The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories (57 page)

In panic, he said, “But if you’re sick—”

“I can make it over to your dome.”

“What about your station? What if data come in that—”

“I’ve got a beeper I can bring with me.”

Presently he said, “Okay.”

“It would mean a lot to me, someone to sit with for a little while. The food man stays like half an hour, but that’s as long as he can. You know what he told me? There’s been an outbreak of a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on CY30 VI. It must be a virus. This whole condition is a virus. Christ, I’d hate to have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This is like the Mariana form.”

“Is it contagious?”

She did not directly answer. Instead she said, “What I have can be cured.” Obviously she wanted to reassure him. “If the virus is around… I won’t come over; it’s okay.” She nodded and reached to shut off her transmitter. “I’m going to lie down,” she said, “and get more sleep. With this you’re supposed to sleep as much as you can. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Goodbye.”

“Come over,” he said.

Brightening, she said, “Thank you.”

“But be sure you bring your beeper. I have a hunch a lot of telemetric confirms are going to—”

“Oh, fuck the telemetric confirms!” Rybus said, with venom. “I’m so sick of being stuck in this goddam dome! Aren’t you going buggy sitting around watching tape drums turn and little meters and gauges and shit?”

“I think you should go back home,” he said.

“No,” she said, more calmly. “I’m going to follow exactly the M.E.D. instructions for my chemotherapy and beat this fucking M.S. I’m not going home. I’ll come over and fix your dinner. I’m a good cook. My mother was Italian and my father is Chicano so I spice everything I fix, except you can’t get spices out here. But I figured out how to beat that with different synthetics. I’ve been experimenting.”

“In this concert I’m going to be broadcasting,” McVane said, “the Fox does a version of Dowland’s ‘Shall I Sue.’ ”

“A song about litigation?”

“No. ‘Sue’ in the sense of to pay court to or woo. In matters of love.” And then he realized that she was putting him on.

“Do you want to know what I think of the Fox?” Rybus asked. “Recycled sentimentality, which is the worst kind of sentimentality; it isn’t even original. And she looks like her face is on upside down. She has a mean mouth.”

“I like her,” he said stiffly; he felt himself becoming mad, really mad. I’m supposed to help you? he asked himself. Run the risk of catching what you have so you can insult the Fox?

“I’ll fix you beef stroganoff with parsley noodles,” Rybus said.

“I’m doing fine,” he said.

Hesitating, she said in a low, faltering voice, “Then you don’t want me to come over?”

“I—” he said.

“I’m very frightened, Mr. McVane,” Rybus said. “Fifteen minutes from now, I’m going to be throwing up from the IV Neurotoxite. But I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to give up my dome and I don’t want to be by myself. I’m sorry if I offended you. It’s just that to me the Fox is a joke. I won’t say anything more; I promise.”

“Do you have the—” He amended what he intended to say. “Are you sure it won’t be too much for you, fixing dinner?”

“I’m stronger now than I will be,” she said. “I’ll be getting weaker for a long time.”

“How long?”

“There’s no way to tell.”

He thought, You are going to die. He knew it and she knew it. They did not have to talk about it. The complicity of silence was there, the agreement. A dying girl wants to cook me a dinner, he thought. A dinner I don’t want to eat.
I’ve got to say no to her. I’ve got to keep her out of my dome.
The insistence of the weak, he thought. Their dreadful power. It is so much easier to throw a body block against the strong!

“Thank you,” he said. “I’d like it very much if we had dinner together. But make sure you keep radio contact with me on your way over here—so I’ll know you’re okay. Promise?”

“Well, sure,” she said. “Otherwise”—she smiled—“they’d find me a century from now, frozen with pots, pans, and food, as well as synthetic spices. You do have portable air, don’t you?

“No, I really don’t,” he said.

And knew that his lie was palpable to her.

The meal smelled good and tasted good, but halfway through Rybus excused herself and made her way unsteadily from the matrix of the dome—his dome—into the bathroom. He tried not to listen; he arranged it with his percept system not to hear and with his cognition not to know. In the bathroom the girl, violently sick, cried out and he gritted his teeth and pushed his plate away and then all at once he got up and set in motion his in-dome audio system; he played an early album of the Fox.

“Do you by any chance have some milk?” Rybus asked, standing at the bathroom door, her face pale.

Silently, he got her a glass of milk, or what passed for milk on their planet.

“I have antiemetics,” Rybus said as she held the glass of milk, “but I didn’t remember to bring any with me. They’re back at my dome.”

“I could get them for you,” he said.

“You know what M.E.D. told me?” Her voice was heavy with indignation. “They said that this chemotherapy won’t make my hair fall out, but already it’s coming out in—”

“Okay,” he interrupted.

“
Okay
?”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“This is upsetting you,” Rybus said. “The meal is spoiled and you’re—I don’t know what. If I’d remembered to bring my antiemetics, I’d be able to keep from—” She became silent. “Next time I’ll bring them. I promise. This is one of the few albums of Fox that I like. She was really good then, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” he said tightly.

“Linda Box,” Rybus said.

“What?” he said.

“Linda the box. That’s what my sister and I used to call her.” She tried to smile.

“Please go back to your dome.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well—” She smoothed her hair, her hand shaking. “Will you come with me? I don’t think I can make it by myself right now. I’m really weak. I really am sick.”

He thought, You are taking me with you. That’s what this is. That is what is happening. You will not go alone; you will take my spirit with you. And you know. You know it as well as you know the name of the medication you are taking, and you hate me as you hate the medication, as you hate M.E.D. and your illness; it is all hate, for each and every thing under these two suns. I know you. I understand you. I see what is coming. In fact, it has begun.

And, he thought, I don’t blame you. But I will hang onto the Fox; the Fox will outlast you. And so will I. You are not going to shoot down the luminiferous aether which animates our souls. I will hang onto the Fox and the Fox will hold me in her arms and hang onto me. The two of us—we can’t be pried apart. I have dozens of hours of the Fox on audio– and videotape, and the tapes are not just for me but for everybody. You think you can kill that? he said to himself. It’s been tried before. The power of the weak, he thought, is an imperfect power; it loses in the end. Hence its name. We call it weak for a reason.

“Sentimentality,” Rybus said.

“Right,” he said sardonically.

“Recycled at that.”

“And mixed metaphors.”

“Her lyrics?”

“What I’m thinking. When I get really angry, I mix—”

“Let me tell you something. One thing. If I am going to survive, I can’t be sentimental. I have to be very harsh. If I’ve made you angry, I’m sorry, but that is how it is. It is my life. Someday you may be in the spot I am in and then you’ll know. Wait for that and then judge me. If it ever happens. Meanwhile this stuff you’re playing on your in-dome audio system is crap. It has to be crap, for me. Do you see? You can forget about me; you can send me back to my dome, where I probably really belong, but if you have anything to do with me—”

“Okay,” he said, “I understand.”

“Thank you. May I have some more milk? Turn down the audio and we’ll finish eating. Okay?”

Amazed, he said, “You’re going to keep on trying to—”

“All those creatures—and species—who gave up trying to eat aren’t with us anymore.” She seated herself unsteadily, holding onto the table.

“I admire you.”

“No,” she said. “I admire
you.
It’s harder on you. I know.”

“Death—” he began.

“This isn’t death. You know what this is? In contrast to what’s coming out of your audio system? This is life. The milk, please; I really need it.”

As he got her more milk, he said, “I guess you can’t shoot down aether. Luminiferous or otherwise.”

“No,” she agreed, “since it doesn’t exist.”

Commodity Central provided Rybus with two wigs, since, due to the chemo, her hair had been systematically killed. He preferred the light-colored one.

When she wore her wig, she did not look too bad, but she had become weakened and a certain querulousness had crept into her discourse. Because she was not physically strong any longer—due more, he suspected, to the chemotherapy than to her illness—she could no longer manage to maintain her dome adequately. Making his way over there one day, he was shocked at what he found. Dishes, pots and pans and even glasses of spoiled food, dirty clothes strewn everywhere, litter and debris… troubled, he cleaned up for her and, to his vast dismay, realized that there was an odor pervading her dome, a sweet mixture of the smell of illness, of complex medications, the soiled clothing, and, worst of all, the rotting food itself.

Until he cleaned an area, there was not even a place for him to sit. Rybus lay in bed, wearing a plastic robe open at the back. Apparently, however, she still managed to operate her electronic equipment; he noted that the meters indicated full activity. But she used the remote programmer normally reserved for emergency conditions; she lay propped up in bed with the programmer beside her, along with a magazine and a bowl of cereal and several bottles of medication.

As before, he discussed the possibility of getting her transferred. She refused to be taken off her job; she had not budged.

“I’m not going into a hospital,” she told him, and that, for her, ended the conversation.

Later, back at his own dome, gratefully back, he put a plan into operation. The large AI System—Artificial Intelligence Plasma—which handled the major problem-solving for star systems in their area of the galaxy had some available time which could be bought for private use. Accordingly, he punched in an application and posted the total sum of financial credits he had saved up during the last few months.

From Fomalhaut, where the Plasma drifted, he received back a positive response. The team which handled traffic for the Plasma was agreeing to sell him fifteen minutes of the Plasma’s time.

At the rate at which he was being metered, he was motivated to feed the Plasma his data very skillfully and very rapidly. He told the Plasma who Rybus was—which gave the AI System access to her complete files, including her psychological profile—and he told it that his dome was the closest dome to her, and he told it of her fierce determination to live and her refusal to accept a medical discharge or even transfer from her station. He cupped his head into the shell for psychotronic output so that the Plasma at Fomalhaut could draw directly from his thoughts, thus making available to it all his unconscious, marginal impressions, realizations, doubts, ideas, anxieties, needs.

“There will be a five-day delay in response,” the team signaled him. “Because of the distance involved. Your payment has been received and recorded. Over.”

“Over,” he said, feeling glum. He had spent everything he had. A vacuum had consumed his worth. But the Plasma was the court of last appeal in matters of problem-solving. WHAT SHOULD I DO? he had asked the Plasma. In five days he would have the answer.

During the next five days, Rybus became considerably weaker. She still fixed her own meals, however, although she seemed to eat the same thing over and over again: a dish of high-protein macaroni with grated cheese sprinkled over it. One day he found her wearing dark glasses. She did not want him to see her eyes.

“My bad eye has gone berserk,” she said dispassionately. “Rolled up in my head like a window shade.” Spilled capsules and tablets lay everywhere around her on her bed. He picked up one of the half-empty bottles and saw that she was taking one of the most powerful analgesics available.

“M.E.D. is prescribing this for you?” he said, wondering, Is she in that much pain?

“I know somebody,” Rybus said. “At a dome on IV. The food man brought it over to me.”

“This stuff is addictive.”

“I’m lucky to get it. I shouldn’t really have it.”

“I know you shouldn’t.”

“That goddam M.E.D.” The vindictiveness of her tone was surprising. “It’s like dealing with a lower life-form. By the time they get around to prescribing, and then getting the medication to you, Christ, you’re an urn of ashes. I see no point in them prescribing for an urn of ashes.” She put her hand up to her skull. “I’m sorry; I should keep my wig on when you’re here.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Could you bring me some Coke? Coke settles my stomach.”

From her refrigerator he took a liter bottle of cola and poured her a glass. He had to wash the glass first; there wasn’t a clean one in the dome.

Propped up before her at the foot of her bed, she had her standard-issue TV set going. It gabbled away mindlessly, but no one was listening or watching. He realized that every time he came over she had it on, even in the middle of the night.

When he returned to his own dome, he felt a tremendous sense of relief, of an odious burden being lifted from him. Just to put physical distance between himself and her—that was a joy which raised his spirits. It’s as if, he thought, when I’m with her I have what she has. We share the illness.