Gray Matters (6 page)

So if Vera receives the news of her impending memory-merge with something less than elation, it is because she is satisfied with the past as she lived it. What need has she for a metaphysical love affair? Her own recollections are sufficiently erotic (the stinging kiss of the thorns, her second husband’s playful habit of sharing her with his Great Dane), and if she desires immediate satisfaction, she can dial for an orgasm at any time, night or day.

Skeets Kalbfleischer prepares for his first date. Centuries before, when he still had hair to comb and teeth to brush, he would have forestalled his nervousness in front of the bathroom mirror, plastering his cowlick down with Vaseline and water, polishing his smile and mentholating his breath. There would have been difficult Windsor knots to be tied and retied until the ends of the unfamiliar four-in-hand hung exactly even; shoes would have to be flawlessly shined; fingernails cleaned; pants pressed—a million trivial details to make the time go faster. But, alone in the eternity of his cranial container, Skeets is without armpits to deodorize or acne to conceal. He is trapped, like the Titans in Tartarus, in a world where time has ceased to exist.

The blueprints for the Amco-pak series come through without difficulty. Itubi is pleased. The Auditing Commission must be relishing his contrition. Another soul saved. Score another point for technology. Somewhere an unknown calculator adds his name to the list, a cipher among ciphers. Itubi is unconcerned. Let the Auditors enjoy their false triumph; what he wants are the blueprints.

They are exact detailed plans, reproduced three-dimensionally on the memory-file. The diagrams and scale drawings seem almost to float in Itubi’s consciousness, like models spun from fine glowing wire, a cobweb designed by an electrical engineer. Itubi is able to view the plans in the round; he can study them from any angle, from above, along the sides, underneath. His early training as a machinist (a part of his boyhood he had always resented) now does him yeoman’s service. The complexities of the Amco-pak are easily unraveled. In less than an hour, Itubi has memorized the plans.

Kalbfleischer? Kalbfleischer? What sort of name is that? Vera Mitlovic is positive it sounds Jewish. A rich American Jew. They were trying to humiliate her. Once before, advised by her Auditor, she underwent not a merge, but a simple memory transfer. It was felt that maternity would be a beneficial experience for Vera (all of her marriages and affairs were barren) and so she experienced prerecorded childbirth. Vera was in labor for over thirty hours, the delivery a nightmare of forceps and clamps. As instruments of torture, not even the racks and wheels of the Inquisition could rival that hideous table with its fiendish straps and stirrups. Now they add insult to injury by preparing this merge with a Jew. Somehow Vera will persevere. She’s lived through worse. It might even prove a diverting novelty, like a Chinese or a black. Certainly, it will be better than being alone.

Obu Itubi is ready at last. The moment for action has come. Without ending his original transmission, he simultaneously submits three random memory-bank requests. The warning light blinks on and off. Itubi ignores it and activates his communicator antenna. The light is blinking faster now. Itubi opens all circuits. The Memo Center clicks on, a distant humming in his guts. Gyros spinning, feedback eliminator up to full, magnetic relay-transfer switch to the on position, photon oscillator near the danger point. The warning light goes berserk as all systems function and Itubi is alive, alive… .

Like a prizefight manager at ringside, Auditor Philip Quarrels is hurriedly giving Skeets last-minute advice. He warns the boy of the ephemeral nature of induced memory-merge. Although the phenomenon in many ways resembles a dream, it registers in the conscious mind as actual experience. A sublime process, the Auditor concludes, a commingling of spirits beyond the wildest speculations of all the poets in history. Aside from the miracle of cerebrectomy, it is technology’s finest gift to mankind. Skeets pays little attention to this rhetoric. He is waiting, filled with apprehension like a condemned man on the gallows trap, for the precise moment when Center Control completes the necessary rewiring and plugs him into a new world.

WARNING

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CIRCUIT OVERLOAD

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WARNING

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CIRCUIT OVERLOAD

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WARNING

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CIRCUIT OVERLOAD

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WARNING

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CIRCUIT OVERLOAD

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WARNING

Vera Mitlovic emerges from the whirlwind mounted on a chestnut mare named Chi-Chi. The morning fog has lifted and the horse’s damp flanks steam slightly in the sunlight. Chi-Chi was seven years old the summer of Vera’s thirteenth birthday. She was requisitioned by the Wehrmacht the following winter and died in a burst of springtime shrapnel on the Russian front. Vera rides bareback with only a halter for a bridle, her sun-browned legs swinging with an easy motion against the barreling belly. The air is pungent with eucalyptus. Condensation glistens on the curve-bladed leaves and, underneath, the steady dripping is like a gentle rain.

The landscape seems familiar to Vera: the round bronzed hills, stands of live oak and eucalyptus. Although it will be twenty years before she makes her first Hollywood film, the young actress urges her horse down a California trail with the same youthful confidence that, in another girlhood, had blossomed along lonely roads on the high meadows of the Carpathian Alps.

At the bottom of the draw, the sunlit Pacific glitters through the dripping trees. Vera rides out across the sandy beach, threading between scattered driftwood logs. A line of jetsam, an assortment of trash and sea litter, marks the high-water line. Vera rides into the surf until the receding foam boils above Chi-Chi’s shanks. The sun is quite hot now. She pulls her sweater up over her head and knots the sleeves around her waist. For a long while she looks out at the horizon where a small white sail is barely visible.

Scanner viewers are having a treat. An Amco-pak Mark X comes hurtling down the aisles, caroming from side to side, the encircling duraplast bumper leaving long skid marks on the cerulean surface of the Depositories. Such speed is unusual. The Amco-pak is accustomed to more sedate operation and it is all the machine can do to maintain control. The Mark X had been quietly recharging in a subdistrict vehicle hangar when the emergency call came from Maintenance and Repair. At a time of repose for the machine: the end of a day-long shift, all work facilities switched off, the controls at half power, pneumatic limbs dormant—peace and relubrication, a chance for bearings to cool and metal to lose its fatigue. Then the alarm signal. All systems are instantly active, all circuits automatically open, and the Amco-pak is speeding down the long ramp to the Depository even before Center Control signals the location of the breakdown.

The trouble is in Aisle B. A preliminary diagnosis teleprints in the memory unit of the on-rushing Amco-pak: multiple short circuits cause major power drain; no communication with the resident; only three minutes of reserve oxygen remaining. The situation is urgent. Emergency cranial decantation is a ten-minute job; cell damage is irreparable after the brain is without oxygen for only eight. Aisle B is half a mile away. Center Control authorizes all possible speed.

A strong offshore wind blows from the port quarter and Skeets trims the mainsail of the
Sand Dab III,
giving the sheet two turns around a cleat to secure it. It was his father’s sloop and although he was often crew, manning the jib sheet in races on Lake Michigan, he had never been allowed to take the helm. He is alone in the boat, an anomaly which bothers him no more than the inverted coastline. The course is southerly and instead of seeing Lake Shore Drive to starboard and Chicago in the distance, there are rolling gold foothills and low pine-covered mountains visible over his port gunwale. He recognizes the contours of Point Reyes peninsula. An aunt (one of his mother’s sisters) had a home on Tomales Bay and Skeets spent a summer in California when he was six.

The wind shifts slightly and Skeets corrects, sailing on a beam reach, a course which carries him, by degrees, farther out to sea. Skeets remembers his father’s warning about keeping in sight of land and jibes suddenly, coming about hard-a-lee. The boy leans back as the boom swings across, lashed by a stinging spray blowing over his bow. It is a dead beat to windward all the way to shore and Skeets prepares himself for a long hard sail.

Vera rides in a trance, unaware of the wind-tears streaking her cheeks or the splatter of sand against her legs. The warm powerful flanks rippling between her thighs and the steady tickling crotch-rubbing joy of galloping headlong down a deserted beach have dampened her panties and filled her head with wild whirling thoughts.

Spent, she reins in. Chi-Chi slows to a trot and walks stiff-legged for a few paces. Vera dismounts, weak-kneed and trembling. She leads her mount up the beach and ties her to a splintered piling. Vera wonders if she is going to be sick. All this summer new emotions have troubled her body like seismic tremors. At night she can’t sleep; during the day she feels frequently dizzy. Only long reckless rides on Chi-Chi seem to satisfy her yearning. Or almost, for the fire still burns, the itch continues to prod.

Vera unbuttons her cotton dress and steps lightly out of her entangling underclothes. The wind caresses her burgeoning body and makes her nipples pucker. She runs her hand down across her tummy and the furz of maiden floss, cupping her sex, which hungers like the mouth of a raging vacuum cleaner. She wishes she could hose-up the entire world: beach, sea, sky, and stars. She would be like that storybook Chinaman who swallowed the ocean, filled to the bursting point with all the unbearable beauty of a summer morning.

Vera heads for the water, a swim in the Pacific to cool her torrid flesh. The sea feels fresh as an Alpine stream; the girl runs splashing across the foam and dives beneath the curl of a breaking wave. She swims straight out, ignoring a weathered sign nailed to a submerged piling. It is in English, a language Vera didn’t learn until she was over thirty, but the reincarnated adolescent reads it naturally and without effort:

DANGEROUS CURRENT … NO SWIMMING
.

The Amco-pak has all of its arms working at once. While several pair are busy with the cranial container—removing the face plate, disconnecting media hookups, and attaching an emergency oxygen hose—another set probes within the Mark X’s own interior, readying the reserve cockpit for its new occupant. This vestigial operation center remains from the time, centuries before, when the Amco-pak was first developed as an ambulatory vehicle for cerebromorphs. The introduction of the portable Compacturon DT9 computer emancipated the maintenance van but the original cockpit was retained for emergency operations.

Actual cranial transfer is the simplest part of any decantation. A long rubber-and-steel duct extends from the side of the Amco-pak like a mechanical ovipositor. Electromagnets maneuver the cranial container onto internal conveyor rails and the resident rides smoothly inside where final linkage is completed automatically. While a spectrographic medical analyzer (standard equipment on the Amco-pak) probes for possible cell damage, the Mark X attempts communicator contact.

B-0489 … B-0489 … attention … all lines are open … answer immediately if you receive my signal… B-0489 … attention … attention …

Obu Itubi hears the mechanical voice and relaxes. There had been panic and doubt during those moments of isolation when all his circuits were disconnected, but he is safe now. Everything is working perfectly. He is ready for the final phase. It is time to communicate.

Attention, Amco-pak; I am receiving your signal clearly. Please let me thank you for being so prompt.

Over-all time from Vehicle Hangar Nine to Aisle B, a distance of 1.6 kilometers, 6 minutes, 20 seconds. Emergency decantation completed in
7
minutes, 3 7seconds. The Amco-pak series functions to guarantee resident safety. B-0489 … describe the breakdown as specifically as possible. Your words will be teleprinted as part of my report to Center Control.

Am I completely connected to all circuits?

Positive.

Do I have scanner control?

Positive.

Is the coordinator impulse mechanism active?

Positive.

Can you disconnect any of the reserve control systems?

Negative. All emergency connections are automatic. The reserve control system is an independent function.

Very good. Reserve control operations will begin immediately on a coordinate of Delta Seven, Sigma Nine-five. Preliminary instructions: disconnect the Compacturon DT9, all emergency repair procedures will cease, end communicator contact with Center Control.

The Amco-pak obeys without complaint, shutting off its intelligence almost gratefully. The memory of serving human masters is still imprinted on the ancient circuits and the machine awaits further orders, arms telescoping into storage position with long pneumatic sighs.

Skeets Kalbfleischer is prepared. He has a merit badge in water safety and the bold ensign of the Red Cross is sewn to his bathing trunks. When he hears the cries for help and sees the girl’s frantic splashing, there is no hesitation. The sea anchor is over the side in a second. He pushes the tiller around until
Sand Dab III
is in irons and, springing to the mast, he uncleats the halyard and drops his mainsail. At the bow, remembering the safety manual, he removes his top-siders and yacht club sweatshirt before diving into the heavy swell.

The girl is naked! Skeets swallows sea water in astonishment when he hauls her into a cross-chest carry. The taut young breasts strain against his forearm as he sidestrokes back toward the drifting boat. With each scissor kick, his legs graze the marble smoothness of her ice-cold butt. Where did this mermaid come from? His boyish imagination summons up all the funny-paper possibilities: shipwreck, abandoned by pirates, falls from airplanes and cliffs. The girl is unconscious. She was sliding under the surface without a struggle when Skeets caught hold of her wrist, and her legs trail lifelessly behind her as the floundering young lifesaver reaches the stern of his boat.