Very Hard Choices

by Spider Robinson

  —try focusing on me—

  "Good idea," he said.

  Three boats were visibly and unmistakably hosting parties, two of them into the raucous stage. Others were occupied but less noisly so. Presumably those would contain the fewest and quietest minds. Zudie aimed that way . . . and from his involuntary physical responses I could tell it wasn't working out as well as he'd hoped. As we approached within fifty meters of a large boat that seemed empty, or at least dark, quiet and buttoned up for the night, he began to moan softly. Then without warning he spun his head to the left, away from the boat, vomited with great force, and changed course to miss it as widely as possible. He was able to close his teeth and lips on the moan, but not to stop it, and his paddling began to falter.

  Maybe this will sound stupid, but I tried to be me as hard as I could, to think as loud as possible.

  He stopped moaning. "Thanks," he said, just loud enough for me to hear.

  The current was strong, this close in, and blindly determined to frustrate him, sweeping him the way he didn't want to go; as his stroke was weakening, each one did him less good. The distance between us and the dark devil boat was widening, but just barely—and not fast enough.

  I took out my paddle. "No," he groaned, but I ignored him. My right arm was all but useless, but my right hand worked as well as ever. I made it into an oarlock and rowed the paddle like an oar with my left arm. If I timed it just right with my breathing cycle, it didn't hurt a bit. Well, not a byte. It added some velocity. Enough that we finally pulled far enough away for Zudie to start recovering.

  —that bad?—

  His answer was a shaky whisper. "That man is vile."

  —worse than Allen?—

  "God, no! No, he's only a man. But as bad as men get."

  —who?—

  "Never mind. Just . . . thank you, Russell."

  That was all I could get out of him on the subject. There were two other boats we had to pass that gave him some trouble, but not as bad, and then we had run the gauntlet. He seemed to regain strength as we reached the shallows, and when we had approached the beach close enough to hear it, he suddenly poured on the coals and then somehow executed a maneuver strikingly like the bootlegger-turn Jim Rockford used to do in his tan Firebird once an episode, so that we hit the sand stern-first.

  —showoff—

  "Sit tight." He climbed out of his cockpit, and helped me get out of mine without hurting myself too badly. No companion so thoughtful as a telepath. But he was not as much help as I'd expected him to be. Even those stevedore's arms of his had to be tired after nearly two hours of paddling, of course, but it was more than simple fatigue. That last five hundred meters had sapped him.

  "Are you sure you can make it back out again?" I asked aloud.

  He shrugged. "What if I said no?"

  "I'd get back in, help you make it back out, and go to Plan B. I just thought of it. See?"

  "You thought of it an hour ago and rejected it. It's terrific for me—and no good at all for you."

  He was right of course. The Japanese Buddhist monk Oriyoki Kondo had absolutely no neighbors . . . because his stark little minimalist's sketch of a cabin was in a preposterous location at the base of a rough, near-vertical hillside, accessible only by boat, or by a long and extremely gnarly path that switchbacked its way down the slope from a municipal hiking path that led to paved roads. Best of all, Yoke was sure to be away now, on his annual pilgrimage to a monastery in Osaka. Zudie could land me there in perfect comfort and safety, tie up to Yoke's bare-bones dock, and await further events in peace. Then all I'd have to do was climb a very steep hill without completely collapsing my lung. In the dark, without a flashlight . . . on a path I'd taken a total of maybe five times, all in daylight. And then be left with an even longer walk to my place than the one I was facing now.

  "This way is only medium crappy for both of us. I promise I'll get your boy on a plane to New York if he shows up. Good luck, Slim." He shoved the kayak off, boarded it like Hopalong Cassidy, and began paddling like mad.

  Slim is not the first nickname I ever had, but it was the first one I ever liked, and Zudie was the one who gave it to me, and kept using it until everyone else did.

  —good luck, Zandor—

  With no idea whether it helped or not, I stood there at the water's edge, being me as loud as I could, until he had made it safely all the way through the mindfield. I could barely see him wave his paddle. I waved back with my good arm.

  Then I turned around, and allowed myself to think about what lay before me.

  The path that leads up from the Yacht Club beach to the small gravel parking lot isn't that steep, but it's long, and sand all the way, hard to walk in. (Trucked-in sand, like the beach itself. Heron Island has no natural sandy beaches.) The road the parking lot leads to is asphalt, a more reasonable walking surface . . . but its first hundred meters or so are way steeper than the path up from the beach, a higher grade than provincial or city codes would have permitted, and it doesn't entirely level off for nearly half a klick. If I had to guess, I'd say that in ideal circumstances—as fit as I ever get, rested, and with two fully inflatable lungs—it would have taken me perhaps two and a half to three minutes to walk from the shore all the way up to level ground, depending on how many times I chose to stop along the way, and I'd have arrived sweaty and breathing aerobically, feeling it in my calves.

  It took me about ten minutes, and there were a couple of times I honestly doubted I'd make it, and I arrived soaked with sweat, wishing I could spare the breath to sob, feeling pain riding the sciatic nerves all the way up my legs to my lower back. I wanted, badly, to sit down and rest, but I knew how hard it would be to get back up again. So I picked out a sturdy tree a few meters from the road, leaned back against it very carefully, and let it hold me up until I felt ready to continue. Not soon. Finally I lurched back out onto blacktop and resumed walking home.

  Level ground lasted no more than two or three hundred meters. It came back from time to time, but not often for much longer than that.

  Every road on Heron Island is a roller coaster to one degree or another for most of its length, and one in particular was clearly designed by God specifically to kill bicyclists and joggers. My route home that night was not that bad, but I feel confident in saying it was the second worst possible, because I gave it a lot of thought, as I walked, replayed each road on The Rock in my mind in detail and compared them. For some reason it seemed important to quantify exactly how bad my luck was running tonight. For some other reason, when the answer came back almost as shitfully as possible, rather than minding, I took a weird kind of comfort in it.

  Even on Heron Island there are usually at least a few cars on the road at night on a Saturday night. But I was on the least-traveled road, and furthermore I seemed to have precisely hit that golden period during which everybody who wanted to party was already there, and nobody was ready to go home yet.

  Ordinarily that walk home would have taken perhaps forty-five minutes. That night it took more than two hours. Each of them composed of longer-than-usual minutes.

  I was born with bubbles on the surface of my lungs, called blebs, much like the bubbles on a bald inner tube. Nobody knows why. Every so often, for mysterious reasons or none at all, one of those bubbles pops, and the tire starts to go flat. As the lung collapses, it pulls away from the inner wall of the thorax, leaving a vacuum which promptly begins filling with blood and other bodily fluids. That hurts even more than it sounds like it does, and encourages further collapse.

  At worst it stops about halfway . . . but if it gets that bad, you're in for lengthy hospitalization, involving procedures you don't want to hear about and I don't want to think about. Fortunately, thirty years ago a surgeon at Bellevue Hospital in New York did a procedure I also won't describe, and since that time I've never had a collapse worse than five or ten percent . . . which only means a few days in bed and a week or two of feeling frail and moving carefully.

 
Three decades later I can still vividly remember exactly how painful that operation and its aftermath were. Beyond belief—let's leave it at that. I only learned about ten years ago, by accident, that it is considered one of the most painful procedures a human is likely to survive. Nobody at Bellevue thought to tell me that; for twenty years I believed I was just more of a coward than other people. To this day, I can't bear to be touched on or near the scar, which runs from my right nipple almost all the way back to my spine, even though it can hardly be seen any more.

  That is why pain in my chest is my worst nightmare. Reason has nothing to do with it. My animal body knows that its lungs once caused it an eternity of unendurable horror, and believes they might again at any time.

  My son was at risk. My friend Nika's career and freedom were in great jeopardy. Mine too. Reason had nothing to do with it. I kept on walking through the dark. So my chest hurt; big deal.

  Every time I passed a driveway, especially one with light visible through the trees, I fantasized giving up: knocking on the door at the end of it and begging whoever was inside for a ride. I just couldn't come up with a fantasy in which my explanation for why I needed one sounded remotely plausible, even to me.

  Keep walking, Russell. Remember to alternate feet.

  Because the problem was, I didn't need a ride to my home, or even to my driveway. I needed a ride to no closer than half a kilometer from my home. There was no way of knowing where Agent Pitt was right now—so I had to assume he was in my home right this minute, rummaging through my underwear drawer in search of maps to Zudie's place. If so, I did not want him to hear a vehicle stop at the end of the driveway, make a U-turn, and go away.

  Keep walking. Oh, wow—look there: a garbage can as old as I am, metal instead of plastic, just tall enough to sit on and the lid is flat. Sit. Rest a minute. Or two.

  I needed to connect with my son, one driveway short of mine, just as quietly as possible, and find out from him whether my house was still safe to approach . . . and if so, send him to burgle that damned incriminating laptop at once, while I stood watch near the end of the driveway. Armed with, say, a shovel, that I could swing left-handed, maybe two or three times tops.

  Back on your feet. Keep walking.

  If it was too late, if Pitt had already tossed the place or was there now . . . well, I could ask Jesse to hit me with the shovel, and put me out of my misery. He probably wouldn't take much persuading.

  Bad upgrade. Throttle back from slow to ultraslow. Listen to chest.

  Maybe I would get lucky, and find Nika, too, lurking in my neighbor Doug's barn. Lina might have insisted on waiting around for her, and then if clocking out took Nika less time than she'd feared, Lina could have gotten her back to Heron by about now.

  Pause until pain subsides.

  And even if Lina had dropped her off and come right home, Nika might have been able to clock out fast and then rent or charter something with enough muscle to beat Lina back here. She might have Agent Pitt in handcuffs right now.

  Keep walking.

  Or she might have found herself saddled with emergency overtime duty of some sort, and be stuck on the mainland overnight, or worse.

  Bad downgrade. Downshift from ultraslow to half that.

  Car! Walk backwards, stick out thumb, smile ingratiatingly—

  —dive into roadside brush, barely in time, fortunately landing on left side—

  Get up. Curse drunken louts. Resume walking.

  13.

  Outside time and space

  It went like that forever.

  I can't remember how many times I had to stop altogether, and wait for the pain to recede. At least once on every upgrade. I do remember very clearly giving up, three separate times—just despairing entirely and sitting down somewhere to await the heat death of the universe. I only remember changing my mind the first time; the other two, I simply found myself in motion again with no memory of having decided to be.

  At some point I came unstuck from reality, and seemed to be walking through an unedited highlights-reel of my own life. Times and places and especially people from my past came and went randomly, completely out of sequence.

  Xerox, for instance.

  There was a time when I could have told you what Xerox's real name is, but it's long gone from memory after all these years. Something Hindu and very long and barely pronounceable is all I can recall now. But the man himself I don't think I'll ever forget; for some reason, he made a lasting impression on me. The first thing he said to me was, "Please call me Xerox, my excellent friend. I have renamed myself after one of my greatest heroes." At that time, Xerox Corporation was probably the biggest runaway stock market success story since the Depression; its revenues had risen from chump change to more than half a billion dollars in eight years. I do not know if my friend Xerox thought the company had been founded by someone of that name, or if it was the company itself he admired. But I am quite certain that if he's still alive today, he's doing precisely whatever it is he wants to be doing—successfully, in style, and with huge gusto.

  This will sound ridiculous if you're not as old as I am, but trust me: back in the sixties, things got so weird that even genuinely caring parents like the ones I was lucky enough to have could find themselves telling their beloved son he was no longer welcome in their home until he cut his hair short again. So by 1967 I was spending my holidays, semester breaks and summer vacations hiding out on campus at William Joseph College, rather than accept symbolic castration. When the administration caught me at it that summer, we worked out a deal where I earned my keep by doing odd jobs, and the first one I got was the weirdest: human fire alarm.

  The Marianite Order that ran old Billy Joe had just constructed a small new dormitory that year specifically for foreign students, of whom they'd accepted a large number at inflated rates, and of course the building wasn't ready when the new year approached. Most of the things it lacked (hot water, heat, windows) would merely be vast lingering inconveniences for the new inhabitants, but one lack in particular was really important even in the school's eyes: a fire alarm system. Without one, the building could not legally open—state law forbade it.

  So they hired me to walk around the building looking for fires.

  Eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for a total of nearly three months. Even at minimum wage, it added up to a tidy sum, enough to keep me in marijuana for the next two semesters. Minimum wage in 1967 was something like $1.20 an hour . . . but a gallon of gas cost 28 cents, and an average new home went for $40,000. Marijuana was then commonly sold in quarter-ounces called "nickel bags" because they cost five dollars; you could buy a pound of excellent weed for a hundred bucks, or a kilo for two.

  I can no longer recall what hashish went for then—I just remember that I got an incredible deal from Xerox.

  Most of the international students that first year were dirt-poor, there by the grace of God or scholarship; Xerox seemed, if anything, more affluent than any of the American-born students. When he walked the campus he somehow gave the impression of wearing spats and swinging a walking stick. Girls went crazy for him even though he was short and dark and had a face like a foot and spoke with an accent thicker than that of Apu the Quickie-Mart owner. Guys forgave him for it because of his extraordinary hash, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply.

  He shared a bowl with me the night we met, and roared with laughter at my explanation of what I was doing there. It was good stuff; I found myself telling him about my weird roommate Smelly, and my problems with my old lady; he told me about his politics and his mother. And finally we had reached a level of stoned intimacy at which even I, a good American hippie white boy terrified of accidentally saying something racist, felt comfortable asking him what it had been like to grow up well off, while surrounded by so much abject poverty.

  He laughed so hard he spilled the pipe, and burned a hole in the one blanket Billy Joe had so far found for him. He had grown up in Bombay (as Mumbai was called b
ack then) poorer than poor: not just broke like everybody else, but without family. He had no idea who his parents were or what might have happened to them; there was nobody to ask. Nobody raised him; he did it himself.

  How? I naturally asked. He wasn't sure. He said his earliest memories were of running a protection racket that covered three streets, using hired eight-year-olds as muscle. That had brought him to the amused attention of a local crime lord named Yama, who took him under his wing, and bullied him into learning English.

  "The big mistake Lord Yama made," Xerox said, passing me the generously refilled pipe, "was to tell me just how great a gift he was giving me: how much people paid for English lessons. Those who tutored the children of the rich, he told me, were paid more than even a good thief could make." He grinned like a hungry hyena. "He was right. I stayed with him for nearly six years, learning many useful things, but only until I could pass for a teenager most excellently. Then I got my first job as a tutor of English . . . and that year earned more money than Yama had paid me in six. The work was also much easier, and much safer. In three years, I was lending money to Yama." He stuck out his chin proudly. "Bombay is home to the Bombay Stock Exchange, the National Stock Exchange of India, and the Reserve Bank of India. I am the only person in this international students' building who has paid his tuition and expenses out of his own pocket, every penny. I even offered to pay for four years in advance, but the college was unwilling to gamble so on the American economy."

  "I didn't realize they were that smart," I said, and passed him the pipe I now had going well. "But tell me something, Xerox. How did you ever manage to promote yourself that first tutoring gig, without any credentials you could show? I mean, you couldn't put 'graduate of Lord Yama's academy for young men' on a resumé."

  "That would not have been prudent, no," he agreed, and took a few hits before continuing. "Instead I went with my greatest strength: bullshit."