He moved quietly, still a little afraid, trying to think of ways to open the coconut when he found it. He imagined himself standing before a large and raggedly faceted stone, holding the coconut in both hands. He raised it and smashed it down, but when it struck it was no longer a coconut but Maya’s head; he heard her nose cartilage break with a distinct, rubbery snap. Her eyes, as blue as the sky above Madhya Pradesh, the sparkling blue sky of the egg, looked up at him, but he could no longer look into them, they retreated from his own, and it came to him quite suddenly that Lucifer, in falling, must have fallen up, into the fires and the coldness of space, never again to see the warm blues and browns and greens of Earth: I was watching Satan fall as lightning from heaven. Nicholas had heard that on tape somewhere, but he could not remember where. He had read that on Earth lightning did not come down from the clouds but leaped up from the planetary surface toward them, never to return.
“Nicholas.”
He listened, but did not hear his name again. Faintly water was babbling; had Dr. Island used that sound to speak to him? He walked toward it and found a little rill that threaded a way among the trees, and followed it. In a hundred steps it grew broader, slowed, and ended in a long blind pool under a dome of leaves. Diane was sitting on moss on the side opposite him; she looked up as she saw him, and smiled.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello, Nicholas. I thought I heard you. I wasn’t mistaken after all, was I?”
“I didn’t think I said anything.” He tested the dark water with his foot and found that it was very cold.
“You gave a little gasp, I fancy. I heard it, and I said to myself, ‘That’s Nicholas,’ and I called you. Then I thought I might be wrong, or that it might be Ignacio.”
“Ignacio was chasing me. Maybe he still is, but I think he’s probably given up by now.”
The girl nodded, looking into the dark waters of the pool, but did not seem to have heard him. He began to work his way around to her, climbing across the snakelike roots of the crowding trees. “Why does Ignacio want to kill me, Diane?”
“Sometimes he wants to kill me too,” the girl said.
“But why?”
“I think he’s a bit frightened of us. Have you ever talked to him, Nicholas?”
“Today I did a little. He told me a story about a pet fish he used to have.”
“Ignacio grew up all alone; did he tell you that? On Earth. On a plantation in Brazil, way up the Amazon—Dr. Island told me.”
“I thought it was crowded on Earth.”
“The cities are crowded, and the countryside closest to the cities. But there are places where it’s emptier than it used to be. Where Ignacio was, there would have been Red Indian hunters two or three hundred years ago; when he was there, there wasn’t anyone, just the machines. Now he doesn’t want to be looked at, doesn’t want anyone around him.”
Nicholas said slowly, “Dr. Island said lots of people wouldn’t be sick if only there weren’t other people around all the time. Remember that?”
“Only there are other people around all the time; that’s how the world is.”
“Not in Brazil, maybe,” Nicholas said. He was trying to remember something about Brazil, but the only thing he could think of was a parrot singing in a straw hat from the comview cartoons, and then a turtle and a hedgehog that turned into armadillos for the love of God, Montresor. Nicholas said, “Why didn’t he stay here?”
“Did I tell you about the bird, Nicholas?” She had been not listening again.
“What bird?”
“I have a bird. Inside.” She patted the flat stomach below her small breasts, and for a moment Nicholas thought she had really found food. “She sits in here. She has tangled a nest in my entrails, where she sits and tears at my breath with her beak. I look healthy to you, don’t I? But inside I’m hollow and rotten and turning brown, dirt and old feathers, oozing away. Her beak will break through soon.”
“Okay.” Nicholas turned to go.
“I’ve been drinking water here, trying to drown her. I think I’ve swallowed so much I couldn’t stand up now if I tried, but she isn’t even wet, and do you know something, Nicholas? I’ve found out I’m not really me, I’m her.”
Turning back, Nicholas asked, “When was the last time you had anything to eat?”
“I don’t know. Two, three days ago. Ignacio gave me something.”
“I’m going to try to open a coconut. If I can I’ll bring you back some.”
When he reached the beach, Nicholas turned and walked slowly back in the direction of the dead fire, this time along the rim of dampened sand between the sea and the palms. He was thinking about machines.
There were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of machines out beyond the belt, but few or none of the sophisticated servant robots of Earth—those were luxuries. Would Ignacio, in Brazil (whatever that was like), have had such luxuries? Nicholas thought not; those robots were almost like people, and living with them would be like living with people. Nicholas wished that he could speak Brazilian.
There had been the therapy robots at St. John’s; Nicholas had not liked them, and he did not think Ignacio would have liked them either. If Nicholas had liked his therapy robot he probably would not have had to be sent here. He thought of the chipped and rusted old machine that had cleaned the corridors—Maya had called it Corradora, but no one else ever called it anything but “Hey!” It could not (or at least did not) speak, and Nicholas doubted that it had emotions, except possibly a sort of love of cleanness that did not extend to its own person. “You will understand,” someone was saying inside his head, “that motives of all sorts can be divided into two sorts.” A doctor? A therapy robot? It did not matter. “Extrinsic and intrinsic. An extrinsic motive has always some further end in view, and that end we call an intrinsic motive. Thus when we have reduced motivation to intrinsic motivation we have reduced it to its simplest parts. Take that machine over there.”
What machine?
“Freud would have said that it was fixated at the latter anal stage, perhaps due to the care its builders exercised in seeing that the dirt it collects is not released again. Because of its fixation it is, as you see, obsessed with cleanliness and order; compulsive sweeping and scrubbing palliate its anxities. It is a strength of Freud’s theory, and not a weakness, that it serves to explain many of the activities of machines as well as the acts of persons.”
Hello there, Corradora.
And hello, Ignacio.
My head, moving from side to side, must remind you of a radar scanner. My steps are measured, slow, and precise. I emit a scarcely audible humming as I walk, and my eyes are fixed, as I swing my head, not on you, Ignacio, but on the waves at the edge of sight, where they curve up into the sky. I stop ten meters short of you, and I stand.
You go, I follow, ten meters behind. What do I want? Nothing.
Yes, I will pick up the sticks, and I will follow—five meters behind.