The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction MEGAPACK® (23 page)

There was the old man. There was the gangrenous leg. There was Dr. Steele, crisp and rugged and dimple-chinned, the network’s star surgeon, $250,000-a-year’s worth of talent. There was the scalpel, gleaming in Steele’s hand.

Northrop began to sweat. The amplified brain waves were coming through the intensifier, and he felt the throbbing in the old man’s leg, felt the dull haze of pain behind the old man’s forehead, felt the weakness of being eighty years old and half dead.

Steele was checking out the electronic scalpel, now, while the nurses fussed around, preparing the man for the amputation. In the finished tape, there would be music, narration, all the trimmings, but now there was just a soundless series of images, and, of course, the tapped brainwaves of the sick man.

The leg was bare.

The scalpel descended.

Northrop winced as vicarious agony shot through him. He could feel the blazing pain, the brief searing hellishness as the scalpel slashed through diseased flesh and rotting bone. His whole body trembled, and he bit down hard on his lips and clenched his fists and then it was over.

There was a cessation of pain. A catharsis. The leg no longer sent its pulsating messages to the weary brain. Now there was shock, the anesthesia of hyped-up pain, and with the shock came calmness. Steele went about the mop-up operation. He tidied the stump, bound it.

The rushes flickered out in anticlimax. Later, the production crew would tie up the program with interviews of the family, perhaps a shot of the funeral, a few observations on the problem of gangrene in the aged. Those things were the extras. What counted, what the viewers wanted, was the sheer nastiness of vicarious pain, and that they got in full measure. It was a gladiatorial contest without the gladiators, masochism concealed as medicine. It worked. It pulled in the viewers by the millions.

Northrop patted sweat from his forehead.

“Looks like we got ourselves quite a little show here, boys,” he said in satisfaction.

* * * *

The mood of satisfaction was still on him as he left the building that day. All day he had worked hard, getting the show into its final shape, cutting and polishing. He enjoyed the element of craftsmanship. It helped him to forget some of the sordidness of the program.

Night had fallen when he left. He stepped out of the main entrance and a figure strode forward, a bulky figure, medium height, tired face. A hand reached out, thrusting him roughly back into the lobby of  the building.

At first Northrop didn’t recognize the face of the man. It was a blank face, a nothing face, a middle-aged empty face. Then he placed it.

Harry Gardner. The son of the dead man.

“Murderer!” Gardner shrilled. “You killed him! He would have lived if you’d used anesthetics! You phony, you murdered him so  people would have thrills on television!”

Northrop glanced up the lobby. Someone was coming around the bend. Northrop felt calm. He could stare this nobody down until he fled in fear.

“Listen,” Northrop said, “we did the best medical science can do for your father. We gave him the ultimate in scientific care. We—”

“You murdered him!”

“No,” Northrop said, and then he said no more, because he saw  the sudden flicker of a slice-gun in the blank-faced man’s fat hand.  He backed away, but it didn’t help, because Gardner punched the  trigger and an incandescent bolt flared out and sliced across Northrop’s belly just as efficiently as the surgeon’s scalpel had cut through the  gangrenous leg.

Gardner raced away, feet clattering on the marble floor. Northrop dropped, clutching himself. His suit was seared, and there was a slash through his abdomen, a burn an eighth of an inch wide and perhaps four inches deep, cutting through intestines, through organs, through flesh. The pain hadn’t begun yet. His nerves weren’t getting the message through to his stunned brain. But then they were, and Northrop coiled and twisted in agony that was anything but vicarious now.

Footsteps approached.

“Jeez,” a voice said.

Northrop forced an eye open. Maurillo. Of all people, Maurillo.

“A doctor,” Northrop wheezed. “Fast! Christ, the pain! Help me, Ted!”

Maurillo looked down, and smiled. Without a word, he stepped  to the telephone booth six feet away, dropped in a token, punched out a call.

“Get a van over here, fast. I’ve got a subject, chief.”

Northrop writhed in torment. Maurillo crouched next to him.  “A doctor,” Northrop murmured. “A needle, at least. Gimme a needle!  The pain—”

“You want me to kill the pain?” Maurillo laughed. “Nothing doing, chief. You just hang on. You stay alive till we get that hat on your head and tape the whole thing.”

“But you don’t work for me—you’re off the program—”

“Sure,” Maurillo said. “I’m with Transcontinental now. They’re starting a blood-and-guts show too. Only they don’t need waivers.”

Northrop gaped. Transcontinental? That bootleg outfit that peddled tapes in Afghanistan and Mexico and Ghana and God knew where else? Not even a network show, he thought. No fee. Dying in agony for the benefit of a bunch of lousy tapeleggers. That was the worst part, Northrop thought. Only Maurillo would pull a deal like that.

“A needle! For God‘s sake, Maurillo, a needle!”

“Nothing doing, chief. The van’ll be here any minute. They’ll sew you up, and we’ll tape it nice.”

Northrop closed his eyes. He felt the coiling intestines blazing within him. He willed himself to die, to cheat Maurillo and his bunch of ghouls. But it was no use. He remained alive and suffering.

He lived for an hour. That was plenty of time to tape his dying  agonies. The last thought he had was that it was a damned shame he couldn’t star on his own show.

THE PLEASURE OF THEIR COMPANY

Originally published in
Infinity
(1970).

He was the only man aboard the ship, one man inside a sleek shining cylinder heading away from Bradley’s World at ten thousand miles a second, and yet he was far from alone. He had wife, father, daughter, son for company, and plenty of others, Ovid and Hemingway and Plato, and Shakespeare and Goethe, Attila the Hun and Alexander the Great, a stack of fancy cubes to go with the family ones. And his old friend Juan was along, too, the man who had shared his dream, his utopian fantasy, Juan who had been with him at the beginning and almost until the end. He had a dozen fellow voyagers in all. He wouldn’t be lonely, though he had three years of solitary travel ahead of him before he reached his landfall, his place of exile.

It was the third hour of his voyage. He was growing calm, now, after the frenzy of his escape. Aboard ship he had showered, changed, rested. The sweat and grime of that wild dash through the safety tunnel were gone, now, though he wouldn’t quickly shake from his mind the smell of that passageway, like rotting teeth, nor the memory of his terrifying fumbling with the security gate’s copper arms as the junta’s storm-troopers trotted toward him. But the gate had opened, and the ship had been there, and he had escaped, and he was safe. And he was safe.

I’ll try some cubes, he thought.

The receptor slots in the control room held six cubes at once. He picked six at random, slipped them into place, actuated the evoker. Then he went into the ship’s garden. There were screens and speakers all over the ship.

The air was moist and sweet in the garden. A plump, toga-clad man, clean-shaven, big-nosed, blossomed on one screen and said, “What a lovely garden! How I adore plants! You must have a gift for making things grow.”

“Everything grows by itself. You’re—”

“Publius Ovidius Naso.”

“Thomas Voigtland. Former President of the Citizens’ Council  on Bradley’s World. Now president-in-exile, I guess. A coup d’etat by the military.”

“My sympathies. Tragic, tragic!”

“I was lucky to escape alive. I may never be able to return. They’ve probably got a price on my head.”

“I know how terrible it is to be sundered from your homeland. Were you able to bring your wife?”

“I’m over here,” Lydia said. “Tom? Tom, introduce me to Mr. Naso.”

“I didn’t have time to bring her,” Voigtland said. “But at least I took a cube of her with me.”

Lydia was three screens down from Ovid, just above a clump of glistening ferns. She looked glorious, her auburn hair a little too deep in tone but otherwise quite a convincing replica. He had cubed her two years before; her face showed none of the lines that the recent troubles had engraved on it. Voigtland said to her, “Not Mr. Naso, dear. Ovid. The poet Ovid.”

“Of course. I’m sorry. How did you happen to choose him?”

“Because he’s charming and civilized. And he understands what exile is like.”

Ovid said softly, “Ten years by the Black Sea. Smelly barbarians my only companions. Yet one learns to adapt. My wife remained in Rome to manage my property and to intercede for me—”

“And mine remains on Bradley’s World,” said Voigtland. “Along with—along with—”

Lydia said, “What’s this about exile, Tom? What happened?”

He began to explain about McAllister and the junta. He hadn’t told her, back when he was having her cubed, why he wanted a cube of her. He had seen the coup coming. She hadn’t.

As he spoke, a screen brightened between Ovid and Lydia and the seamed, leathery face of old Juan appeared. They had redrafted the constitution of Bradley’s World together, twenty years earlier.

“It happened, then,” Juan said instantly. “Well, we both knew it would. Did they kill very many?”

“I don’t know. I got out fast once they started to—” He faltered. “It was a perfectly executed coup. You’re still there. I suppose you’re organizing the underground resistance by now. And I—And I—”

Needles of fire sprouted in his brain.

And I ran away,
he said silently.

The other screens were alive now. On the fourth, someone with white robes, gentle eyes, dark curling hair. Voigtland guessed him to be Plato. On the fifth, Shakespeare, instantly recognizable, for the cube-makers had modeled him after the First Folio portrait: high forehead, long hair, pursed quizzical lips. On the sixth, a fierce, demonic-looking little man. Attila the Hun? They were all talking, activating themselves at random, introducing themselves to one another and to him. Their voices danced along the top of his skull. He could not follow their words. Restless, he moved among the plants, touching their leaves, inhaling the perfume of their flowers.

Out of the chaos came Lydia’s voice.

“Where are you heading now, Tom?”

“Rigel XIX. I’ll wait out the revolution there. It was my only option once hell broke loose. Get in the ship and—”

“It’s so far,” she said. “You’re traveling alone?”

“I have you, don’t I? And Mark and Lynx, and Juan, and Dad, and all these others.”

“Cubes, that’s all.”

“Cubes will have to do,” Voigtland said. Suddenly the fragrance of the garden seemed to be choking him. He went out, into the viewing salon next door, where the black splendor of space glistened through a wide port. Screens were mounted opposite the window. Juan and Attila seemed to be getting along marvelously well; Plato and Ovid were bickering; Shakespeare brooded silently; Lydia, looking worried, stared out of her screen at him. He studied the sweep of the stars.

“Which is our world?” Lydia asked.

“This,” he said.

“So small. So far away.”

“I’ve only been traveling a few hours. It’ll get smaller.”

* * * *

He hadn’t had time to take anyone with him. The members of his family had been scattered all over the planet when the alarm came, not one of them within five hours of home—Lydia and Lynx holidaying in the South Polar Sea, Mark archaeologizing on the Westerland Plateau. The integrator net told him it was a Contingency C situation: get offplanet within ninety minutes, or get ready to die. The forces of the junta had reached the capital and were on their way to pick him up. The escape ship had been ready, gathering dust in its buried vault.  He hadn’t been able to reach Juan. He hadn’t been able to reach anybody. He used up sixty of his ninety minutes trying to get in touch with people, and then, with stunner shells already hissing overhead, he had gone into the ship and taken off. Alone.

But he had the cubes.

Cunning things. A whole personality encapsulated in a shimmering plastic box a couple of centimeters high. Over the past few years, as the likelihood of Contingency C had grown steadily greater, Voigtland had cubed everyone who was really close to him and stored the cubes aboard the escape ship, just in case.

It took an hour to get yourself cubed; and at the end of it, they had your soul in the box, your motion habits, your speech patterns, your way of thinking, your entire package of standard reactions. Plug your cube into a receptor slot and you came to life on the screen, smiling as you would smile, moving as you would move, sounding as you would sound, saying things you would say. Of course, the thing on the screen was unreal, a computer-actuated mockup, but it was programmed to respond to conversation, to absorb new data and change its outlook in the light of what it learned, to generate questions without the need of previous inputs; in short, to behave as a real person would.

The cube-makers also could supply a cube of anyone who had ever lived, or, for that matter, any character of fiction. Why not? It wasn’t necessary to draw a cube’s program from a living subject. How hard was it to tabulate and synthesize a collection of responses, typical phrases, and attitudes, feed them into a cube, and call what came out Plato or Shakespeare or Attila? Naturally a custom-made synthesized cube of some historical figure ran high, because of the man-hours of research and programming involved, and a cube of someone’s own departed great-aunt was even more costly, since there wasn’t much chance that it could be used as a manufacturer’s prototype for further sales. But there was a wide array of standard-model historicals in the catalog when he was stocking his getaway ship; Voigtland had chosen eight of them.

Fellow voyagers. Companions on the long solitary journey into exile that he knew that he might someday have to take. Great thinkers. Heroes and villains. He flattered himself that he was worthy of their company. He had picked a mix of personality types, to keep him from losing his mind on his trip. There wasn’t another habitable planet within a light-year of Bradley’s World. If he ever had to flee, he would have to flee
far
.

He walked from the viewing salon to the sleeping cabin, and from there to the galley, and on into the control room. The voices of his  companions followed him from room to room. He paid little attention to what they were saying, but they didn’t seem to mind. They were talking to each other. Lydia and Shakespeare, Ovid and Plato, Juan and Attila, like old friends at a cosmic cocktail party.

“—not for its own sake, no but I’d say it’s necessary to encourage mass killing and looting in order to keep your people from losing momentum, I guess, when—”

“—such a sad moment, when Prince Hal says he doesn’t know Falstaff. I cry every time—”

“—when I said what I did about poets and musicians in an ideal Republic, it was not, I assure you, with the intent that
I
should have to live in such a Republic myself—”

“—the short sword, such as the Romans use, that’s best, but—”

“—a throng of men and women in the brain, and one must let them find their freedom on the page—”

“—a slender young lad is fine, but yet I always had a leaning toward the ladies, you understand—”

“—massacre as a technique of political manipulation—”

“—Tom and I read your plays aloud to one another—”

“—good thick red wine, hardly watered—”

“—I loved Hamlet the dearest, my true son he was—”

“—the axe, ah, the axe!—”

Voigtland closed his throbbing eyes. He realized that it was soon in his voyage for company, too soon, too soon. Only the first day of his escape, it was. He had lost his world in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye. He needed time to come to terms with that, time and solitude, while he examined his soul. Later he could talk to his fellow voyagers. Later he could play with his cubed playmates.

He began pulling the cubes from the slots, Attila first, then Plato, Ovid, Shakespeare. One by one the screens went dark. Juan winked at him as he vanished, Lydia dabbed at her eyes. Voigtland pulled her cube too.

When they were all gone, he felt as if he had killed them.

* * * *

For three days he roamed the ship in silence. There was nothing for him to do except read, think, watch, eat, sleep, and try to relax. The ship was self-programmed and entirely homeostatic; it ran without need of him, and indeed he had no notion of how to operate it. He knew how to program a takeoff, a landing, and a change of course, and the ship did all the rest. Sometimes he spent hours in front of his viewing port, watching Bradley’s World disappear into the maze of the heavens. Sometimes he took his cubes out and arranged them in little stacks, four stacks of three, then three stacks of four, then six of two. But he did not play any of them. Goethe and Plato and Lydia and Lynx and Mark remained silent. They were his opiates against loneliness; very well, he would wait until the loneliness became intolerable.

He considered starting to write his memoirs. He decided to let them wait a while, too, until time had given him a clearer perspective on  his downfall.

He thought a great deal about what might be taking place on Bradley’s World just now. The jailings, the kangaroo trials, the purges. Lydia in prison? His son and daughter? Juan? Were those whom he had left behind cursing him for a coward, running off to Rigel this way in his plush little escape vessel? Did you desert your planet, Voigtland. Did you run out?

No. No. No. No.

Better to live in exile than to join the glorious company of martyrs. This way you can send inspiring messages to the underground, you can serve as a symbol of resistance, you can go back someday and guide the oppressed fatherland toward freedom, you can lead the counterrevolution and return to the capital with everybody cheering…Can a martyr do any of that?

So he had saved himself. So he had stayed alive to fight another day.

It sounded good. He was almost convinced.

He wanted desperately to know what was going on back there on Bradley’s World, though.

The trouble with fleeing to another star system was that it wasn’t the same thing as fleeing to a mountain-top hideout or some remote island on your own world. It would take so long to get to the other system, so long to make the triumphant return. His ship was a pleasure cruiser, not really meant for big interstellar hops. It wasn’t capable of heavy acceleration, and its top velocity, which it reached only after a buildup of many weeks, was less than .50 lights. If he went all the way to the Rigel system and headed right back home, six years would have elapsed on Bradley’s World between his departure and his return. What would happen in those six years?

What was happening there now?

His ship had a tachyon-beam ultrawave communicator. He could reach with it any world within a sphere ten light-years in radius, in a matter of minutes. If he chose, he could call clear across the galaxy, right to the limits of man’s expansion, and get an answer in less than  an hour.

He could call Bradley’s World and find out how all those he loved had fared in the first hours of the dictatorship.

If he did, though, he’d paint a tachyon trail like a blazing line across the cosmos. And they could track him and come after him in their ramjet fighters at .75 lights, and there was about one chance in three that they could locate him with only a single point-source coordinate, and overtake him, and pick him up. He didn’t want to risk it, not yet, not while he was still this close to home.

But what if the junta had been crushed at the outset? What if the coup had failed? What if he spent the next three years foolishly fleeing toward Rigel, when all was well at home, and a single call could tell him that?

He stared at the ultrawave set. He nearly turned it on.

A thousand times during those three days he reached toward it, hesitated, halted.

Don’t. Don’t. They’ll detect you and come after you.

But what if I don’t need to keep running?

It was Contingency C. The cause was lost.

That’s what our integrator net said. But machines can be wrong. Suppose our side managed to stay on top? I want to talk to Juan. I want to talk to Mark. I want to talk to Lydia.

That’s why you brought the cubes along. Keep away from the ultrawave.

On the fourth day, he picked out six cubes and put them in the receptor slots.

* * * *

Screens glowed. He saw his father, his son, his oldest friend. He also saw Hemingway, Goethe, Alexander the Great.

“I have to know what’s happening at home,” Voigtland said. “I want to call them.”