Дэймон Найт - Orbit 11

The duty tech hung from the scaffolding, twenty feet above the floor, three feet away from the banked lights of the Big Board. He settled back against the black leather cushions of his chair, waiting for the official confirmation. The siren had been cut off. He was bored. He nudged at the blank light with the toe of his shoe. Idly, he began to read the code symbols again. Somehow they seemed familiar.

The runner’s voice buzzed in his head. “Dispatched.” “Confirmed,” the tech replied automatically, then still tracing the symbols with his finger: “Christ, do you know who this is? The deader? It’s her again. That crazy broad. Christ, this is the third time this month.”

“Fuck her. She’s nuts.”

The tech looked at the dead light, shook his head. The chair eased back down into its rest position before the metal desk. He squirmed around to get comfortable, drank the dregs of his coffee, rested his feet on the rim of the desk and settled back. The whole thing had taken maybe eight, maybe ten minutes. Not bad. He reached out and found the article he’d been reading.

By the time they brought her back, he was deep in the magazine again.

They carried her in and put her into the machines. The machines kept her in stasis to retard decay while they synthesized blood from sample cells and pumped it into her, grew new skin and tissue from scrapings, repaired the veins in throat and wrists, grafted the skin over them and flash-healed them without a scar. It took about an hour and a half, all told. It wasn’t a big job. It was said that the machines could rebuild life from a sample as small as fifty grams of flesh, although that took a few weeks—even resurrect personality/identity from the psychocybernetic records for a brain that had been completely destroyed, although that was trickier, and might take months. This was nothing. The machines spread open the flesh of her upper abdomen, deactivated the monitor that was surgically implanted in every citizen in accordance with the law, and primed it again so that it would go off when her life-functions fell below a certain level. The machines sewed her up again, the monitor ticking smoothly inside her. The machines toned up her muscles, flushed out an accumulated excess of body poisons, burned off a few pounds of unnecessary fat, revitalized the gloss of her hair, upped her ratio of adrenaline secretion slightly, repaired minor tissue damage. The machines restarted her heart, got her lungs functioning, regulated her circulatory and respiratory systems, then switched off the stasis field and spat her into consciousness.

She opened her eyes. Above, a metal ceiling, rivets, phosphorescent lights. Behind, a mountain of smoothly chased machinery, herself resting on an iron tongue that had been thrust out of the machine: a rejected wafer. Ahead, a plastic window, and someone looking through it. Physically, she felt fine. Not even a headache.

The man in the window stared at her disapprovingly, then beckoned. Dully, she got up and followed him out. She found that someone had dressed her in street clothes, mismatched, colors clashing, hastily snatched from her closet. She had on two different kinds of shoes. She didn’t care.

Mechanically, she followed him down a long corridor to a plush, overstuffed office. He opened the door for her, shook his head primly as she passed, closed it again. The older man inside the office told her to sit down. She sat down. He had white hair (bleached), and sat behind a huge mahogany desk (plastic). He gave her a long lecture, gently, fatherly, sorrowfully, trying to keep the perplexity out of his voice, the hint of fear. He said that he was concerned for her. He told her that she was a very lucky girl, even if she didn’t realize it. He told her about the millions of people in the world who still weren’t as lucky as she was. “Mankind is free of the fear of death for the first time in the history of the race,” he told her earnestly, “at least in the Western world. Free of the threat of extinction.” She listened impassively. The office was stuffy; flies battered against the closed windowpane. He asked her if she understood. She said that she understood. Her voice was dull. He stared at her, sighed, shook his head. He told her that she could go. He had begun to play nervously with a paperweight.

She stood up, moved to the door. “Remember, young lady,” he called after her, “you’re free now.”

She went out quickly, hurried along a corridor, past a robot receptionist, found the outside door. She wrenched it open and stumbled outside.

Outside, she closed the door and leaned against it wearily. It was full daylight now. In between dirty banks of clouds, the sun beat pitilessly down on concrete, heat rising in waves, no shadows. The air was thick with smoke, with human sweat. It smelled bad, and the sharper reek of gasoline and exhaust bit into her nostrils. The streets were choked, the sidewalks thick with sluggishly moving crowds of pedestrians, jammed in shoulder to shoulder. The gray sky pressed down on her like a hand.

Time went fast. It was nearly five when I reached the lip-reading clinic where Sharon worked as a part-time assistant. I had been delayed at the office; the hectic teletype flashes from the Australian front had nearly overloaded the machinery, not to mention the manpower. The input had been too much for the boss, who had given me a two-day bonus vacation, ostensibly as a reward for a job well done, but really so I wouldn’t have the pleasure of watching him crawl the walls for the next few days. Toning down all that grisly stuff for public consumption was a bitch, but I managed, beautifully. I could cope.

I hurried up the dingy marble stairs, thinking, don’t those street cleaners ever? then stopped, realizing that the grubbiness of the building was a psychological ploy. Dirt meant age, and age was permanence. Security, catch?

I opened the door, noticing a garish sticker sloppily plastered across the shatterproof glass: Helen Keller Died for Your Sins.

A bit hysterical, perhaps, but significant. I went inside.

The vestibule was deathly still, an unnerving reminder of the anechoic chamber I had been confined to for the few weeks following my last crack-up. I do cope, but then we all have our own ways. I can stay relatively stable for moderately long stretches, but eventually I end up in a chamber. So that’s my vice. I’m used to it now, although I envy those people who can get by with nothing more than sunglasses or insulated gloves.

Sharon stood across the foyer under a day-glo “QUIET’ sign. She wasn’t pretty—too much face and a chin that jutted out like one of those nut scoops used by the blind peanut vendors on Montessori Avenue. Her hips were full, her legs too fat. She was dressed in a voluminous jumpsuit that challenged the legal limit—a bright, shocking magenta. But after all, that was Sharon.

And she was crying.

“Sherry—” I said. She turned to me, all tears, those familiar fool’s-gold eyes red-rimmed with pain. “They fired me,” she said, pulling a tissue out of the old gasmask bag she used for a purse.

“What—?”

“They said I couldn’t pace myself with the students, that I was going too fast, God knows that I tried—” She was shaking uncontrollably. I knew it was more than the job. “I don’t know why it should bother me, really. I’m just a selfish bitch anyway. I was only in it for the money.”

“It wasn’t that way, Sherry.” (A sudden twinge of doubt, about Sherry, myself, our relationship. But no. Sharon was just a talented, down-and-out girl doing her best to help those poor bastards who had no other escape than to put out their eyes, plug their ears. But what could you expect from a society so flooded with sensory and informational input, so paranoid that it was necessary to have a “QUIET” sign in a clinic for the deaf?)