Vernor Vinge: Rainbows End

"Hey, Alice, I've never minded that Miri calls us by our first names. There'll come a time when besides loving us, the Little General will also be our peer, maybe our boss. But this is just confusing my old man — " Bob jerked a thumb at where Robert Senior sat, half slumped and staring. "Play back the way Dad was acting this afternoon. See how he lit up. He thinks Miri is my aunt Cara, when they were little kids!"

Alice didn't answer right away. Where she was, it was midmorning. Sunlight glittered off the harbor behind her. She was running support for the U.S. delegation in Jakarta. Indonesia was joining the Indo-European Alliance. Japan was already a member of that bizarrely named club. The joke was that the "Indo-Europeans" would soon have the world surrounded. There was a time when China and the U.S.A. would not have taken that as a joke. But the world had changed. Both China and the U.S. were relieved by the development. It left them with more time to worry about real problems.

Alice's eyes flickered this way and that as she nodded at an introduction, laughed at some witty comment. She walked a short distance with a couple of self-important types, chattering all the while in Bahasa and Mandarin and Goodenuf English, of which only the English was intelligible to Bob. Then she was alone again. She leaned a little toward him, and gave him a big grin. "Well that sounds like a good thing!" she said. "Your father has been beyond all rational discourse for how many years? And now suddenly he's engaged enough to have a good time. You should be thrilled. From here, he'll only get better. You'll have your father back!"

"… Yes." Yesterday, he'd said goodbye to the last of the in-home caregivers. Dad should improve very fast now. The only reason he was still in a wheelchair was that the docs wanted to make sure his bone regeneration was complete before they let him loose in the neighborhood.

She saw the expression on his face, and cocked her head to one side. "Are you chicken?"

He glanced at his father. The Paraguay operation was just a few weeks away. A covert op at the edge of the world. The prospect was coming to seem almost attractive. "Maybe."

"Then let our Little General do her thing and don't worry." She turned and waved at someone beyond his vision. "Oops." Her image flickered out and there was only silent messaging —

Alice — > Bob: Gotta go. I'm already covering for Secretary Martinez, and local custom does not approve of timesharing.

Bob sat for a moment in the quiet living room. Miri was upstairs, studying. Outside, the late afternoon slid into evening. A peaceful time. Back when he was a kid, this was when Dad would bring out the poetry books, and Dad and Mom and little Bobby would have a readalong. Actually, Bob felt a happy nostalgia for those evenings. He looked back at his father. "Dad?" No answer. Bob leaned forward and tried to shout diffidently. "Dad? Is there enough light for you? I can make it lots brighter."

The old man shook his head distractedly. Maybe he even understood the question, but he gave no other indication. He just sat there, slumped to the side. His right hand rubbed again and again at the wrist of his left. And yet, this was a big improvement. Robert Gu, Sr., had been down to eighty pounds, a barely living vegetable, when UCSF Medical School took him on for their new treatment. It turned out the UCSF Alzheimer's cure worked where the years of conventional treatment had failed.

Bob did a few errands on base, checked the plans for the upcoming Paraguay operation… and then sat back and just watched his father for a few minutes.

I didn't always hate you .

As a child, he had never hated his old man. Maybe that wasn't surprising. A kid has very little to compare to. Robert was strict and demanding, on that little Bobby had been very clear. For even though Robert Senior had often and loudly blamed himself for being such an easygoing parent, sometimes that seemed to contradict what Bob saw at his friends' homes. But it had never seemed mistreatment to Bob.

Even when Mom left Dad, even that hadn't turned Bob against the old man. Lena Gu had taken years of subtle abuse and she couldn't take any more, but little Bobby had been oblivious of it all. It wasn't till later, talking to Aunt Cara, that he realized how much worse Robert treated others than he had ever treated Bob.

For Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., this should be a joyous time. His father, one of America's most beloved poets, was returning from an extended campout in the valley of the shadow of death. Bob took a long look at Robert's still, relaxed features. No, if this were cinema, it would be a Western and the title would be The Return of the SOB .

"My eyeballs are… fizzing!"

"This shouldn't be painful. Do they actually hurt?"

"… No." But the light was so bright that Robert saw fiery color even in the shadows. "It's all still a blur, but I haven't seen this well in…" he didn't know how long; time itself had been a darkness "… in years."

A woman spoke from right behind his shoulder. "You've been on the retinal meds for about a week, Robert. Today we felt we had a working population of cells present, so we decided to turn them on."

Another woman's voice: "And we can cure your blurred vision even more easily. Reed?"

"Yes, Doctor." This voice came from the man-shaped blur directly in front of him. The figure leaned near. "Let me put this over your eyes, Robert. There'll be a little numbness." Big gentle hands slipped glasses across Robert's face. At least this was familiar; he was getting new lenses fitted. But then his face went numb and he couldn't close his eyes.

"Just relax and look to the front." Relaxing was one thing, but there was no choice about looking to the front. And then… God , it was like watching a picture come up on a really slow computer, the blurs sharpening into finer and finer detail. Robert would have jerked back, but the numbness had spread to his neck and shoulders.

"The cell map in the right retina looks good. Let's do the left." A few more seconds passed, and there was a second miracle.

The man sitting in front of him eased the "glasses" off Robert's head. There was a smile on his middle-aged face. He wore a white cotton shirt. The pocket was embroidered with blue stitching: "Physician's Assistant Reed Weber." I can see every thread of it ! He looked over the man's shoulder. The walls of the clinic were slightly out of focus. Maybe he'd have to wear glasses out-of-doors. The thought set him laughing. And then he recognized the pictures on the walls. This was not a clinic. Those wall hangings were the calligraphy that Lena had bought for their house in Palo Alto. Where am I ?

There was a fireplace; there were sliding glass doors that opened onto a lawn. Not a book in sight; this was no place he had ever lived. The numbness in his shoulders was almost gone. Robert looked around the room. The two female voices — they weren't attached to anything visible. But Reed Weber wasn't the only person in sight. A heavyset fellow stood on his left, arms akimbo, a broad smile on his face. Robert's look caught his, and the smile faltered. The man gave him a nod and said, "Dad."

"… Bob." It wasn't so much that memory suddenly returned as that he noticed a fact that had been there all along. Bobby had grown up.

"I'll talk to you later, Dad. For now I'll let you wrap things up with Dr. Aquino and her people." He nodded at the thin air by Robert's right shoulder — and left the room.

The thin air said, "Actually, Robert, that's about all we intended to do today. You have a lot to do over the next few weeks, but it will be less chaotic if we take things one step at a time. We'll be keeping watch for any problems."