Woman On The Edge Of Time (28 page)

“But I’m no scientist. What do you want from me?” Her
eyes touched Bee and withdrew as if burned, after-image of black on her retina. Suppose there was a price? Suppose they wanted something from her, something, anything. Vaguely she imagined herself smuggling back a weapon, a bomb disguised as a toothbrush. Why should they have been so nice to her if they didn’t want something? In her lap under the table her hands sought each other, coldly sweating.

Barbarossa cleared his throat. “We could put it: at certain cruxes of history … forces are in conflict. Technology is imbalanced. Too few have too much power. Alternate futures are equally or almost equally probable … and that affects the … shape of time.”

She did not like to be lectured by him, for he reminded her of other men, authorities in her time, even though she could see that in this setting he had no edge on the others. “But you exist.” Still she waited for the price, the stinger.

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Luciente smiled, her eyes liquid and sad. “It’s not clear. We’re struggling to exist.”

“I don’t understand,” she said resentfully.

“You move your hand. You wave it. Do you understand how?” Barbarossa too smiled, his blue eyes asking her to listen. “How does the decision in your brain fire your hand? Yet you move.”

Her glance fell on Dawn, pouting in her chair. “I wish I could let you fly away into the past with me. For a visit. You’d fix things for me anyhow. Make me so happy. But not to where I’m kept. No!” That child being wheeled to electroshock, her fine brown hair plastered to her scalp with sweat, her eyes so wide open staring at the ceiling that a ring of white circled her pupils.

“Dawn, it isn’t bad to want to help, to want to work, to seize history,” Luciente said, getting up to caress her. “But to want to do it alone is less good. To hand history to someone like a cake you baked.”

Connie looked across the table at Bee, meeting his gaze for the first time. “Are you really in danger?”

“Yes.” His big head nodded in cordial agreement. “You may fail us.”

“Me? How?”

“You of your time. You individually may fail to understand
us or to struggle in your own life and time. You of your time may fail to struggle together.” His voice was warm, almost teasing, yet his eyes told her he was speaking seriously. “We must fight to come to exist, to remain in existence, to be the future that happens. That’s why we reached you.”

“I may not continue to exist if I don’t check back … . What good can I do? Who could have less power? I’m a prisoner. A patient. I can’t even carry a book of matches or keep my own money. You picked the wrong savior this time!”

“The powerful don’t make revolutions,” Sojourner said with a broad yellow grin.

“Oh, revolution!” She grimaced. “Honchos marching around in imitation uniforms. Big talk and bad-mouthing everybody else. Noise in the streets and nothing changes.”

“No, Connie! It’s the people who worked out the labor-and-land intensive farming we do. It’s all the people who changed how people bought food, raised children, went to school!” Otter was so excited she leaned far forward over the table till one of her fat braids dipped into the yogurt. As she argued Hawk picked Otter’s braid out and wiped it with a cloth napkin without Otter even noticing. Hawk smiled. Her smile still said mother. For a moment her glance rested on Dawn wistfully. “Who made new unions, withheld rent, refused to go to wars, wrote and educated and made speeches.”

“But there was a thirty-year war that culminated in a revolution that set up what we have. Or else there wasn’t and we don’t exist.” Luciente held her hands up, her eyes big and laughing.

“You’re not talking much this morning,” Connie said warily. Was Luciente sore at her about Bee?

“Oh, grasp, Luciente’s still half buzzy,” Otter said teasingly. “Jackrabbit and I had to go in delegation last night to fetch per home from Treefrog to do cleanup.”

Jackrabbit roused and waved in response, traces of paint and something shiny on his arms as if he had not quite cleaned up.

“Take Connie to the museum,” Luxembourg said. “Then person can understand us and our history better.”

“No!” Luciente woke up. “Guidelines set in grandcil by everyone call for no specific history in this proj.”

“How can a person understand without understanding?”

“That argument belongs to meeting,” Luciente said firmly. “I wait you to raise it there, Luxembourg. Until, no blurring!”

“Zo, you shook Luciente awake,” Jackrabbit said, grinning. “Charging into righteous battle with a grandcil ruling in per teeth.”

Luciente rubbed her cheek, embarrassed. “Maybe we can have coffee this morning? All this talk about it I could use some.”

“Should we send a note of complaint to Diana of Treefrog?” Otter asked, and everybody laughed, enjoying their power to embarrass Luciente.

Dr. Redding had arrived on the ward as she slipped back. Nobody was paying attention to her. I could have stayed longer, she thought regretfully, but things looked interesting. Dr. Redding, Dr. Morgan Acker, the psychologist, Miss Moynihan, the EEG technician, and even the secretary, Patty, and the attendants were gathered around Alice’s bed.

“I want you to pay close and careful attention this morning, and I want you to keep in mind in the ensuing months of this project what you’re going to witness demonstrated. I expect to see immediate effects in a higher level of confidence among staff,” Dr. Redding said coldly.

Dr. Morgan’s ears were red sticking through his pale thin hair. He hunched smaller. Misery rose from him like a stench. It was quiet in the women’s ward.

“Don’t get too sure of yourself, Dr. Ever-Ready.” Alice grinned under the hill of bandages. “That fat kid doctor there, he scared. He scared of me. Thinking I be fixing to bite it off.” Alice snapped her teeth. Under the sheet she wriggled her long body.

“Behold, Francis,” Dr. Redding said genially. “Patients recognize hesitation. You were reluctant to include Alice in the experiment because of the very violence that makes her a suitable subject. Your fears are groundless. Poor impulse control has brought this subject into repeated scrapes with society. The very lack of control that has stunted her development, we can provide her.”

“You just saying I do what I want. Don’t you wish you just sometime know what you be craving to do? Mr. Beardo there,
he poor at controlling impulses too. Making it with Miss White Coat Hot Pants. You all just go have one on me and get this crap out from my head.”

A tremor of embarrassment bent them all, grass in the wind. Then they drew mutual strength, gathered around Alice’s bed, and silently decided to pretend not to hear her. Acker muttered something about “random hostility patterns.” They clustered around a machine that was writing with pens eight at a time on paper that had been heaping up on the floor in accordion piles.

“All that paper,” Alice said, louder. “Running out like toilet paper gone wild. How many trees we use up this morning?”

Redding held out his wrist watch. “Argent and Superintendent Hodges will be here soon. Let us hope. And the camera crew.” Morgan and Moynihan were exclaiming over spikes. All the time the pens kept writing and the paper kept dropping in its neat diarrhea on the floor. Redding came to a decision. “Nurse, time to get off those bandages. Mrs. Valente, bring us coffee and we’ll hang out in the conference room till our guests come to the party, eh?” He sped out, with his staff in pursuit.

The nurse began removing the head bandages. Cautiously Connie and Sybil edged nearer and nearer till Connie called out, “Is it true you got needles stuck in your … head?”

“No he. Electrodes, they call them.”

Connie stared expectantly as the bald scalp emerged from the swathing. Like Bee. “But I don’t see anything!”

“They inside, girl. What you expect, I look like a goddamn pincushion? They stupid, but they not that stupid!”

“Alice, if they’re electrodes, where are the wires?” Sybil asked cautiously.

“You old-fashion. No wires. They use a little radio, and they stick that inside too!”

“Now, you cut this out,” the nurse said suddenly. “That’s enough. Quiet on the ward. You’re disturbing this patient.”

“I don’t see how we could possibly disturb Alice. It isn’t we who put a radio and electrodes in her head,” Sybil said loftily.

“Quiet down or I’ll give you a shot that will lay you out flat,” the nurse said, hands on her hips.

Back at their own beds, Sybil whispered, “The nurse didn’t contradict us about the electrodes. Could it be true?”

“But what for?”

“Control. To turn us into machines so we obey them,” Sybil whispered.

What nonsense it had to be! They were crazy, they were imagining this. She wished she had stayed in Mattapoisett.

At eleven the staff was back with two more doctors and a video tape crew. One of the newcomers she recognized from the Christmas party of her last commitment as the superintendent of the hospital. Dr. Samuel Hodges was over six feet tall and in his late fifties, with only a circlet of crisp curly gray hair like a laurel wreath around his ruddy dome. The other man was older, with silky white hair, a radiant tan, a fine gray suit, natty but conservatively tailored. Dr. Redding and Dr. Hodges called him Chip, but Dr. Morgan called him Dr. Argent. Dr. Redding asked him how St. Peter’s Island had been, casually throwing at the super that Dr. Argent’s family owned an island off Georgia. Scoring, point-counting.

“A very small island,” Dr. Argent said. “Used to offer shelter to runaway slaves. Now to runaway slaving doctors.” He spoke differently than the others; at first she thought perhaps he was English, and sometimes his voice reminded her of the Kennedys speaking on TV. He wore his white hair a little long and wherever he stood became the center of the room. Redding talked to him with the soft edge of diffidence mellowing his voice. A teasing edge brought a laugh up to Redding’s throat and kept it waiting there, like a little warning light.

“We’ll be video-taping occasionally over the next two months,” Redding said to Dr. Hodges. “Advantages: on-the-spot record of procedures and patient responses. Able to be edited into a film we can use for funding and education. No special lights needed.”

“The light in here is borderline,” one of the crew said. “When we get on the ward in NYNPI we’ll get you better tape.”

“Don’t turn that camera on me!” Alice yanked away from the nurse and flailed in the bed.

“I can, of course, calm her at any point, but I’d prefer to proceed as we’ve programmed it,” Redding said.

Dr. Hodges made him a little bow, indicating he should continue. “Doctor, it’s her head,” Mrs. Valente said apologetically. “We’ve shaved it. She’s bald. You know, it makes her be embarrassed? To be photographed bald?”

They looked at Valente blankly. Connie felt embarrassed herself. She had disliked Valente on sight, because of her burliness and her speech impediment. But Valente actually saw them as people; saw Alice as a woman who should not be publicly shamed. Valente went on, mumbling badly. “Could maybe get wigs?”

“Patty.” Dr. Redding nodded to the ever-hovering secretary. “Get an assortment of wigs for the women, for use while their hair grows out.”

“How soon do you want them, Doctor?” Patty looked dubious. She was a slender woman, always in a mint green or cherry red pants suit, with short blond hair and big round bluetinted glasses sliding on her nose.

“Alice is just a demonstration. We won’t start on the others till we’re at the institute. Two weeks, say.”

So they were going to do it to all of them. They were going to do it to her—whatever
it
was. Her too.

“Charlie, if I may be so bold,” Dr. Argent said, “why not begin with her kicking around? After all, irrational violence is what we’re about.”

“Right you are.” Redding chuckled, looking upstaged. “Certainly. Let’s go. Roll ’em.”

“One minute, Doc. We’re working on the miking. Just keep her going and we’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.”

Alice did keep going. She succeeded in heaving herself out of the bed and it took both attendants and the nurse to force her flat again. As the struggle proceeded, the crew started filming, a mike dangling over the bed, while the impassive gum-chewing cameraman edged Patty out of the way to get a good angle.

“Welcome to the monkey house at the zoo!” Sybil yelled. All the patients were active now, some talking loudly to themselves or the air, Miss Green lying prone with the pillow pushed over her head, Tina Ortiz watching in a knot of fury. The men were crowding the door to stare in. Alvin made a dash down the ward to bang on the outer door with both fists. Fats
grabbed him under the armpits and walked him back to his bed. Alvin did not appear again; probably they snowed him with heavy tranks.

Redding, wearing a small mike around his neck like a pendant, lectured steadily on amperage and voltage. “We will be stimulating points one through ten of the left amygdala with point nine milliamps, one hundred, point two microseconds pulse duration, bidirectional square waves for five seconds.” He sounded like a repairman from the telephone company calling in to report on a job. Alice breathed in snorts, letting go a tirade of curses. One of the crew shut off her mike. The two attendants braced themselves, holding her down. Dr. Argent stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his lips pursed as if he might start whistling a tune, watching the whole scene with bright interested gaze. Occasionally he rocked to and fro on the balls of his feet. Dr. Hodges stood farther back, stealing a glance at his watch. Finally he sent Patty for a chair.

“The focal brain dysfunction we see in this patient has resulted in episodic dyscontrol. We believe this kind of hardcore senseless aggression can be controlled—even cured. In layman’s language, something is wrong in the electrical circuitry—some wires are crossed in the switchboard of the amygdala. When these circuits ‘short out,’ as it were, irrational violence is triggered in the patient.”

Dr. Argent winced, seemed as if he would speak, muttered to himself. Finally he said softly, “Perhaps we should leave analogies to the poets, Charlie.”

“Acker, ready? Morgan? Moynihan? Let’s go.” Redding turned to the camera crew. “You can film the computer stuff at the institute. Here we’re just jerry-rigged.”