Gravity Box and Other Spaces (20 page)

Mindan half expected to be stopped, if not in the city then by the border, waylaid and killed but nothing happened. He went alone this time and traveled directly to Githira.

Fama met him soon after he crossed the border.

A year later he heard the news that King Prester had died. In his sleep, it was said, but other rumors told of poison. Mindan wondered if he ever recovered from the horn. Stephen took his place on the throne with his queen, the Princess Virith.

Mindan never went back.

Bruce held Ro-boy tight against his chest, regarding the others in the waiting room with great suspicion. There was a tension in the room that wasn't all him. Every kid in there was embracing his or her own Ro-boy as their parents fidgeted. There were young kids, babies to Bruce's eyes, and a few around his age, eight or ten. Bruce rested his chin on his Ro-boy's head.

Ro-boy had been silent since the previous evening, when Bruce's parents had argued and his dad came in and removed Ro-boy's brain. Bruce had slept badly without Ro-boy telling stories and talking him through the nightmares. He had finally drifted off early in the morning hours, a sleep that ended too soon when his mother gently rubbed his back, telling him to get ready for a visit to the doctor. Her eyes had been puffy and red.

He knew better than to ask anything when she was like this. Her explanations didn't make sense to him. Sometimes it was okay, but most of Bruce's memories of his mother included bouts of crying and self-recrimination, most of it somehow related to Bruce's dead brother, Ryan.

Bruce had no memory of Ryan, who had died before Bruce was born, but he had been a presence in the house
throughout his life. As far as Bruce could tell, the only times his parents fought were about Ryan.

Now Bruce hugged Ro-boy and glanced at his dad, who sat on his left, arms folded, staring ahead, his mouth a straight, unsympathetic gash. On Bruce's right, his mother kept her hands folded in her lap. Her eyes drifted across the room, occasionally fixing on a child, her mouth flexing around the effort not to cry. Confused as he was, Bruce sensed that she was even more so.

Two other families were called in before the nurse came for Bruce. His dad tapped his shoulder, and Bruce walked alongside him through the door, his mother following down the corridor to an examination room. Bruce's dad indicated that he should sit on the couch opposite the desk below a large terminal screen. One wall showed a meadow in early morning sun. His parents took chairs with their backs to the meadow.

Bruce was relieved when the door opened a few minutes later and a tall man in a short smock entered.

“Hi,” he said, his voice deep and pleasant. “I'm Dr. Widistal. You're the Michesons?” Bruce's parents stood and his dad extended a hand.

“John,” Bruce's dad said, clasping the doctor's hand, “and this is my wife, Vanessa.”

The doctor shook Vanessa's hand, then went to his desk and touched the keyboard. A chart appeared. Bruce saw his name and birth date above two columns of notes and numbers. The doctor read for a time, then turned to Bruce.

“Bruce. Is that your friend?”

Bruce glanced at Ro-boy. “Not right now. He's not really here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dad pulled his brain.”

“I see.” He looked at John and Vanessa. “What's the situation with the Personal Auditing Liaison?”

John cleared his throat. “I don't believe the PAL is functioning as it should. He's eight and by now, according to my understanding, he ought to be past certain—manifestations—of early childhood. We've had unexplained tantrums, nightmares, occasional bed-wetting, and certain related discipline issues.”

Dr. Widistal waited for more, but when John remained silent, he glanced at Vanessa, then at Bruce. “Did you bring the matrix with you?”

John fished the insert from his jacket pocket and handed it to Dr. Widistal. Bruce had not seen it often—a small, off-white wafer edged in silver—and wondered now if he would ever see it again. The doctor inserted it into a slot on the side of his screen. A smaller window opened on the left and he spent a few minutes studying the data that scrolled up. Suddenly he pulled the matrix and dropped it into a drawer, then stood.

“Where did you get this matrix?”

“From—here,” John said, shrugging. “We had it profiled here—” He looked at Vanessa, who looked from Bruce to the doctor to the floor. After a couple of false starts, she said, quietly, “I had it cloned after Ryan's death.”

“What did you do with Bruce's?”

Vanessa shrugged. “It's—somewhere—”

“I didn't know about this,” John said.

“How long has the substitution been in place?” Dr. Widistal asked.

“Um—” Vanessa reddened. “Since he was three.”

The doctor made notes through the keyboard and sighed. He turned to Bruce. “May I see?” He held out a hand for Ro-boy.

Bruce waited for a response from his PAL, but then remembered that he had no brain. Without its mind it appeared to Bruce as nothing but a featureless set of arms and legs with a head. When Ro-boy was there, it showed him human features that varied with Bruce's mood, but always a face he could trust. Now Bruce offered the bare form with both hands, and Dr. Widistal took with obvious care.

“Thank you, Bruce,” he said and placed it on the desk. He plugged a cable into it and still another window opened on his screen. He tapped the keyboard a few times, nodding, then unplugged it and set it aside. He stood. “Mr. and Mrs. Micheson, would you come with me, please. Bruce, I'd like you to wait here while I talk to your parents. Everything's going to be fine, okay?”

“Okay.”

The doctor waved his parents through a different door than the one they had entered and closed it behind him.

Bruce stared at the big screen still displaying his data. He understood some of it—the optimization curves year by year, with the deviation percentiles (he still had trouble pronouncing some of the terms, but he had been getting better) that increased over the last four, bothered him, but his academics showed consistently high. He knew that most of what he saw required the kind of interpretation Ro-boy normally supplied. Seeing himself spread out in numbers and comments like that gave him a peculiar feeling of not being himself, but that also might have been his PAL's absence. Ever since his dad took Ro-boy's brain last night, Bruce had been anxious, fidgety, waiting for something that had never happened before. Usually when he felt this way, Ro-boy helped. Not just the explanations he gave, but just a sense that everything would be all right.

That was how it was supposed to work, but it seemed recently to take Ro-boy longer to calm Bruce down, and even when he succeeded it was a tenuous calm and sometimes short-lived. Bruce thought it had to do with his parents and their arguments, which had been getting more frequent.

At least there had been no fights this morning. It seemed for the last six months his parents had made a routine of building an argument where none existed and letting it rage like a storm. Occasionally Bruce recognized himself as the subject, but it never made sense. As far as he could tell the only problem he had was a pronounced dislike of broccoli and cauliflower.

His dad had been upset at some of the vids he had been watching this past year, claiming they were violent or disrespectful of something; Bruce was never sure what exactly. About four months ago he had used a word—he still did not know where he had heard it—that had been the cause for a whole week of tension. He had taken a control chip out of the mower, just to examine it. He should not have left the machine broken that way, and certainly not where his dad could find it, but he had. His dad lost his temper. Bruce didn't understand how he could be upset that he was doing something more important than lawn maintenance, so he didn't explain himself. Instead, he spoke out his resentment with the word—well, a few words—that turned his father's face a strange shade of red.

In the end his dad took the issue up with his mother, not him. No one talked to him about it. No one asked him anything. He seemed to be nothing but an object, not a person, so he stopped listening to them.

The worst had been the last couple of months. So bad, that he had become afraid of his dad, and he avoided his
mother. His dad seemed to watch him constantly through narrowed eyes as if searching for flaws Bruce grew convinced he possessed and could not hide, while his mother teared up at the least thing: a word, a gesture, even the way Bruce laughed. Bruce no longer felt safe with either of them, having failed at being who or what he was supposed to be. He found no help from Ro-boy, no advice that worked, nothing that offset the anxiety and doubt. Now he was wetting his bed, a regression that horrified him, and Ro-boy had just been lobotomized. Bruce was alone.

He slipped off the couch and went to the door. Pressing his left ear to the cool surface, he tried to still his breathing.

“—personal auditing liaisons, PALs, are not interchangeable, Mrs. Micheson,” Dr. Widistal was saying. “They are very carefully matched to the developing neural and psychometric matrix of the child for exactly this reason, to assist in the positive reinforcement of desirable characteristics—”

“I know that!” Bruce winced at the sharpness of his mother's voice. “But—”

“But you wanted Ryan.” That was his dad. Though the tone was flat, Bruce heard the anger in his voice. “I told you to go see a specialist.”

“Could a specialist have brought Ryan back?”

“No, but you might have learned how to cope better.”

“I didn't want to cope! I wanted my son back.”

“Mrs. Micheson—”

“All right, I understand. I shouldn't have switched out the matrix from his PAL. How do we fix it?”

“
Now
you want to fix it,” his dad snapped.

Bruce backed away from the door and returned to the couch. He shuddered, felt pressure behind his face,
recognized the signs of incipient crying, and fought it. He was tired of crying, of being weak, as some of his classmates accused him. Alone, he waged a short, intense battle for control. The urge receded.

The door opened, startling Bruce. Dr. Widistal entered. He smiled as he sat down at his desk. He pulled the matrix from the slot, opened a drawer to his left, and dropped it in. From another drawer, he took a new unit and inserted it.

“Now, Bruce,” he said as he worked on his keyboard, “we'll have you ready to go in a little while.”

“Did my parents leave?”

“No, but I asked them to wait outside while you and I worked on Ro-boy.”

“Does he need fixing?”

“Seems so. Nothing serious, just—” His attention fixed on the new window on his screen. He typed a few commands, then turned to Bruce. “We're going to do a profile now. Do you know what that is?”

“You make an image of my brain?”

“Basically. This will take about half an hour, so I need you to lie back on the couch—that's it—I'm going to bring the scanner over—close your eyes if it makes you more comfortable—that's it—now, just relax. I'll be asking a series of questions, making a few statements, playing some sounds and music—”

Bruce remembered bits of the last time he had been through a profile, but this one took longer and seemed to include more variety. He enjoyed it and Dr. Widistal had a knack for putting him at ease. But when it was finished and he sat up, a vague anxiety returned as he thought about Ro-boy's brain in the doctor's drawer. Try as Dr. Widistal did to explain it, Bruce knew that this new profile was intended to give Ro-boy a new brain, a new
mind. No matter what, it would not be the same, and Bruce did not like that idea.

He watched Dr. Widistal work for a time, taking the older profiles and, with the new one, editing them into a new matrix. Bruce kept glancing at the drawer.

“I'll be back in a few moments, Bruce,” he said, standing. He flashed a smile and left.

Bruce waited then went to the doctor's desk. He opened the drawer. His ears warmed as he saw a handful of matrices. They all looked the same. For a moment he almost closed the drawer and gave up. But he shuffled through them until he saw a scratch on the length of one that looked familiar. His heart seemed to balloon as he grabbed it, closed the drawer, and shoved it into his pocket. He got back on the couch before Dr. Widistal returned.

“Okay, Bruce. Just a little longer and you'll be set to go.”

He took the new matrix and inserted it into Ro-boy. He ran a cable from the PAL to the screen, made a few final adjustments, then disconnected it and handed it to Bruce.

“Say hello to Ro-boy, Bruce.”

Bruce took the Ro-boy, holding it at arm's length, and waited. There was always a period in the morning, upon waking, when nothing came from Ro-boy, as if during the night the connection had faded or disappeared. It felt that way now, staring at the immobile face and soft body. Only now it was Ro-boy who had gone to sleep and upon waking must be wondering if Bruce had disappeared.