Damon Knight - Orbit 19

“Point-oh-five,” Cyrus cut in, “and I still think you’re Jewish. I bet you don’t have a cap on your genital shaft, your olfactory bulb is long and hooked, and your granny ran a Miami Beach notions store.”

“Did you take a bath last night?” the computer asked. Cy looked incredulous. “Not here,” he said irritatedly, “at Mara’s. We took a sonic after the coupling.” The machine was quiet. “Well, what do you want?” Cy asked. “You want to smell my armpits? Here, have some axillary action—” He playfully fanned his hands under his armpits.

“Your skin bacteria count is moderately high,” the console voice said soberly. “What did you do after you left Mara’s?”

“Oh, for Christ sake, what do you care what I did?”

“Come on, Cy, I can probe your retinograph tapes. Tell me openly. I hope you didn’t go near the river force-field again.”

Cy looked sheepishly irritated. “No, I didn’t fly along the force-field —say, they’re calling it the gossamer curtain these days. No, I didn’t try to leave good old Washington DC Quadrant—God knows what might be in Alexandria after three hundred years of quarantine, but I am very damned curious about what’s outside our beneficent geodesic bubble.”

“So where did you go?”

“Took a flitter to Sam’s and had a few intravenes. Then I came here.”

“Did you code in a flight plan or fly visual?”

“Visual.”

“Anything unusual happen on the way from Sam’s?”

“No—wait. One of those Dumpster flits damn near rammed me. It smelled to high heaven. Had a horn like a hundred clarion banshees.”

“You were tainted with cobalt-active industrial waste molecules. You should take a mudpack bath and another sonic. The decontaminant cellule here didn’t get it all.”

Cy stood up and moved toward the bath area. “I stay so aseptic the wind seems to blow right through me,” he said, “and I never smell Mara. She had on a Chanel musk last night, but she tasted like lettuce.” He moved into the bath cellule and stood at attention. “Get it over with,” he said.

“Take a deep breath and hold it,” the computer voice replied. Force-fields blocked the basic apertures, and fine black Javanese mud sprayed Cy from all angles, turning him into a tar-baby. The heated mud-spray blipped into millions of pores, squeezing into microscopic pockets, flooding epithelial plains, trapping the bacteria. Hydrogen bus-bars glowed around Cy, baking the mud, then a rush of freon cooled it. A mild electric shock vectored inboard of Cy’s shoulderblade, and he contorted his body, like a dash runner breaking the finish-line tape. The mud casing split in millions of rivulets and tributaries and filigrees. Cy jogged in place, stretching his mouth as wide as he could, feeling the delicious splitting of the tightly baked mud. He picked off some of the larger pieces, the sensation vaguely erotic; the itching exoskeletal plates lifted away to reveal smooth pink flesh. A lime-distillate shower followed, the mud washing down Cyrus’s body in black and green streams.

“You can dry off with this,” the computer said, and a service-crawler handed Cy a fusion torch set at glow. Cy looked wearily at the pistol-like torch, and the fire hydrant-like crawler. He moved the torch over his body, then playfully aimed it at the crawler, and threatened to palm it to “Sear.” The crawler threw on a force-field and scuttled into its wall cubicle.

“Come on, Cy, drop the torch into the chute,” the console voice said.

“Suppose I liquefy all your transistor plaques instead,” Cy said with affected disdain, spinning to a two-handed police gunfighter stance.

“You know it’s deactivated, Cyrus,” the voice came back. Cy flipped the torch across the room, missing the chute by several feet. The sonic came on and Cy closed his eyes. He seemed to have a Eureka thought as the sonic stopped: “Hey, let’s have that holographic robot again, the Pretty Boy Floyd one, and at three-quarter speed.”

“Okay, but just one holobot this morning. You’re docketed for classes in barter-object evolution at nine.” The environdial wall scene bloomed into a coldly rustling cornfield. A figure materialized, crouched on one knee, a Thompson submachine gun held across its chest. Cy picked up the fusion torch and stalked toward the wall.

“Hey you—Pretty Boy!” Cy called mockingly. The figure’s face went slack, tensed briefly, then went flaccid in autonomic fear. At three-quarter speed, the holobot of Floyd moved as if in weightless space, pointing the Thompson at Cy, and fingering the trigger housing in slow, silent, ponderous inchings. Pretty Boy’s cheeks swelled, and spittle sprayed out. Four holographic slugs left the muzzle, spinning toward Cy like thimbles skewering through wax. “Gotcha gotcha gotcha!” Cy cried, pumping the fusion torch at the figure. The holobot seemed terrified by Cy’s quick movements. Cy waited for the bullets to come to him, then flicked at each one with his forefinger and thumb, like skooshing bugs. The bullets ionized like dust-puffs. Cy stepped into the wall and took the gun from Floyd’s trembling hands. He turned the activated torch on Floyd’s pants leg, and the moaning energy-cone vaporized the blue serge material. “Run run run, the cops are coming!” Cy shouted in Floyd’s ashen face, thrusting the Thompson back at him. The holobot took it and spun slowly, lumbering away in sodden, crashing strides. “You’re gonna get it, Pretty Boy!” Cy screamed in stereo echoes. “You’re gonna get it right in the navel!” The holobot covered its ears and plunged into the brush. The scene faded and a mirror-smooth Moldau setting came on.

Cyrus felt emotionally bristling, and sexual fantasies edged into his thinking. He thought deliciously of his last coupling session with the Rita Hayworth holobots.

“I am beamed in on you, Cy,” the console voice came through. “You’re having prurient fantasies again. I want some dilution of the androgenous matrix. Try it by yourself first, by contingency reinforcements. Ready? Begin.” Cy closed his eyes and focused on the velvety black of his lids. He tried counting leaping unicorns, then block-by-block visual replays of walking from his quarters to the drill-field, then layer-by-layer removal of a baseball cover. He tried to hum a Bach adagio.

“Good, Cyrus,” the voice said, “your response times were much improved that time. You are becoming really quite good at autonomic control.”

I’ll ram a soldering iron in your circuitry one day, Cy thought, and he knew right away the computer had read the subvocal message.

“Say that aloud,” the console spoke, “verbalize that last engram.”

“I was just joshing,” Cy said lamely. “I have a kind of selfishly possessive feeling for you sometimes, knowing how powerful and objective you are. But, goddammit, dependency breeds hostility. I resent being dependent on you, and I resent your controlling me.”

The computer fed in a thirty-two-second replay of Cy’s responses, and increased his hypothalamic amperage slightly.

“Now verbalize that last nonverbal sample,” the voice said.

“I’ll ram a soldering iron up your solid state Panasonic ass!”

“There now, doesn’t that feel better?”

“Yes.”

“Trust me, Cyrus, don’t fight me. You can be all but one hundred percent adaptive, or you can get some robopathic reinforcement. I can’t keep you within my control range. You can try the runaway bit anytime you like, but all the archives show you wouldn’t make it. You couldn’t survive beyond the force-field veil, as you called it—”

“The gossamer curtain,” Cy corrected, “the filmy veil, the veil-like film—”

“The world—your world, and my world—ends at those shimmering force-fields, so trust me, I want you to retain your volitional faculties—”