13 At the Halfway Point
To love someone is a grace. To marry someone is a contract. The part of me that loved Essie, was loving her wholeheartedly, sank in pain and terror when she relapsed, surged in fearful joy when she showed signs of recovering. I had plenty of occasion for both. Essie died twice in surgery before I could get home, and again, twelve days later, when they had to go in again. That last time they made her clinically dead on purpose. Stopped heart and breath, kept only the brain alive. And every time they reanimated her I was frightened to think she would live-because if she lived it meant she might die one more time, and I could not stand it. But slowly, painfully, she began to gain weight, and Wilma told me the tide had turned, as when the spiral begins to glow in a Heechee ship at the halfway point and you know you’re going to live through the trip. I spent all that time, weeks and weeks of it, hanging around the house, so that when Essie could see me I would be there.
And all that time the part of me that had contracted to be married to her was resenting the bond, and wishing I were free. How do you account for that? That was a good occasion for guilt, and guilt is a feeling that comes readily to me-as my old psychoanalytic program used to tell me all the time. And when I went in to see Essie, looking like a mummy of herself, the joy and worry filled my heart and the guilt and resentment clogged my tongue. I would have given my life to make her well. But that did not seem a practical strategy, or at least I could not see any way to make that deal, and the other guilty and hostile part of me wanted to be free to dwell on lost Kiara, and whether somehow I might find her again.
But she mended, Essie did. She mended fast. The sunken bags of flesh under her eyes filled to be only bruises. The tubes came out of her nostrils. She ate like a pig. Before my very eyes she was filling out, the bust beginning to swell, the hips regaining their power to startle. “My compliments to the doctor,” I told Wilma Liederman when I caught her on her way in to see her patient.
She said sourly, “Yes, she’s doing fine.”
“I don’t like the way you said that,” I told her. “What’s the matter?”
She relented. “Nothing, really, Robin. All her tests are fine. She’s in such a hurry, though!”
“That’s good, isn’t it?’”
“Up to a point it is. And now,” she added, “I have to get in to see my patient. Who will be up and about any day now and, maybe, back to normal in a week or two.” What good news that was! And how reluctantly I received it.
I went through all those weeks with something hanging over me. Sometimes it seemed like doom, like old Peter Herter blackmailing the world and nothing the world could do to resist it, or like the Heechee stirring into anger as we invaded their complex and private worlds. Sometimes it seemed like golden gifts of opportunity, new technologies, new hopes, new wonders to explore and exploit. You would think that I would distinguish between hopes and worries, right? Wrong. Both scared the hell out of me. As good old Sigfrid used to tell me, I have a great talent not only for guilt but also for worry.
And when you came right down to it, I had some fairly real things to worry about. Not just Essie. When you reach a certain age you have, it seems to me, a right to expect some parts of your life to stay stable. Like what, for instance? Like money, for instance. I was used to a lot of it, and now here was my lawyer program telling me that I had to watch my pennies. “But I promised Hanson Bover a million cash,” I said, “and I’m going to pay it. Sell some stock.”
“I’ve sold stock, Robin!” He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t programmed to be able to be really angry, but he could be wretched and he was.
“So sell some more. What’s the best to get rid of?”
“None of it is ‘best,’ Robin. The food mines’re down because of the fire. The fish farms still haven’t recovered from losing the fingerlings. A month or two from now-“
“A month or two from now isn’t when I want the money. Sell.” And when I signed him off and called Bover up to find out where to send his million, he actually seemed surprised.
“In view of Gateway Corp’s action,” he said, “I thought you’d call our arrangement off.”
“A deal is a deal,” I said. “We can let the legalities hang. They don’t mean much while Gateway has preempted me.”
He was suspicious immediately. What is it that I do that makes people suspicious of me when I am going miles out of my way to be fair?’ “Why do you want to hold off on the legalities?” he demanded, rubbing the top of his head agitatedly-was it sunburned again?
“I don’t ‘want’ to,” I said, “it just doesn’t make any difference. As soon as you lift your injunction Gateway will drop theirs on me.”
Alongside Bover’s scowling face, my secretary program’s appeared. She looked like a cartoon of the Good Angel whispering into Bover’s ear, but actually what she was saying was for me: “Sixty seconds until Mr. Herter’s reminder,” she said.
I had forgotten that old Peter had given us another of his two hour notices. I said to Bover, “It’s time to button up for Peter Herter’s next jab,” and hung up-I didn’t really care if he remembered, I only wanted to terminate the conversation. Not much buttoning up was involved. It was thoughtful-no, it was orderly-of old Peter to warn us each time, and then to perform so punctually. But it mattered more to airline pilots and automobus’s than to stay-at-homes like me.
There was Essie, however. I looked in to make sure she was not actually being perfused or catheterized or fed. She wasn’t.
She was asleep-quite normally asleep, with her dark-gold hair spilling all around her, and gently snoring. And on the way back to my comfortable console chair I felt Peter in my mind.
I had become quite a connoisseur of invasions of the mind. It wasn’t any special skill. The whole human race had, over a dozen years, ever since the fool kid, Wan, began his trips to the Food Factory. His were the worst, because they lasted so long and because he shared his dreams with us. Dreams have power; dreams are a kind of released insanity. By contrast, the one light touch we’d had from Janine Herter was nothing, and Peter Herter’s precise two-minute doses no worse than a traffic light-you stop a minute, and wait impatiently until it is over, and then you go on your way. All I ever felt from Peter was the way he felt-sometimes the gut-griping of age, sometimes hunger or thirst, once the fading, angry sexual lust of an old man all by himself. As I sat down I remember telling myself that this time was nothing at all. More than anything else, it was like having a little dizzy spell, too much crouching in one position, when you stand up you have to pause a moment until it goes away. But it didn’t go away. I felt the blurriness of seeing things with two sets of eyes at once, and the inarticulate anger and unhappiness of the old man-no words; just a sort of tone, as though someone were whispering what I could not quite hear.
It kept on not going away. The blurriness increased. I began to feel detached and almost delirious. That second vision, that is never sharp and clear, began to show things I had never seen before. Not real things. Fantasy things. Women with beaks like birds of prey. Great glittering metal monsters rolling across the inside of my eyelids. Fantasies. Dreams.
The two-minute measured dose of reminder had gone off track. The son of a bitch had fallen asleep in the cocoon.
Thank God for the insomnia of old men! It didn’t last eight hours, not much more than one.