W. Thompson: Out of the Waste Land

Geisler snorted. “They didn’t have to,” he said.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Margaret said.

He shrugged. “They said you might try to waste yourself.”

Suicidal impulses? she thought in surprise. “I’ve never thought about killing myself.”

“Yeah?” He didn’t sound like he believed her. “They tell me you’re a prime candidate for the easy out, lady. They ask you about your daughter and your husband, and you clam up.”

“How would you know?”

Geisler chuckled. “Community college, remember? I took a lot of courses on psychology and therapy—how do you think I qualified for a job taking folks like you on therapeutic excursions?”

“So they briefed you on me.”

“Uh-huh. What they told me was, you, your husband and your daughter got immunized against the Hanoi flu last year, when everyone expected a killer epidemic. Only you and the girl had a bad reaction to the shots, because you both have the same defective gene. The shots ate away at your central nervous systems. You lived because they got you into intensive care in time, but it hit your girl harder and she died.

“OK, the girl inherited that gene from you, so you blame yourself for her death. Only, so does your husband, because he’s the sort of guy who needs to blame somebody. You were learning how to walk again when the creep filed for divorce. He dumps a load of guilt on you, and then he dumps you like garbage. With problems like that, you’ve got reason to end it all.”

“I know.” She felt her head buzzing. Everything he had said sounded distant, as though he had been describing something that had happened to a peasant in ancient Sumeria. “But I haven’t thought about killing myself.”

“If you say so,” Geisler said. “But from what they tell me, maybe you haven’t thought, period. I figure you’re blocking it out, which is the sort of thing that catches up with you.”

“You want me to talk about what happened.”

“That’s part of my job.”

She clicked on the movement icon that made her nod. “What do you want me to say?”

He shrugged. “Your girl’s name was Lydia, right? How often do you think about what happened to her?”

Margaret tried to think. It was difficult, like trying to multiply several large numbers in her head. She felt herself losing track of everything. “I don’t know. I don’t have much time for thought. There’s therapy, and I have to practice speech and movement on my own, and program in new movement and dexterity icons every time I need to do something new, and—”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Not changing it,” Margaret said. “Just explaining why—”

“You lived and she didn’t,” Geisler said. “How do you feel about that?”

It was a moment before Margaret could work her speech icons. Geisler waited patiently through the silence. “I don’t know,” she said. “I wish it were the other way around, but it isn’t. Do you think my implant has something to do with how I feel?”

“No,” he said, “you’re doing it to yourself. You had more than you could handle, so you blanked it out.

People do that, to give themselves a temporary break. But you’re making it permanent.”

“Maybe,” Margaret said. “Look. Our canteens are almost empty. We should talk about this later.”

“Yeah, right,” he said sourly. He stood up. “Let’s get to the next cache.”

Margaret got up and followed him. The trail ran along the hillside, well above the canyon floor. The path seemed little smoother than the rough, steep ground all around her, and she spent an hour picking her way along. The breeze began to pick up, and dust started to fog her eye-plate, forcing her to stop several times to wash it off.

I haven’t let myself think about it, she told herself as the computer walked her across one of the few smooth strips of path. Quite deliberately, Margaret stopped walking and tried to think about… it. Why Lydia was gone. Why Alan was gone. She tried to focus her attention on her memories, but it was like trying to look at something in her eye’s blind spot.

The computer. She wondered if Geisler could be right about that. Maybe it was doing something to her mind. It wasn’t natural to feel this lack of grief and loss. She should have felt something; Lydia deserved it.

But she could remember Lydia before her death. A lovely six-year-old having a normal childhood. Father’s chin, mother’s hair, nose, and cheeks distinctly her own. Her favorite videotape had been a Bolshoi Ballet production of Swan Lake, she had liked to sprawl in front of the TV and admire the pretty costumes the ballerinas wore. Alan had taken that tape after—

Keep walking, she told herself. This hike was only a form of therapy, but the Sun and scorching air were real. She needed to reach the water in the next cache before she could think about less immediate problems. She started walking again. The trail curved up the hillside and came to a fairly smooth and level stretch of ground. As she reached that, Margaret felt absurdly pleased by the sight. It appeared she would be able to walk at least a hundred yards without trouble here. This was the best ground she had seen out here.

Then Geisler cut loose with a string of profanity. “Trouble?” Margaret asked, as she came up behind him.

“Yeah, trouble,” he said in disgust. The path came to a dead end at a gully which cut across the slope and emptied into the main arroyo some fifty yards away. The gully was fifteen feet deep and ten feet wide, and it was crossed by a crude bridge: a wooden beam four inches square, with two guide rails made of rope at waist height. The guidelines were held in the ground by long iron stakes, and they swayed in the breeze. “No way am I crossing that,” Geisler said.

“That must be the idea,” Margaret said. His fingers couldn’t operate his prosthetics while his hands clutched the lines. “I can handle it.”

“Uh-huh.” He looked up at the sky. “Better move. Those aren’t rain clouds, but I don’t like what this wind is doing.”

“Dust storm?” she asked.

“Right, dust storm. Now move.”

Margaret went to the bridge and hesitated. Until now she’d never encountered a situation like this. Just how did you cross a rope and wood bridge? She had no movement icon she could click on, to let the computer guide her body like a marionette.

Marionettes, she thought suddenly, operated through crude, basic movements. That was the trick. She stepped up to the end of the bridge and grasped the rope guidelines. Then she selected a set of basic icons. Right foot forward. Right foot down. Left foot forward. Left foot down. Release right hand. Move right hand forward. Put right hand palm on rope. Grip rope. Release left hand. Motions repeated with painful slowness, made even slower by the shifting of her body as the helmet struggled to keep her in balance against the buffeting of the wind, which was rising. Putting her foot down on the beam with each step was even trickier.

At last she was across the bridge. “I’ll go look for the cache,” she told Geisler, who stood at the far end of the bridge.

“Don’t talk, do! ” he called.

The ground beyond the bridge was even rougher than the path she had followed so far, and as the wind gusted in the narrow canyon it filled the air with swirls of tan dust. Her eye-plate worked like goggles, but even so she almost missed the cache in the thickening haze: a pile of canteens and a sack of freeze-dried food. Margaret slung the canteen straps over her shoulders and took the sack. She looked inside and saw the map which marked out the trail to the next cache. Then she headed back for the bridge.

The wind was howling when she reached the bridge. Geisler was gone, and one of the guidelines was down, its iron stake pulled out of the ground on the other side of the bridge. Another part of the therapy? she wondered, before she looked down into the arroyo. Geisler lay on the rocks at its bottom. He looked unconscious.