Steel Beach (14 page)

“Well? Are you going to help me beach this thing?”

And at that moment everything changed. I still am unable to fully describe just
how
it changed. The beach was the same. The sunlight streamed down just as it had before. The waves never missed a beat. My heart continued to meter out the seconds of my life. But I knew something fundamental and important was no longer as it had been before.

There are hundreds of words describing paranormal phenomena. I’ve examined and considered most of them, and none fits what happened when the Admiral spoke. There are many words for odd states of mind, for moods, for emotions and things seen and not-seen, things glimpsed, things incompletely understood or remembered, for degrees of memory. Things that go bump in the night. None of them were adequate. We’re going to have to come up with some new words—which was precisely the CC’s point in letting me experience this.

I went into the water up to my knees and helped the old man pull the boat onto the shore. It was quite heavy; we didn’t get it far. He produced a rope and tied the boat to a palm tree.

“I could use a drink,” he said. “The whole point of this was so I could have a drink with you. Like a human being.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak yet. He followed me up the path to my Robinson Family tree house, stood admiring it for a moment, and then followed me up the stairs and onto the lower veranda. He paused to admire the workmanship of my wheel-and-pulley waterworks, which used the power of the nearby stream to provide me with drinking and washing water high up in the tree. I showed him to my best rattan chair and went to the sideboard, where I poured us both glasses of the very last of my best whiskey. I paused to wind up the Victrola and put on one of my three scratchy cylinders:
The Blue Danube
. Then I handed him his drink, took mine, and sat down facing him.

“To indolence,” he said, raising his glass.

“I’m too lazy to drink to that. To industry.” We drank, and he looked around again. I must have glowed with pride. It was quite a place, though I say it myself. A lot of work and ingenuity had gone into it, from the dense-woven mats on the floor, to the slate fireplace, to the tallow candles in sconces arrayed around the walls. Stairs led off in two directions, to the bedroom, and the crow’s nest. My desk was open and cluttered with the pages of the novel I’d recently resumed. I was bursting to tell him of the difficulties I’d had producing usable paper and ink. Try it sometime, when you’ve got a few spare months.

“It must have taken a lot of industry to produce all this,” he said.

“A year’s worth. As you know.”

“Actually, three days short. You missed a few days, early on.”

“Ah.”

“Could happen to anybody.”

“I don’t suppose a few days more or less will matter. Back in the real world, I mean.”

“Ah. Yes. I mean, no, it shouldn’t.”

“Odd, how I never worried about things back there. Whether I still have a job, for instance.”

“Is it? Oh, yes, I suppose it is.”

“I suppose you told Walter what was going on?”

“Well.”

“I mean, you wouldn’t just pull the whole rug out from under me, would you? You knew I’d have to be going back to my old life, once we were done…  once we’d…  well, done whatever the hell it is we’ve been doing here.”

“Oh, no, of course not. I mean, of course you’ll be going back.”

“One thing I’m curious about. Where has my real body been all this time?”

“Harrumph.” Well, what he said was something like that. He glanced at me, looked away, harrumphed again. I felt the first little scamperings of doubt. It occurred to me that I had been taking a lot of things for granted. One of them was that the CC had his reasons for subjecting me to this tropical vacation, and that the reasons were ultimately beneficial to me. It had seemed logical to think this at the time, since I in fact was benefiting from it. Oh, sure, there were times when I had complained loudly to the crabs and the turkeys, bemoaned hardships, lusted after this or that. But it had been a healing time. Still, a year was a
long
time. What
had
been going on in the real world in my absence?

“This is very difficult for me,” the Admiral said. He removed his huge, ridiculous hat and set it on the table beside him, then took a lace handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his forehead. He was balding almost to the crown; his pink scalp looked as bright and polished as tourmaline.

“Since I don’t know what’s bothering you, I can’t really make it any easier for you.”

Still he didn’t say anything. The silence was broken only by the never-ending sounds of the island jungle and the splash of my water wheel.

“We could play twenty queries. ‘Something’s bothering you, Admiral. Is it bigger than a logic circuit?’ ”

He sighed, and drained his whiskey. He looked up at me.

“You’re still on the operating table at the studio.”

If there was supposed to be a punch line, I couldn’t see it coming. The idea that what should have been a one or two-hour repair job should have taken the better part of a year wasn’t even worth considering. There had to be more.

“Would you like another drink?”

He shook his head. “From the time you remember appearing on the beach to the time I spoke my first words to you, seven ten-thousandths of a second elapsed.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Even as I said it, I realized the CC was not prone to making ridiculous statements.

“I’m sure it must sound that way. I’d like to hear your reasons for thinking otherwise.”

I thought it over, and nodded. “All right. The human brain isn’t like a computer. It can’t accept that much information that fast. I
lived
that year. Every day of it. One of the things I recall most vividly is how long so many of the days were, either because I was working hard or because I didn’t have anything to do. Life is like that. I don’t know how
you
think, what your perceptions of reality are like, but
I
know when a year’s gone by. I’ve lived for a hundred of them. A hundred and one, now.” I sank back in my chair. I hadn’t realized I was getting so exercised about the matter.

He was nodding. “This will get a little complicated. Bear with me, I’ll have to lay some groundwork.

“First, you’re right, your brain is organized in a different way than mine is. In my brain, ‘memory’ is just stored data, things that have been recorded and placed in the appropriate locations within the matrix of charge/no-charge devices I use for the purpose. The human brain is neither so logically constructed nor organized. Your brain contains redundancies I neither have nor need. Data is stored in it by repetition or emphasis, and retrieved by associations, emotional linkages, sensory input, and other means that are still not completely understood, even by me.

“At least, that used to be the case. But today, there are very few humans whose brains have not been augmented in greater or smaller ways. Basically, only those with religious scruples or other irrational reasons resist the implantation of a wide variety of devices that owe their origin much more to the binary computer than to the protoplasmic neuron. Some of these devices are hybrids. Some are parallel processors. Some lean more toward the biologic and are simply grown within and beside the existing neural network, but using the laws of electric or optical transmission with their correspondingly much higher speeds of propagation, rather than the slower biochemical regime that governs your natural brain. Others are made outside the body and implanted shortly after birth. All of them are essentially interfaces, between the human brain and my brain. Without them, modern medicine would be impossible. The benefits are so overwhelming that the drawbacks are seldom thought of, much less discussed.”

He paused, lifting an eyebrow. I was chewing over quite a few thoughts concerning drawbacks at that moment, but I decided not to speak. I was too curious as to just where he was going with this. He nodded, and continued.

“As with so many other scientific advances, the machines in your body were designed for one purpose, but turn out to have other, unforeseen applications as well. Some of them are quite sinister. I assure you, you have not experienced any of those.”

“It seems sinister enough, if what you say is true.”

“Oh, it’s true. And it was done for a good reason, which I’ll get to in my own time.”

“It seems that’s something I now have an infinite supply of.”

“You could, you could. Where was I? Oh, yes. These devices, most of them originally designed and installed to monitor and control basic bodily functions at the cellular level, or to augment learning and memory, among other things, can be used to achieve some effects that were never envisioned by the designers.”

“And those designers are…  ?”

“Well, me, in large part.”

“I just wanted a reality check. I
do
know a
little
about how you work, and just how important you’ve become to civilization. I wanted to see what sort of fool you took me for.”

“Not
that
sort, at any rate. You’re right. Most technology long ago reached realms where new designs would be impossible without a great deal of involvement by me, or a being a lot like me. Often the original impetus for a new technology comes from a human dreamer—I have not usurped
that
human function yet, though more and more of such advances as we see in our surroundings
are
coming from me. But you’ve caused me to stray again from the main point. And…  do you have any more of that whiskey?”

I stared at him. The charade that a “man” was actually “sitting” in a “chair” in my “treehouse” drinking my “whiskey” was getting a bit too much for me. Or should it have been “me?” No matter what other hocus-pocus the CC might have worked with my mind, I was completely aware that everything I was experiencing at that moment was being fed directly into my brain through that black magic known as Direct Interface. Which was turning out to be even blacker than I, a notorious resister to D.I., could ever have guessed. But for some reason of his own, the CC had decided to talk to me in this way, after a lifetime of being a disembodied voice.

Come to think of it, I could already see one effect of this new face of the CC. I was now thinking of the CC as “him,” where before I’d always used the neuter third person singular pronoun.

So I got up and re-filled his glass from a bottle nearly half-full. And hadn’t it been nearly empty the last time I’d poured?

“Quite right,” the Admiral said. “I can refill that bottle as often as I wish.”

“Are you reading my mind?”

“Not as such. I’m reading your body language. The way you hesitated when you lifted the bottle, the expression on your face as you thought it over…  Direct Interface, the nature of the unreality we’re inhabiting. Your ‘real’ body did none of these things, of course. But interfacing with your mind, I read the signals your brain sent to your body—which doesn’t happen to be hooked into the circuit at the moment. Do you see?”

“I think so. Does this have anything to do with why you’ve chosen to communicate with me like this? In that body, I mean.”

“Very good. You’ve only tried Direct Interface twice in your life, both of them quite a long time ago, in terms of the technology. You weren’t impressed, and I don’t blame you. It was much more primitive in those days. But I communicate with most people visually now, as well as audibly. It is more economical; more can be said with fewer words. People tend to forget just how much human communication is accomplished with no words at all.”

“So you’re here in that preposterous body to give me visual cues.”

“Is it that bad? I wanted to wear the hat.” He picked it up and looked at it admiringly. “It’s not strictly contemporary, if you must know. This world is about at the level of 1880, 1890. The uniform is late eighteenth century. Captain Bligh wore a hat a lot like this. It’s called a cocked hat, specifically, a bicorne.”

“Which is a lot more than I ever needed to know about eighteenth century British naval headgear.”

“Sorry. The hat really has nothing to do with anything. But I’m curious. Has my body language conveyed anything to you?”

I thought it over, and he was right. I had gleaned more nuances from talking to him this way than I would have in the past, listening to his voice.

“You’re nervous about something,” I said. “I think maybe you’re worried…  about how I’ll react to what you’ve done to me. What an astonishing thought.”

“Perhaps, but accurate.”

“I’m completely in your power. Why should anything worry you?”

He squirmed again, and took another sip of his drink.

“We’ll get into that later. Right now, let’s get back to my story.”

“It’s a story now, is it?”

He ignored me, and plowed ahead.

“What you have just experienced is a fairly recent capability of mine. It’s not advertised, and I hope you don’t plan to do a story on it in the
Nipple
. So far I’ve used it mostly on the insane. It’s very effective on catatonics, for instance. Someone sits there all day, unmoving, not speaking, lost in a private world. I insert several years’ worth of memories in a fraction of a second. The subject then remembers wakening from a bad dream and going about a comfortable, routine life for years.”

“It sounds risky.”

“They can’t get any worse. The cure rate has been good. Sometimes they can be left alone after that. There are subjects who have lived as many as ten years after treatment, and not reverted. Other times counseling is needed, to find the things that drove them to catatonia in the first place. A certain percentage, of course, simply drift back into oblivion in weeks or months. I’m not trying to tell you I’ve solved all the mysteries of the human mind.”

“You’ve solved enough of them to scare the hell out of me.”

“Yes. I can understand your feelings. Most of the methods I use would be far too technical for you to understand, but I think I can explain something about the technique.

“First, you understand that I know you better than anyone in the universe. Better than…  ”

I laughed. “Better than my mother? She’s not even in the running. Were you trying to think of another example? Don’t bother. It’s been a long time since I was close to anyone. I was never very good at it.”