For if a person as well known, as much admired as Gidi, was capable of such—such deviations—then who else might be as well? If Gidi could drop down that deep into something that had no name, then who else might fall? Might not he, Alvar Kresh, fall as well? Might he not already be falling, as sure as Gidi that all he was doing was right and sensible?
Davirnik Gidi. Burning hells, that had been bad. So bad that he had blocked it almost completely out of his memory, though the nightmares still came now and then. Now he forced himself to think about it.
Davirnik Gidi was what the Sheriff’s Department primly called an Inert Death, and every deputy knew Inerts were usually bad, but it was universally agreed that Gidi had been the worst. Period. If there was ever a case that warned of something deeply, seriously, wrong, it was Gidi.
The Inerts were something Spacers did not like to talk about. They did not wish to admit such people existed, at least in part because something that is appalling only becomes more so when it is also dreadfully familiar. Nearly every Spacer could look at an Inert and worry if the sight was something out of a distorted mirror, a twisted nightmare version built out of one’s self.
Inerts did nothing for themselves. Period. They organized their lives so that their robots could do everything for them. Anything they would have to do for themselves they left undone. They lay on their form-firming couches and let their robots bring their pleasures to them.
So with Gidi, and that was the frightening thing. Inerts were supposed to be hermits, hiding away from the world, lost in their own private, barricaded worlds, deliberately cutting themselves off from the outside world. But Gidi was a well-known figure in Inferno society, a famous art critic, famous for his monthly parties. They were brilliant affairs that always started at the dot of 2200 and ended on the stroke of 2500. These he attended only by video screen, his wide, fleshy face smiling down from the wall as he chatted with his guests. The camera never pulled away to reveal anything but his face.
So a young Deputy Kresh learned in the follow-up investigation after his death. He could not have found out firsthand: Sheriff’s deputies simply did not get into events as elegant as Gidi’s parties.
In Spacer society, a host not attending his own parties was not especially unusual, and so Gidi’s absence was not remarkable. A very private man, people said of Gidi, and that explained and excused all. Spacers had great respect for privacy.
The only thing that was thought odd was that Gidi never used a holographic projector to place a three-dimensional image of himself in the midst of his parties. Gidi explained holographs made for parlor tricks, and would create an illusion he did not wish to advance—that he himself was truly present. Illusions disconcerted people. They would try to shake the projection’s hand, or pass it a drink, or offer it a seat it did not need. No host wished to upset his guests. It was just that he was in essence a shy man, a retiring man, a private man. He was content to stay at home, to enjoy talking with his friends over the screen, to watch them as they had their fun.
It even started to become fashionable. Other people started making screen appearances at social events. But that fad stopped cold the day Chestrie, Gidi’s chief household robot, called the Sheriff’s office.
Kresh and another junior deputy took the call and flew direct to Gidi’s house, a large and grim-faced house on the outskirts of the city, its exterior grounds strangely unkempt and untended. Vines and brambles had grown clear over the walk, and over the front door. Clearly no one had gone in or out of the door in years. Gidi never sent his robots outside to tend the yard—and never went out himself, it seemed.
The door sensors still worked, though. As soon as the two deputies came close, the door slid open, the mechanism straining a bit against the clinging vines. Chestrie, the chief robot, was there to meet them, clearly agitated. A puff of dust blew out the door, and with it, the smell.
Flaming devils, that smell. The stench of rot, of decayed food, human waste, old sweat and urine hit the deputies hard as a fist, but all of that was as nothing to what lingered beneath—the sweet, putrid, fetid reek of rotting flesh. Even now, thirty years after, the mere memory of that roiling stench was enough to make Kresh feel queasy. At the time it had been bad enough that Kresh’s partner passed out in the doorway. Chestrie caught him and carried him outside. Even out in the air, the stink seemed to pour out of the house, all but overwhelming. It took Kresh’s partner a minute to recover, and then they went back to the patrol car. They pulled out the riot packs and got the gas masks.
Then they went in.
Later, the experts told Kresh that Gidi was a textbook example of the Inertia syndrome. Victims of the syndrome started out normally enough, by Spacer standards. Perhaps a bit on the reclusive side, a bit careful, a bit overdetermined to control their own environment. There was some debate over the triggering mechanism. Some said it was the sheer force of habit, driving the victim’s behavior into more and more rigid channels, until all activity was reduced to ritual. Gidi’s cup of tea at bedtime had to be made precisely the same way every night, or risk throwing the pattern off. Even his monthly parties were ritualized, starting and ending with the precision of a space launch.
But patternizing was only part of it. Self-enforced seclusion was the other half of the Inertia syndrome, and according to some, the real trigger for it. Some unpleasant disturbance would upset the victim, throw off the ritual, and the victim would decide never to let any such thing happen again. The victim would gradually cut off all ties with the outside world, order his or her robots to refuse all visitors, arrange for all essentials to be delivered—typically, as in Gidi’s case, by the less obtrusive underground tunnels rather than by surface entrance. As with Gidi, the victim would often literally seal himself off from the outside world, ordering his robots not to open the door to anyone, ever, period.
The deputies learned a lot from Chestrie and the other robots, and from the copious journals Gidi kept, chronicling his search for what he called “a comfortable life.”
The journals seemed to reveal the moment when the downhill slide began. He attended a party that did not go well, one that ended with an inebriated fellow guest attacking Gidi over some imagined insult.
The violence stunned him, shocked him. Gidi stopped attending parties, and soon stopped leaving home altogether.
He could stay where he was, in perfect comfort. With his comm panels and entertainment systems all about him, why would he want to move? With his robots eager and willing to do anything and everything for him, it began to seem foolish, almost criminal, to act for himself when the robots could always do things better and faster, do them with no upset to his routine, his pattern. He could lose himself in his art catalogs, in dictating his articles, in endless fussy arrangements for his monthly parties. In his journals, he described himself as “a happy man in a perfect world.”
At least, all was nearly perfect. The more peace and quiet he had, the more the remaining disturbances irritated him.
Any needless action, by Gidi or by his robots, became unthinkably unpleasant. He began to obsess on simplification as much as regularity, determined to strip away to the essentials, and then strip away whatever he could of the remainder. He set out on a quest to remove all the things that could disturb his quiet, his peace, his solitude, his comfort of being secure in his own place. Banish them, eliminate them, and he could achieve a perfect existence.