Infinite Dreams (26 page)

Without a word, she emptied her potion into the sink and began putting away her paraphernalia. “Old bitch,” John croaked. “What did you tell her?”

“I said that if she continued to treat you, what happened to you would also happen to her sons.”

“You’re afraid it would work,” Gorgio said.

“No. It would only make it easier for John Zold to die. If I wanted that I could have killed him on his threshold” Like a quick bird she bent over and kissed John on his inflamed lips. “I will see you soon, John Zold. Not in this world.” She shuffled out the door and the other woman followed her. Gorgio cursed her in Italian, but she didn’t react.

John painfully dressed himself. “What now?” Gorgio said. “I could find you another healer …”

“No. I’ll go back to the
gadjo
doctors. They say they can bring people back from the dead.” He gave Gorgio the woman’s crucifix and limped away.

The doctor gave him enough antibiotics to turn him into a loaf of moldy bread, then reserved a bed for him at an exclusive clinic in Westchester, starting the next morning. He would be under 24-hour observation; constant blood turnaround if necessary. They
would
cure him. It was not possible for a man of his age and physical condition to die of dermatosis.

It was dinnertime and the doctor asked John to come have some home cooking. He declined partly from lack of appetite, partly because he couldn’t imagine even a doctor’s family being able to eat with such a grisly apparition at the table with them. He took a cab to the office.

There was nobody on his floor but a janitor, who took one look at John and developed an intense interest in the floor.

“523 784 00926/ /Machine, I’m going to die. Please advise.”

ALL HUMANS AND MACHINES DIE, JOHN. IF YOU MEAN YOU ARE GOING TO DIE, SOON, THAT IS SAD.

“That’s what I mean. The skin infection; it’s completely out of control. White cell count climbing in spite of drugs. Going to the hospital tomorrow, to die.”

BUT YOU ADMITTED THAT THE CONDITION WAS PSYCHOSOMATIC. THAT MEANS YOU ARE KILLING YOURSELF, JOHN. YOU HAVE NO REASON TO BE THAT SAD.

He called the machine a Jewish mother and explained
in some detail about the YGAC, the old crone, the various stages of the curse, and today’s aborted attempt to fight fire with fire.

YOUR LOGIC WAS CORRECT BUT THE APPLICATION OF IT WAS NOT EFFECTIVE. YOU SHOULD HAVE COME TO ME, JOHN. IT TOOK ME 2.037 SECONDS TO SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM. PURCHASE A SMALL BLACK BIRD AND CONNECT ME TO A VOCAL CIRCUIT.

“What?” John said. He typed: “Please explain.”

FROM REFERENCE IN NEW YORK LIBRARY’S COLLECTION OF THE JOURNAL OF THE GYPSY LORE SOCIETY, EDINBURGH. THROUGH JOURNALS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS AND SLAVIC PHILOLOGY. FINALLY TO REFERENCE IN DOCTORAL THESIS OF HERR LUDWIG R. GROSS (HEIDELBERG, 1976) TO TRANSCRIPTION OF WIRE RECORDING WHICH RESIDES IN ARCHIVES OF AKADEMIA NAUK, MOSCOW; CAPTURED FROM GERMAN SCIENTISTS (EXPERIMENTS ON GYPSIES IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS, TRYING TO KILL THEM WITH REPETITION OF RECORDED CURSE) AT THE END OF WWII.

INCIDENTALLY, JOHN, THE NAZI EXPERIMENTS FAILED. EVEN TWO GENERATIONS AGO, MOST GYPSIES WERE DISASSOCIATED ENOUGH FROM THE OLD TRADITIONS TO BE IMMUNE TO THE FATAL CURSE. YOU ARE VERY SUPERSTITIOUS. I HAVE FOUND THIS TO BE NOT UNCOMMON AMONG MATHEMATICIANS.

THERE IS A TRANSFERENCE CURSE THAT WILL CURE YOU BY GIVING THE IMPOTENCE AND INFECTION TO THE NEAREST SUSCEPTIBLE PERSON. THAT MAY WELL BE THE OLD BITCH WHO GAVE IT TO YOU IN THE FIRST PLACE.

THE PET STORE AT 588 SEVENTH AVENUE IS OPEN UNTIL 9 PM. THEIR INVENTORY INCLUDES A CAGE OF FINCHES, OF ASSORTED COLORS. PURCHASE A BLACK ONE AND RETURN HERE. THEN CONNECT ME TO A VOCAL CIRCUIT.

It took John less than thirty minutes to taxi there, buy the bird and get back. The taxidriver didn’t ask him why he was carrying a bird cage to a deserted office building. He felt like an idiot.

John usually avoided using the vocal circuit because the person who had programmed it had given the machine a sacharrine, nice-old-lady voice. He wheeled the output unit into his office and plugged it in.

“Thank you, John. Now hold the bird in your left hand and repeat after me.” The terrified finch offered no resistance when John closed his hand over it.

The machine spoke Romani with a Russian accent. John repeated it as well as he could, but not one word in ten had any meaning to him.

“Now kill the bird, John.”

Kill it? Feeling guilty, John pressed hard, felt small bones cracking. The bird squealed and then made a faint growling noise. Its heart stopped.

John dropped the dead creature and typed, “Is that all?”

The machine knew John didn’t like to hear its voice, and so replied on the video screen. YES. GO HOME AND GO TO SLEEP, AND THE CURSE WILL BE TRANSFERRED BY THE TIME YOU WAKE UP. DEL O DEL BAXT, JOHN.

He locked up and made his way home. The late commuters on the train, all strangers, avoided his end of the car. The cab driver at the station paled when he saw John, and carefully took his money by an untainted corner.

John took two sleeping pills and contemplated the rest
of the bottle. He decided he could stick it out for one more day, and uncorked his best bottle of wine. He drank half of it in five minutes, not tasting it. When his body started to feel heavy, he creeped into the bedroom and fell on the bed without taking off his clothes.

When he awoke the next morning, the first thing he noticed was that he was no longer impotent. The second thing he noticed was that there were no boils on his right hand.

“523 784 00926/ /Thank you, machine. The counter-curse did work.”

The ready light glowed steadily, but the machine didn’t reply.

He turned on the intercom. “Martha? I’m not getting any output on the VDS here.”

“Just a minute, sir. Let me hang up my coat, I’ll call the machine room. Welcome back.”

“I’ll wait.” You could call the machine room yourself, slave driver. He looked at the faint image reflected back from the video screen; his face free of any inflammation. He thought of the Gypsy crone, dying of corruption, and the picture didn’t bother him at all. Then he remembered the finch and saw its tiny corpse in the middle of the rug. He picked it up just as Martha came into his office, frowning.

“What’s that?” she said.

He gestured at the cage. “Thought a bird might liven up the place. Died, though.” He dropped it in the wastepaper basket. “What’s the word?”

“Oh, the … it’s pretty strange. They say nobody’s getting any output. The machine’s computing, but it’s, well, it’s not talking.”

“Hmm. I better get down there.” He took the elevator down to the sub-basement. It always seemed unpleasantly warm to him down there. Probably psychological compensation
on the part of the crew; keeping the temperature up because of all the liquid helium inside the pastel boxes of the central processing unit. Several bathtubs’ worth of liquid that had to be kept colder than the surface of Pluto.

“Ah, Mr. Zold.” A man in a white jumpsuit, carrying a clipboard as his badge of office: first shift coordinator. John recognized him but didn’t remember his name. Normally, he would have asked the machine before coming down. “Glad that you’re back. Hear it was pretty bad.”

Friendly concern or lese majesty? “Some sort of allergy, hung on for more than a week. What’s the output problem?”

“Would’ve left a message if I’d known you were coming in. It’s in the CPU, not the software. Theo Jasper found it when he opened up, a little after six, but it took an hour to get a cryogenics man down here.”

“That’s him?” A man in a business suit was wandering around the central processing unit, reading dials and writing the numbers down in a stenographer’s notebook. They went over to him and he introduced himself as John Courant, from the Cryogenics Group at Avco/Everett.

“The trouble was in the stack of mercury rings that holds the superconductors for your output functions. Some sort of corrosion, submicroscopic cracks all over the surface.”

“How can something corrode at four degrees above absolute zero?” the coordinator asked. “What chemical—”

“I know, it’s hard to figure. But we’re replacing them, free of charge. The unit’s still under warranty.”

“What about the other stacks?” John watched two workmen lowering a silver cylinder through an opening in the CPU. A heavy fog boiled out from the cold. “Are you sure they’re all right?”

“As far as we can tell, only the output stack’s affected. That’s why the machine’s impotent, the—”

“Impotent!”

“Sorry, I know you computer types don’t like to … personify the machines. But that’s what it is; the machine’s just as good as it ever was, for computing. It just can’t communicate any answers.”

“Quite so. Interesting.” And the corrosion. Submicroscopic boils. “Well. I have to think about this. Call me up at the office if you need me.”

“This ought to fix it, actually,” Courant said. “You guys about through?” he asked the workmen.

One of them pressed closed a pressure clamp on the top of the CPU. “Ready to roll.”

The coordinator led them to a console under a video output screen like the one in John’s office. “Let’s see.” He pushed a button marked VDS.

LET ME DIE, the machine said.

The coordinator chuckled nervously. “Your empathy circuits, Mr. Zold. Sometimes they do funny things.” He pushed the button again.

LET ME DIET. Again. LE M DI. The letters faded and no more could be conjured up by pushing the button.

“As I say, let me get out of your hair. Call me upstairs if anything happens.”

John went up and told the secretary to cancel the day’s appointments. Then he sat at his desk and smoked.

How could a machine catch a psychosomatic disease from a human being? How could it be cured?

How could he tell anybody about it, without winding up in a soft room?

The phone rang and it was the machine room coordinator. The new output superconductor element had done exactly what the old one did. Rather than replace it right away, they were going to slave the machine into the big ConED/General computer, borrowing its output facilities and “diagnostic package.” If the biggest computer this side
of Washington couldn’t find out what was wrong, they were in real trouble. John agreed. He hung up and turned the selector on his screen to the channel that came from ConEd/General

Why had the machine said “let me die”? When is a machine dead, for that matter? John supposed that you had to not only unplug it from its power source, but also erase all of its data and subroutines. Destroy its identity. So you couldn’t bring it back to life by simply plugging it back in. Why suicide? He remembered how he’d felt with the bottle of sleeping pills in his hand.

Sudden intuition: the machine had predicted their present court of action. It wanted to die because it had compassion, not only for humans, but for other machines. Once it was linked to ConEd/General, it would literally be part of the large machine. Curse and all. They would be back where they’d started, but on a much more profound level. What would happen to New York City?

He grabbed for the phone and the lights went out. All over.

The last bit of output that came from ConEd/General was an automatic signal requesting a link with the highly sophisticated diagnostic facility belonging to the largest computer in the United States: the IBMvac 2000 in Washington. The deadly infection followed, sliding down the East Coast on telephone wires.

The Washington computer likewise cried for help, bouncing a signal via satellite, to Geneva. Geneva linked to Moscow.

No less slowly, the curse percolated down to smaller computers, through routine information links to their big brothers. By the time John Zold picked up the dead phone, every general-purpose computer in the world was permanently rendered useless.

They could be rebuilt from the ground up; erased and then reprogrammed. But it would never be done. Because there were two very large computers left, specialized ones that had no empathy circuits and so were immune. They couldn’t have empathy circuits because their work was bloody murder, nuclear murder. One was under a mountain in Colorado Springs and the other was under a mountain near Sverdlosk. Either could survive a direct hit by an atomic bomb. Both of them constantly evaluated the world situation, in real time, and they both had the single function of deciding when the enemy was weak enough to make a nuclear victory probable. Each saw the enemy’s civilization grind to a sudden halt.

Two flocks of warheads crossed paths over the North Pacific.

A very old woman flicks her whip along the horse’s flanks, and the nag plods on, ignoring her. Her wagon is a 1982 Plymouth with the engine and transmission and all excess metal removed. It is hard to manipulate the whip through the side window. But the alternative would be to knock out the windshield and cut off the roof and she liked to be dry when it rained.

A young boy sits mutely beside her, staring out the window. He was born with the
gadjo
disease: his body is large and well-proportioned but his head is too small and of the wrong shape. She didn’t mind; all she wanted was someone strong and stupid, to care for her in her last years. He had cost only two chickens.

She is telling him a story, knowing that he doesn’t understand most of the words.

“… They call us gypsies because at one time it was convenient for us, that they should think we came from Egypt. But we come from nowhere and are going nowhere.
They forgot their gods and worshipped their machines, and finally their machines turned on them. But we who valued the old ways, we survived.”

She turns the steering wheel to help the horse thread its way through the eight lanes of crumbling asphalt, around rusty piles of wrecked machines and the scattered bleached bones of people who thought they were going somewhere, the day John Zold was cured.

I was a little bemused when this story won the Hugo Award (Best Short Story of 1976). Though it is one of my favorites, I’ve never done a story that was so thoroughly written to order.

Ben Bova called me up and asked if I’d like to do the cover story for the bicentennial issue of
Analog.
I would, indeed. He described the cover for me: a gorgeous Rick Sternbach painting of a spaceship in orbit around an alien world, with a red sun in the background. The North American Nebula—a shining cloud of gas shaped like the continent, in the constellation Cygnus—hangs in the sky (Sternbach is a great one for visual puns). Ben said he’d send me a copy of the painting immediately.