At any rate, it was only twenty minutes wasted, and I gained more time than that by disabling the recycler room lock. I cleaned up, changed clothes, stopped by the waldo lab for a few minutes, and then took the slidewalk to the Environmental Control Center.
There was only one young man on duty at the ECC at that hour. I exchanged a few pleasantries with him and then punched him in the heart, softly enough not to make a mess. I put his body where it wouldn’t distract me and then attended to the problem of the “door.”
There’s no actual door on the ECC, but there is an emergency wall that slides into place if there’s a drop in pressure. I typed up a test program simulating an emergency, and the wall obeyed. Then I walked over and twisted a few flanges around. Nobody would be able to get into the Center with anything short of a cutting torch.
Sitting was uncomfortable with the bruised hip, but I managed to ease into the console and spend an hour or so studying logic and wiring diagrams. Then I popped off an access plate and moved the micro-waldo down the corridors of electronic thought. The intercom began buzzing incessantly, but I didn’t let it interfere with my concentration.
Nearside is protected from meteorite strike or (far more likely) structural failure by a series of 128 bulkheads that, like the emergency wall here, can slide into place and isolate any area where there’s a pressure drop. It’s done automatically, of course, but can also be controlled from here.
What I did, in essence, was to tell each bulkhead that it was under repair, and should not close under any circumstance. Then I moved the waldo over to the circuits that controlled the city’s eight airlocks. With some rather elegant microsurgery, I transferred control of all eight solely to the pressure switch I now hold in my left hand.
It is a negative-pressure button, a dead-man switch taken from a power saw. So long as I hold it down, the inner doors of the airlock will remain locked. If I let go, they will all iris open. The outer doors are already open, as are the ones that connect the airlock chambers to the suiting-up rooms. No one will be able to make it to a spacesuit in time. Within thirty seconds, every corridor will be full of vacuum. People behind airtight doors may choose between slow asphyxiation and explosive decompression.
My initial plan had been to wire the dead-man switch to my pulse, which would free my good hand and allow me to sleep. That will have to wait. The wiring completed, I turned on the intercom and announced that I would speak to the Coordinator, and no one else.
When I finally got to talk to him, I told him what I had done and invited him to verify it. That didn’t take long. Then I presented my demands:
Surgery to replace the rest of my limbs, of course. The surgery would have to be done while I was conscious (a heartbeat dead-man switch could be subverted by a heart machine) and it would have to be done here, so that I could be assured that nobody fooled with my circuit changes.
The doctors were called in, and they objected that such profound surgery couldn’t be done under local anesthetic. I knew they were lying, of course; amputation was a fairly routine procedure even before anesthetics were invented. Yes, but I would faint, they said. I told them that I would not, and at any rate I was willing to take the chance, and no one else had any choice in the matter.
(I have not yet mentioned that the ultimate totality of my plan involves replacing all my internal organs as well as all of the limbs—or at least those organs whose failure could cause untimely death. I will be a true cyborg then, a human brain in an “artificial” body, with the prospect of thousands of years of life. With a few decades—or centuries!—of research, I could even do something about the brain’s shortcomings. I would wind up interfaced to EarthNet, with all of human knowledge at my disposal, and with my faculties for logic and memory no longer fettered by the slow pace of electrochemical synapse.)
A psychiatrist, talking from Earth, tried to convince me of the error of my ways. He said that the dreadful trauma had “obviously” unhinged me, and the cyborg augmentation, far from effecting a cure, had made my mental derangement worse. He demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction, that my behavior followed some classical pattern of madness. All this had been taken into consideration, he said, and if I were to give myself up, I would be forgiven my crimes and manumitted into the loving arms of the psychiatric establishment.
I did take time to explain the fundamental errors in his way of thinking. He felt that I had quite literally lost my identity by losing my face and genitalia, and that I was at bottom a “good” person whose essential humanity had been perverted by physical and existential estrangement. Totally wrong. By his terms, what I actually am is an “evil” person whose true nature was revealed to himself by the lucky accident that released him from existential propinquity with the common herd.
And “evil” is the accurate word, not maladjusted or amoral or even criminal. I am as evil by human standards as a human is evil by the standards of an animal raised for food, and the analogy is accurate. I will sacrifice humans not only for any survival but for comfort, curiosity, or entertainment. I will allow to live anyone who doesn’t bother me, and reward generously those who help.
Now they have only forty minutes. They know I am
—end of recording—
25 September 2058
Excerpt from Summary Report
I am Dr. Henry Janovski, head of the surgical team that worked on the ill-fated cyborg augmentation of Dr. Wilson Cheetham.
We were fortunate that Dr. Cheetham’s insanity did interfere with his normally painstaking, precise nature. If he had spent more time in preparation, I have no doubt that he would have put us in a very difficult fix.
He should have realized that the protecting wall that shut him off from the rest of Nearside was made of steel, an excellent conductor of electricity. If he had insulated himself behind a good dielectric, he could have escaped his fate.
Cheetham’s waldo was a marvelous instrument, but basically it was only a pseudo-intelligent servomechanism that obeyed well-defined radio-frequency commands. All we had to do was override the signals that were coming from his own nervous system.
We hooked a powerful amplifier up to the steel wall, making it in effect a huge radio transmitter. To generate the signal we wanted amplified, I had a technician put on a waldo sleeve that was holding a box similar to Cheetham’s dead-man switch. We wired the hand closed, turned up the power, and had the technician strike himself on the chin as hard as he could.
The technician struck himself so hard he blacked out for a few seconds. Cheetham’s resonant action, perhaps a hundred times more powerful, drove the bones of his chin up through the top of his skull.
Fortunately, the expensive arm itself was not damaged. It is not evil or insane by itself, of course. Which I shall prove.
The experiments will continue, though of course we will be more selective as to subjects. It seems obvious in retrospect that we should not use as subjects people who have gone through the kind of trauma that Cheetham suffered. We must use willing volunteers. Such as myself.
I am not young, and weakness and an occasional tremor in my hands limit the amount of surgery I can do—much less than my knowledge would allow, or my nature desire. My failing left arm I shall have replaced with Cheetham’s mechanical marvel, and I will go through training similar to his—but for the good of humanity, not for ill.
What miracles I will perform with a knife!
NANCY KRESS
Out Of All Them Bright Stars
Born in Buffalo, New York, Nancy Kress now lives in Brockport, New York. She began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies, and has since become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; she has also appeared in Omni, Universe, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and elsewhere. Her novels include The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, and The White Pipes. Her most recent book is Trinity and Other Stories, a collection, from Bluejay. Her story “Trinity” w
as in our Second Annual Collection. Kress lives in Brockport with “two sons, two cats, and a wholly superfluous dog”.
Here she gives us a very human story—about aliens.
OUT OF ALL THEM BRIGHT STARS
Nancy Kress
So I’m filling the catsup bottles at the end of the night, and I’m listening to the radio Charlie has stuck up on top of the movable panel in the ceiling, when the door opens and one of them walks in. I know right away it’s one of them—no chance to make a mistake about that—even though it’s got on a nice-cut suit and a brim hat like Humphrey Bogart used to wear in Casablanca. But there’s nobody with it, no professor from the college or govenment men like on the TV show from the college or even any students. It’s all alone. And we’re a long way out on the highway from the college.
It stands in the doorway, blinking a little, with rain dripping off its hat. Kathy, who’s supposed to be cleaning the coffee machine behind the counter freezes and stares with one hand still holding the used filter up in the air like she’s never going to move again. Just then Charlie calls out from the kitchen, “Hey, Kathy, you ask anybody who won the trifecta?” and she doesn’t even answer him. Just goes on staring with her mouth open like she’s thinking of screaming but forgot how. And the old couple in the corner booth, the only ones left from the crowd after the movie got out, stop chewing their chocolate cream pie and stare, too. Kathy closes her mouth and opens it again, and a noise comes out like “Uh—errrgh.…”
Well, that made me annoyed. Maybe she tried to say “ugh” and maybe she didn’t, but here it is standing in the doorway with rain falling around it in little drops and we’re staring like it’s a clothes dummy and not a customer. So I think that’s not right and maybe we’re even making it feel a little bad. I wouldn’t like Kathy staring at me like that, and I dry my hands on my towel and go over.
“Yes, sir, can I help you?” I say.
“Table for one,” it says, like Charlie’s was some nice steak house in town. But I suppose that’s the kind of place the govenment people mostly take them to. And besides, its voice is polite and easy to understand, with a sort of accent but not as bad as some we get from the college. I can tell what it’s saying. I lead him to a booth in the corner opposite the old couple, who come in every Friday night and haven’t left a tip yet.
He sits down slowly. I notice he keeps his hands on his lap, but I can’t tell if that’s because he doesn’t know what to do with them or because he thinks I won’t want to see them. But I’ve seen the closeups on TV—they don’t look so weird to me like they do to some. Charlie says they make his stomach turn, but I can’t see it. You’d think he’d of seen worse meat in Vietnam. He talks enough like he did, on and on, and sometimes we even believe him.
I say, “Coffee, sir?”
He makes a sort of movement with his eyes. I can’t tell what the movement means, but he says in that polite voice, “No, thank you. I am unable to drink coffee,” and I think that’s a good thing, because I suddenly remember that Kathy’s got the filter out. But then he says, “May I have a green salad, please? With no dressing, please.”
The rain is still dripping off his hat. I figure the government people never told him to take off his hat in a restaurant, and for some reason that tickles me and makes me feel real bold. This polite blue guy isn’t going to bother anybody, and that fool Charlie was just spouting off his mouth again.
“The salad’s not too fresh, sir,” I say, experimental-like, just to see what he’ll say next. And it’s the truth—the salad is left over from yesterday. But the guy answers like I asked him something else.
“What is your name?” he says, so polite I know he’s curious and not starting anything. And what could he start anyway, blue and with those hands? Still, you never know.
“Sally,” I say. “Sally Gourley.”
“I am John,” he says, and makes that movement with his eyes again. All of a sudden it tickles me—“John!” For this blue guy! So I laugh, and right away I feel sorry, like I might have hurt his feelings or something. How could you tell?
“Hey, I’m sorry,” I say, and he takes off his hat. He does it real slow, like taking off the hat is important and means something, but all there is underneath is a bald blue head. Nothing weird like with the hands.
“Do not apologize,” John says. “I have another name, of course, but in my own language.”
“What is it?” I say, bold as brass, because all of a sudden I picture myself telling all this to my sister Mary Ellen and her listening real hard.
John makes some noise with his mouth, and I feel my own mouth open because it’s not like a word he says at all, it’s a beautiful sound—like a birdcall, only sadder. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting it, that beautiful sound right here in Charlie’s diner. It surprised me, coming out of that bald blue head. That’s all it was: surprise.
I don’t say anything. John looks at me and says, “It has a meaning that can be translated. It means—” But before he can say what it means, Charlie comes charging out of the kitchen, Kathy right behind him. He’s still got the racing form in one hand, like he’s been studying the trifecta, and he pushes right up against the booth and looks red and furious. Then I see the old couple scuttling out the door, their jackets clutched to their fronts, and the chocolate cream pie not half-eaten on their plates. I see they’re going to stiff me for the check, but before I can stop them, Charlie grabs my arm and squeezes so hard his nails slice into my skin.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he says right to me. Not so much as a look at John, but Kathy can’t stop looking and her fist is pushed up to her mouth.
I drag my arm away and rub it. Once I saw Charlie push his wife so hard she went down and hit her head and had to have four stitches. It was me that drove her to the emergency room.
Charlie says again, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m serving my table. He wants a salad. Large.” I can’t remember if John’d said a large or a small salad, but I figure a large order would make Charlie feel better. But Charlie doesn’t want to feel better.
“You get him out of here,” Charlie hisses. He still doesn’t look at John. “You hear me, Sally? You get him out. The government says I gotta serve spiks and niggers, but it don’t say I gotta serve him!”
I look at John. He’s putting on his hat, ramming it onto his bald head, and half-standing in the booth. He can’t get out because Charlie and me are both in the way. I expect John to look mad or upset, but except that he’s holding the muscles in his face in some different way, I can’t see any change of expression. But I figure he’s got to feel something bad, and all of a sudden I’m mad at Charlie, who’s a bully and who’s got the feelings of a scumbag. I open my mouth to tell him so, plus one or two other little things I been saving up, when the door flies open and in burst four men, and damn if they aren’t all wearing hats like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. As soon as the first guy sees John, his walk changes and he comes over slower but more purposeful-like, and he’s talking to John and to Charlie in a sincere voice like a TV anchorman giving out the news.
I see the situation now belongs to him, so I go back to the catsup bottles. I’m still plenty burned, though, about Charlie manhandling me and about Kathy rushing so stupid into the kitchen to get Charlie. She’s a flake and always has been.
Charlie is scowling and nodding. The harder he scowls, the nicer the government guy’s voice gets. Pretty soon the government man is smiling sweet as pie. Charlie slinks back into the kitchen, and the four men move toward the door with John in the middle of them like some high school football huddle. Next to the real men, he looks stranger than he did before, and I see how really flat his face is. But then when the huddle’s right opposite the table with my catsup bottles, John breaks away and comes over to me.
“I am sorry, Sally Gourley,” he says. And then: “I seldom have the chance to show our friendliness to an ordinary Earth person. I make so litt
le difference!”
Well, that throws me. His voice sounds so sad, and besides, I never thought of myself as an ordinary Earth person. Who would? So I just shrug and wipe off a catsup bottle with my towel. But then John does a weird thing. He just touches my arm where Charlie squeezed it, just touches it with the palm of those hands. And the palm’s not slimy at all—dry, and sort of cool, and I don’t jump or anything. Instead, I remember that beautiful noise when he said his other name. Then he goes out with three of the men, and the door bangs behind them on a gust of rain because Charlie never fixed the air-stop from when some kids horsing around broke it last spring.
The fourth man stays and questions me: What did the alien say, what did I say. I tell him, but then he starts asking the same exact questions all over again, like he didn’t believe me the first time, and that gets me mad. Also, he has this snotty voice, and I see how his eyebrows move when I slip once and accidentally say, “he don’t.” I might not know what John’s muscles mean, but I sure the hell can read those eyebrows. So I get miffed, and pretty soon he leaves and the door bangs behind him.
I finish the catsup and mustard bottles, and Kathy finishes the coffee machine. The radio in the ceiling plays something instrumental, no words, real sad. Kathy and me start to wash down the booths with disinfectant, and because we’re doing the same work together and nobody comes in, I finally say to her, “It’s funny.”
She say’s, “What’s funny?”
“Charlie called that guy ‘him’ right off. ‘I don’t got to serve him,’ he said. And I thought of him as ‘it’ at first, least until I had a name to use. But Charlie’s the one who threw him out.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection Page 42
