John Varley - Steel Beach

"I'll send her the repair bill. That should cheer her up."

Cricket arrived from somewhere. She had a lighted cigarette which she placed in my mouth, grinning.

"Got it from the prop department," she said. "They always used to give these to wounded soldiers. I can't imagine why."

I puffed on it. It wasn't tobacco, thank god.

"Cheer up," Cricket said. "You tore up her fists pretty good."

"I'm clever that way; I pounded them to hamburger with my chin."

I suddenly felt an alarming urge to cry. Holding it back, I asked both of them to leave me alone for a while. They did, and I lay there smoking, studying the canvas ceiling. There were no answers written there.

Why had the taste of life turned so bitter for me in the last weeks?

I had sort of drifted away. When I came back, Brenda was bending over me. Considering her height, she had a long way to bend.

"How'd you find me?" I asked her.

"I'm a reporter, remember? It's my business to find things out."

I thought of several cutting replies, but something about the look on her face made me hold them back. Puppy love. I had vague memories of how badly that could hurt, when it wasn't returned.

And to give her her due, she was improving. Maybe she would be a reporter, some day.

"You needn't have bothered. It's not like I'm badly hurt. The head injuries were minimal."

"I'm not surprised. It would take a lot to hurt your head."

"The brain wasn't injured at…" I stopped, realizing she had just taken a jab at me. It had been pretty feeble, it hardly qualified as a joke -she might never master that skill-but it was something. I grinned at her.

"I was going to stop by Texas and bring that doctor… what was it you called him?"

"Sawbones. Pillroller. Quack. Caulker. Nepenthe. Leech. Lazarmonger."

Her smile grew a little glassy; I could see her filing the terms away for later research.

I was smiling, but the truth is, even with current medical practices, being paralyzed from the waist down is a frightening thing. We have an entirely different attitude toward our bodies than most humans down the ages, we don't fear injury and we can turn off pain and we generally treat flesh and bone as just items to be fixed, but when things are badly wrong something in the most primitive level of our brain stands up on its hind legs and howls at the Earth. I was having a galloping anxiety attack that the painkiller plugged into my medulla wasn't dealing with at all. I have no idea if Brenda realized this, but her presence at my bedside was strangely comforting. I was glad she was there. I took her hand.

"Thanks for coming," I said. She squeezed my hand, then looked away.

Eventually the planned casualties stopped streaming in, and a team of medicos assembled around me. They plugged me in to a dozen machines, studied the results, huddled, and murmured, just as if what they thought really mattered, as if the medical computer was not entirely in control of my diagnosis and treatment.

They came to a decision, which was to turn me onto my stomach. I surmised they had concluded it would be easier to reach my broken spine that way. I'd better not ever hear medicos called overpaid blood-monkeys again.

They began to carve. I couldn't feel it, but I could hear some really disgusting sounds. You know those wet-muck special-effect sounds they use in the movies when someone's being disemboweled? They could have recorded them right over my broken back. At one point something thumped to the floor. I peered over the edge of the bed: it looked like a raw soup bone. It was hard to believe it had once belonged to me.

They pow-wowed again, cut some more, brought in more machines. They made sacrifices to the gods of Aesculapius, Mithradates, Lethe, and Pfizer. They studied the entrails of a goat. They tore off their clothes, joined hands, and danced in a healing circle around my prone carcass.

Actually, I wished they had done any of those things. It would have been a lot more interesting than what they did do, which was mostly stand around and watch the automatic machines mend me.

All there was to look at was an antique machine against the wall, a few feet from my face. It had a glass screen and a lot of knobs on it. Blue lines were crawling across the screen, blipping into encouraging peaks now and then.

"Can I get you anything?" the machine asked. "Flowers? Candy? Toys?"

"A new head might do the trick." It was the CC talking, of course. It can throw its voice pretty much where it pleases, since it was talking directly to the hearing center of my brain. "How much will this cost me?"

"There's no final cost-estimate yet. But Wales has already requested the bill be sent to her."

"Maybe what I meant was-"

"How badly are you hurt? How shall I put it. There are three bones in the middle ear, called the Malleus, the Incus, and the Stapes. You'll be happy to hear that not one of these six bones was broken."

"So I'll still be able to play the piano."

"Just as badly as ever. In addition, several minor organs emerged unscathed. Almost half a square meter of epidermis can be salvaged."

"Tell me. If I'd come to this place… I mean, a hospital like this one is pretending to be-"

"I know what you mean."

"-with only primitive surgical techniques… would I have survived?"

"It's unlikely. Your heart is intact, your brain is not badly damaged, but the rest of your injuries are comparable to stepping on a land mine. You'd never walk again, and you'd be in great pain. You would come to wish you had not survived."

"How can you tell that?"

The CC said nothing, and I was left to ponder. That usually doesn't do much good, where the CC is concerned.

We all deal with the CC a thousand times a day, but almost all of that is with one of its sub-programs, on a completely impersonal level. But apart from the routine transactions of living, it also generates a distinct personality for every citizen of Luna, and is always there ready to offer advice, counsel, or a shoulder to cry on. When I was young I spoke to the CC extensively. He is every child's ideal imaginary playmate. But as we grow older and make more real, less tractable and entirely more willful and frustrating relationships, contacts with the CC tend to fall off. With adolescence and the discovery that, in spite of their shortcomings, other people have a lot more to offer than the CC ever will, we cut our ties even further until the CC is just a very intelligent, unobtrusive servant, there to ease us through the practical difficulties of life.

But the CC had now intruded, twice. I found myself wondering, as I seldom had in the past, what was on its mind.

"I guess I've been pretty foolish," I ventured.

"Perhaps I should call Walter, tell him to tear up the front page."

"All right. So it isn't news. So I've had things on my mind."

"I was hoping you'd like to talk about that."

"Maybe we ought to talk about what you said before."

"Concerning your hypothetical suffering had you incurred these injuries in, say, 1950?"

"Concerning your statement that I might prefer being dead."

"It was merely an hypothesis. I observe how little anyone today is equipped to tolerate pain, having never experienced an appreciable amount of it. I note that even the people on Old Earth, who were no strangers to it, often preferred death to pain. I conclude that many people today would not hold life so dear as to endure constant, unrelenting agony."

"So it was just a general observation."

"Naturally."

I didn't believe that, but there was no point in saying so. The CC would get to the point in its own way, in its own time. I watched the crawling lines on the machine and waited.