“Are you sure this is an appropriate place to celebrate?” said Twilla in a brittle voice.
She usually felt more agreeable to new ideas than she sounded. A need for reassurance made her a touch querulous, I guessed.
“Of course,” said Robert as he heaved himself up from the car seat.
He had no particular extra weight to lift, but did need to fight against an abnormal musculature. Rising from a sitting position had proved a difficulty since childhood. He walked with a cane, but not because he needed any help walking. Just standing.
We must have looked like a case study in misfit groups. Gangling Tony and his nervous mother, both with uncontrollable hand motions; Meg Astor with her serious and half-frozen face; Robert with his disjointed appearance, and his cane; Verry with hers; and me.
I look pretty much normal.
When we filed into the Brewtique, Joe looked up with only half the surprise I expected. He calmly went about setting up glasses. The one customer there rose to leave as we entered. I wondered how Robert arranged it: we had bar and Joe to ourselves.
“Did you catch the news?” said Verry, finding her seat.
“Caught some of it.” Joe finished setting up. “You looked good.”
“Thanks, Joe.”
Joe glanced at me, catching my eye for a second before moving to Robert. “Rounds? Even the kid?”
“I’ll have soda,” said Tony.
“If he wants,” said Robert. “Say, Joe, I hear you might not be the town’s last living bartender any more. Another live-tended bar’s opening.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
Five years ago, when Joe dropped out of everything to take over the Brewtique, all other bars in town had converted to coin arcades. You put in an I.D., a dollar coin or two, and got your I.D. and change back if the I.D. was good, and if you were owed anything—unless you wanted to tip. Had to be the oddest part of machine bars: tipping. Presumably the techs got the extras.
Joe showed an iconoclastic streak for one of his generation, bucking trends with his human-run bar.
Its best features survived from days when the town itself was feeling its oats: a wood frame around the bar mirror, of oak; a tin ceiling stamped in patterns of squares, and painted a red deeper than fire-engine and darker than the crimson of maples in autumn; cushioned stools; and a long curve of a bar-top, darkly shellacked, with a brass rail below.
People admired Joe’s work in keeping it open. From what I heard, it might have been looking at a profit, even. Not profit in the way machine arcades raked it in, but profit even so.
“I haven’t formally introduced you two. Tony?” said Robert. “Remember I told you about the guy on the life-modeling project before you stepped on?”
Tony nodded, eyes aglow. He heard plenty.
“Well, this is him.”
“Him?” With a disbelieving eye-over at Joe, who pretended not to care.
“Yes,” said Robert. “Joe. This is Joe Staupolos. The town’s only living bartender, at least for the time being. Former bright star and genius kid with our project. In fact the high-end project’s been on hold since he left.”
“What’s the matter,” said Tony brightly. “Teenage burnout?”
Joe spilled the beer he had been setting in front of me. I know how steady his hands are. I would have spilled it myself. Tony had all the tact in the world—with his rabbits.
In all fairness, teenage burnout we kept as an open topic at Med-Dyne. We thought it worth talking about, because it happens: going too far, too fast, and pushing the brilliant kid until something pops or cracks and the kid leaps out a window.
So when Tony Barbieri wanted to put together rabbits, we gave the nod. We would have just as soon do white mice or frogs: but rabbits would be fine. A big jump for us, but fine. We wanted the young mind to go where it wanted, at whatever pace it needed to go.
Joe gave no sign beyond the few drops of beer. He wiped them up and filled the other glasses. Robert had straight tomato juice. Twilla drank something with a ridiculous parasol.
“No, not burnout,” said Robert on Joe’s behalf.
“So, Joe,” said Tony, his voice still bright with his youthful cheer, “you were on the big project? Wow. I couldn’t do it. I mean I don’t want to. You saw Hocus, didn’t you? I’ll be working out testing for Hocus for years. Man, that’s enough.”
“But the work you’re doing,” Meg said to Tony, “it’s what would make possible work like Joe’s. We didn’t know before what we know now.”
“Yeah, but Joe’s work, that’s so much bigger.”
“It was too big,” she said, “back then. But it’s your breakthrough—”
“That’s right,” Verry said. “It’s a breakthrough, hooking up the processors to work on the real-time modeling of each cell.”
“Not a price breakthrough,” muttered Robert.
“No, but a performance breakthrough,” Verry said. “Parallel processors were pretty good before—”
“Hey,” said Tony. “Those were your parallel processors. I just established the hierarchy.”
“Well sure it’s a new form of parallel processing,” said Verry. “But it’s the overall integration of parts in a whole—we couldn’t have done it without you, Tony.”
The chatter bugged the hell out of me. Even so, I could see Joe beginning to rise to the bait. He looked at the kid, and at Verry.
“On the tube,” he said, “all you talked about was the frigging rabbit.”
Tony flinched, but grinned anyway. “Well, sure, and that’s what it’s all about. The frigging rabbit.”
Everyone laughed. I relaxed a little. Joe likewise, if a littler bit.
“Sure,” said Verry. “People see the rabbit and can’t believe it’s real—or that it isn’t. It’s both real, and not real, in terms of being a rabbit.”
“That’s right,” said Tony. “It’s a machine. But how does anyone know that? You can cut it open and it bleeds! You look at its face and it looks just like a rabbit, acts like a rabbit, and moves like a rabbit. You analyze its cells and the cells work the same way the cells do in a rabbit.”
“Almost,” said Meg.
“Even shits like a rabbit.”
“But we made it,” said Verry. “It’s all the result of electronic output.”
“That’s the difference,” said Tony, his face alight. I have seen enthusiasm on the face of a teenager but never such brightness as came from this light-bulb of a high-school head. “We made it. Or even closer to the truth, we let it make itself. You have to say that. I didn’t even really invent the hierarchy. We let the hierarchy establish itself. But the brain—that’s the real thing. It takes like about four hundred of old Holland-style neural nets to make each neuron, and even at that, it probably isn’t enough—”
“Do you still love him?” Verry said one night.
“Still love him?” I cried out involuntarily at the question and felt the pain within me that came neither of age nor disability. “How could I not! My god, Verry, he’s my boy! He was everything! Everything! Maybe that’s how it got under my skin, and turned me into—” I stopped, unable to go on. I pulled in a breath of air I thought I could never release, for it felt strong enough to yank out my heart with my lungs.