Worlds Enough and Time (24 page)

It was a mutual chemistry of discovery and fascination. The adult males in Sandra’s life, her creche fathers, were all cast from the same mold: self-assured, endlessly patient, mildly but consistently authoritarian. Uncle John was like a different species. He never told her what to do. He was likely to answer a question with another question, or a paradox. He was sarcastic, oblique, darkly humorous but always serious.

Usually when Sandra talked to adults she rightly sensed they were only partly there. Uncle John gave her all of his attention, as if studying her, and talked to her carefully but without condescension. He was
real
to her in a constant way that no other grown-up, not even her mother, had ever been.

John didn’t try to analyze his fascination with her beyond the obvious fact that she was a genetic duplicate of the woman he loved most, the woman who had rescued him from a life of disconnection, alienation, self-destruction. She had novelty value, too, and presented a learning experience, since he had never watched a child grow. She seemed unusually alert and creative, but he admitted to a lack of comparative data.

They met after dinner, without O’Hara, every Monday and Thursday. John would drill her on the week’s arithmetic lesson and they would play a game of checkers or Owari. He promised to teach her chess when she turned twelve—and knew from O’Hara that she was secretly studying it on her own.

She never had the chance to surprise him.

12 July 2110 [27 Hippocrates 2110]—John had a stroke day before yesterday. Sygoda called me asking if something was wrong; he’d missed a staff conference and didn’t respond to his keyboard, though it was busy. I thought he had probably left it on and, forgetting about the conference, had taken a nap. The beeper won’t wake him if he’s really sawing wood.

I was up in zero gee anyhow, staying out of the engineers’ way while they were measuring for a new murderball court, so I ducked down to his flat.

He was lying by the toilet, where he had vomited. His eyes were open, but all he could say was my name and “shit,” over and over. I called the ER and got him a drink of water, on which he almost choked. He was waving his left arm around initially, but had calmed down by the time the medics got there. They both said they thought it was a stroke, but wanted a doctor’s opinion. They attached three diagnostic telltales, and the physician on ER duty confirmed that it was a “cerebrovascular incident,” and told them to take him to the lowgee ward without passing through high gee. I went along with them, holding his left hand. His right was stiff and cool.

They put him in bed with an IV drip and scanned his head. They showed me a picture of a large area in his brain that was suffused with blood.

It doesn’t look very good. In the old days he would have gone straight to nanosurgery, where an army of tiny machines would be directed to go in there and clean up, restore synapses. But nobody now can do it; we don’t even know exactly how to get the machines in and out of the brain, which has to be done with high precision.

He’s been stable now for two days. It’s always possible that the missing nanosurgery information will come in from Key West next week or next year. There’s also a chance that he will recover some or most or all of his faculties spontaneously, as the brain reorganizes its wiring. There’s a larger chance that he’ll have another stroke and die.

Every hour without change makes spontaneous recovery less likely. He still can’t move his right arm or leg and there is no expression on the right side of his face. He still has only two words.

A speech therapist spent a couple of hours with him, but he just looked at her. I got him to try a keyboard once, but after half a line of gibberish, he gave up. He can’t or won’t read.

Sandra is inconsolable. She comes to the door but can’t get any closer without bursting into tears.

I’m close to tears most of the time myself, but haven’t cried in his presence. I know he’s conscious of that effort and appreciates it. We communicate in small ways. Most of the medical people treat him like a vegetable, but they haven’t been married to him for twenty-four years. He’s still all there, or mostly there, in some sense, at least emotion if not intellect. It’s so sad, so unfair. A fine reward for a lifetime of brave coping.

Daniel and Evelyn and I take turns staying by his side. They want one of us there all the time for a few days, to talk to him when he wants to listen, and to report any sudden change.

After about two weeks of no change, O’Hara was given the option of either taking John home with her or having him transferred to the Extended Care Facility. The ECF was primarily an old folks’ home, with a few younger people like John, who didn’t need a lot of medical help but did need to be fed and changed. Even if it hadn’t been at the 0.6-gee level, the ECF would have been out of the question because of the indignities O’Hara witnessed there. It was crowded and understaffed and smelled of stale urine and gastric juices. People mumbled and cried and the cube was on all the time.

The obvious third option, cryptobiosis until nanosurgery was possible again, seemed too risky. The brain was the most delicate organ preserved, and was the locus of almost all fatalities on restoration. Sylvine Hagen said she might give John a 10 percent chance of surviving, though even if he lived, he might not have enough cerebral organization left to make nanosurgery useful. They didn’t tell John.

What they finally did was take John back to his quartergee office, which they had converted into a sickroom. It wasn’t difficult to care for him, once he mastered the bedpan and urinal and was able to feed himself after a fashion. They rigged up an “answer board” that had the numbers from 0 to 9 and
YES, NO
, and
MAYBE
. They all had beepers that he could call with a button by his bedside, and they split up responsibility for answering his calls.

O’Hara wound up on duty more often than Evelyn or Daniel, which was not unreasonable, since she could do most of her work from John’s console. Dan was busier than he had ever been as Coordinator, since he’d gone back to his old Earth Liaison/Engineering post when they’d begun talking to Key West, and was busy all day meeting with various specialists, working out the right way to phrase questions so that the marginally educated Earthlings could find the right answers in their old-fashioned books.

Sandra finally overcame her sadness and fear enough to come play checkers with John. Everyone was relieved to see that he played a vicious and intelligent game. He initially refused to play Owari, because he didn’t have good enough left-hand coordination to count out the pebbles, but she pleaded and wheedled until he did it, which gave her a much better success rate than the physical therapist, whom John saw as a dangerous adversary.

The end of John’s novel is also a beginning, which is not an unusual contrivance. It was one of those times when all three relatives were at work, so O’Hara got the beeper by default. She was annoyed, because it was an important meeting with Coordinator Montagu and the Education Committee. She said she’d be back in a few minutes.

When there was nobody else with him, John watched a lot of cube, setting it to Random Walk until something of interest showed up. When O’Hara came in, the cube was stop-framed on a documentary about cryptobiosis, a naked man being prepped on a rolling slab. John pointed at the cube and then stabbed his answer board
YES.

O’Hara had known that this would come up sooner or later. “We looked into that, John. It would be simple murder. Or euthanasia, or suicide—you wouldn’t have a ten percent chance—”

“Shit!” John said, and stabbed
YES.

“Even if you survived, you’d be mentally worse off—”

He pounded
YES YES YES YES
. “Shit-shit!”

O’Hara sighed. “Let me call Dr. Hagen.”

Sylvine Hagen came down, armed with statistics and lab results and truly gruesome cube footage. John would not be convinced. O’Hara said they would have a family conference about it.

A novelist’s prerogative would be to go inside John’s mind, and demonstrate that he was well aware of all of the conflicting factors, including the rather complex one that O’Hara and Evy and Dan and Sandra would all be greatly relieved if he were safely installed up on 2105, and their guilt at that foreknowledge of relief was the main thing standing in his way. The novelist would have John screaming silently at them
Anything is better than this! I only have a tiny chance of ever functioning again, and your peasant rectitude is the only thing standing in my way!
—but all I can really say is that John said the same word over and over, and kept pounding
YES
, no matter what they said to him.

The solution was undramatic: recourse to law. O’Hara discussed the situation with Thomana Urey, an expert in constitutional law, and she said there was no question. John was capable of making the decision for himself, and was presumably aware of the subtleties, even though he couldn’t discuss them. He didn’t have any more “right” to cryptobiosis than anyone else did, but in standard practice the only thing that prevented a person from exercising the option had been his or her usefulness to the maintenance of
Newhome
. John was not currently useful to anyone—including, apparently, himself. Let him go.

With a little guilt and a lot of relief, they did.

THE NOVEL OF SANDRA’S SEX LIFE

Uncle John’s stroke was one of two hard blows that marred Sandra’s eleventh year, the first being a painful and premature loss of virginity.

O’Hara had reluctantly given Sandra permission for an early “forced” menarche, so she wouldn’t be left behind by the other girls. Predictably, a combination of natural curiosity and peer pressure had resulted in a classwide orgy of sexual experimentation, and Sandra wanted to join the party.

It was a couple of years too early. She was small, she couldn’t relax the appropriate muscles, and her hymen was tough. The first two boys she asked were unable to penetrate her before ejaculating. The third, unusually large and strong for a twelve-year-old, succeeded, but in his enthusiasm caused a lot of pain and bleeding. Sandra withdrew from the sexual marathon the same day she entered it, hurt and bewildered, distrustful of males.

Her mother took her to a gynecologist, who tried to comfort her with case histories, and used a little camera to show her that she wasn’t badly hurt inside. Both women urged that it would be a good idea for her to wait awhile, to heal emotionally more than physically. It might also give the boys in her peer group time to learn something about girls, so they wouldn’t be such blunt instruments. They were both supportive and nonjudgmental and made her feel like shit.

She took her pain to Uncle John, and he said well, you did something stupid and got hurt and it hurts twice as much because you knew it was stupid when you did it, right? The creche mothers and O’Hara all wanted you to wait, but you went ahead because your desire for other kids’ approval overrode both common sense and the desire to please adults. Besides, it’s
your
body, et cetera, but it might not be a bad time to reflect that it’s actually two cells from your mother’s body that got loose and have sort of been going their own way, and aren’t you glad there’s no father in there to complicate things? But if you only do one stupid thing this week, it’ll be better than most of my weeks. Let’s play checkers.

She hugged him and cried on his shoulder, and it is not just novelistic speculation to imagine that this made him feel uncomfortably nonavuncular feelings toward the little girl. He had discussed it a few days before with Daniel, while they were splitting a box of wine in the south lounge after dinner.