. What I mean is that he had a most strong sense of the absurdity of everything which most people seem to utterly lack. They lack imagination; they lack the powerful emotional ingredient of hysteria. Why, without hysteria, without that crazy laughter which makes no sound, I might have died myself there with Don, with--Mildred? Mildred, are You there? Really, I don't care if we have no children. If You are Mildred, it was a silly idea. I lack the facilities for that here though we could seek them out if you were at all interested. If there are still domes, we could find them, and take care of things there.
Mildred, when and if you wake, if you wake yourself, and survive--I can help you with this, if the programs did not--you will know, you must know, that I had to leave. I couldn't stay and help; I broke my contract to save my own life. But don't blame Don for all of this. If Don had not deliberately given me the wrong sheets I would not have been able to cope as I did. But Thurber and Forts on the Ohio River against which Indians hailed arrows in vain surged through me, twisting my ideas of what was going on. My pioneer receptors sniffed danger and forced me out of town. They said electricity is leaking from the sockets and the bed is falling, really it is. And really, it was.
I remember the first day in the clinic when I was actually able to help.
Tad Schneider slammed the door open and dragged his mother in by the arm. He was just a kid, and his thin sallow face looked more desperate than usual. They all looked desperate once they got to the clinic--before the plague took them wild horses couldn't have dragged them in. That was something I could have done better, educate them about the nature of inoculation. If I had only had longer . . . I was just getting started. A small snippet of nanplague, a few special molecules to course through your brain, attach to your organelles, handily block uglier things. Things that make you think that you must rape and kill, or that dirt is delicious. Arbitrary things like that, some more sophisticated than others, all thoughts which invade the brain with the power of religion.
At any rate, on this level it was behavior modification on an enormous scale. The level of belief which makes people agree that a particular war is necessary, for instance. That to pro tect the practice of a religion which preaches love and forgiveness it is necessary to commit genocide. That was the kind of thing I was there to inoculate against. It was a very tricky dance I was trying to do and I couldn't blame the populace of Columbus for being utterly suspicious of me and my kind. Of course your regular death-plagues--cancers of various sorts, dehydrating fevers which killed after seventy-two hours, things like that, were also entirely possible, and their preventiion part of the baseline immunization package. It was just so diffi cult for these people to believe that what had killed could also heal. They were not ignorant nor were they idiots; they had just been through too much and had decided that it was better to die than to trust any sort of official emissary. Unless it happened to them.
Then they were happy I was there.
Immunization works, though imperfectly, but in a less than totalitarian state this tampering requires permission. That was part of what I was supposed to do--educate--but I've long since realized that my mission was sabotaged once I climbed into that cocoon so trustingly. I don't even think Don carefully consid ered what to do. Scramble the interloper. Ransack the library and give him (or her--surprise, Don!) something at random to top off th
e required information. He probably had no idea what the Thurber sheet was all about. It was just--random. Maybe, con sidering the fear of sheets he had inherited, he thought that would be enough. Enough to make the new doctor look stupid and fail. Perhaps it was.
Mrs. Schneider was tall and rather beautiful, with long, steely-gray hair, though dressed poorly because these folks couldn't afford much and pretended not to want anything remotely connected with nan, such as inexpensive clothing. The continual din of chanting from the usual five or six demonstrators filled the room before Tad closed the door. Tad, fifteen (I knew the minute, hour, and day of his birth when I shook hands with him) with shaggy brown hair and the amazing thinness of youth, looked around the room as if he'd entered the gates of hell and I, in my starched white coat, were the devil. He yanked his hand away from mine.
"She's," he said, and shook his head. Tears gathered in his eyes; he trembled. Mildred, you rushed out then and offered him a Coke; he said no but his mother said, "Drink it," and he did.
She turned to me and said, "It's true. It's happened to me. Something awful. How long have I got?"
"We'll have to do some tests, Mrs. S.," I said, though once I shook her hand I had a pretty good idea of the general parame ters. "Will you sign some consent forms for me?"
"Gladly," she said, and began to sit on a scarred plastic chair beneath an overhead fixture which lacked one light bulb. Mildred had been in the middle of changing it. I clearly saw a cascade of tiny yellow electrical bolts falling on Mrs. S's head from the empty socket. "Why don't you sit over here?" I asked, and hustled her across the room.
"Stand well back. I bite, you know," she said.
"I quite understand," I said, and she was more friendly after that though I'm not sure if she believed me. She frowned over her task after sitting, and looked at the hand holding the pen once or twice in a puzzled way, as if wondering how it func tioned. She bared her teeth as she signed the paper briskly and handed it back to me. "Hurry, please," she said.
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