“Yes, Rudolph.” Tonelessly she spoke, as before. Emptily.
“There’s one emotion I’ll bet you can still feel. Fear.” He lurched over to the bookcase and, with a harsh, labored grunt, hauled down the bust of Freud. “I’m going to kill you. Don’t you even care about that?”
“No, Rudolph.”
Balkani, in anguish and fury, lifted the massive bronze bust high over his head; he moved back toward the couch. She did not flinch; she did not, in fact, even seem to notice. He brought the bust down on her skull with all his strength. Her cranium burst.
“I only meant to—” he began numbly as the robot Joan Hiashi slid from the couch and fell, sprawling, onto the floor. And then he saw within her head—not formless organic tissue—but a crumpled turret of printed microminiaturized circuits and solid-state cerebro-spinal axis components, as well as delicate sweep-range surge gates, low-temp liquid helium battery conduits, homeostatic switches—with portions of the circuitry grotesquely still functioning, including the standard feedback networks for the master turret which, though it hung out of her skull and dangled down her cheek, continued ticking like some debrained reflex-arc crayfish-thing. And he recognized the handiwork which had gone into the building of the thing as his own.
“Joan ?” he whispered.
“Yes, Rudolph?” answered the robot faintly, and then its power failed.
“Joan?” Paul Rivers said.
Sitting on the bed of their Knoxville hotel room, in the hot red light of sunset, Joan Hiashi said, “Yes, Paul.”
“Is there anything you want?”
“No, Paul.” She studied the windowbox that now rested just inside the window of their room, and at the tropical plants that grew there. Then she smiled, and Paul Rivers smiled, too.
The therapy may be slightly unorthodox, he reflected, but it’s working. Now if she can only start caring about—not only plants—but people and the world of a common, shared reality.
“They want you to kill Percy X, don’t they?” she said. “I overheard. I wanted to hear.”
He said, “That’s right.” And did not look at her directly.
“Are you going to do it?” she asked, without emotion.
“I don’t know.” He hesitated, then said, “What do you think I should do?” A new twist, he thought acridly; the doctor asking the patient for advice.
“Be happy,” Joan said. Getting up, she walked over to her newly purchased windowbox of plants, where she knelt and played in the dirt with her fingers. “All these political movements and philosophies and ideals, all these wars—only illusions. Don’t trouble your inner peace; there’s no right and wrong, no win or lose. There’s only individual men and each one is completely—completely! —alone. Learn to be alone; watch a bird fly without telling anyone about it or even storing it up to tell someone about it in the future.” She turned toward him, her voice low and intense. “Let your life remain the secret it is. Don’t read the homeotapes; don’t watch the newscasts on TV. Don’t—”
Escapism, he thought as he listened to the hypnotic voice. I’ve got to be on my guard; it’s compelling but false. “Okay,” he said to her, breaking into the flow of her words, “while I sit here staring stupidly at the back of my hand, what happens to my patients? What happens to the people I could have helped?”
“They go on in their insanity, I suppose,” Joan said. “But at least you don’t join them in it.”
“You have to face reality.”
“My hand is real. It’s the war that’s a dream.”
“Doesn’t it matter to you that the whole human race is enslaved by creatures from another planet? Doesn’t it matter to you that we may all soon be dead?”
“I planned on dying sometime anyway. And when I’m dead, what’ll it matter to me whether others go on living or not?”
Paul Rivers felt a wave of sick frustration sweep over him. She’s so imperturbable, he thought feverishly, so safe behind her schizoid defenses. Be-hind that saintly faqade what absolute selfishness—what smug egotism. Looking down at his hands he saw that his fists were clenched. My god, he thought; what am I doing? I dont hit patients; I help them. She must be getting to me, reaching some deep wall of repressed Balkani-ism within me. Across from him he saw that she watched alertly, perceived the frustration, anger and—fear.
“What far bigger struggle?”
Wordlessly, Joan pointed to the windowbox; among her flowers, a contingent of red ants and another of black ants were engaged in a fracas. For the moment Paul gazed into the turmoil of writhing bodies and crunching mandibles—then he looked away, unable to speak. Is it I, he asked himself, who’s living on dreams and comforting illusions? Am I, in the end, the real escapist?
Joan, he realized, was still watching the ants. But not with anguish; on her Buddha-like face he saw a faint, gentle smile.
Rudolph Balkani sat at his elaborate, solar-battery-powered, justifying typewriter and let the words pour from his fingers. More than two days without sleep, but what did it matter? The methamphetamine tablets in his silver pill-box would keep him going until he had finished.
Only a single light burned in the room: the unshaded bulb over the cluttered desk on which he worked. The rest of the room, including the sprawled figure of the ruined robot Joan Hiashi, lay in shadow. It seemed to him as if the single bulb held back, with steadily diminishing strength, a blackness so heavy and thick as to be almost touched.
He had locked the door; several times people had knocked on it but Balkani had told them to go away. They had. Both the intercom and the vidphone had been carefully smashed. The bust of Freud had done them in, too.
Now the bronze, frowning father-figure lay facedown on the floor, its anger spent. The time had arrived for the son to create a universe. Feverishly of a book to the new universe that would displace the universe of Freud, together with all the other universes before it. A generation of young people would take this book as their Bible in the revolution of youth against age.
As he worked he hummed a snatch of a tune, always the tune of one of the advertising jingles which he had collected and studied in his early years. How much he had learned from TV commercials! While others turned down the TV set when the commercials came on, Balkani turned them up. The programs had nothing to sell but middle-class morality, a dreary product at best, but the commercials offered a world where dreams were for sale, where youth and health came in a box, and all pain and suffering were smoothed over with long, beautiful, slow-motion hair. Avant-garde films? Balkani jeered at them. Nothing lay in the most surrealistic of them to compare with the charisma of TV commercials. The work of the dedicated shoestring movie-makers of the ’sixties and ’seventies was now mercifully forgotten, but video-tape copies of erotic soap and beer commercials from the same period now brought bids of up to two hundred UN dollars from collectors.
At this moment Balkani stood ready to finish his masterpiece, Oblivion Therapy. Why not? The Joan Hiashi case, the one remaining piece in the cosmic crossword puzzle, had fallen—in an unexpected way, to be sure—in place. All alone in his office, Balkani laughed aloud. How simple it had become, after all. A gigantic shaggy dog story, where the whole point of the joke consisted in the fact that no point existed.
What lay behind it all?
Oblivion.
Suddenly Balkani stopped. The last sentence which he had typed had a ring of finality to it. Yes, he had written the concluding sentence of this, his life’s magnum opus. Carefully he removed the sheet from the typewriter and placed it with the rest of the manuscript; he then wrapped the manuscript with care and precision and addressed it to his New York publisher. He placed the package in the out-going mail tray and the autonomic mechanism of the tray at once whisked it from the room. So that was that.