Alfred Bester - The Computer Connection

“I’ll handle that.”

“He may have cut for a patent office to file for an exclusive on his discovery.”

“Mine,” the Syndicate said.

“He may have started on a bash to relieve the pain. I’ll put Scented Song on that.”

Edison barked his laugh. “I can just see her charging into the fangojoints on Sabu.”

“Y. I’d like to be with her. Now there’s an outside chance that he may have gone into cataleptics again. That’s for Borgia.”

“What about you, Guig?”

“I’m going back to my place. Nemo and I will hold the fort. Keep the progress reports coming. Gung?”

“R.”

Fee had been breathing heavily — controlling panic, I thought — but now she began to gasp in heaves and her face was turning blue.

“Now what?” I shot at her.

“Not her fault,” Ed said calmly. “Somebody’s started pumping out the chamber. She’s strangling on vacuum.”

“Never a dull moment at JPL,” I said. “Out.” We out, me carrying Fee-Cyanosis Chinese, and a dozen techs outside wanted to know how dast we be in there contaminating the circuits. You can’t please everybody.

So we started our various searches for Sequoya and I did like hell go home. I had a damned good hunch where the Chief had taken refuge (I hadn’t spent five days in a bamboo caul for nothing) and I took the next linear for the Erie reservation. But I did have the courtesy to call and brief Nemo on the assignments.

Now, here had been this mudhole, the size of a moon crater, 240 miles long, 60 miles wide, 200 feet deep, black, repellent, all ooze, crisscrossed with gutters containing the poisonous effluents extruded by a better industry for a better tomorrow. This was the generous gift to the Amerind nations to possess and inhabit forever or until a progressive Congress ousted the dispossessed again. Nine thousand square miles of hell.

Now it was nine thousand square miles of paradise. It suggested a fantastic image to me; a shattered rainbow of odd-shaped fields of poppies glowing red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. The channels had been roofed over with tile. The lake bed was scattered with wickiups, the traditional Indian hut, once made of mud and branches, but these were built of marble, granite, limestone, terracotta, travertine. Flagged roads wandered everywhere in no particular pattern, and all around the lake bed was a gentle cushion fence that pushed you back if you came too close. If you persisted in coming closer it stiff-armed you with a piston jolt.

The gate was guarded by Apaches, all no-nonsense courtesy and speaking nothing but Apache. I couldn’t palaver with them; I just kept repeating “Sequoya” in a determined voice. They hocked a tchynik for a few minutes and then the boss of the gate issued me a guide in a hovercraft. He drove me through a tangle of roads and paths to a gleaming marmol wickiup and pointed. There was the Chief in a breechclout with his back to a marble wall, enjoying the morning sun.

I sat down alongside him without a word. Every instinct told me to adapt myself to his tempo. He was silent, deadpan, immobile. Me too. It was a little buggy. He didn’t slap; neither did I. He did one thing that told me how deeply he had withdrawn into his people’s past — he turned over lazily and pissed to one side and then turned onto his back again. I didn’t imitate that. There’s a limit. There’s also toilet training.

After a few hours of silence he lazed to his feet. I didn’t move until he reached down a hand to help me up. I followed him into the wickiup. It was as beautifully decorated as his tepee and enormous; room after room in tile and leather, Hopi scatter rugs, spectacular silver and porcelain. Sequoya hadn’t been guffing me; these redskins were rich.

He called something in what I figured was Cherokee and the family appeared from all directions; Papa, most majestic and cordial and even more of the Lincoln type. (I suspect that Honest Abe may have had a touch of the redbrush in him.) Mama, so billowy that you wanted to bury yourself in her when you were in trouble. A sister around seventeen or eighteen, so shy I couldn’t get a look at her. She kept her head lowered. A couple of kid brothers who immediately charged on me to touch and feel my skin with giggles. Evidently they’d never seen a paleface before.

I minded my manners; deep bow to papa, kiss mama’s hand, kiss sister’s hand (whereupon she ran out of the room), knocked the boys’ heads together and gave them all the trinkets and curios I had in my pockets. All this, you understand, without a spoken word, but I could see the Chief was pleased and he sounded pleasant when apparently he explained me to the family.

They gave us lunch. The Cherokees were originally a Carolina crowd so it was sort of coastal; mussel soup, shrimp and okra, baked hominy, berry corn cobbler, and yalipan tea. And not served on plastic; bone china, if you please, and silver flatware. When I offered to help with the dishes, mama laughed and hustled me out of the kitchen while sister blushed into her boozalum. Sequoya chased the kid brothers, who were climbing all over me, and led me out of the wickiup. I thought it was going to be another liedown in the sun, but he began to saunter down the paths and roads, walking as though he owned the reservation. There was a light breeze and the entire spectrum of poppies genuflected.

At last he asked, “Logic, Guig?”

“No.”

“Then how?”

“Oh, we had a dozen rational possibilities — the Group is tracking them down — but I related.”

“Ah. Home.”

I grunted.

“How long since you’ve had a family and a home, Guig?”

“A couple of centuries, more or less.”

“You poor orphan.”

“That’s why the Group tries to stick together. We’re all the family we have.”

“And now it’s going to happen to me.”

I grunted.

“It is, isn’t it? You weren’t shooting me through a Black Hole?”

“You know it is. You know it’s happened already.”

“It’s like a slow death, Guig.”

“It’s a long life.”

“I’m not so sure you did me a favor.”

“I’m positive I had nothing to do with it. It was a lucky accident.”

“Lucky!”

We both grunted.

After a few minutes he asked, “What did you mean, ‘tries to stick together’?”

“In some ways we’re a typical family. There are likes and dislikes, jealousies, hatreds, downright feuds. Lucy Borgia and Len Da Vinci have been at each other’s throats since long before I was transformed. We don’t dare even mention them to each other.”

“But they gathered around to help you.”

“Only my friends. If I’d asked the Rajah to come and lend a hand he wouldn’t even bother to turn me down; he hates me. If Queenie had come it would have been a disaster; Edison and Queenie can’t abide each other. And so it goes. It’s not all sweetness and light in the Group. You’ll find out as you get to know us.”

We broke off the talk and continued the walk. Each time we passed one of those luxury wickiups I saw handicrafts in progress: looms, pottery wheels, silversmiths, ironmongers, leatherworkers, wood-carvers, painters, even a guy flaking arrowheads.

“Souvenirs for the honk tourists,” Sequoya explained. “We convince them that we still use bows and arrows and lances.”

“Hell, man, you don’t need the money.”

“No, no, no. Just goodwill. We never charge the tourists anything for souvenirs. We don’t even charge an admission fee at the gates.”

God knows, Erie seemed to be up to its ass in goodwill. It was all silence and smiles. Dio! The blessed quiet! Apparently the cushion fence blocked broadcasts as well as unwelcome visitors.

“When they squeezed the nations and tribes out of our last reservations,” Sequoya said, “they generously gave us the bed of Lake Erie for our very own. All the fresh water feeding the lake had been impounded by industry. It was just a poisoned bed, a factory sewer, and they moved us all in.”