Very Hard Choices

by Spider Robinson

  "Thank you," he said. His voice quivered just a bit.

  So did mine. "You're welcome."

  He got up and made me a second cup of coffee. He used the time to organize his thoughts, so I shut up too and used mine to look his place over a little more closely. He'd obviously been here for years before dropping in on me. Just ferrying all this gear out here was a lot of work, and apparently he'd managed it both singlehanded and undetected, a neat trick. Keeping the place supplied must be another neat trick. No wonder he was in such good shape.

  I forced my mind away from both puzzles, for fear of distracting him with involuntary questions. The Powerbook on the coffee table went into its screensaver mode, and Zudie used the same one I did, Electric Sheep. It produces random visual effects strikingly like what I used to see behind my eyelids while tripping on LSD-25 back in the sixties, bright and colorful and mathematically elegant and quite hypnotic. I was about to hear a story from the sixties: I stared at the screen and let the thought of tripping carry me back in memory—

  —Zudie was handing me my clothes, still warm from the dryer, and a plastic container that held my belt, keys, lighter and other pocket junk. When I wondered about my wallet he gestured to where it and its contents were spread out on a counter to dry in the kitchen area. He was wearing grey Bermuda-type shorts himself, now, which I thought very gracious considering we were in his home.

  "Wrong initials," I said as I dressed.

  "Beg pardon?"

  "They warned us about dreaded acid flashbacks. Remember? I've waited eagerly for one ever since, and I've never had one in my life, or met anyone who did. The dreaded flashbacks that have recurred over and over, roughly every decade, aren't LSD. They're KIA and MIA."

  He sat back down. "And CIA."

  "I thought that was where this was going."

  He was silent for so long that I began to watch the Electric Sheep display again to silence my mind, lest I derail his train of thought again. Whether it helped I couldn't say.

  Finally he spoke. "Russell, I think I have to tell you why I've been holed up here for so long, ignoring you. Why what I did to Allen nearly four years ago tore me up as badly as it has. You think you want to know . . . and you really do need to know. If I do, I think you'll agree that I needed to tell you. But you won't thank me. You'll wish I hadn't. Wish I hadn't had to.

  "Now you have to make a very hard choice. Whether to let me."

  I sat and thought about that awhile. "You're my friend," I said then, "and you know more about what's going on than I do. Do what you think you need to do."

  9.

  Saturday, June 23, 2007

  Coveney Island, British Columbia, Canada

  Those were the last words I spoke until Zudie had finished his story. It was quite obvious that telling it was hard for him. I didn't want to make it any harder. Whenever he stopped to search for words, I waited until he found them.

  He said:

  The last you saw of me and Oksana, at the end of that semester, we told you we were going to spend the summer together at ESP Camp: a remote retreat in the woods somewhere in Maryland, where we were going to be paid guinea pigs for a bunch of white coats from the psych department at Duke University. That's what we were told. Nobody mentioned any government involvement to us. The only initials we heard were ESP and PSI. We thought of it as a paid vacation in the country. And just possibly an approach to some way of learning to cope with . . . my predicament.

  The last you heard of either of us was when you got back to William Joseph in September and we weren't there, and all you could find out was that Oksana had been killed in a tragic hunting accident, and nobody knew where I was. You tried very hard to learn more, thank you for that, but there wasn't any more to learn, and after awhile you came to the same conclusion everyone else had: that in my grief at losing her, I'd taken my own life.

  That was pretty close to the truth. I didn't kill myself. But I did get Oxy killed. And then to stay alive, I had to kill my identity.

  Right, getting ahead of myself.

  Oksana was the one they were really interested in. They had been for years, since she'd been in high school. Her gift wasn't as dangerous as mine, so she'd never learned to hide it. They'd finally gotten her to sit down for a week of testing during Spring Break, and the data suggested that she seemed to have a limited ability to influence probability somehow. Only on a very small scale . . . but if she was in the right frame of mind, she could roll sevens for as long as you liked, with your dice. She made enough in roulette winnings to pay for an entire semester before the Atlantic City Benevolent Association asked her nicely to stop playing there. This was way before we decided to make up for our degradation of the noble Native Americans by letting them milk gambling-addicts: Atlantic City was pretty much it for the east coast, now that Havana was gone.

  After a few disastrous incidents in my childhood, and a long talk with my grandmother, I'd never told anyone but her about my own ability, and I didn't plan to. I've always known how most people would react if they knew, and I didn't want to be feared. But I did want to spend the summer with Oksana, so I compromised: I used telepathy to fake just enough talent at guessing Rhine cards to make me an ESP suspect too. If it turned out that anyone there actually knew anything about telepathy that I didn't, I thought perhaps I might just consider slowly "coming out" to him or her.

  I was at that age when hope doesn't take any effort at all.

  It started out great. The place was beautiful, a lodge beside a lake in the middle of nowhere that we had all to ourselves. White birch and maple everyplace. Bullfrogs and a trillion crickets at night. Comfortable rooms, decent food. No TV. Great library. Everyone on the staff was a decent person in a lab coat: honest, earnest, academic. The other Specials—as we were encouraged to call ourselves—were a fascinating crew, ranging from utterly ordinary to crazy as a basketball bat. But we all got along well despite our sometimes wildly incompatible quirks, because for most of us it was the first time we'd ever been in a group where we were not considered weird. It was a novel and pleasant experience, not automatically being the strangest person in the room. The work was interesting and not onerous.

  Then new directives came in from somewhere outside, and the direction of the research started changing subtly.

  A guy with a talent for clairvoyance who'd been trying to predict stock market or sports results would be tasked with predicting the outcome of a specific military operation in Southeast Asia instead. A woman with telekinetic ability would find herself being asked not to make marbles roll uphill, but to try and cause a guinea pig's heart to stop beating. A road-company psychic like me would be asked not what card a man was looking at, but whether he was lying to me about it or not.

  And then one day Oksana was asked by her tester whether she thought she might be able to influence the probability of an individual uranium atom fissioning—and if so, from how far away? Could she, hypothetically of course, prevent or discourage an atom bomb from going off? Or, say, encourage one far away to go off by itself, or fail to?

  We talked quietly between ourselves that night, and we both began to have problems with our paranormal powers. Nothing as obvious as a strike . . . but our test scores started to trend downward. We also talked about sharing what we knew with the other Specials. A few of us were strongly in favor of the Vietnam War—I was myself, then—but not one of us was interested in learning to use our special talent to kill people. Especially not on a nuclear scale.

  But we were both nervous about taking that overt a step. Once released, the demon could not be put back in the box: if it was a government operation and they knew we'd outed it, we could end up in very deep shit. We wanted to know how deep.

  We'd all seen the nominal director of the place, listened to him address us from a stage, gotten memos from him—but he seemed a bit snobby, always kept his distance. I doubt anyone else remarked it, but he was the only person in the whole place who'd never come within fifty meters of me, o
r any of us. Well, I was the only one capable of getting within fifty meters of him without being stopped, and one day I did.

  Then I ran all the way back to Oksana's room, and got her to take a walk with me to one of the places I now knew was not bugged, and we began planning our escape.

  His mind was one of the scariest I'd ever encountered, then—very much like I'd always imagined Mengele's mind must have been. But what really terrified me was the mind of the man who terrified him, the master he served and hated. A CIA senior agent, who called himself Pitt and didn't offer a first name. If the director's mental picture of Agent Pitt was remotely accurate, I did not want to ever meet him.

  At Pitt's insistence, the director had placed surveillance devices all around the perimeter of the place, not just at the access points but in the forest itself too, even though he privately considered it a stupid waste of money and technology. It was very good technology for the time, CIA technology: it could not have been defeated by anyone but its designers, the techs who monitored and serviced it, the director who'd had it installed, or someone who'd been reading his mind.

  If you're privy to another man's secrets, if you're better informed than he thinks you are, it can give you the illusion that you're smarter than he is. You can get so used to everyone you meet considering your special talent to be unimaginable, when you finally encounter one of the rare minds that is capable of imagining it, it blindsides you. I forgot to be humble.

  I paid dearly for it.

  We gave it a few days. Let our test scores come back up to baseline, so we'd stop standing out. It must have made Pitt look even closer, realize we were getting ready to make our move.

  Zudie stopped for so long that I started to think he'd reconsidered telling me the rest. And then enough longer that I started to wish he would, if it was really that bad. Then he went on.

  Oksana was from a tiny little place in New York called Saranac Lake, so remote they had their own phone system. Her mom's phone number was LE-27; you had to ask an operator to connect you. Oksana knew about living in the woods. She filled backpacks with what we would need to survive in the open for as long as a week. Anything we didn't have, I stole to order. It got to be kind of fun. Adventure. Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, outwitting Injun Joe.

  Finally she said we were ready. That night, we went over the wall.

  It was a piece of cake. Almost an anticlimax. After all, I knew all the security procedures.

  Wrong. I knew all the security procedures the director knew about. All the ones Agent Pitt had told him about. But Pitt had no problem at all dealing with the concept of a telepathic opponent. A security system he had carefully not told the director about—a robot system with no mind for me to read—caught us just as we were becoming confident enough to talk to each other without whispering. She was leading, I think it read us as a single target. She said over her shoulder, "Zandor, it's going to be so—" and then it shot her. With a rubber bullet. Marketed as nonlethal. Agent Pitt didn't want to waste any assets, just stop them leaving. It was supposed to hit the target in the lower chest, knock the breath out of him. Oksana was very short. She took it in the larynx. She fell down on her back. I laid down with her, held her in my arms. She kicked her legs and died. Half a minute, maybe. That was very bad.

  Then it got a whole lot worse.

  Zudie got up abruptly.

  He went to the kitchen end of the room and made more coffee. He moved slowly, deliberately, like a monk being mindful. When the cup was full he carefully dunked a shot glass into it, then set the full shot glass aside and replaced its contents in my cup with brandy. He brought me the cup and the bottle of brandy, kept the shot glass for himself. I'd never seen him drink caffeine before. He'd always treated it the way some unfortunates have to treat peanuts. He'd once turned down a cup of decaf Nika offered him, saying they didn't decaffeinate it enough. I set the bottle down on the coffee table and made a toasting gesture. He responded. Clink. We drank.

  He said:

  I'd never been near anyone when they died before. Rich family. Sheltered life.

  In the movies, on TV, in books, everywhere, it's always the same. When people die, they die like a light going out. Or at worst like a TV getting turned off: z-z-z-zip, shrink down to a single pixel, click!, gone. It's pretty to think so. Maybe even necessary.

  But it's not true.

  Well . . . maybe it's true for those who die of sudden catastrophic brain trauma. I don't know. Maybe it's even true for those whose death is the culmination of of a slow natural process of dissolution. But not for those who are killed.

  It wasn't for her, anyway.

  I know. I was there.

  Her breathing stopped. Her heart stopped. Her body died.

  Consciousness persisted.

  How much? Enough to feel pain. Know loss.

  How long? A minute. An hour. A million years. Somewhere in that range.

  Oksana had faith. That helped her. A little. For awhile.

  I'd never really been religious. At age seven, I already knew what the Catholic Church was trying to do to me; I just kept my head down and my mouth shut.

  But they got to her. Her parents were so overjoyed to get out of the Ukraine, they made sure she joined them in thanking God for the miracle. Like most good people, she took the good parts of her religion to heart, and tried her best to resolve the contradictions.

  She called on that faith to sustain her, and it did help. Some. For awhile.

  But Oxy wasn't an idiot. She felt herself going away into the darkness. Alone. Blind. Helpless. Terrified beyond all description. It was impossible not to wonder how, why, a loving God could leave one of his children in this state for one second—

  Let alone a million years.

  No atheists in foxholes? My ass.

  No. No, you're wrong.

  No, it wasn't like that either. Think about it. All the Near Death Experience stories you've ever read were, by definition, recounted by someone who didn't die. Maybe that's what you experience just before your brain starts to die, I don't know. The ones I've read sound a lot like anesthetic-dreams on an operating table. Bright light in your face, shadowy people all around you with benevolent intentions who look a little like your dead Uncle Phil.

  Yes, maybe the Buddhists are right. Maybe she was just heading for one of the Bardos, a place between incarnations. How can I know? To me the Buddhist universe has always seemed cold, indifferent. Not much comfort in it. Life is suffering. Somehow they're okay with that. Oksana wasn't Buddhist.

  She just saw extinction coming. And she was scared shitless. Jesus stopped being plausible. She missed me so much.

  She cried out for me.

  That's how I know, for absolute certain, that I can't send.

  With my whole heart and brain and mind and soul, more than I wanted to keep living, I tried to shout back. I wanted to reach out and and tell her—

  I'm here.

  I'll always love you.

  You made me so happy.

  Let go now.

  If it can be done, I'll find you again.

  I tried harder than I ever had before to touch her mind, the way everyone touched mine. I gave it everything I had. More. Like a mother lifting an SUV off her child with one hand.

  Total failure.

  We were both screaming at the top of our minds. I heard her. She heard nothing. She started to crack—

  Zudie lifted the shot glass to his mouth, moistened his lips from it. Sighed. Emptied it with a gulp, knocking it back like raw whiskey. Set the shot glass down on the table.

  You've read Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained?

  I know. Don't feel bad. His reasoning isn't hard to follow at all . . . it's just hard to wrap your mind around. Big surprise. I'll summarize as best I can— without writing another book longer than his, anyway.

  Basically Dennett says the Buddhists have it right: the self is an illusion. Consciousness is just a cover story: there is no you, really, but your body finds i
t extremely useful to pretend there is. Its various systems—organs, glands, nerves, muscles, blood, gonads—are what the Buddhists call dependently co-arising. They all have to be there, working in concert, for any of them to exist at all. The illusion that there is a tiny little man sitting in a control room in the middle of your brain, coordinating things by looking at a monitor screen and deciding what should be done next, is so useful that not long after your birth your body comes to consider it utterly essential, and to depend on it.

  Consciousness is your DNA and bloodstream and nerve cells and gut putting on a puppet show together, and they need a director so badly they create one out of thin air, the self, by the process that is the backwards of denial. If any part of the cast or crew loses the illusion of self for too long, all die. The same kind of reverse-denial on a societal scale can produce religion for similar reasons: without it, all die.

  That's why meditation is never going to be really popular. Most people would rather die than stop thinking even for a few moments, because deep down they equate the two. When the ceaseless monkey chatter of the mind becomes oppressive, they just turn on the TV or play some mp3s to drown it out.

  But basically the mind exists because all the various parts of the body believe it does.

  That goes for both the conscious and the subconscious mind—and also for the "body-mind" even below that, the part that would remember what side you like to sleep on and how to play your favorite instrument and where your genitals are located even if the brain were removed. Okay?

  Somehow . . . kneeling there in a forest in the dark with Oxy's head on my thighs, while my conscious mind was tearing itself apart trying to send solace to my Oksana, somehow . . . somehow my subconscious mind or my body-mind or both knew it wasn't going to work, and somehow they intuited the only thing that would, and knew there was no time to hesitate.