Rimkin thought: Live Martians? If I were a live Martian, then I wouldn't have to worry about the seven hundred and fifty enzyme reactions that keep the human body alive. But then, there'd be others, different ones, even more complicated, even more dangerous, because they have to function over a much wider temperature range. Am I a Martian? Am I one of those strange creatures I watched in the beam of my flash walking the strange alleys with the garnet-colored walls, driving their beasts and greeting one another with incomprehensible gestures? But this woman, which one is she? "Where's Jimmi …?" Rimkin asked.
He heard Hodges start to say something; then she decided not to and began the complicated maneuver of her prostheses to stand. "Can you walk, Rimkin? I think I'd better get you back to the skimmer."
"The skimmer …? Oh, yes. Of course. It's time to go back to the skimmer, isn't it?"
He ached. All over his body, he ached. But he managed to stand, thinking, Why does it hurt so? Perhaps it's one of the seven hundred reactions starting to fail, and I'm going to …
"Let's hurry up," Hodges urged. "If you've been out here all night, you're probably on the third time through your air. I bet it's stale as an old laundry bag in there."
Rimkin started slowly across the stones. But Hodges paused. Suddenly she bent down before the cracked visage and shone Rimkin's laser on the broken iris. She looked for the whole minute it took Rimkin to reach the edge. She made puzzled "mmmmmmmm" sounds twice.
When she joined him to climb down to the sand, she was frowning behind the white frame of her helmet. And a couple of times she made stranger faces.
IV
The process of getting Rimkin to bed pretty well finished getting everybody else up. When Dr. Jones wanted to give him a sedative, Rimkin went into a long and fairly coherent discussion about the drug's causing possible upset in his enzymal chemistry, which the others listened to seriously until suddenly he started to cry. At last he let Jimmi give him the injection. And while the pretty Micronesian qualitative analyst stroked his forehead, he fell asleep.
Mak, in his weight allowance for Equipment Vital to the Facilitation of Your Specialized Functions, had secreted a Westphalian ham and a gallon of the good Slivowitz, contending that breakfast was pointless without a hefty slice of the one and at least a pony of the other. But he was willing to share; the ritual of breakfast was left to his episcopacy. Anyway, he had the best luck among them beating dehydrated eggs back into shape. Now, in the small area under the steps where such things were done, he was clanking and fuming like a rum-and-maple dragon.
Smith came down the stairs.
A skillet cover rang on the pan rim. Mak grunted. "I didn't realize he was that bad, Ling."
Jones folded the gaming board; the pattern of white and black fell apart. He slid the pebbles into the pot and pushed the stud on the pot base. "I guess none of us did." The pot began to vibrate. The white stones were substantially less dense than the black ones, so, after a good shaking, ended up on top. "Do you think Mars is just too much for him?" Dr. Jones had already noticed that the separation process took longer on this lightweight planet than at home.
"Naw." Mak ducked from under the stairs with his platter of ham and eggs. The steam rose and mixed with the pipe smoke. "This must have been building for months, maybe all his life, if Freud's progeny are to be trusted."
He leaned over hefty Miss Hodges and set the platter down. Then he frowned at her. "You look oddly pensive, ma'am."
Hodges, using her aluminum stalks, pushed herself around from the table so she could see Smith, who was at the bottom of the stairs. "What happens if you cut—or break—a hologram plate in half, Ling?"
"I guess you get half the image," Jimmi said. She was sitting on an upper step. Richard Nielson was staring directly at the top of her head.
"If I sit down at the table before the rest of you," Mak said, ducking under the steps for the coffeepot, "you're only going to get half your breakfast."
Smith, Jones, and Jimmi took their chairs. Mak set the steaming enameled pot (it, too, was from Yugoslavia, and had come with Vital Equipment) on the coffee table, sat down, and took four pieces of toast.
"Actually, you don't." Ling passed the egg platter to Hodges. "If you think of it as a method of information storage, you'll understand. You take the ordinary hologram plate, cut it in half, and then shine a laser beam on it, and you get the complete, three-dimensional image hanging there, full size. Only it's slightly out of focus, blurry, a little less distinct." He folded a sliver of ham with blackened edges and skewered it to some toast. "And if you cut it again, the image just goes a bit more out of focus. Try and imagine a photograph and a hologram of the same object side by side. Every dot of light-sensitive emulsion on each is a bit of information about the object. But the information dots on the photographic plate only relate to one point of a two-dimensional reduction. The information dots on the hologram plate relate to the entire, solid, three-dimensional object. So you see, it's vastly more efficient and far more complete. Theoretically, even a square millimeter cut from a hologram will have something to tell you about the whole object."
"Does that 'theoretical' mean something," Mak asked between burblings of his briar, "or is it just rhetoric?"
"Well," Ling said, "there is a point of diminishing returns. From what I've said, it would seem that most information storage is essentially photographic: writing, tape, punchcards—"
"But those are all linear," Dr. Jones objected.
"Photographic in that there's a one-to-one relation between each datum and each un-integrated fact—"
"Think of a photograph as composed of the lines of a television picture," Jimmi said, hastily swallowing eggs and toast. "A photograph can be reduced to linear terms, too."
"That's right," Ling said.
"Diminishing returns …," Hodges prompted.
"Oh, yes. It's simply this: If you only have a relatively small number of addresses—cybernetics term for the places your data are going to go"—he explained to Jimmi's puzzled look—"then you're often better off with photographic or linear storage. That's because you need so many bits of hologramic information before the image starts to clear enough to be—"
"—anything but a menacing shadow, a ghost, a specter of itself, a vague outline filled with the unknown and too insubstantial to contain it."
Everyone looked at Hodges.
"What are you talking about, Evelyn?"
"Rimkin." She gestured with her brandy glass to keep Mak from filling it to the brim. "Poor, crazy Rimky."
"Oh, he isn't crazy," Jones insisted. "He may be having a nervous breakdown on us, which is too bad. But he's a brilliant, brilliant man. He did end up beating me at go last night. Sometimes I'm just afraid these sorts of situations are merely occupational hazards."
"True, Jonesy." She smiled ruefully and sipped. "And that's all I meant by crazy."
"You brought this whole business up in the first place, about the broken holograms," Ling said. "Why, Evelyn?"
The inflamed light of the morning desert jeweled the glass in her puffy fingers. "Do you remember the head that had fallen from the frieze? It was cracked so that one of the eyes had broken in half. When I found him this morning, he'd been out all night with his laser beam looking at the images in the broken eye." She put her glass on the table.
After a while, Dr. Smith asked, "Did you take a look?"
Evelyn Hodges nodded.
"Well?" Mak asked.
"Just what you said, Ling. The images were whole. But they were slightly blurred, out of focus. I think there was something off with the timing, too. That's all."
Mak leaned forward, made disgusted sounds, and began to batter his ashes over the detritus of crusts and butter on his plate. "Let's go out and finish up those measurements." He poked the stem in his pocket. The periscope dropped. "If he was up all night, that shot should keep him asleep till this evening."
V
It didn't.
Rimkin woke fighting
the drug after they had been gone twenty minutes.
And he still didn't know where he was. Not where he should be, certainly. Because his head hurt; it felt as though the side had been broken away. His whole body was sore. He lurched from the bed and tried to focus on the objects—pillow, reading machine, boxes of microfilm on the table—but they all had haloes like the superimpositions from special-effect sequences in old color films.
Jimmi was sitting on the bottom step, reading. She had chosen (a little unwillingly) to stay with the patient.
Crash!
She looked up.
Richard Nielson was trundling down the steps toward her. And at the top, stood naked Rimkin. Jimmi leapt away as the bust struck the reader she had dropped on the steps.
"Rimky, are you …?"
He came down the steps, three of them slowly, seven of them fast, the last two slowly. Then, while she was debating whether to try and restrain him physically, he was gone through the double doors to the lockers. She ran toward them—the two brass handles swung up and clicked. She crashed against them. But behind the veneer that looked like walnut was ribbed steel.
Inside the locker, Rimkin fumbled the catches of his air suit and thought. Hot. Hot outside. Twice he dropped the contraption on the grilled floor. Boiled … boiled something. An Earthman would boil out there on the desert without a suit. But why was he worrying? He wasn't sure who or what he might be. But the streets with their shaggy pennants and their elegant citizens walking their shambling beasts with blood-colored eyes; they were waiting for him there in the hot city, the dusty city, with high, marsite facades from which the carven heads gazed down on dry gutters.
He didn't need a suit, of course. But the lock-release switch was inside the suit, and it wouldn't work unless the suit was sealed. He picked up the white, slippery material again. Sealing the suit was almost habit; and the habits must have been working, because the skimmer door was opening now. Through his faceplate he could almost see the great city of High Weir stretching away to the temple. But slightly out of focus, indistinct.… How was he supposed to know which were shapes of time-cast dust and which were the intelligent creations of the amazing culture of his people, his planet? He brushed his arm around his faceplate—but that didn't do any good.
He walked down the blazing, alien street.
And the street sucked his boots.
He was going to take off his air suit soon. Yes. Because there was no need for it in such a brilliant city. But wait just a few minutes, because things were still too unfocused, too amorphous. And sand, from when he'd brushed his arm across his faceplate, kept trickling down the plastic. Nor were the figures in front of him Martians. He didn't think they were Martians. They were white and bulbous and were busy about the shards of purple stone, doing things to the slim columns that rose to prick the Martian noon.
"Who are you?" he said.
Two of them turned around.
"Rimkin …!"
"I don't know who you are," he told them.
"Hey, what's he doing out here?"
"I'm a Martian," Rimkin told them. "You're nothing but … that's right, potatoes!" He tried to laugh, but it came out crying because his head hurt very badly, and he was dopey from whatever they had given him that morning.
"We've got to get him back to the skimmer! Come on, Rimky."
"I'm going to take off my air suit," he said. "Because I'm a Martian and you—"
But then they were all around him. And they kept holding his hands down, which was easy because he was weak from the drug. And the carved heads, the gleaming eyes, melted behind his tears.
"Rimkin! Rimkin! Are you out there? Evelyn, Mak, Rimkin's out there some place!"
"We've got him, Jimmi! It's all right. We're bringing him back to the skimmer."
"Who are you? I can't tell who you are!"
"Oh, Rimky, are you all right?"
"I'm a Martian. I can take off my spacesuit—"
"No, you don't, fellow. Keep your hands down."
"I think you're all crazy, you know? I'm a Martian, but you're all talking to somebody who isn't even here!"
"Rimkin, go on back with them and don't give them any trouble. For me, for Jimmi. They just want to help."
"I don't even know you. Why do I have to come back? This is my city. These are my buildings, my house. It's just not clear any more. And it hurts."
"Keep your hands down. Come on—"
"Jimmi, are you all right? How did he get out? He didn't hurt you, did he?"
"I guess the sedative wasn't strong enough. He surprised me and managed to lock me in the study. I just found Evelyn's emergency keys in her room a minute ago so I could get down to the controls and radio you. What are we going to do with him?"
"I'm going to go to Mars. I can take off my spacesuit. I'm a Martian. I'm a Martian—"
"He doesn't seem to be dangerous. They'll get him back to Earth, fill him full of calming drugs, and in six months he'll probably be good as new. I wouldn't be surprised to find out he goes into this sort of thing periodically. I spent a couple of weeks in a hospital drying out once."
"Why can't I take off my suit? I'm a Martian—"
"Rimky, remember all those enzyme reactions you were going on at us about this morning when you didn't want to take your shot? You open your suit, and the temperature out here will work so much havoc with them you won't have time to blink. You'll also fry."
"But which ones? How can I tell which ones will …"
"Evelyn, I can't hit him over the head. I'll crack his helmet."
"I know, I know, Mak. We'll get him back. Oh, this is so terrible! What causes something like this to happen to a perfectly fine—more than fine—mind, Ling?"
"Don't hit me over the head. Don't … I'm a Martian. And it hurts."
"We won't hurt you, Rimky."
"Evelyn, we're out here exploring the ruins of new civilizations on other planets, and we still don't know. We know much of it's chemical, and we can do something about a lot of it, but we still don't … Holograms, Evelyn …"
"What, Ling?"
"Nobody's ever been able to figure out how the brain stores information. We know the mind remembers everything it sees, hears, feels, smells, as well as all sorts of cross-referencing. People have just always assumed that it must be basically a photographic process, all the separate bits of data stored on the juncture of each individual synapse. But suppose, Evelyn, the brain stores hologramically. Then madness would be some emotional or chemical situation that blocked off access to large parts of the cerebral hologram."
"Then large parts of the world would just lose their sharpness, their focus …"
"Like Rimkin here?"
"Now keep your hands away from your suit catch!"
"Come on, Rimkin. Once we get you home, you'll be all right."
"It won't hurt any more?"
"That's right. Try to relax."
As they reached the lock, Rimkin turned to one of the white, inflated figures and his voice grew tearful. "Aren't I … aren't I really a Martian?"
Two white hands patted the shoulders of his air suit. "You're George Arthur Rimkin, Associate Professor of Semantics at Inter-Nal University, a very brilliant man who has been under a lot of pressure recently."
Rimkin looked out over beautiful rifts and dells, shapes that could have been sand dunes, that could have been the amazing structures of the great Martian city of High Weir, that could have been … He was crying again. "It hurts so much," he said quietly, "how am I supposed to tell?"
The End
© 1968 by Samuel R. Delany. First published in If, October 1968.
When I Was Miss Dow
Sonya Dorman
These hungry, mother-haunted people come and find us living in what they like to call crystal palaces, though really we live in glass places, some of them highly ornamented and others plain as paper. They come first as explorers and perhaps realize we are a race of one sex only, rather amorphous beings of proteide; an
d we, even baby I, are Protean, also, being able to take various shapes at will. One sex, one brain lobe, we live in more-or-less glass bridges over the humanoid chasm, eating, recreating, attending races, and playing other games like most living creatures.
Eventually, we're all dumped into the cell banks and reproduced once more.
After the explorers comes the colony of miners and scientists. The Warden and some of the other elders put on faces to greet them, agreeing to help with the mining of some ores, even giving them a koota or two as they become interested in our racing dogs. They set up their places of life, pop up their machines, bang-bang, chug-chug; we put on our faces, forms, smiles, and costumes; I am old enough to learn to change my shape, too.
The Warden says to me, "It's about time you made a change, yourself. Some of your friends are already working for these people, bringing home credits and sulfas."
My Uncle (by the Warden's fourth conjunction) made himself over at the start, being one of the first to realize how it could profit us.
I protest to the Warden, "I'm educated and trained as a scholar. You always say I must remain deep in my mathematics and other studies."
My Uncle says, "You have to do it. There's only one way for us to get along with them," and he runs his fingers through his long blonde hair. My Uncle's not an educated person, but highly placed, politically, and while Captain Dow is around, my Uncle retains this particular shape. The Captain is shipping out soon; then Uncle will find some other features, because he's already warned that it's unseemly for him to be chasing around in the face of a girl after the half-bearded boys from the space ships. I don't want to do this myself, wasting so much time, when the fourteen decimals even now are clicking on my mirrors.
Sci Fiction Classics Volume 3 Page 4
